Sydney Andrews – Definitely more parent/child interaction coming then. I'm really open to requests for this fic, so give me the ideas and I'll try to work them in. Re; Kes' awful mouth, I think she probably picked it up around the ship, because in the movies, there is a lot of swearing, and Kes seems like the type who would pick it up quickly. She's pretty rebellious, and also, at the moment, she wants to try and seem older than she is, and not be thought of as the 'young one'. You picked up on something I hadn't mentioned actually, that in this scenario, Kiana is like the 'Neo', as in, she's the one who's newly exposed to this world, and Kes is the 'Trinity' who knows it all back to front, and also notices the things that Kiana doesn't. The Seventh One idea is really interesting, but I've set this story after M1, as though M2 and 3 haven't happened. I hadn't thought about maybe Trin and Neo having more of a connection to Kiana, that's definitely something to work in there. I really feel like I should credit you for all these ideas you give me! And yes, there is an Oracle chapter coming up, but not for a while. I'm really looking forward to writing it actually :) Penultimately (man this is a long response!) there will be some hints about childhood soon, especially Kiana's. She's got a lot of baggage. Finally (whew!), as always, thanks for reviewing! And for giving me such a lot to mull over (hugs)

Neo – Thank you! I'm definitely writing it – just try and stop me!

scarstar – Thanks! I think those kinds of details are interesting, they make a character 3-D. I love that line too, btw :) Thanks for reviewing!

LadyOfThieves – Ah, I knew you would succumb to the Matrix side before long…And yes, you and Katie did inspire the alright-crazy-person look. I use it daily in fact, but you helped to create it! I love that sentence. It's the sort of thing I say to my mum whenever she gives away too much information! I need to speak to you about doing something later this week, any thoughts? Oh, also, a dojo is a practice area for martial arts. You know the bit in the first film, where Neo and Morpheus spar in the oriental looking room? That's a dojo. Talk to you soon!

I'll keep this brief, because I am really ill. And it's half term. So at any other time I'd be missing school. But now, I can't do anything fun and I've got homework to do. This really stinks. Reviews make me feel better though…hint hint. Because I am so subtle (!)

Hope you like the chapter! Thanks again to Bagpipes for all her help.

Chapter VIII: Evolution

Kiana woke up in amazing amounts of pain. Despite the fact that it wasn't real, most of the muscles along her body ached and she felt stiffer than she had done in a long time.

She'd quite literally passed out after her session. She'd summoned up the strength to get back to her room, and then she'd collapsed face down. When she'd woken up, she honestly thought she was being suffocated until she realised she had her face pressed into the blanket.

There was no way to tell the time. This annoyed Kiana, as she always liked to know the small details. But it appeared they were without time, timeless.

Kiana wandered through the bowels of the ship, just to try and get her stiff limbs working again. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was freezing, she was convinced her echoing footsteps would disturb someone and she was convinced that she was just getting stiffer.

How do you even get cramp when you've just had a virtual workout?

Too confusing. Kiana's brain couldn't cope with that at the moment.

Eventually, she climbed up onto the main deck, thinking it might be empty. No such luck. As Kiana climbed up the ladder to the main deck, Kes, who was sitting at the Operating station, turned around to see who the intruder was.

"Hey" she said softly. "Couldn't sleep?"

Kiana shook her head.

"Thought you'd be shattered after training" There was something strange in Kes' tone, almost suspicious, but her face and voice were neutral. Kiana mentally shook off her reservations, but replied guardedly.

"I slept a little" she supplemented, her voice as impartial and expressionless as Kes' own.

Kes turned back to the screens, using the scrolling code as an excuse to look away. Something about Kiana disturbed her, and whilst their similar eye colour and stature was part of the reason, the greater reason was simply that there was something bizarre about her whole presence, something unnerving.

She tried not to think about that and concentrated on the falling green code as she pretended not to notice Kiana watching both her and the screens with interest.

"How do you read the code?" Kiana asked.

"Slowly and painfully" Kes said with an unintentional touch of humour. "At least at first. It takes a while to get fluent"

Kiana gave Kes another glance. She always seemed, at least to Kiana, very much in control, very confident, very mature, but right then, she looked so much younger as she sat with her tousled hair falling over her face and her ill-fitting threadbare clothes hanging loosely off of her slight frame. She looked even younger than fifteen at that moment.

"You must have been studying it for years" she commented.

"Since I was five" Kes remarked carelessly.

"Shit" Kiana said, almost involuntarily. "Sorry, I just can't imagine having to leave the matrix at five years old"

"I didn't" Kes informed her. She stretched out her arms, pulling back the sleeve to expose the skin. "See? No plugs"

"So you were born here then?"

