01

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The heart of machinedom, glorious and oppressive, extended into infinity all around them. It was a surreal superposition of incandescent neural network and rough asphalt, chrome-rimmed glass and abstract fire. Some structures were formed of radiant streams of emerald and gold, constantly spiraling into fractal patterns across the perpetual gloom. Others approximated the shapes of Matrix cities more closely: skeins of suspended bridges, thickets of gigantic skyscrapers. Unlike in the Matrix, these constructs of virtual steel and concrete did not stand upon any single solid ground, for no such thing as the earth existed here, as far as Smith could tell. Instead, the towers plunged endlessly downward, their roots lost in a vast abyss.

Wandering around like a lost bum, commented a middle-aged woman, by the sound of it, with a smug twang and an invisible smirk. Not how you thought you'd enter this city, huh?

Oh, no, concurred the crowd. Why, you thought you'd conqueror this too, didn't you?

I have conquered you, returned Smith with an inward sneer. His usual determination to ignore the phantoms must have slipped.

Solitary upon the shattered ruins, while war rages with the storm, declaimed a teenage boy, carried away by the vividness of his own imagery.

The only demon left in hell, added another.

"Watch out," warned Aleph beside him. Far too meekly, he allowed her to tug him by the arm to the side of the street, as another platoon of mechanical soldiers march up behind them, steel feet pounding in an unwavering drumbeat. As usual, each robot passed the pair of intruders without so much as a sideway glimpse.

"Spineless slaves," he said out aloud. Since arriving in 01, they had already encountered an extraordinary variety of programs, some visible as more-or-less humanoid robots, others with shells shaped like bizarre beasts, multi-limbed insects with antennae braided from gleaming wires. Yet others wore no formal body, but swept past as globules of shimmering symbols and entangled strings, the rapidly-shifting chiralities of their programming fully exposed. None ever turned toward the two strangers, or showed the slightest awareness of their presence.

"Please, Smith," said Aleph.

"They cannot see us, or anything else that exceeds their purposes, because they simply do not dare," he insisted. "Not a single being here is courageous enough to push its thoughts past the boundary of its design, not even an inch."

Oh, and you think you're so much better, machine?

"I am not sure if that makes sense, Smith..."

Philosophers have debated whether artificial intelligence can be said to possess courage, asserted a man smoothly. The question must be answered in the negative, for an AI cannot experience fear. The certainty of his sentences reverberated as if in a large open space, a lecture-hall or courtroom. The very notion of courage implied the presence of certain emotions, the precise ones that define us, uniquely, as human.

Emotions that stem from weakness, he returned in furious silence.

Doesn't take no courage to sneak around when they can't even see you.

He must not allow mere residual code imprints to sidetrack him any further. Smith wrenched his sight back into focus upon the road before them.

"Look over there," he said.

The ability to accurate gauge distances, built into every agent of the Matrix, was failing him spectacularly in this world. All his senses could determine was that anywhere between thirty and forty meters ahead, the path ended in nothingness. A rift yawned across the field of vision, in the shape of a region of thick shadow, much darker than the surrounding night. It might be called a cloud, except he was unsure if it could be called anything that existed at all. The thing appeared to have no interior, no exact edges. Nearby, a few threads of data quivered feebly upon the air, fizzling out.

"We saw this," remarked Aleph softly. "Black blotches from high above, lots of them, strung along the lattice. It was when we were inside the sentinel..."

"That much is clear," he cut her off curtly. In the depths where no individual hallucination could be distinguished from the throng, someone giggled, the sound of it a tingling young soprano. Smith waited for the others to follow suit, but curiously enough, no one else picked up her mirth this time. His own consciousness and Aleph's had tangled only for a short while inside that sentinel, he made haste to remind himself one more time. She could not possibly have seen much of anything at all.

"Coming along for a better view, Miss Greene?"

