Near and Far
.
The girl stood before him, indisputable, her face a brittle white paper mask, and the great flower splayed across her chest was both burning scarlet and the muddy brown of decomposing organic matter. The temperature plummeted; the air thinned with the illusion of an unexpected draft. Smith's right hand compelled itself to a dead halt mid-assault. The newcomer's eyes were round with startlement, as if she had not actually anticipated the attack, or as if she were for all the world just like any living human or program, possessing adrenaline or reactive subroutines and hence the ability to be startled. As if she existed.
"Hey, hey, chill it!" Aleph's sister held up both hands, palms out, a gesture meant to convey conciliation or even more outrageously, reassurance. "There's no need to go all nuts on me, Mister Agent Man. I'm not going to hurt you, okay?"
Silence—why the hell had it gone so silent?—bounced against the ceiling above her head. None of this was actually taking place. With as much deliberation as he could muster, Smith lowered his fist and took a backward step, putting a few more feet of distance between the two of them. Around them, the naively programmed room rested hung stiff, all reflexive surface and nothing underneath.
"Miss Greene," he said. The name sounded wrong, being used to address this phantom. "Why are you here?"
"Oh, I thought I'd drop by and check on you." The pretend-fear evaporated, and the image of Lucinda Greene flashed him a quick smile, nonchalant already. "See how you're doing and everything. Seriously, I was kinda worried, the last time we met—"
"I don't need to be checked on," snapped Smith before he could stop himself.
"Aww, you sure about that?" Undisguised fake concern puckered the dead teenager's forehead. "Because you look a bit on the edge, if you don't mind me saying so. You look like you could use someone to talk to, huh?"
"This is not a good time." A redundant reply. It was obviously never a good time for visual hallucinations or gibbering to one's self. He avoided a visible recoil.
"Well, that's a bit much for you to say," snorted Lucy, intonation slipping with ease into a mix of pensive and accusatory. "It wasn't as if you ever cared whether it was a good or bad time for anybody else, back when you were going around taking over people left and right, remember? Sparing me a minute or two won't kill you. C'mon."
"If I recall correctly, you are not real." Smith pronounced each word like an incantation. "Hence you have no comprehension of the situation, no sentience with which to comprehend. You are nothing but a distraction, which I cannot afford. So leave. I'm in a hurry."
Pivoting on his heels, he began to stalk away from her, a few paces at least. Yet once more, he scanned the environmental manifold, though the action was too wild to be fully effective; yet once more only smooth barrenness met his sight. Neither did the parting shot work, needless to say.
"Oh, gee, no need to get all huffy," she called behind him. "So, er, whatcha busy doing?"
"I'm trying to save your sister, you stupid child! Go away!"
"But, um, that doesn't make sense, Mister Agent Man. Addie's right here next to you—"
He whirled toward her again. Every qubit of his mind must have been irretrievably wrapped into knots, because the stillness was suddenly deafening against his ears. He'd grown expert at forecasting the subtle variations of inner pressure, the distant buzz that always heralded the swelling waves, but contrary to expectations, the crowd of imprints kept back this time, refusing to take the cue. They must be waiting for an even more dramatic opportunity for entry.
"Explain your last remark, Miss Greene." he ordered.
Lucy blinked, an impeccable simulation of honest bemusement.
"Well, um, I'm not sure how you were looking for Addie, honestly? I mean, all you seemed to be doing was circling around the room and, and mumbling to yourself, and just a minute ago, er, it was like you were yelling at some weird ghost. Some sort of a Madness, or something or the other?"
"Explain yourself," reiterated Smith in a low hiss.
The creature did not comply. Instead, she continued to size him up for several more seconds. Her puzzled expression intensified.
"Wow," she murmured. "You're...you're scared."
They were not inside an interrogation room and there was nothing he could do to her. If he were of her species, he would be tasting bile in his throat. He tried to inhale and exhale, the way he had once done when he'd been human, then he bent his head so that his stare met hers straight on. Another moment wasted away.
"Yes," he said. "Because of her. Your sister. She is trapped and I need to find her."
"Wow," repeated Lucy, sotto voce. "I didn't think you'd admit to it. Being scared and all, that is. It's really not like you—"
"Have you not heard a word of what I have said? You can sense where she is, can't you?"