"Not quite here. Zion"

"What?"

"The last city of the human race" Kes explained somewhat distractedly, as her eyes were fixated on the screens and the falling code.

"Where is it?"

"Beneath all of these sewers–"

Kiana looked blank, so Kes decided to backtrack slightly.

"What we're flying through right now are the sewers of the Megacities of the world. When the A.I machines and the humans fought, everything got destroyed in the war. Morpheus told you about that, right?" Kiana nodded. "Well, Zion's way beneath these sewers, towards the mantle of the earth. It's a lot warmer than on ship"

Kes stopped there, and Kiana was itching to ask more, but she sensed something in Kes' manner that told her that the subject was closed. Instead, she turned to another burning question.

"So why did you join the ship at five?"

"You met Trinity and Neo, right?"

Kiana nodded, though she was thrown off by the change in conversation. What did that have to do with anything?

"Yeah. So?"

"They're my parents" Kes stated matter-of-factly. "So I came with them onto the ship"

"Was that hard?"

Kes shrugged. "Not really. I like it here. It's kind of peaceful on these ships. And at least there's some space to breathe"

That made little sense to Kiana, who found the ship almost unbearably small at times, and was still adjusting to the ambience of having the crew around her the whole time.

"What, this is less crowded than Zion?"

Kes wrinkled her nose, finally pushing the headset off and spinning her chair to face Kiana directly. "Not really, but everyone's much more interdependent. As a ship, you've got to fend for yourself. In Zion, it's a lot more community-like. It's kind of…I don't know, irritating, I guess" She gave a slightly bitter smile. "But don't ask me, I'm kind of biased"

"Why?" Kiana knew she was prying, but she was sincerely interested, and Kes didn't seem to mind too much.

"You know I said that Neo and Trinity were my parents?"

"Yes"

"Well, they're kind of important" Her voice was completely neutral, no tone of any sort in it at all. "And in Zion we all get a lot of attention" Kes turned away for a second, tapped in a few keys, her eyes barely flickering down to the keyboard as she did so, then turned back to face Kiana. "You'll get it too"

"Why?"

"The Zionites way outnumber the crews. There are like twelve ships, with maybe five or six people on each one, right? So that's at most, possibly seventy or so people on the ships. There are almost a million in Zion. And the ships often don't dock for months at a time. So when a ship docks, it's kind of rare. And the Nebuchadnezzar in particular is pretty special"

Kiana was starting to notice that Kes rarely met her eyes. Every time she tried, Kes looked away, and she looked back at the screen, though she didn't do anything active like typing.

Kiana reached up to brush the hair away from her face, a habitual motion with her, but instead her fingers encountered the hat – an old, ragged object, but it covered her baldness, and she could kid herself that she had hair underneath it this way. Kiana wasn't particularly into self-delusion, but her hair was like her identity. Without it, she felt particularly alien. If she could kid herself that she still had hair, it gave her confidence. Shallow, she knew, but it was something that was important to her. She practically hadn't taken it off once.

"Why?" she asked, feeling ignorant and untutored, but pretty much beyond caring at this point. Kes didn't seem to like her all that much, and so if she bugged her a little more about things, it probably wouldn't matter.

"Why what?" Kes asked distractedly, her eyes back on the screen.

"Why is the Nebuchadnezzar so special?" Kiana repeated with patience.

Kes didn't answer for a second, and suddenly started typing at the keyboard, stabbing at the keys. "Shit!" she exclaimed, her eyes following lines of code whilst her fingers moved.

"What's wrong?" Kiana asked, a little surprised by Kes' sudden action.

"Go get Morpheus, now!" Kes ordered. "Tell him Niobe's Inside and the code's going haywire"

"Won't he be sleeping or something?"

"He basically doesn't. Go, now!"

Kiana got up and left, exiting the room swiftly. As the clatter of her boots on the metal grille faded, Kes' deep brown eyes scanned the scene and her fingers responded almost instinctively, zooming in, out, rotating, everything possible to try and get a better idea of what was going on. All the time she followed the figure wandering through the Matrix.

Suddenly, her monitor screen flickered, and died.

"Come on!" Kes snarled with urgency and desperation, hitting the monitor with the flat of her hand. The impact seemed to stimulate the machine, and it flared back into life, but she was in a completely different place from before, when the computer had died.

"Piece of shit" she seethed through gritted teeth as she frantically tried to recover her position. What she was reading was the coding for a small settlement in Ghana, when what she'd wanted was to hack into the Megacity. It was never a smooth hack, and right now she couldn't be arsed to fight her way through the layers upon layers of coding that surrounded the Megacity.

