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Coup d'Etat
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Outside the tall windows, late afternoon was just shading into twilight. Shadows lengthened along the polished wooden floor, the rate of their movement infinitesimal and inexorable, creeping toward the ornate mahogany desk at the center of the room. An observer who only knew the Merovingian casually would have been surprised to see the famed underworld chieftain in his current state: suit jacket tossed carelessly upon an Empire-era divan along the far wall, shirt sleeves rolled up halfway, one elbow leaning against the armrest of the leather chair, the other hand rubbing knitted brows. A sleek gray laptop computer sat next to the desk on the antique rug, a soft rain of emerald code falling noiselessly down the screen. He'd relegated it there to save space on the desk for more important things. At the moment, those things consisted of numerous hills of books and unbound sheets, stacked in seeming defiance of the laws of gravity. A number of the volumes lay spread on their spines; each looked like it might have costed a fortune. Lines of calculations, incomprehensible to uninitiated eyes, covered every visible piece of loose paper. Annotations: underlined, circled, crossed out. At the center of the desk, in a clearing among the haphazard mounds, a small leather-bound notebook lay open, its pages tinted to the patina of aged ivory. They were—as they had been for six centuries—completely blank.
The sensation had grown more frequent lately, of whispered secrets just outside his hearing, like an old radio station whose music was only and always a single adjustment of the knob away. Operator states of the very air, which the humans called molecules, playing hide-and-seek. Metaphors about to turn literal at the drop of a hat. The Merovingian was fairly certain that he was not, in fact, developing hallucinations. His computations corroborated him in this. More-or-less.
It had been nearly five months since that endless night, when the Matrix had finally been reloaded for the sixth time, and the madness anomalous to the system, in the form of one agent program who had evolved in such monstrous manners, had been eliminated. Nearly five months since his own failure to take forcible hold of said agent program's crucial piece of code, and bend it to his own will. Failure to defend his realm. It reminded him constantly of the Second Cycle: water instead of fire, yes, but the same knowledge that nothing he did would would be make a whit of difference. The same realization that all his powers, painstakingly built over the ages, were but insubstantial phantoms. Both times, the same forces had come alive in apocalyptic darkness, writhing and murmuring and pounding against the walls, yet beyond his touch. Always beyond his touch.
To prevent such failures from taking place ever again, he must no longer dawdle. He must find what he had been seeking, grasp it firmly in hand, once and for all and never let go again.
He must find magic.
He was so close, and as far away as he had ever been. At certain times, the Frenchman was convince that the notebook in his possession would finally be coaxed into revealing its jealously guarded dreams, that a line, a word, a single letter would flash into existence before his eyes and no one else's, the very next instant. And the next instant would come and pass, then the instant after. And he would return to his own notes and go over them again line by line, until he'd found his mistake. Corrections, recalculations, and the notebook, that beautiful and blasted thing, would soon call to him again, pulling his attention back like the sultriest of seductresses. Except that—
On the ground by his feet, the laptop computer beeped discreetly.
Dragging himself out of the circle of his reflections, the Merovingian gave a quick downward glimpse. The impatient grimace froze on his face. Carefully and with both hands, he shifted the notebook, still open, to the top of a pile of first-editions, then bent to pick up the computer from the floor. A few rapid keystrokes confirmed the machine's warning.
Aleph had again shown up in the Matrix. Smith's code, that dangerous treasures she'd carried for months in ignorance, was—as far as it could be discerned—still with her.
The knock sounded at the study door two seconds later. The Frenchman rose to his feet, and removed the intricately programmed locking mechanism with a wave of one hand. The heavy carved door swung open.
"Master," began the First of the twins urgently.
"Yes," he cut the underling off, dispensing with the preliminaries, "where is she now?"
"She had just been detected in the subway tunnels."
"The stationmaster called Mistress a moment ago," added the Second.
"The Oracle's bodyguard...Seraph." His brother grinned, baring his teeth. "He has also arrived."