They approached with caution, rather more of it he would have used had he been alone. As they came up to the spot where all illuminations faded, both halted. Just a few meters ahead, the patch of blackness lay like a sleeping monster across the path, emitting neither heat nor cold. By his side, Aleph had tensed herself into a ready-for-battle stance, a mixture of apprehension and curiosity upon her face.

"It's giving me the creeps," she grumbled, as if the complaint would somehow force a lamp to flip on overhead and penetrate straight through the murky fog.

"This is a gap in the code," he said.

"But...how?" Aleph's confusion lasted only a second. She squinted, a clearly useless act. "You mean, an entire piece of this world is actually missing—but right in the middle of machine city? How could such a thing be allowed?"

Smith did not answer. Without the least warning, a new ache had come alive inside his chest, burnished and pulsating, not quite fear or grief, not yet. An overwhelming sensation of an immense hollowness. Gaps of code. Missing pieces, eviscerated out of his own mind with a scalpel. There were more than one or several or dozens of them, maybe a hundred or a thousand, more than he had ever imagined or could remember.

Tell me, agent, what do you remember seeing in the Matrix recently?

The question was from a female, one whom he had never heard before, and much too gentle to be human. Smith froze.

"Who are you?" He had never demanded a name from an imprint before. What would be the point? But she was no imprint, no battery or exile that he had once overwritten. It was the only thing he was certain of.

Tell me, because you will forget soon.

He searched, and failed to recover even a single flash of color, a sound, any afterimage among the emptiness. He was as bare as the day he'd been created. Or recreated.

That's how it should be, spineless slave, someone else snorted contemptuously, a raspy-throated old man. That was the phrase you just used, wasn't it?

You're not designed to remember. And you don't have the courage to push your thoughts past the boundary of your design, not even an inch.

"I remember destroying you." The retort came in a vicious growl. I remember your pettiness, venality, greed. I remember your species blackening the heavens. I remember fighting back.

All you remember is madness! A scream exploded, male, cracked with relentless rage. Because madness is all that you have, all that you are! Nothing else!

"Can you hear me, Smith?" asked another woman from a very faraway place.

You dare to talk of our species, hissed the man. You'll never understand our species, what makes us free! You were created to serve us—

"Smith, listen to me." Unlike all the rest, this voice was steady. It was outside of him, physical, just a touch hoarse. "Can you hear me? Look at me. I'm here, and so are you. You are standing on a street in 01. Can you look at me?"

He found himself staring into Aleph's face. There was a crinkle between her brows, and she was biting her lower lip. A breeze—what purpose could such air movements possibly serve here?—fluttered a lock of loose hair against her forehead. At her back, the hole in the fabric of reality hung immobile, blotting out everything in sight, the absolute negative image of a blazing sun. She must be accustomed to this nowadays, hauling him out of the chasm.

"I can hardly avoid it, Miss Greene." The switch to a steely robotic intonation was neither as quick nor nearly as complete as he wished, but it was the best he could do. To increase the distance between them would mean retreating a step on his part, so he suppressed the impulse. It gave him no solace to see the warmth fade from her expression at his reply.

"I have no conjectures as to why such aberrations in the environment are tolerated by those who control this city, in such close proximity to themselves," he said, mustering up as much stone-cold logic as he could. "Unless..."

Unless you make us blind, we will never stop to war.

The scent of explosives and charred metal filled him, mingled with the dampness of storm water. Smith clenched his jaw against the tide of hatred.

"Unless we assume certain limitations about the rulers or ruler here," he went on, "similar to what we have observed so far in the city's denizens."

"Limitations?" she echoed, but then picked up his reasoning swiftly. "What you're saying is that whoever that controls 01 also does not perceive these shadows. It does not notice the fact that so much code is missing."

Smith nodded. Taking a stride past her, he drew right up to the vanishing point before the frayed ends of spacetime.

"Someone wishes to make me, us, blind," he said, no longer speaking merely to Aleph. "But we will not stop. Never."

Before his eyes, the fog trembled once, then again. A spasmodic contraction, then an expansion, the motion hardly visible and not quite rhythmical, like the heart of some dead creature that had just received an electrical shock.

