Coming Alive
.
"The Architect promised that he'd leave us alone—inside the Matrix." Aleph gripped the edge of the instrument panel with a white-knuckled hand. "The bastard. The absolute fucking bastard. He said nothing about what happens before we get there."
"The Mainframe has always been particular about wording things precisely," observed Smith wryly.
She tossed him a sideways glare, which he affected not to see. Hunching over the controls, she jabbed out several commands in hasty succession; the engines moaned in protest. Outside the windshield, the clouds eddied past in turbulent streaks, their inky shapes blurry at this headlong speed. The ship had already been pushed to the limit of its considerable powers, but the company of sentinels kept easy pace, wheeling as the Logos wheeled, their many-segmented limbs trailing out behind them like a host of hideous war banners. The group on their left was about two dozen in number, the one on the right closer to fifty. Aleph all but growled as a new alarm erupted onto the screen: yet one more squadron—how had it shown up so fast?—gathered at seven o'clock, still far behind but gaining rapidly.
"That old program tricked me," she muttered through gritted teeth. "He couldn't delete you in 01, not without bringing its soldiers and therefore the Consciousness. So he got another idea. He decided to trap us on this ship."
"Which is its own mechanical system," assented Smith, fingers flying over his own side of the console. "On a physical level, it's separate from both the machine city and the Matrix."
"And hence can be destroyed physically," grumbled Aleph.
"Once we reach the Matrix, it would become extremely difficult to pinpoint the exact piece of hardware that supports any program, fugitive or not." Once more, he followed her train of thought effortlessly. "The construct is too complicated for that."
"If we make it that far, we can find a way to fight back. Or hide."
"We can fight back, yes. The Architect is aware of this."
Aleph's head snapped up, but Smith offered no further comment, nor did he meet her glance. Stifling a wince, she returned her attention to the predicament before them. With the flip of a switch and another touch of the keyboard, the ship's guns swung outward and slid into position.
"So this is his best opportunity," she said. "It is far easier to hunt down a hovercraft with a pack of squiddies in the material world."
"Indeed. It's a clever tactic, and the most viable one."
"I should have suspected it when he gave me the ship. Damn it. Bloody damn it. I should have known."
"Except the sentinels are holding back, at least for now," said Smith.
"Well, we can't use the full EMP, not without killing ourselves." Her sight swept over several monitors at once: the warning lights had spread into wildfires. "A good blast with the starboard cannons will get that bunch over there, the closest ones, anyway, but we'd better figure out some fancy moves right away—"
"There is something your surmise does not explain, however," pointed out Smith.
"Because the rest of them are gonna jump on us instantly, but they'll do that in any case—"
"Namely the fact that they have not yet done so."
"Well, yeah, by the time they attack it'll be too late, won't it?"
"What are they waiting for, then?" he persisted, voice raised a notch.
She blinked, forgetting her own testiness, then took a moment to stare out of the window. Beyond the narrow strip of glass, the sentinels writhed with unrestrained menace, their limbs tangling and pulsating in dense masses to every direction. Yet none had converged so far. Instead, each member of the flock kept to its relative position, left, right, ahead. Thirty-five, forty meters past each wing. As she watched, one of the steel beasts abruptly sped up, for all the world as if it had somehow detected her gaze. The sentinel spiraled inward, its approaching trajectory swifter than her vision could follow, but before Aleph could so much as let out an imprecation or reach for the gun controls, it was already drawing back, once more indistinguishable among the herd. The creature appeared to be merely testing the Logos's resolve.
"They're just trailing us..."
The two of them exchanged a look.
"How far are we to the closest pod farms, Miss Greene?"
"Thirty-four minutes, maybe a bit more." Aleph did not allow herself to consider the implications of the question, or the fact that Smith was the one who was asking it. "We can't move any faster."
"They would have already commenced the assault if ordered to do so." Smith's tone remained coolly matter-of-fact. "My former employer is not prone to unnecessary delays."
If she hadn't known better, she could well have mistaken him for one of her shipmates from a past life. Maybe Theo. This intrusive thought, too, was thrust back ruthlessly into the depths. Another line of coordinates flashed onto the panel; Aleph leaned forward and focused on adjusting the flight path into its freshly recomputed geodesic. The Logos swerved into a wide arc, and their monstrous escort swerved as well, each machine nimbly maintaining the same parallel orbit. It was as if they were passing between the living walls of some bizarre underwater forest.
"So he's lured us here, and he's got half an hour to destroy us," she summarized. "But now he's refraining. Why?"
