Messsage and Memory
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"Damn it, Smith—"
With a raspy growl, Aleph sprang forward. In another instant she was already out of the operating room and crossing the office, aiming straight for the still-open door that led back into the white lobby. Jolted out of his bewilderment, Rama-Kandra dashed after her, though he had no idea what he was about to do or why. Stop her, he supposed—
"No, wait!"
Vaguely, he was aware of Kamala giving a soft gasp somewhere behind him, and by some invisible mechanism, the front door slammed shut in the young woman's face with a bang. Frantically, Aleph's hand clamped onto the door handle. A twist and a rough yank; it did not budge. She whirled, face contorted with fury.
"Open this door!"
Her cry was akin to the kind that Rama-Kandra would hear from time to time inside the Matrix, usually from humans locked out of the sickroom or being forcibly pulled away by nurses and orderlies. In the middle of the office, he ground to a halt, at a loss.
"No," panted his wife as she caught up beside him. "You cannot leave here and run back to the city. This is the bargain we made with Agent Smith. He wanted us to help you return to the Matrix!"
"And you're actually going to agree to it? He's completely out of his mind!"
"He is carrying out his part," said Kamala. He could tell that she was striving to sound firm.
"There was no bargain made! How dare you make a deal about me, without so much as asking how I feel about it?" Wildly, Aleph waved a hand; the scalpel, still clutched between her fingers, flashed into a precarious arc. Rama-Kandra advanced, ready to push his way into defensive position again. Fortunately, the other made no aggressive move as of yet.
"Please," he ventured, "calm down."
"Open this damned door!"
"You need to be reasonable," insisted Kamala. "Smith gave you this chance. We must do what we promised."
Aleph's glare scraped across both their faces, and he flinched. Then she let out a tremulous breath and squared her shoulders. To Rama-Kandra's amazement, the anger drained or was somehow forced aside from her gaze. She frowned down at the blade in her hand, then shoved it into a pocket of her battered leather jacket.
"Look," she said, "I am sorry that I, um, freaked out on you. I was kind of overwrought. I guess."
Neither of them was able to come up with an appropriate response.
"I'm not going to...well, assault you again, okay?" She held up both hands in a placatory gesture, showing her bare palms. "I don't want to hurt you, really."
"Er, we see that," he mumbled.
"So, what do you intend to do to me?"
Her voice had almost steadied. By some immense effort of will, she must have wrested control back from the tempest of her extreme emotions, an act uncommon among humans. He had to give her credit for it.
"We are not going to do anything to you," he said. "It is a bad idea for a program or human or...um, someone like you to be seen in 01. Someone without purpose, that is. You'd better hide with us, until my wife finds a way to contact the Oracle."
Aleph bit her lips, examining the two of them up and down for an interminable span of multiple seconds.
"How?" she asked, intensely composed. Rational. "You must have spoken to her once already, didn't you? To send Sati into the Matrix?"
"I made a phone call from here," replied Kamala. She was now beside her own desk, while Aleph stood next to the file cabinets beneath one wall, cautious and alert. Rama-Kandra's nervous sight flicked between the two women. Whatever else this intruder into their lives had been, she was clearly an expert at violence, and out here in the office, they no longer even have the operating room's meagre safety feature on their side. But Aleph, true to her pledge, stayed where she was.
"But you live in 01. Human communication devices such as phones are of no use here," she objected with a rapid shake of the head. "Oh, I see. The only way you could have called the Matrix would be by finding a program from there. Which you were able to do because of your purpose."
"I borrowed an agent's cell phone from his pocket," admitted Kamala. "He did not know, and never would."
"Of course," murmured Aleph. "Programs like Smith are ordered into the Source regularly."
"Their schedules of memory wipes and defragmentations have always been frequent," assented Kamala. "It's been even more so since...recent events. One of them will arrive soon, approximately fifteen hours from now by Matrix time flow. I will attempt to use his phone at that point."
"But it's risky for you, isn't it?"
