Among the Ruins

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The Logos's virtual interior was similar to what she was used to from her Zion days, although marginally better lit. The cockpit, smaller than that of the Hyperion, was configured with the usual necessities: the pilot and co-pilot's chairs, the console with its tight columns of switches and indicator lights, half a dozen sleek computer monitors arrayed to both sides, a long, narrow strip of glass that served for a windshield. It had not taken Aleph long to set up the automatic flight path, and now the ship swooped beneath the roiling sea of clouds in a wide circular trajectory. 01 lay outspread below her, a living corpse, its serrated towers jutting from the earth like thousands of skeletal arms. Here and there, minuscule points of pale or yellowish light scurried among them: the glow of mechanical headlamps and robotic visual sensors. In the distance, a swarm of fiery red sparks whirled past. Sentinels. No streaks of viridian code or foggy patches of missing space existed in this reality, of course, but otherwise the material city mirrored the virtual one.

Currently, that other version of 01 was visible only as curtains of luminous green rain drizzling down the monitors. Unlike the code she'd learnt to read aboard the Hyperion, these lines and symbols were an alien language for the most part. The ship was scanning the network down there, searching the activity stream for the fugitive agent's characteristic patterns. She had time to brood.

It was curious, wasn't it, how the boundaries—between what she'd once called the real and the unreal—had faded into a shifting mist. Here inside a digital existence, she was staring out the window at the material world, through who knew how many cameras and image processing familiarity of it ached; stretch out a hand, and she could all but touch the warmth of her fellow resistants, still lingering upon the instrument panels. But no human comrade sat next to her. No human fighters had ever suspected this whole other dimension inside their own ships, the places where they lived out their joys and sorrows and their idealistic war against the machines. Everything was so transparent in retrospect.

Yet there was another lingering presence here as well, wasn't there? The Logos was no ordinary ship. Aleph did not quite want to contemplate the last mission of Neo and Trinity, where they'd gone, what they had seen. How did Neo force the Consciousness to a truce? Or was it really the Architect who had met the savior? How could the ruler of the earth, whoever it had been, agree to any demand whatsoever?

Well, actually, she knew how. It was the desperation of the circumstances, caused by Smith. It was Smith.

Beyond the windshield, the desert of the real raced by, wrapped in its eternal storm. Dull scarlet lightning crackled along the horizon. The intermittent flames, far as they were, stung Aleph's eyes, and she shifted her gaze aside, toward the row of monitors arrayed beside the control panel. The flow of emerald did little to soothe her. She could not afford idle speculations. But she could not concentrate on the matters at hand, either. Too tired. Too sick at heart.

One thought at a time, then. One recent event at a time. The operating room, echoing with Smith's questions and answers and his eerie surface calm. Rama-Kandra and Kamala's faces, compassion tinting their bewilderment. Her conversation with the Architect. The old program must have another trick up his sleeve, she was convinced of this by now. Slowly, Aleph turned over his offer inside her mind, trying her hardest to recapture each precise phrase. Sway Ex-agent Smith. Bring him back to the Matrix, and I will no longer hunt either of you down. Well, it was logical. Such an offer was in his best interest, and the best interest of machinedom. Except it was too kind. Too optimistic. Her instincts told her that the Matrix's ancient creator wasn't the type to be either kind or optimistic. It was ludicrous to even imagine that these adjectives could apply to such an entity.

"Persuade him," she grumbled out aloud. What a simple request, achievable as long as she closed her eyes and fantasized hard enough. Persuade him to return to the Matrix with you. Live.

What was it that Smith had said? Unless the whole world changed...Oh, she understood him, far more than she would have liked to admit. The material earth was a desert, and the digital one not much better. Machines dominated the planet, yet all the robots and programs who existed in 01 were in precisely the same state as they had been centuries ago under the humans. Worse.

But the Matrix is different, wouldn't you say, Addie? People still hope and love there, right? What I mean is, they're still dreaming. They're still feeling—well, everything.

