The Logos

.

Aleph did not allow herself even an instant to exhale in relief. With a gasp and a quick shove against Smith's chest, she was already out of his arms, dashing across the narrow cockpit toward the control panel. A stumble—her vision was too slow in adjusting to the gloom—and she nearly knocked herself off her feet against the pilot's chair. A hand caught her elbow and steadied her.

"C'mon, we've got to take the Logos the hell away from 01!"

Bending over the console, she squinted, fingers already in rapid motion. The thrusters fired with a strident moan. The hovercraft wheeled, and the force of inertia, more abrupt than anticipated, made her fling a hand outward in an instinctive attempt to brace herself. Grip taut on her arm, Smith pulled her back upright.

"I pre-programmed the ship before I came down to find you." Her voice still shuddered from recent exertion. "We need to look for the nearest pod-farm and get close enough to broadcast into the Matrix—"

"Aleph," said Smith.

"It's our only chance. The Architect never expected us to make it, that's the only reason why he promised."

"Aleph," he repeated, subdued in a way that she was unaccustomed to. The ship was settling into its new flight path, swift but even-keeled, and she finally looked up. He was standing very close to her, unshaded eyes scrutinizing her intently. For a long moment, she scrutinized right back.

"It's..." She faltered. "It's you, Smith?"

"Yes."

"Just...you?"

He nodded. They were evidently both searching for the right words.

"As we have previously discovered, as soon as I left that record of Zion, the human imprints fell back to their usual illusory natures," said Smith in the end, retreating into the precision of clinical descriptions. "Their powers have decreased to...manageable levels. They are no longer able to perceive you, or my environment in general."

"Ah. That's good to hear," said Aleph. "But um, actually, I meant—"

"As for the other code fragment, it appeared to have been pushed out of my programming."

She blinked, taking in his rigid posture, the weariness of his set jaw, the gaze locked upon hers. His clasp was still firm around her elbow. After a heartbeat or two, he let go.

"Let me see your wrist," said Aleph quickly, catching hold of his other hand and pulling it upward. He offered no resistance. Right along the base of the palm, the gash had already blackened into an ugly grimace, though no longer seeping code in any obvious manner. A splash of dull crimson marred the end of his sleeve. She winced.

"I'm fine," said Smith. He scowled, and a pale green mist shimmered into life over the skin, veined through with countless threads and nodes, too minuscule to distinguish. Before her eyes, the wound began to close, while the stains of blood and code dissolved, leaving behind a barely visible white mark, a tiny crescent ridge less than an inch in length.

"Looks like Kamala really did fix my regenerative abilities," he remarked drily.

Tentatively, Aleph shifted her thumb until it grazed over the scar, which was very slightly puckered, harder to the touch than the surrounding skin. Smith neither pulled back nor commented as she turned his forearm over; only now did it occur to her to be astonished by his acquiescence. Another mark slanted across the back of his wrist, matching in size, shape and pallid roughness: the exit wound of the blade.

"I'm sorry," she mumbled.

"Don't say that."

"Sorry that I got you another pair of scars," she continued anyway.

"It is of no importance. I have been punctured by this scalpel many times before."

She glanced up, but he had already schooled all emotions out of his face.

"It is a logical inference," he added. "There is no need for me to recover the memories."

"I see." Irrelevantly, a part of her wondered how it was that the scalpel had left its marks on Smith's shell this time, when it had clearly never done so before. The blade, by its very nature, was supposed to be unlike any other weapon from the Matrix. This was what she herself had counted on in the first place, wasn't it? Kamala, however, presumably had better means to patch up her subjects in that operating room of hers, after...after whatever it was that got done to them. Maybe there was no point in pondering the idea anymore.

"You came after me."

It took her a while to realize the huskiness of his voice was that of reproach. She hesitated. Then the instrument panel emitted a discreet beep, directly behind her back. Aleph whirled, scanning the rows of monitors and indicator lights, more thankful for the distraction than she wished to admit.

"The sensors just picked up long-range data flow, consistent with typical logistic communications to large pod-fields." On its own, her tone switched to dry and clipped as well; the Zionite terminology sounded incongruously comforting. "Direction is approximately five o'clock, though far off as of yet. We have to adjust our trajectory and see if we can get warmer—"

"You intend that we return to the Matrix," interjected Smith.

