House of Ghosts
.
The young woman never needed to speak the underground city's name out aloud, for he, too, recognized the place immediately. He, too, had once walked here, in an existence that did not belong to himself. His and not his. What had been the name? A man with streaks of filth on his stubble-ridden face, and sweat beading against his skin. Bane. That was it. It was one of the few names he recalled, out of the whole rancid throng.
"An unusual change of scene," observed Smith. By some automatic conditioning, his voice was reverting back to its old agent intonations, all hollowness and well-honed edges. "The psychotic old monster may actually have a sense of humor, after all."
"Don't, Smith," muttered Aleph.
The sensation of a pocket-knife's well-honed edge slicing across his palm, a neat crimson line stretching in its wake. He had not been used to bleeding or physical pain back then, how charmingly naive of him. A release of pressure. A flick of his wrist, and the blade slid into the woman's flesh, severing muscles and nerves and windpipe as easily as if he were still in his own realm. What had been her name? Started with M. Maggie. Right. Another one he was supposed to know.
Very quietly, Aleph pulled her hand free of his grasp. His fingers had fallen limp, and it took no effort on her part. For an instant, he expected her to glance down, and frown in distaste at the thick red liquid stuck to her skin. But no blood dripped from her palm, nor from his own. His last sojourn in Zion was a memory that stained only himself.
Their footfalls boomed upon the iron floorboards of the narrow gallery. Aleph went a few paces ahead of him, not so much to lead—for he did not require it—but so that he would not see her face. A wobbly set of stairs descended to the ground level. The tremulous glow of flames and makeshift electric lightbulbs cut off all words between them. Smith waited, but Bane, cleverly for one of his ilk, now bid his time in haughty silence, though the man had been howling with uncontrolled fury only a few minutes ago, back there in the machine city. All the rest of his adversaries took their cues from him. Clearly, they wanted to keep him anticipating. Despite himself, he inhaled and exhaled, but contrary to every expectation, no odor of human bodies or human desperation touched his nostrils.
"Why is it like this?" Aleph asked unceremoniously. The cavern put a faint reverberation into her syllables. It was not necessary for her to explain the pronoun.
"The human species must have been deceiving itself, as usual, to have imagined itself capable of building the free city on its own." Smith paused, ready to bare his teeth back at the crowd, who would surely pipe up in protest at the irony. They did not.
"I get that," snorted the young woman. They were on the main floor of Zion's great meeting hall now, and she laid a tentative hand against the nearest pillar, pressing against the uneven rock as if testing it for brittleness. "Only the machines could have had the technology to dig so far underground, on such a scale. It's obvious, if people would only consider things with unaffected logic. But they were too scared and too proud."
"And this image we've fallen into must be the machines' own collective memory of creating Zion. That is all, Aleph."
"No," she snapped. "Why?"
Smith had no reply, an increasingly frequent occurrence these days. He raised his sight toward the hanging forest of stalactites, code meticulously crafted to imitate the drop-by-drop deposit of calcium and salt inside the planet's bowels, the sluggish layering of individual molecule upon molecule. Upon the massive walls to every side, hundreds of openings yawned like toothless mouths, some wide and rounded, others barely tall enough for a man's height: passages that led to the hive of cramped corridors and cells, where men and women ate and defecated, procreated and rotted according to the instincts of their flesh. But this version of Zion did not possess an insect colony. Neither pulsating drumbeat nor buzzing cries pierced the hush.
"Why did the machines make Zion?" persisted Aleph. She waved a hand in a sort of aimless gesture above her own head; gigantic bat-like shadows flitted among the lamps. "And why is this memory inside one of those—those globules of darkness?"
"If we are correct about what 01 is, Zion must be a repressed thought, for reasons we do not yet understand," he began, tautly rational. He was not designed to be skilled at speaking soothingly, especially not while distracted by the enemies' deafening refusal to open their mouths.
"Why are we here, anyway? And are you—" She whirled to stare fixedly at him. "And are you seeing the same things I'm seeing? Are you even here with me?"
"Calm down for a minute, Aleph. I'm not standing atop a pile of corpses right now, if that's what you're asking."
"Does the ruling power here remember Zion, or not?" There was a quaver in her voice. "What is it trying to tell us?"
His tormentors, the entire innumerable lot of them, offered not even a snicker in response. Still doing their best to keep him on his toes. A change of tactics.
"Maybe the machine mind simply prefers not to remind itself of having to deal with humanity," he said. The sarcasm was just a touch unnaturally over-sharpened. "It is not difficult to conceive of such a possibility, in fact."