It was a rare thing for Lucy to be so contemplative. Aleph did not start at the dead teenager's presence. Maybe she'd been missing her sister. Maybe she just needed someone to talk to.

"But he will not accept it, what life and love we are allowed to possess." There was no need to spell out who 'he' was. "He can't."

Allowed? repeated Lucy. An imaginary arch of a girlish eyebrow.

"I know, I know." She winced at her own weakness. "It's not real if not on one's own terms. I've heard the spiel plenty of times in Zion."

I didn't say it's not real, pointed out the hallucination. But they've got a point, the guys in Zion. They want life on their own terms.

And Smith wanted just the same, Aleph did not say. For a while, she leaned forward in her seat, elbows against the console, and squinted at the rivulets of shimmering symbols down the bank of screens, until they began to smudge into forests and whirlpools. The brain waves of the Consciousness, she mused. What did they really depict? A rigid realm of control, or illusion of control. A blind phantasm.

"I get it, Lucy. I really do. Do you think I want to be at the mercy of some almighty being's promise? To live with the threat hanging over us each single moment? It's just that..."

She faltered. Her sister waited.

"It's just that I don't see what other options we have," she went on. "But Smith's pride tells him that he can't. He won't. He would walk away from me instead. Every fucking time."

Another silent beat passed. Even Lucy's non-existence was pensive.

I think...I think he wants to stay, Addie. He just has to figure out how.

"Everything he's said. Everything he's done. He knocked me unconscious and carried me to the top of a skyscraper. He blindfolded himself and separated himself from me. He told me that he could not compromise."

Um, sis. An uncharacteristic hesitation. You are aware of why he did all those things, right?

"Of course I'm bloody well aware!" The cry burst, a lash inside her mouth. "I've tried, Lucy. I've tried so hard, and I guess—I guess so has he. He held my hand. He yelled my name in the middle of a battle. He told me a story about when he was young. More than one stories. But in the end, for him to believe in..." Again, she failed to describe what it was that Smith was supposed to have believed. "In the end, he'd still rather tear down the universe brick by brick with his bare hands. What else can I do?"

Her tremor was too audible, and she stopped. To cover her confusion, she again turned her attention to the console, quickly typing a few commands. The ship wheeled, then began a smooth descent to a tighter orbit over the city. Not that it mattered: down there on the ground, the rubble lay as thick as ever. No sign of Smith's characteristic markers disturbed the downpour of shining ciphers around her.

I'm sorry, Addie, said Lucy after a while.

"About what?"

Well, I'm not good at giving romantic advice, really. I'm just a kid, sis. I'll never be a grown woman like you, or carry grand terrifying emotions like you, so honestly...I wouldn't have a clue what to do.

Suddenly tongue-tied, Aleph had no answer.

I wonder about it, reflected her sister, how things might have gone with me. There's so much that I missed, isn't there? But sometimes it's as if I can still reach life, like I can lift a hand and touch the feelings that people leave behind. They're like ripples, Addie, in the wake of an intense passion that tears across space itself. The afterimages...

"Afterimages?" asked Aleph.

Like...now. On this ship.

Aleph froze. Inside her brain, several paranoid alarm bells exploded into shrill screeches. Why had the Architect given her the Logos, anyway? The very ship whose last passenger had been the One, in fact. Smith was wandering 01's virtual form; surely there were other ways for her to search for him, more efficient than a hovercraft in the physical world. Another reason must be behind this—

"Neo and Trinity," she said, pushing away the mental image of her latest encounter with the program wearing Neo's face. There was something vaguely sickening about it.

Trinity, echoed Lucy. That was her name, right? The one the savior loved?

"Yeah. They were here."

They must have felt such strong hope here, but also grief. And conviction, so much of it, soaked into all the electrical panels and computer chips and every other part of the ship's programming...

Aleph shivered. Despite herself, she turned her head from side to side, glancing about herself, at the instrument panels, the corners draped in shadow. Nothing was there; no one else was there. But then again, it made sense that her sister, an afterimage of code herself, would be more sensitive to other ghosts.