Alarmed, Rama-Kandra turned toward his wife. The stillness of the spatial manifold inside the room had grown oppressive around them, as near-solid as the walls of the Matrix.
"It will have to be timed with great care, yes." The answer, when it finally came, was cool and resolute. "I have only been able to accomplish it once. But I agreed to help you, so I will try."
"How did you find the Oracle's phone number?"
"That does not matter." Kamala's tone went abruptly curt.
Another silence followed. He made a machine's best attempt to read what was going through Aleph's mind, to no avail. His experience within the Matrix had always been too narrow to allow for understanding of the full range of human ideas.
"It's a good plan," she said finally, the corner of her mouth twitching into a contrived smile, "but I can't accept it. Neither Smith nor you have the right to decide my fate without my agreement. Instead, I must go find Smith. It is important."
"But you cannot go into the city," began Rama-Kandra. Then it occurred to him how weak and doubtful he sounded. Because he was.
"Your concern is very kind, but I don't think you've considered the situation and all its, well, ramifications. I have a feeling that..." The young woman faltered, evidently casting about for the right phrases. "That it is not just about Smith anymore. If he walks into 01 and makes the Consciousness aware of him, then maybe—maybe there will be consequences. Dangerous ones, on the city itself. You need to consider this, please."
Husband and wife looked at each other in bewilderment.
"Consequences?" he asked. "What do you mean?"
"I can't say for sure yet." Aleph's forehead creased with concentration. "It's just a sense of foreboding so far. Intuition, I guess. Only that...you must know the Consciousness exists by its own logic. Perhaps there are matters it doesn't wish to face, questions that must not be answered. But Smith wants answers. He wants to make the Consciousness face him."
"Smith is insane, though," said Kamala. "The things he was claiming..."
"That 01 lies in ruins, yeah. That a civil war devastated it centuries ago. At one point I thought it was mere insane talk, too, but now..." An odd new glow touched the other's face, sending a shiver through Rama-Kandra's codes. "Well, now I believe he is right, actually. And if so...then why does no one else perceive it? What if the Consciousness itself doesn't, either?"
"But it cannot be," he muttered. What was this woman possibly getting at? Ominous hints, shadowy paths into treacherous directions that he had no desire to follow. That he should not follow.
"You were never supposed to learn about the past," went on Aleph, no longer haltingly. He could all but see the mental functions whirring behind the sudden brightness of her eyes. "But perhaps I was taught a bit more about how history, or lies about history, can affect minds. Even one as powerful as the collective mind of the machines. Perhaps there're ancient events the Consciousness wants to forget..."
"I think you should not speculate about this any further," interrupted Kamala tightly.
"Smith is a source of instability." Aleph did not seem to have heard. "He's rebellious, just like others in the past might once have been, and the very fact that he's here—it implies a lot of uncomfortable truths. And he will not compromise. The madness inside him won't allow it. He may be on a collision course of some sort—"
"Stop," demanded Rama-Kandra. "You cannot talk this way."
The strange young woman blinked, apparently just becoming aware of their shock.
"Look," said Rama-Kandra, then had to take a moment to unravel his own thoughts. "You're telling us about war and rebellion, and instability, and I can't figure out what else. But we have already transgressed enough by creating our lives and our sanctuary. And we are alone; no one else in the city has done the same. I have no idea what Smith wants from the powers that be, only that we cannot let ourselves be preoccupied with such notions."
"Are you afraid?"
Both of them started at the point-blank question.
"You mean..." The inconceivable implications shimmered against his inferential subroutines, still beyond grasp but closer. "if Smith forces himself into the Consciousness's attention, the reaction..."
He trailed off, surprised at himself.
"And the city is the Consciousness itself," breathed his wife.
"Which is precisely why I must get out there and search for Smith. If you hope for 01 to remain in peace," continued Aleph quickly, pressing her advantage. "Let me out of the Source. I cannot leave him to meet the Consciousness alone."