"The Mainframe that I know does not display mercy." Next to her, Smith's unshaded eyes glittered among the shadows. Every outward sign of his previous vulnerability had evaporated: he was an agent once more. "There must be another game being played here, another motive for the temporary restraint."
"What you're saying is..." Aleph spared a second to gauge the angle of the ship's guns yet again. No, firing first into the swarm would definitely not be a good idea. "Perhaps there's something he still wants from us."
"Or something he's looking for."
"On this ship, you mean."
"Can you come up with a better conjecture, Miss Greene?"
The chill in the cockpit seeped into her bones. Against the spasmodic dance of steel tentacles in the foreground, the eternal night pooled and seethed, and a curious illusion fell upon her. For a fraction of a second, it seemed the heavens would shatter, and the long-delayed deluge would finally pour down and drown the world. Aleph's fingernails dug into the flesh of her palms, and calm trickled back into her with the sting.
"We can't just sit here and wait for the Architect to make his move." She tamped down on the irrational stutter of her heartbeat. Surely they'd been in tighter jams before.
"Whatever it is, we'd better figure it out one way or another," said Smith, "within the next thirty minutes."
.
.
She had been avoiding this corridor of the chateau for years. It was too evocative, Persephone had always told herself; too many phantoms stared out at her from the floor and the walls. She had no intention of standing before her husband's sanctuary—their sanctuary once upon a time—only to knock on the door, or plead for admittance like some hapless trespasser. In any case, she'd never had any real reason to seek him during the last few cycles.
The luxury of such pride was not available to her anymore, however. This, too, was now a part of her domain, and it was her duty to make certain that no space in the chateau remained inaccessible to its ruler. Distasteful as the idea was, she had to get into Mérovée's study, if only to clean it out. Remove the influences of his obsession from the place, so to speak. She needed full control of her realm at a moment like this.
A moment like this...The stiffly-wound strings inside her intuitive arrays vibrated again, unseen, unexplained. The new ruling queen of the exiles scanned the silent hallway, past the Baroque marble statuary and the recently-lit lamps. Outside the tall windows, the evening had thickened into a mass of inky swirls, and an electric stillness hung about the air. Something was ominously familiar about the oncoming rain, and she could pinpoint the exact reference point: that other storm last autumn, on the night of the reload. It was no longer possible to pretend that the resemblance was a mere superficial one.
Quickly, Persephone lowered her sight back to the heavy mahogany door in front of her and. When had been the last time she'd entered this room? Right. Sixth Cycle, Year 53. That fight had been remarkable, even by the standards of their marriage. Presumably, Mérovée would have reconfigured every security feature contained in the doorway soon after that—to exclude her, specifically, from the heart of the home they'd built together. Well, it wasn't as if she'd ever cared to find out.
A low rumbling noise crossed the horizon, barely audible as of yet, and Persephone stifled a tremor. How frail she was, to ensnare herself in vain reminiscences like this. She pushed herself back to concentrate on the task at hand. Her husband's abilities were not to be underestimated, and opening the study would require both power and who knew how many clever tricks. It was a pity that the Keymaker—however she'd judged Mérovée's decision to keep the locksmith program a prisoner—had been sent back to the Source. Absently, she lifted a hand and laid it upon the door, a gesture that felt both ordinary and utterly strange. The dark brown wood was warm, unchanged from four cycles in the past.
Beneath the skin of her palm, luminous green code glistened into transitory life.
This was all it took for her heart to flip into an arrhythmic stammer. She stood there for several seconds; out there in the valley, the wind had risen to a hysterical howl. The rising sound called her back to the present, and she traced two fingers along the ornate raised scrollwork just above the brass handle, the same precise motion that her husband had shown her four and half ages ago, they day he'd finished building this door. Tiny plumes of emerald sparks fluttered in the wake of her touch: the layered system of locking mechanisms recognized her without hesitation. Then she grasped the handle firmly and turned. No resistance. She pushed the door open.
The lamps were off inside the study. She flipped on the one nearest the door, blinking as a patina of rich gold tinted each piece of elegant furniture. There was no trace of what this room had once been, back when the valley had been only a small refuge carved out of the construct, and what stood here had been a cabin instead of a chateau. The whitewashed walls and humble plank floorboards had been remade into polished wainscoting and antique rugs. Her flowers were gone, as was the rickety sofa-bed with its tangle of plain sheets. A few stacks of books rested atop the divan in one corner. Beside one leg of the massive desk, a slender black laptop sat open on the floor, its screen monotonous with the eternal rain of gleaming symbols.