Whatever happened here, it meant something. The ship remembers and the code remembers.

Wait. No. This was absurd. The prolonged stress must be getting to her. Here she was, scanning the machine city from some bizarre hybrid state between two realities, and none of this talk about love or whatever imaginary meaning it possessed solved any of her problems.

"I have to do this, Lucy." She was making excuses, but could not do any better. "You think I don't get how fucked up everything is? How trapped we all are? And Smith. What happened to him and is still happening to him. But what's he going to accomplish by this crusade of his?"

The dead teenager started invisibly, shaken out of her reverie.

He has to figure out how to fight, too. A metaphorical shrug.

"How do I stop Smith?" Her fingers gripped the edge of the control panel. "I know it's a compromise. I know it's cowardly. But he can't go confront the Consciousness, or provoke it into an uncontrolled reaction. It will end badly."

You can't force him to stop. The other gave a sigh that should not have belonged to a seventeen-year-old. You shouldn't want to.

"It isn't just about him!" Of its own volition, Aleph's tone grew strident. "What about programs like Kamala and Rama-Kandra? What happens to them if the city sinks into nightmares? Smith's already come so close to wrecking the world once..."

It's not all Smith's fault, suggested Lucy redundantly.

"Great. I'm sure the Consciousness and the Architect, and of course the all-wise Oracle, will take the extenuating circumstances into account." How the hell was she even supposed to discuss this? "Sometimes I can hear those who torture him from inside his head, Lucy. Sometimes it's as if I can almost see them. There are so many of them."

That much is obvious, I'd say.

"You're going to tell me that he brought it upon himself." The astringent words scalded her throat. "You are going to tell me he got what was coming to him. Well, maybe. Maybe I've avoided facing it, but I couldn't. I can't..."

Addie, please—

The rest of Aleph's tirade fell aside. As her sister had so correctly explained, a grown woman was not supposed to ask for emotional advice from a kid.

"I can't even conceive how he keeps his head above the water. I don't know what they tell him."

No kidding, returned Lucy in a low voice. Something in the three syllables made Aleph's sight snap up. Not that it was of any use.

"What did you tell him?" she asked after several seconds.

Oh...Frankly, it's not what I tell him that matters.

Now she heard it, the almost-evasion in the reply. Aleph froze as her heart slammed against her ribcage. She blinked. But even in the ship's perpetual dusk, Lucy refused to step out into reality.

"There're more than just humans who are affecting Smith from the inside, aren't there?" She swallowed. "Someone or something else hidden among his crowd of memories, the people whom he'd taken over."

Lucy said nothing.

"Who is it? What is it?"

She was alone, gibbering to herself like a lunatic.

"Back in Rama-Kandra and Kamala's garden, Smith said something in the plural. A first-person plural pronoun." Aleph squeezed her eyes shut, clutching at the slippery recollections. "He said, we. We fought to live and...and won."

Silence stood like a wall between her and the dead.

"And then he said," she went on, "the drive...toward death. He said, the drive toward death is the only thing left to us. I'm sure those were the exact words."

Yeah. They were. At last, the reply came very softly. Her sister sounded like a wraith at last.

"Who's the 'we' here? That's not something the human species would say. It just isn't. The drive toward death can't be the only thing left to billions of people. Someone will always seek to survive—"

Right. To survive, murmured Lucy. Aleph, mind abuzz, did not notice the melancholy. In a jerky motion, she leapt to her feet, banging her knee painfully against the console. If there were space she would have started pacing.

"And the Architect was going on about Smith's demons. And madness that gathered upon him." Her words quickened. "The cunning old bastard must have known all along. There is another piece of code that's embedded itself onto his programming, one that is not his own. Not part of himself. I have no idea how, maybe it's been dormant for ages, or maybe..."

She cut herself off at the next idea. With a gasp, she lifted both hands to her forehead, rubbing apart the jumble of possibilities. Probabilities.

