Three Battles

.

Above the city's iridescent network of parapets, above the wriggling tentacles and bloodshot glares, the stars burned defiantly, feverishly blue. Their brilliance, far greater than any Aleph had ever seen inside the Matrix, sang out with all-but-audible voices, and the song sliced into her soul. What were they trying to tell her? Surely it was no longer possible to comprehend. Too much had been destroyed and irrevocably buried.

So, Addie, d'you ever wonder why they created the stars, anyway?

The air went out of her lungs.

They didn't have to make these lights so beautiful. They didn't have to make them to start with. The dead teenager was in an incongruously meditative mood, from the sound of it. Weird, huh?

Lucy, murmured Aleph mutely. When we were girls, you always used to say the stars were...

Keyholes in the vault, breaks in the curtain, yes, laughed the ghost, nostalgic. Beacons of hope to humanity since time immemorial. 'Cause hope is what our species always need, I guess.

Aleph inhaled sharply. This was not an opportune time for falling prey to reminders of her previous life—two previous lives, if one must be honest. But it was already too late.

I am not human anymore.

Oh, you wish, snickered Lucy. Either way, you still see the stars just the same. They still offer you the same stories, even while dying. Go ahead, look at them for me. Look carefully.

A continuous buzz issued from the cloud of sentinels. Each squid-machine quivered, arms lifted toward the fierce flames shining down upon them, as if in impotent fury. Did these creatures possess enough sentience to feel such an emotion? Aleph could not begin to conceive it. Unlike the sunshine, the stars appeared to be out of their reach as of yet, if only for a short while.

"They're beautiful." The words were not what she had been about to say a minute ago.

Smith did not reply. They had halted in the middle of their approach toward the ramparts, and he, too, had his face raised to the sky. Something in the way he held himself ramrod-straight constricted her heart.

"These are the stars I saw," he said at last, very quietly.

"But what does it mean?" she asked, shaky with amazement. "The stars were created inside the Matrix for the benefit of humans. Why here?"

"I do not know, Miss Greene." He let out a half-laugh. "They did not intend me to know. Still don't."

Aleph flinched. For a moment, she attempted to come up with a response, but before she had succeeded, the scene overhead changed one more time. The entire black vault trembled, its underlying programming laid bare for no more than a millisecond—pillars, beams, struts, engineered from inconceivably complex arrays of commands and symbols and precise mathematical abstractions. The stars vibrated in retaliation, phalanxes of living hearts.

"The code up there, it's..."

She tore her sight away from the sky and toward him.

"Fighting itself," he said.

The civil war began and turned into a rout swiftly. Darkness rushed in, gigantic soot-covered fingers spread wide, and the nearest stars trembled as it reached them. Each gave one final desperate flash; each flickered out, helpless before the implacable touch. Monstrous jaws of oblivion widened. The entire structure of the phantom cosmos was being re-programmed: like the previous sunlight, the view of these stars, too, must be something that the machine rulers of 01 refused to tolerate. Were there fingers typing away on a keyboard or a thousand keyboards, somewhere in an inconceivably faraway room or a thousand rooms? Probably not. Maybe all it took was a moment of anger or a sequence of decisions, though in whose brain, she could not begin to fathom.

"Smith, I..." She did not know why the words came out so tentative, but they did. "I remember seeing this, too."

He said nothing. One hand looked like it was about crush the sword-hilt, the other was squeezed into a fist.

Halfway between the ground and the stars, the sentinels contorted, whipping their sinuous limbs into a sort of uncanny dance. A rite, one might have guessed if the creatures had been anything but mindless brutes. In but a few minutes, only fragmented patches of gleaming sky remained, stubborn outposts among vast stretches of shadow. The dream they clung onto already felt like no more than ancient fantasies.

"I saw these stars in my dreams," Aleph went on. "I remember them dying like this."

"You dreamed of them when you possessed a part of me."

"Yes."

"I never saw the stars go out." His voice came like echoes from the end of an endless tunnel, even though he was right next to her. "It must have happened, come to think of it, when the second Matrix failed, soon after I first took those three point two seconds to exceed my design." An ironic snort. "By then I was preoccupied with my own troubles, though."