But she didn't have a choice. There was no way to regain the ground she'd lost.

Cursing under her breath, she began the hack. Because the Matrix was always evolving, it always took different codes and methods to try and scan the major cities. Though Kes was a quick study, it was different every time, and as each attempt she made was rejected, her expletives got louder and more inventive. No hack had ever been so hard before.

A clatter of feet behind her informed her that Kiana was back. Morpheus always made virtually no sound, as though he didn't want to disturb the ship.

"What is it?" Morpheus asked, looking at the screen over Kes' shoulder.

"Niobe" Kes said, feeling sorry for him. They were both practically part of her family, and she knew how frustrating it was for them, being on separate ships and having to get news through the Matrix code. "She was Inside, I swear. But then the code got all nuts and she disappeared. Like, literally. And then the computer crashed and it ended up outside the mainframe" She tried another combination of codes and emitted another obscenity under her breath as it was again rejected. "The code's warped. I've never had this much trouble getting in before"

"Let me try" Morpheus said, and Kes passed him the headset. She moved backwards, towards Kiana, who was standing a way back from the monitor and looking like she was having trouble keeping up with the rapid flow of dialogue that had just taken place.

"I don't get the problem" Kiana whispered to Kes. She was, again, feeling like she was asking an obvious question, but there was no way she could deduce what was going on from the meagre information she had collected since she was unplugged, and frankly, she had no way to escape the 'newbie' tattoo on her forehead.

"We can look at bits of the Matrix simply by reading the code" Kes explained softly, watching Morpheus work. "But in order to look at the more sensitive parts of the Matrix, the Megacities and other, protected areas, we have to hack through the mainframe. When the monitor, crashed, we lost the hack. But we should be able to get back in…" Her voice trailed off, and her face was covered with a pensive expression.

Morpheus moved away from the console.

"Any luck?" Kes asked

Morpheus shook his head. "The code is changing. Something is wrong. We need to get everyone here. Kiana, can you get the rest of the crew?"

Kiana nodded, and left quickly. Though her grasp of the situation wasn't deep or detailed, she understood urgency, and now there was plenty of it in the air.

"Kes, we need to contact the Logos"

Kes picked up the headset again, starting to make the call, as Morpheus returned to trying to hack the mainframe.

"Operator, and if that's the captain we're looking for, man, are you ever late"

"Sparks, it's Kes. Are you following Niobe?"

"We were, but then the mainframe got frosty on us, and our hack dissolved"

"Same as. Something does not want us watching the Megacity"

"You don't think it was coincidence?"

"Not really. Seems too convenient to be coincidence. And I didn't think machines believed in coincidences. When did you last speak to Niobe?"

"Just before we lost the monitor. We were about to try and set up an exit, but then the connection cut out"

"Why was she in the Megacity anyway?"

"Some crazy mission that was going to risk everyone's life again. Including mine, and how is that fair?"

"It never is. Call us if you get news"

Kes hung up, sliding the headset down her head so that it hung around her neck. "The same thing happened to them" she reported to Morpheus. "We've all lost the mainframe. I don't get it. How can they do that?"

"Do what?" Neo asked, coming up behind his daughter with Trinity, Link, Elysia and Kiana following.

"We're frozen out of the Megacity. Something's keeping us out" Kes explained quickly. "The Logos is in the same situation, but worse because Niobe's Inside"

"Holy–" Link began, looking at the code. "That's never happened before"

"Yeah, the corruption's pretty bad" Kes commented.

"Yeah, but have you seen this?" Link slid into the seat in front of the monitor that Morpheus had vacated. He pointed, his fingers running down the trailing lines of code. "It's not just the top layer of code. It's all the way down, running right down to the bottom layer"

"My God" Elysia breathed. "Something's changing. They're changing the Matrix, right from the core"

"But why?" Trinity asked. "What's so important that they've got to go back and change the most basic lines of code?"

Kiana listened to the talk around her with interest, but also a cold chill down the back of her spine. There was something eerie about all of this, and the coldness of the ship didn't help. She wrapped her arms around herself, trying to catch more information from the talk going on around her.

"Neo, can you see what's happening to the Matrix?" Morpheus asked, looking thoughtful.

Neo leaned in a little, just so that he could see the green phosphorescent screen more clearly. He stared at it for a moment, concentrating, his eyes flickering over the screen as he took in the code. Finally, he stood back, shaking his head. "Nothing's apparently different. Everything looks the same, even if it doesn't read the same"

"No offence Neo, but that's impossible" Link stated. "How can they change the very make-up of the code and it not show up?"

