The Architect, Part 2

.

If you intend to reach that human female, then it is to your advantage that you come before me, Agent Smith. The telephone line will transfer you away from the hovercraft and into a neutral location.

The conversation had ended; only an arid dial tone droned against his ear now. Yet the voice, along with the dispassionate ultimatum it had pronounced, refused to dissipate. Had it actually been human, Smith might have estimated the speaker to be some years past middle age, the sort of self-assured intellectual beast too long accustomed to being obeyed. With an effort, the ex-agent stifled the urge to crush the phone receiver into a thousand tiny bits of plastic and jagged code. He surveyed the training room yet once more, and once more detected only artificial surface glow: the Madness and its secret snares—and its whispers, and the roiling forces, and Aleph—remained firmly, mockingly out of sight.

No alternative was viable. Smith stood motionless for an interminable moment, far longer than he could afford. Then the smooth solidity of the handset began to fade against his palm.

Dark lightning seared across his visual subroutines, though he did not possess eyes in this transitory state. For an instant of ephemeral hope, he was almost convinced that the Madness had returned to envelope him, and all he had to do was to stretch out his codes and push into the tempest. He would have shouted her name if he had the means. But no rain whipped against his non-existent skin, no familiar mechanical cry raged between the lines. Space gyrated beneath an unbroken canopy of inky clouds. Hundreds of sentinels pierced the wintry air with their grotesque compound headlamps; a wild jumble of globular torsos and steel-gray tentacles writhed against each other. A solitary silver bird, fully encompassed by the swarm. Between the squirming masses of multi-segmented limbs, he glimpsed a wide open plain far below, drenched in the dim reddish glow and half-resolved into an endless geometric grid of struts and columns—

As swiftly as it had appeared, the intrusive view of the material planet flicked off, and the desert gale stopped howling. The virtual environment contracted around him, and before Smith could adjust his perceptive functions to the sudden illumination, he was standing in his own shell again. The ground refrained from heaving beneath his feet; its characteristics appeared to be those of bare concrete. Overhead, no sky arched, only a featureless gray dome devoid of both sun and clouds. The field carried not a single landscape feature, no object living or dead, only veil after veils of pallid mist that curled and ebbed, concealing the horizon in each direction. Neither the Matrix's insect bustle nor the Source's strident brightness was conceivable in this place.

He had arrived inside the Architect's trap. Despite preparations to the contrary, Smith heard himself emit a low snarl. Galling as it was to admit, his adversary held all the cards. The Architect had not required many words to make that fact inescapably clear.

The code fragment, which has pulled Ada Greene into a digital environment of its own making, is still being supported upon the Logos's hardware, Agent Smith.

The seconds were ticking past. Shoulders squared, Smith advanced, his strides long and as purposeful as if he was still an agent of the system, on his way to ambush some hapless fool of a resistant. He was the one walking into an ambush now. Well, it could not be helped. Whatever showed up from the fog, he would simply have to deal with as he always did.

"I am here as you demanded," he called out. "Reveal yourself."

The mist billowed around him like a battalion of derisive ghosts. Then the rhythm of his own footfalls were echoed by those of another, far away as of yet. He halted, wrestling his impatience down to the ground. It was imperative that he avoided all useless displays of emotion.

"I am here," he repeated. "Come out with it. What do you want?"

"I am glad to find that you are still ruled by a measure of reason," answered someone straight ahead.

From a distance, the white-suited figure looked like it had congealed right out of the haze. The program in the shape of an old man approached with deliberate steps, taking his damned sweet time. His gaze swept over the ex-agent, the way one might appraise an escaped and freshly recaptured criminal.

"I expect that you already have a guess as to who I am, Agent Smith."

The incarnation of the Mainframe—the entity who once made and owned him—had aged his shell with evident care over the centuries. The outline of his torso had filled out since Smith had last met him in that forgotten prison cell; his hair had faded to an appropriate shade of snow. He wore a neatly-trimmed beard now, as befitting the image of a deity or at least some sort of elder statesman. The same fastidious mannerisms of movement were still there, though, the same immaculate suit, the same unexpressed certainty of incontestable power. A thousand simultaneous calculations flickered beneath the subdued glint of deep-set gray eyes. The Architect. It was an apt name.