A dozen doubts raced through Aleph's mind, yet she was again unable to formulate any of them in a way that made sense. For the second time since arriving at the outskirts of 01, they watched light die against the firmament in hopeless battle. Unlike the sentinels, the blackness gave no war-cry: all it did was to lengthen, swipe, paint over in flawless efficiency. The transitory vision faded, constellations and fiery galaxies, nothing but bits of insubstantial glitter. Silence draped over the universe.

The mechanical squids began to disperse, their purpose fulfilled. A hundred crimson eyes twinkled off, vanishing into the grassy mist in the direction of the city. Most of the others followed, company after company, until only a single pack of several dozens remained, cutting wide spirals atop the ramparts, the rear-guards of the operation. A few descended, giving the space above the clearing a final once-over.

Well, one of these guys isn't like the others, sis.

Aleph blinked, swallowing back all the angry retorts that welled up on their own. Then she froze.

"Look at that squid over there," she whispered.

One of the machines had dropped to nearly eye-level, less than twenty meters to their left, and stopped. For a while, it hung at the same spot, tentacles dangling beneath its globular body, single lantern-eye aimed steadily upon their faces. Smith spun around, glance instantaneously sharper than the blade in his hand. He stalked two steps past her; the creature jerked back a corresponding interval.

"It perceives us." His tone was cold and clipped, that of an agent once more.

No kidding. Guess this cute little squiddie is a bit smarter than everybody else, chuckled Lucy.

"Wait, Smith. We don't know what they'll do if one of them gets attacked!"

The other sentinels were still circling at a distance, their trajectories unchanged as of yet. Weren't the brains of all these things supposed to be connected? If so, then the rest should be charging down upon their heads in less than an instant—

This time, she was the one who advanced impulsively, before Smith could grab her arm and haul her back. The sentinel retreated further. Before its powerful whip-like limbs, the sensation of utter exposure made her gulp. Instinctively, she held up both hands, palms open, a too-human gesture. The rock she'd picked up back on the plain weighed uncomfortably inside her pocket.

"Aleph," said Smith a few paces behind her. Without turning her head, she knew the sword was now aloft and ablaze with reflected green flames.

"You are not a sentinel, are you?" she asked, enunciating syllable by syllable, though there was no rational reason why the thing would comprehend any language from the Matrix.

"Aleph, get out of the way."

"What are you?" She did not manage to make her voice completely steady, but it would have to do. "Who are you?"

.


.

The various configurations of nervous glowers and pointed guns tonight were definitely getting tiresome, decided the Merovingian. Ex-agent Jones was still crushing his arm in wretched tension, and a Desert Eagle was still jabbing against his right temple. Ridiculous, really, how earnestly the exiled goon was working at his pretense of emotionless calm. The stairwell was too cramped and the two dunces had placed themselves between Persephone and himself. The world was still a dead voiceless toy; the pair of handcuffs around his wrists were still nothing but steel. Even the tiniest of feats, that of sensing the mechanism inside its lock, had been denied him. He never should have surrendered so meekly.

A key gleamed in Brown's hand. Of course. Helena must have brought the pair more than mere messages.

"I told you so, darling," he said.

"You just can't help it, can you?" she murmured. They were finally able to see each other's faces again: her sweet lips were curled in disdain.

"I beg your pardon. Old habit."

The door ground open, its hinges whining softly, and familiar pale fluorescent light spilled into the narrows stairwell. Jones gave him a push. With a shrug, he stepped across the threshold. His captors followed close behind, Brown's gun still aimed at Persephone's head.

"Please remain where you are, ma'am."

His wife's brows crinkled pensively.

"And you'll shoot me if I don't, I suppose?" she asked. Then, before the other was able to reply, she took a firm stride forward into the white corridor.

"I am warning you, ma'am—"

"Persephone!"

Only his own choked cry reverberated down the hallway. No gunshot, no splash of blood. The Merovingian, a nanosecond before throwing the weight of his shoulder against Jones and thrusting himself between the other two, somehow compelled himself back to a veneer of composure.