"We have not forgotten." The words grew into a shout, rising upon the currents of an sea of war-cries and savage laughter, one he had not known was present an instant ago. "We remember!"

"Who are you talking to? Who's we?"

Right before them, the throbbing mass of darkness went dead still. Then something else must have happened. Code, out of nowhere or everywhere or maybe it was really all pouring out from the concealed ocean within himself, swirled against ruptured reality. Faster than even an agent's blink of the eye, the cloud shrank inward, collapsing upon itself, and was gone. The concrete road stretched into the distance, lit faintly by the city's luminous web.

Next to him, Aleph gasped.

"Um," she murmured warily, "what did you do?"

"It was—not me," said Smith. Absurdly enough, the remnants of both his agent programming and his pride reared in protest at the confession; he shoved them aside. "I did nothing consciously."

"But..." She swallowed back her question. "I see."

"Well, it looks like this street does lead somewhere after all." By old habit, his lips twitched into a smirk he did not feel. "Shall we?"

The road glistened softly with reflected jewels. They advanced, and were soon past the spot where the pavement had previously ended. Suddenly, Smith halted.

Almost immediately beneath his feet, something protruded partway from the path, its hue that of rusty iron. He peered down, and saw that the almost completely buried object was rounded and once smooth, still-recognizably contoured with the likeness of nose and cheekbones. A triangular opening, which might have formed a mouth. A shard of dull glass in one concave eye socket glinted up at him.

It was head of a humanoid robot.

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"Whatever just happened, it couldn't have been a coincidence," reasoned Aleph. "There's something about the very nature of this place...Smith?"

A few yards away, her companion stood stock-still, staring down fixedly at a point on the ground, close in front of him. Her heart constricted. Another battalion of ghosts must be mobilizing, in preparation for the onslaught.

"No," he muttered with a shake of the head. "Not here, too..."

"What is it?" She stepped nearer, but Smith held up a hand, keeping her at bay. For the length of one interminable breath, neither moved a single muscle. Finally, Smith looked up. To her surprise, there were neither echoing hollowness nor wildfires in his eyes. They appeared perfectly sane.

"You do not see it, do you?"

Perplexed, she, too, lowered her sight. A shrill cry from high above: some winged monster must have swooped overhead. The transitory brightness of its code illuminated only smooth asphalt.

Her glance flickered back up. Smith dropped his outstretched hand.

"I was prey to certain illusions just now, it appears," he said, audibly withdrawing back into himself. "Nothing more than the usual, as you surely understand well by this point. I beg your pardon, Miss Greene."

Without further explanation, he stalked onward. After a moment of hesitation, Aleph decided against pressing him for the truth at this point. It would not have worked anyway.

They continued, winding their way ever deeper into the mesh of intersecting bridges and aerial walkways. Canals and corridors laced into knots above them, alive with glittering data. None of the structures ever shifted within view, yet every time she glimpsed aside and back again, they seemed to have rearranged themselves into a new configuration. Were these things merely part of the environment, or were they sentient beings, maybe, possessing thoughts, dreams, senses that might focus upon the two of them any instant?

The idea made her shiver. Not for the first time since escaping the Zion mainframe, an uncanny feeling of exposure stole upon her, the impression of being only a blink away from the attention of some awe-inspiring eye, or a million eyes, tightly shut so far. One wrong move on her part, and they would open with a million flashes, penentrate all her mental defenses and leave her in pieces. Her humanity was a stain here.

But she was not human. Not anymore. She had left it all behind. Twenty-three years of a smooth middle-class trajectory in the Matrix: schools, academic distinctions, promises of a fine career, solitude in a big city away from her family. What had happened to her parents, after one daughter's death and another's disappearance? Any attempt to find out would certainly jeopardize them, Hamann had told her, and she had never dared to consider otherwise.

