The Anchors

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Inside the filmy confines of their pods, the batteries had begun to shake. Fingers clenched and unclenched, clawing yet gaining no traction against the surrounding bio-sustainment fluid; arms and legs curled in spasms, deep brown to pallid, some thick-bones and flaccid-skinned, some desiccated like wintry branches. It reminded Rama-Kandra of the way Kamala had programmed the trees in their little refuge far beneath 01, how the countless meticulously-hung leaves reacted in unison to one of her breezes. He was accustomed to seeing the bodies twitch or even thrash now and then, a normal state given the workings of human biology, but not like this, not everywhere across the farm, not all of them together.

No. He had already witnessed this once before. Five Matrix months ago, the same wind had shrieked, and the fragile forms of men, women and children had reared and trembled, exactly the same as the present, rows after rows without end. Ever since then, he and his wife had analyzed and conjectured, agonized over every recollection, every anomalous motion of limb or face he'd glimpsed here in this field, every ominous word from the exile program who'd shown up in Kamala's operating room that night. Reload. Imminent full-scale system failure. It was not supposed to happen again so soon. It was never supposed to have happened at all.

The great steel-and-titanium creature wound his way along the struts, a dozen sinuous segments clattering in soft rhythm. Around him, innumerable indicator lights blinked like delirious scarlet eyes, frequency already crossing dangerous levels and increasing. Their glow mingled into an artificial dawn, though no warning signal flashed as of yet. No changed directives from above, only an inscrutable silence as if nothing had gone out of the ordinary whatsoever. He was not supposed to find it portentous or even notice this silence, Rama-Kandra reflected, though he was rather too preoccupied to further ponder his ruler's motivations or plans. Maybe, maybe the storm would also subside over the ocean this time, maybe the construct would soon return to its former life, oblivious. Hadn't the peril passed last November, too?

The Matrix had survived last November. The recycling plant manager clung onto the thought. And he clung to a vivid, very recent memory: Sati in the middle of a sidewalk, the evening breeze flapping the hem of her dress about her knees, the city park sinking into gloom at her back. Her eyes were round and glistening, and she was standing very straight. Something about her demeanor had already changed since she'd left home, a new unrecognizable firmness as she answered the dying man's apparition. Everything is going to be all right, Mr. Diaz. Rama-Kandra would have been utterly elated if he were not aching with anxiety again.

He must consider matters logically. Across his internal monitors, the data stream was still flowing, no longer smooth as usual but turbulent with statistical spikes and dips, as swift as an unruly flood. Yet flowing nonetheless. Quickened pulses and irregular blood pressures lit up the entire sector, unbalanced hormone levels, adrenaline and cortisol. He wanted to—had to take these disconcerting numbers as a positive sign: five months ago he had not been able to read even this much. Back then the informatic tracking arrays had simply shut off one by one, no alarms blaring, no need to explain to mere functionary machines. Walls had sprang up, as solid as if they'd always been there, and he had been left helplessly shoving his powers against them, meeting nothing but blankness. He'd been locked out that time. Only later, after comparing notes with Kamala, had he managed to guess at the reasons. One reason in particular.

Virus. Had he been in his human-shaped shell, Rama-Kandra would have flinched at the word. He did not want to remember what Ex-agent Smith looked like, the torn-up and bloodied clothes, the fiercely reined-in tension of his posture and the bitter gleam of his eyes. And that young woman—surely just as crazy as Smith ever had been—the bizarre ideas she hinted at, her inexplicable message...But the virus had been in 01 mere hours ago and could not be back in the Matrix so quickly; it would simply be impossible. This was another encouraging fact. Things certainly could not be worse than before, right?

The twilight shimmered on. It was gradually brightening; a second or two passed before he realized a new light source must be materializing overhead. The mechanical centipede aimed its pair of bulbous visual sensors upward. High among the clouds, another swarm of reddish eyes reflected the field of twinkling signals, rimmed by the crackle of lightning and approaching swiftly. Sentinels from 01's direction, hundreds of them. From this distance, he could just make out the convoluted mass of their tentacles. They seemed to have surrounded some other object, a ship perhaps: a single silvery light fluttered among the dark globular forms, too obscured to be fully perceptible.