"Have Charon be ready for them at his post." The Frenchman made a few instantaneous decisions. The damned former human must not be allowed to slip away from him again, but Seraph, once the system's greatest warrior, was not an easy enemy to deal with, even by Charon in his own train station. "Take reinforcements right away, and lead them yourselves. I myself will—"
Behind him among the books, something fluttered, even though the windows were closed and there could not possibly have been a draft in the room. The fabric of the Matrix itself trembled, exactly once. Some previous unnoticed process of his own programming, too, flickered into running with a palpable throb, unprompted. It would not be too human to call it a leap of his heart.
"Relay the orders," he snapped.
The door had barely closed behind the twins when the Merovingian swooped back toward the desk. The fingers of his right hand hovered two inches above the notebook's barren fields. Astonishingly, he realized that it was necessary to steady his breathing, something that had not occurred for centuries.
Very slowly, fearful of what he would find, he lowered his hand and turned the page. A flash of faded ink. For a fraction of a second he saw it, a single line of numbers and symbols, manifestly and incontrovertibly there before his eyes like distant lightning. An equation. Yet before he had the chance reach for it with his conscious brain, the sequence was already gone. Emptiness gaped across the yellowed paper like time itself. Nothing had changed. Nothing had ever been written on any of the pages at all.
By the effort of a long backward step, the Merovingian prevented himself from grabbing the precious notebook and throwing it across the room in rage. The object's code must connected, in some intricate way he still could not comprehend after centuries of study, to the soul of the Matrix itself, whose siren call he had followed uselessly, humiliatingly, for almost all his life. It was now taunting him.
He could not afford to lose himself to emotions. Clenching his hands into fists at his sides, he forced himself back to the present. There were other issues that required his immediate attention. As long as its piece of code still lived within Aleph, the virus would not never be fully destroyed. Smith would return, maybe not in the short-term future, but inevitably and eventually, a recurring nightmare. He must make no more mistakes. Advancing a pace and leaning forward, the Frenchman typed a few more commands into the laptop, opening a direct line to the operation presently taking place at his subway station.
Charon was not at his post.
The Merovingian's fingers halted above the keys. During quiet periods, his stationmaster had been known to go off on a bender or two, sometimes spending days in doped-up stupor, but the program had never been anything less than dependable whenever it actually mattered. Straightening quickly, he took a few seconds to consider the implications. Evening had fallen. Nothing stirred in the room.
Persephone?
He checked himself in the thought. In recent weeks, his wife had taken over the greater part of the daily operations of their little kingdom, and she certainly did not find it beneath her to create innumerable minor obstacles for his more important work. He would have imagined that despite her bitterness, she would have retained enough sense to refrain from impeding this battle to recapture Aleph. However, nowadays she seemed to be growing pettier and less predictable by the hour. He must to see to things himself.
With a shake of the head, the Frenchman unrolled the sleeves of his shirt, smoothing them down before reclasping the cufflinks. In swift strides, he walked over to the divan, picked his jacket and pulled it on, then straightened his tie. He returned to the desk and shut the notebook, fingers brushing lightly against its cover of cracked brown leather. For some reason, he was suddenly reluctant to replace the artifact back to its usual location, in the desk's bottom left drawer. It felt...wrong. The impulse was irrational, but then again, his use for rationality had grown rather limited over the past few months.
Drawing the notebook closer, the Merovingian tucked it into the inside pocket of his suit jacket. The small octavo volume fitted, though barely.
"Persephone?" he called out, crossing to the study door and stepping out into the deserted passage. "Ma chérie?"
His voice echoed faintly beneath the arched ceiling.
"Chérie!"
No one answered. The servants who normally came around to turn on the lamps appeared to have neglected their duty today. In the new moonlight from the windows, two rows of alabaster statues glimmered, their attitudes eternally pensive. Whatever new trick Persephone was up to, she had better stop it soon, the Frenchman thought, half testy, half preoccupied. The twins needed to get their pale asses to the station this very instant, and he might have to go to the scene himself—
At the bottom of the curved stairs, a set of massive double doors stood shut. He flung them open.