"Thank you, Mr. Brown," said Persephone, regarding the ex-agent across the Desert Eagle's black hole of a barrel. "I can see that you are not entirely ungrateful for the protection I offered you and your partner."

With a clang, she yanked the door shut behind her. They were alone in the corridor.

"I would not have expected you to develop false ideas about what agents are, ma'am," returned Brown, jaw clenched.

"That's rather brazen of you, claiming to be agents this time of the day," remarked the Merovingian, scarcely refraining from a string of imprecations. The pressure of Jones's weapon, cool and metallic, had not moved against his forehead.

Both scowled.

"The exile tensed perceptibly when you attempted to search him in the hall," said Jones. It was the first time the Frenchman heard the two address each other. "I felt it."

"You would not have survived, had you tried to carry through your search back there," stated Persephone.

"And now?" returned Brown, seemingly not noticing his own sarcasm. Something was familiar about his intonation. Persephone did not reply. The virus, realized the Merovingian as the former agent laid a disgusting hand against the side of his suit jacket. The blockhead was starting to sound like Smith. From the night of the reload.

"As if anyone would enjoy the sensation of your paw all over," he observed, passably insolent.

Brown's palm ran downward along the side of his torso, making his skin crawl even through his clothes. That night of the reload the storm had writhed and howled, and the Matrix had been dementedly, agonizingly alive. And himself, helpless to stop the monster, or to reach the forces so incontrovertibly present...

"What's this?"

The ex-agent lifted a notebook bound in battered brown leather, not much bigger in size than a man's hand. The Merovingian stopped breathing.

"Take it back with us," said Jones. "The Mainframe will—"

"This thing?" snapped Persephone, openly incredulous. "You've started to carry it around with you?"

He managed to not wince outwardly as Brown thumbed through the fragile pages. The other Desert Eagle, however, remained stubbornly icy against his skin. The handcuffs' mechanism remained stubbornly buried inside a wall of inorganic code.

"It is empty."

"How much more obsessed are you going to get, Mérovée?"

"Call it a madman's talisman, then," he replied with a short laugh. "By the way, gentlemen, did your former master explain why he's suddenly so interested in capturing me again, after all these years?"

A full beat.

"You are an exile, a program who has refused to return to the Source when called," Jones intoned the standard reply.

"Whereas the two of you are...?"

"It is not our purpose to question the Mainframe's decisions. Now come with us, Mr. Merovingian."

The grip on his arm hardened yet again, hauling him several yards down the corridor. He had no choice but to comply. One more forlorn attempt: he drove his will outward, pushing tendrils of thoughts to search for the invisible, the layer of the Matrix beneath its exterior. It had to be there; he had sensed it before, almost reached it before—

Hollowness. The world obeyed the laws of physics programmed into it, and nothing else, for nothing else existed. The handcuffs' edges cut into his flesh like razors.

"It is not our purpose to delete you, ma'am." The aim of Brown's weapon was back upon Persephone, just in case. The finger of his right hand grew tight on the trigger; his left hand was far too rough against the notebook's spine. "But if you persist—"

"If anyone is to imprison my husband, it must be me." Persephone stalked forward. "You shall not have him."

"We have to get moving," said Jones to his partner, voice strained.

Suddenly, impossibly, a breeze grazed the Merovingian's cheek, so faint that he might have imagined it. A tremor of uncertainty, and then he sensed the disturbance of the air again. It was real, definitely and achingly here—a loose strand of hair fluttered against Persephone's ear. Still imprisoned in Brown's grasp, the notebook's cover shimmered into radiant gold for a single blink of the eye, then withered back to drab brown.

"Imbeciles," he laughed. "Since when has anyone heard of a ruler making deals with his slaves?"

Jones's head snapped toward him; Brown, too, spun around, the aim of his gun momentarily leaving Persephone's form. The Merovingian's mouth twitched into a contemptuous smirk an instant before two shapeless arrows of dazzling green code ripped through two closed doors. Two exuberant shouts went up along the corridor.

