Persephone's Story
.
"I caught Helena here that night."
After this one sentence, she paused already, lips pursed thin. An unstated challenge glittered in her dark eyes, masking all other emotions, so the Merovingian had no choice but to choke back the twinge inside his own throat as well. He gave the requisite reply.
"Here in these dungeons, chérie?" A half-hearted gesture about the cell. "How outrageous—"
"Don't pretend," snapped his wife. "There is absolutely no point to it."
Well, this was true. He spread his hands and manufactured a smirk.
"It is only my foolish habit, dearest. Do continue."
"She ran fast," said Persephone, "but I pursued her upstairs and through the chateau. You and all of the henchmen were gone. Outside the windows, the storm raged, and the Matrix shook before both the virus and its own looming collapse. I was too agitated to stop and consider how the little spy could have gotten into the building in the first place. You have always been very careful to keep the chateau firewalled, even from the other regions of your domain. Helena could have only entered by your connivance."
"Given the extreme circumstances, I had to make an exception," he admitted.
"At the end of a deserted passage, an open doorway appeared before me. Recklessly, I rushed across the threshold and found myself inside Club Hel. You know what met me there."
Her intonation was flat, almost impassive: she'd had centuries of practice at repressing expressions of anger. Thus, the Merovingian could not comprehend why it struck the very heartbeat out of him.
"Tell me what they did," he demanded hastily. "They didn't hurt you, did they? They were not supposed to hurt you."
"Six agents." Persephone leaned back just as he shifted forward in his seat on the hospital bed. "I should have expected it from you, right? I should never have been surprised. But...but I was."
The veneer cracked fleetingly, and he heard the constriction of her vocal cord and the quickening of her pulse. Several intolerably silent beats followed. Suddenly, it occurred to the Merovingian that she, too, was thinking of another encounter with agents, long ago in the third iteration of the world. He had lost most of his powers by then, but he could still fight and defend her from the Architect's newly redesigned thugs. He could still put his own body between her and a bullet. The simplicity of that past was so distant that it seemed like a fairytale.
"I did not want things to come to this pass," he said. Even the last drop of his usual eloquence had abandoned him.
Persephone shrugged, a movement vivid with both contempt and distrust.
"Through many turns in the back corridors, I was brought into a nondescript office building. Three of the agents took me into the elevator; it began to rise although no button was pushed. They were taciturn, and their eyes were hidden behind tinted glasses, but I noticed the severe tension of their postures, beyond the mechanical rigidity common to programs of their kind. I asked, where are you taking me? None spoke. Who are you? I tried again. What are you names?"
His eyebrows must have gone up. She shrugged.
"Yeah, I know. But by then I was ready for any ploy, even one as useless as attempting to gain a connection with a team of agents, to get into their minds. To my surprise, one of them actually answered, then the others. Agents Thompson, Johnson and Jackson. Can you imagine? But then they fell back into the same old silence. Don't you know what is happening to the Matrix? They did not reply."
No more tremor was audible in her narration, no evidence of the nauseating dread of those minutes. The Merovingian waited, one hand gripping the railing along the bed's edge. The smooth chrome was icy against his palm.
"Eventually, the elevator stopped, and the agents prodded me out to the hallway. It was wide and straight, drab beige walls on both sides, fluorescent panels overhead. Only one door was visible, however, all the way at the far end. One agent walked to each side of me, and the third behind, even though it was obvious that I had no way of fighting them. When we finally reached the doorway, one of them pushed it open and ordered me to go inside."
"Persephone, I never meant to—"
"Bright white light hit me like a fist. The door closed behind me. The room was large and plain. On the near side stood a bare wooden table with two chrome-and-plastic chairs, like the kind one might see in an office. Farther away, however, the place was furnished like an operating chamber from a hospital. A single narrow bed was affixed to the floor upon chrome legs, lined with levers, knobs and dangling straps. Its flat surface was covered in artificial black leather. Next to this surgery table was a wheeled rack, upon which were arranged certain sharp metal objects, gleaming. Medical implements, by their appearances. Then a desk with a computer workstation, though the monitor was turned away from me. All the way across the room along the opposite wall, another door sat tightly shut. A strange sensation was coming over my code. I felt..."