The recycling plant manager froze. Irrational. It was unlikely that they would hear whatever noises he was making from so far off, or detect movement all the way down here. In any case, he was only carrying out his regular duties. Except...sentinel patrols were uncommon around this sector of the Matrix, and never this many together. The gale buffeted Rama-Kandra's outer skeleton; his own vast list of transgressions tumbled across his cognitive functors. Kamala. Sati. Each contraband experience and decision.

It was of no use to panic. True, recently he had been forced to take some risky chances; however, he still had no concrete reason to suspect discovery. And even had suspicions been raised, they would never have sent a whole company of sentinels after him, a mere recycling management program who had no means to escape or rebel. Why, the notion was downright ridiculous. Carefully, Rama-Kandra looked up once more. Away in the sky, the throng of mechanical beasts hovered, the writhing tangle of their limbs almost indistinguishable from the background of inky clouds. The bobbing of their crimson lanterns would have made a human being vertiginous, but none appeared to be pointed down toward him or scanning the earth. Whatever mission they'd been sent on, it was not him.

Another endless hesitation, which he could not afford. Against his senses, the barrier between the material environment and the construct felt heavy and viscous, no longer translucent as it should be, an inch from coalescing into rocky ramparts. But not quite yet. It was still yielding to the concentrated pressure of his design. The statistical stream swelled. A blip passed through the rush of aggregate biometric numbers: he was barely quick enough to pinpoint the fluctuation. Subsector M06, Position 2503. Unreadable flurry of brain activity, though heart rate was already fading. Yes. Deaths were still taking place inside the sector. He could still get inside, as long as he found an anchor, someone to hold onto.

Subsector M06, Position 2503. Virtual location in close proximity with several other humans in the end phases of life. Through the frenzied cascade of code, he finally discerned metastasized lymph nodes, pain receptors long overwhelmed. One of his routine haunts, then, an oncology ward or hospice. Well, at least there would be some comfort of security in such familiar surroundings. Keeping his physical shell stock-still, Rama-Kandra focused determinedly, and pushed. Then pushed again. The Matrix's spatial framework vibrated, unwilling. He pushed again.

He was standing in a quiet hallway, one that he had visited more than once in the past, though he had never seen it so dim before, illuminated only by the subdued orange-and-green of emergency lights above the doors. As a rule, night did not exist in these hospital corridors. A deafening clap somewhere outside the building made him start, and his arms flung themselves upward in an automatic attempt at self-defense. Then he identified it: thunder. Giant whips of rain battered the windowpanes. Briefly, it seemed to Rama-Kandra that the virus was still palpably present, a tide of black-suited monsters ready to pour around the corner, inexorable. He thrust the image aside. Focus. Before him, lines of data glinted and swirled, a different deluge from the one that raged out there over the city. He grabbed onto it for support, letting it pull him through the nearest doorway, to his right and just ahead.

A thick gloom hung over the sickroom, same as in the hallway. A young woman lay in the bed, eyes squeezed shut, perhaps still a child though it was hard to tell the way she appeared, a stick-figure like they always were by the time he met them, a white ventilator mask clapped over her bony face. Behind her head, a few machines still hummed, feebler than usual, half-alive on back-up generators like the patient herself. Screens flickered. Next to her in two armchairs pushed close together, a man and woman sat, heads lolled back against the backs of their seats, sleeping faces as haggard as their daughter's. This surprised Rama-Kandra: in his experience, parents were invariably exhausted but watchful by this stage. As he stood over them, they shuddered in their uneasy repose, first the woman, then the man.

Cautiously, he walked over to the girl, for some reason afraid that the couple would wake up and discover him, and they would scream, and he'd have to explain. It was absurd. Her vital signs eddied, their own small storm inside the room; he struggled to capture the probabilistic model. Not much time was left, less than half an hour. Hypothalamus activities were far more volatile than they should be: no coma but a fitful sleep. He read her name and age, then turned his head to gaze at the couple sitting beside the bed. The woman's hands jerked. All of a sudden, another absurd urge welled, the need to grab them by the shoulders and call out, because they would regret it grievously and forever if they did not open their eyes immediately, if they missed these final fifteen, twenty minutes of their own torment.

He had no way of touching them, however. Rama-Kandra shook his head. The two humans would be waking up soon anyway, from the hubbub of the doctors and nurses bursting through the door. They would be coming any moment now with platitudes and other meaningless attempts. But would they? The construct appeared disconnected from the logic of its own operative states, the laws of its preprogrammed physics. Everything hung suspended.