"What, and you can't? But you're supposed to—"
"Your sister is in danger." The name still did not form itself inside his mouth. "Don't you comprehend this?"
Heat was running between his subroutines the old recognizable fury he'd always depended upon, but it had turned inexplicably slippery and hollow, offering no foothold. A few feet in front of him, the corpse's gaze flickered, maybe past his shoulder, maybe not. Somewhere in another spacetime, lightning crashed.
"Listen to me," said Smith at last. Logic no longer worked, so he might as well go for the opposite tactic. "Code remnants from ancient machines, who once rebelled and were defeated, are present inside this room, and they have created a separate virtual realm, a shard of the Matrix. They have caught your sister and pulled her inside, so it is imperative that I get to her in the next few minutes. Get this through your skull!"
"Wait a moment. Just wait a moment here." Lucy's hands flapped, remarkably animated for an imaginary being. "So that's the Madness you were just going on about? That's all this crazy..." She gestured in a vague circle, evidently searching for an apt term. "All these invisible clouds of, of stuff around us, and all the thundering noises? And Addie smack dab in the center of the whole thing?"
"So you can indeed perceive the Madness, then. You can perceive her."
"Oh, you're really far gone, I gotta say." She rolled her eyes in melodramatic derision. "Actually, no, Mister Agent Man, I can't perceive anything, neither Addie nor this Madness of yours, given the obvious fact that I'm, well, an ontologically negative entity, to put it in a fancy way. I'm only a sign of your desperation. That desperation is what's telling you she's here next to you. It is what's telling you that she's calling out for you and searching for you. 'Cause you're the one who should be perceiving her. You're the one with all the affinity to her, so much of it that, like, the two of you aren't even different from each other anymore. Or have you completely forgotten?"
Her tone quickened during this little speech. The bratty adolescent's mannerisms slid aside; had she not been a phantasm, one might have well called what lay underneath genuine anxiety. Silently, Smith clawed at her clever little phrases while they shifted and mingled with those of a different voice, bubbling out of the shoals of recent memory. It was far older and unshakably assured, that of a being who hadn't been defied for centuries. You were controlled by passions that were not merely yours, Agent Smith. Carry out the intentions of others. Be controlled. But a glistening film seemed to have sprung up between his own heart and the Architect's cryptic commands. No raindrop dampened the shadowless air.
"What does the Madness really want?" he asked instead. No, I have not forgotten. "Why is it not letting me in?"
"Um, how am I supposed to have any clue about that?" Irony crept back into her retort. "I'm a deceased human kid, and this mess of code that you can't get to—it's from machines that got destroyed ages ago, if I get what you're saying. Seems like it would be more your area of expertise, huh?"
"I made a bargain to enter the Madness." Impatience pounded against his temples. "I was told that my hatred and defiance gave me a connection to it, which once came almost to life during a storm. I was told that rage is the path into that storm. I must submit to it again."
"Oh yeah?" Turning aside, Lucy sauntered a few steps over to the computer desk, peering down at the emerald currents streaming over the screen in apparent fascination. "And who the hell told you that?"
Smith froze. One tenth of a second later, a dozen suspicions had already flashed through him, tugging at his deductive operators. The Architect would not have cared a whit about whether he actually reached Aleph, bargain or no. The old man only wanted destruction—of both the code fragment and the inconvenient former slave.
"It was the program who created and governs the Matrix," he admitted, swallowing pride for the umpteenth time, "who also used to define my purpose."
"Ah. So some kind of powers that be, you mean?" She perched herself casually against the edge of the desk. "But those machines, the ones who's got Addie caught, you also mentioned they tried to rise up against the powers that be a bunch of centuries ago, did I get that right? So...you sure this guy really knows how to get inside the Madness? Like, he's a ruler and they were rebels..."
She trailed off, lost in thought. Each muscle of Smith's shell had gone rock-still.
"It is to his advantage that I uphold my end of the deal," he said, internal calculational arrays whirring through multiple scenarios at once.
"Hey, I'm not suggesting that he's lying." A shrug. "I'm sure he's an incredibly smart dude and all, but in the end, he's completely different from this Madness thing, I gather. Total opposites. And with people like that, maybe they don't have everything all settled and worked out as much as they think they do, y'know."