Aleph pressed her lips into a thin line. After several seconds, she carefully loosened her fists, which had been clenched at her sides.
"You were talking," she said finally, "just before the black fog fell around us. About our own thoughts evoking revelations in the virtual environment of 01."
Her question went unasked in words. This would be the perfect opportunity for Bane to make another entrance. Smith squared his shoulders. If he could only provoke the man into a snarl or a yell, or even one of his self-righteous insults, something, anything. But no. Like all the others, the dead Zionite chose to continue prowling just beyond detection range.
"I heard one of my voices at that moment, as you probably surmised already," he said instead. The unaccustomed honesty was a needle inside his mouth. "He was the only human being from Zion whom I ever took over. The only one other than Anderson, that is. I saw the desert through his eyes."
"His name," said Aleph. "It was Bane, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"I mostly learned about him from you, the way you talked about him when we were imprisoned. I barely ever met him, back when I was...there."
The way she spoke, it was as if this were somehow a crucial point to make. Smith continued to hold himself on edge, ready for the assault of his victims, while they continued to hold themselves in reserve, while ever line of programming continued tightening with the wait. Then something else stole upon him, and space billowed as if before a storm.
"Does he..." Aleph hesitated. "Does he know about me?"
"No." He was still able to hear and comprehend her. The new presence came with no audible words; nothing solid made the lights shimmer. Only a phantom brushing against his senses. It was familiar, but less human than he recalled.
"Bane is not real," he added. The reassurance sounded suspiciously like one intended for himself, though he could not possibly be frail enough to require one. "He's only a symptom of my own flaws. That's what all of them are."
After an interminable beat, she nodded, though it was unclear whether she trusted him. Real, unreal. As if it made a whit of difference. Quickly, Smith lifted his gaze and scanned the layered balconies lining the cliffsides, the empty combinations of torchlight and rust, searching for a trace of the invisible spirit, anything tangible that he could grasp.
"They use to go on a lot about humanity here," said Aleph, seemingly only musing. "Our emotions, creativity, infinite potentials, all the stuff that supposedly made us so special. People dreamed about destroying the Matrix and the machines..."
"Anderson," he interjected. There, far above and to the left, all the way at the end of one ragged walkway. Almost the afterimage of a long black trench coat, fluttering in and out of existence within a millisecond.
"What is it, Smith?"
"It is nothing, Miss Greene. Only one more hallucination."
This time, it was obvious that she knew he was lying.
"I think we should get out of here, Smith."
"Wait," he said. "Something important is here. Something we must figure out."
"I've figured out enough."
With the impossible speed of nightmares—and nowadays he was perfectly well-versed in what those things were—the atmospheric pressure amplified. One second later, it was already a palpable force, that of something single-minded and unshaken, the sense of another's power and superiority, of an absolute certainty.
Certainty of what?
"The One. Their savior." The two epithets rose out of the chasm without the aid of his own conscious will. "He was here."
"Well, yeah." A half-hearted roll of her eyes. "That was also part of the machines' plans for Zion."
If breathing were required for him, he would have already suffocated. Purpose, identified Smith belatedly, one that was not his own, suffusing each piece of stone and metal, every concealed qubit of code in this stifling record.
"But why was the One needed to start with? What was his purpose?"
"I'm not sure." The wobble re-entered her voice. "I'm not sure if I care anymore."
"And if this is what Zion looked like when it was first built, then why is..." Focus now. "Thomas Anderson here?"
"I don't see him here. You said it was only another one of your mirages." Aleph grimaced again. "Please, Smith. Let's just get out of here, okay?"
"It's all happening just like before. I felt it, when my code crossed with his. The Matrix is reloaded periodically, and the One has do to with it, but how? Why?"
She blinked at him, her expression half-crumpled, and at long last, he detected the glimmer of moisture in her eyes. The ghost of the One weighed a mountain on his limbs. Then a new noise—a quiet, constant humming, somewhere overhead and very far away—drove away both the questions and the answers. All the lamp flames vibrated, their movements infinitesimal as of yet.
"Those are..." Aleph glanced up. Several seconds passed. "Drills."
"During each reload, Zion is physically destroyed," said Smith, grasping onto a piece of knowledge he never should have possessed. "It looks like the consciousness of 01 has a hidden recollection of this part, too."
"We need to move," she growled. "Or we'll be buried—"
Yeah, you'll get crushed to dust, selfish traitor bitch, said Bane, stepping out from behind the curtains and glowering at Aleph through Smith's eyes.