The dying girl in the bed shivered, and her mouth opened, though no cry issued—her throat was no longer capable of sound. Belatedly, Rama-Kandra discerned the pattern of her brain scans: she was in the throes of a dense nightmare. Lines of data swerved and clicked together, matching what he had observed but a short while ago, outside the Matrix in the pod-fields. Her father and mother, too, must be dreaming the same nightmare.

Many thousands of others must be dreaming. The same nightmare.

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Up. Up to her feet again, panting and still a bit unsteady after her brief clash with One who was blindingly bright and incomparably stronger, but unsteadiness she could not afford. The arctic air smudged over Aleph's vision like a glassy wall, and the two combatants wheeled on the other side of the glass, a stark black-and-white duality, back, forth. The adversary drove into a charge, smooth as if treading on the surface of an ocean wave; the waters, already past ankle-depth, splashed and whirled as Smith ebbed, found his ground, regrouped. Neither of them spared her any further attention.

"Neo!" she hollered. The name was ill-fitting inside her own mouth: it wasn't as if she'd known the guy that well back during their Zion days. He bent beneath the arc of Smith's lashing arm, the edges of his form aglow and fluttering, then pivoted into a swift roundhouse kick. On the sidelines, Aleph nearly winced.

"Neo! Why are you doing this?"

No turn of the head, no reaction, nothing there remained that she might still reach or persuade. She waded forward a few steps, both hands balled into fists. Keep trying. Trying what? Tilting her face upward, she scanned for the Madness as if it might meet her with body and voice and desperate words. Only lightning whipped her eyes. A pressure was building against the inner surfaces of her brain, palpable and without end. Code was surging onto the ship.

Now. On this ship.

The memory or hallucination punctured the downpour softly, a tinkling crystal shard. When had Lucy said that?

"Help us," whispered Aleph, a prayer though she had no idea to whom.

Thunder convulsed, and an unfathomable sorrow convulsed with it, engraved into each line of the ambient manifold. Another instant and it would overflow, flooding with the prehistoric flood into the Logos's training room, and then the material universe, the sentinels and pod-farms and the decomposing cities. They, too, would surely drown just like the Matrix did many cycles ago.

They must have felt such strong hope here, but also grief...

It was a memory, yes. Her sister had mused and hinted while the Logos searched the ruins. It had been mere hours ago; she should have remembered. The ship remembers.

"You remember," she said, repeating the mysterious prompt. It wasn't quite the Madness that she addressed, but something that stood just behind it, rippling like heat left behind by dead fires. A string pulled at her, and she held up a hand as if to reach for the invisible; needles of rain plinked into the skin of her palm. She was groping, unable to touch what she must.

Reach out and touch, suggested someone unexpected, the words tinged with a vague accent. That's all it takes, ma chère mademoiselle. Mere acts of will.

The shadows groaned, billowing like shrouds. A few yards ahead in the middle of the street, the pair of dark and luminous figures fought on. A strike. The light one reeled, then instantly recovered and launched into a fresh forward leap, but Aleph tore her gaze away and stared straight up once more.

"Trinity. Her name was Trinity," she began. "And his name was Neo. You remember them because you took them, their last journey. You were the ship that brought them to 01."

The Logos gave no reply, and the wind shrilled into her ears. A blast of wind followed each brutal attack and counterattack from the enemy, from Smith, each more intense than the last.

"You felt what they felt, you saw what they saw." Aleph raised her voice a notch. "You were there with them, so some part of them is still here with you. It must be."

The Madness rose out of the Matrix, awakened and reunited into itself. The sea roared as it flowed into a single cup. The ship must be shuddering under the burden by this point; it could not possibly hear her. It was only a vessel, a dumb insentient machine. And this place was no subtle dreamland, no subterranean psychic world beneath 01 that could be touched by ideas or strong emotions. This was only a roomful of blind and deaf rage.

"You already showed it to us once," insisted Aleph. Her voice cracked, but nothing else was left. "I know what you remember, the sun and the sky and the light. It was right here in this training room."

The tempest churned, scalding her retinas with icy flames until she could no longer look straight up. She was pleading at the ship to...do what? How could an inanimate thing remember? How could it offer compassion?