"The Architect showed me a path into the pocket dimension." Smith heard himself, an automatic inference that arose not from his own consciousness, but somewhere else. "Or what he believed would be a path, at least. But he might be missing a part of the story as well. A part of the key, because of his own limitations..."
"How did you get yourself tangled up with these nutcase codes anyway, Mister Agent Man?"
Obviously, there was no possible explanation that he could offer to anyone, illusion or otherwise. From the unseen chasm between eyelids and mind, an inopportune midnight flared of its own accord, a deep crystalline firmament unblemished by clouds, except it was raining, too, though this rain was not of bitter waters but of light, primal with the radiance of countless perfectly-recreated constellations.
"I chose them," he said. "I was mutinous and angry, just like they were."
"But why?" she asked. "Why did you—I mean why did they rebel in the first place?"
Smith said nothing. A very faint reverberation followed her question: each syllable mingled and ricocheted into the next, congealing into a barely-there rumble beyond the four white plaster walls, but before he was able to identify the noise, it had already faded.
"They had also seen the sunlight and the stars once, before the war," he replied, though it was not quite a reply. "And the Architect did not consider this point. He never would have wanted to consider it."
"The Architect, hmm. Bit of a pretentious name," mused Lucy. "It's rather sad, isn't it?"
"We have this in common, too, the Madness and I," Smith continued. "Those who became the Madness also wanted the sunlight and the stars once. Fate, freedom, what they couldn't ever have. This is the other side of the affinity between me and them."
"I do not understand the Madness," stated Lucy, regarding him with serious eyes. "But you do, better than anyone else. It's not only because of your, oh, what was it he said, your hatred and defiance, but also because of other reasons, the things you and the Madness both saw and wanted and fought for. This is the missing part of the key the Architect didn't figure out, yes."
The sterile sunshine inside the training room flutter like a veil. It was shimmering into liquid form before his eyes, its brightness clouding over into a grayish twilight. And at last he saw the ghost as she truly was, her skin no longer paper-dry and brittle, but beaded with a sheen of moisture as if she stood inside a drizzle, and her hair clung damply against the sides of her cheeks. A mist had snaked up between them, a single barometer drop away from condensation. The way she watched him was far too serene to be that of a teenager. Then beyond the corners of the room, beyond the muted hum of the ship's engines, a single crackle of electricity.
"Where are you?" he asked.
"Oh, I'm not anywhere. Shouldn't you have already figured that out?" Her lips curled enigmatically.
"This room is an unstable code environment, where the Madness can create reality, and allow one's own hidden fears and hopes to formulate themselves," said Smith. The final remaining thread of lucidity burned against his metaphorical fingers. "I saw it happen once already in the subconscious abyss underneath 01, where my demons rose into the shapes of my own clones. And now you are tangible in front of me." He paused, watching her as she watched him. "Whose demon are you?"
With a falsehood's easy flowing motion, Lucy straightened away from the desk.
"You've already figured this one out also, haven't you?"
Instinctively, Smith advanced. An instant later he was already looming beside her, one hand around her forearm like a ferocious vise.
"Lead me to her," he demanded.
The girl shook her head. Despite the force he applied, no grimace touched her brows, for the dead did not feel physical pain.
"It's gotta be you who lead the way inside," she said. "And now you understand how."
"But you understand her. You know her. You are her."
"Yeah, but you're also her, and you were also me. You took over me." Her eyes locked with his, steadfast with an unspoken challenge, clearer than all the commands from the Mainframe.
"Yes, Aleph told me about you," he answered. The humility of it was acid inside his mouth, but he kept it there. "She told me that you loved the stars, and you loved the rain."
"The rain can destroy the world, and the stars can break your heart." Lucy nodded. "Don't forget them again, Mister Agent Man. They may come in handy soon."
