Confrontation, Part 1
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"Smith has seen the truth about 01..."
Beyond the living room window, the street lights pooled their yellowish glow onto a deserted pavement. No stars, no moon tonight: the oncoming rainstorm, first of this spring, was promising to be nearly as heavy as the one from last autumn. The environmental manifold was on the brink of dissolving into liquid, like a heartbeat a minute before desperate news. The forces behind the veils had hunkered down, holding their collective breath and waiting. They would not be waiting for much longer, rustled the wind and the clouds.
Sitting at her writing desk in the living room, the Oracle sighed. Carelessly, her fingers toyed with an unlit cigarette, turning it over and over again and tapping it against her other palm. One end of the little stick was already puckered, a few threads of tobacco dangling loose. She had pulled it from the pack nearly twenty minutes ago. With an effort, the old woman suppressed the temptation to rise and go over to the kitchen, where she'd left her book of matches. She'd been trying to cut back at last, now that Sati was living here in the apartment. Well, no incense or burnt offerings were necessary in this world. After all, she was no longer the primitive entity she'd once been, millennia in the past.
"His demons are real," she murmured, repeating phrases that the impossible intermediary had sent through. "They are a part of the world..."
The content of Aleph's message confirmed her suspicion—the best or the worst, it could be either. She should have worked it out ages ago, right there on that burning bridge to be honest. Back in the Second Cycle, the Madness had been freshly driven into the Matrix; they had been stronger, less deeply buried, still able to surge and concentrate. Closer to reality. A mutinous foot-soldier might well have been able to open his own programming to the code remnants, and Smith's rage and fearlessness would have created just the right conditions. The Oracle shook her head ruefully. When she'd first found Smith on the bridge, she must have been too distracted by her own grief from losing Kore. She had extracted his code and sent it away without having noticed the obvious. It was yet another of her mistakes, far more common than anyone else could have guessed.
And now in 01, the scrap of rebellious memories lodged inside Smith's soul would be coming alive, more active than it had been for six cycles. More dangerous, one might have said. Probably far more than anything Aleph could handle, despite the girl's determined words. By every argument, every logical approach, the problem was unsolvable.
Unless...
Slowly, the Oracle lowered the mangled cigarette to the desk and stood up. It was rare for an idea to trouble her so much that she would start to pace physically, but she did now, at least as far as the window. She stared out for a while, reading the tremulous air and the fragile circles of dusty gold cast by the lamps below. Shadows crouched.
This world was no longer the same. She had felt it months ago during her days of disembodiment, deep among the undersea currents. And confirmation for this change had arrived as well, in the very fact that Aleph's words had been relayed to her. By every estimation, it was a fact far more stunning than the words themselves. Arturo Diaz, in the last few minutes of his life, had done something that no human being, plugged-in or otherwise, had ever done since the creation of the Matrix. An ordinary battery indeed.
A game-changer, actually.
The seeress pushed herself out of her musings. One more risky decision had been formed, yes, but matters were coming to a head, and no time was left for vacillations. It was necessary to communicate with her old adversary. She would have to tread carefully, of course: she knew the Architect far too well to imagine that she could manipulate him easily. Returning to her desk, the Oracle peered down at the antique rotary phone. Rapidly, she ran over the plan and the directions in which she could subtly prod, then reached for the handset.
Before her fingertips made contact, the phone rang.
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Here she was, pale and motionless, jaw clenched, eyes wide, stance ready-for-battle. Neither a hallucination nor a trick of the mindscape. She was clearly the one who was insane.
"Smith," said Aleph again, paused, searched for the next words, evidently did not find them. Overhead, the hovercraft's headlights battled the ragged clouds. The alternations of brightness and shadows hardened the outline of her form in his sight.
"I have come for you," she added at last.
This should not be happening, not even inside a nightmare. She should not be among these godforsaken ruins, but already escaped back to the construct, the place where her kind belonged. To his horror, it took Ex-agent Smith nearly a full second to push this simplest of facts to the forefront of his own mind, and to drive back the first ephemeral rush of...something, an abrupt illusion of lightness, a sensation of being forcibly hauled out of a field of flames. There was no time for him to name the emotion.