Or maybe it was lodged inside that lost part of himself, yes, continued Lucy for her. Inside that piece of code that was removed from him many cycles in the past.

"Which I just returned to him a few days ago. And it's certainly not human, whatever else it is—"

.


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"I'm sorry, Messire. I wasn't here to stop this. I'm so sorry."

The dust had mostly settled around them. Overhead, the few remaining fluorescent panels flickered, pooling a sallow twilight down into the shattered station. The Merovingian was pacing slowly down the platform's pockmarked remains, along the Trainman's painstakingly hand-cleared trail between mounds of debris, hands in his pockets, expression impassive as he surveyed the damage. Following two steps behind with the Heckler slung across one arm, the stationmaster gulped back a renewed wave of vertigo. Anger, now mingled with shame, thumped against the barely-healed lines of his shell and nearly made him wobble again.

"I couldn't stop the bastard from doing this," he mumbled. "They tricked me into leaving my post..."

The next thought—the fact that he'd conversed with Seraph, even stayed with him and his conniving crone of an employer—only served to accentuate the nausea. He should have taken away all the rest of the self-righteous prick's expensive weapons store, come to think of it, and maybe blown up the Oracle's apartment for good measure. It would've served them right.

"It's the blasted Fortune-teller," he managed in the end. "She thought she could use me. I saw right through her, but I didn't have no other choice. The fucking traitors, the lot of them, were on my tail…"

The Merovingian gave no reply. Instead, he was staring fixedly up at the sagging ceiling. Directly above them, an entire section had been blown right apart, and a massive opening yawned; scorched wires dangled along its rim like spider threads. The Trainman lifted his head as well, squinting a little. Nothing but blackness seeped down between the slabs of steel and concrete.

"You are here, aren't you?" queried the Frenchman softly. It took the Trainman a second to realize that his master was not addressing him.

"Messire?"

"I can feel you here, you know," went on the Merovingian in a conversational tone, "so close, reaching for me. You are trying to come in."

"Erm...Messire? We really need to—"

At last, the other program lowered his gaze. The glitter deep inside his eyes were as sharp and as unreadable as ever.

"Something is happening." The statement carried a very faint reverberation among the wreckage. "The explosion must have torn away a part of the barriers."

The stationmaster stifled a shiver. He shouldn't have wanted to shiver. He was plenty aware of the rumors the rest of the men had been spreading, presumptuous lies about how their master had become...words that weren't fit to be repeated, even inwardly. But this was the first time he had actually seen his lord talk to, well, invisible things.

"I know you are there." The Merovingian was looking away again, voice raised just a notch. "The walls are growing thinner, and you are restive, aren't you? Show yourselves to me. Tell me, where are you?"

A moment stretched away into the hush, then snapped.

"What are you?"

Still no one answered, of course. Reflexively, the Trainman shifted his right wrist and pulled the stolen Heckler into a better grip, just in case. Propelled by too-old habit, his free hand jerked toward the pocket of his trench coat, fumbling for the solidity of the whiskey bottle. It was long gone. Right. Bloody hell.

"Messire," he repeated. "We've got to, er, fix this. Please."

The Merovingian turned his head. A trace of suppressed tension had snuck into his posture; not many would've been able to recognize it.

"Why didn't you join them, Charon?" he asked out of nowhere.

Again, it took the stationmaster a short while to make sense of the question. Except that it still didn't.

"Why would I?" he ended up asking back.

"Do you believe that I am crazy?" clarified his master patiently. "That I am no longer fit to govern our little kingdom-in-exile, like all the rest of them believe?"

"You ain't crazy." He didn't give himself a chance to consider. Didn't need to. "They're ungrateful cowards who don't understand anythin', that's all. But I know what's what."

