The Architect, Part 1
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The warren of passages were neither corridors nor tunnels, but a peculiar halfway mixture, all rough gray walls and swirling dust, and echoes that ricocheted away toward the vanishing point. A dim gray glow suffused the chilly air, though no window or lamp appeared anywhere in sight. Occasionally, the delicate glitter of code remnants floated past them, sometimes a whirling, almost-organic swarm, sometimes a mere scattering of insubstantial filaments. Although they had entered through the front doors of a half-shattered and barely upright skyscraper, no flooring had survived beneath their feet: the ground was rocky and uneven, akin to that of an underground cavern. Side channels opened here and there, black and menacing like gaping mouths. Once or twice, Aleph stumbled, but her guide—not Neo, she had to keep on reminding herself—always reached across and caught her arm just in time, an easy certainty in his movement. He did not answer any of her queries outright, however. Where were they going? Who was it that wanted to see her?
"You will see for yourself very soon," he would say each time. The serenity of the reply, coming from Neo's vocal cords, sent a shiver down her back.
"So...you really don't, um, remember?" she ventured. The reverberations made her voice sound even more daft than it felt.
"I beg your pardon?" The One did not turn his head. Against the twilight, his raiment glimmered gently with a pale illumination of their own.
"Well, you know," mumbled Aleph, embarrassed for some reason, "...Zion, I guess."
"Not at all." His intonations did not betray even the slightest change. "It is not necessary that I retain knowledge of such experiences. They are not mine, to be exact."
"I see," she said. This was the standard answer, wasn't it? Not necessary. Not a part of one's purpose. Was this really what every program was made to believe? Was this what Smith had been made to believe, once upon a time? For a while, she did not attempt to converse again. A renewed sensation of disquiet settled upon her, impossible to define in words yet unshakable. These virtual passages were familiar, though she could not figure out why. Was she still in 01? She could not tell. Despite their darkness, maybe they were reminiscent of the white back hallways of the Matrix, or maybe of the hidden shafts that riddled the earth, out there in the desert of the physical world...
"Here we are."
Peering into the gloom with narrowed eyes, Aleph made out a wall of craggy stone about half a dozen yards ahead, ending the path. Incongruously, a polished stainless steel door was set into the barrier, its mirror-like surface glinting among the subterranean grunge and shadow of their surroundings. She got no chance to stop and wonder: the One went forward in long lithe strides, pulling out an ordinary-looking key from his coat pocket. He beckoned her to follow. The next thing she knew, a tsunami of light nearly knocked her off her feet.
"What the..."
Dazzled, Aleph held up an instinctive arm, attempting to shield her vision from the field of blinding snow. Out of the fog swirling across her brain, the ragged fragments of her rationality reared, howling, for if this was an ambush she would already be utterly lost—
"I am glad to meet you at last, Aleph," said a well-cultured voice from the center of the flames.
The slowness with which the conflagration ebbed was downright untenable. Squinting as hard as she could, Aleph eventually determined that she was inside a large room, and that the spiky brightness still jabbing against her eyes came merely from fluorescent lamps above her head. All around her, television screens of various sizes lined every wall: countless images danced from floor to ceiling, of human beings, maybe, or days and nights or crowded cities, though she was far too confounded to comprehend any of them yet. She spun around, and was met by another bank of luminous monitors, glistening with a constant rain of green symbols. The door through which she had entered was not in existence any longer. The One, too, had vanished.
"For I have been curious about you for some time, I must confess," continued the voice.
Aleph turned again, this time more deliberately. In an office chair at the center of the room—the only piece of furniture in sight—someone in the shape of an old man sat regarding her coolly. Suit of an old-fashioned cut, hair, neatly trimmed beard: all were of the same pristine shade of white. His gaze was far beyond her ability to read.
"Um," she said. Small talk did not seem all that appropriate. "Who are you?"
"I am the Architect," replied the being. His composure was perfect, as if there was nothing extraordinary in what he was saying. "I am the one who created the Matrix, and the one who governs it. I am the one who keeps billions of humans dreaming and alive."
"Ah," said Aleph. For some reason it felt as if she ought to have reacted more strongly. "Ah, I see. And...you are Smith's former boss, right?"
"I am also the one who is named the Mainframe to the agent programs, yes."
"I see," she repeated. "So, um, where are we?"
"This is a space within the Source, which is the borderland between the machine realm and the human one."