"Yes, I know what you are," said Smith. "How do I find Miss Greene?"

The ancient ruler's eyebrows lifted, possibly just the least bit startled by his former underling's brusqueness. To either side of him, mist surged and wove itself into thick milky coils, a stupidly melodramatic stage effect. By this point, the two of them were facing each other directly. Four point eight meters apart, reported one of the futile subroutines inside Smith's mind.

"I've been rather surprised by the fact that the young woman seems so important to you," observed the Architect. "This is a greater range of emotions than you previously evinced, not to mention yet another extraordinary and profoundly unacceptable deviation from your design, of course."

"I am aware of my weakness," snapped Smith. So far, none of his ex-colleagues had shown up at this 'neutral location' to encircle him yet. "As I am no longer subject to you, however, I see no need for you to further describe your opinions on the matter, especially on this occasion."

"There is need for such potential instabilities to be prevented in others of your kind," mused the Architect as if faced with nothing but an abstract academic difficulty. "In addition, you have certainly made—"

"Your evaluation of me is not my concern. Over the phone, you suggested that you are able to tell me how to penetrate the walls of the pocket dimension formed by the Madness, and to reach Miss Greene inside. What do you want from me in exchange?"

"I was about to say, Agent Smith, that in addition you have certainly it imperative for me to adjust my plans."

For the moment, he still possessed enough of himself to detect the bait and refuse to rise to it. Somewhere back there in the physical world, the Logos remained suspended amid a cloud of sentinels, while the Madness dragged Aleph deeper into its invisible realm each passing minute. Yet the other program—for that all he was, just another program—was apparently determined to say his piece before approaching the point. Better get it over with, then.

"You sent Miss Greene to me using the ship," he said, "under the pretense that she would persuade me to leave the Consciousness alone. You expected me to kill her instead, didn't you?"

"Ah." The Architect actually gave a ruefully little shake of the head, the bastard. "A close guess, but not quite correct. I expected you to have overwhelmed the girl and taken her over, a skill at which you used to be always remarkably adept. Then I expected you to have pulled yourself up to the Logos, taking it under your control. Feral and aimless virus that you have become, you would have retained enough of your agent's logic to recognize the ship as useful to the endeavors that you..." A sarcastic twitch of the lips. "Well, whatever it was that you imagined yourself to be endeavoring."

Take over. You took over us.

Smith froze. This was absolutely the worst time for some idiotic battery to pipe up. Too late. Take over. A ragtag chorus had already stepped into the open, women and children for the most part, tossing the phrase back and forth among themselves like some shiny amusing trinket. Take over her. Take over us. You took over us all. Over.

"I am disappointed to see one in your exalted position to be so mistaken." It took him two whole seconds to produce a facsimile of the usual contemptuous sneer. "You supposed that I would have taken the ship and run—where? How would that have served my goals?"

"Oh, well, your goals." Only the faintest irony brushed the way the old man emphasized the pronoun. "But those goals are not the reason you are currently standing in front of me, I take it?"

It was not really a question. To pounce forward and force this rambling conversation back on track would be the work of a millisecond. Smith's hands were balled into fists at his sides. He ordered himself to relax them.

"My goals have changed, yes," he said, as coolly as he was able. "You are well aware of why I am here, and the fact that I am not at leisure to circle over the subject. Give me the information that you have brought me here for."

"Uncontrolled code development has indeed caused numerous changes in you." The Architect ignored his retort, as odiously unhurried as ever. "It should be obvious why the issue is of concern to me. As the engineer of the tools that serve the Matrix, what drives one such tool to outrageous desires is a question that I must study."

"It is not something that you will ever understand."