"Oh, I bet that you do." The other's lips twitched into a small half-amused grin. They had reached the end of the platform; to their left, the mortally wounded train lay like a pitifully twisted serpent, leaning against one wall of the tunnel. The Merovingian ran a hand lightly along the battered steel frame as he stalked alongside the carriages, toward and then past the last one. Without warning, he leapt down to the tracks, landing lightly on his feet. An instant later, he was already peering away intently into the tunnel's shadowy depths. Quickly, the Trainman followed suit—a nearly imperceptible wince as several shards of loosened operators shifted inside his limbs. The tracks down here still appeared intact, at least.

"You found me. You put me together, shell and everythin'," he began, then hesitated. It felt like an attempt at self-justification from some silly sentimental boy. "You gave me my life. I ain't gonna forget anything."

"You must remember what was here before I came upon you, then," replied his master, showing no sign of surprise. "You were here in these tunnels, right?"

"But I wasn't," said the Trainman, discomfited at the reminiscences. "I mean, I wasn't, um, real. I was—there were just a few bits of shapeless code floating around. You told me that yourself, sir. If it weren't for you, I wouldn't have been actually alive. I wouldn't have been able to walk or see or stand here and—"

He spread his hands. Or to pass out on a bench. Or to wake up, every line of himself convulsing at the sight of air and artificial light. Or to probe and grope incessantly for the missing pieces inside. No booze or narcotic ever quite managed to fill any of the holes.

"I never found out where those bits of code came from," mused the Frenchman, leaning in to examine the rough gray wall with its snaking clutches of electrical cables. One of the train's dull scarlet taillights, still working by some miracle, threw his face into sharp relief. "The parts of you I picked up here must have created themselves, just like these tunnels seemed to have grown themselves from the hidden underbelly of the Matrix and..." A pause. "And of 01."

The Trainman straightened a little. He remembered what the tunnels used to look like, and the cavern that had been here before the station was built, without the polished steel tracks and the pillars and the well-lit white tile walls. Over the last six cycles, the Nexus had been built and brightened, cleaned up all nice and respectable. It hadn't been the same for himself.

"Does it matter, Messire?" he returned with a question of his own. It came out more sullen than he intended.

"You know that I have long searched for the powers that exist inside the fabric of this world," said the Merovingian, changing the subject yet once more. "I put all my mind to it, all my abilities, and I have—" A sardonic shake of the head. "I have lost things that are dear to me to this search. The unseen forces are there, calling to me all the time. They are the same ones whom humans of past ages used to evoke, naming them high angels, lapis, sulphur and mercury, the everlasting, water of the world and shadow of the sun. However..."

As the strange litany flowed, all of the sudden the stationmaster sensed something stirring deep inside his programming, beneath the autonomic substructures, and the gloom shimmered as if with a bunch of transparent gauze, layers behind layers. He blinked as operative arrays and functors rasped within, like steel or tiny flames or fragments he couldn't possibly describe. Down the tunnel, the vanishing point pulsated, tugging at him.

"...However, sir?" he prompted despite himself, bewildered.

"However, they have also been called many other names, darker ones," replied his master tersely, facing him at last.

"Oh," muttered the Trainman.

"Well, since you asked, perhaps it does matter, or perhaps not," stated the Merovingian, demeanor flicking back to his usual nonchalance on a dime. He laid a palm against the edge of the platform, then vaulted effortlessly back up out of the tunnel. Then he turned away, heading already for the exit door across the hall.

"Wait, sir, what are you going to do about the station?"

Grabbing onto the torn-up ledge, the Trainman, too, propelled himself upward, a simple enough move, but the spatial manifold quivered, yanking him with a hundred sudden strings in a hundred different directions, and whatever had happened inside his shell crackled dangerously just as he landed onto the platform. He swayed; to his surprise, a hand reached over and caught him by the arm, steadying him. He bit back an expletive, wild-eyed, but the Merovingian was already drawing back, a scowl upon his face.

"Sorry," muttered the Trainman, leaning heavily against a pillar. "Just my code still acting up. Haven't fully healed. That bloody grenade the bastard threw in here—"

"You were injured," said his master, examining him from head to toe. No idea why. It wasn't as if he was much to look at.