"Unless…" Morpheus began. "Maybe this isn't a change in the Matrix taking place, only a change in the code"

"Not following you" Elysia put in.

"What if this is a change in the way the Matrix is programmed, without changing the fabric of reality in the Matrix?"

"That would mean…"

"A new code" Neo mused. "We're locked out until we learn the rules"

There was a moment of silence, on the deck, until the shrill ringing of an alarm shattered it.

"Shit" Kes swore under her breath, so as not to be detected by her parents.

"Trinity" Morpheus called, going towards the cockpit. Trinity followed quickly, and within a few seconds the ship was powering up.

"Plasma rifles?" Elysia asked Neo, who nodded, and they ran down to the lower level, where the ship's small battalion of arms was kept.

"What is that alarm?" Kiana wondered out loud.

"Sentinels, squiddies. They're machines designed to seek out our ships and destroy them" Kes explained as she ran over to the other Operating station. "Link, I got this one"

Link nodded, and left the station, going down below as well. Kiana suddenly felt surplus to requirements. "What do we need to do?"

Without warning, the ship suddenly jolted and jerked into life; Kiana almost falling over because of the sudden movement.

"Okay, I know this is a really shit time for explanations, but I need some as soon as possible" she exclaimed.

"We only have one weapon against the squiddies; the EMP, but it would knock out every electrical signal within a certain range. We'd be unable to fly until we fixed it, and there's every chance more would come whilst we were grounded" Kes explained, twisting a small key so that a button on the Operating desk glowed red. "We usually try to outrun them. Or blow their machine A.I brains out"

Neo, Elysia and Link returned from the lower decks, each clutching something that Kiana could tell was a gun, though she'd never seen anything like it before.

Now that it had started, the ship moved smoothly, like an elevator going up to the top floor. Kiana was beginning to feel distinctly uneasy, but she tried to ignore the feeling, and instead gripped the console as hard and as unobtrusively as she could.

"What are the guns for?" she asked.

"Just in case" Link replied.

"Quiet!" Morpheus' voice came through the intercom, ordering in that tone that no-one could refuse. The order made Kiana itch to ask another question, but she instead tapped her first and second finger rhythmically into the flesh of her thumb, pressing them determinedly deeper every time she felt inclined to speak or even move. She was well past the 'maybe if I pinch myself, I'll wake up' phase, but there was a tiny part of her that hoped that was what would happen.

There was an air of tension in the cabin, so strained it was practically tangible. There didn't really seem to be that much point in staying quiet, as they were apparently being pursued by giant squids, but everyone in the cabin seemed to be waiting, listening for something. Though what it was, Kiana wasn't sure.

It was almost a minute before she suddenly heard it. The scraping of steel, the clunk of something heavy landing and an ominous boom as it moved. It was like there was a giant metallic spider climbing on the roof, surrounding them.

The ship twisted suddenly, and Kiana was thrown to one side of the ship, slamming her side into the steel wall. The whole right side of her body felt broken, like the doll she'd had when she was six, until she'd thrown it out of the window of their apartment on the twenty-third floor. She felt like that doll; broken and yet visibly unaffected. Though, just by guessing, she'd have a huge purple bruise there tomorrow.

She could hear more of them latching onto the roof, metal claws punching through metal. The sound was deafening, and as something tugged on the roof above her, it sounded like pulling multiple plasters off raw, unhealed skin.

Suddenly, red light filled her vision, a strange contrast to the dark blue metal. Cold air rushed in from the hole to fill the ship, and Kiana felt like she was made of ice. She couldn't remember being so cold before. It felt like all the life had been sucked out of her.

A shot from one of the plasma rifles, a beam of creamy light shot out and almost hit the monster. Key word being almost. It shot past the sentinel and headed out into the darkness behind it. Kiana couldn't even tell who had shot it. She was transfixed by the light, and the eyes of the sentinel. Her fear was fixing her to the spot, freezing her. And yet, there was something else mixed in with the fear. There was a sense of curiosity as well. She almost felt like she was watching the whole scene play out from high above, and the sarcastic voice in mind was telling her how unbelievable it was.

That's why she wasn't doing anything. She didn't believe it was happening.

And then the red light blinded her, created darkness for her with the purity of it's light. It got more intense, it got closer…and then there was nothing at all.

Ooh…now we hit some of the action part. And some more plot stuff comes into play. But mainly I wrote this because I was bored and wanted to get to the action stuff faster :)

Please review!