.
.
The last time she'd laid eyes on Charon had been four cycles and sixty-three years ago, if memory served her correctly. He had looked rather different back then, cleaner, eyes less bloodshot, fewer signs of the ravages of human booze and human drugs. Far more remarkable, however, was the way his shell had aged. The strangest of Mérovée's creatures was no longer a pale youth with hunched shoulders and frightened gaze. His stare was all anger now.
It was highly unusual for a program's outward appearance to change from the passage of time, unless by deliberate design or intervention, or an extraordinary irregularity in the program's nature. The Oracle made a mental note to herself, then pushed her powers a bit deeper in. The damage inside the stationmaster's operative states made her brows furrow, though only for half a second.
"What happened to you, my dear?" she asked, a mild opening.
"Don't pretend you don't fucking know, you old witch," spat Charon, stumbling back to his feet.
"Looks like someone ought to wash your mouth out with soap," remarked Seraph, placing himself precisely between her and the other man with two quick strides.
"Please, it's fine," murmured the Oracle.
"Your bloody minion—threw a bloody grenade—into my station!"
This time, she was actually startled by the cry's sheer vehemence. In one fluid motion, Seraph surged to counter Charon's renewed forward charge. She had to raise her voice a notch.
"Do you intend to aid your master?"
With an efficiently raised right arm, her bodyguard checked the first attack. The other followed with another blistering punch; Seraph swerved to the left, forcing Charon to pivot and revert to defense in an instant. The combination of injury, surprise and uncontrolled emotions had clearly reduced the wild program's powers, and he did not manage to lean fully aside as Seraph's left palm circled upward and landed firmly against his shoulder. The stationmaster staggered, backpedaling several paces.
"What happened to my master?" The anguished shout lowered to a snarl.
"I am not certain, my dear. But I believe..." She took a step to the side so as to regain an unobstructed view of his face. Her loyal bodyguard moved to reposition himself as well; she halted him with a warning glance. "I believe he will be all right."
The other's glare would have ignited the air around her, if such a thing were possible, but he had the sense to refrain from advancing once more.
"How the fuck did you figure that out, Fortune-teller? You put her up to it, didn't you?"
"Her?" repeated the Oracle, though it was perfectly clear whom he meant. A few nearly instantaneous computations flashed through the deepest part of her mind. She was fairly sure that her son-in-law would never have tolerated discussions about Kore's origins among his henchmen, unless...
"Mistress," squeezed out Charon between gritted teeth. "He—he loves her, my master. How could she, if nobody said nothin' wicked to her ears? That's what you do, whispering to people, getting them to do what you want. And you ain't a friend of my master's, exactly. There's got be a reason why she..."
He choked off, and for the first time in many, many years, the Oracle found herself startled by the strength of another's feelings.
"Whatever actions your mistress took, I assure you that they did not stem from any whispers of mine," she said, scrupulously neutral. "I have not even heard any news about your master, in fact."
"She set them against my lord. The bastards. Dishonorable traitors, all of them. But they wouldn't have dared. They'd been scared dead if there wasn't nobody to egg them on. Could only be Mistress."
"That's nonsense," Seraph entered the fray gamely before she could. "So you don't actually know it was—"
"It would never have worked if it wasn't for her! He'd have torn them into pieces, all of them! But he loves her, and she must've used it against him." Charon lifted both hands to the sides of his head, pushing strands of lank hair out of his face. "No way it could have happened otherwise. He loves her and she...All these years and she, the snake of a woman..."
"Oh, don't you dare," said Seraph, advancing a pace.
"Seraph," said the Oracle, lifting a hand. The program facing them was genuinely unaware of Kore's relationship to herself, it appeared, and it would be disadvantageous to give away the fact at this point.
"You cannot help your master unless you put yourself together," she continued. "Your code has been damaged; it will repair itself, but only if you let it. These injuries are...unusual in nature, if you'll permit an old woman's observations."
Despite his precarious position, Charon's face twitched into a derisive leer.
"What, you gonna tell me what to do?"
"Do not throw your courage away on meaningless rage." She kept her eyes steady upon his. "You were wounded when your subway station was blown up, even though you were not present when it happened. Is this correct?"
"Yeah, and what of it?"
And now she saw it at last, underneath the defiance and the shards of ragged power, underneath all the layers of purposeful programming, a very remote gleam of something else, unstructured, chaotic. It was no more than an afterimage, so faint as to be invisible only a few seconds ago, even to her. The implications were so extraordinary that she had to consciously prevent herself from an audible gasp.