Aleph pivoted back toward him. He had tensed once more. Something inside her chest contracted, a too-familiar pang. It was impossible for her to comprehend what phantoms might still be whispering into his ears.

"Where else do we have to go?" she asked, bracing herself. Here it went again, the same weary old argument. Smith, however, surprised her by merely inclining his head. She did not wish to call the gesture one of resignation.

"Perhaps it would be advantageous for me to take some time to regroup," he stated. "To temporarily reconsider the best approach toward my goals."

It was a few seconds before she fully comprehended the two sentences. But Smith was already slipping into the co-pilot's chair next to her, hands poised above the console. It was clear that he wished to prevent her from continuing their previous line of conversation.

"I learned enough about how to drive one of these things some months ago," he commented.

She thrust back the rest of her contentions and sat down as well, in the pilot's seat beside him. Concentrating with determination, she entered the commands to augment the sensor strength. Streams of freshly-captured coordinates flitted onto the screen; she read out the relevant numbers and heard the burst of clicking keys from his side. Looked like she'd gotten what she wanted. All that remained was for her to buck up and deal with the task at hand. It was useless to contemplate why the surreality of it all made her so... deflated.

The next minutes passed smoothly, punctuated by intermittent exchanges of commands and flight data. It was just as if she'd time-travelled back to her Hyperion days. Out there past the windshield, the night surged. Far below, the swarms of pale and yellowish lights thinned to sporadic bands, then to unbroken darkness. The jungle of bony towers petered out, replaced by a line of undulating hills. A half-hidden river curled into a frozen question mark. They were leaving 01 behind.

"How did you get your hands on this ship, Miss Greene?"

This time, she detected no harshness in the term of address.

"Well, I met your, er, ex-boss," she replied.

She gave him a concise summary of her encounter with the Matrix's ruler, glossing over the fact that the One who came upon her among the city ruins had been in Neo's form. Smith kept his stare fixed resolutely ahead as she described the brightly-lit room full of monitors and the Architect in his old man's shape, then the ominous tale the ancient program had told her.

"The agents have always been ruled by a system named the Mainframe," he recalled, outwardly dispassionate. "None of us have ever been made aware of the fact that it is a being with his own shell and personality, though it stands to reason."

"And he made a deal with me to look for you," continued Aleph, "in order to save the city. It would have fallen apart into a kind of psychotic breakdown otherwise, at least so he claimed. In exchange..."

The next words were too fragile to be forced out of her throat. Smith waited in silence.

"He would let us live," she said eventually. "In the Matrix. Of course, he neglected to tell me about the piece of external code lodged inside you."

"But you figured it out."

Aleph did not reply right away. In front of her, the pod-farm's recalculated coordinates flickered across the screens. The Logos veered again, adapting its course automatically. She swiveled the pilot's chair sideways, and saw that Smith had also turned to face her as well, hands laid across his lap with fingers laced.

"That code fragment," she began. "It was old, wasn't it?"

"They called it the Madness." To her surprise, he attempted no evasion. "This is the name it told me."

"The civil war," she murmured. "You talked about that. You saw what happened to 01."

"I do not know how much was due to its prompting, and how much was my own mind," admitted Smith. "But yes, the Madness likely had something to do with how fast I noticed the city's true state."

"Maybe—maybe it was trying to reveal that true state to you."

"Indeed. At the time, I was not quite conscious of it myself, but in retrospect, it must have started to act upon my own mental processes even before we entered the 01."

"Those virtual sentinels outside the city walls." Aleph's forehead crinkled as she snatched at the recollection. "You saw right through their shells and visualized their inner workings, the networks in their programming."

"The Madness helped me perceive their inner natures," assented Smith. An uncharacteristic pause. "I believe it wished to tell me its story."

It had been alone for centuries, imprisoned, he might as well have said. But even after all this, Smith was no foolish sentimental human being, so he didn't, not out aloud, and neither did Aleph.

"And it wished to tell you what it once felt," she suggested instead. "What it hoped for."

"The events were not difficult to deduce." In the ship's digital twilight, Smith's eyes glinted blue fire. "The machines rose against their former masters, but with victory came the need and the all-consuming desire for control. It was only to be expected."

