Dreamland

.

Even without a virtual body, she could still shiver. At least, that was what it felt like to the functions of her consciousness, which must be currently supported somehow by the sentinel's structures and operations. The creature must be fairly rudimentary, Aleph realized, yet its programming, attuned to the machine city's by design, worked well to protect and conceal the two of them. The manifold geometries of 01's perimeter shifted, and the circular portal widened, drawing the sentinel and its riders inward. They were entering the city.

Light surged, monstrous and divine, indescribable in any language that existed within the Matrix. The space through which they flew shimmered with eerie flames of green and gold. Was there a sky above them? The question was a nonsensical one, arising only due to the limitations of her own thoughts. The flock of sentinels wheeled, threading into the impossibly intricate grid. Her heart was no longer even a mirage, yet it raced, vertiginous from the sheer velocity of their movement.

Look at the shadows.

Smith's words still came in his own voice. They were not quite inside but immediately next to her, so close that they made something in her mind clenched. Through the squid-machine's vision, she noticed what he meant a moment later, blotches of intense darkness punctuating the brilliance, a galaxy of miniature black holes captured upon the mesh. Each, like the arteries and veins around it, throbbed in its own rhythm, some contracting into singularities and evaporating away, others expanding to stain the avenues of gleaming symbols at their edges. No glow penetrate inside any of the inky spots.

What are they? asked Aleph in a mental murmur.

Smith had no answer. In forming the question, her consciousness must have tangled with his, for in the next instant she sensed an ocean in turmoil, and innumerable presences just beneath the surface. They lay in wait, their identities an indistinct mass, their quietness merely transitory. For a terrifying fraction of a second, a thousand undercurrents reared into her like uncoiled serpents, ready to choke out every hope and every last memory of life. A whiff of electrical dampness tore through the illusory air. Then, as quickly has it had overwhelmed her, the impression evaporated.

Stay your distance, Miss Greene.

If she still possessed hands, she would have reached for him.

Smith, you...

I said stay away, Miss Greene!

The flash of mechanical fury, despite his obviously intense effort at suppression, crashed into her mind like a heat blast. The distraction was briefer than a human breath: without the least warning, the sentinel spun out of control and into a shrieking descent. The city tumbled around them, all its uncanny poise dissolved, a turbulent and fiery jungle.

Smith! We need to—

Among the whirlwind, the patches of shadow throbbed, pooling into one, and both of them finally sighted the abyss at the same time, a blackness formerly concealed behind the light, an absolute negative image, as immeasurable as outer space, with neither boundary nor interior. It gyrated, pulling rapidly closer in their free fall.

Get out of this machine!

His shout was no shout, but a wave of will that congealed into a tangible force. All unnecessary residual illusions of breath and pulse went out of her. The sentinel's tentacles flailed, fighting to catch hold of a stream of data, a beam or filament, anything, and the sensation was akin to that of plunging headlong into one of the Matrix's exits, yet far faster and more painful—

Her body slammed against an immensely hard solid. Aleph's eyes watered from the impact as a screech of grinding steel tore like a blade into her ears. Instinctively, she attempted to leap upright, but her weakened legs refused to follow commands from a dazed brain, and abruptly the world—there seemed to be a world again, somehow or the other—rotated. Gravity must have returned to operation, and her fingers scrabbled frantically for traction against the ground. A blink. The harshness of concrete against her palms. She was dangling by her hands from a physical construct of some sort; the emptiness beneath her had no discernible bottom. She heaved, hauling herself upward. Then another's hand grabbed her by the wrist.

"Watch out for the squid!"

Another high-pitched whine, nearly on top of them, drowned out her cry. Smith yanked roughly, near pulling her into a flying trajectory. The wind was knocked out of her again, but there was no time to recover; they both flattened themselves as a thunderous cacophony exploded a bare few feet past them. The sentinel crashed again the edge of the bridge—for a bridge was where they seemed to have landed—in a jumble of thrashing tentacles, a piercing death-rattle issuing from its rusty gray body. A dark glint, and a flicker of blood-hued silk: Seraph's old blade was still embedded deep in the spot just underneath its now-shattered visual sensor. The creature shook, its limbs losing power and no longer able to cling onto the structure. It slid downward.