"Oh, I think it's just fascinating, the connections between you shell and your master's station," she said with a shake of the head, a dozen thoughts racing. "I do wonder if Mérovée ever noticed it himself."
"Ain't any of your business, Fortune-teller."
"Your master is a brilliant man," mused the Oracle. "He has probably pushed his insight as far as it will go, for one such as himself."
"Ain't of any help to him now," grumbled Charon bitterly.
"Serves him right," said Seraph in an undertone.
"It is not easy to foresee what may or may not be of help, down the road," the Oracle interposed quickly. "But you are in more immediate danger. Your old friends are still out there searching for you."
"I would've shown them what's what."
"Yeah, right," snorted Seraph. "In your state? They'd have hauled you off in a minute, if I didn't show up right before they did."
A scowl on the other's part, but no retort. The old seeress paced forward across the broken gravel, three steps, four. Seraph frowned, and also shifted on his feet almost imperceptibly, ready to intercept any hint of an assault. As far as she could tell, the stationmaster himself was unaware of the most unusual aspect of his own nature—this infinitesimal trace of the Madness. She would have to find out how much Mérovée saw or understood.
"What the fuck do you want?" asked Charon after the silence had grown oppressive.
"I wanted to take a good look at you, my dear."
"Huh. Really." He flung up his hands, a sarcastic gesture. His long greasy coat flapped in a newly arrived breeze. "Well, have you seen enough?"
The Oracle's lips curled upward into her best enigmatic smile. It gave her another second or two to formulate the next decision. At the thought of her own connivance against Kore, guilt twisted inside the old woman; she suppressed it instantly. Her daughter's emotions were too perilously complicated nowadays; it was for the best that she remained uninvolved.
"And I want to tell you that I will need to meet with your master," she added, "fairly soon, in all probability."
The man's hostility shaded into confusion. Seraph's glance, too, swept toward her in astonishment.
"And you expect me to help you with that, I guess?" asked the stationmaster after a pause.
"It's what you're planning, isn't it? To rescue your lord and king? But you must allow yourself to heal before that. And that means staying out of the clutches of your former colleagues."
Charon squinted at her through reddened eyes.
"Are you...making me some kind of offer here?"
"I wish no harm to you or your master."
"Um, wait a minute here," said Seraph.
"I don't trust you, Fortune-teller."
"My view of Mérovée has never been completely cordial, I won't deny it to you," replied the Oracle in a gentle tone. "But I see you. I hear the way you talk about him. And someone who can inspire such loyalty as yours...deserves some reevaluation on my part."
A long silence. The Oracle stole a glimpse over at her bodyguard's dour face. She would have to discuss things with him when they were alone. Then the vagabond-shaped program straightened a little, folding his arms across his chest.
"What are you proposing, then?" he asked.
.
.
Why did the soul of the machine city, god or demon that it might be, have to be such an absolute and utter bastard? Here it was, sitting supreme upon a ruined planet, king of all that it surveyed and beyond, and it had to go and remember—or be too scared to remember—some silly little underground colony, complete with human loves, human morality, human betrayal. It was absurd.
Well, there was no time to waste on dwelling in the past, resolved Aleph. How much had the spirit of 01 recalled or forgotten about its invasion, maybe multiple invasions, of Zion? It would probably be prudent to avoid finding out.
"We need to move." Instinctively, she reached for Smith's arm. He shook her off with one jerky movement.
"Leave." The snarl was aimed somewhere a few yards to their right, next to a nearby pillar. "Leave her alone."
Aleph gasped in surprise as Smith's gaze whipped past her face, and for the first time since she could ever recall, she caught sight of a pure fear in his eyes, undisguised, untempered by either rage or defiance. In two swift strides, he backed up and turned aside from her.
"No." He stared intently at an indistinct spot among the lanterns. "There is too little distinction between inside and outside here. They are coming alive..."
"Smith," said Aleph, taking a step toward him.
"He saw you! Stay away from me!"
"What—who's he?" she asked, stopping dead in her tracks. Her heart, already unsteady ever since they'd arrived into this godforsaken simulacrum of Zion, did a somersault inside her chest.
"He saw you," said Smith, still facing away from her. "But they're never supposed to see you. They never did before. They are only my own symptoms."
Aleph stole an upward look. The low thrumming—still miles above?—had grown a bit louder. A flickering of the torches. Right. The drills. This was the last thing she needed, some vengeful wraith adding to the dread already pooling thick around them.