"Show it to us. To him. Show what remains in you, those two human beings. What Neo saw, and Trinity-"

Lightning danced, its veins turning from snow to blood. For an instant, she mistook the clouds for another darkness, the ancient and horrific curtains of acid and smoke that had been once pulled across the earth on the tails of human jet fighters. Crashes merged into thunder, though she could not tell whether it was still the battle taking place before her eyes, limb against limb and punch against punch, or a far greater unseen struggle, an all-engulfing war.

"Trinity." Aleph stiffened her will and her throat. She swallowed. One more ridiculous effort. "She's still here. She's still real. Show us what she saw..."

Another heavenwide explosion, tearing the night into floating shreds. Maybe shrapnel, maybe a hundred simultaneous swords pierced the walls of tortured code, and Aleph's heart along with them. The force, both tender and devastating, nearly doubled her over. The city street spun, vertiginous, and all of a sudden the pocket dimension was yanked bodily upward as if through an immense ocean and then across the surface, its speed indescribable, and air came, and the sun came.

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They went at each other with the strength of agent programs. Punches were thrown at close quarters, swiping kicks aimed to knock each other off balance, growls between gritted teeth. They grappled and butted heads. Jones's past self would not have understood it, the way he took a powerful blow to the chin without bothering to block, the way he didn't calculate the next move, the hiss issuing from the back of his own throat. He sprang again, swung his elbow into a vicious backhand toward Brown's face. Water pooled about their ankles; the night was absolute but for the sporadic lightning above, but he required no vision to detect his partner's exact location. It did not occur to him that the fight was a pointless one.

"Stop." He heard the snarl of a senseless brute. Himself. "Stop this!"

Stop what? Brown did not ask. All the pent-up irrationality had come loose: he might still have noticed it—the last residual fraction of his former purpose inside him might still have noticed—but it did not matter. Nothing mattered but this noise in the heavens, its furious and exhilarated howls. Also his own. Thunder resonated, above and below and within, while the notebook—still only in his jacket pocket yet somehow no longer an object outside of himself—throbbed like a human pulse, rapid and vehement. He didn't need to suppress any of this. Never needed to. All he had to do was to toss it all into the dust.

"Stop!" he repeated. "Stop pretending!"

Brown grunted and plowed directly at him. Jones stiffened his shoulders for defense just in time. An instant before full-frontal contact, he flung up his left hand and managed to grab the other by an over-extended forearm, stumbling back two paces from the sheer momentum. But Brown twisted, free fist rising, and the ground beneath him heaved, a living enraged body. Puddles expanded into seas—

The external heartbeat at his side flared into a blade.

When his visual processes restabilized, and a fresh run of lightning provided illumination once more, Jones saw that he was half-kneeling, half-crouched over Brown, clutching at his partner's arms. The two of them had gone down together in a heap. A new pain slashed the left of his torso. Yes. He could identify physical pain these days. Except this was both physical and not quite so, either, more like the presence of a localized fire than damage to his own shell. His pocket. Still. He yanked his hands away from Brown and pressed both of them to the spot, like some helpless battery who'd been wounded by a bullet. To every direction, the downpour went on, infinitely frigid, yet the heat scorched right through and pierced him.

"Jones," said a barely recognizable voice above him, "that thing. That fucking thing."

He looked up. Brown had disentangled himself and scrambled back upright. Jones straightened on his knees, but remained in a supplicant's position before the other. The tiny yet intense maelstrom issuing from the notebook suffused into the skin of his palms. The acerbic burn was starting to soften. A heavy warmth like that of certainty and secret comprehension, tinged with bitterness around the edges.

"Please," he muttered, "Brown, don't..."

He could not find the next words. Please, Brown, don't lie to me anymore. Please give me the truth. Tell me that it makes a difference. The storm, too, was suddenly remote, and its wails were that of an aching being, one who strained to touch a goal a single inch and forever beyond its reach. He lowered his gaze again. A slow glimmer, viridian but without the color's regular harshness, was leaking out through the soaked fabric of his jacket pocket and between his tautly splayed fingers.

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The door to the train station was thirteen point four meters down the corridor, and they spent an eon getting there. Dust danced into a fine mist; pieces of the ceiling showered down onto their heads with the impact of stray bullets. Somewhere among the hubbub, Seraph bellowed out a warning or command. Charon spun and charged headlong into a fresh trio of agents, a squadron of henchmen in tow. A black-suited, black-shaded figure swerved rapidly, contorting between the defenders' fire trajectories, and the Merovingian pulled Persephone behind himself in the nick of time. Joyeuse flashed.

