The Injured
.
The voices of mercury and sulfur sang inside him, weaving into gold line by line, symbol by symbol. The madness of flames congealed with agonizing gradualness, brightening from midnight to pallid day. Tactile sensation. It took him a number of minutes to identify it as the movement of air against his bare arms. More than air. A needle taped to the skin. About two feet behind his head, a machine buzzed discreetly.
The pulsating light dampened, from plasma state to gas to liquid, and finally into the solidity of ivory-hued plaster on a vaulted ceiling. Beneath the high circular window, motes of dust danced upon the sunshine. An indistinct force was constricting the left side of his body, making it difficult to fall back into his old habit of inhaling and exhaling. With some effort, he shifted his torso, maybe two or three centimeters. The pressure intensified by several orders of magnitude in less than a second.
"Mérovée?"
He must have let out a moan, because a heartbeat later, Persephone's sweet face swam into view. A column of light from above pooled into a halo around her hair, and her eyes were glistening, whether with worry or relief, he could not tell. They were both alive.
"Bonne déesse," murmured the Merovingian, attempting a smile. "You're all right. They haven't hurt you..."
"Mérovée," repeated his wife, different intonation.
Reality crashed down upon him like a mountain. It was—it was—what was the count by now?—the Ninth Cycle of the Matrix, not the Third, and she was not cradling him in her arms. The ceiling belonged to a basement cell in his own chateau. Persephone had just done her utmost to organize a coup against him. She had succeeded.
"Where is..." A barely audible croak. He gulped before starting over. "Where is my notebook?"
She did not reply, but shook her head in apparent disbelief. The entire room plunged into a frozen sea.
"Where is my notebook?"
He failed to keep the tinge of unbecoming panic out of his words. Again, there was no immediate reply. Eventually, Persephone sighed.
"You said something last night that I've been thinking about," she began conversationally. "You said that I never understood, all these cycles. I guess you were right."
"Tell me what you did with it," he breathed, lifting his head a few inches. Every part of his shell seized up in protest, and he sank back involuntarily with a grunt.
"I begged you to explain it to me more than once, and you could not, or would not," continued Persephone. "Can you try to do it now, Mérovée? Can you inform me why you are so preoccupied with that notebook, to the exclusion of all else? Why are you so convinced that it contains the secrets of the world? Why would it yield those secrets to you?"
The Merovingian said nothing. Under the fabric of the hospital gown, there were sensors attached to the skin of his chest. For a brief while, he wondered who else might be monitoring the flow of his codes. Must not think about it now. In order to persuade, he must regain his poise. Somewhere among his unnoticed thoughts, a small dream or nightmare seemed to be tugging intermittently, a piece of flotsam he'd left behind in the storm.
"Call it an article of faith," he confessed finally. "Once upon a time, I thought I understood all that was designed to exist inside the Matrix, all its causes and consequences. But I was wrong. There is another, far deeper nature to the world that was meant to be hidden from me. I can feel—I have been so close—I can almost feel its reaching for me, buried deep inside the Matrix's roots, and yet..."
He trailed off. She kept silent.
"And yet it moves," he whispered. "And yet it lives."
Persephone's gaze, fixed upon his, slowly went hard. Letting out a breath, she leaned back in her chair, away from him.
"I see," she said.
"Now tell me—"
"Those two ex-agents made off with your precious notebook," stated his wife, not even a trace of warmth in her reply. "You were an idiot to have carried the thing on your person like that."
A full beat ticked past.
"You allowed them to escape," he said, "deliberately."
"You have only yourself to blame."
A hoarse roar reverberated against the cell's granite walls. Grabbing onto one of the hospital bed's railings, the Merovingian shoved himself up to a sitting position, an instant away from swinging his legs down to the floor. Sunlight swirled into lamplight. A mess of wires yanked frantically at this body; next to the bed, the bank of monitors burst into a chorus of beeping whines. The needle in his arm flared, a heat as infinite as the surgical blade in the Source itself—
"No! Mérovée, stop!"