"C'mon," she said. "Let's go."
"He knows you're here. I cannot tell what will happen if we're trapped here much longer. He may get stronger."
"Let him! I'm not afraid of Bane, okay?"
"He knows you're afraid. Get out of my sight, Aleph."
"The hell I will." Rapidly, she searched for the right phrases. "You expect me to go back out there and face your ruler all by myself? The one you wanted to confront? After you've dragged me all the way here?"
"If I look at you, so does he." With one hand, Smith fumbled along the front of his blood-soaked shirt, pulling the hem loose. A rip. Giving the strip of torn cloth two quick folds, he raised it to his eyes and began to tie the makeshift blindfold at the back of his head. "The nature of the environment, the idea of humanity all around us must be affecting the imprints in my codes. It feels—it feels he's going to become real..."
"Then fight him, damn it!" Aleph reached forward, and her fingers clasped again around his wrist, this time with much more force. Thankfully, Smith must be too confounded by his sudden vulnerability to push her away immediately. She started to haul him toward one end of the cave, steering around the pillars and stalagmites that dotted the floor.
"You are being foolish, Miss Greene." Smith's voice mingled with the mechanical whine from overhead, now unmistakable. Somewhere in the distance, great steel blades were toiling their way through a hundred layers of imaginary geological formations.
"At least I'm trying, okay?" In her peripheral vision, the air had started trembling. There, the entrance of the long corridor to the docks lay just ahead, exactly where it was supposed to be. "Let's see if the power here constructed Zion's ships, too—"
He's right, Addie.
Every inch of her body went cold. Smith must have noticed it as well; his fingers came around her palm, and with a small tug, he forced her to a stand-still.
Did you just forget the nature of this world? A soft liquid laugh, as if in delight at having beaten her sister in a game of cleverness. A crazy dream that the king of the earth doesn't want to ever recall again...
"Please, Lucy," begged Aleph.
You can't escape its destruction by running around, sis.
"You cannot escape destruction," said Smith. His intonation had shifted in a way that she could not immediately characterize. A slight resonance, maybe.
Before Aleph knew it, her hand had wrenched itself out of the grasp of his fingers, and she yanked it back, dropping his wrist. They stood just inside the mouth of the passageway, and he faced her, half in darkness, half in fire-glow, his sight willfully blocked by a dirty rag.
"We have to try, Smith!"
"Zion has been destroyed," he murmured tonelessly, "again and again. What is its purpose, if not for this?"
She should be putting herself into a defensive stance, Aleph realized. Abruptly, she was grateful for the fact that neither of them could see the other's eyes. From the minuscule muscle movements of his forehead, just above the cloth's top edge, she perceived that he must have squeezed his eyes shut behind the blindfold. It was stupidly useless, wasn't it? Even if Bane, or Neo—or any other ghost who'd solidified and now wanted a piece of the defector—could not see her, they could still hear her voice perfectly well. They could simply reach forward and grab her.
It's an interesting question, isn't it, though? cut in Lucy pensively. There's got to be a reason why the machines created Zion...
"Let's talk about it later, okay?" Either Lucy's obstinacy or Smith's was going to the death of her, probably both. At his back, all the lights of the cave were sputtering, mellow no longer.
"Stay away, Miss Greene." One side of his chin spasmed. "They made the Matrix, they made Zion. They made me a zookeeper and I never understood why. But I've figured it out. They have finally told me my purpose."
A hard lump was taking shape inside her chest. This was the worst possible time for anger, Aleph knew, yet she grasped it with the last of her strength like a drowning woman onto a straw. Anything was better than this weakness.
"That's bullshit, Smith!" Her voice rang shrill above the incessant droning of the attackers, grinding toward them foot by foot, moment by moment. "Why the fuck are you still going on about purpose? You decided to throw all that away ages ago, remember? It's just an excuse for what you wanted—"
"I wanted destruction, yes." The words came at her like bullets out of a gun. "That night, I knew I could destroy 01, just like I destroyed my chains. It was exactly the same as before, the same as humanity from centuries ago—"
"Stop it, just stop it," growled Aleph. Fear had at last been tossed aside. "I don't need to hear this! Yeah, I get it, destruction was what you wanted for 01, for the Matrix, for Zion, everyone, right? What would you have done if you succeeded?"
"I had to show them. I had to get free."