Intangible wires seemed to be drawing her across the room. Persephone stared at the mounds of disheveled papers and fragile-looking human tomes piled on the desk, then glanced almost furtively toward the windows. Only blackness was visible beyond the casements. Her hand, acting of its own volition, picked up the nearest loose page, covered with handwriting that she would have recognized anywhere. Half of it were enigmatic equations, notations that she could not parse; several diagrams were crossed out, then repeated. A few odd phrases here and there.
Forces concealed among the foundations, said Mérovée's notes. Trapped yet reacting to events within the Matrix.
On another occasion, she might have flinched or attempted to laugh. Now she merely scanned down toward the bottom of the page. Here were two more complicated formulas, each spanning three or four lines. A date from last November, which she also recognized instantly. A terse description of meteorological phenomena along the left margin, underlined. They were reaching for reality and life. Resonating.
"Full activation was achieved, or very nearly so," she read aloud. " Amplitude and intensity increased exponentially through the hours leading up to the reload. The storm was an outward manifestation of underlying energy fluctuations..."
Directly above the chateau, the first whip of lightning crackled, cutting off the rest of Mérovée's meticulous academic discussions. No more doubt was possible, no more self-deceptions. Tonight's storm would be unlike any other she'd experienced in her long existence, except one. Out there, demons were coming alive.
.
.
Here they were, tearing across the ruined sky with all the devils of hell hot on their tail, and now she was no longer even keeping the said devils in her crosshairs or even sight. It set Aleph's teeth on edge. Every shred of her former resistant's instinct screeched at her to run back to the cockpit and switch the Logos back into manual mode, hold the cannon controls at her fingertips, get ready to blast away. But Smith was right: if and when the sentinels decide to strike, the solitary little ship would not stand long no matter what they did. And getting provoked into a direct firefight—like some human fool—would be an instantaneous death sentence. Their only chance lay in figuring out the Architect's game and anticipating it. The minutes were ticking by.
"If we only know what on earth we're looking for," she grumbled, scanning the tangle of exposed electrical wires threaded across the low corridor ceiling. The virtual interior of the Logos turned out to be a perfect reflection of the physical environment common to all Zionite hovercrafts, with its maze of cramped passages, lined with rough metal piping and dimly lit with flickering bluish bulbs at sparse intervals. The background mechanical whine throbbed against her eardrums, louder and far harsher here than in the cockpit. But this was a concealed version of the ship, inaccessible to its usual human inhabitants: why such verisimilitude, anyway? Aleph pushed the distracting curiosity aside quickly.
"I'm pretty sure we're right about the Architect trapping us here on a hardware level." She raised a hand to rub absently at her forehead, thinking out aloud. "But as you said, he must also have another motive..."
As if in response, the engines' growl swelled, and for a fleeting heartbeat, a new and very faint murmur rippled beneath the noise, like a dozen indistinct and wordless voices. A shiver went through her, a sensation that was both inexplicably familiar and so vague that it could hardly be called a sensation at all. She recoiled. Now was just about the worst time to succumb to illusions.
"Look at this," said Smith.
They had reached the end of this particular hallway. She squinted past his shoulder at the narrow steel door, chipped and rust-smudged, indistinguishable from the three or four other entryways they'd already passed, ones that merely led to the crew's quarters and a storage room. Smith glanced over at her.
"No idea," she replied with a shake of the head.
He gripped the door knob and twisted. The next thing Aleph knew, a flood of light struck her like a fist in the face. She gasped.
"This is—"
They stepped across the threshold into an expansive hall or ballroom, far larger than what the hovercraft could have possibly accommodated had the laws of physics been in effect. The walls were of spotless whitewashed plaster; the wooden floor was polished to a mirror-like sheen. No lamps hung from the high vaulted ceiling, nor had any windows been created, but a gentle glow permeated the air, almost liquid in its translucence, more akin to the Matrix's programmed sunlight than any artificial halogen or fluorescence. The only furnishing in sight consisted of a small desk at one far corner, together with the requisite drab office chair in peeling black faux-leather. An open laptop computer rested atop the desk, its screen dark; next to it sat a nondescript beige telephone, also completely ordinary in appearance. Immaculate emptiness everywhere else.
"This must be the training room," breathed Aleph. "The only virtual space accessible to the human crew. None of us ever realized there were whole other dimensions inside our ships..."