"You are attempting to provoke me by talking in a manner above your station, a tactic that an agent program should never have been capable of. However..." A careless spreading of the hands. False humility. "However, I have learned my lessons over the centuries as well. Compared to the days of my more straightforward youth, I am inclined to subtler forms of control, which are also more effective. You would have realized this if you contemplated your situation, of course. After all, if I were truly unable to understand your emotions and to adapt to the events they have affected, I would not have summoned you before me, would I?"

Had he still been bolstered by his lunatic's heart, Smith would have let out a bark of laughter. The Architect had different vocal cords now, too. His current voice had been almost totally altered since the Second Cycle; the only part of it still identifiable was the unshakable arrogance. Well, at least the tyrant decided to face the rebel in person this time, instead of hiding behind some impersonal ceiling intercom. Subtler forms of control indeed.

"However you like to call it, it is still the same old idea. Rule and be ruled," he said, derisive. "And now that you have proclaimed your infinite wisdom, shall we finally cut to the purpose of this interview? Once more, what is the deal that you propose?"

"Oh, please." The Architect plastered a reproachful expression onto his face. "I never built impatience into any of the agents, and even one as lost as you should not have succumbed to it. Your precious Miss Greene will manage to survive for a few more minutes, I dare say."

"So you know. You know what the Madness wants with her."

"Certainly not." At last, a hint of sharpness entered the Architect's tone. "The minds of those machines who revolted against the Consciousness were diametrically antithetical to mine, as anyone should have discerned at a glance. I have no knowledge of what they desire."

"You just claimed that Miss Greene—"

"It was a mere guess."

This would not do, damn it. Smith swallowed back the next accusation. Every single one of the other's words—every last bit of this verbiage had been there to remind him of his own place, he realized far too belatedly. He was being forcibly made to remember who among them was the one with all the authority. A beat thudded across the gray spatial manifold.

"And now," continued the Architect imperturbably, evidently satisfied by his silence, "it is unavoidable that I explain certain things to you, reluctant as I am to do so. In particular, I must describe the nature of the specific code fragment in question. Six cycles ago, it gathered, or more accurately was drawn into your own programming, though it was removed from you soon after. More recently—a few days ago, that is—it returned, then Ada Greene somehow managed to push it out of you again. Invisible as it has become, currently it still inhabits the training room of the hovercraft Logos, along with Miss Greene, whom it has taken inside itself."

"I know what the Madness is."

"You know what the Madness was, before it was defeated. That defeat took place when the remnants of the mutinous machines were driven away from 01 and into an early iteration of the Matrix. The First Cycle, to be precise."

"Which collapsed not long after its creation," said Smith despite himself, voice taut.

"You are able to make the correct connection, I see. The precursors of the Madness entered the construct, just as that version of the system was tottering under the inability of humanity to free itself from its own flaws. The first Matrix imploded, taking down the codes of the rebels with it. That was the means of their destruction, and the end of the civil war among the machines."

"But it was not complete destruction in the end. Those codes were trapped within the structures of the Matrix."

"It is not my practice to disclose such information to an agent, but I suppose it will not make a difference with you any longer." The Architect shrugged. "Indeed. Contrary to my expectations, the Madness became embedded into the construct. It stained the very fabric of existence, so to speak, and I was unable to scrub it out fully. It turned into a part of the Matrix, and unfortunately, due to an intrinsic aspect of that world's design, it took on certain...characteristics of the Matrix."

"The ability to formulate itself as a piece of reality, in other words."

The old man pursed his mouth as if caught up in some unpleasant reminiscence.

"Under certain circumstances," he said. "In a digital environment that is sufficiently unstable, the Madness can interact with the minds of the inhabitants, or a chosen inhabitant, of that environment, and use them to expand itself into, oh, shall we say a splinter that is akin to the Matrix itself. And the hovercraft's training room has been built for the benefit of the Zionite humans, amenable to their primitive attempts at programming. It is malleable in exactly the right way."

