Rhiannon Reeves – I'm so glad you like it. I never really pictured Kes and Trinity getting on, as they're both pretty headstrong. Thanks for reviewing!

Sydney Andrews – Do you know what, your review really made my day. Your compliments made me blush! I love the name Kes, at one point it was Kyra, which I never liked as much (I have no idea why I went for names starting with K, but I found some quite cool ones). If you want to swap plots, make sure we're not doing the same thing, feel free to email me, it's in my profile. Thanks for reviewing, and I can't wait to read your story!

scarstar – Aw, thanks! I'm so sorry, I haven't emailed you in forever, I'm so lazy! I hope you had a good Christmas, can't wait to see your Dublin photos. There's a few half-decent 'daughter of the One' fics, but they're a bit few and far between. There are a few in my favourite stories, but I think this one's a bit different (I hope!) Thanks for reviewing! (hugs)

Bagpipes5K2 – Oh, yummy cookies! And with sprinkles? This day just keeps getting better (hugs) I was going to send you this chapter to read over, but I sort of ran out of time. I'll send you the next one soon, promise! And I will get off my arse and get on with Simulation one day...Thanks for reviewing!

I was going to update on Thursday, but I got such nice reviews I thought I'd update specially. As such though, I didn't get it checked because I decided to do it impulsively and so I didn't have time to send it to my beta, the amazing Bagpipes5K2 (go check out her fic, Souls in Winter, it's incredible!). So if there are any mistakes or parts don't make sense, can someone point them out to me please, so I can fix them? Thanks.

I hope you all had a good holiday. I ended up with a fair amount of money, which is either going to fund me buying the Ultimate Matrix Collection or all the Matrix comics I can find. However, I did get my Keanu Reeves fix, as I got Dracula for Christmas. It's pretty funny for me, being British, seeing American actors imitate British accents. It's an amazing film though. Very gothic and dramatic. Has anyone else seen it?

Anyway, enjoy!

Chapter II: Kiana

The blonde-haired girl sighed irritably. The excitement of the hack left her with an adrenaline rush that stayed with her for hours afterwards, but then she was hit with a sense of emptiness and loneliness. It was almost becoming an addiction, the compulsion to hack. It ate into her system and embedded itself under her skin.

She didn't really know what had started her hacking in the first place. Originally, she had just been experimenting, pushing the limits of her computer knowledge. She'd always felt more comfortable in virtual reality, and hacking was just another way to expand her talents. That was just over a year ago. Since then, she had just improved more and more, breaking more laws than she even knew about. At first, she had been worried, and she had considered stopping. But, just then, she discovered he first nibble of information about the Matrix. It was only something tiny, a mere mention of something in an Internet article, but that had intrigued her, and since then she had dedicated every moment possible to trying to find the answer to the question. Everything else in her life had fallen apart, but the only thing keeping her going was the feeling that the search might soon be ending.

She manoeuvred through the school hallway, full of noise and laughter and shouting that masked the utter obliviousness of everyone. Here, she was known as Cassandra or Cass, a name she'd never liked. Now, the alias she always used was Kiana. She didn't know where it came from or what it meant, but it had just appeared in her head, and it felt right. It felt like the name she was meant to have.

Thank God I'll be out of here in a few months, she thought. Now that her eighteenth birthday was behind her, she felt like she'd hit her peak. By eighteen, you were meant to have a plan, an idea of what the rest of her life was going to be like. Kiana had nothing. All she knew was the answer to the question was out there, and finding it was consuming her.

She was able to walk through the corridor virtually unnoticed, surprisingly. Really, she should have been quite noticeable, with long white-blonde hair and a fine angular face that seemed too bony. What was more noticeable though were the enormous purple bags under her eyes and her near gauntness. Both came from spending the days pretending to care about her life and the nights hacking endlessly, searching for the answer among a sea of irrelevant information.