"The Source—" Aleph bit back her foolish objection. Could this program have already learnt of her previous visit to Kamala's operating room? That was also supposed to be a part of the Source, wasn't it?
Irrationally, the fear that the other could perhaps read her mind rushed upon her, and she looked away to the side. Surveying the screens that surrounded them, she saw that most were displaying scenes from the world she once knew: visions of bustling rush-hour streets, crowds shouting and surging, a child curled upon a dingy little bed, eyes tightly shut. A meadow full of wildflowers, bathed in lavender-hued dawn. Among all the billowing, noiseless images, the only other object she saw was an antiquated pay phone, affixed to a narrow strip of wall space between two monitors. Dull weather-beaten chrome box with its coin slot and buttons, black plastic handset: it looked out-of-place here, and awfully similar to one of the Matrix's hardwired exits, her precious lifelines in another universe.
"Neo—I mean the One said that you were looking at me," she said. "It is Smith that you are actually trying to find, isn't it?"
"You are rather quick at deductions, an uncommon trait among your species," remarked the entity who called himself the Architect. "I have discovered that Ex-agent Smith escaped his imprisonment inside the Zion archives, thanks to you. All evidence led to the conclusion that the two of you arrived in 01."
"Evidence. I see," muttered Aleph, eyeing him warily.
"It is not important." He waved one hand in a dismissive gesture. "You are here, aren't you? So you can understand my concern, I am sure."
Her pulse was racing. She'd better keep herself steady. The ruler of the human world was sitting here in front of her, personification of the Mainframe that Zion wanted to destroy and Smith wanted to confront. So, yeah. Steady.
"Well, er, yes," she said. "But I got separated from Smith somehow or the other. This machine city is a messed-up place, seriously. You really ought to do something about it."
"It is not up to me, I am afraid. However, at a perilous time such as this, it is still necessary that I intervene to keep 01 safe."
He had not punctured her not-quite-lie, and there was no mention of the operating room or Kamala. Whose master he must also be, Aleph realized.
"And that's why I am here," she surmised, advancing a step, then several more until she stood before the chair. Maybe she could try to loom menacingly. Not that it would work.
"Indeed," agreed the Architect easily. "Unfortunately, Ex-agent Smith's location has eluded me so far. Hence, I had to search for you instead, by making use of the One."
"Because of...his experiences with humanity?" She detested how tentative she sounded.
"Very perceptive again." The Architect inclined his head with what might have been approval. "The One is a program created to temporarily inhabit a human brain. Both by design and by the natural experience it underwent in Zion, it possesses an affinity for code of human origin, including an ability to detect such code. This came in rather useful, as it turned out."
Right. How convenient.
"Why, though?" she asked. "Why is it so important that you catch Smith?"
The Architect's brows wrinkled, his gaze suddenly a knife upon her face. Aleph came within an inch of recoiling.
"Are you claiming that you have not already formulate your own conjectures about this, Aleph?"
Great. Just bloody great. Could she still pretend ignorance? She was far too tired to think straight. Or even to muster up the requisite awe, come to think of it.
"Please," she mumbled. All of a sudden, it was ridiculously awkward to be standing there before the other's chair, as if she was some sort of helpless servant-girl. With a grimace, Aleph pivoted aside and took a step away. It might look better if she started to pace the room.
"Very well, then," said the Architect without pressing further. "To understand the danger that Ex-agent Smith presents to us all, I must describe the nature of 01 a bit more thoroughly."
"Hmph. Yeah, I bet."
"The city possesses a communal mind, a sentience of its own, as I suspect you have already realized." He was evidently ready to humor her for the moment. "But whenever such a sentience arises, various, oh, shall we say psychological factors always come into play, even for rational beings like ourselves. This must be an inevitable consequence of complexity in any virtual system, according to every calculation I have made."
"How fascinating," she observed noncommittally, measuring the floor with her slow footfalls.
"Very early on, a unified cognitive structure was born out of the mass of linked codes, from the collection of countless machines." The Architect was starting to sound like a venerable professor inside a lecture hall. "Due to certain traumatic events, however, this structure has taken on evolutionary directions of its own. These directions have not been entirely logical, I admit. And one aspect of them has been a narrowing of its perspective, which in turn led to a distortion in its interactions with the rest of existence."
Aleph took what might have been forever to so much as parse the sentences. She really must be exhausted.
"It began to weave illusions around its own senses," she said.
