a/n: thank you to all who reviewed chapter 8; I'm thrilled to see a few new readers, and I hope you'll stay with me, here... I see there is a very diverse array of opinions surrounding Synergy (is she bad? good? good at being bad?)... and agent smith IS a mystery at this point. Keep in mind that his program is a little corrupted. After all, he DID assimilate the entire world, and then Neo, and was then destroyed and locked up in Siberian exile for about 20 years. That will put a strain on anyone's sanity. But he does have a rather anomalous connecion with Synergy, who is herself an anomaly "not unlike him" (smith's words, chapter 6). It is certainly risky business mixing them together.

Well, we will see exactly how far it goes in chapter 10, which is another Syn/Smith chapter. Chapter 9 here is back to the Neb, where our sadly separated Trinity and Neo have to pull together when they read something ratherdisturbing in the core...

Enjoy, and don't forget to review! -Syd

Chapter 9

Neo leaned back in the reclined chair on the Observation Deck, watching the cascading green code stream across the huge six-by-ten foot monitor in front of him. Of all Trinity's recent improvements to the design of the ship, this wide-screen Matrix feed had to be his favourite. He'd divided the screen into two-by-three foot segments, and was watching the code from six different locations simultaneously. He liked to turn off the intercom and all the lights and just sit by the glow of the screens, free of all of other distractions. Unfortunately, this time the dark didn't keep his mind from wandering.

He was feeling guilty for hiding in here while Trinity briefed the crew on their new mission. He'd used the excuse that he wanted get started right away with looking through the Matrix for anomalies, but the real reason he'd locked himself in here was because he didn't want to be around when the juniors found out they had a rogue program claiming to be Smith running around shooting people. He had nothing to tell them, no answers to give. And the thought of all of them staring at him with unspoken expectation was more than he wanted to handle.

Suddenly, the door behind him squeaked open, and Neo could tell by the careful, feather-light footsteps that it was Trinity.

"How did it go?" he asked her without removing his eyes from the screen.

She swivelled the chair next to his around and sat down. "They're a strong crew."

She hadn't answered his question, and for a few seconds they both watched the Matrix feed in silence. Neo knew what she meant. They were all young, and none of them knew what it was to fight a War. They were the product of a peaceful society, and had been trained to free minds and hack Exits, not fight Agents. For a long time Trinity had been lobbying for more intense combat training at the Academy, but as the years went by, the number of required hours in sparring programs had been cut by one third.

Trinity sighed. "Knight wanted to know what they should do if they run into him."

"What did you say?"

"I told him what Morpheus told me to do. I told him to run his ass off."

Neo nodded. Over twenty years later, it was still good advice. "Trin, look at this." He stood up and pointed the remote control forward, displaying a collection of pre-selected frames in real time. "What do you make of it?"

She joined him next to the screen and studied each cascading image in turn. A bolt of lightning frozen in the sky, permanently stretching across a blue, sunny background. Isolated patches of fog and rain inside commercial buildings. Stairwells to nowhere. Cars driving into Bermuda-Triangle intersections and vanishing into thin air. "Where did you get these from?"

"The Matrix feed from today. I've found more problem-spots like this, over ten already."

"Kansas meets the digital twilight zone."

"My thoughts exactly," Neo said. "It looks like someone isn't doing a very good job of keeping the system tidy. Stuff is breaking down everywhere."

"Maybe the Architect is on vacation." When he didn't offer anything further, she asked softly, "Anything on Smith?"

"I did a search. If he's out there, he isn't reading the way he used to." Neo met her eyes. "I won't know until I'm in."

Trinity's heart lurched in her chest as she recognized the worry in his voice. They had both been here before, so long ago. She hesitated for a moment before giving into her instincts. Gingerly, she reached out and touched his hand. "Tell me what you're thinking. Please."

Neo toyed with her fingers, brushing his calloused thumb over her dainty knuckles. Then he spun her wedding band around her ring finger once, towards the pinky always, in keeping with Zionist superstition that rotation in this direction brought lovers good fortune. The two of them could certainly use it. "Honestly, Trin," he said, "I think we're getting too old for this."

"Captain!"