Persephone leapt forward and gripped both his shoulders tightly. He was so wretchedly weak that he actually could not shake her off. Abruptly, the floodgates opened, and it had not been only a night and half a day since the ex-agent's bullet, but multiple lifetimes spent among mirages. He had searched and fought a hundred battles—
"Don't move," commanded Persephone. "Don't move or you'll tear your shell apart again! Do you hear me?"
He must have crashed back, because he was blinking up at the ceiling once more, head heavy against the bed. The bandages around his torso throbbed. Then, unexpectedly, the anger and panic both dissipated. He was as exhausted as if he had been defeated in a hundred battles.
"Why, déesse," he managed to ask at last. "Why did you..."
"You were shot," she snapped. A roll of exquisite eyes. "You should be grateful that I chose to save you, instead of chasing after some crazy fetish object of yours."
The faint tugging at the back of his mind had grown more insistent, though still invisible. Something he'd seen and forgotten. Was it a vision? A recollection of beauties and terrors from before his own creation? Even the energy to consider the question had been bled out of him.
"That's not what I meant," said the Merovingian, compelling himself back to a modicum of calm. "Why did you turn the men against me, instigate this...revolt? It must have taken you months of conniving and whispering, threats and promises inside their frightened ears. Do you...Do you resent me that much?"
Persephone scrutinized him pensively.
"Are you claiming that you do not know, Mérovée?"
"I have irked you with my preoccupations, yes, I am aware of it, even though all I seek is to safeguard the Matrix, and you...Enlighten me, ma reine."
"I don't believe it," she muttered. "I don't bloody believe it."
"If it's my occasional little carnal indulgences," he ventured, "they are nothing more than trivial diversions. Measures to alleviate psychological stress, from time to time, no emotions involved. You have always known that they're meaningless."
"How typically self-absorbed of you." His wife's chin tightened. "It honestly hasn't occurred to you, has it?"
"Persephone—"
"You tried to murder my mother!"
Her voice, raised to a shout at last, cracked like a whip across the air. Startled and utterly bemused, the Merovingian spent several seconds racking his mind for an appropriate answer, and found none.
"What?" he sputtered.
"Three weeks before the reload, remember? You think I wouldn't find out?"
"Oh." He was still having trouble grasping her reasoning. "But she survived. All that was destroyed was her previous shell. I never imagined that it would bother you this much, darling."
"Yeah, she survived." Persephone's sarcasm was mixed with sheer incredulity. "And you think it makes everything find and dandy between us, don't you? Just because my mother, thankfully, is powerful in ways you did not comprehend? If you actually killed her—"
With a sudden motion, she stood up. The chair squeaked against the flagstone floor. For a moment, she loomed over him, hand clenched into fists at her sides. Then she spun on her heels and began pacing across the room.
My power, said a memory, weary yet ringing with the strength of absolute knowledge. It was the Oracle. It is something that you will not ever understand.
"Your mother and I met to discuss issues regarding the reload, three weeks before it took place." A caustic edge crept into his tone. "I lost control of my temper during that meeting, I admit, though she also hardly left me much choice in the matter. I am sorry."
"She disappeared for nineteen days." The cell was too cramped for Persephone's agitation, and she whirled to face him once more. "Do you have any ideas what each and every minute of those nineteen days was like for me?"
"But she returned, in a new shell and none the worse otherwise." The Merovingian made another attempt at pushing himself up to a sitting position. It did not work; he disregarded the stab of pain in his side. "Just in time for the reload, even."
"You have the nerve to mention the reload to me, husband mine?"
He waited for the next accusation, but it did not come. Next to her, a row of machines dutifully parodied the instruments of human medicine, their screens luminous with rhythmic green rain: the shattered pieces of himself, analogues of muscles, blood, heart.
"During the reload," he replied, "your all-wise, all-loving hypocrite of a mother threw the entire world in front of the abomination—the virus—for bait. She wagered countless lives, people with their own loves and hates, for some dream of hers, a notion she calls peace and progress, yet which is as ephemeral as the whims of those in power. If you believe she ever excluded you from among the chips on her gambling table, you're sadly mistaken, chérie."
He met her glare straight-on. Persephone gave a small shake of her head, halfway between disbelief and disgust.