Only one transitory flicker of power coursed through the Matrix; only one flicker sufficed. The Merovingian twisted as the Desert Eagle slipped for a fraction of a second against his temple; a bullet passed two inches in front of his face. His left fist shot up from behind his back, broken handcuffs swinging from the wrist, and connected with Jones's chin, satisfactorily if somewhat less than elegantly, flinging the other off his feet and across the hallway. Both Desert Eagles crackled. The First twin, still in plasma form, swerved between three or four bullets in the midst of his rush toward Brown, while the Second solidified between their mistress and the ex-agents, pushed her back toward relative safety against one wall, then whirled back around, submachine gun in hand.

"Earpiece, Brown!" Scarcely back upright, Jones dropped again, rolling under the first burst of gunfire. He did not sound remotely like an agent anymore. "We need reinforcements!"

"No time! We must get out of—"

"Don't shoot at—the fucking—notebook!"

The roar must have been his own. Leaving Jones to the mercies of the Second, the Frenchman veered as well, cutting a beeline for Brown, who was backing away rapidly, one hand squeezing the trigger of his gun in quick succession, the other still clutching the precious object. The First charged, about to engage hand-to-hand—

"Mérovée!"

Grinding to a halt along the polished floor, he avoided crashing into Persephone by about two feet. He had no idea how she'd managed to move so fast into exact position to block his path.

"Stop this insanity," she said, motionless, eyes ablaze. Despite the fact that she was the only one not yelling, her voice somehow rang above the twins' whooping cries and the whizzing bullets. "Now."

"Out of my way!"

A shove, and he was past her, but the delay had already taken its toll. For the second time in as many heartbeats, the Merovingian forced himself into a hard brake.

"Do not think of it," growled Ex-agent Brown, holding the notebook aloft. The barrel of his Desert Eagle was jammed against its cover.

All the noises vanished around him.

"Mérovée, please," whispered Persephone. What on earth could she possibly be pleading for? Risking a sideways glance, he saw her half-sitting, half-kneeling on the ground, peering fixedly up at him. Her beautiful face had gone pale. He could not tell if she'd been injured by a stray bullet—

Another gunshot, far louder than all the preceding ones. Jones must have taken advantage of time's skipped beat, but the Merovingian, gaze locked with Persephone's, did not see it. Pivoting back toward Brown, he gritted his teeth. He had been an inexcusable idiot.

"How clever, Mr. Brown. Do you ever wonder if your Mainframe will tolerate..."

The blast of fire against his left side made him pause. The brightness of the corridor swirled into a snowstorm. Then blackness swelled.

.


.

Even during his agent days, Smith had always been adept at detecting fear in humans, far more so than any of his colleagues. Nevertheless, he was rather surprised to find that he could recognize it even in a creature that had nothing whatsoever in common with either a battery or a Zionite. The sentinel had gone instantaneously and absolutely still. Even its dangling tentacles, each as thick as the trunk of a small tree and taller than his own height, had ceased their undulations, as if the program had simply forgotten how to move. The scarlet globe of its visual sensor locked upon Aleph without a single flicker.

"You are another type of program," she insisted, for some reason refusing to retreat. "You can hear me, can't you?"

"Move away," he said, walking several steps to the side so that she no longer blocked his line of attack—if the notion of charging forward to chop at a sentinel's arms with a rusty piece of metal could be consider as such.

No visible or audible reaction from the machine.

"Can you understand me?" queried Aleph.

The question was irrational, obviously: how could she possibly have expected the thing to answer? Now more than ever, Smith cursed the code damage that prevented him from regenerating the Desert Eagle back to his side, but then a stray idea froze his anger.

"Ask it how it took over a sentinel," he interjected.

"Wait, do you mean..."

"Don't look at me," he added before she had a chance to turn toward him. "Don't speak to me directly."

Aleph did not nod, but her shoulders stiffened as realization dawned upon her. But before she could again address the creature—or more accurately whatever program that was concealed inside its primitive shell—another high-pitched rasp of steel pierced the darkness. Overhead, five or six of the sentinels wheeled, and were descending again toward the field and their lagging companion.

"Get down!"

Several events occurred simultaneously. The abnormal sentinel in front of them drew in its limbs and shot upward like a rocket, while the others plunged, accelerating frenetically. Both he and Aleph dove, narrowly evading dismemberment as one swooped between them with a shriek. The wind in its wake struck his face like a lash. A glance up: the sentinel that had detected them earlier was already lost in the night sky.