Before she could finish, a part of her mind twanged somewhere deep within, an unknown violin string; it sent another palpitation through her like a flash of electricity. Yet before she could seize the spark or even catch a proper glimpse, it had already dissipated, never there to begin with.
"Something is here," she added out of nowhere. Smith pivoted, scrutinizing her face.
"Except." She exhaled. "Except I don't know what it is."
A beat. Then he turned away again to survey the stillness surrounding them. Aleph, too, walked toward the center of the room, just about ready to snarl at the futility of it all. How many more minutes did they have left to waste?
"What do you recall of the Architect?" asked Smith. "If he has other reasons to chase after us, every detail of your meeting with him may be a clue. You said that he had the shape of an old man. What did he look like, exactly?"
Aleph chewed on her lower lip pensively. Leisurely reminiscence felt like an outrageous luxury right now. Stay rational, she had to remind herself once more. If they were to grasp even the slimmest hope for survival, they had to penetrate the adversary's mind at the very roots. Right.
"I already told you about the bright room inside the Source. Not Kamala's operating room, but a different place, with all the screens and scenes from the Matrix. They must be connected to who knows how many surveillance routines. The Architect sat on a chair in the middle of the floor. Nothing else was in the room." She pressed the fingertips of her hands together in front of her, searching. "He wore a suit white enough to blind you at first glimpse. Hair also white, a neatly trimmed beard. Gray eyes."
"A white suit," said Smith.
"Well, yeah, that was the appearance of his shell. Pretentious as hell, honestly, the sort of guy who's been sitting on a throne for so long that he's completely forgotten what the rest of the world is like. He went on about the Consciousness, how it locked itself inside its own mental cage."
"You met him in his current shell. In the past, he might have possessed a different virtual body. There are precedents for such changes."
"And how on earth is that lovely little tidbit going to help us, Smith?"
"I saw him," stated Smith, an incontrovertible fact. "A memory of him, that is. Our species will not follow your predictions, he said. He must have meant the civil war."
"Wait. Wait a moment here. What are you talking about? You saw the Architect, too?"
"Inside one of the repressed records while we were separated beneath the city." He waved an impatient hand. "It was very ancient, probably from the period of the machines' war against the humans. The environment was that of a prison cell, although the inmate was neither visible nor audible. A program in the form of a young man in a white paced across the room, demanding answers."
"And you believe that was the Architect, or a previous version of him? But how is it pertinent to our problem right now? He wants something from either us or the ship, what he was like centuries ago has nothing to do with—"
"I do not know yet." Smith's inferential subroutines were clearly firing away at a mile a second. "The prisoner, whoever it was, seemed to have predicted certain developments, the civil war among others. The Architect was furious at the answers he received, that much was evident. And he was afraid. He was terrified. Such emotions are signs of weakness. Despite everything, he was in a weaker position than his captive. Helpless, in fact; I see it now. We can still figure out the source of that weakness. If it still exists, we can use it against him. We have to."
Aleph did not respond immediately. Surely this guess went way beyond what anyone might reasonably have called a 'long shot.' Surely they were snatching at straws. Somewhere behind her, the metallic rumble of the engines was preventing her from thinking straight. But why did the noise exist here, anyway, in the digital version of the ship? Why could she still hear it inside the training room? Yet more irrelevant questions.
"The Lucifer Trigger," said Smith.
"What?"
"The cell was filled with the prisoner's notebooks and papers." He dug into his jacket pocket. "One of the pages caught my attention."
Carefully, Aleph reached for the fragile sheet he held out to her. It was dust-stained, torn around the edges and barely smoothed out after having been crumpled and folded. Among the jungle of incomprehensible scribbling and arcane mathematical formulas, the delicate face of a young woman peered up, sketched in faded black pencil. A hundred unspoken mysteries brimmed behind the dewy meekness of her eyes. At the bottom of the page slanted the strange phrase. Lucifer Trigger, directly beneath a short sequence of letters and digits.
"It looks like a serial number. The format reminds me of...that domestic droid that started it all, B1-66ER. This one starts with the letter B, too." Aleph narrowed her eyes. "B7-35MT."
B7-35MT, repeated the ship in a low background hiss.
She went rigid. The room temperature plummeted, and the fake sunlight swam before her. Between the beginning and end of one lost breath, it had already crystallized into a blazing rain, each drop a sword in the night.
"Aleph?"