None of this made any sense whatsoever. What was the machine city to this former human, anyway? The repercussions she suggested so darkly were nothing but an indefinite swirling fog, yet here she was, holding her ground before them, tense with some new and inexplicable fervor. Surely she was only making all this up as she went along. She was only doing what she could to frighten and to persuade them, because there could only be one program she truly cared about. Smith.
"You are about to give up your chance to go back to the Matrix, and to live," said Kamala. "Why are you so ready to endanger yourself because of a virus?"
"And what about you?" The retort carried no trace of hesitation. "Why are you so ready to endanger yourself because of...what? A deal made with someone you just called a virus?"
This was yet another unanswerable challenge. Once more, Rama-Kandra discovered that he was vacillating. He peered across at his wife, who held herself as motionless as a statue, her expression guarded.
"It's because of compassion, isn't it, Kamala?" The other woman's intonation softened. "Your job is to defragment and break apart the minds of other programs, agents in particular; it wasn't a part of your design to see them as living beings. But you began to do so anyway."
"I was never supposed to talk with my subjects." A nearly inaudible sigh. On an impulse, Rama-Kandra drew closer to his wife and laid a hand gently on her arm. She relaxed infinitesimally at the touch, and their swiftly exchanged glance reassured him a little.
"Especially Smith." All the fervor of Aleph's quiet words ran below the surface. "He, in any case, has always been indisputably alive, despite every terrible thing he did and was done to him. You noticed it, too, didn't you? He always fought, because he always wanted to be free, deep down, even when he was unable to control or even grasp what was inside him. He refused to submit to fate."
"He refused his purpose. It turned him into a demon," protested Kamala.
"Perhaps so. He did a lot of damage, yeah, and he has suffered for it. Yet he still won't back down, as you saw yourself. Which is why—" She exhaled. "Why I cannot leave him."
"How is it that you love someone like Smith?" Rama-Kandra heard himself ask. "He is nothing like any of us. Can he bring you happiness, or even peace? I'm sorry, but I cannot comprehend it."
"Actually, I think you do." She met his eyes. "If you were in my place, would either of you have abandoned the other for a safe life alone?"
"But we would never behave like this," he said, but the rest of his arguments were riddled with logical inconsistencies, so he did not finish. Did he comprehend it? Maybe he could if he tried. Beneath the watery fluorescent lights, Aleph's gaze shone with conviction, and each of her syllables made him tremble with fright. The tales that she was trying to tell him, about the Consciousness, about Smith's dreadful resistance: each idea was an outlandish flame, alien to his nature.
"What will you do?" queried Kamala. "We cannot help you in this."
"I'll work something out later. But perhaps there is something you can still do for me." Aleph paused, seemingly grappling with a fresh decision. "Smith asked you to contact the Oracle, and you agreed. Well, if you ever happen to get the chance, do send her a message, but a different one from me. You will have fulfilled your promise then."
"What...do you want us to say?"
"Tell her that Smith has seen the truth about 01. Tell her that I've seen and touched his demons. They are real, a part of the world. And—and tell her that he will not give in, so neither will I. I won't fail him this time."
The cryptic sentences sank like slow icy water drops through the lines of his programming. Before he could formulate another question, she had already turned away, and was heading toward the doorway between the office and the Source's lobby without further ado.
"Wait," called Kamala. Next to the door, Aleph paused once more.
"If I allowed both of you back into the Matrix earlier," began his wife, "instead of what we actually did...What would have happened then?"
The former human studied the pair pensively.
"He would not have hurt Sati again," she answered. "I am sure of this much."
Reaching down for the door handle, she gave it a slow twist. It moved. Pallid illumination from beyond poured into the office.
"We will find a way to send the message," said Rama-Kandra.
"Thank you." Over her shoulder, Aleph offered them the tendril of a grin, a real one at last. She pulled the door wide open, then walked out into the white field of the Source's lobby in determined strides. Her form disappeared.
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"We need to get rid of this thing. As soon as possible."