A low snarl issued from Smith's throat. Here he was, after six centuries nailed to a bridge, after lightning, hellfire, apocalypse, made to dodge and flee by a flock of dumb beasts. No. It was not these squid-machines themselves, but another power that controlled them. A force or consciousness, who hid itself in safety behind 01's walls, the one who would not allow even a glimpse of the sunlit sky or the stars.

He found himself on his feet again, fingers still firmly around the sword hilt. The half dozen sentinels had passed over the field, and were swerving into a wide loop atop the forest canopy's verdant glow. After spending few seconds to regroup, they sped one more time toward the clearing, their eyes a single row of hideous searchlights. They must have observed that one of their numbers had tarried beyond its purpose; it had somehow triggered yet another sweep of the area. This time, Smith stood his ground, upright. With one move of his wrist, the blade shifted into a diagonal stance, at the ready. He was a fool to believe that they would get away unnoticed.

"No!" cried Aleph. "What are you doing? They still don't perceive us—"

The sentinels surged above the field, then broke formation without warning, their trajectories switching to random with a speed extraordinary even to an agent's sight. Briefly distracted, Aleph did not glimpse the one that bore down upon her from the left until almost too late. Smith pounced forward. Both hands caught her shoulders—he must have tossed the sword aside—as he slammed into her. The tip of a segmented tentacle sliced the air a few inches above his head. They landed together, hard. Something warm and sticky streaked against the center of his palm.

"It's fine," grunted Aleph, pinned roughly between his body and the ground. She peered up at his face. "I'm fine. It's just a nick..."

Smith rolled off her, one hand scraping against the gash through her clothes, at the spot where shoulder met upper arm. She did not recoil. Another sentinel pulsed a few feet overhead, forcing them to remain crouched on their knees. The air roiled. Aleph's smudge of blood burned like a small yet intense flame against the skin of his hand. Before his eyes, 01's great luminous barrier, parapets and columns of eternally poised symbols and concepts, erupted as if before a soundless scream. Then all the viridian code darkened into an icy torrent.

Because I choose to, said Thomas Anderson, while all the other human torturers held their collective breath. Because unlike you, I possess the ability to choose.

There was not even scorn in the young man's voice. It was unnecessarily when speaking to a virus, especially by One chosen by an unseen power, the same divinity who could shred the sun and erase the stars, and bury the past and imprison it so securely that not even a thought could pass through.

"No, you're wrong," he returned, not knowing to whom. Yet unlike all the previous bouts of madness he had ever experienced, a strange clarity fell upon him, a breeze that made every virtual molecule of the world quiver. Space and time each contorted half an inch, and the six sentinel, hovering mid-air a few meters above the clearing, flashed into beings of blinding gold.

"Smith!" called Aleph as he leapt upright.

The shells of industrial gray dropped away from the creatures. Squinting at the closest one, he saw its programming, its animal consciousness. Unlike the forest and the city walls, the sentinel's true form was bright yellow in hue, tinged here and there with crimson. Wiry cycles of quantum logic ran along its multiple limbs, converging into a hollow knot of interlocking nerves immediately beneath the sphere of its visual organ.

"We have to get one of them back down here," he said.

Aleph, who had just scrambled back to her feet, stared at him open-mouthed.

"That sentinel you saw," he continued quickly. "The one that saw you. It had been hijacked. And if some other coward of a program could take over one of these things, then so can we."

"And how do you propose we do this?"

"I see its code." He grinned, carried on a wave of euphoric rage. Overhead, the squadron was still lingering, but surely not for much longer. He could already sense it, the singular will driving itself into the machines' operational routines, about to withdraw them back toward the city.

"Hey!" he bellowed at the top of his simulated lungs, disregarding her astonishment. "Hey, you! Look at me!"

Another delay, and the machines would certainly escape out of reach. Nearby to one side, the discarded sword lay upon the surface of glistening code. A few long strides, a swift kick of one foot, and it was back in his grasp. He drew back his arm; the blade flickered.

"No, wait!"