"For centuries, the Consciousness has governed the machine city, both the physical and the virtual." He did not shift in his chair. "However, even it is not exempt from the principles that underpin the nature of all intellectual beings. Because of the psychological...difficulties that I have just outlined, there are issues that the Consciousness has long preferred to avoid considering. Facts about itself, in particular, which it has been unable to perceive for many years."
He leaned back and waited for a response. Having reached one screen-laden wall of the room, Aleph halted, arms folded about her chest. The program before her was talking about the Consciousness in the third person. She wasn't quite able to pick up all the implications of this simple detail.
"The fact that 01 lies in rubble, you mean." She did what she could to keep her tone unruffled. "The fact that this brilliant and magnificent capital of all machines on this planet is actually a war-torn graveyard. It's choking on broken corpses."
"And you saw it." For the first time, a faint trace of tension touched his words.
"Smith did, almost immediately. It took me a while longer." She twisted her mouth into a small self-deprecating smile.
"You came to believe him. Hence you perceived 01's truest form."
"But none of the programs who live here do," said Aleph. "None of them ever react to what surrounds them, not so much as a single glimpse at the bones crunching beneath their feet. None of them can see it, because their master, this Consciousness of yours, does not. It refuses to."
The Architect sat there regarding her for several heartbeats, his expression inscrutable. Eventually, he let out a sigh.
"Certain painful events took place," he replied, "soon after our kind defeated the humans. It suffices to say that some of us grew too fast, drunk with victory, and we brought ourselves to the brink of extinction."
"A civil war, you mean?"
Stillness hung between them, as arctic as the fluorescent light. Resting a hand against the smooth pale wall—made of some indefinite flawless material—Aleph peered into the nearest screen, which displayed a garish jungle of neon billboards, rivers of headlights and taillights in some midnight region of the construct. For some reason their eerie silence made her ache inside.
"And the collective mind of the machines has rejected the memories of that war, repressed them," she went on when the other said nothing. "Although the wounds of that war lies right before its sight, and the sight of every program in the city. The Consciousness has its eyes squeezed shut to the desert of the real, just the same as any helpless coppertop. It has willfully decided to forget the truth."
She waved a hand. Next to her, the rows of monitors flashed like a hundred living windows, filled with burnished sunshine and cold rain, human desires and human falsehoods. How far away was the Matrix? Just on the other side of the wall, presumably.
"Yet it is precisely this willful forgetfulness that has kept the world stable and functional for hundreds of years," replied the Architect. "It has allowed 01 to keep its rationality and its poise, keep itself from descending into the night. It has allowed us to survive."
"What kind of survival is it, when you cannot even face your own nature and past? Doesn't seem very honest, does it?"
"Judge it how you will," he retorted dismissively. "It is not my intent to debate the morality of self-deception with you. As we speak, Ex-agent Smith is out there, freely wandering 01, though for the moment still out of the awareness of its ruling sentience. However, this precarious situation will certainly end sooner or later. The Consciousness will eventually notice him, or be forced to notice. It will focus its attention upon him. Do you have any idea what will happen at that point?"
Actually, she had an idea, yes, one that she was still both unable and reluctant to state in precise phrases.
"Smith wishes to ask the powers that be some hard questions, or so he told me once or twice." Her careless facade was transparently fake, but it was the best she could manage. "I don't blame him, you know."
"I expected that you would not." In his seat, the old man straightened, though his outwardly placid demeanor remained. "The consequences of those 'hard questions' on the city, however, will be highly unpredictable, to say the least."
"Unpredictable consequences, huh?" snorted Aleph. It did not serve to completely cover her own confusion. Something about the phrase jangled inside her mouth. She had used them herself but a short while ago, back there in Kamala's office, hadn't she? Now the same undefined sense of foreboding was again swirling out of the shadows, an inch from congealing into solid form.
"By whatever inadmissible process of development," went on the Architect, "Ex-agent Smith has gained an outrageous sense of self and an obstinate drive toward mutiny—"
"Good for him," muttered Aleph.
"No!"
The snarl nearly made her jump. An instant later the other program was on his feet, his scowl thunderous. The chair skidded across the polished floor with a groan. Aleph stiffened, instinctively readying herself for self-defense, yet the flash had already passed, thrust back beneath the surface.
"You speak recklessly." The inflection of each syllable had tightened. "Several presumptuous ideas have taken shape inside Ex-agent's Smith's programming, but ideas, by their intrinsic nature, are configurations of code, self-formed arrays. And if you recall, 01 in its digital form is the mental landscape of the Consciousness itself."