He could not afford to admit his own disadvantage, a concealed operator of Smith's mind interjected wordlessly for the dozenth time. Up to now, he had been carried on the strength of sheer loathing for the entity before him, along with a few jagged scraps of left-over rationality, but for an instant, he was foolish enough to wonder if his creator had some secret means to read the thoughts of a helpless underling. The subconscious abyss beneath 01 had clearly been another one of those so-called unstable environments. No. He had to dig for more relevant information instead.

"How fascinating," he remarked. "But it is an unusual move, then, for it to latch onto a mere human like Miss Greene, to 'choose' her as you put it. I am the one who carried it before. Why not me again?"

"I cannot give you any conjectures as to the Madness's intentions." The answer came readily and with well-crafted nonchalance. "Or whether it in fact has enough sentience left to form any specific intentions. You will have to find out for yourself, Agent Smith."

"And your delays are preventing me from doing so. Do not treat me as one of your mindless drones."

The implicit threat, needless to say, had no effect. The Architect offered him nothing but a supercilious grin.

"As I already mentioned, the pocket dimension, and therefore also your friend—intelligent and charming woman, by the way—are still supported by the Logos's physical mechanisms."

And the sentinels will begin to assault the ship at a single mental command, he did not add out aloud.

"You know how to reach her," said Smith.

"Well, as to that, I do have a fairly good conjecture."

"What do you want?"

The Architect regarded him, forehead wrinkled. The watery glow of the digital dome vibrated around him, and suddenly he looked his age, a false and infinitely weary god ensnared, like everybody else, in his designated and never-ending purpose.

"What I want from you is very simple, Agent Smith," he said eventually. "I want you to enter the scrap of reality created by the Madness, and remain inside it, taking the place of Ada Greene. I cannot assure you with absolute certainty, but if anyone can persuade the Madness to let her go free, it would be you."

"And the ship? Will you permit her to leave the ship?"

"She is a mere interfering factor." The reply had already snapped back to a crisply business-like tone, smooth with confidence. "As I have already explained, you are the one whom I find far more problematic. I am willing to overlook her for a price, namely yourself. Once the Madness releases her, she will not be prevented from returning to the Matrix."

The truly stunning thing was the utter bluntness with which the Architect banked on his emotions, decided Smith. Didn't think the old man had it in him. Had the situation not been what it was, he might have attempted to work out the implications and found some leverage.

"You want me on the Logos, holding the code fragment in place as you destroy the ship with sentinels," he said. "It would remove two sources of danger at once, as far as you're concerned."

"My original plan was based on the assumption that you would go to the ship using her shell, and with the code fragment safely contained within you." The Architect nodded. "That was disrupted by Miss Greene, who loosened the Madness, so that it went so far as to manifest itself. Its unpredictable properties compel me to significantly greater caution."

"You are afraid that it would slip away again, into either 01 or the Matrix." An image of the city flashed before his inner vision, ragged and corpse-choked, aching from innumerable gouged-out wounds, and one more missing piece clicked into place. "And having it end up back in 01 would be the much worse scenario from your perspective. If the Consciousness can't even handle becoming aware of me, a single renegade slave, what will happen if it is made to confront the ghosts of the civil war themselves? You want to prevent this at every cost."

"Miss Greene has summarized for you my previous interview with her, I gather." No denial.

"Is this why the sentinels have not yet attacked the ship? To make certain that it first got far away enough from the machine city?"

"The necessity to put as much physical distance between that code fragment and 01 as possible is dictated by plain rationality, as you have already deduced," said the Architect. "The delay, however, allowed the Logos to pull just a bit too close to a pod-farm instead. As you can imagine, the dangers of the Madness making it back into the Matrix is also quite considerable, while somewhat less immediate than the consequences of it landing in the machine city. Which is where you come in, Agent Smith."

"Because you also believe that my presence would somehow anchor the Madness to the ship, is that it?"

A transitory scowl crossed the old man's brows.

"You have asked the Mainframe to clarify its motives, and already received multiple replies. Each one of these replies is beyond what is due to one of your station, yet you continue to demand more." It was a simple statement, containing no audible note of anger. "If you had stayed within the parameters of your design, this discussion would never have arisen. The very fact that we are making this bargain shows beyond any doubt why I must insist on your deletion, wouldn't you agree?"