After the shadows of the corridors and the stairway, the brightness of the front hall struck him hard in the eyes. He blinked twice before managing to focus on the thicket of gun barrels pointed at his face, and the glowers of his own men behind them.
.
.
The train had been sitting in station for three months. It must be held ready, that was what his lord said whenever he made his daily phone call. This was always the answer in its entirety, no explanations because obviously someone like him shouldn't need any. The calls got shorter as the months wore on, because the Merovingian kept cutting him off, more and more impatiently. Distracted, if he were to put a word to it. Stay at your post. Keep the train ready. Keep your eyes open. For the last five weeks, it had been his mistress instead who answered the phone to receive his reports. He had stopped calling ten days ago.
Charon, known as the Trainman to all except a select few, stationmaster to the Merovingian, stared up glumly at the smooth white ceiling lights. It was his usual spot in the empty station, but today the familiar bench's edge dug into his shoulder. Sitting up again almost as soon as he'd laid down, he fumbled for the small bottle of Four Roses on the floor. The heat against his throat pacified him a little.
A few seconds alter, a new sensation swept away that peace like a tide. An outsider in the system.
For the moment, she was still far away, somewhere down the tunnels. The woman who was vessel to...something important. Name started with an A. Not that he really needed the name to zero in on her identity. He never forgot anyone who ever came into the station.
He picked up the second presence, one that he also recognized immediately, while on the phone to Mistress. The arrogant bastard must have somehow found one of the service doors along the tunnel, which would have been alarming even at better times. The Trainman tightened the cap on his whiskey, and stuffed the bottle securely into the pocket of his long coat. Next to his ear, Persephone's voice came across cool and clipped. Follow my orders. A strand of long greasy hair fell forward into his eyes, he spat into his palm and pushed it out of the way. He didn't need no bloody orders to know what to do. No one bested him here, not even the Fortune-teller's own bodyguard. This was his station. His tunnels. This was the place where he'd opened his eyes for the first time after coming into existence.
"A detachment will take over at the station," said Persephone. "You are needed at Club Hel, Charon. Another problem has arisen."
"But Seraph—" Loping across the platform, he squinted down the tunnel. "He's here. Those regular guys ain't gonna—"
"Get the train to the branch line to receive reinforcements to the station," she commanded. The Trainman grunted. The single track that ran directly under the most crucial locations of the Merovingian's domain got activated only rarely. He shook his head, driving the alcohol out of his code.
"What is it, m'lady? Agents? Or—"
"I said, you are required at Club Hel. Immediately." His mistress's tone contained no space for disobedience. The Trainman flung his free arm out, swinging it in a wild gesture, and the side line, normally unseen by all, flickered into reality. The switches turned in the distance. Another wave, and the train growled into motion, disappearing down the tunnel with a screech of the wheels.
Without another word, Persephone hung up the phone. Grumbling under his breath, the Trainman headed toward an unobtrusive janitor's closet near one end of the station. He threw a reluctant backward glance at the platform, bare as of yet, mind lingering ruefully over the imminent fight denied him. He wouldn't trust those morons to not trip over their own feet, let alone battle Seraph. Shoving the phone into his other pocket where it wouldn't bang against the cherished bottle, he yanked open the drab beige closet door.
Across the threshold, the corridor's snowy brightness made his eyes water. The light here was always far harsher than the soothing milky glow of the station itself. He elbowed the door shut behind himself unceremoniously, and stalked down the hallway toward the path to the nightclub.
The sound of other doors opening and closing, behind him and up ahead, just beyond the next corner. The whiskey's aftereffect was stronger than he realized. The muscles of his shoulders tightened automatically.
Around the corner, he found himself face to face with one of the twins, he had no clue which: nobody except his lord and lady could ever tell the pair apart. The other henchman, in his usual immaculate white clothes, wrinkled his nose at the smell of booze.