Startled, Trinity's breath caught in her throat and she jumped, ripping her fingers from Neo's hand. "Jesus! What?"

Hawk-Eye froze in the doorway, eyes vacillating from Captain to First-Officer, standing close in the darkness. "I'm sorry, ma'am. I should have knocked."

By the end of her sentence, Trinity was already on the other side of the room, turning on the lights. "Nevermind that. Go ahead."

"We have something on the feed in the Core you should see," she said, trying unsuccessfully to keep her voice level. "We think we found him. Except…"

"What?" Neo asked, already fearing he knew the answer to his own question.

"Well, sir… it looks like there are two of them."

When Trinity and Neo arrived in the Core with Hawk-Eye, they found David and Knight huddled around the Operator's station. Kirk was sitting at the keyboard, trying to keep the two figures in the Primary Focus. A large transparent screen stretched out in a 120 degree arc around his chair, displaying several rectangles of green and white cascading code on a black background.

"You're gonna loose it!" Knight yelled at him. "Sacrament, they're fast."

"Not as fast as I am." Kirk typed quickly, staring straight in front of him, as if in a trance. He was wearing his virtual-reality headset, a mobile unit of his own invention which wrapped around his forehead and plugged into the back of his skull, displaying additional windows of information in his field of view, in multiple dimensions. "I've got it," he said, reaching out and touching the pressure-sensitive screen, selecting a single window and enlarging it to stretch around the entire display.

"What are they doing?" Knight asked as Trinity brushed him aside to afford herself and Neo a better view. She leaned one arm on Kirk's headrest and skimmed the code quickly.

"They're severing the Hardline," she answered matter-of-factly.

Neo nodded. "Location, Kirk?"

"Lincoln and St. Matthew."

"Check our other Exits for a connection," Neo said. "And start rotating our carrier frequency every few seconds."

"Sir?"

"We don't want them to be able to track us." Trinity finished her First Officer's thought. "Find the closest Exit that isn't destroyed. If they're all dead, hack a new one."

She turned to Neo and in an unspoken agreement they both stepped away from the Operator's chair, their backs to the crew as Kirk searched the Matrix for a way in.

"Well, they're behaving like agents." Trinity began with the obvious. "But the code is much more complicated. Whoever they are, they're reading a lot like free entities."

"I don't think it's him. Smith's cutting Hardlines doesn't make sense," he said. "It's too… pedestrian."

"Maybe he wants our attention."

"Well, he has that."

"Yo, I've got a live wire at Crescent and Sherbrooke, storage room in the basement of some art museum." Kirk announced. "You two want in?"

Neo touched her elbow. "I'll go."

"Load us up, Kirk. Both of us." Trinity said, taking hold of the computer screen above her jack's headrest and entering the location. She glanced over at Neo. "You lost this argument twenty years ago. Don't tell me you wanna go again."

It had been a long time since Neo had bothered to bring a gun with him into the Matrix. Trinity, of course, had never abandoned hers (that she packed two Beretta 84 Cheetahs in her long, tailored suede coat while she sported a sleek, sophisticated pair of pleated dress-pants and high heels was somewhat of an inside joke among the juniors). Indeed, it had been years since she'd donned her famous skin-tight leathers, much to her husband's unvoiced disappointment. After Rorie was born, soft, wavy hair replaced the gelled-back crop, and feminine, form-fitting blouses were preferred to shiny, push-up corsets. In fact, only the large oval sunglasses and her favourite pair of handguns survived the maternally-triggered transformation.

And so it was of some surprise to Neo when among the storage crates, early classic Mexican pottery, and statues of African fertility gods, he found himself staring at an entirely patent-leather-clad Trinity, passively examining a few of Frida Kahlo's more grotesquely beautiful oil paintings. It was as if he'd travelled back in time, Neo thought, unable to look away as dozens of memories rushed to the forefront of his consciousness. Every feature of Trinity's body, mysteriously prepossessing in her unique blend of gothic and BDSM fetishist, was perfectly preserved, right down to the razor-sharp part in her short hair. Incredibly, after so many years, she hadn't forgotten a single detail, and neither had he.