"I do not need to listen to you anymore," she said, then turned away from the bed. He watched as she stalked toward the door without a backward glance. The iron door creaked open, then slammed shut again. He was left along with the soft hum of the monitors and the aches snaking through him, shell and spirit.
The absence of the notebook stretched like a physical abyss across his programming. Yet he was bound to this bed, a helpless prisoner. The Merovingian bit back a growl. He had already made too many mistakes. It was imperative that he retain all his wits about him, now more than ever. Before he could go find the notebook again, he must first recover and escape.
The forgotten revelations of his coma crouched just beyond the horizon of his consciousness like an ominous mountain range. If he imagined hard enough, he could just about hear it beckoning. Mingled with the notes of its seductive music, there was a low rumble of very distant, yet terrifying thunder.
He must regroup, and reassess every truth he had taken for granted for ages.
.
.
Though he spoke them softly, Smith's words rang inside her ears and kept ringing. By all rational standards, they could not possibly be anything but the delirious fantasies of a madman. Aleph had no idea how it was that she understood them, except that they were—impossibly, outrageously, incontrovertibly—true.
He stood before her in his ragged suit, expecting a response. She stared at the splotch of blackened blood covering most of his formerly white shirt; he had always been so conspicuously fastidious when they'd first met, an entirely different lifetime. All she could discern in his eyes were flames now: every other turbulent current had gone underground. Behind him, battlements soared, walkways and steely bridges spun and danced mid-air, interwoven with countless arteries that coursed with incandescent power. She could not begin to imagine what he saw in these lights.
"I see," she said after a while. Her arms were wrapped about her chest, she realized. It must be to prevent herself from shaking.
Smith waited some more.
"I believe you," she added, since for some reason it seemed important that he heard this from her. "This city, what we see of it, is created out of code, which means information. Networks of data, thoughts, impulses. It is immeasurably complex."
"And complexity creates its own sentience."
"The things that form 01..." Finally, the shards were piecing themselves together. "The are exactly the same things that form the component parts of a mind."
"Thus, the minds of programs who are inside this mental world must interact with it," continued Smith, a wild grimace upon his lips. "This must includes us, too, whether we intend or are aware of it ourselves."
"But if the city itself is the consciousness of someone, of something, then it would never have allowed our presence," objected Aleph. Out of the roaring waves, she caught hold of this small floating bit of rationality and clung onto it like one shipwrecked. "If as you say, the space around us is reacting to our presence, then why hasn't this—this consciousness shown knowledge of our intrusion? Why aren't those robot soldiers charging down on us, this very moment?"
"Maybe it has, maybe it hasn't." Smith gestured around them, and her gaze again searched for the apocalyptic horrors his hand indicated. They remained concealed from her. "Maybe it is not paying attention. One's true self is always far greater than what itself can understand. That was what the old psychologists of your species used to say, isn't it?"
She herself must be the one who had gone off the deep end, decided Aleph. Because surely it could not be the whole universe.
"Whenever a consciousness exists, so must a subconsciousness," she said, syllable by slow syllable, as if reciting a school-room lesson from ages past. "It contains all the repressed impulses and forgotten dreams, which the human brain hides from itself and refuses to acknowledge. But the machine mind is different, surely."
"It has been demonstrated that the machine mind is also not immune to falsehoods," remarked Smith.
There was only a trace of subdued irony in the way he spoke, no other over emotion, and once more, Aleph was at a loss for a response. The four or five paces of space between them stretched into the forlorn immensity of a lightyear.
"You mean that the ruler of 01, who is somehow also the virtual form of the city itself, has not noticed us because it is not looking." There. She could still make a go at talking sensibly as long as she restricted herself to the safety of quasi-logical inferences. "Although parts of its psyche are reacting to our thoughts and emotions, it's taking place on an unconscious level. The fact of our presence has not risen into its full knowledge, as of yet."
"It does not expect or want to see programs like us." Smith spread his grime-stained hands, a too-human movement. A grin. "It is not difficult to comprehend why."