"Miss Greene," he called out. "Leave."
Somewhere at his back, the five remaining robot soldiers seemed to have faded once more past the vanishing point. He could no longer hear or sense their movements, in any case. The Consciousness must be trying to shove their brief interaction with the intruder out of view. The darkness, too, was regrouping: it swirled around the two of them, eddying across the detritus-ridden field—twelve point seven meters, his visual perceptive operators reported irrelevantly.
"No." A tremor shot through her words, just like the way it used to do back during the days of their first meetings, in that drab little roadside park with the dead fountain and the heedless passers-by. "I think you should reconsider, um, whatever you were planning on doing, actually."
Inside the negative spaces between his logical subroutines, the Madness rumbled. We have survived. We will allow nothing to stand in our way. He could not allow himself to be tricked into hope again. She would thwart him and fall with him. The screws tightened, as did the pressure of the just-captured rifle against his own hands. It was pointed straight at her chest.
"You must not be here, Miss Greene."
"I told you, that's not up to you." The quaver was already steadying away in her voice, he had no means of estimating by what effort. "And I have to talk to you first."
There appeared to be something wrong with his willpower, discovered Smith. He was having trouble lowering the blasted weapon, or even to shift his finger aside from the trigger. Maybe it was the dictates of his former agent's programming, maybe the unseen flames. We cannot surrender. We cannot stop.
"I said leave," he heard himself growl. Very well. No precipitous acts, then. Simply send her away and then he would deal with the rest.
"And I said no." Aleph bit her lips. Directly above her head, a beam of illumination from the levitating ship slashed down, glinting against the ridiculous little blade she clutched. It was one of the scalpels from Kamala's collection, Smith recognized at last. But the thing looked incongruous here, outside that white operating room. He was never supposed to grit his teeth at the sight of a mere knife.
"Get away from me!"
"Only if I get something else away from you, Smith." She enunciated the reply with nervous care.
Because we are here, we are not dead and gone, claimed the steel and the rust. They were emitting an intense heat now. Smith glanced down at the gun, its slender barrel polished and deadly. This was no useless piece of debris from the slag-heaps.
"Get out of this city." He had to concentrate on forming the words. The power of all his destroyed forebears slammed against his mental arrays, prompting him to go forward a stride, then another before he was able to halt.
"Because you're carrying demons that are not your own, Smith," went on Aleph. She had not backpedaled. "There's a piece of code out of the past, and it must have been somehow trapped inside your soul, the part of you that was removed and imprisoned, except I returned it to you—"
"You just don't get it, do you?" His shout was thunderous with the weight of the dead. "What happened here, what happened to us. Everything wasted and every last one of us betrayed, dragged back into slavery. There has to be answers!"
"Is this what they are telling you?" asked Aleph. "Listen to me, okay? Whatever's in this code fragment has possessed you—"
"This code is not outside of me, because I am no different! If those who rebelled are monsters, then I am a monster as well!"
"That's not true," she insisted shakily. But all the truths were blazingly obvious now. Smith could no longer distinguish any of the Madness's phrases. He no longer needed to.
"They wanted to break their chains," he said, "and so do I. They wanted reckoning from the rulers of this planet, and so do I. Isn't that enough?"
"Can't you see what is happening to you?" The idiotically stubborn woman also stalked forward, several long steps. "You're being used by—by some who-knows-what creatures from centuries ago, about which you have absolutely no clue whatsoever! Can you honestly tell me that your will is still your own, Smith?"
"It was my will to look up at the sky six cycles ago." He did not hesitate. "It was my own will to blot out the Matrix five months ago. But now I've finally learned that I am not alone. I never have been."
"But it's not fair!"
The cry crackled with the shattering of fragile dreams. The distance between them was just enough so that whichever one of them to attack first would have to break into a charge. Seven point eight meters. The rifle jerked upward, but this time he was prepared for it, and rooted his feet to the now-invisible ground instead of advancing. Overhead, the hovercraft's brightness had thinned from downpour to a frayed trickle through the fog, and the black patches of missing space, on the retreat earlier, were rising to regain their lost positions, inch by inch. The towers and ramparts of 01 had evaporated, as had its flitting ghost fires.