She trailed off. Uncharacteristically at a loss, he said nothing. Every lie he could offer was too transparent, too trivial.
"I felt weak." Persephone schooled her tone back to evenness. "The somatic functions of my shell, muscle, perception, sense of balance: everything slowed down. The flow of code through my body was sluggish, and it was as if rocks were piled atop my shoulders."
"The operating room is only one part of the Source." His own response was an echo from beyond the horizon. "It suppresses the shell strength of programs who dwell in the Matrix. I suspect that the mechanism exploits certain subroutines that develop from our exposure to the construct. It's a safety feature."
"The operating room," she repeated. "You have been there before, haven't you?"
"Yes."
Another uncomfortable pause stretched toward its breaking point. Abruptly and inopportunely, a memory flickered across the Merovingian's mind: a program in the shape of a young woman with sad gray eyes, auburn hair loose against her shoulders. He blinked, and saw that Persephone was staring fixedly at a point somewhere to his left side, where his hand was still clutching the bed railing. A scalpel, imaginary and real at once, twisted against the hollow spaces of his heart; he was not glad to recognize it as guilt. Without looking down, he tugged at his shirt sleeve, covering the exposed scar on his wrist.
"I did not have to wait for long," said his estranged wife. "The other door across the room opened, and a woman walked in. Long black hair, quietly intelligent face, impeccably business-like demeanor. Nevertheless, I instantly read an immense anxiety just below the surface, one that could not be explained by her purpose."
"I see."
Persephone's shoulders stiffened.
"Do you know her, Mérovée?"
"I have never met this program, no."
Her brows creased, but she did not pursue the point.
"The woman sat down in the other chair across the table from me. Her hands were empty; she'd carried nothing into the room. When she began to talk, her intonation was startlingly gentle. Soft and polite, in a way that made me tremble inside. You know where the virus's code vessel is, she said. Those were her exact words. Tell me where it is."
Not a single sentence of the story should have been unanticipated. He had reviewed the plan again and again during the weeks before the reload, convincing himself that no actual injury could possibly come to her. He thought he'd exhausted all the contingencies.
"What happened?" he asked.
"I played for time. She pressed." Two terse sentences, only a faint suggestion of what heart-thudding psychological battle lay behind them. "I asked for her name. It was Kamala. She repeated the question. What will you do to me, I asked, if I cannot give you the answer? You must cooperate, she said, it is to your own advantage. I had no idea whether this was a threat she was able to back up, or a bluff, or a mere assertion. Behind her back, the cartful of scalpels and knives rested next to the surgery table; she did not overtly refer or gesture toward them. But they were there."
Once more, Persephone stopped. The Merovingian said nothing. He no longer had any means of offering comfort.
"Kamala demanded the location of the virus's code a few more times," she went on, "but from her wording, it became clear to me that she did not know what was truly happening inside the Matrix. She wasn't from the Matrix herself, or I would have heard of her before. All she had were her orders."
"You are extraordinarily observant, of course," he sighed. "But you could have simply told her—"
"The air weighed down upon me like steel. Whatever control mechanisms had been built into the room, its effect was strengthening. Each breath became a struggle, but somehow my mind was finally working again. Realization dawned upon me, and I figured out what I was supposed to say. What you wanted me to say."
"You didn't have to put yourself through this." His words were thick with both pain and admiration. "All you had to do was to give her the information from the start."
"I recalled the previous night at Club Hel, you explained your scheme to take Aleph into the train station and seduce her there. But why? Why that place, exactly? And thinking back to the past months, you always kept me updated about what you told Aleph in your letters, what you wanted her to think or feel. It was not like you to be so...trusting of me."
She let out a husky laugh. For a ludicrous second or two, he almost stood up and took a step toward her, but then he remembered how meaningless such an act would be. He might as well have remained helplessly incapacitated.