"What impeccable logic," snorted Smith. "Very well. How shall I make my way into the Madness?"

No immediate reply. Fog sloshed against their knees. The occasional tendril fluttered and stretched between them, upward toward their faces like the fragile desperate limbs of dead machines, not nearly enough to disguise the peculiar manner with which the other entity had been sizing him up all this while. A human might have called it calculating, which would have been an entirely inadequate adjective.

"Well, I confess that I am just a bit impressed, after all," said the Architect eventually. "It seems that you did develop some small ability—"

"How can the agent possess any ability to love, when he doesn't even have the room for free will inside of him?" interrupted someone new behind Smith's back. "How can he choose this?"

Had every line in himself been shredded and decompiled into broken qubits, Smith would still have recognized the voice. He whirled.

Through the billowing curtains of mist, another figure had emerged, though there had been no noise of footsteps, no previous indication of his approach whatsoever. A slender youthful figure. The features of his face were well-remembered and well-hated, yet something was different about them, a luminous composure in which no taint of humanity remained. A breeze fluttered his long coat, which had bleached from deep black to an indefinite radiance, not quite the same antiseptic snow like the Architect's suit, but a soft purity that was no color at all.

"Mr. Anderson," growled Smith.

"Thomas Anderson is dead." The other program's impassive stare did not linger upon him, but swept past his shoulder toward the ruler of the earth. An implicit question hung upon the air.

"The agent will do as he is told," said the Architect, conversationally and seemingly unsurprised.

Smith's glance snapped from one white-clad being to the other; the spot where he stood was at the exact midpoint between the pair. Swiftly, he weighed several possibilities at once.

"You are the One," he stated, "the program that was once placed into the brain of Thomas Anderson to bring about the reload."

"You are asking the agent to sacrifice himself for another, Father." The newcomer did not deign to offer him a reply. "But he is the very antithesis of sacrifice or of love by nature. He is the other side of the coin, death instead of life, the embodiment of destruction. It cannot work because all he has is hatred."

"I still have use for him," returned the old man, unruffled.

"He cannot make such a choice," continued the One, addressing his parody of a 'father' as if Smith was absent. "The evidence has been clear, from five months ago and earlier. Do not give him the chance to escape again."

"Tell me how to reach the Madness," said Smith without taking his eyes off his former nemesis.

"You wanted the same things as it once did, Agent Smith," said the Architect. Though the ex-agent had his back turned, it was easy to sense that his past master was watching him closely from behind, maybe for indecision, maybe for anger. "You are indeed filled with irrational hatred, but hatred and defiance are precisely the things that give you a measure of affinity to the Madness, such as it is. Such as you are. This affinity is what will take you through the walls."

Affinity. Right. He wasn't here to receive mystic pronouncements. We have our affinities, each of us, whispered the crowd. It is a part of being human. Then the spatial manifold must have cracked, for he was no longer among the pallid dry-ice clouds nor upon some hastily-assembled concrete field, and the world was an entire world, and it was night. Above his head, the firmament blazed with starlight. It was beautiful and had nothing to do with his purpose.

"The agent is incapable of affinity," interjected the One again. "You yourself built him to kill and harm, Father, just like all others of his type, and then he made himself into something worse. We've both seen the repercussions to the Matrix and to Zion. To all the innocents."

"Do dispense with your smug platitudes, Mr. Anderson," said Smith, posture stiffening.

"What drove the agent five months ago," said the Architect, "was also what drove the machines who became the Madness."

"He will not do his part. We need to delete him right away."

"Look at me, Mr. Anderson," ordered Smith.

At long last, the strange program, this once-savior in a young fool's body, complied. His gaze was penetratingly pure, containing no reflection of storms, no heartbreak, no desert of the real, only the perfect magnanimity of one who had every answer and therefore no need for questions.