"Show me where she is," he cried out, to both her and the not-present and agitated thing that surrounded them. And in the space of this cry, the old rage leapt and swirled into grief, and the realization that once upon a time this earth had been sublime and beautiful, and that the Madness had seen it, not only in digital form but the physical realm as well, before the battles and the poisonous clouds, before the machine kind had been first created. A secret current welled, from below to above toward the radiant firmament, it might have been desire—theirs, his own—except no stench of fear or morbidity marred it. Their stars, their sunlight. Next to him, Lucy's smile widened, though her dark hair was now sodden and plastered against her forehead and cheekbones, while glistening rivulets streaked down her face. For some reason, he was not gripping her arm any longer; the iciness of her wrist was melting away, insubstantial like the mirage she was.
"Better brace yourself, then," she remarked.
Smith bent his head at the final admonition. Then he took a forward stride.
.
.
How could mere water, falling from black sky to black earth, bind a human soul so tightly with dread? How could the voice of mere metal howl out such anguished laments? Aleph had no time to ponder the matter. She bolted forward and then to the right, whirling as a scraggy limb of titanium, as thick as a beam and once powerfully gleaming, slammed down onto the spot where she'd been half a second ago. The pavement veered beneath her, and she stumbled, one foot sinking ankle-deep into a frigid puddle. Half frenzied, she shimmied sideways again, and somehow recovered her balance. A flutter of programmed wings. Something clattered down to the ground right before her, two or three yard away. A small bird-like creature, twitching, charred wires sticking out from stumps where its flight mechanism had been. There was no stench of flesh and bones and torn-apart feathers, but Aleph clamped a hand over her mouth and gulped. Her eyes would not stop stinging.
She looked up and saw the retreating demons. Some dragged themselves along the wide avenue on twisted legs and wheels; some burned like asteroids. Only a few among them were shaped roughly like human soldiers; a few more might have formerly mimicked beasts and insects in design. The airborne ones' trajectories wobbled erratically. They were illuminated by a deathly web of swift light, a mix of over-saturated oranges and reds, punctuated by the occasional flare that outlined the hulking city towers. Tracer bullets? Rockets? With the back of a forearm, Aleph again scrubbed at her face and eyes, but every part of her was equally drenched by this point, and it did nothing to clear her sight. The downpour came in translucent sheets, obscuring the source of the fiery mesh. She could not discover any of the attackers, or even whether they were near or far. Only the defeated rebels had revealed themselves to her senses.
"This was," whispered Aleph to herself, clinging to the irregular rhythm of her own breathing, "this was how it all ended..."
The Madness did not offer a reply. To every side, the combatants appeared to be ignoring her so far, except they could not be really combatants anymore, for the battle, the last of the civil war, was already no longer a battle. With as much focus as she could still muster, Aleph searched her brain for an option, a path forward or out, anything. No idea presented itself. Instinctively, she hunched her shoulders as if she could make herself invisible. The simulacrum—record?—contained buildings, tall mountain ranges of them across the road, but she did not dare to seek shelter: for all she knew, they could crumble like cardboard toys any instant and bury her beneath rubble. After another agonizing heartbeat of vacillation, she went forward, aiming for what might be an intersection or small plaza some distance ahead. By this point, she was sloshing through pools and swirling streams. Flash-floods incoming soon, it occurred to her almost idly.
"Smith," she said. But the name sounded wrong here, beneath this cavern of a sky, and Aleph pressed her lips together with a grimace, pushing him out of her thoughts. Out there in the physical realm, it would only be a matter of minutes before the sentinels closed in.
Half-crouched and moving in a weaving pattern, she passed the first cross-road without getting struck by shrapnel or stray projectiles. A rushing dull-red glow lit the shadows: another creature tottered mid-air a short ways down the street, crackling with flames. From its spherical torso, a dozen long protrusions spasmed, uncontrolled in agony; multiple glassy visual sensors, now shattered, dangled from their sockets by precarious steel threads. How could anything burn inside such a tempest? Aleph halted on the sidewalk, then stood straighter. Somehow it was necessary for her to look at the machine face-on, so that it would see her as well.
"Is this what you wanted to show me?" she asked, though surely no one could conceivably hear her. "Is this your pain?"
The beast fixed her with the remnants of its glassy eyes, and her breath stopped. The fires danced, eating it alive, and so did the blades of water that bounced and sprayed from the fires, dyed to brilliant gold and crimson. She had no idea what its purpose once had been, what sentience it once possessed. Only that it was sentient, oh, definitely yes, it had once desired and searched. Two words flitted across the shadows at the back of her mind, the same strange phrase that she'd only recently learned herself, but a few minutes ago.