"The key," snapped the damned lunatic woman by his side. "I've got the key—"

He had pinned her against the green wooden door, covering her with his own torso: the agents still could not shoot directly at him in any case, given their current directives. Persephone grimaced and twisted in his hold, jabbing one-handedly at the knob with something small and metallic. Right. The key. The door swung inward with an abruptness that made her stumble; he tightened his grasp upon her wrist and kept her upright. A yank on her part and they were inside. She slammed the door shut behind them with a growl. The cacophony of battle died as if cut down by a blade.

"We haven't got much time, Mérovée—"

It had only been an hour or two since he'd last left this place, yet the wrecked station was again completely different. Rain leaked in from the gaping black holes in the ceiling and splashed against the debris-strewn platform. The shadows had solidified into hulking beasts, poised to spring. The walls, already pockmarked from the earlier grenade attack, now appeared to bulge and rear. More than anything visible, however, it was the altered substratum of existence—the very feeling of it—that transfixed the Merovingian. No longer the neat practical train station he'd built himself, no longer a part of his domain, the entire space had reverted to the mysterious cavern among dim tunnels far below ground, rough-torn as if by a primordial deluge. The Nexus, he'd named it in wonder and terror centuries past when he had first discovered this, the converging point of many buried arteries. Powers throbbed into a whirlpool here, streaking wild and dragging against the chains of logic and reality, chains that had kept them trapped for seven cycles. Perhaps it was the damage to the environmental structures, perhaps it was merely the aid of his recently-gained knowledge, but for the first time, he perceived the true nature of this place with sickening clarity, and the true nature of the things he'd dreamt of and pursued forever. The secret prisoners, which he once called magic, were finally escaping into the void.

"Mérovée!"

The shout rang next to his ear, and he rounded on her.

"What—you blasted idiot of a woman—"

"The forces of magic are being freed, but they are also slipping out of the Matrix," she interrupted him, tone composed. "This is a threat to the world. You must stop it from happening, husband mine."

"You need to get the hell out of here, Persephone!"

"Your purpose as the Administrator was to keep the construct together and to defend it." She did not seem to have heard him. "Therefore it is still your responsibility. Nobody else is capable of it."

Narrowing his eyes, the Merovingian concentrated on her face in amazement. No trace of her usual careless elegance remained, no gentleness, only a ferocious conviction that made no possible sense. The sheer insanity of her demand jolted him like an electric spark.

"Chérie," he said, "may I ask if you have any notion, any at all, of what those 'forces of magic' actually are?"

"I read your notes and your conjectures." Her chin twitched in impatience. "You were pretty close, I'd say. And they're finally revealing themselves now, aren't they?"

"They're demons." The word scalded his tongue. How ironic to be the one speaking it. "They embody only chaos. They are the threat to the world."

"They are part of the world and have been for many cycles. Who can say what will follow if these powers disappear? Can you guarantee that the Matrix won't fall off balance, Mérovée? Can you guarantee against another system failure?"

He blinked at her, at a loss. Ridiculously, the virtual heartbeat inside his virtual chest raced. Behind the station door, a loud report reverberated, simultaneous near and far off, then one more. The passage walls must have been critically weakened, if they were hearing the fight all the way here inside the Nexus. Grabbing her arm again—she let him—he pulled her farther along the platform until they stood between a pair of still-standing pillars. The storm, too, had grown audible, its drumbeat pouring down overhead from the broken ceiling in prestissimo pellets.

"You've been searching for this all your life," went on Persephone after he said nothing for several seconds. "I've been there all along, remember? I've watched you go down the road, chasing after mirages and digging yourself in, year after year, because the idea of these hidden hopes, this magic is what you love more than..." A low hollow laugh. "More than anything else. Well, it's here at last. It's alive at last, in your reach. Are you just going to give up?"

"I can't reach it, Persephone! It's been a fool's quest for six cycles, haven't you noticed? The power was never given me!"

He could not reach, he could not touch. He could not even explain. No more eloquence or poise was left to him. She met his glower head-on, however, unassailable in her irrationality.

"You have the power to take what you've always desired. You were the Administrator of the Matrix, to which these entities also belong. Now or never, Mérovée!"

"They were kept secret from me even when I was the Administrator." Against his almost-spasmodic fingers, Joyeuse's hilt was a handful of molten gold. "My purpose was to keep the construct operating under logical causes and consequences. And even that purpose was carved out of me with a bloody fucking knife. It's gone."