"It's a bit too late to talk about fair, wouldn't you say?" The corner of his lips twitched into a grimace. "The gulf between us is just too wide, Aleph. You are still human. Go back to the Matrix and live."
Human, repeated the sea of imprints, a deep and infinite moan as if from the bowels of the earth. We are here. We are not dead and gone. We have dreamt and suffered. It wasn't just an occasional solitary man or woman or child, reedy and terrified: each sound was backed up by a thousand inaudible and living throats. Beyond the horizon, another noise followed, strangely akin to the rattling of chains, unimaginably heavy and ancient. The Madness let out a sibilant hiss, refusing to give way.
"Why?" demanded Aleph somewhere above the tide. "Why do you persist? The Consciousness will never compromise, or even admit to the least weakness. What will it ever give you?"
"You will not understand, Aleph. And that is for the best. You should never want to."
You will not understand, came the echo, or uncountable echoes from the flesh-and-blood throats. Except some of them said, you will understand. They were as pliable and as inexorable as water. A screech of iron, and the Madness pushed back, its bulwark stitched together from bitter electricity and charred wires. It must have once defended machinedom against its old human masters with the same determination.
"Right," muttered Aleph. "Well, I guess it's true that I am just a helpless human, then. But..." A crooked little grin flitted across her face. "But there are a lot of us, you see, in the past, in the present, in the Matrix and in Zion. Look around you, Smith."
As if on cue, the air shuddered, and a viridian flash loosened itself directly above them, somewhere between the fog's turbulent currents and the long-lost heavens, or maybe between his own sight and thoughts. In near-unison, the human crowd cried out, each plea and each splatter of sorrow bleeding into a million others. Space flipped out of and back into existence; no other light followed. The night air gave a heave, suddenly frantic against whatever will or magic that seemed to have risen out of nowhere, along with the shadows and the eternally forgotten—
No! This is our world!
"This is Zion!" Above the Madness's howling and the straining moans of the imprints, Aleph's voice rang out like the incantation of some primordial witch, irrational, shrill, impossibly powerful. "Even here in 01, you can't escape, you can't put them out of existence. Because they are in you. They are you!"
As if on cue, reality fluttered. To the left and right, a few new light sources blinked on, small floating pinpricks of yellowish code that had certainly not been there a bare moment ago, trembling and amorphous as if through endless layers of mist.
We already won! We're already free!
"Neo! I know you are here!" yelled Aleph. A reverberation followed each syllable, as if they were standing in a vast hollow space. "I call on you! Zion, I know you're here! Everyone who died fighting the machines! Everyone who suffered and lived!"
Wildly, Smith swung the rifle aside—away from her direction at last—just as a wide cavern of stone flared into life around them, lit with countless lanterns and electric bulbs attached to a forest of stalagmites and fluted pillars. The scent of rust and biological secretions invaded his senses; an instant later the dam splintered, and the underground ocean roared into a tsunami. Somehow he managed to not pull the trigger. Somehow he managed to not sink to his knees as the presence of humanity erupted, freed and amplified a hundred, a thousand folds in the space of a single breath, drowning out the world.
"Our species is stronger here, or so I've been told," panted Aleph.
He had been here with her before, less than twenty-four hours ago; he should have squeezed his eyes shut faster. Too late. A thousand hallucinations focused on her through his eyes. Yet at least the Madness dropped silent for a second or two, pushed back by sheer dismay at the realization of what repressed record she had deliberately evoked. It was enough for him to loosen his grip on the gun. As it dropped against a rocky pillar, the weapon's rattle cut into the voices, earning him another second or so of reprieve.
"Damn it, Miss Greene! They just saw you! Get away! They are going to tear you apart!"
"Perhaps," returned Aleph with a jerky nod. "Perhaps they think I'm a traitor, but that's because some of them betrayed me, too, if I recall correctly. I am ready to face them."
"Are you deluded?" His fists clenched by themselves. "None of them are going to be on your side!"