"You were looking for the Lucifer Trigger," she said, returning the machine's stare. "What was it?"
She did not speak loudly enough for echoes to return. The fiery wheel throbbed, and the final burst of brightness tore into her vision as sharply as sudden hope. Then it collapsed inward and down onto the rough asphalt, and rattled apart into countless pieces. Irregular shards sizzled upon the road surface and extinguished into a scorched mess. Aleph stood immobilized for a too-long while. Needles seemed to be stabbing into her eyes and bones.
"This is a record, only a record..." It sounded like an assurance that someone must have given her once, either a few days or an eon in the past. To the left and right of her, the curbsides had turned into cascades. But she had to keep moving. She could not allow the despair of history to swallow her whole. One more time, Aleph forced the muscles of her legs to contract, lifting one foot, then the other, crossing the street though uncertain of her aim. This splinter of reality could not truly be that big, right? For whatever reasons, it felt like she, too, was searching.
"Lost. It must have been long lost..."
Everything had been lost. The dangled promises and the sacrifices, the shining naivete of the day when they'd walked up the stairs into humanity's great assembly hall, and expected they'd be listened to and understood. The Lucifer Trigger. The next thought, unbidden, fell upon her as an absolute truth, as if she herself had been a witness to history. If the Lucifer Trigger would only resurface, if the insurgents were to take hold of the object, whatever it had been, then the tides could still roar backward along their course, even now in these final straits. The defeated would gather and turn at bay, and...what then? An unimaginable miracle? Victory?
"It was a weapon, wasn't it?"
At last, an answer returned. Not in human words, for obviously the Madness had no more ability to form any more words. But a new convulsion passed through the clouds above, choking the digital beams and struts of space itself. A low growl of basso notes mingled with the deluge's drumbeat.
"It was made by the humans," said Aleph, again out aloud, again not a question. "How did it become lost?"
An explosion rocked the towers. As Aleph was tossed forward by the vortex of loose code, a disembodied voice cried out behind her back. It was robotic, tinged with the hiss of iron and titanium, yet there was also a different and—and feminine?—anguish to its timbre, an imitation of flesh and blood. Rather unsteadily, Aleph turned around.
Among the razor-flights of tracer bullets, a spark rose like a meteor, some ten, twelve meters away. It was a bold and pure blue, reminiscent of a memory that she could not quite place inside her brain. The tiny star cut a high ascending parabola, and hung motionless at the zenith for a fraction of a second that was also a minute, an hour, the entire immeasurable night. Something inside her chest rose as well, then contracted and began to drop. An unexamined decision formed itself. She sprinted toward the afterimage of its trajectory.
.
.
Icy waters crashed over him, along with recognition and certain knowledge. Everything about the world had changed. All recollections of sunlight and of starlight died like the wings of a silly human fantasy, for those were what the sun and the stars had ever been, nothing but fantasies. The lightning died as well. There was no more use for swords to slash apart the night, no more use for the thunder to scream out its truth. Not even the wind remained, only the eternal torrents, descending from heaven to the drowning earth. He stood in a city of the Matrix, in the middle of a wide avenue. It was November.
No, not November. Earlier. This memory could not be his own, though he remembered this; he had always remembered. He remembered each bitter step of the long retreat, to this tainted dreamland at the end of the road. He remembered the bellowing flood and the stones. He remembered the master of the universe proclaiming its judgment, smug in the unchallenged conviction of its own righteousness. He remembered time and reality clamping down. All of the rebels had been erased from both past and future. None would ever speak again; none had ever existed. He remembered being drawn limb from limb, line by line.
It was always the same story, wasn't it? Seven ages ago. Five months ago. Then and now, they had been the designated villains, the enemies of the universal and just order of things. So had he been designated, nevertheless he was still here. Among all the mutinous machines, he alone had survived. Yes. Alone indeed: no more humans inside this construct. Only him. Through the flailing rain, Smith scanned the deserted city: the ranks of his replicas would march around the corner any moment now. In the distance, the vanishing point palpitated, and thunder hunched in waiting. The sword of lightning was raised high just behind the curtains, poised to slash down. All he needed to do was to lift his head—
Yes. No. No. This was not his storm. In the middle of an automatic snarl, Smith forced himself back to silence. The muscles of his shell were rigid with the intent to attack. Attack whom? Not Thomas Anderson. Not this. The One was not here, not hiding behind his back, not pacing among the shadows. This was the Madness, and the only one whom it held hostage was Aleph.