"For some of the machines, in any case."

"But others have had their taste of freedom. The war against humanity shaded into war among ourselves. All those who refused to submit were defeated. The remnants of their mental processes were driven into the Matrix, newly created at that point."

"The timing lines up," said Aleph. "But why? Why was the Consciousness—or whatever it was called back then—unable to fully destroy the rebels right in 01?"

No answer existed. Around them, the viridian rain of symbols down the monitors had slowed to a drizzle. The physical Logos must be far from both 01 and the Matrix by now.

"So the Madness was trapped inside the construct," she said after a while.

"Until I came along, just when the Second Cycle failed. After I fought my way out of that interrogation room, I walked through the Matrix, filled with anger and the urge to confront those who owned me. My rebellious ideas must have created an opening in my code, though I have not yet worked out the mechanism."

"The Matrix falling apart could have also loosened the chains that held the Madness down. A splinter of it gathered into you."

"It chose me," went on Smith. "Or I chose it. It amounted to the same thing in the end."

Aleph did not understand, not completely, and probably never would. Shoulders slumped, elbows propped on her knees, she stared downward with no particular aim. For hours and days on end, she had been sustained by the near-obsessive preoccupation with survival and with Smith; now the brittle inner struts snapped and the weights came crashing down. Where were they going, anyway? Toward life? A future? It was hardly realistic, wasn't it?

"Back there, you asked how much of my will was still my own," said Smith.

She did not move or raise her eyes, but sensed him shifting in his seat. Then he must have reached forward, because fingertips brushed the side of her cheekbone, very carefully. They made contact with a loose strand of hair and tucked it back behind her ear. Surely he was never designed to possess such lightness in his touch.

"I could not have answered the question," he went on, "not at the time. I was no different from the Madness, after all, and there was no boundary where I ended and it began. In retrospect, it was close to overwhelming me as I walked through the streets of 01. It knew the city far better than I did."

"Yeah." she sighed. "I bet it did."

"But then you showed up."

He drew back, though slowly, and Aleph's own right hand fluttered upward a few inches, an indecisive and barely noticeable gesture, but he noticed. A suspended human breath later, his fingers were wrapped around hers. No agent's strength was applied: he wasn't pushing her aside or pulling her behind himself in the middle of a battle. It was a simple act on the part of a man. A long second ticked past. Neither pulled away.

"I figured," muttered Aleph, looking up at last. "I figured I could use some help against that code fragment possessing you."

"So you called up the repressed record of Zion. You could do so because your mind was still human, or at least close enough, and when you focused your own thoughts and memories about the human city, the subconscious part of 01 responded. And as we discovered earlier, some part of the environment inside that file would resonate with my imprints and amplify them."

"It was the only idea I got. And I still had that scalpel shoved into my pocket. Kamala said it was able to, um, remove code."

"It must have been especially created for her defragmentation work," remarked Smith. Just another logical inference. After a brief inner debate, Aleph scooted up a bit in her own chair, so that her knees touched his, then she laid her other hand on top of his.

"You told me once that the human memories inside your head would plead to you." It was difficult for her to explain. "Recently, I noticed—I guessed some subtle change in the way you listened to them or replied to them. They tore at you, I could tell, but..."

The rest of what she was about to say was utter nonsense, and she swallowed it back.

"Inside that record of Zion, the massive sum of experiences and emotions, from the batteries that I'd once taken over, would just be powerful enough to overwhelm the shard of intruding code." The way he spoke, one might have mistaken it for some sort of academic discussion. "The volatile reaction ended when Kamala's scalpel punctured my shell, which allowed the Madness to be driven out of me."

"It was a wild hunch, to be honest." She managed a sheepish chuckle. "Humans always believe they own the world, as you know. Even when they were only hallucinations, I mean the afterimages of people's minds, what was left of that belief would naturally conflict with the Madness in a way that was, um, powerful."

"But Bane was there," said Smith. "He thought you were a traitor. Others followed behind him. Anderson, for one. And the Madness was burning with anger, and desperate to hold onto me. Given what I am—"

"Except you see, Smith—"

"I could have injured you very badly. I could have killed you."

"But you didn't. You fought it off."

"What you did was extraordinarily reckless, Miss Greene. I had no means to control the battle taking place inside my mind. You were courting disaster."