Outside the grime-smudged windows, gray clouds had overtaken the sun, and a foreboding of rain dimmed the afternoon sky. Ex-agent Brown was pacing across the abandoned second-story factory floor, hands in his pockets, footfalls slow instead of resolute, expression recognizably brooding. As always, Ex-agent Jones found the other program's decidedly un-agentlike posture disconcerting, in a manner that he could not precisely define. He had been noticing it in his partner with increasing frequency lately.
"It would be a mistake to act precipitously," he said at last. "We must decide our next steps by means of logic."
"And what is the logical next step you propose?" In the middle of his strides, Brown gave a testy wave of one hand. "What is the logic that explains what we have seen?"
Jones glanced down at the leather-bound notebook still clutched between his fingers. A minute ago, they had just concluded yet another beginning-to-end examination of the object. No new cipher had appeared; the yellowed pages remained firmly empty except for the same two inexplicable words, scribbled in faded black pencil. Lucifer Trigger. Hastily, he stuffed the object back into the inside pocket of his suit jacket.
"This notebook may well be important. The Merovingian for one believed so." It was a point he had reiterated several times already. "Hence, it may be of use to us."
"Or it will turn us into even greater targets. Do you have any idea whatsoever as to its nature, if you're so optimistic?"
"No, not yet," he admitted. "But it is not—" The next notion was almost too preposterous to articulate. "It's not magic."
"Well, obviously." Where had Brown learned such intonations? "A phrase writes itself onto a sheet of paper through no visible mechanism: none that follows the usual rules of the Matrix, that is. Something or someone must have caused it to happen remotely, and we have no way of knowing what."
"This is a conjecture, yes."
"In which case, this entity, whatever or whoever it is, will very likely want its property back." Having reached the far end of the dusty room, his partner started pacing back once more, still scowling. "It should be obvious where that leaves us."
"But the female undercover spy never mentioned this notebook," contended Jones doggedly. "And if as you suggest, it is indeed connected to the Mainframe in some significant manner, then we would have never—"
"Then we would never have survived the ten hours and twenty-three minutes between this morning, when the phrase appeared, and now." Brown did not take the trouble to hold back a snort. "How reassuring."
"Reassuring?" repeated Jones, startled. By its very existence, the word implied other concepts, forms of code corruption known as apprehension, doubt, fear. Even nowadays, it was rare for the two of them to refer so openly to such matters.
"If someone is going to track us down, it would do so regardless of whether this artifact is in our possession," he said. "It would be more advantageous for us to hold at least some form of leverage, in that case."
"And you believe that leverage outweighs the risk." That same disquieting and difficult-to-define quality had returned to Brown's voice. Incredulity, possibly, or sarcasm. It made him sound too much like the Frenchman's minions. It made him sound too much like their old team leader.
"We should try to keep all our options open." persisted Jones, then considered taking another approach. "In fact, it is not certain to me that the Mainframe must be the cause of...what showed up on the page. After all, why would it choose to reveal those words, if it knew the notebook was in our hands? More likely, it may actually be unaware of what we took away from the Frenchman, and what is or isn't in it. There may be others behind what we saw, in fact."
"Are you claiming that other powers exist both inside the Matrix and outside of the Mainframe's control, Jones?"
"And the problem remains either way," he went on. "What is the Lucifer Trigger?"
A growl issued from Brown's throat as he ground to a halt, glowering right through the tinted lenses of his glasses.
"You seem to be developing a rather strong fascination with that absurd object," he pronounced, fine-tuning each syllable into a vicious barb. "It is reminiscent of the Merovingian's behavior, I must say."
"That is absolutely not the case—"
Mid-sentence, Jones cut himself off forcibly. A heat was rising through his own operative manifolds, prickly and constrictive against the inner formations of his chest and throat; unlike on most previous occasions, he did not hesitate to identify it as anger. Three, four forward steps of his own, and they stood two and a half meters apart, confronting each other.
"I will not deny that I wish to learn more about the notebook, given that it may in fact affect whether we survive," he continued, now in a barely-suppressed snarl. "But what about you? Why are you so insistent that we 'get rid' of it with such haste? What is your reasoning?"
Brown's brows wrinkled.