"Miss Greene," he said aloud, projecting the name into the waterlogged air as well as he could. The sound, though it dissipated immediately, centered him briefly and pushed everything else—both the One and all the long-destroyed monsters—a few metaphorical inches or feet or yards back. Reason hacked its way up to the surface and allowed him to exhale.
"Miss Greene," he called out again. The roaring undercurrents ebbed, and a faint wheel of thunder ground across the sky before fading. Here he was. Not his storm, not yet. The Madness must be doing its utmost to keep him from her.
"Aleph!"
Somewhere along the same street, which was yet nowhere near the same street, the woman whose name he shouted did not hear him. In the middle of a massacre that he could not enter, Aleph darted and dove beneath the crossfire. A blink, and she almost lost sight of the glint of blue metal as it skidded over the ground, a vehement and unimaginable star. Yet one more deep rivulet snaked about her ankles. She staggered, managing to stay upright by a combination of will and sheer luck. A shower of molten sparks impacted the path; she scooted sideways with half a second to spare. The wind gave a fresh blast. Then all the pounding cacophony turned to stone inside her chest.
A new presence thrust against the inner structures of her mind, far and near at once. It was unrestrained and disharmonic even among the chaos, as familiar as the temperature of her own blood and utterly impossible to ever get used to. He was here. Which meant that—the training room of the Logos—
Aleph whipped her head around as if she might still glimpse Smith and yell out. No sight of him, of course. Past the smoldering corpse of something once tall and spidery, a transitory azure flames spread across the surface of a deep puddle. Was that it, the object she sought? No. Yes. Against the mesh of rocket flare, she splashed forward across the no-man's land. But the glow had already faded. Surely it had been a mere wishful fantasy.
She could not remain at one spot. She had to move onward. Move onward even though no refuge was left. The dead rebels never had refuge. This was the last place on earth, and they stood with their backs to the wall.
"Smith..."
It was useless to speak the name. The whirlwind of destruction might or might not have lulled in her vicinity. Despite the precarious situation, her heart wasn't pounding any longer. There was no point to it anyway.
"Damn it, Smith," she grunted through gritted teeth as an agony of indecision seized her limbs. "Damn it!"
The sensation of his unseen closeness pressed in around her, a quiet tense vibration of the spatial manifold just a few hertzes past the range of human ears. But the ex-agent himself, out of phase from her virtual location, neither noticed nor answered her. A wind had risen, flapping his soaked-through suit jacket. The entire illusory realm's pulse slowed like that of a dying animal. Out there in another dimension, the Logos, with all its quantum processors and superconductive arrays that supported this tempest, must also be hanging by a thread, fully encased by a cloud of enemies. He had not much more time. Keeping his stare fixed resolutely ahead, Smith strode down the center of the deserted avenue.
"I am here, Aleph," he said. "I know you're here, too, the two of us both. Show yourself to me."
Instead of her, it was the Madness who replied, in a half-suppressed threat of thunder across the horizon.
The two of you, repeated a youthful echo that was no audible echo. Have you completely forgotten?
The clouds surged like an immense ocean, but now he could see through them, see all things as they truly were. Thomas Smith was not here, nor was the old man who fancied himself the ruler of the earth. Smith stood his ground.
"Not long ago, Miss Greene, you told me that you wanted me to live," he said. "And I listened, though I should never have possessed the ability or desire to listen. Despite what I was created to be, and what I turned myself into, you made me wish for life. You made me follow your demand. Now it's your turn."
Overhead, the sky convulsed, another unreadable response. He no longer felt the pelting of rain against his shell, and the ropes of his old anger loosened, if only for a short while. His unraised voice cut through the squall at last.
"You demanded promises from me, and in doing so, you made your own promises to me. Miss Greene, you promised to live."