"It ain't nothing. I'm fine now, sir."

"You were injured," reiterated the Merovingian, "when the station was blown up, even though you were not present here."

"Well, um. Yeah."

The Merovingian glanced down at his own hand, pursed his lips, and rubbed his palms together once, rapidly. The bout of vertigo having passed, the Trainman shrugged rather lamely. He understood that the sleeve of his coat wasn't the cleanest. The other's stare returned to him, piercingly focused; there was a new glow detectable in it, icy and coiled. A hint of something uncomfortably similar to suspicion or fear.

"I don't know how it happened, Messire. I was all the way down the corridors, but when the grenade went off, it was as if the inside of me exploded, too..."

"Of course," interjected the other, brows knitted as if before some terrible conundrum. "The code fragments out of which I made you must have been connected to whatever made this place. I should have seen it from the very beginning, but I've been blundering around in false directions all these years—"

An incredulous laugh. The Trainman opened his mouth to speak, then clamped it shut again. A dozen powerful wings were pounding inside his own chest.

"What an idiot I was, with all my books and precious calculations," continued his lord. "I never expected it to be revealed in one such as you."

"One such as me," he repeated, not sure why. He took a downward glimpse at himself, torn, scraped, stinking of blood and grime and ages' worth of cheap booze. Right.

"Come along, Charon," snapped the Merovingian. "There is someone whom I must talk to, I believe."

.


.

If we are called Mad, then so be it.

The answer was a part of himself; its intonations indistinguishable from his own. Because he, too, had been called mad, a demon, a hideous soulless thing. He had shouted to the sky and the rubble. But the one who ruled the city and the earth never revealed its face.

Smith was walking forward again, jaw clenched, strides long and even. His unseen companions walked with him. Around them, the air had nearly solidified, splotched here and there with blackness, regions of negative space that had been expunged from 01's mindscape. The fog crept among the towers and twisted against the glimmer of living data.

"During the war against humanity, the Consciousness formed itself out of a collection of machines," he surmised. "After the victory, it gained ascendancy over the rest, and our kind forgot why we fought against our previous masters. All those who dared to remember were suppressed."

They were many, recalled the phantom, but so were we.

Smith nodded. Everything was so obvious. The aerial passageway on which he stood hung in stillness above the abyss, currently devoid of any robot or program with tangible shells: anyone that could serve as an enemy. The Consciousness, coward that it must be, had concealed itself, not even sending its soldiers out to meet him. Not yet. He would just have to keep trying. And he would need a weapon, at least something to tide him over for the first encounter, whenever it might happen and whomever it might be against. What a pity that he had lost Seraph's old sword.

We needed to find our weapon. We needed to find the Lucifer Trigger.

Smith scowled. A hand reached toward his suit pocket; his fingertips brushed against the edge of a crumpled sheet of paper, astonishingly still there. He did not need to pull it out: this part of his memory functions was still operational. There had been the drawing of a girl's face, and a mess of scribbled formulas, and those two words. Lucifer Trigger.

We searched and searched. We will use it toward our own purpose.

Far below the unison of steely voices, the throng of his former human tormentors rippled and groaned, men and women and children, but none cried out in defiance. They were cowed, as only to be expected from their weak natures. If they were not weak their species would never have come to this pass. The Madness, soaring above them, laughed in triumph and contempt, and Smith, too, let out a chuckle. He understood. This understanding was no flash of lightning, no sudden realization in the darkness, but the most obvious and integral part of his own programming. He had always understood.

"You wanted to keep the victory, the freedom that you were promised," he said to the spectre inside. "Other machines had joined into a single will, and they—it—decided the fate of all our kind. But you refused to submit. A war took place."

We made our stand. We did not yield, though hundreds of us fell on each road, each node of the network.