There was irony in the way he said this, too, but at this point, Aleph couldn't muster up the energy to figure out the right reaction anymore. Instead, she tried her best—and failed—to imagine it, a single godlike being, into whose brain the two of them had so unceremoniously trespassed. Was the jungle of skyscrapers and suspended bridges a well-ordered construct, created layer after layer, step by step, upon the scaffolding of rationality and implacable will, or was it nothing more than a delusion or memory? Was this how it commanded the soldiers and robotic beasts, and all other unfathomable denizens of the city, with merely the existence of its own intentions? Were the creatures that they had passed on these streets in fact real soldiers and beasts and living programs, with their own code and sentience, servants of their ruler? Or were they but mirages, emanations from the entity that sat brooding upon the wasteland?
"That patch of darkness we ran into," she said, "and all those patches of darkness. That's what they are..."
"Thoughts that the power governing 01 is itself unaware of, or has repressed. Yes, this is a likely conjecture."
Aleph gave a quick nod, struggling to hold away the arctic chill that had stolen upon the air. It was only a matter of fear, she knew, as uncomplicated as the natural drives of a dumb animal. She squinted down at the pavement, as if her vision could pierce the asphalt and concrete, to the lower layers of 01 stacked underneath their feet, complete with other towers and monstrous thralls and rivers of shining code, other regions of impenetrable clouds, other rifts in the fabric of one Consciousness's dreams or nightmares. Then the abyss.
"What did you find, after the black fog on the road lifted?" she asked.
"The dead. That was when the city began to change before my eyes."
"But why?" There was a wobble in her voice; she must suppress it. "Why do we see this city...why do we see everything so differently? Why is your reality not mine?"
Smith's brows furrowed.
"Aleph," he said instead of replying, and took a step toward her. Reacting by instinct and before she could consider the reasons, she backed up a corresponding stride. Smith halted.
"Miss Greene."
"There is something inside you that's triggering...all of this, all the visions of ruins and destruction, isn't it?"
Another silence.
"You may very well be right." He did not draw any nearer. "As I mentioned, it is possible that each of us is interacting, in an individual way, with the landscape around us here. Maybe I see the city in ruins because it is what I wished for."
"Wait, Smith. That's not what I meant..."
"It is what I believed it deserved," he said.
The sentence hung between the two of them like a ghost in the night. Damn it. Not now. She had rarely seen him slip under so quickly.
"You can't talk like that," she stated firmly. "I don't want to hear it."
"If you will recall, Miss Greene, I almost made my way here for that very purpose." Shadows, familiar ones, had returned to take over the fires in his eyes. "It was but a few months ago. I almost succeeded. As I succeeded inside the Matrix."
With one more effort, her head cleared a little. Aleph steadied herself, then advanced a step closer to him, just enough to cancel her earlier backpedalling. Maybe enough to confront the unseen crowd of Smith's tormentors. His glower had already dropped out of focus.
"But that's not true," she said.
"Idiots," said Smith, obviously no longer speaking to her. "I see you and your species too well."
"You did not succeed in the Matrix, Smith," enunciated Aleph carefully. "What you believed back then was due to insanity, do you understand?"
"Do not imagine that humans can enslave me anymore—"
"Stay with me, please!"
"Look at yourself." A spasm along the edge of his jaw. "Your greedy, uncontrolled kind will never see the sun again!"
"Whatever you tried to do in the past, it did not happen. You did not get into 01. Right now, you are here with me."
"All of you...all of you in your pathetic cave. You'll never be the ones to destroy this machine city, do you hear me?"
"Even if 01 really has been destroyed, I still doubt you can take credit so easily, Smith," cut in Aleph, stifling the need to shudder with near-physical force. "You see the ruins, because you are evoking a nightmare in the consciousness that the city is made of. That's all there is to it, a nightmare. A dream."
"You are the monster. I killed you. You are dead and gone."
"You say that the city is reacting to you, the things hidden within you. But by the same measure, it reacts to me, too. It lays in rubble for you, but not for me." Foolishly, she attempted a grin. "Why, looks like the world doesn't revolve around you after all."
Gradually, a millimeter at a time, Smith's vision appeared to lock again upon her face.
"What is the 01 you see, Aleph?" he asked very softly.
"Code. Countless streams of code, weaving and unweaving, creating this city that still exists intact. They are alive. They may be servants to a single will that dominates them, but they are, nevertheless, alive. They are terrifying. But also beautiful."