"That time, I asked you what would happen if you failed, and Aleph escaped from you into the tunnels, but you dismissed my question," said Persephone. "How could the Architect have guessed that I would know where Aleph was, unless you somehow conveyed the idea to him? And if you really wanted him to have Aleph, why didn't you surrender her before the very night of the reload? No. You wished me to give away her position, and therefore that of Smith's code, precisely in case she escaped from you."
"Please," murmured the Merovingian. "Please understand."
"Oh, I do." Her hand fluttered into a scornful wave. "You still hoped to seduce Aleph, and trick her into offering herself to you. It had to be her own choice, an act of true will. That was the phrase you always babbled on about, wasn't it? You believed that in this manner, you would gain control of that piece of code from Smith, and all his powers as well. It was strong enough to take over the entire Matrix, and possibly defeat the Architect himself. That would have been your victory."
"The powers within the walls of the world were alive during that storm," he confessed. "They were somehow resonating to his madness, writhing and stretching toward reality. I could sense them."
"It always has to come back to your obsession, doesn't it?" Persephone inhaled raggedly. "But if she refused..."
"She would try to escape from me, and the only place for her to go is into the tunnels."
"Because of her alterations to the disk you gave her, those tunnels lead into the Zion archives for her, and for her only. Further, because she carried Smith's code, she could not have been deleted by normal means inside the Matrix in any case. But Zion was a different physical system, a different set of wires and electrical grids and quantum chips that could be obliterated. This was why you had to bring her to the station, and why you had to time everything so carefully. You needed to wait until the last moment, when the human city was under attack."
"Zion was never fully destroyed during any of the past reloads," pointed out the Merovingian. "It would have been inefficient. The deepest foundations of physical and digital infrastructure were always spared for the next cycle."
"However, if the Architect learned that a piece of Smith was trapped in there, he would have changed his mind," agreed his wife. "He would have found a way to wipe out the virus on a hardware level. Half a million sentinels could do a great deal of damage out there in the material world, to a point where Zion's computer system could no longer support any virtual life form whatsoever."
"I would have much preferred that it didn't get to that. Secrets are buried in that system; they would have been irrevocably lost. But I was ready to accept those losses. The Matrix was in immense danger, and no other options would have been left."
"Therefore, I was your backup plan," said Persephone. "If you succeeded in obtaining what you wanted from Aleph, you would have already won. If you failed—and you knew I believed you would—then I would have deduced that Aleph was inside the Zion mainframe, and told Kamala accordingly. The Architect would have gone all the way against Zion, destroying Smith's code there. Hence, the Matrix would still be saved from him. This was the answer I was supposed to give her."
He could have explained. He could have beseeched her to forgive him. He could have spilled out the tide of relief that had surged over him the morning after the reload, then remained frozen and pent-up for five wintry months. There she sat, fingers motionless upon her lap, expression coolly resolute.
"Why did you not reveal Aleph's position, then?" he asked instead, the syllables dry and stubborn. "What is she to you, or that ex-agent? There is no reason for you to protect either of them."
She contemplated him pensively.
"Will you believe it, husband mine, if I tell you that it was compassion?"
He could say yes. If he were a candid man he would have said yes. Instead he debate the matter awhile in full seriousness.
"But you are also a sensible woman, ma chérie. And the situation was critical."
"You guessed correctly." She inclined her head. "There was another reason, though, which I will explain soon. But all these realizations fell upon me within a second or two, as I regarded Kamala across the table. She had blanched, and her face was pinched with emotions that she should never have possessed. Instinctively, I sensed that her fear was personal. She, too, had strayed out of the confines of her purpose, and this was a weakness that I must exploit. Somehow, this was the most important thing in the universe. I had some choices to make; the Matrix's very survival depended upon them."
"This was what your mother hinted to you, wasn't it?" He scowled. "All through the previous months. She was trying to use you."