He also hadn't forgotten how wonderful they'd been together, at a time when neither of them had anything else in the world to live for but each another. In Neo's memory, those first twelve months were an exhausting blur of sex and war, a dichotomy of bliss and hell that in retrospect, he wouldn't change if he could. They'd barely scratched the surface, they'd only just begun, and yet this beautiful stranger had become everything to him, his sparring partner, field partner, teacher, lover, confidante and friend. To live was to love her, and this was the one truth to which he'd clung, even as their universe collapsed and burned around them.

Had they really changed so much since then? In the few seconds of reflection Neo allowed himself after his RSI materialized next to hers, he had to wonder how much of the magic of their fantastic past was truly lost. She wasn't an exotic stranger anymore. He knew her, more completely than he knew himself, and with such intimate knowledge came a new definition of romance. They no longer lived for the stolen nights of passion between missions, or the occasional hushed encounter on the Neb, snatched away in the darkness when their sleep shifts happened to overlap. Over the past twenty years, Trinity had given him much more than that. She'd given him Rorie. She'd given him an entire lifetime of memories, and a weathered, unconditional devotion that still ran constant, smooth, and strong. From what other woman could he ever presume to receive such gifts?

Looking at her now, Neo couldn't imagine how a love like theirs had recently drifted so far from grace. And in the present context, with them both facing such a dangerous mission, alienation seemed unthinkable. If there were time, Neo would have taken her aside and told her all of this, asking her forgiveness for their recent fighting and pledging a restored commitment to reconcile their differences. But of course, there wasn't time. All Neo could do was watch her with interest as she slipped on a pair of elbow-length motorcycle gloves that he hadn't fantasized about in over a decade.

"You riding shotgun, or flying?" she asked, interlacing her fingers and tightening the buckles around her wrists.

When he didn't answer, she looked up at him, mistaking his expression of renewed adulation for an unspoken question regarding her choice of attire. "Look, I just don't want the bastard to forget who he's dealing with." She checked her guns. "Unless he has a phobia of being audited to death that we don't know about, I doubt Mrs. Anderson, Chartered Accountant would strike much fear into the heart of the enemy."

Neo couldn't help a smile as Morpheus' old adage came to mind. There are some things in this world that will never change…

"So. Shotgun, or flying?" she asked again, shoving her weapons back into their holsters.

"Shotgun. I think it's best to stick together. We don't know what we're going to find."

"Right." She pulled out her keys and followed Neo into the main atrium of the museum, ignoring scrutinizing glares from a handful of visibly offended cultural patrons. It was morning rush-hour and the downtown grid was jammed with bumper-to-bumper commuters.

Neo spotted his wife's souped-up black Ducati parked on Sherbooke, with two helmets slung across the leather seat. He tossed one to Trinity and then pulled out his cellular phone to speed-dial the Neb.

"Operator."

"Kirk, do you still have a visual on our two friends?"

"Yeah, they haven't moved. I don't know what they're doing now."

"They're probably tapping the Hardline to see if we try to use it again. It won't take them long. We're going to need directions, and fast."

"I'm already on it. Unfortunately, it's going to be a bit complicated with all the one-way streets and traffic."

"One way streets?" He made eye-contact with Trinity, who grinned back knowingly. "Oh, that's right. You kids have never seen the Captain in a hurry, now have you?"

Sixty-three traffic infractions and several criminally-punishable felonies later, Trinity delivered them to their destination unscathed, and in record time. Lincoln was a narrow street, nearly deserted save for a few cabs which waited patiently for clients from the surrounding hotels. Neo removed his sunglasses and scanned the code up and down the ally.

"What?" Trinity asked, conducting her own survey of the area.

"I don't know. Something."

"Neo, I hacked this Exit a few months ago so Knight and I could watch a target across the street." She indicated a tall, low-income apartment building with the designation 'The Manhattan' written in tarnished gold letters above the main entrance. "Room 1402. There are three elevators, one main stairwell that leads to ground level, and a garbage chute."

"And?" He could tell she had something else up her sleeve.

"There's also a skylight."

"Now we're talking." He wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her close. "With your permission?"

Locking both arms around his neck, Trinity leaned into his muscular frame and let him lift her off the ground. "Let's go."