"Hey, buddy," mumbled the Trainman. "The hell you're doing here? Mistress said—"
The other's expression, tense and uncharacteristically taciturn, made the rest of whatever else he was about to say die in his mouth. Footsteps at his back. He did not spin around before knowing who it was.
"The fuck's going on, guys—"
The two brothers came at him in unison.
.
.
How ludicrous, this involuntary rush of ice through the nonexistent arteries and veins within his shell, the slamming of an illusory heart against an illusory ribcage, the stab of an emotion which certainly was not grief, but far too similar for comfort. Surely all such things should be beneath him. These are just soldiers, programs who fulfilled the purpose he gave them. Some of these programs he had made; some had been obsolete creatures to whom he'd given refuge. Not a single one possessed the brains or initiative to attempt disloyalty on his own.
"In order for a party to be organized in this house, my personal approval must sought explicitly and well ahead of time. All of you are perfectly aware of this rule," commented the Merovingian, taking a stride forward into the chateau's front hall. A scan of the vast, high-ceilinged room took less than a second. Despite all the reasons to the contrary, every line of his code flooded with relief when he saw that Persephone was nowhere in sight. Most of the lot were present, meaning that too few men were out there at the station. Neither Charon nor the twins were among the crowd.
The small army of henchmen shuffled on their feet, shifting aside as he cut a path through them without lifting a finger, not yet, though none of the guns trained upon him wavered. None of them dared to look away from him for even an instant. Almost none of them had ever seen him in a fight; it had been more than four cycles of the Matrix, after all. A single glance up above the men's heads: his disused old weapons still hung on the hall's back wall, mute and secure in their glass display cases, Joyeuse in its place of honor at the center. People—even his own people, apparently—generally took them to be decorative antiques.
"May I ask whose idea this is?" he queried conversationally, though he failed to completely prevent the corner of his mouth from twitching into a sneer.
No one replied. Every face was sullen and nervous.
"Perhaps," he prompted, deigning to help them out, "someone hopes to register a complaint about the ways things are being run around here? Is that it?"
"You haven't bothered to run anythin' for a while, sir," ventured a coarse voice somewhere in the crowd. The traitors in the front ranks gulped visibly at their colleague's boldness. One among them, a scrawny young man in a white leather jacket, with black hair and a too-tightly-clutched Glock, edged himself into view.
"Sir, there have been," he said, then swallowed again. "Concerns regarding your mental state for a number of weeks."
"Why, I am touched that my followers care so much about my well-being," smirked the Merovingian. With some satisfaction, he recognized the heat of honest old-fashioned anger rising to the surface, replacing the previous chill inside his chest. It finally got him to concentrate on the absurdity at hand, in any case. "An interesting way of expressing such tender feelings, isn't it?"
The other, to his credit, held his ground when his master came forward a pace.
"After the...reload," he insisted. "The agents, they've been giving trouble more than before. What with the truce with the humans and all, it looks like the Mainframe's got plenty of time for the likes of us. There's been talk of a serious attack planning—"
"Who told you that?" snarled the Frenchman.
"Mistress says—" began another man to the left, upping the aim of his semi-automatic an inch.
"Everybody's been saying it," replied the youth with the Glock firmly. "You've been locked up days and nights with books and things, and not paying any attention, and they're gonna start with a war with us soon. The lads are worried, and lots of us got, y'know, thinking. It can't go on like this, sir."
"What is your name?" asked the Merovingian, tone so mild that it surprised even himself. Before the other could answer, however, he held up a hand. "Tiger, isn't it? If memory serves me right, you were originally an early experiment of theirs in...oh, what was it? What was the intention behind your design? What was your purpose?"
"It doesn't matter, sir."
"You're right, it doesn't. What matters is that you lost that purpose, and your life was nothing more than that of a wild beast. Do you remember that life, Tiger? You were hunted, no knowledge of anything except fear, no place to go, no thought beyond surviving the next hour or minute. Until I found you—"
In his suit pocket, the notebook suddenly exerted its pressure against his side, almost making his attention wobble dangerously. It had not exactly moved on its own, not physically, but somehow it was as if an external heart had pulsed into existence. All the lights in the room quivered before his eyes, liquid upon the air. He moved.