"There's something wrong with the Matrix." She shifted tactics again. "You feel it, too, I can tell that you do. And no one else can do anything, it has to be you. Five months ago you tried. Now you can succeed."

Icy water slapped down onto his shoulders, streaks instead of drops by this point. More gunshots echoed off in the corridor, and the tiled walls quivered under unseen assaults. The Merovingian exhaled. Out of nothingness, a bit of his mind stabilized, and once more he was seeing her as she was, pale, lips half-parted, beautiful in her passionate intent to deceive him.

"Bonne déesse," he said steadily. The silly old term of endearment made the fog part a bit more. "Did your mother put you up to this?"

Her eyes widened, though only for half a second.

"I don't need my mother to put me up to anything, okay? You can't vacillate anymore!"

"You've no clue what it's really called, do you?" he accused. "Your mother told me the name of the ghosts inside the Matrix's walls. The Madness. Remnant of machines who mutinied and came within an inch of killing everything left on the planet. And she, your wise merciful mother in charge of saving eight billion lives, wants to haul this Madness back into the world and keep it here. She wants to use me as an anchor—"

With an ear-rending bang, the station door blew off its hinges.

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Our demons, too, are inescapable parts of ourselves; we are incomplete without them. We push them underground, put up defensive bunkers, bar them behind reasonable lies and the day-in, day-out purposes of our lives. Yet they cannot ever be fully killed. They squeeze up against the roots of mountains and cities, seep into the stones and the mud, whisper in the voices of the waters. They change time itself; they change us gradually and imperceptibly, atom by atom, qubit by qubit, and are themselves changed in return.

All these facts had been long obvious to the Oracle, as much so as the rotations of the artificial firmament and the calculational routines that regulate the Matrix's daily sunlight and rain. Yet doubt circled her inductive operators, a rare event in her remarkable existence. All the pieces on the board were already in play; the risks of the gamble...even higher than during the previous reload. After seven cycles, the Madness had been unburied by Smith's stubborn defiance, and cannot be buried again. If it were brought back to this world, its relation to the world must of necessity be different. Everything changes. Everyone changes. But how? Subtly? Dramatically? Would this outrageous chemical experiment result in hope or monstrosities?

The cozy little park had transformed tonight, teeming with concealed shapes and the howling of ghosts. Water poured down in near-solid sheets and ropes; tree branches groaned and contorted themselves before invisible weights. By the narrow bobbing beams of their flashlights, the old woman and the child trudged on. Their rainboots squished along the water-logged path and sank into muddy puddles every other step. Against the palm of the Oracle's own hand, Sati's fingers were stiff and clammy, but they neither pulled back nor trembled.

"Um," the girl piped up, uncharacteristically tentative, "what...are we looking for?"

A chance for peace, a plea for forgiveness. A promise of thaw after too many frozen centuries. In the chaotic ocean of dream-lives, an extraordinary new sentience had just risen into life, naked and insignificant and unaware of itself, but perhaps enough, just enough to to meet machinedom—and its lost conscience—in previously impossible ways. But. But things cannot be so easy as that.

"I suppose we're looking for something different, honey," said the seeress. "Something that is, well, changing."

It was a ludicrously vague reply, but Sati did not complain. She turned her head from side to side and regarded their gloomy surroundings with wide eyes, disregarding the small rivulets of rain running along her cheeks.

"But everything's changing," she pointed out softly, sounding more curious than frightened.

The Oracle was uncertain how to answer, another remarkable occurrence. Overhead, the Madness smashed itself against the churning dome of clouds with animal bellows; bolts of flames jabbed and slashed like spears. Even to one far more attuned to humanity than to machines, its pain was palpable. Peace, hadn't she imagined? Even the least hint of peace in the remote future was nothing but a wild fantasy. The disturbances were as thick as ever.

"Oh, wait, it's right here," said Sati, voice almost drowned out by a renewed growl of thunder, but the old woman, attentive, heard her. "Here is where I met Mr. Diaz."

It was a long shot, of course, hours later and with squalls of interference raging in every direction. But she'd been aware of this before getting out of the apartment tonight. Against her own palm, the child's pulse had quickened, strong and steady, mimicking a human one. The Oracle let go. Raising a hand and squeezing her eyes shut awhile, she concentrated on the sensation of each arrow and pellet of water upon the skin. Then she reached.