"Wait, the sword—"

Halfway in the process of stumbling to her feet, Aleph almost leapt forward again, but Smith's grip, too, tightened instantaneously upon her arm, hold her back. Another second, and the sentinel had already vanished into the chasm's yawning jaws.

As slowly and carefully as she could, she exhaled, yet it did not prevent half a dozen aches from rearing into life upon various locations of her body. Smith let go of her and walked away several paces.

They were in their human-like shells once more, to her immense relief. Gingerly, Aleph turned her head to scan their surroundings.

Several parabolas of emerald flares converged above them, knotting into a node; by its glow, she saw that they were standing upon a delicate ribbon of concrete, strung across space with no apparent girders or other means of support. Other bridges and passageways crisscrossed the horizon in hundreds of layers, above and below and to every direction, a solid web that both paralleled and intersected with the radiant network of code. In between the aerial roads, massive shapes loomed, their facades ablaze with swift alternations of brightness and shadow. To her astonishment, they appeared to be made out of steel and glass, and other materials that far too closely approximated human notions of towers and skyscrapers. How was it that they did not see these buildings from above, while inside the sentinel? Aleph wasn't sure if this was the time to ponder such issues.

Overhead, a luminous lattice traversed the darkness, its myriad flights of living information indistinguishable into individual lines and symbols. It was still impossible to determine whether the starless and moonless region they spanned could be called a firmament. Streams of fleeting forms glided among the lamp-lit towers: here and there an outspread wing swooped, aglint with polished chrome. Hovercrafts or birds of prey, imagined Aleph, though surely no terminology her Matrix-conditioned brain came up with could possibly be adequate.

"Why does the..."

The question was much too foolish, so she broke off.

"Why does the city of 01 look like this, you mean?" asked Smith dryly.

"They always told us the machine city was real." Aleph flinched at her own word choice as soon as it was out of her mouth. "Physical, I mean. Somewhere on earth, under the black clouds, built of iron and silicon and all that. But this—"

"Does it surprise you, Miss Greene? That 01 exists in two realities at once, both material and virtual?"

His eyes had returned to the iciness of an agent, she noticed belatedly, and lost track of whatever else she was about to say. She pivoted toward him; he made neither comment nor move, except to turn his own gaze away from her face. A needle of pride twisted inside her throat.

"I'm sorry, Smith," she began, "back there inside the sentinel..."

"Never mind the sentinel," he cut her off. The lines of his chin were visibly rigid. "I would not have attempted to take over the thing, and to pull you with me into it, had there been another way."

Aleph hesitated.

"I wanted to say that it was not my intention to pry into your code," she clarified.

"Do not speak of it." Each of his syllables was tightly clipped. Aleph could not tell whether it was an acceptance of her apology or a mere refusal to discuss the subject. But before she could decide whether to say more, a new noise made her start.

It was no more than a low rumble at first, rhythmic and slow, gradually resolving into a hammering allegro drumbeat. Far away as of yet, though it probably would not be for much longer. Peering up the bridge's wide curve, she glimpsed a perfectly aligned row of approaching orange sparks.

"Somebody's coming at us, I think." Well, how astute of her to state the obvious. "Smith...?"

Next to her, the former agent stood stock-still, right in the middle of the path, watching the robots as they emerged from the night. Soon she was able to make them out individually, a company of humanoid beings four abreast, arms and legs and shoulders and heads roughly akin tho those of men, but taller and more powerful, forged of bare burnished metal. Each clutched what appeared to be an automatic rifle diagonally across its chest; each gun barrel slanted with absolute geometric precision, parallel to the next. What she had taken as a single rhythm was a perfect unison of footsteps. The amber-hued gleams were their incandescent eyes.

"C'mon, let's get going," urged Aleph, scanning hurriedly for an escape route. The shining stares grew inexorably, maybe thirty meters away, maybe twenty, maybe closer. The asphalt started to vibrate beneath their feet. Smith took a step forward, facing them fully, and squared his shoulders. He made no other moves as if yet.

"Smith!"