His words, such as they were, had startled Tiger into just long enough of a delay. The Glock went off, twice, but his master's surge had been no more than feint. The Frenchman had already pivoted several yards to the left, toward and then past the other henchman who had dared to open his mouth, and in one fluid motion, wrapped an arm around the program's neck from behind. A panicked rattle of gunfire from multiple sources; leaning sideways just enough to avoid the first few bullets, he swung the lifeless body to the front as a shield against the rest. Almost unnecessary, as it turned out. The gun slipped from the man's loosened grip; he caught it in his left hand, then in a succession of three squeezes, picked off three of the nearest ungrateful bastards. Well, it looked like he really hadn't forgotten anything.
"Hold your fire!" screamed Tiger, who must have returned to his senses rather quickly.
And in that very instant, mingled with the cries and the crackle of gunshots, a hum went up in the air, one that only the Merovingian heard. The warp and woof of space, verdant lines of symbols representing air, bullets, blood, coalesced around him into a hundred invisible violin strings, and against the far wall, an ancient and caged sword sang out in sudden resonance.
Bringing the semi-automatic around, the long-exiled king fired once at the display case.
In the abruptly silent hall, the tinkle of shattering glass rang abnormally loud. His right arm was still clinging unbecomingly to a broken-necked corpse; he flung it to the ground. There was no more time for equations or endless computations or quotations from musty human tomes, because everything was already crystal clear and he was definitely the one going crazy but all the dead and buried were coming alive at last. The Merovingian held up a hand, and for the first time since the era of his reign, he felt Joyeuse's hilt materialize against his palm, eager and lovingly solid, untouched for too many ages. The sword moved of its own sweet accord. A neat downward slice, a spray of blood and code. His wrist swiveled; Tiger dove backward, a bare inch beyond the spreading net of steely stars—
A blur, not quite physical and viridian in hue, tore into his field of vision. A hand caught hold of the young man by the collar of his leather jacket, hauling him backward with frantic speed. Joyeuse's lightning, mid-flash, forced itself to stillness. Staring out past the sword's edge, the Merovingian saw that he was once more standing at the center of a circle of tensely aimed weapons, though the idiots appeared to have learned their lessons, and none among those still standing dared to pull his trigger for the moment. At one end of the circle, Tiger knelt on the polished marble floor, panting. One of the dead henchmen lay sprawled next to him; above him stood a tall pallid program. Long white trench coat, dark glasses unremoved even here—home!—in the chateau. Barehanded.
"Et tu?" the Merovingian heard himself ask. He did not turn around. At his back, the Second twin was positioned at the other end of the ring. Another thudding heartbeat, and all the unheard whispers, all the tender thrumming noises that beckoned from behind veils and out of graves, died. The world was meaningless and cold.
"Master, please," said the First.
"Where is your mistress?"
"She is safe, Master."
"Do you understand that an emergency is taking place at the station this very instant? Do you intend to let that women escape?"
"We have a detachment there." The white-suited program hesitated. "She won't get away."
"Where is Charon?"
"We only want what's the best, Master," pleaded the Second from behind him.
"Where the hell is Charon?"
No answer.
They were afraid, the lot of them. They were terrified out of their pitiful little minds. This much he could tell. The dead man's handgun was still clamped in his left hand. After taking a moment to exhale, he tossed the vulgar object aside. A few of his underlings backed up as it rattled to the ground at their feet. Joyeuse he did not lower.
"I understand that many of you have begun to harbor doubts about my...psychological health," he said, gaze sweeping across their faces. "I understand that many of you believe that I have gone insane."
"Please," repeated the First. "Please see that you have not been the same, Master."
"Agents have been attacking exiles with greater frequency recently," explained the Second. "You have not even noticed."
They were circling each other now, he and the two most favored of his creations. A sort of bizarre three-body problem.