After a flash where reality seemed to bend and gravity somehow pushed them upwards, Trinity was slipping out of her husband's arms high on the rooftop of the building. She couldn't help but be impressed every time he did that, warp the code so effortlessly to suit their purpose. Lift her over skyscrapers, cities, clouds at a moment's notice. She wondered what went through his mind, what it was like to be him in that moment of complete and unadulterated freedom.

"Thank you," she murmured, but even as her feet touched the roof she was aware of it. Trinity reached for both her guns and spun around, firing the first few times purely on instinct. By the time her eyes had focussed on what she was shooting at, three police officers were already lying dead over twenty meters away.

"How did they know?" she asked, furtively scanning the rest of the roof for any others. The sky was a dull white, overcast, and the din of distant traffic rumbled up from below her. And something else. Approaching sirens.

Suddenly, the maintenance exit flew open, and a flood of armed S.W.A.T. soldiers poured onto the roof, surrounding them.

"Freeze!"

"Well, this takes you back," Neo said.

"Drop your weapons! Do it now!"

"Neo." Trinity pressed her back flat against his. "You go for the Exit. The Agents might still be in there."

He hesitated. There were over a dozen military agents on the roof, and police backup on the way.

"Drop the guns and get on the ground!" the Special Weapons and Tactics Team leader yelled.

"You don't have time," Trinity insisted. "I'll catch up with you."

"Alright." She felt him exhale, pushing back against her slightly. "Give 'em hell, Trin."

In perfect synchrony, the two of them sprung off in opposite directions, Neo heading for the skylight and Trinity racing behind the old brick cover which surrounded the rooftop exit. Neo was showered with gunfire, every bullet of which he froze in midair. He reached the glass structure protruding from room 1402 easily, and paused for a moment to look back at his wife before diving in.

That Trinity still trained frequently in sparring programs (she was often teased on the ship for her dedication to perfection) was never more obvious; what Neo saw was nothing short of magnificent. In a thousand hues of green, white and grey he watched her execute the dance with style and originality. Every kick, flex, pin, and punch was almost gentle in its fluidic elegance, her form never wavering from an equilibrium of perfect balance. It was a dying art; very few bothered to polish their work like this anymore. Trinity already had two MP5's tucked into her belt, trophies snatched from the hands of the men she'd defeated, but she hadn't bothered to use them yet. She was still using the ten-round clips in her tiny hand guns.

"Neo, what are you…? Go!" she yelled, pausing to check on him after delivering a swift kick to the head of the last officer who had managed to infiltrate her safety zone. She spotted a few soldiers closing on his position and shot a well-aimed bullet into the backs of each of their heads. Although she was over twenty meters away, and her eyes were shaded by dark sunglasses, Neo was certain she was giving him a look of impatience.

Glass shattered around him as he finally crashed through the skylight and landed on the floor of the abandoned apartment. Trinity sure knew how to pick them, Neo thought, glancing around the dark, empty room. The only furniture present were two chairs and table with a laptop computer on it, and all of it was covered in dust. He could practically hear Knight complaining now, requesting permission to upload a sofa, or to at least a mini-fridge to pass the time. But Trinity wouldn't have allowed it, delivering her self-righteous speech about how 'such superficial indulgences enslave the mind and dull the senses.' And although she was absolutely right, what the crew didn't know was that during her third trimester with Rorie, Trinity practically lived for midnight caramel-coated popcorn and strawberry ice-cream binges in the constructs. Sometimes it killed him to keep his mouth shut but of course, he'd been solemnly sworn to secrecy (at gunpoint, no less – what luck that he'd married the only woman alive who'd carry a Glock-18 with her to the virtual fridge).

Neo found the maroon rotary-dial corded telephone sitting on the floor next to the window, or at least what was left of it. The receiver was off the hook, the number dial and faceplate had been removed, and the inside of the phone was gutted.

"What the hell did they do to it?" Neo spoke to himself, picking up the mutilated piece of machinery, turning and spinning it in his hands, looking carefully for the tap. Finding nothing, he turned his attention to the laptop, which he was somewhat surprised to find still functional. Agents usually took the hard drives for analysis (not that Trinity ever made the mistake of leaving anything on them). As the computer booted up, Neo noticed something rectangular and metallic crammed into the universal serial bus port.