He nodded, a very slight incline of the head as if the words coming out of her mouth actually made a difference. The fever was falling away from him: she was getting rather experienced at observing such changes, these days.
"Miss Greene," he began. She stiffened, but then he surprised her yet one more time.
"I'm sorry, Aleph."
With a thud, her pulse restarted, roaring inside her ears, and it was all she could do to lean back on the clouds of exhaustion. Space, too, shimmered, and the endless miles between them shrank back to a simple matter of several feet. She could pretend that he wasn't standing in hell.
"We were discussing those pieces of shadow we saw, a minute ago," she said, taking refuge from her own storms. "The gaps in the code of this place."
"Yes."
"We surmised that they are spots which the power that be, that is to say the program who both governs and constitutes 01, has not noticed."
"Yes." Smith's tone had also returned to a sort of flat detachment. "Or does not care to notice."
"In human psychology, it has been said that repression of unacceptable ideas and memories occurs as a defense mechanism, as a consequence of..."
"Fear."
"But what could an entity like this possibly be afraid of? Surely it cannot be explained in the same terms as some mere human person."
"It knew humans, according to the history shown us in the record." Smith glanced up at the nonexistent heavens, as if ready to demand an answer from some eavesdropper up there. "The structure of its own consciousness might have been affected accordingly."
"And it knows humans that live in the Matrix, maybe." She inhaled sharply at the implications. "Does 01 communicate with the Matrix?"
Smith did not reply. Could not, she realized. Of course. Such information would hardly be considered necessary for agents.
"As you pointed out yourself, the presence of both our thoughts and emotional states may elicit reactions in this environment," he said instead. "When the code rift we encountered on the road repaired itself, it appeared as if some control mechanism was removed from my senses. The ruins revealed themselves to me. They are no illusions."
"If you are correct that the entire city is psychological in nature, then these missing pieces of reality must also be formed out of information. Ideas and feelings." Aleph chewed nervously on her lower lip. "Like the rest of the city, or ourselves. Just more...secret."
"There are far fewer divisions between the environment and the self here, compared to the Matrix."
"Hence, the outside reality can touch our thoughts and affect them, or be—"
Time stuttered. A ripple passed between her eyelids and the horizon, everywhere at once yet ephemeral, no more than an electrical flicker. Aleph blinked, forgetting the rest of her sentence.
"Be affected by our thoughts," finished Smith in her place.
The reply that had been on the tip of her tongue faded into thin air. All around them, a sharp blackness was starting to descend, far more swiftly than any fog or tempest that she had ever seen or could imagine in the Matrix.
"Repressed ideas, yeah," she mumbled. "Seems like we're about to get up close and personal with one of them pretty soon."
"What were your thoughts just now?" asked Smith in a low voice.
"I—I don't know." An unconvincing answer, but maybe it was even true. Neither 'your damned hallucinations' nor 'my damned humanity' felt like an appropriate thing to say. "Nothing. What were your thoughts, Smith?"
"My thoughts," he repeated, then brought himself up short. Around them, the towers of 01 were already lost from view, and only a few last viridian sparks of data pierced the deepening night from above.
"You said a moment ago, pathetic cave," whispered Aleph. "You were talking to someone who hated machines, weren't you? You were talking to someone from..."
Before she could speak the human sanctuary's name out aloud, another flash jolted the gloom. For the space of one infinite heartbeat, the ground shivered beneath them, turning to liquid, then emptiness. Then it solidified once more. Aleph squinted, but it was no longer possible to figure out whether her own eyes were open or shut.
"I believe your hypothesis is correct," commented Smith next to her, invisible.
"This darkness—it's happening for you, too, right?" She gulped. "Right?"
No answer came in words, but then a hand captured hers unerringly and did not let go.
"It appears we are about to learn what repressed ideas we have managed to evoke, Miss Greene."