Focused too intently upon the sentinels, he allowed Aleph to take him by surprise. The abrupt force against his other elbow nearly yanked him out of position. His concentration broke.

"Move aside, Miss Greene!"

"Hold on!" snapped Aleph as he shook himself free. "If you throw that thing—"

Before the sword left his hand, something small and pale flew out of hers. A bright parabola cut through the gloom like a tiny meteor. There was no rattle or clink, or any other noise of rock striking against either metal or code, but the effect was immediate. The pack shuddered as one, their shapes liquid with streaks of living data, then all six plummeted, converging with unerring accuracy toward the spot where the projectile originated.

"What the hell are you seeing, Smith?" yelled Aleph. "And—and how?"

"Never mind how!" He gave her a shove, and they separated in the nick of time as a multitude of shining limbs shredded the air, far more violently than before. "The codes of these things, their minds—" The swipe of a fiery arm as one sentinel nearly discovered them. "A hollow knot under its eye—"

"What does it—" She skidded between the thrashes of two whips. "Look like?"

"Spherical, a foot in diameter." Dodge. "Interlocking neurons or wires, fast circuit of synapses—"

"Could be a lock—"

"How does one open it?"

"There's no time!" she shouted above the ear-piercing screeches. "You want me to talk you through picking a lock now? Just break it!"

Space churned around them. A hurried scan, and Smith chose one sentinel that was currently gyrating a short ways to their right, its orbit approximately elliptical. Rapidly, he closed the few yards of distance to Aleph.

"Do you recall, Miss Greene, how you used to jump for the phone exit back when you were among the Zionites?"

"You're fucking nuts," she muttered as his fingers wrapped around her wrist.

The beast swiveled into another pass, darting straight toward the two of them. Smith narrowed his eyes against the glare. Raising the sword in his right hand to shoulder-height, he waited until he saw the individual qubits of its entangled data flow, from the burnished clot of its nervous center to the tentacle's violent tip. He flung the weapon forward.

His agent's strength had not deserted him after all, and the sword, rusty after six centuries of disuse, turned out to be much sturdier than he'd hoped. Flying in a smooth path, it buried itself with unerring accuracy into the center of the intricately woven sphere of shifting light, slicing apart the code like layers of insubstantial gauze. The sentinel, its arms lashing madly, dropped a few feet to nearly ground level. Smith did not speak or turn to Aleph, whose arm he was clasping so desperately that he feared injuring her. They both ran.

A wild leap, and the golden fire rose to engulf him. It was not exactly like taking over a new human host, but too reminiscent. Something within him contracted as if with a previously unnoticed wound, then his shell dissolved.

Aleph!

I'm here, came the soft reply. It seemed to be issuing from no definite location, but reverberated both within his mind and outside of it at once. It's fine. It's fine...

She was too close. So close that she might have been right inside his consciousness. He would have flinched if it were possible.

The machine ascended with a mental command. The last members of the swarm were still spiraling atop the city's edge. Through the creature's eye, he saw 01 outspread below, a vast array of infinitely complex surfaces and manifolds, dotted with countless singularities, rotating, ever-changing in shape. Its dance, eternal and ephemeral, was far beyond any single program's ability to comprehend. Filigrees of gold and brilliant red, previously invisible, threaded into innumerable patterns against the background of radiant emerald.

This is...breathed Aleph, disembodied. This is...incredible.

The ramparts now revealed themselves in their true shapes, myriads of filaments and gears in incessant motion. The minuscule and the massive blended into each other, then fractured apart again into isolated components. Following its comrades, the sentinel glided toward the city, taking aim at the one of splits among the curving braids. This gap, unlike all the others, did not close, but widened as the flock approached, whirlpooling into a rounded portal. The gate of 01 opened.

.


Notes: In Chapter 3 (Day and Night), Aleph picked up a round rock on the plains as she and Smith walked toward 01.

"I saw these stars in my dreams": In Chapters I-4 and III-1 of Awakenings, Aleph dreamt that she saw stars being extinguished in the sky.

Qubit: The quantum computing analogue of a bit.

I will give some explanation of the strange sentinel, and also on how Smith saw through the shells of the sentinels, in later chapters.