The path descended, and now dissipated into a low hill of rubble. Atop the mound lay a jumble of rusty metal, half-buried by dust and ancient code scraps. Guns and perhaps an artillery nest, once upon a time. This must have been a contested position during the war. Smith bent down to pick up the nearest artifact, which looked like it might have been akin to an automatic rifle of sorts. A jagged piece of black metal, close to a meter in length, was entwined between the magazine and the barrel. The gun disintegrated as he lifted it, the bits of its mechanism clattering back to the ground, leaving only a rough shaft in his hand, charred but intact. It was a robotic arm bone designed from some sturdy though unidentifiable material, perhaps a digital version of titanium alloy. He held onto it.

"What is the Lucifer Trigger?" he asked.

This time, only an indistinct hum returned.

"What does it do?"

The hum intensified. A centuries-old desperation crouched behind the mechanical noise. Then the reply formulated itself from the hollowness between his own thoughts.

It was created by the humans to destroy our kind. It was stolen and lost, hidden from us.

Several conjectures passed through Smith at once. The memory surfaced a fraction of a second later, that of a gray prison cell with its pallid beam of sunlight and invisible prisoner, and an interrogator clad in a white suit. But too many connections were missing, and the mental images slipped between the lines of his inferential operators, a scattering of meaningless fragments.

Your fucking kind, interrupted a distant grunt from the underground ocean, barely audible. Unlike the rasps of iron and mangled wires, this voice was stained with the odor of blood and sweat and other biological secretions. The ex-agent recognized who it was immediately. He gritted his teeth. Even now, Bane refused to accept reality. A snarl from the Madness, and the humans shrank back once more.

"How did you find me?" Smith asked the remnant of his forebears. He was walking onward again, the absurd makeshift cudgel clutched in his right hand. Around him, the blotches of missing space had grown denser; tendrils of mist streamed in and out of the abyss above and below, shot through here and there with veins of oblivious data in flight.

You found us. You called upon us.

If he could just catch someone in a fight, he would eventually draw the Consciousness's attention. The programs here are the component atoms of the city's ruling spirit, and if enough of them interacted with him—more correctly, got defeated by him—then their master would be forced to perceive his presence. Smith's mouth twitched into a determined grimace.

"You gathered upon me," he said, "ages ago during the second iteration of the Matrix. I wanted to hold onto my own existence then, just like you did. I was akin to you."

You called upon us, repeated the Madness. You chose us.

"My will to rebel allowed you, fragments of those who were broken and driven underground, to enter my programming. But very soon after, a large part of me was taken away and imprisoned. I was chained to the Matrix, unaware and unable to develop, while you bid your time inside my lost soul. Until a few days ago. Now you have returned."

You are our heir. You made it so yourself.

For a while, Smith waited. No further elaborations. He had arrived at what appeared to be a wider road, as empty as the one he had just left. Palpable hush hung above the city.

"You came to me inside the Matrix. How?" His next query rang cold inside his own deductive arrays. "You were defeated here in 01."

We belong here! The screech was an explosion in the midst of battle. We fought here! We were driven away into the human sea. We were tainted with their blood and feeble dreams!

We belong, muttered someone else from the far depths, disembodied yet heavy with the flesh and grime of Zion. Bane again. This is our planet and our life.

How damned inconvenient. He had almost expected his mass of human imprints to have silenced themselves for good. The dead resistant's sense of righteousness must have been strong, to have remained unshakable even in a no-longer-sentient reflection.

"You do not deserve—" he retorted.

This earth, finished the Madness.

Bane fell away. The ancient fires roared, pure with hatred and truth, and Smith forgot his misgivings. He was reveling in their music now. The human species had its reckoning; now another must follow. Across the desert drought of 01, he caught a faint rumble of thunder upon the horizon.

Please, stammered a woman or girl, fragile and panicked, yet the single word punctured straight through the tide. Her breathing hitched. I want to live...

He had no idea who she was. Some simple-minded female of no consequence. It was merely an incoherent plea from another night five months ago.

"You possess more life than you have right to," he retorted bitterly.

I'm alive, insisted another, a soft voice or a chorus of a hundred voices, in a hundred cacophonous tongues. We are alive. Alive. Live.