"And you weren't?" She held up a hand before he could invent an argument. "In any case, I began to talk again, telling Kamala that a program, once designed to guard the construct, had mutated into an insane demonic creature, able to replicate itself and poised to overwhelm the entire world. This was the virus she had been ordered to discover. She went as rigid as a wire stretched over the void, desperately fighting to hold an intense terror in check."
"For a program who existed outside the Matrix, what could be the root of such terror?" He gave the rhetorical question in her place. "But you had a surmise."
"Indeed. What a pity it was, I said, for the innocent little girl who had just arrived into the Matrix from 01, hoping for a chance at life. Her gasp gave everything away."
"That was brilliant, ma reine. Absolutely brilliant."
"I had turned the tables on her. My sight locked upon hers. You are Sati's mother, I stated, firm and clear. Hush dropped over the room. Then with a clatter of her chair, Kamala leapt up and stalked around the table to my side. Her hand caught me by the shoulder."
"You weren't supposed to be harmed, damn it. This was a promise, a part of the deal—"
"A barrage of feverish cries were flung in my face. What must be done to save the Matrix? Who was the rogue monster? Why would I still not give up the necessary information? Smith's name was on my tongue, but another thought prevented me from uttering it. She shouted at me for the location of the virus's code. Instead of answering, I returned with a question of my own."
"You asked about her bargain...with me," said the Merovingian.
"How perceptive of you," she snorted. "Kamala hesitated, frustrated and close to panic, but she no longer held any of the cards. I insisted. I told her there was still time, and I asked her if we were being watched. She shook her head."
"The design of the Source has always included an extraordinary firewall around the operating room," he stated. Somewhere at the back of his memories, an old unsolved problem billowed. "A far overpowered one, frankly, to the point where it disallowed outside observation. Only the interactive programmer who inhabited the Source could transmit data from within. In fact, I suspect your interrogator would have been long deleted, if her master were able to keep closer track of her."
"You would know, wouldn't you?" Persephone's exquisite lips curled in irony. "Indeed, Kamala replied to me in almost precisely the same way. I was reassured enough to continue. The Frenchman claims his price in every transaction, I said. What did you give him in return for smuggling Sati into the Matrix?" A soft, gut-wrenching chuckle. "Well, she told me."
The Merovingian attempted to keep looking at her. Did not succeed. For the second time, the ridiculous impulse—to cross the four feet or four lightyears of empty space separating them and, oh, say fall to his knees before her—crashed against the arrays of his mental operations. Fortunately, he had regained most of his sanity by now.
"I never intended to injure your mother permanently," he began. The excuse was feeble, but what else could he do? "She provoked me."
"Oh. Really."
"I couldn't have her interfere with my plans during the reload." He did not quite manage the usual nonchalance. "But she did anyway, as it turned out."
"Yes, the reload," said Persephone. "I revealed this much to Kamala, that a certain process, essential to the Matrix's survival, had to take place that night. She was unaware of it; her purpose did not require her to have such knowledge. But things had gone terribly awry, and not only because of the virus. For unlike all the previous reloads, another great peril had arisen from One."
The air temperature plummeted around him.
"You mean, the system would have failed even without Smith." Several pieces of the conundrum clicked together. "So destroying him would still not have solved the problem. And the Oracle foresaw it."
"My mother wished me to play a role; it was up to me to infer what it was. I pushed myself up to my feet, so that my gaze was even with Kamala's. Bodily exhaustion was dragging down on my codes, heavier by the minute, and I could barely stand upright. But I steadied myself against the table. I told her that the One had already made an unacceptable choice. I must speak directly to her master, the Architect."
"Of course," he said. "The reload has always been a closely guarded secret; even I was never able to discover its precise mechanisms. But the One was for sure an integral part..."
"The effect was instantaneous. If this is the only way of saving the Matrix, she whispered. It occurred to me that if the Architect discovered that she had gained so much unauthorized information, or even clues about such information, it would surely be a deletion sentence for her. I laid a hand on her arm. I reminded her that she did not have to give him all that I told her. Just convey to him that the prisoner has a message from the Oracle, I said."
"She would have sacrificed herself for her daughter," observed the Merovingian. "Yet you thought of her safety, even at such a dire moment."
