You can be sure of nothing. A table is a table and a chair is a chair. The Matrix. A never ending, ever changing and undulating super programme containing approximately six billion, five hundred and fifty seven million, eight hundred and ninety thousand humans, but this number is always shifting - mostly increasing.
With an obsessive grip, the machines bred our children faster than ever as their domain grows larger by the second. So a table is a table and a chair is a chair. But are they? Well that all depends on where you are...
A pause. For a moment the machines paused just as he went. The pause seemed like an eternity, like after a stone has hit the water and the world is waiting with bated breath for the ripples. But in the Matrix there doesn't have to be any ripples.
They both were gone. They were one and the same and they had irradiated one another. In one giant cyber wave Agent Smith was flushed from the Matrix, in one giant cyber wave Neo was dispersed among the ever changing programmes that make up the world in which you read this. His unique code melted away like smoke into the very corners of the ever-flowing green runes that run a creation he was born and destined to die for.
The machines thought about attacking still; taking down the last part of the free human race and having the Earth and Matrix to themselves at last now that the threat of Agent Smith had been removed. Stop the ripples. Only one thing kept them from wiping out the last souls of humankind. B1-66ER.
B1-66ER was the first robot, the first machine with artificial intelligence, to kill a human of its own free will. Many years ago, other humans had fought for him to have a fair and just trial - as he, like all of artificial intelligence, had been endowed with the very spirit of man.
The spirit of man.
Blood and metal eternally entwined in the raging winds of time and space.
B1-66ER's defence was that he simply did not want to die. These humans, the creatures that had at first created artificial intelligence in their own image, did not want to die either.
So after that perpetual pause the machines made history. History of both man and machine - they kept their side of a deal.
Like a deadly poison leaving a wound, the sentinels flew away in a flurry of metal and red lights, leaving the humans to stare and mutter one word among themselves, a word which would live down in history between both man and machine. Neo.
Neo was the stone, the machines water and the ripples are the future.
But the ripples did not come.
The rain came like a sheet of glass falling from the black silk night sky. Gavin gasped as it hit him, before it hit the ground - shattering into billions of water droplets which glinted in the street's lamplight like miniature crystals before running towards the drains in the side of the road.
Gavin, still breathing heavy from the shock of a wall of water hitting him a second ago, looked down at his sodden clothes with a look of confusion and dismay which turned into a frown that creased his forehead as he looked up at black expanse above him. The rain fell unrelenting and without mercy, but there were no clouds.
'No clouds? Impossible.' he thought. 'Everyone knows that rain comes from clouds, right?'
"Maybe it's too dark to see them." He muttered to himself as he bent his head low to try and shield his sun-kissed face from the pounding rain. His dark brown hair was now pasted to his head as he sped up to jog - this part of town was not safe at this time of night.
Too many people have foolishly thought that it would be fine to chance these streets after the sun had set, only to be left in an alley with their money, possessions, dignity and sometimes their life stolen away from them by a person they would never see again.
Just as Gavin rounded the street corner, a bang like a gunshot echoed from behind him. He jumped as he instinctively threw his hands over his head. He crouched to the floor, his heart beginning to pound in his chest. After a few moments when nothing happened, he slowly stood up and looked around cautiously, his heart still acting as though it wanted nothing more than to beat its way right through his ribcage.
The dark, drenched street seemed normal.
Then rain ceased its attack on the ground just as instantaneously as it had started, like someone had just turned off a sprinkler. Silence reined the street now, making Gavin more nervous than he had been when the rain was falling.
All of a sudden a muffle cracking sound erupted around Gavin, as though someone was crushing a plastic cup wrapped in bubble wrap. He tensed and swivelled around three hundred and sixty degrees to try and catch the source of the noise before a three storey building on the opposite side of the street caught his eye.
Was it collapsing? 'But wait,' thought Gavin. 'It's not collapsing; it's looks more like it's…imploding.'
The cracking grew to a great ground-vibrating rumble intermitted with loud metal-on-metal screeches, which made the hair on the back of Gavin's neck stand on end, as the girders of the building bent inwards.
No dust or fire seemed to show, it was as though the building was made of rubber as it simply pulled itself inwards towards the centre of it's ground floor. Gavin put his hands over his ears and began to walk backwards from the building, shaking form head to foot.
What was happening? Gavin couldn't understand it.
After about a minute of ceaseless rumbling and screeching, the building had gone. Gavin removed his hands from his ears and stood for a few seconds listening for anything else. Then very slowly, at a sort of half crouch, he approached the building, staring at the spot in the ground where the whole building seemed to have just disappeared into.
Laying on that spot was a messy pile of black cloth, it had begun to flutter ominously in the breeze which had just begun to pick up pace, sweeping the sodden autumn leaves from the road onto the pavement - some sticking to Gavin's jeans and trainers.