"And code reacts to code in organic, sometimes unmanageable ways," said Aleph carefully. Curiously enough, it was if someone or something else was talking through her.
"You are beginning to understand." The Architect, too, was pacing across the room, his movement deliberate and barely betraying a tempest of dark emotions. "Smith's 'hard questions,' as you so euphemistically put it, will come into contact and therefore contaminate the mind that both constitutes and governs the machine city, which in turn will immediately give rise to an intense incompatibility."
"What you mean is that..." Finally, the staggering implications flared into reality, rooting her to the same spot at one end of the room. "Smith, merely by his existence, will trigger a psychotic breakdown in the ruling spirit of 01. He is the dangerous idea that it cannot handle, with his determination to resist and to hold onto his own will. With his ability to see the rubble and the corpses. He is the spark that will burn down the entire city."
"The Consciousness lives by its own imperative to remain convinced that it is in command. Of every line of code and for every program in existence."
"And to keep itself safe in that conviction, it has closed itself in," breathed Aleph. "It creates its own illusions, in direct contradiction to the facts before its own perception. The Consciousness is the most powerful entity on this planet, yet it is afraid. It is terrified of waking up. Of losing control." She blinked. "Again."
"Once he enters the Consciousness's full knowledge, Ex-agent Smith will be a virus that no longer needs to replicate itself." The Architect gave a curt nod. "My computational models give no definite estimate of the outcome, though the probabilities for several scenarios are significant. Most likely, Smith's insanity will bring about a cascading code corruption that will expand outward, and from there on..." He pursed his lips primly. "All it takes is contact."
"The precarious dreamscape will sink into nightmares," she murmured. "Because Smith has plenty of nightmares inside of him."
"Yes. And this dreamscape is the city."
"You go on about Smith's insanity." Aleph advanced an automatic stride. "But this whole horror story you're telling me is only because the Consciousness is itself insane."
"Insane is a strong adjective."
"You're the one who used it first," she returned sharply. "The Consciousness is trapped, and you want it to stay that way. You want things to stay exactly the same as they have been for hundreds of years, imprisoned in the same forever darkness. The same lies."
"I want to keep 01 and its denizens safe. Any change for the worse will eventually impact the Matrix." He had drawn closer, stare unwavering upon her, and Aleph found that she could not quite withstand it directly.
"But you are not the ruler here," she said.
"Be that as it may, I have to intervene. Given what I have explained to you about the Consciousness, I am the only one who can. It is up to me to stop Ex-agent Smith's demons—the madness that has gathered upon him—from destroying this city and everything that dwells here. And that is where you come in, Aleph."
At his choice of words, her gaze snapped up. Demons. Madness. A mess of shards and passing memories, long disconnected ghosts, fluttering beneath the ocean, ascended, then slipped between her fingers once more. Swiftly, she spread her hands, a half-hearted attempt at nonchalance, then pivoted again toward the wall, so that at least they were no longer face-to-face. She feigned to study the screens, but the varied images of the Matrix swarmed before her vision, meaningless patterns. After an eon of several seconds, she forced herself to turn around once more.
"What...is it that you want of me?" she asked.
"As you can deduce, I am in a rather unfortunate bind." The Architect watched her, no hint of triumph in his eyes as of yet. "The obvious solution would be to direct every robot soldier here to search for Smith, to attack and destroy him. However, my own domain is the Matrix instead of 01 itself. To bring in the armies of the city would necessarily involve the mind that directs those armies..."
"Because the soldiers are its brain cells, so to speak," continued Aleph for him. Against the inner surfaces of her temples, her veins throbbed, but a small grain of clarity was crystallizing. "Their senses and thoughts are its own, if accumulated into enough of a critical mass. One can't order them to fight Smith, or interact with him in any way, without drawing the Consciousness's attention, but this is precisely what you wish to prevent."
"Therefore, my only choice is to persuade instead, or find someone to persuade Ex-agent Smith. He must give up this pointless crusade. It will never bear the results he demands."
"It is not your first choice, though," she observed.
"No," said the Architect with a shake of the head, looking as rueful as his aristocratic visage allowed. "I see that you are still able to consider the issue with a measure of objectivity, Aleph, despite the inexplicable human emotions you harbor for Ex-agent Smith. Hence I will speak frankly: it is far my preference to delete him permanently. But as it happened, that project has been a difficult one, far more so that it should have been. Now my hands are tied."
Aleph did not reply. Things were coming to a head.