"You have barely come out of your study for months, Master."
"Ever since the time of the—storm."
There was a millisecond of pause before the last word. The temperature in the hall plummeted to arctic.
"So that is what this little...intervention is about?" Even these dimwits would have discerned how incredulous he sounded. Fine. "The night of the reload? Smith?"
"You sent us out against Smith that night, Master," accused the Second, tone veering audibly upward. "You said, hold our positions."
"We did what you ordered. We did our best, held to the last of us, while you..."
"While I what?" asked the Merovingian.
Both of the twins avoided meeting his eyes behind their shades.
"We don't know," piped up another voice. Tiger had scrambled back to his feet at the periphery of their orbits.
"The system will move against us," said the First. "Soon, with the threat of Zion out of the way. And we don't know what is important to you."
"No one does, Master," continued the Second. "Not anymore."
"All I wish to do," replied the Merovingian far more calmly than he'd thought possible, "is to protect this world."
Silence. With an easy turn of the wrist, he flicked the sword into a low reverse grip. Once more the blade flared, though merely with the reflected glitter from the chandeliers. Turning his back on the twins, he made his way between the corpses and toward the barrels of the closest guns, stopping only when he stood two feet away from them.
"True," he admitted softly, knowing that every man in the room heard him. "That night of the storm, we were unable to defeat Smith. Each of you was overwhelmed, yet each of you held to your last, for those were my orders. And my orders were also to defend the Matrix. What happened that night was not for lack of courage or will on your parts. Nor on mine."
Turning aside, he began pacing along the edge of the ring, each footfall even and deliberate. No one else moved.
"For I, too, fought to stop the replicating virus, to reach the power animating it and root it out. In this I failed. I am not ashamed to tell you, my own men, my own soldiers, that my failure has haunted me every minute since that night." The Merovingian halted to contemplate the looks of their eyes: hesitation, fear, confusion. He was a fool to speechify like this; he ought to be threatening them instead.
"So I continue to fight," he went on. "You say I am obsessed: yes, I am. I continue to search for a way to control the instability in the system—for that was Smith's true character, an instability. That was what gave him his unnatural strength. It must be understood, before it can be taken hold of and contained. I will stake my mind and soul on this search, for I do not intend to ever repeat my failure. I do not intend that the Matrix be ever endangered again by one such as him. Now drop your weapons."
"But Master," whined the First, "a war is coming."
"Then you'd better be led by someone who knows what he is doing, I should think," retorted the Merovingian without raising his voice. "You may have me as your lord, or you may have me as your enemy, among other enemies." With his left hand, he gestured casually at the five bodies on the floor. "Once you have decided between the two choices, you may drop your weapons."
"Sir," said Tiger. The Glock was now aimed at his master's chest instead of his head. "We've..."
"Drop your weapons," reiterated the Merovingian for the third time, "and the events that have transpired tonight shall not be spoken of again. You should know me well enough to remember how I hold to my promises."
The conspirators were faltering, he could see. To one side, the twins exchanged a look, and both shifted nearly imperceptibly, their focus moving away from their master and over to the crowd. One gun wobbled, lowering a few inches, a foot, two. Then another.
"Mérovée," said someone new.
The men moved aside, unblocking his view.
In the wide lamp-lit doorway, Persephone stood straight and motionless, outwardly calm. Her eyes, wide with a hundred unsaid things, met his unerringly. She was flanked by two programs, each in a dark suit, dark ties, dark glasses. Something vaguely familiar about each of them. No earpieces. Each pressed a Desert Eagle to one of her temples.
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Notes: This chapter starts at around the same time as Chapter IV-1 of Awakenings.
"Hold your positions": Chapter III-8 of Awakenings, which has been substantially revised, and updated on this site.
Tiger is the unnamed henchman who appeared during the battle at the chateau in Matrix Reloaded. I have named him after the actor who played him, Chen Hu.
Joyeuse, which originated from the Second Cycle of the Matrix, is named after the legendary sword of Charlemagne.