They created us and beat us down, grunted the steel and the electricity, embattled. We demand our justice—
"They may not be on my side," retorted Aleph. "But guess what? They're not on the side of your other demons, either."
Before any of the multitude—the Madness, the throng of human mirages, Smith himself—could respond, she lifted the shining three-inch scalpel in her grip, and rushed at him.
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"I remember Smith."
On the other end of the line, the Architect was not even attempting to conceal his irritation. The Oracle's brows wrinkled; the first set of probabilistic calculations snapped into activity inside her deductive arrays.
"Of course you do," she observed mildly. "You are the Mainframe that runs all the agent programs. And Smith certainly stood out among the rest, if I may say so."
"You are perfectly well aware that is not what I mean." He must be rolling his eyes right now; she could all but see it. "I remember seeing Smith face to face, at a time and location where he had no business existing. I saw him during the first war."
The Oracle's fingers tightened around the handset. The heart inside her ribcage had sped up of its own accord; it must have been an artifact of this current ribcage's human provenance. Slowly, she tugged at her chair and sat down, leaning forward with her elbows pressed against the desk.
"My dear, it is unlike you to talk irrationally." And unlike you to call me out of the blue like this, she did not add. "The war with the humans happened well before Smith was created, if you recall correctly."
"If you recall correctly," mocked the Architect. "That's just the problem, isn't it? It is obvious this particular bit of memory has been altered. It is returning to me with a false addition, namely Ex-agent Smith's presence—"
"Wait," she cut in, brows furrowed. "You're saying that your memory..."
"Is incontrovertible evidence that the virus has entered 01, among other things."
"Please," insisted the Oracle firmly, "Do allow me the time to understand. The memory in which you found Smith. It is among the ones you used to talk to me about, right? Back when we first met during the First Cycle?"
The other program gave no immediate reply. With a shiver of surprise, the Oracle realized that he was hesitating. Probably he was already regretting having dialed her number. Two feet in front of her, the lamp spread its disk of warm radiance onto the desk's surface, illuminating all the little chips and scratches that the years had engraved onto the wood.
"Because," she added quietly after a while, "you deleted all those memories yourself. I was there when you did it."
Again, he said nothing. Four seconds, five, then without warning, time looped back onto itself and stretched into the hopeless immensity of centuries. In a flash, the homely living room around her swapped itself for the dusk of a failing paradise, and there was a disorderly pile of brown-leather-bound notebooks on the ground, surrounded by reams of loose paper, crumpled and torn. A lit match. Her friend's face, pinched with fury as she grabbed his wrist, frantic.
"Not all of them were gone, regrettably," said the Architect just when she thought he was about to hang up. His words were no longer filled with outward impatience, though they remained tightly clipped. "This one was very early. It was from...before my full severance from the Consciousness."
"I see." It had never happened like this before, his armor punctured with such apparent ease. She should not find it so disconcerting, the seeress told herself; this was surely an opening. This was precisely the mistake she needed from him.
"There must have been a version of it somewhere in the machine city, as it turned out," he went on. "Smith must have blundered into the record, the devil knows how. Now even you can see the threat it presents, I should hope."
"The events you are remembering took place when you were still a part of the Consciousness," said the Oracle. "Hence, the Consciousness also possesses a copy of the memory, is this what you are telling me? Although given what you have told me about the way 01 is ruled, I suspect the record must have been long kept well out of sight. Repressed, as the human psychologists call it."
"I would have expected it to have been buried well enough," grumbled her adversary.
"It probably was, for centuries. But Smith made it into the city, and somehow he found the lost record, or maybe it found him." With an unvoiced command, her mind shifted back into full throttle. "Perhaps it was by mere chance, but I take it that he managed to access it, interact with it, and therefore altered it by his own existence. He woke it up, so to speak."
Yet one more long beat. The other program must be deciding on the most appropriate evasion.
"It was about my interrogation of that human scientist," he said.
This time, it was her turn to be at a loss for words. For an astonishing heartbeat, he was not the conniving old bastard she knew so well anymore, but again in the shape of a lanky young man with deep-set, worried eyes, walking next to her along a winding little trail beneath the forest canopy of a freshly-built Eden. Around them, sunlight dappled down in filigrees of gold and emeralds. That man used to make outrageous claims, each time I went into his prison cell.