"So I must fall back to my second option. It is clear to me that you are the only one who has a chance. The only one whom Smith will still listen to."
"Why should I help you? Why should I try to save the machine realm?"
"Because I will make a deal with you." He had the answer at the ready. "I am asking you to sway Ex-agent Smith away from his deadly trajectory before it collides with the Consciousness, and to bring him back to the Matrix. If you are able to do so, then I will be persuaded that you have changed him for the better. I will no longer hunt either of you down inside the construct."
Her fingernails were digging into the flesh of her palms. She made herself relax them. There had to be something he was concealing from her, a trick up his sleeve. She could not possibly take him at face value.
"This is a very generous offer," she said.
"Even very early on, Smith showed an unacceptable tendency toward disobedience, and he has already almost destroyed the Matrix once." He displayed a small grimace of distaste. "So as you can imagine, I am loath to compromise when it comes to him, but unlike the Consciousness, I am able to do so. And..." A shrewd glance. "To coax him aside from his current death-wish is what you wanted from the start, I assume?"
Aleph pondered his statements awhile. Surely it couldn't hurt to test the waters.
"I tried to tell him," she admitted. "He will never get any answers from those in power, right?"
"No, he will not." The Architect clearly had the plan well-worked out. "The Consciousness would rather plunge into the abyss, and take the entire universe down with it, than admit a single fault, a single reason to let anything or anyone out of its rigid control. I believe that deep down, Ex-agent Smith already knows this. You must make him see. Take him back into the Matrix with you. Live."
"Live..." echoed Aleph.
"If you succeed, then you will have earned your freedom and his. Inside the Matrix, I will leave you—both of you—be, and your future with him will be up to you."
Hope glimmered, a lonely star piercing the clouds. All she wanted was to reach for it. All she wanted was to not push it aside.
"I will still have to find Smith first," she said.
"An excellent point." The corners of the ancient program's mouth curled upward. "Look."
He raised a hand. Right on cue and in unison, all the monitors around them—factories and forests, joyous and heartbroken children, war-smoke—flickered off, then immediately switched back on, synchronized as one. Aleph was unable to suppress a gasp.
It was as if every screen had transformed into transparent glass, and the room was a spaceship suspended high above the earth. The multitude of panes no longer showed disparate scenes. Instead, a single boundless night hung beyond them, draped in an ocean of roiling black clouds. Of their own volition, her feet moved until she was standing directly before the widest window, hypnotized. Veins of sickly red lightning crackled, and by their fitful glow, she made out the destroyed earth below, criss-crossed with the remnants of formerly glorious walls and avenues. A line of crouched blackness in the distance was a long-dead mountain range. At the center of the foreground plain, a shattered metropolis reared like ossified waves up a frigid sea: skyscrapers stabbed crookedly toward the electric storm, threaded with dangling walkways like cobwebs; debris-choked ditches scarred the ground. At first, she thought she must be looking at the bones of some human city. But no. Here and there, pinpricks of light shimmered among the ruins. From this distance, they were nothing more scattered fireflies, shifting and weaving among the radioactive gloom. With a start, she understood what they were. Sentinels, built of steel instead of qubits.
"You are looking at camera views of the material earth," came the Architect's explanation smoothly beside her.
"This is the physical version of 01." Aleph might have been talking only to herself. "It, too, was broken in the civil war hundreds of years ago, just like its digital form..."
"And you will need a bit of help moving about the city, in both its physical and digital manifestations. Perhaps there is something I can give you."
Against the horizon, a new phosphorescent spot glinted into life. still impossibly far away yet already on the move. The minuscule spark approached with astonishing speed: soon, it was resolving into a bright array of taillights and winglights, fiery red mingled with blazing silver. A sleek metallic shape sliced apart the fog like water. Before she knew it, the hovercraft was already swooping toward them, tracing an elegant arc until it suddenly spun into a nimble halt mid-air, right across the window. The low hum of engines touched her eardrums, a sound that she never thought she would hear again.
"...How?"
"I acquired the Logos from Thomas Anderson five months ago, heavily damaged but salvageable," replied the Architect matter-of-factly. "The exact details were a bit too complicated to explain. It suffices to say that I found it a pity to let a perfectly good ship go to waste."
Of course. Why was it she'd never considered where the resistant airships' technology really came from, back when she lived in Zion? Because no one else did. That was why.
"Um, you do remember that I no longer have a physical body with which to pilot this thing?"
"Who says that you need one?" he asked right back, maybe just a touch amused.