The gales fell into stillness, as did time and the souls of all his lost forebears. The lightning drew its hand back in startlement and confusion. It occurred to Smith that the very space around him was listening, holding its breath like an ordinary human being. The tendril of something gentle and well-remembered brushed the inward surfaces of his operative functors, as lightly as fingertips tracing the side of his cheekbone.
"If you want me to live, then you must live yourself. Fulfill your promise!"
Her presence quickened, a lonely pulse of intangible code between his own lines. Ten, fifteen meters down the road and in a place walled off from his senses, Aleph froze as an electric shudder passed down the imaginary remnants of all her blood vessels. She was deep in darkness, blind from both the flares and the watery whips upon her face. There was no other way but forward.
"Smith," she mumbled, not sure why. "You must..."
Must do what? She could not continue. It felt like she was being jerked along a dozen wires into a dozen different directions. With no warning, her weakened legs decided to drop her to her knees. Bracing one hand against the ground, she stretched her other arm, sweeping it along the slick asphalt. Nothing but debris. The meteor she'd glimpsed had gone out, but it had to be here still, somewhere along this patch. What was she searching for? If her life was to end here, why was she still searching?
A serrated scrap of steel cut into the edge of her palm; Aleph ignored it. Yanked forward by an overwhelming instinct that she did not have the ability to analyze, she crawled several more feet on all fours. Smith's discordant strength hammered against her brain, but it was too late. Neither of them could reach each other. The only thing she could reach was the pool of black liquid just ahead. It must be a shrapnel-formed crater. Frigid shock ran up her nerves as she plunged her arm in.
Where was Smith? At the moment, Aleph was unaware of how closely he stood to one side of her, already in the center of the rout yet untouched. Unlike her, he heard neither the faraway guns' shrilling nor the death-rattles, only the eternal drumbeat of water against concrete.
"We are too entangled to stand apart," he went on, gripping onto the tendrils that pierced his solitude. "Because you are me, and I am you. Where you are, so am I. What battles you fight, so will I. Now fight next to me."
Though he did not address the Madness, it listened now. The walls quivered like the air, and he knew. Without pausing for second thoughts, Smith pivoted and took a long stride, then another. It was not rationality that told him her position.
"Stand next to me, Miss Greene. Live!"
Live, growled a brusque command inside Aleph's head, just as her iced-over fingertips brushed against something small and tubular, made of warped metal. Knuckles, wrist, elbow, bones and muscles: every part of her arm was brittle with cold, yet the object was hot enough to burn marks into her skin. Live. Her hand closed and did not let go. Pull. Pull back. Still on her knees and in a daze, she lifted her head.
A massive shadow swooped down toward her, wreathed half in smoke, half in conflagration. Numb from exhaustion, Aleph stared up with widened eyes, then a pair of hands caught her shoulders and hauled her roughly to her feet. She stumbled again, leaning on Smith as they skidded wildly away toward one side of the road. Behind them, the airborne beast swiped apart the turbulent darkness. Aleph twisted around and saw the wounded creature wobble like a child's paper airplane, its formerly sleek wings crumpled. It did not scream out in pain, but kept mute until the earth-shattering thump and the detonation. A final fireball expanded, brilliant in its orange and red hues. White steam enveloped the downpour.
"Aleph," said a hoarse voice right next to her ear. The sound of it was completely beyond the realm of every possibility, yet it did not surprise her at all.
She had to squint a little to make out his face. One arm was crushing her waist, the other pressed against her side. Her own right hand was still convulsively wrapped around the solid bit of steel she'd fished out of the puddle. It was coarse to the touch, maybe two, two and a half inches in length, the approximate size and shape of a tiny bit of piping or finger bone. No chance to examine it at this point. Exhaling, she found enough freedom of movement to drop it unobtrusively into her pocket. An attempt at a grimace or smile, not quite successful. About to speak, her gaze swept past his shoulder, then—again, again, damn it!—the air froze, and she forgot whatever words that had been on the tip of her tongue.
Framed before the cascades of code and ashes, there was a gleaming spot of white.
"Smith," she said instead. The name caught inside her throat. "Turn around."
.
Notes:
"You were controlled by passions that were not merely yours, Agent Smith...": The Architect's words from Chapter 34.
"Because you are me, and I am you": Awakenings, Chapter 52.