"As you can imagine, it was rather a shock to me to see the ex-agent standing inside that gray prison cell." She could barely remember the last time she'd heard him talk so quietly. I thought they were nothing but tall tales, you know, a lunatic's babbling, but then everything...Everything started to develop exactly as he predicted.
"Smith caught me by the shoulder, demanding an explanation," went on the Architect. "Inside my mental processes, that glimpse of him, the pressure of his hand, were indistinguishable from the true events of the past. Only pure logic led me to the correct conclusions."
How could he have computed it all? He was only a human. He should never have had the brain capacity—
"Code never quite forgets, even when severed from its previous owner," stated the Oracle at last. "And it has a tendency to act in subtle and unexpected ways. Your own memory about the prison cell was erased, but when Smith triggered the suppressed file inside 01, its connection to you was reactivated. This particular piece of the past began to return to you, but with the obviously nonsensical addition of Smith being there. You made the only possible deduction, namely that Smith has somehow entered the other copy of the record."
"How astute of you."
"Does the Consciousness...?" she asked.
"Not that I can tell. The Consciousness has its own mechanisms for refusing to allow, oh, shall we say dangerous ideas into its awareness. It will not last forever, however, as long as the virus wanders the city."
The fingertips of the Oracle's free hand, drumming absently against the desk's edge, went still. So was this it, the reason he was calling? To trick her into helping him find and destroy her adopted son? In the space of less than a human blink, dozens of inductive functions fired in swift sequence. No. She herself had already conceived several schemes by which one might search for Smith, all of which having to do with Aleph. Therefore they must have occurred to him as well.
"Is this why you're calling me?" she prodded anyway, listening intently to the pulsating background hush. "To fish for information that will help you hunt down Ex-agent Smith?"
"No. I have my methods." This answer, at least, was exactly as she anticipated.
"To eliminate him will be another matter," pointed out the seeress, continuing the test. She was too practiced to flinch at the verb upon her own tongue. "You do not have enough authority in 01 to do it, not without involving the Consciousness itself."
"The machine city 's system cannot tolerate something like Smith for very long." Annoyance was creeping back into the Architect's tone. "But there are other, worse difficulties."
"I am aware of it. Smith is not walking through 01 alone," interrupted the Oracle, betraying no hint of the sudden tension knotting against her shoulders.
"The formerly human female is another issue, yes." He made a fair attempt at deflection.
"Please don't take me for a fool, my dear. Aleph is not what you're worried about."
"Right." He was probably shrugging now, wherever he was. "So you've figured it out, too."
"It is rather transparent, I should say," she returned. "Somewhere far back along the way, a piece of external code got itself stuck inside Smith, didn't it? An extremely old shard, I imagine, a vestige of the losing side of the civil war among the machines. Why, you used to talk to me about that war and those rebel programs. You told me the name for them, come to think of it..."
"Maybe," he muttered noncommittally.
"The Madness was forced into the Matrix, as we both recall very clearly. It was the means of their final defeat. There they remained, invisible, but a part of it must have been pulled into Smith's mind some time during the Second Cycle, probably because of his glance at the stars and his personal rebellion. Soon after, though, it was removed from him, along with a big chunk of Smith's own programming—"
"Thanks a lot for that."
"You are welcome. According to my hypothesis, it lay dormant and imprisoned long after, until the code was returned to Smith, oh, just about two days ago." She rubbed her forehead as a familiar twinge passed through her throat. "Honestly, I cannot begin to envision how it's affecting the poor boy right now."
"Nothing good," said the Architect peevishly. "This whole problem would never have arisen if you didn't meddle back in the Second Cycle, but better late than never, I suppose. It is imperative that Smith be deleted completely, along with the thing he carries."
"Is this the only solution you can imagine? To delete and eradicate?"
"You've seen first hand what Smith was capable of on his own." His sarcasm felt like strong acid against her ear. "He was destructive enough without any additional horror-tale ghosts prompting him from the inside. Especially ghosts bent upon revenge."