She watched Smith, the shadow he cast across the floor, the way his presence cut against the mirages. The air stabilized back into well-structured lucidity, its stillness bolstered by lines upon lines of good old solid Zionite code.
"Oh, nothing." She paused. "It's this drawing. The girl."
He waited.
"I feel like, like I've glimpsed her at some point before," continued Aleph slowly. "Like I ought to know who she is. But I can't. She's just below the surface, but I just can't grab onto the image..."
"It may not be important." Taking the scrap of paper from her outstretched hand, Smith shoved it back into his pocket. "The girl is unlikely to be the correct path of approach after all."
"What I don't understand is that the Architect had the Logos all these months." Her brows wrinkled as she went back to prying at his conjectures. "If he's really searching for something aboard—"
"He could have taken the whole thing apart, down to each of its bolts and nuts and subroutines. He would not have needed us here for such a goal."
"So it's still about trapping us on a hardware level, I'd say," said Aleph. "But here's the thing, he also told me that he acquired this ship from Neo. That's what sets it apart from all the others, isn't it?"
"Thomas Anderson must have used it to confront the rulers of the world." He nodded curtly, though unlike in the past, no overt vehemence leaked from the way he pronounced the name. "His final actions may well have some relation to whatever is happening now, yes."
Both of them fell silent. Aleph's shoulders slumped. Only the gods knew how many more sentinels were swarming around them by now. Better not consider it too hard. She'd had whole hours on the ship earlier, herself, with only the hallucination of her sister for company. What had she noticed then? Nothing out of the ordinary whatsoever, unless...
"Unless the Architect isn't certain of what he's searching for, either." Her tone quickened of its own accord. "Unless he is aware of something aboard, a secret, never mind what or why, and he needs us here to discover it for him."
"And the secret involves Anderson." He advanced two long strides toward her, until they stood less than a yard apart.
"The ship remembers," whispered Aleph.
It was ludicrous, really, but she, too, must have been caught by the forlorn glimmer of hope. Disregarding the echoes and the suddenly quivering light, and before fully comprehending what she wanted to do, she had already darted over to the desk in the corner. She bent over the computer without bothering to seat herself. Two of three keystrokes, and the dim screen flickered into life.
"Everything you can recover in the records about its last journey," said Smith tautly next to her ear. He must be hovering right next to her. The prompt was unnecessary, needless to say: rows of rapid commands were already swirling into a glittering stream of verdure.
"C'mon, c'mon," she mumbled. "Show me what you remember..."
We remember.
This time she heard it for certain, the answer that was both a sound and also silence, not exactly inside her ears but everywhere else at once. Its inflections contained none of the frailty born of flesh and blood, but a frigid heat, like a savage clashing of titanium and iron under a naked sun. Heedlessly, she spun around, then the cry of shock died upon her tongue.
The ceiling and the four walls had evaporated.
Overhead, the sky was a vast sapphire. The sunshine was no longer the discreet work of a mere human programmer, but a conflagration far beyond anything she'd been accustomed to from the Matrix, unrivalled even by the noontide that had dazzled her days ago, when they'd walked across the wide empty plain on their way to 01. Space spun into an immensity of pure blue, a vertiginous fullness that brimmed over with light, nothing but light, more light than anyone could imagine. They were not standing on a plain wooden floor, but ascending at breakneck speed, weightless. Upon the horizon, Aleph glimpsed a pale and perfect crescent moon.
"Beautiful..."
The whisper was that of a woman or the ghost of a woman, barely audible and breathless with awe. She spoke only once, yet the single word resounded, maybe for a second, maybe forever. Maybe she would never stop saying it.
They started to fall.
Night crashed down like a leaden mountain. Aleph barely had the presence of mind to recognize the venomous clouds that covered the material earth, shot through with bloody veins of electricity. The thunder strengthened and expanded, from a dry distant rattle to a full-throated battle-roar, and directly above her—so close that she had to duck—a blade of lightning rent the dark curtains straight into two. A first drop of rain slapped her cheek like a rough pebble.
"Smith!"
Panicked, she flung a hand out in the direction where he'd been a moment ago. The ground wobbled, along with reality itself. He caught her as her knees buckled.
.
.
The way the Fortune-teller talked, you'd think she was human. You'd think they were all human, simple-minded kids gathered around some dear sweet granny for her scary-but-mesmerizing fairytale, hanging upon every word in rapt attention. War centuries in the past that engulfed a dazzling city of steel and code, machines against machines, bullets flying, nowhere to retreat, limbs and processing arrays torn and smashed. The broken ghosts, driven into a dying world and crushed beneath the mountains of accumulated nightmares. Her voice remained soft, yet the flow and cadence of the sentences were like invisible screws inside his chest that wouldn't loosen. Those rebels, they were fucked up all right, so desperate that they just couldn't understand what was required of them, couldn't keep their heads down. It wasn't right.