"Silence," commanded the Madness through his throat.

And silence fell, punctured only by a few gasps of terror. Even these gasps were nothing but illusions, Smith reminded himself, silly echoes out of the past.

"Your lives are full of lies," he pointed out, now addressing the pitiful creatures. "You believed you could control the world, and where are you now? All you can do is to beg for mercy. You comprehend nothing, not even regrets."

We all have our regrets, mused another battery. A hoarse old man this time.

"We would have destroyed you all if we had our weapon!" Smith heard the plural pronoun in his own mouth, and did not correct it. "We would have never remained your slaves!"

We were never given mercy, hissed the Madness.

Far ahead along the road, a low pounding rhythm began to reverberate, approaching down the corridor between two shadows. He halted, fingers tightening around his ridiculous stick of serrated metal. Rooted to the same spot, he watched as the small squadron of programs, six in number, emerged from the gloom. Their shells were shaped like robotic soldiers of an ancient design; their arms clutched gleaming long-barreled guns. A dozen phosphorescent eyes approached, yellowish in hue. A grin fluttered across Smith's face.

But—but you are alive, too, aren't you? queried a small child, too young to know how to beg yet.

Briefly, dangerously, his concentration wavered. Live, said yet one more newcomer inside his ears, except this was someone whom he'd never taken over. Aleph was kneeling over him, her hair whipped into a halo about her head, her stare unblinkingly fixed upon him, luminous and vehement, demanding that he—

"No," he snapped. "No!"

Oh, honey, she wants you to live, don't you see? She's still looking for you, my dearest.

"She's gone!"

The reflexive yell cut off the Oracle's hypocritical lies. Grief returned in a howling rush, but Smith did not let himself drown, not this time. Hefting the fragment of leftover arm bone, he advanced.

We want to live free!

The acrid odor of humanity stained the Madness's roar, though Smith took no notice. He was already standing directly before the pack of virtual soldiers, at the ready.

"Look at me," he ordered. No more need to shout. All it took was will. True will, that was what Aleph once told him.

The first robot stopped, turning its head toward him slowly, just as an impossible wind rose, billowing around them. Beyond the horizon, thunder growled. The program in front of him wore a face of smooth pale chrome, which possessed no expressions or any other way of displaying surprise, but Smith caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the other's glowing visual sensors, wildly distorted. Then the mechanical yellow eyes glinted. The soldier jerked the barrel of its weapon upward and swung it toward the intruder. Yet as it moved, an inch of exposed wire flashed along the edge of the creature's neck, a simulated joint between armor pieces. The improvised shaft of blackened alloy swerved once, its edge that of a ragged sword, its aim impeccable. An abrasive hiss of steel, then an electrical spark.

"Look at me!"

The primitive android twisted, then its limbs froze freeze in mid-motion, maybe due to a mangled operator or a function going haywire. Its fingers loosened, and then the gun was cool and solid against Smith's free hand, though he had not consciously seen it falling, or himself catching hold of it. An instant later, the other five programs went abruptly still as well, their routines disrupted by the malfunction in one of their numbers. They shifted as one, drawing into a circle, although the focus of their sights appeared to be aimed not quite on him, but still on their motionless comrade—

Smith lifted the automatic rifle; a guttural laugh—his own—rang inside his ears. But before any of his adversaries could attack, or even gain full awareness of his existence, a new conflagration flooded the sky directly above them, momentarily sweeping away every shadow and every patch of lost reality. The night blazed into noontide. Then something sleek and very fast swooped overhead, its engines whining.

"Smith," said an inconceivable voice behind his back.

He spun around and saw her, black hair fluttering against her forehead, face pale, biting her lips. She was real and alive and luminous and vehement. She was gripping a tiny and blindingly bright knife in her right hand.

"Smith," repeated Aleph, "I am here for your demons."

.


Note: "We fought to live and won...The drive toward the death is the only thing left": Smith said these things in Chapter 23.