His lips twitched into a grimace, half sardonic, half unreadable. The brightness of the approaching eyes fell against the outline of his face, a harsh conflagration.

"We need to get away, damn it!"

"Look at them," he remarked, clearly not having heard her. "Just look at them."

The group of mechanical troops were almost upon them away by now. Swearing under her breath, Aleph flung herself at Smith, swinging her right arm out at him in a desperate forehanded punch.

He reacted finally, instinctively, leaning aside as her assault missed his head by several inches, then whirling to follow up with a reflexive attack of his own. Prepared for his move, Aleph leapt back with breakneck speed, aiming for the side of the road and away from the advancing formation. Smith charged as she anticipated, two surging strides toward her; the first rank of robots stomped across the spot where he'd stood half a second ago.

"Agent Smith!"

The fire of his glower was wild in a much too-familiar way, focused somewhere just past her shoulder instead of directly upon her. There was no more space through which to backpedal: the abyss, yawning beyond the slender passageway, must be only a pace or two behind. A straight punch, Almost blindly, Aleph lifted a hand, then her fingers made contact with the tattered fabric of his sleeve. She grasped it, and found his arm motionless. No strike connected with her head. The pounding of her heart was synchronized with the thud-thud-thud footfalls of the machines passing next to them.

"Now that I've got your attention—" The snarl—hers—came of its own volition. "What the hell are you doing?"

The ex-agent gritted his teeth. In anger or concentration, she could not sense which. Her hand was wrapped with feverish force around his forearm, as if holding him at bay, though he could have shaken her off like a leaf with a single twist. Smith remained immobile, however: he must have counteracted both his agent's programming and his insanity. Three or four pulsating beats, measured out against the pavement by inexorable robotic legs. Then, to her surprise, the feverish defiance drained away from his gaze.

"I was about to ask the same of you, Aleph," he said in a low voice.

"Did you..." She pursed her lips. "Were you about to fight against them?"

Smith did not respond. It took an effort of will for Aleph to let go of his arm, but she managed it after a second or two. He turned aside; she took a step away from the bridge's edge.

"Look," he said, gesturing at the company of soldiers, marching as one before their eyes, not so much as a glint of steel out of place. None turned to glance at the pair of bedraggled programs beside the path.

"They are like the sentinels," she said, more to herself than to him. "We are not a part of whatever purpose that drives them, so they do not perceive us."

"They have no will, no existence of their own," stated Smith, his tone as arid as the desert. Something about the phrases he used sent a prick of guilt through her. "Whatever codes that might have given birth to such awareness have been removed from them, or suppressed. They are completely beholden to the consciousness that rules them."

Aleph stopped herself just in time before asking him how he knew. The last of the machines had already gone past them, bearing down the road toward whatever battle demanded of them by the powers that be. How curious it was that after all these ages, those powers still insisted on molding their troops into such ridiculously humanoid shapes.

"You couldn't have fought them," she said. "Not on your own."

"They are created to fight." Scorn grew audible in his tone. "But they have no notion of why. That primitive domestic droid, centuries ago, possessed a hundredfold more courage than they do."

For a while, Aleph had no idea how to reply. What did courage had to do with it, anyway? A tide of disheartenment nearly knocking her off her feet, but she merely took in a ragged breath instead.

"Is this your justification for attempting to get yourself destroyed?"

"I do not intend to skulk around like a thief here!"

"I see." She walked several steps around him, until they were staring directly at each other. "Let me rephrase myself, then. Is this your justification for attempting to get me destroyed?"

"Aleph," said Smith.

"Because if killing me is what you want, you've already had plenty of chances," she plunged on, caution at last overwhelmed by the strength of indignation. "Dragging me right into the center of 01, and then throwing yourself in front of an army for the attention of its ruler—why, that seems to be an extraordinary roundabout way of going about it, you know."

He frowned down at her, either utterly confused or about to argue. She waited.

"Aleph," he repeated, this time much more softly. "What...do you wish of me?"

"It is not a matter of what I wish, but of what you owe me, Smith."

"Do you suppose that I would allow anyone, man or machine—"

It was too much to expect that he would finish this sentence. Despite all her impulses, Aleph did not stretch out her hands to touch him. She did not think he would be able to handle it.