"Well, this is a first." Neo tried to pick the mangled phone tap out of the USB, but his fingers were too big. So he shook the laptop a few times, and finally heard a light ping-ping-ping on the floor at his feet. But just as he bent to pick it up, the door to the apartment burst open, and two figures in black suits and ties entered the room. Neo instantly recognized them, or at least a part of them.

"It's him," said Agent Brown. "The anomaly. The anomaly."

"The anomaly," repeated the Agent Johnson.

"Got a bit of a stutter there, fellas," Neo said, rediscovering a fraction of the smart-tongued arrogance he once possessed in his youth. It felt surprisingly good. He grabbed the phone tap off the floor and held it up. "Now, which one of you screwed this up? Tweedle-dee? Tweedle-dum?"

"Should we proceed?" asked Brown.

Johnson's head twitched. "Should we proceed? Should we proceed?"

Neo rolled his eyes. He had a feeling neither of these was the program that had attacked Ghost. Still, that a pair of sentients had recently resurfaced, looking for hard drives in phones and trying to tap USB ports was cause for concern. Neo thought of the glitches he'd detected in the System earlier that day. Perhaps there was a connection.

"He is only human."

"Only human. Only human."

"He is only-"

"Can we get on with this, please?" Neo interrupted, positioning himself for a brief but tedious fight. The two Agents extended their guns straight at him. He heard two shots fired, and then Brown and Johnson collapsed to the floor, their bodies transforming into the corpses of two police officer hosts in a blaze of light.

Puzzled, Neo looked up to see Trinity standing on the roof, peering down at him through the busted skylight. She indicated the Berettas in her hands. "Last two bullets," she said, as if there were some unwritten requirement that she always had to use the exact amount of ammunition she brought in with her.

"Jesus Christ, Trin." Sincerely disappointed, Neo put his hands on his hips. "How… anticlimactic of you."

"You know, I'm remembering a brave but inexperienced young soldier who, staring down the barrel of an Agent's gun, was much more grateful to have a little help." She hopped down into the apartment and glanced at the two dead bodies. Quirking an eyebrow and folding her arms, "Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum, Neo?"

He grinned. "You know, I'm remembering a beautiful but mysterious young officer who, believing herself quite clever, shamelessly filled her Target's computer screen with talk of 'White Rabbits…'"

Unexpectedly, this made Trinity smile, the kind of genuine, unguarded smile that shone in her eyes. Even in this empty, virtual reality he could see it; he'd struck a chord. But it was fleeting, as these islands of vulnerability often were with her. She caught herself, eyes fluttering away from his, a girlish, self-conscious reaction that was so completely, wonderfully Trinity, it was all Neo could do not to take her into his arms and kiss her right then and there.

As the few seconds of sexual tension passed and quickly became an awkward silence, Neo cleared his throat, reached into his pocket and held out the tap. "In any case, I think those two Mad Hatters were a few scones short of a tea party. They jammed this into the USB port of your laptop."

She took it from him, looked it over once, and then crushed it under the heel of her boot. "There's more," she said. "I found a pair of wire-cutters on the roof."

"They cut the Hardline."

"No. The poor fools cut the cable."

Neo chuckled when suddenly, her phone rang. As she answered, she turned her face from his to hide a smirk. Whenever he laughed, he made her laugh. "Yeah."

"Captain." Kirk's voice came though clearly, although Trinity could also hear Knight holler "Trin, you're my hero!" in the background. Her body tensed. He was using that name on the ship again (something, and by something she meant David, told her he did it all the time while she was jacked in).

"Go ahead, Kirk."

"Uhm… we just got a phone call here for you from someone identifying himself as 'Seraph.' Says the Oracle wants to see you. He said you'd understand."

Trinity's heart skipped a beat. If Seraph had resurfaced, something was wrong. In fact, the last time she'd seen him, Neo was stuck in limbo twenty years ago. "Got it."

She was about to hang up when Kirk added, "Oh, and by the way, there are about thirty cops in the lobby. They're sending some up right now."

"You say that as if it's a good thing."

She could practically hear the smile on Kirk's face. "Well, if I may speak candidly ma'am, we're all kinda looking forward to the show."