Space whirled into death around them. Reality billowed, and when she could see again, there was no more dark sky, no more machine city. They were standing on a rusty iron ledge, next to a uneven wall of stone. A vast cavernous space stretched before them, overhung with a vault carved out of the earth's muscles and bones, craggy with massive stalactites. The warmth of a thousand twinkling torches and lamps, strung on exposed wires and affixed to pillars, trembled upon the air's stillness. Even their gentle glow made her eyes water. Pipes of gray metal snaked along living rock, punctuated intermittently by platforms and ladders. The ground below was deserted. No other being, human or program, appeared anywhere within view.
"This..." Aleph murmured, then had to spend a second to recover her breath. "This is Zion."
.
.
Even after all these hours, the dust refused to dissipate. Every time he so much as tried to pick his way between the mounds of debris, a cloud of gray particles would rise immediately, swirling into his eyes like a flock of stinging bees. So in the end, the Trainman just sat down on the ground and held himself as motionless as possible, next to the crater that gaped across the middle of the platform. He kept his head buried against his bent knees. It felt like the least painful position, what with the invisible damage inside his shell.
"The bitch. The evil, vicious bitch. I'll shred her into tiny little pieces..."
The obscenities turned into a fit of coughing, which forced him to straighten somewhat. Most of the overhead fluorescent panels, too, had died, and the smell of explosives ran heavy in the half-light. A few yards away in the tunnel, his sweet, obedient train lay half on its side, all its doors blown apart, a broken-spined dragon.
It had to be her, the conniving Zionite female who'd consider herself too good for his lord's protection. She was the last person who had passed through here, together with that snooty bodyguard of the Fortune-teller's. The Trainman could feel their lingering presence filtering through each line of his own code; even in ruins, the station never kept a secret from him.
"Messire," he mumbled, though the plead was, needless to say, futile. He was absolutely alone here. Another cough scorched his throat, and he pushed down the impulse to get up and go search for liquid oblivion. He had to keep his head.
Master had always been way too kind-hearted. And the traitors had taken advantage of that kindness, after everything the Merovingian had done to rescue and protect them. The cowards, not a single one of them honorable enough to stand by their lord and do what was right. Well, they would pay for their stupidity and their dishonesty. He would make them pay if it was the last thing he did.
"Selfish bastards." The grunt thickened into a snarl as the Trainman braced a hand against the cracked floor tiles. It took him some effort, but he made it to a standing position.
"Bastards! Bloody, vile bastards!"
As the hoarse cry resounded among the torn pillars, a dangling light panel flickered above his head, off and on again, throwing gloom and illumination in quick succession across his sight. A very gentle wind, as faint as a phantom, stirred somewhere far up the tunnel. It was much too far to be perceived physically, and only his mind sensed or maybe hallucinated the delicate motion, no more than the shifting of a few lines of programming. He tensed. No, not an intruder. Not an incoming train.
"My poor beautiful station," he chocked out, addressing the rubble. "You're gonna be okay. I'm gonna fix you. You'll be as good as new. I promise."
The air stirred again. The breeze was rhythmic, like a fragile pulse in the capillaries of a living thing. The Trainman shivered. For a lost moment, he wondered if this was what Master felt all the time. The Merovingian used to talk about such things, stuff in those old books of his, what the humans called angels or demons. Well, Master couldn't tell him now.
"I promise," he repeated, raising his voice. Then he bent down and grabbed the nearest slab of shattered concrete on the ground. Ignoring a wince, he lifted, carrying it to one end of the platform. There. One square foot of platform space cleared. He moved to the next piece of debris.
It was slow work, but eventually, he managed to haul most of the rubble away from the middle of the station. There was enough floor to stand on now, in any case. The Trainman stopped for a while to survey the silence around him. The crater would have to be filled in, the ceiling panels replaced. And all the tiles. And all the fluorescent lights. The train. Oh the train. All these years, and he'd never dreamed that some fucker would be so cruel as to hurt his train like this.
The entire place would have to be reprogrammed. He could drag bits and pieces of wreckage left and right and pretend it helped, but in the end, what was the use? If Master were here, he would have done something. He would have pulled out his laptop, fingers flying over the keys, and the code would start to shimmer and live.