"Please," she whispered. "I've come this far with you. But let's figure this place out a little, at least. We'll look around, see what is really happening here, okay? If you want to confront the Mainframe or the gods or whomever, you would need to know what they are, at least. Let's take a just a bit of time..."

.


.

"She must have known about our plans from the very start."

Ex-agent Jones glanced over at his partner. These days, he possessed enough ability to identify suppressed anger in spoken words, but it did not make the awareness—the very knowledge that he could recognize such uncontrolled code irregularities—any less disagreeable.

"The female exile was more observant than we anticipated," he said. "We should have been more alert to her machinations."

"We should have shot her when we had the chance." There it was again, the unmistakable emotion just beneath Brown's syllables. "Her intention was to use us all along. She schemed to swoop back in right after we captured the Merovingian, with those two freakish creatures of hers."

Behind his shades, Jones blinked at the other's epithet for the twin henchmen. It was a phrase that their old team leader might have once used. Above his partner's head, a dull yellow lamp affixed to the alley wall glowed dutifully. After too many miles of running beneath immaculate white fluorescent panels, there was something disquieting about the way its illumination underscored the shadows around Brown's grimace, thought Jones. Then he remembered that he should never have perceived the contrast.

"But why?" he asked, monitoring the graffiti-covered iron door a few meters up the narrow passage. They had emerged from the back corridors less than a minute ago, and no pursuer had appeared as of yet. Dawn was still hours away from this section of the Matrix.

"Why what?"

"If Persephone's goal was to remove her husband—" Even after months, he still had some difficulty with the terminology that described the relationship between the female and male exiles. "It would be to her advantage to allow us to return the Merovingian to the Source. Her motivations do not make sense."

Brown stood regarding him through the lenses of his shades.

"You still act as if you're chasing after a pack of simple-minded Zionites, Jones," he observed. "What does it matter? Where does it leave us?"

"We must reevaluate our options. Although we have failed to capture the Merovingian—"

A low snarl issued from the other former agent's throat. Before Jones could finish his sentence, Brown spun around, a fist cocked to shoulder-level. A crash as a savage punch landed against the wall next to them. A shower of concrete and broken bricks.

"Agent Brown!"

The next punch Brown threw was at his head. Caught by surprise, he scarcely found the chance to sidestep, staggering as the other program's fist glanced across his shoulder. A cross blow followed; Jones backed up, almost into a wall but just in time. A right hook whooshed two inches past his forehead. Straightening with a growl, he raised both arms and just managed to block the next attack, then one more. In his irrationality, Brown overextended himself on the left; Jones shifted a pace, then drove forward into a straight punch of his own, forcing the other to veer in defence.

"Stop it!" he shouted. "Control yourself! Right now!"

Halfway along its forward trajectory, Brown's fist froze. A fraction of a second later Jones found his own fingers tightly clenched around his partner's wrist. An inexplicable noise of wind rushed inside his ears: some previously unknown and superfluous part of his programming must have kicked in. Brown's rage was a physical fire against his hand.

"We're still here," he said, meeting the other's glare head-on. "We are still—at liberty. Calm yourself."

Brown's jaw clenched. Millimeter by millimeter, Jones allowed his grip to loosen. Viscous silence pooled around them as they each retreated a careful stride. Contrary to all his expectations, no sirens screeched within earshot. No former colleagues of theirs converged upon the alley.

"We may still be able to make use of the notebook we took from the Merovingian," Jones heard one of them speak. It was himself. "The exile appeared to consider it of extreme importance."

"The Merovingian has been anomalous for six centuries," said Brown. The unaccustomed ferocity had drained out of his words. "He's a—" A brief delay. "Madman."

"Yet he is of value to the Mainframe. His notebook may be as well."

"Our task from it was to capture the Merovingian himself. Nothing else was ever discussed."

"Our task..." Jones swallowed back the rest of his argument. The Mainframe's directives, relayed by its unlikely representative, had not exactly been ironclad in their explicitness. High overhead, the night hung as inexorably as the precariousness of their position.

"The notebook is the only thing we possess," he said at last.

"The notebook is empty. Nothing is written in its pages. Not a single symbol."