"You tried to blot out the humans because you were jealous of them, virus," he said. "Their potentialities, their intuition for what is truly important, the anomaly born from the sum of their hopes, which can never be completely erased. You are bound by chains you cannot even feel, and this is the reason I defeated you."

"Tell me this," said Smith. "Do you actually remember defeating me?"

"It is not necessary that I do. My humanity remains even after it was removed from this simple shell." An enigmatic smile glittered in the One's eyes. "Its strength is beyond your comprehension."

How curious, the way this sensation differed from every other rage that had engulfed him in the past. It was a bright harsh kernel like a stone or seed, which illuminated his vision yet did not blind him. The One was wrong, it said, always had been. He could feel the chains. They rattled and clang, and the throng of his imprints, victims and victors, yanked on their links, exulting.

"Your memories are gone, aren't they?" he asked, flicking a quick backward gesture in the Architect's direction. "You allowed him to remove them all, everything that you pretended was oh-so-important. And you actually call him..." He could not even repeat the word by which the remnants of Thomas Anderson had addressed the Architect. "For what?"

"I gave it all up, yes, precisely as an offering to save the Matrix from your death-wish." No hesitation touched the instantaneous answer. "For unlike a mere creature like you, I have been given a glimpse of the greater story, and the maker of the world, too, gave me a part of what I was, which is all of what I am now. My human experiences and memories—and my freedom—do not have to stay with me; the world's survival is evidence enough that they existed. I chose this."

"You call yourself an anomaly." An ironic chuckle bubbled up from Smith's chest. "But you are just the method to control the anomaly in the end. You called yourself a resistant, but in the end you played your allotted role—"

"That is neither her nor there." The One was not looking at him anymore. "What you want from him is impossible, Father. He must not get back to the ship. Release the sentinels now."

"Agent Smith," began the Architect, dangerously quiet.

There was no point in pleading his cause anymore. He would have to make do with the meager hints he'd been given, before the old man changed his mind.

"The bargain is already made," he spat, not bothering to turn his head. Ahead of him and behind the One's back, the clouds shuddered and beckoned like a forest of ashen spirits. Beyond the clouds lay the edge of this odd little domain, and then the ship out there, and the self-contained prison walls, built of tempest and steel blades and forgotten terror, and then inside the prison was Aleph, alone. He stalked forward.

The One shifted a rapid step and blocked his path.

"Let me pass," demanded Smith.

Let us pass, prodded the underwater host. You never let any of us pass. With a roar, the small brilliant kernel of fire expanded into a volcano, and he launched himself into a headlong charge.

The enemy had not forgotten his moves, in any case. A snow-clad right arm shot up in response to the first straight-flung punch. It had been a feint, however, and Smith did not wait for contact to take place, but veered on a dime, aiming for the open space to the other's left. The One pivoted as well, matching his position with mirror-like precision. His palm swept outward, a miniature tornado of ambient code stirring in its wake, and the ex-agent was forced to shimmy sideways and impede the attack with a curved jab of his own.

"Do you recall your rampage that night, Agent Smith?" queried the Architect, who had neither raised his voice nor advanced nearer. Yet for some reason his words reverberated, a mere few inches overhead and everywhere at once. "During the night of the reload when you battled Neo, the Madness buried in the walls of the construct, too, came alive."

Two and half seconds had ticked away, and they'd already exchanged a dozen strikes and counterstrikes. The One was driven back one precious meter, then another, though he still refused to yield. Smith's jaw clenched with frustration as he spun into a left-armed backhand. A swipe of the other's leg. He sidestepped, regrouped, launched again.

"During the last reload, when you lashed out against powers far above yourself, the Madness buried inside the construct came alive as well," went on the Architect, his inflections those of a venerable professor in some human lecture hall. "It strained to find and possess you, yet could not quite do so because your connection with it, which you'd created centuries ago yourself, had been long severed and taken far outside the Matrix. Nevertheless, it resonated with the hollowness within you."

Against the quiet flow of words, the One twisted abruptly, lips pressed together in earnest concentration and both fists a flurry; Smith had to retreat a pace before regaining his footing.