Instead of listening to her teacher at the front of the class, she just began to doodle randomly on her piece of paper. She wasn't particularly artistic, but she was bored and her hand was almost moving automatically. After about five minutes, she stopped and looked at the paper more intently. She hadn't really thought about what she was drawing, and now all that she had done were some bizarre letters. Scratch that – they weren't even letters. Okay, some were like reversed letters, but many more were like sharp, angular characters, though some were more curved. Anyway, she had no idea what they meant, and even if she had, she wouldn't have been able to read them. For some reason, she had written them vertically, in a grid, like a magic square, only without numbers. These were…indefinable. Yet, looking at them she felt like a distant memory was surfacing. Her fine brows, as pale as her bleached hair and almost invisible on her pallid face, drew together in confusion and frustration as she stared at the lettering, trying to discover its meaning.

It was only when a fist banged on her desk that she brought herself back to the real world.

"Cassandra Wilcox!" the teacher thundered. "Is that your name, girl?"

No, it's Kiana. That's my real name she thought to herself, though she wasn't stupid enough to say it out loud. "Yes" she replied sullenly.

"Well then, would you please deign to respond it?"

Do all teachers take classes in sarcasm?

Kiana tried to listen for the rest of the lesson, but her mind kept slipping to the characters she was drawing on the paper. By the end of the class, she had filled an entire page with those characters. They read like a grid, but each one seemed to have meaning whether they were in the formation or not. It was like seeing a small part of the big picture, that didn't quite make sense on its own. When the bell rang, she stood up, clutching it in her hand, but someone bumped into her from behind and it fluttered out of her hands, swallowed up by the masses of people.

She daydreamed through the rest of her school day, as she was accustomed to do, and didn't say a word to anyone else. When she was a kid, she'd had friends, just like any other kid, but they'd decided she was too weird. When she got to middle school, her natural aptitude for remembering anything had lumped her with the brains, but they'd thought she was too uncaring. When she got to high school, her love of music had helped her into the punk rock scene, but she was too introspective, too wrapped up in herself. Now, she didn't belong anywhere, and she was practically invisible in the business of the school. As far as most people were concerned, she didn't exist to them.

Surprisingly, she didn't care. Nothing else mattered to her at the moment apart from finding the answer.

After school ended, she got back to her house. Her mother was at her job. She worked long, hard hours, to the point that Kiana was sure she didn't remember her daughters' names. Her sister Sophia was out, at another one of her 'social functions'. That was part of the reason Kiana felt so absorbed in finding the Matrix and what it was. She had nothing to keep her here. Her whole family couldn't give a shit about her, except when she did something to embarrass them. The last time she had exchanged more than five sentences with her family was when she ended up in hospital. God that was a bad memory…

She hadn't meant to take the pills. She hadn't meant to take the knife to her wrists. They had just seemed like the right things to do at the time. When she was nearly seventeen, she'd been tired, so tired. Her life was constricting her, threatening to choke her with its suffocating suffering. It was unbearable, filling her with regret and resentment. She'd needed that more than anything else to go through with it. She had wanted to die. But for some reason, she'd lived. The doctors hadn't expected her to. They'd told her mother to prepare for the worst. But she'd lived. Her family hadn't even asked her why she'd done it. They'd just been embarrassed that she had. So, when she got out, Kiana had felt fully prepared to do it again. Why not? She had been ready to die. That was the death she wanted; one where she knew exactly what was coming and she got to pick the place and time. But, then she'd started to hack, and she'd found the Matrix. That had given her a reason to keep going. Purpose gave her life…

Anyway, tearing herself away from memory lane, Kiana realised that she had the house to herself, so she decided to do what she did best. She went into her room and started her computer.

While it loaded, she looked around. She'd had this room her whole life, and it had never changed. It was dark blue, with too much furniture squeezed into the miniscule room. Books and clothes and general rubbish spilled out into the room, covering the floor, with only a path cleared through the room to the bed and to the computer desk. In the darkness of the room, due to the fact that the thick blackout curtains were never opened, it was rather perilous to walk through it. However, Kiana was used to her room, and its darkness, and it didn't bother her anymore.