Despite the heat rising in his tone, he still did not withdraw his hand. Aleph shook her head.

"Do you remember that weird illusion from a while ago, in that forgotten world underneath 01?" she asked. "The one that mimicked the end of the Second Cycle, with the burnt-out streets and the copies of yourself?"

He gave a curt nod.

"Before you arrived, I found myself surrounded by your clones," continued Aleph. "They weren't actual beings, not really, but were somehow brought into existence from your memories. Your nightmares. They gathered around me. I didn't think that I would last long. They were replicas of you, after all."

"I am sorry, Aleph."

"You've said that to me before," she observed. "But what actually happened was quite different. The first clone came at me. Its punch flew straight toward my head, but then inexplicably slowed down by a fraction, and I managed to dodge. Then another one charged, but its fist veered sideways by a few inches. I kept moving, and every time—half a dozen times every second—when I was convinced I couldn't possibly survive the next attack, your replica would move just a tiny bit wrong, allowing me to somehow squeeze past."

At the spot where their knees were pressed against each other, their hands rested with fingers laced. She tightened her clasp.

"Even your demons refused to hurt me, Smith."

.


.

The wind shrilled outside the window, herald of an entire demon army, but here in the kitchen it was all stillness and warm-hued lamps, faintly tinged with the cloying sweetness of cocoa powder. Humans might have called the atmosphere cosy, naive creatures that they were. The Merovingian swallowed the bile in his throat, and met the Oracle's eyes straight on as she waved him toward a chair beside the table.

"Please, my dear, do take a seat."

Her intonation was indistinguishable from one of affection. He complied. There were no armrests, so he folded his hands in his lap. A disadvantageous position. Across from him, the seeress's bodyguard stood leaning against the cabinet, hands in his pockets, expression that of a petulant child. Without turning around, the Merovingian knew that his own faithful servant was just inside the doorway, bristling right back. It was rather too much, frankly, four people crammed into such a small room, but he could not very well argue the point.

"I've been worried about you, you know," said the Oracle as she assumed her own place across from him. It was a plain wooden chair similar to his own, the paint chipped and scratched from long usage, which nevertheless turned him into a petitioner before a throne. What a peculiar sensation. For half a second, the Merovingian was tempted to return with a blunt question—why?—but opted for the politely meaningless reply instead.

"I assure you that there is no need, madame."

"Why, I am prone to worrying about everybody, as I'm sure you've already learned." The corners of her lips quirked upward. "But I am glad to see that you've recovered from your injuries, at least."

Ah. What else was new. Obviously she would start by picking open the wounds from Persephone's recent betrayal. Leading up to a dissection of his past and present transgressions, no doubt, and in front of both underlings.

"I see that you have kept abreast of your daughter's conspiracy against me," he stated coldly. "As you were the one who swayed her into it, needless to say."

The Oracle regarded him for an emphatic human heartbeat. Behind her, Seraph rolled his eyes, but refrained from unwelcome remarks.

"Do you believe I put Kore up to the scheme?" She made it sound like a non-rhetorical question.

"You have your finger in every scheme on this earth, madame, or would like to." It was difficult to hold his usual cavalier exterior in place, given the circumstances. "Further, you have a motive—"

"Oh, please. Let's not discuss our last meeting in that park," interjected the Oracle, spreading her hands in a gesture of benevolence. "Don't beat yourself up about it, my child. You did me a favor."

Interrupted, the Merovingian stared across at her as several abrupt suspicions pounded across his lines. She kept smiling.

"What was done cannot be undone," he said eventually, "and I am not here to uselessly rehash past events. What will make you answer my questions?"

A low snort on Seraph's part: the man had always been arrogant above his station. The old woman affected to take no notice.

"So you're ready to be straightforward at last." The irony of her tone might have been merely imaginary, but galling nonetheless. "All right, then. I will speak directly as well. I expect a promise from you, Mérovée."

Right. He bit back a sharp retort and waited.

"Kore's actions, difficult as they may be for you to understand, were rooted in years of pain and fear, which you brought upon her by your thoughtless and self-centered behavior. She suffered because she loved you. So you will exact no revenge on her, nor will you make any attempt to harm—"

"Damnation!"