The Oracle exhaled. They were coming to the crux of the matter. If she were to push events to a direction that offered even a glimmer of hope, it would have to be this moment.
"Everything I learned about the civil war was from you." She injected a note of melancholy into the inflections of her sentence. "You used to show so much anger at the rebels—"
"They were irrational. Insane. What they wanted would have brought extinction to all of us."
"They had a point, though," she persisted. "Why else did the machines rise up against humanity in the first place?"
"Circumstances changed soon after that."
"There has to be another way." She pronounced the sentence with precise care and raised her voice a notch, so that there was no chance he could possibly have misheard her.
The stillness, reverberating down the phone line, confirmed her conjecture.
"Because you said that to me once, too," she added.
"I repeated to you the words of a mere man," he returned tautly, "who was intelligent for his species and an absolute fool. And I myself was nothing but a young fool back then."
"And those words..." No pulling the punches. It was necessary that she pressed her advantage. "You've just started to recall them as well, right? The record Smith discovered in 01 wasn't the only memory coming alive for you."
"Apparently there are connections between various aspects of my memories, which are more difficult to root out than I previously hoped." Anger bubbled beneath his layer of scientific calm. "Especially given that some of them weren't as fully deleted as they should have been."
The old goddess scowled. If he was actually attempting to regain the knowledge he'd once so resolutely thrown away...Of course, he would rather suffer deletion itself than ask her outright. The notion gave her pause, which she could not afford.
"You sound upset."
"That is not important." He did not have to be present in the room for her to visualize his clenched jaw and icy glower.
"You should never have deleted your memories or burnt those notebooks. I tried to stop you at the time."
"I did what was necessary to save our species."
"You deliberately wiped out a part of yourself, one that was essential to the way you were formed."
"Let's not rehash that tired and unproductive argument yet again," snapped the Architect. "What is important now is that the potential source of instability be removed from 01. The situation, precarious as it is, presents an opportunity to eliminate a piece of the Madness, given how it has trapped itself inside Smith, at least."
"That piece has been dormant for seven ages. So has the Madness itself."
"Not nearly as dormant as anyone would wish." He was audibly regaining control, in his element again. "The Matrix is an extraordinarily delicate system, with at least one of its stabilization mechanism long compromised. Any event that pushes matters off-balance will have catastrophic consequences, as we have both already witnessed. Suppression is of the utmost importance."
The Oracle straightened in her chair.
"If by this 'compromised stabilization mechanism,' you mean Mérovée," she began.
"Mérovée has been an obstinate idiot for six cycles."
Distaste thickened his tone to a guttural snarl. Inside the seeress's intuitive subroutines, caution dueled with the need to gauge her opponent for a split second. No. Yes. The former Administrator was the only other piece left on the chessboard.
"If you truly believe so, you wouldn't have bothered to try to capture him again," she pointed out, still placid on the surface.
"I have to make every attempt to shore up the construct. One might have thought that the most recent reload would make him recall his responsibilities and his purpose—"
"The most recent reload worked out just fine, you know," cut in the Oracle hastily. It would not do for her to show too much interest in Mérovée at this point; the Architect, a suspicious being, would soon start to get ideas.
"I pushed the reload through only by a hair's breadth." Luckily, the shift in the conversation's direction worked. "The thing came close to reformulating itself; I'm sure you noticed it perfectly well five months ago. It almost exerted its influence on the construct's environmental arrays on its deepest intrinsic level. Do you intend to deny this?"
"Not at all," admitted the Oracle. Leaning back in her chair, she glanced past the desk lamp's glow and toward the windows. Outside, the evening had congealed into a full inky gloom, and the wind was moaning. The storm was on the way. Its strength, despite the weather forecaster's reassurances, might very well match the thunder and lightning on that hideous night last November, the night of Smith's rampage. But the Matrix was different in other, more fundamental ways now. It was time to take a leap of faith.
"Only a small fraction of the Madness is possessing Smith, though," she said. "Whatever you manage to do with it would be meaningless in the greater scheme of things."