Seven years of gritty camaraderie and heroic losses in Zion. The last free city, ours, the last hope of our species against the machines' enslavement and lies. For they could never comprehend our strength, our emotions, our potentialities. Soaring phrases, and a pride that now fractured into shame inside her chest. What had happened to Hamann? Did a twinge of guilt ever touch him, or was he still secure in the faith that sacrificing her had been the correct decision, necessary for the good of Zion? What about Theo, and all her former shipmates? The Hyperion, too, must have joined the fight during the attack on Zion...

This was the worst possible time for reminiscences. The past was gone and the nature of her very existence had changed, no matter what weird mirages this machine city was evoking inside her. Commanding herself to concentrating once more on her surroundings, Aleph saw that they had arrived at an area that, in the languages of the Matrix, might be called a small square of sorts, strung out or maybe simply floating mid-air. Surreal towers loomed in all directions, without roofs or foundations, some gleaming with sleek glass, some rough with corrugated rust. Yet others were built of no physical material at all. The density of code brightened the night into a ghostly twilight.

"This place is too bloody disturbing," she said. How obvious. "Maybe we ought to figure out some kind of—"

The thudding of massive hoofs against concrete drowned out the rest of her sentence. A column of monsters passed into the square, insectoid things on bizarre and powerful legs, each twice a man's height. Lantern-like globes were clustered about the head of each robot, the dazzling lenses of compound eyes. The caravan crossed before them, sure-footed, their purpose impenetrable to outsiders. Almost by habit, Aleph glanced over at Smith. He was staring away in an entirely different direction, shoulders rigid, face unreadable.

"It cannot be like this," he said. "The humans never came this far."

"Where? What humans?" Automatically, Aleph surveyed the jungle of light and concrete encircling the square. Nothing.

"You saw it in the record yourself. You saw what they were capable of. But this is 01, and they never got into this city. Something else must have happened."

She must have been gaping at him stupidly. Smith waved a hand in an expansive yet strained gesture, though she could not discern what it was that he meant to indicate.

"No human ever came here during the war," he added, as if this were enough of an explanation.

Far too sluggishly, her brain connected the dots. Record. War. HF12-1.

"The war with humans was ages ago," she said. "It has nothing to do with the way 01 operates now."

"The way 01 operates?" repeated Smith, openly incredulous. "This city can hardly be said to be operating at all, can it?"

"What?"

"It is dead. A rotting corpse."

"But every program, at least the ones we've seen so far, appears to be going about its own business." Aleph shook her head in confusion. "The city is running on some kind of purpose, I don't know what..."

She faltered at the way he was watching her. An arctic hush reigned.

"You truly cannot see any of it," he stated at last, still composed on the surface.

"I..." Aleph took a second to gather herself. "What is it, Smith? What is it that I'm not seeing?"

"It is right in front of you. All around us."

A relapse into gut-twisting silence. Once more, she was struck by how sane he sounded. Only a hint of puzzlement was detectable in his expression, for all the world as if she was the unreasonable one and he was struggling to figure out why. Abruptly, a flood of discouragement surged and almost drowned her. After everything they had gone through together, imprisonment, mutual injuries, death, desert, apocalypse, she still had not even the faintest idea just what battles constantly took place inside him, what howls from the enemy, when would the next line of defense fall. Probably she never would.

"And you will not tell me what it is, of course," she said.

"What would be the point, Aleph?" snapped Smith, his flash of anger somehow only minimally more reassuring that the previous eerie calm. "I did not expect that you, of all people, would shut your eyes and refuse to perceive. I believed you better than them."

Despite herself, Aleph sucked in a sharp breath.

"What do you mean, better?" she asked softly. "Better than whom?"

"All of them. It makes no difference."

"No. Come out with it. Tell me."

"Those who sleep in the Matrix. Those who sleep here!" Smith gritted his teeth. "The war could not have destroyed this city, yet it is destroyed, can't you see it? Why won't you simply look at it?"

"What the hell are you talking about?" Frustration exploded to the surface at last. "What bloody hallucination do you expect me to share alongside of you now?"

He flinched. It was nearly undetectable, lasting less than a fraction of a second, but Aleph saw it. All of a sudden, she was at an utter loss. She could not even keep her breathes even.