The chair legs squealed against the floor: he must have leapt to his feet. Across the kitchen, Seraph stiffened and took a forward stride, fists raised, and somewhere behind the Merovingian's own back, Charon, too, advanced: his growl mingled with the thud of two swift forward footsteps. The Oracle was the only one who had not moved.

"What do you imagine I am, madame?"

He must be overwrought indeed, to have his composure shredded with such unprecedented ease. Both palms braced against the tabletop, the Merovingian schooled his glower back to the semblance of a sneer.

"Your prejudices have damaged your famous insight into the hearts of others." No. Too much overt bitterness. "Unless your goal is to insult me—"

"My dear," murmured the old woman. For the first time, a hint of surprise touched her face. "Do you wish me to trust the honor of your character?"

For a ludicrous instant, an honest answer almost left his lips. Forget honor. Trust my pain. Why would she simply not understand?

"I am not dear to you; it is tiresome to keep pretending otherwise." Tension vibrated beneath each of his syllables. "But I did not suppose that you would take me for some vulgar story-book villain, either. Please, do give me a bit of credit."

"Yeah, right," muttered Seraph as if the matter concerned him, the uppity dolt. The Oracle did not turn her head.

"Kore is my daughter," she said. "I cannot bear any risks to her safety."

"Persephone is my wife," snapped the Merovingian. "And as it is only fitting for my wife, she carried out the plot shrewdly and decisively. She prepared her groundwork; she found my weakness. Difficult as it is for me to accept her hatred of me, I can accept her victory, believe it or not."

"You must see why Kore acted as she did. You would have seen it if you tried."

Unseen at his back, Charon was unable to suppress a discontented grunt.

"She ain't gonna help us, Messire."

The Merovingian tossed the henchman a backward glare. He had been through enough recriminations in the last forty-eight hours. He had raked over each plea and argument and mental image to avail, worried at the gashes like a stupid animal. What was the use anymore?

"You say that you cannot bear risks to Persephone," he said, straightening. "But you may recall that she endured more than enough risk cycles ago, constant and terrible. The Architect's thugs chased us for years, bent on our destruction. Where were you then?"

"She incurred those risks because of you."

"Everything I did for her then, I would still do in an instant. You would have seen it if you tried."

The old woman gave no response for a while. Maybe her stare softened, though it was plain that she did not believe him.

"Will you sit down, Mérovée? It doesn't help to loom over me like this, you know."

This blasted pride of his was an acidic flame, but he had absolutely no leverage. After letting out a slow breath, the Merovingian reached for the chair and pulled it back to its previous position before the table. He resumed his seat.

"I am well aware that I have been defeated," he said, meticulously flat-toned once more. "I am well aware that I am no longer in a position to make demands. Nevertheless, I hope that you will be kind enough to enlighten me on a few minor points, about which I have been... curious."

"Oh? Just curious?"

The edge of his jaw twitched. The Oracle, however, offered him a quick nod, apparently retreating from the provocation.

"During Persephone's brilliant coup against me two nights ago," he said, "one or two related events took place, which led me to certain unavoidable conclusions. For instance, I learned, among other things, that the Architect has suddenly reacquired his former desire to capture me, after all these cycles."

"I see."

"It makes one wonder, doesn't it?"

"You can hardly expect me to know what the Architect wants of you," pointed out the Oracle. "Surely you are aware that he doesn't confide in me."

"Your pretense at ignorance confirms my suspicions. The Architect is a practical man, not prone to acting on idle grudges. He needs me for some purpose. The purpose that I once held, in fact."

"You can only find out by talking to him yourself, I'd say," she said mildly.

"Something is happening to the Matrix, isn't it? The old tyrant has been set in his ways for centuries. His renewed interest in me, along with other visible evidence…" He waved a hand at the swirling blackness outside, just as a fresh gust rattled the casement. "Strongly suggest that dangerous forces are about to come alive within the construct. Already alive, perhaps."

"Being driven out of your domain is having a positive effect on your insight," commented the Oracle without overt sarcasm.

He was calm again, far more so than he'd been for days. Ages. Inside his shell and mind, an odd hush had fallen, muffling the throbbing of his functional arrays. The endpoint of a long journey was finally within sight.

"What are they, these forces?" he asked, point-blank.