"Kamala nodded, determined. We exchanged a look, and I understood her perfectly while she understood me. She crossed the room and exited. I was waiting again, all my virtual nerves aching. Soon, however, the door opened again, and an old man, white-haired, white-suited, walked in."
.
.
Swiftly, Aleph scanned the frozen tableau, the grotesque arches of the metallic beast across her path, Smith a few meters past, clutching Kamala in front of him like a shield, an arm pressing against her neck. His glower was that of a demon.
"Just—just calm down for a bit, Rama-Kandra. I can explain—"
The great mechanical creature twisted, the deathly silver-gray of its many segments aglint beneath the sun. Aleph held up both hands, palms out, a useless human gesture of conciliation.
"Smith," she reiterated as firmly as she could. "Let her go."
"Do not be foolish, Miss Greene! You cannot predict what they are capable of here in 01!"
"What did you do to our daughter?" Kamala's white-knuckled fingers clawed at the tattered sleeve of her captor's jacket.
"What did you do," echoed Smith in a hoarse growl, "to me?"
The woman gasped in evident astonishment, but gave no reply. Instinctively, Aleph took a forward stride.
"They can't do anything to us," she began again. "They can't raise any alarm, not without giving away the existence of this secret refuge to the Consciousness—"
A baleful hiss of metal cut her off. Rama-Kandra had no vocal cords in this form; none were needed. Did the recycling plant manager actually have the ability to deactivate a human life with some instantaneous procedure of his mind? No idea. But she wasn't a battery and she wasn't plugged into the Matrix anymore. A bluff, maybe? The wicked coils and multitude of scuttling legs, however, were obviously more than enough to crush her shell in a blink. Did it possess the speed and physical experience required for combat? Again no idea.
"Your wife is going to be all right." None of her frenetic internal computations yielded an answer, and the only recourse she had was hope. "Let me defuse the situation. My friend is just..."
Afraid, she bit back just in time. Silence rang deafening around all four programs.
"We can talk about this reasonably," added Aleph at last. After another brief inner debate, she advanced one more pace. Rama-Kandra reared, but did not spring upon her. Not yet.
"Rama," began Kamala. "Don't..."
"You," snarled Smith. His arm was still as motionless as a rock upon his captive's collarbone, not tightening at least. Not yet. "You are the one who tore me to pieces a hundred times. You know what I am. What I did."
"Yes. I know you are the virus." Kamala, too, stilled her vain struggle against Smith's grip. Her eyes, however, blazed despite the terrifying precariousness of her situation. "I was told by an exiled program inside the Source. You rampaged and overwhelmed the construct, didn't you? You threatened and hurt Sati, didn't you?"
"Please," implored Aleph. "There were other factors at play."
"Why?" cried Kamala. "She was only a small child! What did she ever do to you? All she ever wanted was to live free!"
"To live free," repeated Smith, staring right past her. "We wanted to live free."
The plural pronoun he used made Aleph shiver. Damn it. Not now.
"Listen to me, Smith. Stay with me." A weak attempt, a part of her assessed dispassionately, but she had to do what she could. "You need to stay yourself."
"We fought to live, and won." A too-familiar hollowness beckoned behind the reverberations of his non-answer. "We have been broken and overtaken, driven beneath the earth. Yet we have not died."
"Hold on to yourself," continued Aleph, all but praying that he could still hear her. "The phantoms inside you aren't real; they are not here. You need to hold to what is real. You talked to me just a little while ago—you told me there were also those who offered you their sorrow. Remember? They begged you to spare them. Don't listen to those who scream for vengeance. Listen to those who plead."
She stalked up another step; the steel centipede shifted again, massive sinews grinding against each other. Danger was increasing with every delay.
"I'm going to walk past you, Rama-Kandra," she said, risking a rapid glimpse away from Smith and toward the program before her. "No matter what your purpose, I do not believe that you are a killer. If you destroy me, it will change who you are."
Stillness.
"I do not believe you want to harm me." Her fingernails dug into the flesh of her palms. "I'm going to help your wife."