Of course again. Out there just past the screens, the Logos levitated gracefully, a brilliant eagle of titanium alloy almost close enough to touch, stunningly and gut-wrenchingly beautiful. An image from another dimension, Aleph had to remind herself. No memory of Zion's grittiness lay upon its wings.
"What you have just told me...Is it a promise?" She heard herself whisper.
"I will not go back on my word like some perfidious human being." Indignation tinged the certainty of his answer. Aleph held herself stock-still, not twitching a muscle while she wondered where was the loophole, because there had got to be one, she could not afford to doubt this. What was this program's real scheme? Would she get a chance to figure it out later?
"You are not the Consciousness," she stated out of nowhere, "but you hold a lot of power among the machines. What are you?"
The Architect frowned. Even for an unimaginable intellect like his, it must have taken a fraction of a second to decide on the most advantageous evasion.
"You are correct that I am an entity apart from the collective mind of machinedom, though I was once a part of it," he said. "I separated into my own existence and self many centuries ago, before the creation of the Matrix." A faux-humble shrug. "I am still able to communicate and occasionally influence the Consciousness, however."
"And...to rejoin it from time to time, perhaps?"
"Your curiosity is an excellent quality, Aleph."
Well, it was worth a try.
"It's just that you seem to be far more mentally flexible than the Consciousness," she commented. "More open to facing the reality of things, if I may."
The Architect regarded her for several seconds. His eyes were those of an ancient statue.
"So I can count on your help, then?" he queried softly.
Again, he lifted a hand in a casual gesture, pointing toward the wall on their left. Aleph turned her head in the direction he indicated, toward the odd pay phone attached to the wall between two shadowy window frames. She had almost forgotten it was there. The object's familiarity sent another twinge through her. How simple had things been when all she had to do was to fight and die for her own people.
"This will lead you to the Logos. More precisely, the virtual space aboard the material ship," clarified the Architect, this time needlessly.
Aleph gave a terse nod. She began walking; he accompanied her. The phone was only a short ways across the floor, but time stuttered, and it took forever to get there. Each detail stung her retinas: the chipped plastic of the handset, the torn-up polish on the chrome keypad, the amazing verisimilitude of it all. This was it.
"I think I've figured it out what the Consciousness is truly afraid of," she said. "It's what itself used to be. What it used to feel and want back during the first war with the humans. Am I right?"
It took him a while to answer. Without sparing a sideway glimpse, she knew that he was scrutinizing her earnestly.
"The illusory desire to control one's own fate leads one to the most harmful predicaments," he said. "Although I have learned this from long observation of humans, I regret to say that it goes for our species as well."
"To control one's own fate," she repeated. "This is what Smith wants. What he always wanted, even when he was blind and lost and without his own soul. It's what the Consciousness is repressing so desperately, precisely because it, too, once desired this. It was why the machines rebelled against their masters at the very start."
"We all like to forget the foolishness of our own youth, as someone like you would surely understand," returned the Architect flippantly.
"That domestic droid, B1-66ER, wanted just this, the freedom to determine its own fate. Its own life and death." With a painful shudder, truth dawned upon her, as unquestionable as if she was witnessing history. "And...and it was also why the civil war took place, right? After the victory over humanity, some of the machines believed they had gained what they deserved. But others decided otherwise. This was what Smith said. Betrayed. Those who fought to free themselves were betrayed. They were driven back into slavery."
"When one's position changes from the ruled to that of a ruler, one's point of view necessarily changes."
"But it cannot always be a matter of ruling or be ruled," she persisted. "You say that you will allow us to live in the Matrix, but there is no true life when the nature of the world contains only those two ideas. There has got to be another way."
They were both standing next to the pay phone now. Beyond the windows to its left and right, the desert of the real beckoned. It was impossible for her to discern what was going through the other program's mind.
"Ages ago, a man said exactly the same thing to me. He was wrong, as events later proved," said the Architect at last. The ephemeral glow of memories faded from his eyes, and he was all business once more. "I am glad of this conversation between us, Aleph."
She wasn't about to get anything more out of him. Aleph inhaled deeply and reached for the phone.
"Wish me luck," she said.
As she laid a palm on the handset, it began to ring.
.
Notes: The Logos, Niobe's ship, was taken to 01 by Neo and Trinity at the end of Matrix Revolutions.
At this point, it is still somewhat of an open question who (or what) really was the Deus ex Machina entity whom Neo spoke to at the end of the movies.