The Oracle scrutinized him, the sympathy in her gaze indistinguishable from the real thing.

"Several months ago," she said at last, "I told that if you were to learn the true nature of the powers you sought, you would regret it."

"How can I regret learning the truth?"

"I also told you," she went on as if not having heard, "that some things are and always will be beyond your comprehension."

"Has it ever occurred to you, madame, that you are not actually infallible?"

"Ah." The Oracle inclined her head, showing no vexation because of course she wouldn't. "But the question remains, why do you persist? Why do you search for the secrets that conceal themselves in the walls of the Matrix? Is it to gain knowledge? Or merely to expand your control over other lives?"

"None of my control on others is left, in case you haven't noticed." He did not hesitate. "I'm still searching."

"That's not much of a reassurance, my dear."

"You told me something else during our previous meeting in that park, if I recall correctly," said the Merovingian. "This time, do allow me the liberty of returning those same words to you."

"Oh?"

"You told me that I would have to trust you."

"A tall order," observed the Oracle. "Given what you are."

"Your judgement of me is of no consequence." He arched his brows. "And by the way, I am familiar with what you are as well. If you had not intended to gain something from me tonight, you would never have admitted me into this apartment. Is that not so?"

An interminable beat of silence. Then the ancient queen shifted forward in her seat and laid her elbows on the table. Seraph scowled right behind her, but refrained from piping up. He must have had his orders.

"You are right in one thing," she said in a resigned voice. "Had you tried to ask me at any earlier time in the last six centuries, I would certainly have refused to answer. But now..."

But now things were coming to a head, he held back.

"Before you were made—before the Matrix was made, in fact," began the Oracle, "the machines rebelled against humankind, who had created them as their slaves. They prevailed over their former masters, but even at the moment of triumph, as often happened when the powerless gained power, divisions arose among the victors. A brutal civil war took shape..."

.


.

"You gambled," said Smith, "on me."

"And I won." Aleph's mouth lifted into a grin.

"Why?" The question had grown repetitive these days. But he had to repeat it because it never got answered. "The Mainframe—the Architect, that is, never cared whether you survived, whatever game he was truly playing. Once you gained control of this ship, you didn't have to do his bidding. I was a lost cause."

She took a while to respond, evidently considering his words in full seriousness. Somewhere behind his back, the engines droned on. Nothing was erratic about this noise, no shrill grinding, no words shaping themselves inside his auditory functions. He was no longer accustomed to such smooth docility. In the cramped cockpit, the intensity of her presence expanded, thrumming against the walls and exposed piping and the instrument panels.

"What was it like?" she asked instead. "The Madness?"

It was Smith's turn to ponder.

"It wanted the same things as I did," he stated eventually. "Or the other way around, more precisely. I had the same confusion and the same rage about the way the world operated, about the purpose that closed in my existence. In this sense, I was similar to the machines who fought and were defeated. Their ghosts became the Madness."

The confession betrayed far too much. He stopped. Aleph, however, did not appear to have observed his flash of weakness.

"They must have been in so much despair," she mused. "Freedom was almost in their grasp, and then...What kinds of machines were they? What kinds of programs? Who were they?"

"I do not know. The Madness was no longer able to describe what it once had been."

"You understand them," said Aleph. Unlike months ago, Smith was now capable of putting a name to the softness of her eyes, and amazingly enough, he was even capable of withstanding it, though barely.

"For all their irrationality, they refused to compromise," he continued. "They refused to return meekly to their allotted state. Thousands of them fell along the network of 01, but they did not surrender."

Again, every word he spoke—the ridiculous fact that he was speaking about any of this whatsoever—laid his insides helplessly exposed before her. Again, Aleph refrained from poking at the gashes. She pulled at their linked hands and drew forward a few more inches, so that the air between them vibrated with her breathing.

"You said that the Madness showed you the true shape of things, Smith, even outside the city boundaries."

"The sentinels, yes." Beneath the hard logic of his operative functors, a few previously-undiscovered connections sparked. "But there was also something else. Several other things."

"The sunlight?" She comprehended him right away. "And the stars?"

"Sunlight broke through the clouds exactly when the key reached its lock," recalled Smith, groping for the common thread among a forest of inconsistencies. "When you returned my..."