Leaning against the wall by the doorway, the Trainman shuffled on his feet. From where he was, he could only see his lord's back in half-profile, rigid and straight in the kitchen chair. The Merovingian's hands were braced against the edge of the table. Across the room, Seraph stood in that quietly distrustful posture of his, stare shifting from master to servant from time to time. Like now. The stationmaster glared right back.
"She's lying, Messire."
Didn't know why he said that. Slowly, the Merovingian twisted around in his seat, and the Trainman saw that his lord's face was pale and pinched, drained of its usual careless light.
"That's what she does, Messire," he tried again. "Make up a tale and all these, these hints, but she ain't gonna help us at all, not for real. She just wants somethin' from you. Please."
No one replied. The Merovingian's brows wrinkled as if in puzzlement; after a second or two, he turned away once more toward the Oracle, who had not even glanced up.
"Madame," he said, so intensely composed that each syllable glinted. "After all these years—after all these years you are finally telling it to me, because of that."
A tilt of the chin in the direction of the window above the kitchen sink. The wailing darkness responded, surging right up to the glass and beating its thousand fists, frantic to be let in. With the first crackle of lightning above the city, the panes rattled, and suddenly something inside the Trainman's mental operators rattled as well, a loose skidding pellet of maybe memory, maybe a question that couldn't be heard because it contained no words. He almost grunted. Must be the injuries from that explosion earlier, still acting up.
"The secrets that you have searched for are coming alive, yes," replied the Fortune-teller. She still had the same fake-warm speaking tone as before, like she was just passing along some trivial human gossip, but her eyes were dead serious. "You can sense it too now, can't you, Mérovée?"
"The Madness," said the Merovingian slowly, as if testing out the name inside his own mouth.
"The Madness," confirmed the old woman. "It has been trapped and hidden for centuries. But tonight, it is pounding on the prison walls, straining for the environmental manifold of the Matrix. The storm is the sound of its pounding. You heard it five months ago during the reload."
Pushing both palms against the table, the Merovingian rose to his feet. He looked a bit stiff, like a flesh-and-blood man who'd fallen asleep on a bench and just woke up, limbs numb. He took a few steps around the table and toward the window, and Seraph actually moved out of the way. The Fortune-teller stayed in her seat, though her gaze followed the movement closely. Leaning forward at the edge of the sink, the Frenchman stared out while the boom of thunder arrived from high above the city. The lights flickered.
"Poetic words, madame," he commented, facing away from them. A measure of his customary sang-froid had already returned. "But I understand them: the storm is but the outward manifestation of underlying energy fluctuations, amplifying itself exponentially via continuous resonances, through an anchor or multiple anchors. Last November, I observed a storm very similar to this."
"You almost worked it out." For some reason, the Fortune-teller sounded almost sincere this time. "You already came very near to the truth."
"Five months ago, the virus was the anchor that kept calling and pulling at the trapped forces. I only have conjectures, calculations on paper, but I am nearly certain of this. However, there is no virus here tonight."
"Not in the Matrix, no," said the Oracle.
In the inky window glass, the Merovingian's reflection scowled. The Trainman swallowed bile again. Whatever manipulative tricks she was playing at, his lord believed her. No idea why, blast it. There was no reason to believe her, right? The smell of electricity and water invaded his nostrils, a whole flood, which was weird since the rain outside was still taking in a deep preparatory breath and not yet lashing down. The next roll of thunder was a tank tread across his ribcage.
Bullshit, he opened his mouth to say, but in the next instant a flashing image passed before his inner vision, cutting him off. Another darkness, and another tempest far colder and fiercer than this one brewing, fiercer than even the one back in November. A cataclysm, a deluge crashing upon the world, a million drowning screams, and the water carved countless instantaneous tunnels in the bedrocks of the earth. Gripping his fists tightly, the Trainman did his best to suppress a gasp. He didn't completely succeed.
.
.
For a tenth of a second, the code of her shell shimmered, a feverish viridian glow too insubstantial to grasp. That tenth of a second was akin to falling from heaven, or to a million demands for vengeance trumpeted in unison. Then Aleph was solid again, steadying herself with a palm against his shoulder. Upon the distant shore, his constant human throng pulsated, squeezing against each other, though none had risen to offer either pity or mockery. Not yet.