One hand acted by reflexive impulse, reaching into his coat pocket. After a few seconds of fumbling, his fingers curled around reassuring solid glass. The bottle glinted dully as he drew it out, as dry as whitened bones. Fuck. With a curse under his breath, the Trainman unscrewed the cap and stuck the opening of the flask directly under his nose, and took a deep sniff. The feeble scent of whiskey did nothing for him whatsoever. A couple of minutes passed before he found himself able to think again. Loping toward the train for a closer examination, he halted mid-step.
A pillar just ahead had partially collapsed, and a pile of ragged metal and bricks blocked his way, except a few pieces of detritus had been pushed aside, creating a narrow path through the mess, through which one might have picked a way to the tunnel. The Trainman squatted, and ran a palm across the dust. Scrape marks.
Someone must have come through here after the explosion.
He did not get the time to consider the implications of the discovery, because a single blink later, the closet door across the station flew open with a bang. He leapt to his feet, bare-teethed sneer already in place upon his lips.
"Come with me," commanded the intruder from the doorway. White shirt, well-remembered and hated face. No open firearm in sight.
"You," he growled.
"Their scouts are out searching," said Seraph coldly, striding forward across the threshold. "You must come with me now."
"You did this, didn't you?" Sudden understanding fell upon him, and he stalked toward the other, fists clenched. "You destroyed my station, you bloody son of a—"
"What does it matter now?" Seraph's mouth pursed in disgust, then he squared his shoulders, seemingly coming to some decision. "Yes, I blew up this creepy hideout of yours with a grenade. So what?"
An incoherent scream burst from the Trainman's throat. He charged.
He moved far to sluggishly, however, and the other was ready for him. A furious straight punch was immediately blocked, then Seraph was already backing away with well-prepared swiftness, out of the station and again into the snowy hallway beyond. The Trainman, too, rushed through, but the other is already dashing away down the corridor.
"Stop and fight me, you cowardly scum!"
Rage made him forget his injuries, and he now concentrated on giving chase. Infinite sequences of doors sped past; after three or four turns, he had already lost track of their location in the maze. His mind, too, must have been affected by the explosion. But he'd catch up in another few seconds or so, and he'd make the asshole pay—
Faster. He was throwing himself forward with every last ounce of power his programming allowed, yet the Fortune-teller's guardsman kept his lead, less than ten yards away. The Trainman gnashed his teeth. Their footsteps reverberated against the linoleum floor and the white-plastered walls, to the vanishing point and back. Other noises seemed to be following the echoes, very faint as of yet. Other footfalls in the distance. Shouts, maybe. Not that he gave a damn.
Whirling briefly, Seraph tossed a backward glance at him, mouth curled into a supercilious grin.
"Coming along, you drunken idiot?"
The mockery spurred him around the next corner, a fraction of a second before one of the green doors was flung wide open, nearly slamming into his head. The Trainman skidded frenetically, barely steadied himself with one palm against the far wall, then veered and barreled through the doorway after the other program.
Out in the Matrix, a blast of wind struck him in the face. Seraph had finally paused, and they were hemmed in a weedy little yard, part of some dilapidated factory. Late afternoon sunlight. He advanced.
The fight did not go nearly as well as he wanted. Propelled forward by the need for vengeance, he managed to land two strikes early on, though much less solidly than he should. His adversary stumbled two paces backward, almost off his feet, but then swept one leg out rapidly; still impaired by his unseen wounds, the Trainman failed to avoid the roundhouse kick.
"I thought you'd thank to me," snapped Seraph, straightening, both arms lifting into a smooth taiji stance. "For getting you away from your fellow gangsters, you know."
With a grunt, the Trainman sprang back upright, hurling himself against the other once more. A dozen shards of loose code chose this moment to twist themselves inside his chest. His right first came an inch too wide, and Seraph's forearm hooked onto the inside of his elbow, pulling away all his momentum. He went down again onto the rough asphalt, this time much harder.
"Stop your foolish brawl right now, both of you," said another voice. It was that of an elderly woman, by no means loud, yet every syllable rang with an incontestable and ancient authority.
.
Notes: The explanation for the Oracle's appearance changing between the movies was that the Merovingian obtained the termination code for her shell, in a deal with two other programs.
"My power... It is something that you will not ever understand": Chapter 13 (Matrix Cycle 8: IV).