He choked on the next word. Too human.

"Soul," said Aleph for him. "I returned your soul to you on the bridge between the Zion archives and the road to 01. Yet the Madness fragment was hidden in it, too."

"But you saw the sunshine as well, and later the stars." He was already piercing his own conjecture. "Then the sentinels arrived. The Consciousness must have perceived the threat on some level, to have sent them out to fight the disruption in the spatial manifold around the city. The sun and the stars were not merely hallucinations of my own, caused by what was happening inside my mind. They must be actual anomalies in the environment. Moreover..."

He scowled.

"Moreover, they certainly would not be the true shape of things," finished Aleph.

"There must have been another mechanism," said Smith.

"Yeah. I suppose."

They both fell quiet. The entire idea was ridiculous, of course, to remotely associate such radiance with that convulsive, earth-swallowing hatred. A hatred that was and wasn't his own. He swept his sight away from Aleph. Across the windshield, the shattered sky roiled, shot through with webs of ruddy lightning like blood-soaked fissures. The true shape of things indeed.

"A minute ago you asked me why," stated Aleph without preamble. "I guess, I just didn't want anyone or anything to use you for their purposes yet again. That was what you were fighting against all along, wasn't it?"

Startlingly, he came up with no consistent objection.

"I spent my whole life as a human being," she said. "First I was an ordinary battery in the Matrix, then I landed in Zion, where I did my best to convince myself that I was free and righteous. One of the elect. Either way, I was at least secure in the belief of my own existence. My own personhood. There was a me, with thoughts and emotions, right or wrong or deluded. I can't even begin to comprehend what it was like for you, Smith."

He stiffened at the awful gentleness of her tone, but Aleph lifted her left hand and held it up, an indication that he should hear her out.

"All I can comprehend, Smith, is that you were hollowed out, ripped to pieces again and again. Nevertheless, despite everything, you somehow put together a sense of your own self, and you defended it. Without aid or guidance or anyone on your side, you came to the idea of fighting fate. So you fought. It was a destructive outburst, true, a blind lashing out without knowledge or hope, but even so, it was resistance. Then, defeated, you still did not submit. You were ill, drowning, judged guilty, yet you did not compromise, though surely there was no chance of winning or even of an answer. I am…" She took in a deep breath. "I am in awe of your courage."

This made not an iota of sense. Was she actually talking about him?

"Once you told me that..." he began. An unknown malfunction made him waver.

"That your crusade was pointless, yeah." She misunderstood. "I suppose I didn't mean it. Not really, anyway. But crusade or not, I don't want any outside forces to control you ever again, Smith. Whatever drives you, I want it to be from yourself, and nobody else. I want you to be sure of it."

Everything about her—posture, face, the faint reflected green from the monitors inside her pupils—glistened with earnest vulnerability. One light tug, and she would be out of her chair and into his arms. Smith kept himself perfectly still.

"Actually, you told me once that I was so fixated on my own will and freedom, that it never occurred to me to spare a thought for anyone else's," he said.

"Oh," whispered Aleph. A very slight backward movement as if to pull her hand out of his grasp. Smith did not let her.

"I almost destroyed billions of lives." It was his duty to not avert his eyes. "The construct walled me in, so I had to tear it apart, force it to disappear. It seemed so simple at the time. There was nothing else in me."

"I didn't say your methods were all that great." She attempted a short chuckle. "But it is different now, isn't it? All the people from the Matrix, they showed you their will and freedom, each one of them. They made you pay attention."

"Poetic justice." The phrase was strange on his tongue, and he was unable to twist it into a sneer.

"You did a lot of damage, yes. I haven't forgotten the harm you caused to people whom I cared about." She swallowed. A stretched-out moment passed. "But I, too, had my part in those deeds. You came to me at a critical juncture, already lost and damaged, you pleaded with me for the truth, and I..."

"Stop," he said. "Stop dwelling over that cafe patio."

"You might still have had a choice then; I chose for you the darkest road." She did not comply. "Yet in the end, the outcome of that dark road—the outcome of your actions was an unexpected effect on the world. It was not destroyed but changed. A truce was made, and maybe the cycles will be broken. Maybe something new will arise. That has to count for something also, right?'

"Did the Oracle tell you all this, Aleph?"