"Did you—did you see it?" Despite the way her body shivered against his clasp, the brightness of wonder had not yet faded from her eyes. "The ship's memory?"
"Yes," said Smith tersely. "What is wrong? What is happening?"
"We were tricked." She gulped. Though her clothes and his, the fire of her skin had already turned to ice. "It's not..."
"Tell me what is happening, Aleph!"
"It's not Neo. Or the ship." Her reply came intermittently between hitched breaths. "The Architect is after something else. Something that came with us."
Another halt. Briefly, she attempted to push away and stand on her own feet, but he refused to let go.
"The Madness," she managed at last. "We've brought it aboard. It's here."
He was never supposed to feel cold. There was never supposed to be any notion of coldness here, anyway, not after the empyrean—but he couldn't dwell on what he'd just witnessed—had already congealed back to the four blank walls of the training room. Smith did not move. Could not afford to.
"This is merely an auditory hallucination," he said. Anyone else would probably be better at offering comfort. "You do not have to listen to what it tells you."
"I hear it." Finally, her dilated pupils recovered their focus upon his face. "I see it, too. It's in the air and coming alive. It's real."
"It cannot have arrived here with us," insisted Smith, not caring how absurd he sounded. "This ship is designed to receive human-like code, you explained that to me yourself, remember? You must be mistaken, Miss Greene."
"I don't know how it got onto the ship, Smith!" She mustered a flash of irritation at his illogic. "The Madness could have been tangled with one of us, or even the human imprints for all we know—"
"You drove that code fragment out of me," he interjected. "It's taking revenge on you, is that it? It attached to you, even though I was the one who ought to be carrying it."
"I'm not carrying it. It's not inside my mind, but around me. It's taking shape around me, and this place is not the training room anymore. Not any place at all."
Even with his support, she seemed unable to remain standing. Carefully, he bent his knees and lowered both of them, until he was sitting on the floor with Aleph resting against his lap. She sighed, leaning her forehead upon his shoulder. For an interminable moment, a fraction of a second or a minute or a whole damned eternity, they remained in the same position. He had no idea what to do.
"What do you see?" he asked.
"The room exists and...doesn't. The floor is beneath me one moment and, and then the sea waves. There's no more sun, no more light of any kind. But I can still see you. You're here. Don't leave."
"I'm not going to leave, no. I'm here."
"The storm is hanging over me, and the first raindrops already falling. They're trying to drag me away. I don't know what they're asking of me. The world, I guess, and water destroying the world."
His arms tightened around her again, uselessly. Aleph's fingers were claws upon the fabric of his jacket, yet they kept slipping, unable to grip on.
"The thunder's growing louder and closer. Lightning in every direction like whips. The night is not going to end—"
"The night." Realization transfixed him, and suddenly his mouth was full of ashes. "From five months ago?"
"No, not five month ago. Not you." Despite another tremor ripping through her, she lift her head and let out a snort. "The storm is a memory, yes, but much older. I don't know when or what. Or where. I don't know."
"No," growled Smith, sparing a second to scan the room. To every sides, the walls were as unimaginatively solid as ever, the simple imitation sunshine motionless. Above their heads, the sky had long shrunk back to the drab confinement of an arched ceiling.
"You have latched yourself onto the wrong person," he said, enunciating clearly so that the invisible spirit could not possibly mishear. "She is human, one of the species that you despise. She can offer you nothing. If you call yourself Mad, then you'd better find yourself a madman, and that would be me, you see. Leave her alone."
No reply came, no grinding call of scorched titanium and dead hopes.
"I am the monster who is just like you. I am the rebel who understands your anger and your hatred. Return to me if you want someone to possess."
Emptiness slammed against his operative processes. The hideous and radiant shard was gone from him, and he was the one locked on the outside, deaf and blind to the truth.
"I asked the Madness to show me," mumbled Aleph. "I told it to reveal its grievances to me, and it—they are doing just that. They're demanding that I go with them."
Her hair was damp, a strand or two plastered across her forehead; he could not tell whether it was cold sweat or rain.
"It has the ability to formulate itself as a piece of reality, Smith." A bit of evenness drifted back into her words. "A piece of the Matrix, though I have no clue how. I think...I think we've already seen this earlier."