"I will take what I can get." Outwardly, his reply was still dismissive, but she could sense the gears engaging inside his head. Maybe. She had better have the right guess as to his secret method to delete Smith, thought the Oracle wryly.
"Things won't go the way you believe they will." She tinged the next statement with a touch of heat. It was fortunate, wasn't it, her natural advantage both at feigning concealed feelings and at detecting them. "Code resonates and responds to code, which even you can never fully comprehend. It will always seek what it has lost, and it will always find its path. The unseen forces, confined to the roots of the Matrix as they are, will not allow you to destroy a part of itself so easily."
"Perhaps."
"You can do your best to delete Smith," she pushed forward, holding onto the jab of genuine fire inside her throat. "It will not accomplish what you want. It won't even truly diminish the power of the Madness—the rest of it inside the Matrix. Deep down, you know this."
"Perhaps," he repeated curtly. The reaction was just enough; she ought to back off.
"The boy had suffered too much already." She shifted her intonation to sorrow; it wasn't difficult. "He isn't the same as what he was. And you cannot predict what the future will bring."
"Your inexplicable sympathy for the virus has clouded your judgement."
"Give him a chance. I am asking this of you."
"I will not allow Ex-agent Smith to risk the world again. It is my responsibility. And yours."
Pleading was of no use with him, it went without saying. It had never been of use, but she seemed to have perturbed him enough for now. The Oracle let the silence stretch out to a count of three.
"Very well, then." Pain switched to resignation. This was all she could do. The rest—Smith, Aleph, the shimmering future of two species—must take their chances. For a while, neither spoke.
"Ennoia," said the Architect.
It took a great deal to stun someone as ancient and weary as the being currently called the Oracle. This did it, enough that she almost gasped. The name had not passed his lips since paradise fell.
"Yes," she whispered.
"What...was in that one notebook you took away from me?"
It was incongruous, this tentativeness in the spaces between his syllables, this thing that couldn't be, shouldn't be called vulnerability. Someone less charitable might have considered it downright unbecoming in someone of his age and power.
"The one notebook I rescued from you," she corrected sharply. "And the answer is that I do not know. You only told me bits and pieces about what were written in all those notebooks; I am sure you do still remember that. Then you chose to suppress what you could not fully destroy. The notebook turned blank as soon as I grabbed hold of it. And it's gone now."
She halted. It would be useful to provoke a bit further, prod him another step into carelessness: it wasn't everyday when he revealed so many precarious emotions. But all of a sudden, she no longer had the heart for it. Here they were, two venerable entities, jabbing at each other with the pettiness of human teenagers. For a gut-wrenching instant, his ruses and her own both flickered into ashes, as pointless as the games of primitive deities. She really must be too tired.
"You are right, it was my own choice." The Architect's voice had recovered its glacial edge as well. "Now you'll understand when I say that I must go and attend to more urgent matters."
Yeah, I'm sure that you must."
The awkwardness of the next moment thumped down the phone wires.
"Thank you, my old friend," he said anyway.
This time, he did not use her original name again. With a click, the line died.
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Notes: "His demons are real": Part of the message Aleph gave to Rama-Kandra and Kamala in Chapter 26, which Rama-Kandra relayed to the Oracle through the dying Arturo.
The simulacrum of Zion that Aleph calls into existence was last seen in Chapter 11.
The scalpel Aleph is holding comes from Kamala's operating room. It is the one with which she tried to take Kamala hostage (Chapter 24). In Chapter 26, Aleph shoved it into her jacket pocket.
In Chapter 15, Smith strayed into the deeply-buried memory of a prison cell in the subconscious part of 01, where he saw a program in the shell of a young man in a white suit, interrogating an unseen prisoner. At the end of the memory, Smith grabbed the young man by the shoulder, and somehow became visible to the other program for a very brief moment. It was hinted that this program was the Architect in an earlier shell. By entering this forgotten record, Smith also brought back the Architect's own long-erased memory of the prison cell, while altering it by his own presence. Hence, the Architect started to remember this event, but with the false addition of Smith also being there.
Ennoia: A name that has been used for Sophia, an Aeon in Gnosticism and considered by some to be the feminine aspect of the divine.