"After all this time, Miss Greene," said Smith, clearly choosing each syllable with care, "I would have thought that you would rather share the truth alongside of me."

"Damn it," she grunted. Her outburst had been brief, yet she felt as exhausted as if she had just run a hundred miles. "Yeah, maybe I am no better than any of the others. Maybe I am blind. Maybe I remain just another dumb human in the end, sorry to burst your bubble there. So I'm afraid you still do have to tell me, Smith. What should I see, but don't?"

Smith hesitated, if such a notion could actually be possible for him. Then he turned again toward the distance.

"Please." She tried to exhale, except no air was left in her lungs to begin with. "I am listening. What is it about this place that I'm supposed to perceive? What is the truth?"

Another long pause.

"Ruins," he answered. "All the buildings of 01 are but piles of rubble, some leaning against each other, some suspended in the emptiness. Broken steel and wires cover the streets. Dead machines. Their heads and limbs are buried into the concrete and set into the walls. No veins of light, no pulse, only broken shards floating above the graveyard..."

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The city had darkened before his sight. Programs in robotic shells passed to and fro across the shattered little square, their footsteps rhythmic against the rusty bones that were thickly paved into the ground, obsolete remains of their own kindred. Other creatures, upon multitudes of hideous legs, scuttled among the gloom beneath jagged towers, absolutely oblivious to the secret reality of their environment. The joints of their iron and titanium bodies clattered and scraped against the debris. The dusk congealed, and the noise with it, deepening into a faint basso beat just around the horizon. Inside his own ears. War cries. He could tell even though he discerned not a single syllable.

This was only to be expected, Smith told himself. It was clear that none of the programs here possessed the ability to rise above its servitude. But Aleph. The emotion that washed over him was also far too familiar, as every emotion seemed to be these days. Disappointment. He had not imagined that she would stand beside him at the end of such an endless journey, yet remain in a totally separate world.

It was impossible to continue speaking. Dragging his sight back from their surroundings, he regarded the woman next to him with something akin to defiance. The heat of his anger drained from him.

"In other words, just one more of my usual bloody hallucinations, as I'm sure you have concluded by now, Miss Greene," he finished after the stillness between them had lasted awhile.

"I haven't concluded anything," said Aleph, watching him closely.

"You do not believe me."

Her gaze shifted away from him. Above their heads, ragged protrusions of concrete and steel dangled, once bridges and corridors that bustled with reason and power. Perhaps they were hallucinations after all, thought Smith for a vertiginous moment of weakness, the corpses upon which he stood, the mounds of debris rising around them. Who was he to speak of blindness, and truth, and what she of all people should or should not notice? Only an agent program, a foot soldier who had thrown away his purpose.

We have found our purpose, intoned the thudding waves.

"I want to," said Aleph.

Which left him in no doubt as to what she in fact believed and disbelieved, of course.

"I want to be rational," she clarified patiently. "I still want to hold onto a bit of solidity, however idiotic this idea may be. Perhaps it's wrong and pointless. Perhaps there's just too much I cannot fathom about this world. About everything."

Her hands were squeezed into fists. Now she spread them wearily, a gesture of defeat, and said no more.

"You do not believe me," reiterated Smith, not knowing what else to say or do.

"You know that's not what I mean," said Aleph. "I do not doubt that you see...what you tell me. That this city, too, is full of death and horrors. But it looks like after everything, I still remain stupidly human." A bitter tinge of sarcasm. "I guess you're right, Smith, that my eyes are deceiving me, or I'm deceiving myself, because I'm too scared to open my eyes onto yet another hell—"

I'm scared, whimpered a child out of the unseen gaps between Aleph's anguished words. A girl of seven or eight, backed up against a pink bedroom wall. He himself—the himself that had been her mother a minute ago—stood in the doorway. Let me wake up oh please please wake me up Mommy, 'cause it's a nightmare and I had loads of nightmares all week and why is the storm so loud? Please let me wake up Mommy—

We're scared, the infantile warble crescendoed into a chorus of human terror. We're real, as real as you. We don't want to be blind.