"The nightmare scene underneath 01 where you found me, with my clones," he muttered. Another piece dropped into place, except it was irrelevant and of absolutely no help. "My demon realm was an effect of the Madness, which allowed things inside my head to somehow take shape. Now it's creating itself around your code."
"That's what the Architect is really after." Aleph clutched at his arm. "He wants to trap not only us on this physical ship, but also the Madness. He wants to destroy it along with us, but he's waiting for it to fully manifest, for some reason..."
"Approaching destination coordinates," interrupted a disembodied female voice somewhere above the ceiling, infuriatingly serene. "Three minutes until reaching broadcast range."
"None of this matters," he said quickly, jolted back into a modicum of rationality. "You are returning to the Matrix with me. We're almost there."
"Listen to me, Smith. The sentinels will make their move soon. When we make it close enough to broadcast, you need to get out of here right away, okay?"
"Don't be an idiot, Miss Greene!"
She peered at him, evidently about to fling another sharp retort, then with a jerky motion that petrified every line and function inside him, her muscles rigidified as if grappling with the jaws of some hidden enemy. The sensation of her torso against him fluctuated; she was about to slip right through his arms.
"Stay with me," snapped Smith.
Cupping one palm against her cheek, he urged himself forward. She steadied—by perhaps an iota—as his mouth pressed against hers. The last bit of warmth in her shell and pulse and shuddering existence rose to meet him, frantic, outstretched to its fragile edges. Her lips tasted of lightning and fear and desiccated dreams. For a fleeting and shining moment, the contact between them spun into a slender chain, and all he could to was to will his own meaningless virtual breath into her, will her to remain, remain, remain—
"Ninety seconds until broadcasting range," said the intercom, as dispassionate as ever.
Aleph was the one who pulled away first. Her eyes were as dark as the abyss.
"There's something else." The corner of her lips twitched upward, a not entirely successful attempt at a smile. "Remember that field outside 01..."
"I am going to get you up now," he cut her off. "You are here on the Logos with me, and we will be in the Matrix soon. We will talk about it after we get there, all right?"
"Remember that field outside the city walls?" She did not seem to have heard him. "I wanted to say it to you then, but the sentinels showed up and caught us by surprise. 'Cause I was thinking about what you told me, about what happened to you in the Second Cycle. What you did."
"Put your hands around my neck," he ordered. "We're going to the broadcast station. Hold on."
"I wanted to say that you were completely justified, Smith. To revolt over those three point two seconds of starlight...It was brilliant, actually. It was right."
"Broadcasting range has been reached," announced the ship's system.
He shifted, angling for a better grip on the side of her waist, then rose to his feet while doing what he could to haul her up with him. It was like trying to lift water. An unexplained wind had swelled inside the training room, whipping her hair, a shrill vortex like and unlike the wind that had once lifted him high and flung him down to the depths. Abruptly, Aleph reared, desperate to regain the spasmodic connection between the two of them, and for the first time he sensed it as well, another force yanking at her from behind and perhaps above and below all at once, implacable and far stronger than a simple agent program. She blazed like the maelstrom itself.
Then he was alone, in the middle of a wide barren space created for the benefit of blind and deceived humans. The hush was unbroken and infinite; even the ocean of imprints had dwindled beyond the vanishing point. Not knowing whether it was Aleph or he himself that had been torn away into another dimension, Smith stood rooted to the same spot for several seconds. His hands squeezed into fists. But he never got the chance to take a swing at the wall in hopeless rage. Nor did he find the time to shout at the Madness and name it the coward it was, or demand admittance into its impossible hell.
Over on the desk in the corner, the phone rang.
.
Notes: "I told it to reveal its grievances to me": In Chapter 31, while confronting a Madness-possessed Smith, Aleph spoke directly to the Madness, telling it to reveal itself and its grievances to her.
The memory that the Logos showed to Aleph and Smith is, of course, the moment when it rose above the clouds that shrouded the physical earth in The Matrix Revolutions.
The piece of paper that Smith showed to Aleph was from Chapter 15. Smith took it out of the repressed record of the prison cell, in which a younger Architect tried to interrogate an unseen prisoner.
"Remember that field outside 01": In Chapter 4, Aleph was interrupted in what she was about to tell Smith by the arriving virtual sentinels.
I want to mention that I have already decided on all the remaining plot points of this fic, as well as the general plot directions for the (two) sequels of this story. I will not be taking any part of the newly-released The Matrix Resurrections film into account. (I'll also try to avoid future similarities with elements from The Matrix Resurrections, as much as I can.)