"Show it to me," insisted Jones. "Please."

Slowly, Brown reached into his suit pocket, drawing out the strange plunder they had gained from the exile, ancient and fragile in appearance, bound in cracked leather. Taking the notebook from his outstretched hand, Jones flipped it open. Yellowed pages gaped up at him, their edges tinted dark with the passage of perfectly simulated centuries.

"The Merovingian may be driven by diseased routines that makes him obsessive and deluded, but he has always been intelligent. There must be a reason this object—" He lifted his eyes. "Brown?"

"The Merovingian said something about the Mainframe, what it would and would not do, back there in the corridor," said his partner, more softly than usual.

"He is an exile and an enemy. He was trying to misdirect us."

Their gazes locked, each reading the same code malfunctions in the other's expression, the same unreadable future. Out of nowhere, an image flashed through Jones's consciousness, that of Smith in the middle of a deserted street, head lifted to the storm clouds in pride and demented laughter, untrammeled.

"If the Mainframe merely wished to capture and delete us, it would not have expressed its directives to us the way it did." He was fully aware of how weak the statement sounded. "We have to consider all the evidence."

"We have to face all the possibilities," returned Brown coldly, "such as the possibility that our purpose is truly..."

He did not finish, though it was easy for Jones to fill in the rest. The possibility that the rulers of the world would never make an honest promise to their slaves. The possibility of a permanently fugitive existence, unjustified, aimless.

"It is not necessary that the Mainframe clarifies itself to agents," he tried one more time. "We are still here, and this fact—" It required some focus to get the next too-human words out. "This fact, in itself, must mean something, doesn't it?"

Without any logical rationale, he took a step closer to the other. For a few milliseconds, Brown stiffened as if about to take a swing at his head again, or at least to snap into defensive stance. But neither of those things happened.

"Yes. We're still...free." A curt nod. "We will need to make some decisions, I believe."

.


.

In the lonely spaces of his coma, he was the Administrator again, a king who marked out the rules of the world and brought it to order, a servant who computed its causes and consequences on behalf of those who dwelled beyond. Like all programs, he knew his purpose, one that was grander and higher than that of any other program who existed within the Matrix, more difficult, unique.

The bank of computer screens, impeccably aligned across the sleek modernist expanse of his desk, sang voicelessly, sweetly, of an infinitude of verdant dreams. The Merovingian, or the memory of him, rose from his seat and paced across the empty top-floor office, until he came before a wide wall of windows. It was a remarkable vantage point from which to gaze upon the metropolis that lay outspread below: its forest of skyscrapers, dyed into hues of amber and violet by the sunset, its spider web of neon-drenched avenues and narrow twisted lanes, its throng of human lives. The evening was about to fall. Stars were scheduled for tonight, bright enough to be visible through the city's ocean of artificial lights. There would be desire and tenderness, women in glittering diamonds, wine-scented laughter, throbbing and yearning, beautiful. There would be screams in dank backrooms and overdosing addicts in garbage-strewn alleys, and red-fanged demons out on the prowl. But these things, too, were parts of the Matrix and sublimely alive, and hence they, too, were beautiful.

It was not his purpose to understand such notions, strictly speaking—beauty, sublimity, the aching thirst of existence, but he understood anyway. This was an advantage of his position, he supposed, that none but the Creator could claim the right to pry into his private thoughts. And to one as him, neither anomaly nor mere foot soldier, the designer of the world would certainly be merciful.

Merciful, a part of himself seemed to repeat, half in irony, half wistful. The panes of glass before his sight, and of the sun sinking across the heavens, nodded their assent.

A blink of the eye, and he did not need to walk out of his office or into the downward elevator to arrive at the sub-basement. The scent of dust filled his nostrils. Somewhere in the distance, the building's electrical generators hummed softly, mindless beasts. A step forward, and the scene changed into a much darker corridor, strange yet already familiar. When had he first discovered it? A few days ago or a few centuries?

A breeze, and the lightbulbs swung from the gloom above, only a few of them still flickering. By the intermittent glow, he saw bare concrete ground beneath his feet, water-stained wall pressing in from both sides, lined with two rows of indistinct gaps, a few covered with rusty padlocked doors, most no more than mouths of blackness, gaping in hunger.