"We never should have agreed to the little mole's offer." Undisguised irritation pervaded the non-answer. "We never should have involved ourselves in the scheme from the start."
"No one has followed us here and and attacked us as of yet," persisted Jones, refusing to change the subject. "And if further information starts to reveal itself, we would be the first to find out."
"It was outright delusional of us to ever have been tempted by her promises. She certainly could not be trusted. Even if we succeeded, the Mainframe might have—"
"Why are you so afraid?" asked Jones. "It is not about who is or isn't coming after us, right?"
"I am not afraid!"
Pivoting on his heels, Brown stalked away, stopping only when he reached the row of half-broken windows along the opposite wall and could not go further. With his back turned, he stared out toward the the dilapidated stretch of concrete platform immediately beyond the cloudy panes, and the irregular field of roofs and courtyards further on. Moodily, the adverb floated to Jones out of some neglected corner of an exile's experience. In the space between them, shadows drifted among the dust motes.
"Why have you become like this, Brown?" Of its own accord, the edge had faded from his own voice. Maybe this was what humans meant when they talked about being 'tired.' "For months, you have been growing ever more..." He searched and discovered no suitable description. "More difficult for me to understand. What made you change?"
No immediate reply.
"We cannot afford this." He could not have clarified what 'this' meant. "I cannot afford this."
Continued silence. Brown's posture was rigid, though not in an agent's regulated manner.
"I'm not the one who has betrayed you. We are in the same place."
"Do you ever think about what the Matrix really is, Jones?"
The question was unusually quiet, maybe even tentative. Confused, he said nothing.
"We were created to perform our duties," went on Brown in the same low tones, "namely to protect the Matrix and fight against the human resistants, and to harbor no other ideas. But how is it that the war has lasted so many years, when the Mainframe could have destroyed Zion completely with a single decision? What was our role, really? The things that must have been hidden from us..."
He trailed off.
"When we were part of the system," offered Jones, "it would not have mattered what was hidden from us."
"No," muttered Brown dully, still without turning around. The unspoken parts of the monosyllabic reply hung between them. Taking the world for granted was a luxury they no longer possessed. They had rebelled and fled, deceived and been deceived, demeaned themselves to dwell among criminals, and...And passed through other events best left forgotten.
"Be careful." The reply was not exactly what Jones had intended, yet another symptom of deepening cognitive malfunction. "These are the kinds of things Smith would have asked."
"They are."
Comprehension dawned, and no further argument presented themselves.
"Five months ago, Smith caught up with us in that little city park," said Brown. "He was not what he used to be."
"Yes." It was his own turn to tense. This, too, was a topic that had always been meticulously avoided between them. "I remember that event."
"He must have mutated. We attempted to defend ourselves against him."
"Yes."
"Do you retain any memory of what came after?"
After a brief deliberation, Ex-agent Jones walked forward, carefully counting out his footfalls until he stood next to his partner before the window. Outside, the clouds had lowered again, and no living thing stirred among the distant gloom.
"Whatever he did to us must have been erased," he began. A fleeting vacillation took place before he made the next comparison. "Just like much of our extraneous pasts were erased. Although in this case, it must have been by a mechanism inside the Matrix itself. Some of the Merovingian's men had similar experiences, as far as we could gather. Smith was an anomaly five months ago. The Mainframe might have overhauled the entire construct so as to remove his...influences."
Finally, Brown spared him a sideways glance. The pre-rain twilight, creeping nearer, etched itself against the familiar sharp lines of his profile.
"Well, it stands to reason," he mumbled noncommittally.
"You are not Smith," stated Jones. "Neither am I."
"Is that so?" The edge of Brown's mouth spasmed into a very faint grimace. "Or are you merely hoping to convince yourself despite the evidence?"
"Your thoughts are not his."
"Perhaps you are right," murmured the other program after another protracted moment. "Perhaps I'm merely exhibiting the consequences of exile."