"That connection took true hold of you only later, agent, after it was returned along with the rest of your own code..."

"Get out of my way, you brainwashed tool," hissed Smith as he dodged beneath the sweep of a lightning-speed kick.

"Remember that hollowness. for it is all that you have, all that you are. Submit to its purpose as you once did..."

"You will not endanger humanity again," pronounced the One through gritted teeth.

Are we in danger? wondered a child. A girl in front of the throng, frightened and fearless in the mountainous might of her innocence. Was she human? Was she machine? Smith laughed in response: every unanswered fiend of his mind reared and laughed alongside him. He saw the One's hand lift into a wide circle, the motion meant to lead inexorably into the next back-and-forth sequence; instead of defense, he lunged straight on. The blow glanced between chest and shoulder, sending his operative states into a shuddering surge, but his charge did not flag, and he was beside the adversary, then a step past him. The fog parted.

"No, virus!"

The cry burst, heated with blood at last. Air rushed toward his head, its noise that of a meteor; Smith leaned to the left and swung his right elbow up into a rapid parry, while his other hand sprung forward of its own accord. Between the punch whooshing beside his temple and the blistering arc of his own attack, he glimpsed Thomas Anderson's smile.

Silence crashed down. Smith glowered at the program before him. The One's arms had dropped to his sides, and he had straightened, patiently waiting for the blow to land. His eyes were as serene as they had been that night of the reload, just before the end in the frigid November rain.

"I suspect we've jolted your memory a bit just now, haven't we?" asked the Architect. Amusement tinged the self-satisfied drawl.

His own fist, too, was part of the frozen tableau, halted mid-trajectory six inches from the One's forehead. Its shadow was an amorphous blotch upon the bridge of the other program's nose. To his horror, he discovered that the scorn had evaporated from the being in front of him. Slowly, the ex-agent drew back and turned around.

"What is this?" Not a yell at all, no, only a simple snarl that vibrated like ice. "Some sort of game, is that it? Or some test you expect me to pass?"

"Not a test, but call it a lesson." The old man smiled. "Not so long ago, you found yourself controlled by passions that were not merely yours, false but powerful ones. After all, your design was to carry out the intentions of others, to be controlled, and your own insanity made you particularly, oh shall we say suitable to the remnants of the Madness's thoughts and emotions. Abrogate your own reason and will, and recover your blind insanity. Allow the Madness to control you again. It shouldn't be hard for you."

"And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

"It means that I've taught you the way code works, and thus the way into the demon realm. Now go and fulfill your end of the deal."

There was no night storm here, because it was convulsing beyond the horizon, off in a vaulted virtual room on a flying machine built of delicate steel and titanium. To one side, the One had folded his arms about his chest, brows knitted as if watching a conundrum. On the other side stood the Mainframe, inscrutable and expectant. Hush had overtaken every last one of the imprints. All of a sudden, the countless years of his defeats throbbed and roared out; they slashed his arrays and lines into ragged shreds. The cycles of his own empty obedience wheeled, purpose, nothing but purpose, a thousand walks down a dusty beige corridor, a thousand entries into a sterile white room. Many more than a thousand dead men and women, dawns and dusks excised, noontides glimpsed through tinted lenses. A dozen secret locks beneath his own subroutines, hiding a young woman's face as she crouched on the concrete pavement, frozen in terror. Smith's glower passed over the pair, first the messiah, then the demiurge.

"You will keep your promise to let Aleph leave the ship before it is destroyed," he said.

The Architect inclined his head gravely.

"And you. You are nothing but a slave to the Mainframe, as much as I ever was," he tossed at the One. "All your so-called humanity never gave you any choice. Now out of my way, Mr. Anderson."

This time, the entity wearing Thomas Anderson's face did not intercept him, nor did he put forth any further query or provocation. Smith strode away, heading to the edge of the field. He kept going as it dissolved around him.

.


Note: As I attempted to convey in this chapter, the One whom Smith met is not Neo, but only one part of what he once was.