The computer's eerie mechanical light cast out a ghostly glow over the room, and something prickled up Kiana's back. She had the ghostly sense of being watched, and though she knew that she was quite alone in the room, she still had to look around to be sure. She caught sight of herself in her mirror, half of her face enhanced with the computer's glowing light and the other half in complete darkness. Half of her face was pure, her pale skin and white-blonde hair glowing under the strong light. The other half was totally obscured, to the point that she couldn't distinguish herself from the gloom of the room around her. She felt so bizarre, like she was half in and half out. The thing was, she didn't know what she was in and out of.

The computer beeped irritably at her, and Kiana moved her gaze to the screen, not losing her sense of eeriness. She raised her hands over the keyboard to start typing, but held them poised there. Something was wrong. She had known it since she walked through the door, only she hadn't known how to interpret it. But she knew it, just as she knew her own name.

She debated opening the curtains, but decided against it. Having light wasn't going to help her find this thing. She had to rely on her intuition. Just as she thought that, another thought passed through her head, which she muttered out loud.

"This is crazy" she said. "This is insane. I'm trying to find God knows what by not looking, but by trying to follow my fucking instincts" She paused, throwing her hands up in the air. "And now I'm talking to myself. Bloody marvellous"

A low buzzing filled the air, and Kiana froze. It ended abruptly, and she had the weird feeling that she had imagined it. But no, it started again and she slapped her hands down at her sides in annoyance.

"Does the whole world just want to get my attention, or am I finally insane?" she complained to the ceiling. It depressed her to realise that she was talking more to herself than she had to any other person in the whole day. The regular pattern of silence and buzzing continued. Kiana looked high and low for its source, but couldn't find it. She fell onto the bed into defeat, pressing her ear to the mattress as she lay on her side. After a second, she froze. She suddenly sprang up, shifting piles of junk around so that she could lie on her front on the floor and look under the bed. It was even darker under there, and she couldn't see anything. Extending a hand, she swung it cautiously over the floor, her fingertips barely skimming the dusty floor. She was thinking that she was wrong when her hand hit something light, plastic and vibrating. Her hand closed around it and drew it out. It was a mobile phone. A ringing mobile phone.

"Shit" she breathed. "Not again" How did this phone get under her bed? This was so weird. She kept on getting the feeling that she should be waking up, but she couldn't find a way to do that.

The phone in her hand sprang open, making her jump. She placed it up against her ear cautiously, as though it would do something weird when it touched her ear.

"Hello?" she said tentatively.

"Hello Kiana. We've been watching you for a while"

Kiana looked up at the ceiling in astonishment. "How have you been watching me…you know what, forget it" she muttered. "I'm guessing that if you can sneak a phone into my room you can watch me as well"

There was a light chuckle on the other end of the phone. The voice was definitely male, pitched low and deep. "And you know why I am calling you?"

Kiana paused for a moment, her heart leaping into her mouth. "The Matrix" she breathed.

"Got it in one"

"Can you tell me what it is?" Kiana made no effort to keep the hope out of her voice. She had been looking for this for so long…

"I can do better. I can show you what it is. But first we must meet face-to-face"

Kiana nodded, then remembered she was on the phone. "Yes. When?"

"Tonight, at midnight, in the abandoned warehouse eight blocks down from your house. Will you be there?"

"Yes" Her voice was soft, but determined.

"Good. All I am promising is answers, no more"

The line went dead. Kiana pulled it from her ear, and stared at it incredulously. That had been the strangest conversation of her life. In thirty seconds, her life had been changed. In thirty seconds, everything had changed. It was amazing really, how little time it took to make such a change.

She lay down on the bed, staring at the ceiling so hard that shapes almost began to appear to her weary eyes. She had no idea whether she was awake or asleep, and she had no way of finding out. Instead, she lay, trapped in the limbo and feeling freer than she had for a long time.

Any thoughts on Kiana? I can never decide if I prefer her or Kes, but they're both really interesting to write. Anyway, please review!