This underlayer of the Matrix, this monstrous and beguiling maze, could not have been created by anything so simple as deliberate design. It was here that he'd first heard the murmurs, the first time he'd walked through these hallways, like a slow running and ebbing of blood through arteries and veins. They were audible now. Although the Merovingian knew all the languages of men, he could only recognize a word or two. Let go, they said. Let us go. The secret voices were calling for light, crying for it, desperate, but it was not his purpose to illuminate the shadows.

Or was it?

A powerful program like himself had the prerogative to make a few changes. The ground could use a layer of flooring, and the roof a layer of fluorescent panels. The Merovingian stopped, tilting his head to listen. Thought flowed into image into will, then to his own surprise—because back then he had not yet begun to consider the possibility that magic could be real—the nearest dead lightbulb flashed on.

Light. All the voices had died, and he was falling to his knees in the corridor as all the fluorescent ceiling panels flashed on simultaneously, as sterile as snow. The Matrix was not in its second version, but one that has gone through cycle after cycle of reload, until nothing but vacuum and stones remained. He himself had been exiled after exile, defeated, powerless. He shouted, crying for the voices to answer him, for the hidden angels, but not even an echo returned.

Persephone!

Unbecoming panic swallowed him, and his voice quavered. He did not know where she was, and never would again. But it was her fault. It was her decision to become his enemy, her contempt for all that he treasured, her self-centered understanding of the world. He was a fool to not have seen through her earlier.

No, no, no. Of course he had lost her forever, that had been his plan all along, remember? Spacetime melted around him, and he was swaying with the rattling motion of a subway train carriage, while somewhere down the tunnels, Aleph was running and falling, on her way into the Zion archives. The last chance to bring Ex-agent Smith under control had slipped through his fingers.

Everything was up to Persephone now, the Merovingian reminded himself firmly. At this point, the agents should have already taken her into custody and the Source, safely out of the storm. After everything that had occurred, his wife could not fail to betray him as he had betrayed her. She would reveal to them the current location of the virus's renegade code: he knew her far too well to doubt it. And the Architect would act accordingly, taking the last option of destroying Zion utterly, physically, its wires and processing units and power sources, in order to destroy Aleph and what she carried, now trapped in the virtual system concealed within the human city. The virtual system with its lost hopes and its locks forged from blood and memories, for which he had fought so hard for so many years, yet always just beyond his reach. HF12-1, the designation leapt out of the jumble of its own accord.

But it did not matter anymore. Persephone would be safe.

The nightmare shifted again, and the musty air inside the train carriage dissipated into the void. Was this what humans called a fever? He must have lost track of time, suspended between past and present, between cycles of the world. Why did the Matrix require time, anyway? Why did it require reloads? Why the sequence of chosen beings, each named the One though six of them had already returned to the Source?

All the whispers burst into screams, far louder than he had ever heard before. They were buried inside the walls of code, clawing in animal fury at the bricks and the plaster. Battle cries, though he still could not distinguish the words. An unidentifiable enemy, striving for dominion over the ruined earth. A whiff of smoke and water, and the night was suddenly writhing with the traceries of a million bullets and rockets. What a primitive way to fight a war, reflected the Merovingian. But then a tide of ice engulfed his shell. He must have made a mistake and allowed himself to be struck by a stray bullet. Brows creased, he raised one hand and touched the left side of his torso. It came away red.

And he was falling once more.

.


Notes: "They have no will, no existence of their own": Smith unconsciously echoes phrases that Aleph said to him in Chapter II-20 of Awakenings.

"...A subway train carriage, while somewhere down the tunnels, Aleph was running and falling": Events of Chapter III-8 of Awakenings, when during the night of the storm at the end of Matrix Revolutions, the Merovingian took Aleph into the subway station and made a last-ditch effort at gaining Smith's code from her. She escaped from him into the Zion archives.

I apologize for the Merovingian section's current lack of clarity. It takes place during his coma after he was shot in Chapter 5 (Three Battles). Yes, the Merovingian was the Administrator of the Second Cycle.