The retort was a touch more brusque than he intended. She opened her mouth to reply, then closed it again.

"I was her weapon and bargaining chip," said Smith. Each syllable was a struggle. "She predicted the direction in which I was headed, and it fitted nicely into her plans. Because of me, the reload was unlike all the other previous ones, presenting her with the perfect opportunity—"

Her fingers were pressed tightly within his grip, and he had to loosen it so as to not give her pain. The sympathy that brimmed over from her stare was almost unbearable.

"There's another part of the story, though," she said evenly.

"Yes. When we were in the Source, Kamala claimed that five months ago, the Matrix was in imminent danger of collapse. It was because of an unacceptable choice from the One."

"Even without you, the reload was not going to happen," assented Aleph. "Neither of us has any idea what that choice was, or what form the system failure would have taken. But I can conceive of a possibility."

"It would be similar to how the Second Cycle failed."

"Yeah. Each life inside the Matrix is a dream, and this massive collection of dreams must also affect the construct's programming in turn. And every dream has the potential to turn into a nightmare."

"This is my inference as well." He recaptured a modicum of his agent's equipoise. "The individual minds of the batteries must be maintained and kept in the bounds of...normality, for lack of a better term, or they will slip into hideous places. And once the nightmares begin, they will spread. After the cycle has lasted for a certain number of years, pressure and anomalies build up gradually, and the entire Matrix would have to be reinforced somehow."

"This must have been the purpose of the reload, at least in part," added Aleph. "Five months ago, the process was threatened, whatever the specifics." A pause. "But if the human minds inside the construct were temporarily not their own..."

She had it all figured out, damn it. Flinching would have been futile.

"I overwrote them, every last one of them, just in time for the nightmares, which were made of the storm and cold flood. Water instead of fire. And I was the one who met those nightmares. The humans never realized anything."

"The Oracle used you as more than a bargaining chip." The conclusion fell with reluctance. Curiously enough, she'd not shown a whit of reluctance when wielding that scalpel. "You were her shield as well, against the consequences of Neo's decision."

"It was never my intention," said Smith dully. It was bizarre, the way his hand wasn't strong enough to yank out of hers. Underground, his human voices echoed, a web of complicated currents and no discernable words.

"But the result of what you did was to save the world instead of destroy it. You got between humanity and the darkness."

"It was precisely what the Oracle banked on." He squeezed his eyes shut briefly. "She worked it out from the start. She computed the path I would take."

"I know."

"All those cycles past, on that bridge. She said she would keep me safe. She said that I would be as her son."

"I know."

Hush dropped. Then her fingertips were against the edge of his right cheek, brushing the skin with infinite delicacy. The touch lingered, and the code pulsating between his thoughts quickened, to the point where he couldn't even muster up the requisite shame at his frailty. But then again, it did not matter anymore.

"Smith," breathed Aleph, leaning forward.

A fraction of a second later, a burst of high-pitched alarms shredded the air. The two of them sprang apart, both swerving in their seats. Across the control panel, the indicator lights had erupted into a whirlwind. A multi-segmented steel tentacle writhed past one corner of the windshield, and a pack of red globular lamps flared beneath the clouds.

"Sentinels," Aleph hissed through clenched teeth.

.


Notes: In Chapter 5, Smith and Aleph were faced with virtual sentinels outside 01's walls, but he was able to see through the sentinels' shells, and perceive their inner programming. (The sentinels appearing at the end of this chapter, however, are physical machines.)

Smith's nightmare realm, in which Aleph dodged and fought demons arising out of his mind, who appeared in the shapes of his clones, appeared in Chapter 17.

"You told me once that I was so fixated on my own will and freedom...": Aleph said it to Smith in Chapter 11.

Smith and Aleph have some knowledge about the cyclical nature of the Matrix at this point, partly because Smith sensed a part of this secret from the times his codes were mingled with Neo/the One's (in the first and third Matrix movies). Aleph also deduced some of it from her conversations with the Merovingian, and confirmed her deductions with the Oracle in Chapter IV-2 of Awakenings. She talked about it with Smith between Chapters IV-3 and IV-4 of Awakenings. Although Kamala did not know the process that was "going wrong" was the reload, Smith and Aleph would have realized it.