"How does choking the whole world to death make you free?" A bitter heat was welling irresistibly, on its own, like a mouthful of blood. "You were so fixated on your desperate will, your freedom, that it never occurred to you to spare a thought for anybody else's, right? What about the will and freedom of all those people in the Matrix?"
"Did you, any of you here, ever give a damn about the will and freedom of the coppertops?" Smith's retort echoed along the narrow passage, a prisoner's address before the jury. "How many of them have died at Zion's hands? How many of them have deserved—"
"What the hell do you get to say about those things, Smith? What makes you the arbiter anyone else's will or freedom, or what they deserve, human or machine? Do enlighten me, is this why you really came to 01 this time, too? To kill, finish the job, turn it all into rubble? What other lies have you told me?"
Ooh, commented Lucy succinctly.
"Why does 01 exist, then?" Smith advanced a step. The rocky floor beneath their feet was uneven, and he stumbled, unaccustomed to blindness; flinging out his left arm, he steadied himself against a knot of extended stone along one corridor wall. "Why the Matrix, or Zion, or programs like me? Why do they keep all those people alive and dreaming? Why does any of this exist, if not to fall?"
Um, you guys probably shouldn't be just standing around arguing, given the situation—
With an ear-splitting bang, something struck the ground somewhere at the other end of the hall, a piece of wall or metal railings, but Aleph did not notice.
"Take that strip of rag off," she ordered. "Look at me!"
No reply. Then, slowly, he let out a low laugh. The madness of the sound was not his own.
"Don't you dare," she panted, "Bane, or whoever you are. Don't you pretend you have anything to say about Smith's purpose. Because you're lying. I know you hate him. Fine. You want to revenge yourself on him, and on me? Go ahead, say it straight. Come out and look at me."
You can hardly blame the guy, Addie, mused her sister. He's dead because your crazy created-to-kill boyfriend here took over his brain, after all.
"Not revenge," whispered the man before her. "Justice."
"Who am I speaking to?" demanded Aleph.
Kind of similar to how I died, come to think of it.
The drumroll of thunder was now barely muffled by the earth, and a rustling shower of dirt and pebbles fell in the hall behind them. The torn scrap of fabric prevented the ex-agent from returning her glower. His left hand was still outstretched and braced against the wall, gripping the rocky protrusion as if in an attempt to support himself. Another crackle, this one right next to them. A smaller shower of dirt and pebbles filtered down through his fingers.
"It's me, Aleph," said Smith at last, very quietly.
Well, you know, said Lucy, getting into one of her rambling moods, facing death is a funny business.
"Good," snapped Aleph, though she was almost doubling over with relief. "Now give me your hand, if you insist on staying blind—"
"This is a space made of thoughts." Smith's jaw clenched. "And you can only leave here by means of your thoughts."
"Both of us must leave." Leaning forward, she clutched at both his shoulders; he did not move. "Don't resist me, if you want me to think our way out of here—"
"Listen carefully, Miss Greene. I don't have much time. You need to think about how you're no longer human. Much less human than I am now. Think about how you saw 01. You said it was beautiful and alive and not in ruins. When you get out of this memory, no one in the city will see you, and it will not, either; it doesn't want to—"
"No, wait," breathed Aleph as inopportune realization hit her. "That's not true. That sentinel outside the gates saw me, remember? Because another program hijacked it. And Sati. She was once from here, wasn't she?"
"There's something that's tearing at me here. Trying to imprison and dominate me. It's Anderson, or maybe the whole accumulation of humanity. I'm so sorry—"
"Don't think about Anderson or anyone else! Think about me! Think about how we tried so hard to get into 01 in the first place, can't you? And don't you see, there must be someone in this city who's gone beyond its purpose. We must find—"
An explosion shattered the human sanctuary around them. Aleph glimpsed a bright flash, deadly steel finally breaking through and crushing the roof. She dropped to her knees as a chasm cracked open almost directly beneath them, and the grip of her hands slipped from Smith's arms, or vice versa. With a speed born of desperation, she reacted, leaping back up to grab at him again, but all she touched was blank air. The ground buckled once more in panic; a cloud of dust enveloped them, obscuring her vision.
"Smith!"
She heard no response from him.
"Smith! Where are you? Answer me!"
The drills screeched. All at once, every lantern and torch crackled, then went out. The illusion of Zion collapsed inward upon itself, and she was left alone in the darkness of an eternal tomb.
.
Notes: Smith's memories of Zion are not his own, but Bane's. In Matrix Revolutions, it is mentioned that while possessing Bane, he cut his own hand and arm.