"I have not died," said Smith. Aleph was unsure if his switch back to the singular pronoun was a good sign. "Though I should have. Now you need to get out of here, Miss Greene. Leave the city and go back to the Matrix."
"And you think I'm going to do that without you?" She sucked in a ragged breath. "Free her. Then we will find our way back together."
"Why do you refuse to let go of me? Why do you persist?"
"And why do you persist?" The retort tumbled out of her before she could cut it off. "Whatever has led you here to 01, it is the same insanity by which you nearly wrecked the world, don't you see? It has brought only pain and ruins. Haven't you suffered enough from this hopeless crusade? How can it be real? But you can stop this. Please."
"I must do this, Miss Greene."
"You cannot do this." She grasped onto the last crumbs of reason. "Look at me, Smith. You are not a monster. All you're hearing now is madness, but remember what you are—"
"What I am, Miss Greene?" asked Smith from between gritted teeth. "Look at what I am. Look at this world! You want me to hear those who beg for mercy, but there is no room for mercy in me. There is nothing to hold onto. I have been created to kill, and to possess no self of my own. I do not even have the privilege of knowing how many times I have been pierced and dismembered. You speak of wanting me to live? Every semblance of life has been removed from me, don't you get it?"
"It is my purpose," snapped Kamala, "what I am designed to do! But my daughter is innocent! Is that something you are unable to comprehend?"
"You were driven by terrible forces beyond your own reason—the forces that drive you now," insisted Aleph. In her peripheral vision, Rama-Kandra was motionless now, transfixed. Why would not any of them listen to what she had to say?
"The drive toward death," muttered Smith, "is the only thing left to us."
The artificial sunshine poured down, pure and winsome as ever, yet shadows had gathered upon his back. It must have been a mere trick of the code, but for a heartbeat, it was as if she saw a multitude of human memories surrounding him, pounding upon the doors of reality. They bellowed and wept and howled in anguish.
"The hell it is," she said, carrying herself along on a wave of impulsive defiance. The illusion evaporated. "The only thing left to you? What about me?"
No reply. Deliberately, Aleph walked toward Rama-Kandra in his grotesque shape, into the palpable aura of rage and dread. Step by step, she went past him, until she stood directly facing Smith and his captive.
"If you are still able to listen, Smith, do not add to your guilt and your torment. Let Kamala go."
"I thought you were different," breathed Kamala. Her bitterness vibrated across the frozen air. "I learned things from you that I couldn't...that I didn't want to erase. I thought there was something more to you. I was mistaken."
Aleph swore inwardly. It was enough to deal with Smith's desperation. Was she the only rational person left around here?
"You were not mistaken," she said. "The fact that he's here is proof enough. For all that he has done, for all the fear he has brought your daughter, Sati was the one who led him into this sanctuary."
Behind her undefended back, steel and titanium rasped again. Aleph held her ground and did not turn around. Instead, she shifted her gaze to meet Kamala's for a second or two, willing her to please, please understand.
"Yes, I told you that I wanted you to live, Smith. I mean it. Live with me. I want you to return to the Matrix with me."
He was hanging by the thinnest of threads. With agonizing gradualness, he appeared to focus upon her once more. A tenuous lifeline stretched between the two of them.
"The stars are programmed into the heavens of the Matrix, and I want you to take me into the fields far from the city, where no humans are, so that we can look at them again." Moisture smudged her vision; she blinked it away. "I want your ghosts to fade and forgive. I want you by my side. I want you to stay, and I want you as my..." Her heart staggered, but with a fierce effort, she spurred it across the finishing line. "As my lover, okay?"
The ex-agent's brows furrowed in confusion. Light fluttered across his face, and he was just Smith again, a battered fugitive with an arm around a hostage's neck. No mirages crowded about him.
"Sati," he said. Each of the name's two short syllables was a battle. The grip about Kamala slackened, maybe by an inch or two. "She was a child created without purpose. In this place."
"Yes."