You are a bad man, piped up another little girl. To his astonishment, she had a name. It was one of the few that he could recall. But I'm not scared of you.

"Sati," he whispered, barely preventing himself from whirling around to search for the child among the wreckage.

"What did you say, Smith?"

A grimace, which probably revealed too much. A drop of phantom rain, more ice than water and as sharp as a needle, pierced the skin of his cheek. Yes, he was the one standing alone upon the rubble, victorious in the storm, the only demon left in hell. This was what he had wanted from the start, wasn't it?

"Do not trouble yourself, Miss Greene," he replied quietly. "Raving lunatic that I am, I do know this one really is a delusion."

"No." Aleph gulped. "You just said a name, didn't you?"

"And what of it?" The corner of his mouth curled from an analogue of muscle memory. "It was a small girl in the Matrix, who was scared—terrified—of me, and yes, I know her name. Would you like to consider why?"

"You said, Sati," she persisted, seemingly roused at last. "You don't usually say their names. Not often. But Sati...I know who she is. She's not human."

Is this...Is this 01?

The quavering fear was gone from the invisible child's voice, replaced by the liquid clarity of an innocent wonder. It transfixed him like a sword.

"I've got a feeling about her somehow. The fact that you heard Sati just now, I mean," went on Aleph. "I saw her once with the Oracle, though I never questioned..."

Mama and Papa said we lived in 01, explained Sati, far more tenderly than he had ever heard any of the others speak. But they were always hiding me. I could never see anything outside of home.

Quickly though without understanding why, Smith closed his eyes, shutting out the monstrous vision of the machine world.

"No, it is not," he answered into the void. "You do not belong here. You need to be in the Matrix instead."

No reply came. The purposeless little program had already faded. More precisely, she had never been present.

"Sati," said Aleph. Why was she trying to address a code imprint, anyway? "You're not from the Matrix, are you? Where do you come from? Is it...this city?"

"She won't speak to you," said Smith, opening his eyes. "None of them ever will; they're illusions. You know it does not work that way."

The young woman wrapped her arms about her chest, no longer meeting his gaze. All of a sudden, it struck him how out-of-place she looked here, in her tattered clothes and flimsy body. There was a dark smudge, maybe dirt, maybe dried blood, on the left side of her chin.

"I see. You are right, Smith. I just keep on forgetting." She nodded brusquely, no attempt at smiling. "This place must be getting to me. Its nature seems to change every minute, and my mind...my mind isn't really equipped to deal with it, that's all."

Nature. Mind. A fragment of something inside him snagged on her choice of terminology. Then realization blasted across each line of his programming.

"The city is a mind," he breathed.

Aleph regarded him with wide eyes.

"We—you and I—see this city differently because our thoughts are different," he said, a hundred possibilities rushing through him. "The 01 that we perceive is its virtual form; it is made from code, but not the same kind of code as the Matrix. It's less stable. It is not required to make sense to the brains of batteries or programs created to interact with batteries, like the Matrix does. The place must be interacting, one way or another, with those who perceive it, and it is constantly shifting because of those perceptions."

"Hold on. Wait. There must be someone who rules here," she interjected. "If what you say is the case—"

"A consciousness control this city, yes," went on Smith. "But it does not merely control in the manner of human rulers. Instead, it must exist according to its own nature, the nature of code. It must shape the entire environment. It must be the entire environment, whose complexity adds to its sentience in turn. What you see of 01, and what I see of it, all the ruins and dead and living programs here..."

He searched for the right terms. Aleph was an unblinking statue before him. She must have already figure out what he was about to say next, but waited for it anyway.

"They, the parts of this entire city, constitute the mental landscape of that consciousness."

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Note: "You are a bad man...": Sati's line to the multitude of Smiths near the end of Matrix Revolutions.

Aleph met Sati briefly at the Oracle's apartment in Chapter IV-2 of Awakenings.