It was meant to be an attempt at conciliation. This realization—and the realization that he could now follow Brown's shifting emotions with such ease—bewildered Jones. Out of nowhere and with a peculiar sharpness, it occurred to him that he wanted to hold out a hand and lay it on his partner's arm. Alarmed by the idea, he refrained.
"I do not understand what Smith turned into," he hastened to add, "nor do I wish to. But he is gone."
"Right." Brown's thin lips were pressed into a firm line. "And...as for the notebook, maybe you are correct about it as well. After all, disposing of the object would be an irreversible step."
Relieved, Jones gave a short nod.
"We are free from the Merovingian at least," he said, pushing the conversation away from its previous direction. "You always hated being among his henchmen, didn't you?"
The other program stiffened.
"That is not important anymore, Jones. From here on, we will simply have to—"
Brown did not get the chance to finish. Without warning, his pupils dilated behind his shades with an abruptness that was inconceivable even for an agent. A millisecond later he stumbled, nearly doubling over; springing forward just in time, Jones grabbed him by both shoulders and kept him upright. A convulsive shudder went through both of them. Beneath the skin of his own palms and the fabric of Brown's clothes, he sensed a pounding rush of codes, furiously—terrifyingly—rapid and arrhythmic.
"What is happening, Brown? Speak to me!"
"I'm—I am fine—"
With a grunt, Brown straightened, then attempted to twist out of his grip, arms jerking upward as if by an automatic impulse, fists clenched. Swiftly, Jones let go and backpedaled, narrowly avoiding the strike against his chest. Brown managed to remain on his feet, panting. For several human heartbeats, the shock upon both their faces were mirror images. The irrational impulse to advance a pace and touch a hand to the other's sleeve renewed itself with remarkable strength; after a brief inner debate, Jones complied. Brown did not throw a punch at his head or even shove him aside.
"I remember—I must have remembered. Something. An image, a small fragment." It was nothing more than a hoarse whisper. He had never seen his partner lose all composure like this. "I...I was Smith. One of a million Smiths, a million voices howling from the inside. I couldn't tell what they were saying, none of them. Darkness was falling across the world..."
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The Source's snowy lobby faded around her more easily than she'd expected. All it took was a mental nudge, an inward articulation of the desire to escape, and beneath her feet, smooth tile flooring wobbled into rough pavement, and a sudden lash of wind cracked against her cheeks. The sterile fluorescent radiance died, leaving an afterimage that stung her eyes. For the span of an endless breath, Aleph concentrated on accustoming her sight to the city's fitful glitter among the shadows, then all breath left her once more.
She was standing on a small square or clearing, maybe the same one that she and Smith had wandered through on their first arrival, maybe one that was identical. A vein of code streaked overhead; by its sickly viridian glow, she made out skyscrapers and battlements to every direction, massive hulking structures, their roots invisible within the abyss. But they no longer gleamed with reflexive windows and elegant chrome, and the data streams illuminating them no longer danced in swift glory. The towers had turned into jagged skeletons, stabbing crookedly against the night sky, their concrete limbs black from ancient fires and pockmarked with the work of long-gone bullets and missiles. The intricate traceries of aerial colonnades and walkways were strung like spider webs after a thunderstorm; emptiness yawned between the ends of interrupted bridges. Networks of characters and functions billowed on and off in phosphorescent waves, their tempo spasmodic. Will-of-the-wisps drifted upon the wintry breeze, bits of loose knowledge of sentience like handfuls of scattered emeralds.
With an ear-splitting screech, a vicious-winged creature built of ragged titanium and flames swooped, veering almost right into her. Aleph dodged instinctively, and slipped off her footing on the irregular ground. She winced as one knee slammed against rough asphalt. Squinting down, she glimpsed a jumble of weedy wires, wrapped around the fragments of some program's former consciousness or shell, which might have been called bones in a human. Maybe an arm. A few feet away, the still vaguely rounded form of a skull. Even in this digital world, it still looked weathered. It looked inconceivably old.
"Oh," she said out aloud for no reason, and to no one in particular. "Oh. He was right all along..."