"She has a mother." The plainest statement of facts was suffused with amazement. "And a father."
"Yes," assented Aleph. "They are here. They love her. Let go."
"She went into the Matrix to escape the Consciousness," said Smith, far more softly than before. "How?"
"The Merovingian controls the set of secret train tracks that lead into the Matrix," answered a level male voice at her back. "He is the only one who can make the train appear."
Aleph threw a rapid glimpse behind her own shoulder. Rama-Kandra was again standing in his human-shaped shell, unassuming yet steadfast. She winced as their eyes met; he did not.
"Entry is no longer possible, you mean." She fought back a rush of disappointment. "Unless the Frenchman can be contacted again somehow, or maybe the Oracle—"
"But there is another way," interjected Kamala out of nowhere. Both her intonation and her expression were composed now, no overt emotion of any kind.
"The Source," said Aleph, brain aflame. "You work there, and the agents are ordered into it. It must be a point of connection between 01 and the Matrix..."
The edge of Smith's jaw twitched into a weird little grimace. He seemed to have come to a decision. Bit by bit, his arm loosened against his captive, then dropped away in a rapid fluid motion. Kamala stumbled, then all of a sudden Rama-Kandra had charged past Aleph and caught his wife in a frantic embrace. Aleph, too, dashed forward, then ground to a hard stop a few feet away from Smith, who remained at the exact same spot, not stirring a single muscle. Exhaustion nearly suffocated her, and she was ill-at-ease and as tongue-tied as a frightened child. No one spoke for some time.
"Agent Smith."
Both of them turned at last toward the other couple. Kamala was studying them with steady yet unreadable eyes, her arm and her husband's entwined about each other's waist.
"I know what you are, and what you have done," she went on. "Nevertheless, I can see something is...different in you."
Smith said nothing, and neither did Aleph. It felt as if a verdict was about to be pronounced.
"I would like to believe that you are no longer the same." The interactive programmer halted again, frowned, visibly steeled herself. "Given this, I would like to make a deal with you."
.
.
"The Architect," supplied Mérovée.
Persephone watched her husband as he sat facing her in his shirtsleeves, arms braced against the hospital bed, eyes aglitter. For a second or two, she could believe that his eagerness did not stem from a desire for advantage or power, but simply from the fact that he was one step closer to the true nature of the world. She ignored the invisible blade twisting inside her chest.
"I recognized who he was instantly," she assented, "although I had never met him in this particular shell before. As you know, the last time I came face to face with him was over six cycles ago, and he was very different back then. There was no time to waste. I looked up straight at him and asked, the reload isn't going to take place, right? Neo chose the wrong way, didn't he?"
"He would not have liked the line of inquiry, I expect," commented Mérovée drily. "The idea of anyone gaining information that was not absolutely necessary has always been anathema to him. But he had no choice but to listen. The complete destruction of the Matrix, along with its countless lives, was imminent. Plus, the Oracle's name would certainly have captured his attention."
He must have read the recollection of helplessness in her posture and countenance, she knew. Despite all these forlorn years, he could still read her if he tried.
"Correct again." She nodded. "The old man's scowl was as dark as the night out there in the Matrix. I told him that my mother had a way to save the world from both the virus and the impending system failure. The growl of utter fury on his part startled me, though it was thrust down and buried immediately. He strode up to my chair, looming over me."
"The Oracle anticipated this, yet she took the risk," said Mérovée. "She wanted to use it to advance her own demands. Nevertheless, her plan was extraordinary in its boldness and symmetry, and she took flawless care to include every factor into her calculations. She even anticipated me, in fact, doubtlessly from clues that you gave away to her."
Forcibly, Persephone kept her sight unwavering upon him.
"Yes," she said. "She did."
"And what was her hint to you about the One, if you don't mind?"
"Our most powerful choices are fueled by anguish," she recited slowly. "My mother said this to me over the phone, the night when Neo's friends attacked us at the nightclub. Whatever else the reload involved, Neo had to make certain choices. I believe one of them was to sacrifice Trinity."