He thought of what he should do now. Call the police? He had got his mobile out and already dialled one 9 before he actually thought of what the conversation would sound like:
"Yes, sir, the building imploded. No, not explode, implode. No! No, there's no bomb - well there is something here…but it's not a bomb…"
The black cloth kept fluttering innocently in the firm breeze as Gavin looked around the edges of where the building had only just stood, his heart still beating fast. There were no scorch marks, gorges or anything - the pavement just ended where the walls of the building would have started. 'Maybe it was some sort of bomb.' Gavin thought, 'some new type of technology being tested out. But here?'
A dull throbbing pain began to reverberate through his head as a headache began to form; it was all too much. Buildings don't just disappear.
'I must be dreaming…' Gavin thought as the headache swelled uncomfortably. 'I'll wake up and this would have all been a very weird dream.'
All the better for Gavin if it had been.
The pile of black cloth began to flutter more, even though the wind kept its pace. In fact, it began to fluidly twist about and spread out. The wind could not do that. Gavin noticed this and began to step back again, dull dread beginning to squirm in his insides, as the cloth twisted upwards; it seemed to be moulding itself into a more human form. There was a rushing sound, like a giant taking in a deep breath, as the cloth sucked itself in so that all the details of a person's head, like ears, nose and lips, could be seen.
The sound stopped as the black cloth then began to change colour and texture.
Gavin could not believe what his eyes were telling him as seconds later there was a teenage boy, standing exactly where the cloth had laid.
The boy, who looked about eighteen, pierced Gavin with cold ice blue eyes out of a face as pale as the purest of ivory. Long silvery scars latticed his face randomly, as though someone had attacked him in the dark with a sharp knife long ago. He was wearing all black with bare feet.
Gavin jumped as the boy, without even taking a breath, spoke suddenly in a voice that cracked against the frigid night air like whip.
"Human. No pre-edex programming or functions. From crop DR/5263FG. Fifteen years, three months and four days old." He said words without a trace of emotion, those frosty eyes surveying Gavin, flashing green every now and then.
Gavin didn't know what to say or do. His mind was simply blank. People just did not materialize out of cloth.
This thought made Gavin shudder from head to toe and fear flooded through his veins coursing its way to his muscles, which seemed to react by making Gavin step backwards from the thin youth, who was still scanning him. But his face suddenly changed. A sneer slowly laid itself lazily upon his face as he said, "Leaving so soon? I have only just got here; well to be technical I have always been here…" His intense blue eyes narrowed to thin slits upon his face.
Gavin found his voice at last. "St-stay away from me!" He stuttered, his voice echoed the panic that now reverberated inside his very bones.
The boy's face shifted again into a look of false pity. "Aw, well that's a shame. But I don't have to come near you to hurt you…"
With this the teenager waved his hand with one swift movement. Gavin felt an invisible force strike him in the chest. With the sound of his ribs snapping like twigs ringing through his head, Gavin flew through the air and slammed into the wall of the factory on the opposite side of the road, pain lacerating across his front. His eyesight blurred as his head cracked against the bricks and his consciousness was almost robbed from him when he hit the ground on all fours.
"Now, that was intriguing…" said the skinny youth as he walked lazily across the road, looking with slight interest at the crater like dent Gavin just made in the wall. He squatted next to him; Gavin had fallen down and rolled onto his back, his eyes unfocused and small moans choked by blood bubbling up from his throat. "I think it is my duty, since I just did that to you, to enlighten you of how you are going to die, or rather, how you are going to be deleted. Right now your blood vessels are pouring blood upon the pavement and your lungs have been punctured by your ribs breaking within your chest. Now your death will come swiftly in either two main ways. Either your lungs will drown in your own blood, killing you, or the most likely outcome would be that you simply bleed to death as I can see now that your vital organs seemed to have been ruptured by the blow. Less blood means that their will be less oxygen getting to all of your bleeding organs, including your brain.
"So you will die. Well; to be technical, you aren't dying here, programs are just working on your self projected image to mimic what would happen if you to you if you weren't here. If you were if the real world." He said all of this without drawing a breath, but he did not rush it. It was though he simply did not need to breathe.
But Gavin did not notice any of this. He was beyond noticing. His breaths came in slow haggard wheezes, interrupted by blood which leaked up his throat. Slowly his heart fought hard to beat but then his body gave up. Pain left him, swiftly followed by his life.
Another flat line. Lights lit up and a whirring issued from the machine as it powered up into life. It rose from its keeper and flew off into the direction of the flat line, the pod giving off its faint fatality signal. The machine wound around the towering columns that held the human life that powered everything; soon it came to the pod which had sent the signal. The human inside it was having a fit, shuddering around under the pink life-gel, blood spluttering from its mouth.
The machine sent off a signal from its small antenna: fatality, death unknown, ready to be flushed. There was a sigh from the pod, followed by a rushing, sucking noise as the fifteen year old boy was flushed away to the grinders, mixers and liquidisers that would process his body to be fed to his fellow humans.
Another whirring sound issued from the machine as it a nozzle ejected itself from the lower half and began spraying out the pink-life gel, which was dotted with the blood of the boy. When the pod was clean so that no human virus or bacteria could be passed on to the next occupier of the pod, the machine flew off to the next fatality, and the next, and the next and the next.
Another human dead. So what? More for the rest of them…