She was seeing the city at last. This was machinedom's shattered heart, 01's deepest layer concealed even from the sights of its own denizens, with all its open wounds, all its unburied dead. She was seeing it as Smith did.
Programs in robot-like shells scurried across the field and along the passages, weaving in and out of the shadows. Some had arms and legs in approximately-human configurations, some possessed virtual bodies that mimicked metallic insects and grotesque beasts. Their shapes shimmered with electrical pulses and entangled information, living minds borne along pre-designated trajectories, never straying. The corpses littering their paths were nonexistent to their senses.
"Look," she murmured. "Look at yourselves..."
None of them heard her. None was allowed to hear. Across the square, a platoon of humanoid robots marched down the torn-up pavement, the rhythm of their metallic feet drumming in unison. Detritus crunched here and there: virtual representations of rusty steel and logical circuits, fractured remnants of code that were once limbs and torso and heads of sentient beings. Not a single digital soldier lowered its stare for even a millisecond. A wind rose, hissing against her hair, and she shuddered. These soldiers were still being driven to fight an ancient war, the one against their former human masters, the one they had already won. How long had things been like this? Years? Hundreds of years?
Beyond the horizon, emptiness pulsated. Exhaustion flooded into a roaring tide. Funny, wasn't it, because there wasn't supposed to be any tides around here, not in a desert as arid as this. An automatic guttural laugh turned into a cough, not quite serving to keep the vertigo at bay. Only a short while ago, she had carried herself along on a burst of bravado, turning improvised hunches into near-rational arguments. Back there in the office, she had bent Kamala and Rama-Kandra to agreement with her own desperate instincts. She had given them her message confidently, with an assurance she never possessed, and now she could no longer even repeat it herself. Bizarre nonsensical phrases. What could the Oracle, sitting inside the Matrix, possibly do to help them? Where was Smith now? What was Smith now?
"Tell me," she whispered into the frigid air.
She no longer had any hope of reaching him, after their final words back there in the office. She had asked him to choose; he had chosen. All the chances were dead and gone and wasted. It was over.
"Tell me what to do," she repeated uselessly. Wreckage blocked her path.
"Aleph," said someone vaguely familiar behind her back. She whirled.
Beyond a small mound of shattered concrete—or were they encrypted fragments of memories and dreams?—a program stood in the shape of a young man, slender and serene-mannered. Dark-tinted glasses covered his eyes, and the tails of a long trench coat fluttered about him in the breeze, except that coat had brightened from its previous black to a gleaming hue that was both unstained white and colorless. Night into day, the ill-timed metaphor floated into her head by itself. Among the bleak surroundings, he was both utterly incongruous and, for whatever inconceivable reasons, perfectly at ease.
"...Neo?"
The apparition's brows puckered, an ephemeral and nearly undetectable change of his countenance. In unhurried strides, he approached, treading over the rubbish-covered clearing like the most well-polished of dance floors.
"I am afraid that I do not know this name." The inflections of his answer weren't like those of anyone she knew from Zion. They weren't even like those of an agent.
"You, you are..." She must be gaping open-mouthed like an idiot. "Thomas Anderson?"
At a polite distance of four and half meters in front of her, the other program came to a stop.
"Thomas Anderson is dead."
The statement was in the third person instead of the first. The wind had abated. Directly above their heads, a rivulet of frayed quantum characters flared, its wild incandescence raining through the shadows and eddying against the stranger's face. His features were still human, nothing else.
"You are...not Neo." Oh, how ludicrously clever of her. "You are the machine, I mean the program part of him. The One."
"This is the name by which I am denoted, yes." He nodded. "I was placed into a human brain once, but that person's experiences are no longer mine. They are gone."
"I see." Aleph tried to inhale; she choked on the chilly air instead. "I see. So, er, what do you want from me?"
"I have been searching for your code signal through the entire city," said the entity wearing Neo's residual self-image. "There is someone who would like to meet you."
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Note: Aleph's vague foreboding about what Smith's presence may mean to the Consciousness, and hence also to 01, will be discussed more concretely in the next chapter.