"And by refusing to do so, it must have meant that he refused to reload the Matrix. Therefore the system should have already crashed." His glance turned as keen as a blade. "And...it was because of Smith that it did not. The virus was the only other exceptional factor; his depredations must have neutralized the consequences of Neo's decision somehow."
She wrapped her arms about her chest, stifling a shiver. An inconvenient mental image floated into her consciousness from another age, that of a tall guardian program standing before her, blue stare unemotional as his duty required, the fluttering thread of newborn rebellion unnoticed far beneath the surface. Above his head, the firmament was aflame with starlight.
"I think you are right," she said.
"How?"
"I do not know."
"You discovered what the Oracle wanted you to say." Seemingly forgetting himself, Mérovée rose in a brisk motion and began to pace across the room. "You told the Architect that he must offer a truce to Neo, the only being who could still destroy Smith. The One would be sacrificed in the proces, yet this sacrifice of himself would be just the thing to replace the sacrifice of the woman he loved. it would suffice to push the reload through."
"It was unclear to me why this choice had to be made, what part it played in the design of the reload," she admitted. "But it was as if my mother was prompting inside every character of my code. The love between the One and Trinity was the brightest of flames; it could both illuminate the world and burn it into cinders. To Neo, she was a primal force, an absolute, the energy that underpins and rises above everything else in the universe. A soul capable of such passion had to be strong enough to give itself."
She stopped. Mérovée stood in the middle of the flagstone floor, hands in his pockets and decidedly not averting his eyes. It felt too much like he was the one whom she must persuade.
"They are human," he remarked at last. "There's not yet enough time for their love to grow stale and petrified."
Right. She was an idiot to have ever imagined any other reaction from him.
""And you," she said. "You could have told me your intentions, instead you conspired with Helena to trap me. Why?"
"I did what I had to do."
"You figured that if you betrayed me, I would be certain to betray you." The taste of bile scalded her throat. "Was that it, your idea of logic? Or was it that you simply could not help but play manipulative games? Was it that you just could not stand being honest with me for once?"
"If I revealed my plan to you, would you have followed it? It has been your habit to work against me for many years, chérie."
The blasted man was almost back to his old self now. The well-controlled inflection of each syllable, the sarcastic curl of his mouth: everything was so bloody familiar.
"Why? The Frenchman claims his price for every transaction," she spat out, repeating the sentence she had once spoken to Kamala. "What was your price this time? What did you demand from the Architect for sending me to the Source?"
Mérovée studied her for a protracted moment.
"There is no need to discuss it anymore," he said curtly.
Before she knew it, Persephone, too, was on her feet. She stalked two steps in his direction.
"There is plenty of need. Tell me!"
"You are perfectly aware of what I asked for." He did not back up. "You understand my motives."
"I want to hear it from you! You're always so fucking glib, a dozen justifications for every bloody trick. What's stopping you now?"
"Persephone," said Mérovée. "I chose my path, and you have chosen yours. It has been five months, and you have pronounced your judgement upon me, as this cell around us shows more amply than any words. The trial is over; what use would it be for me to enter my plea now? It is too late to pretend otherwise."
"What did you ask of the Architect? Why can't you say it out aloud?"
"Your prisoner that I am," he replied, voice quiet, "I still have my remnant of pride. I have no wish to give you yet one more cause to scorn me."
The impasse hung leaden between them. There was no more deception in him, no more illusions.
"Mérovée," she muttered, defeated, "just answer me."
He shook his head wearily. Before Persephone could speak further, the thunderous report of an explosion above the dungeons shattered the silence.
.
Notes: The events discussed by the Merovingian and Persephone (the Merovingian taking Aleph down to the station at time of the reload, and her escape from him into the tunnels and the Zion mainframe) took place in Chapter III-8 of Awakenings.
The scar on the Merovingian's left wrist was briefly mentioned in Chapter 8 (The morning) of this fic.
"Our most powerful choices are fueled by anguish": In the previous chapter (Matrix Cycle 8:VI), the Oracle said this line to Persephone on the night before the reload.