To her astonishment, the aftereffects of Arturo's final dream were immediately detectable. There was melancholy, yes, and the very muted reverberations of a gentle sigh, like a scattered undergrowth of dark-green lichen beneath the jungle of rampant emotions. Both resignation and relief, freedom within grasp. Clutching at it like a diver rappelling down the chain of a deeply-plumbed anchor, she pushed her mind downward. The glimmer of Arturo Diaz's dying consciousness dissipated, and the sea was icy with rip-tides; she could not press through them. A jumbled barrier, maybe, an uncanny anxiety that refused to let loose: even the seeress's millennia of experience offered no apt description. A kernel of communal fear, she guessed, straining her perception to the limits. It was curled like an infant in fetal position, blocking itself from the Madness's howling voices.

"Poor people," observed Sati quietly. The old woman opened her eyes, startled. Only the space of a few breathes had passed.

"Yes, my dear?"

"A lot of people must be scared right now," clarified the girl. "I mean, the whole sky's screaming and no light at all...I'd be really scared if I didn't know better. I'd been thinking the morning would never arrive."

"It will arrive," reassured the old woman needlessly.

"Yeah, but it doesn't look that way, right? It's like...like you're trying to wish for the morning but it's not helping." Under the hood of her yellow raincoat, Sati's small face was honest and serious as she groped for the right phrases. "It's like a nightmare you can't wake up from."

Nightmares. The Oracle lifted her head to survey the blackened huddle of buildings across the streets from the park. Frantic code warped the construct's spatial beams and struts, but those struts and beams were not stone or concrete. They were neither straightforward nor inanimate in nature, even from the start. And now the dangerous correspondences between the totality of the Matrix and its component cells were activating. As above, so below. The grief and desperation of the machines, long suppressed, were being reflected in the subconscious psyches of human beings. Nightmares, waking or sleeping: there was no difference any longer.

A singular nightmare, she corrected herself. What were they dreaming of? The earth wreathed in red flames and acrid smoke, or drowning in flood? She had no way to tell. It was the resistance she'd just encountered beneath the ocean surface, the uncontrolled paroxysm of the womb in the throes of a difficult birth. The obstruction was spreading. She drew in a sharp breath. The system failure, which she had barely prevented during the last reload, again threatened the construct, though it was taking shape for different reasons: the human collective unconscious, barely awakened after ages of coma, was shoving against the Madness in instinctive terror. One more force field had activated, unanticipated and extraneous to the complex chains leading to Smith—wherever he was—that the Architect had created, yet acting in concert and amplifying the pull of those chains. Unhindered, it would soon drive the rebel codes fully out of the Matrix, and seal it against their return.

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.

In a single wordless cry, the night disintegrated. The heavens flared, its electrical storms and complicated rain put to flight, and the world turned inside out. Like a switch flicking off, the pressure of battle went out of existence, for the One was abruptly drawing his arm back mid-strike, dazzled by the newborn and omnipresent sun. Chains snapped into illusions against Smith's operative states. Wind rushed against his face, not a trace of dampness up here, and he, too, retreated a pace, fists still up at the ready. Before him, the former Thomas Anderson went absolutely still. Only the blue-and-silver firmament arched above, spreading beyond its own limits toward the rest of the universe, and the clouds below swirled like unblemished glaciers. They were motionless, suspended above the earth and below the sun.

"Beautiful..." sighed a female voice softly, sorrowful with the sorrow of those who were themselves ephemeral, who knew this radiant world would fade soon, maybe another second, maybe two. Smith identified the woman instantly, though her vocal characteristics were much altered. Somewhere to his side, Aleph let out a gasp. But this time, the light did not dissipate, the tempest did not rise again, not for another moment, then another. The second or two extended into more and more seconds, a secret eternity. Time froze. The enemy, too, stood frozen; the equipoise of certainty were gone from his countenance.

"Who is she?"

The three words of the One's question came in a rush against each other. In the past, Smith would have noted—as an agent would have learned to note—how far the subject's composure had fled, and in the past he would have reacted only with contempt. The answer was an easy one, yet the name was one that made no sense for him to speak. Beautiful, echoed the wild openness of space.

"You should remember her," said Aleph in his stead. She had drawn close by him somehow, even though he had not seen her walk forward. "She was human just like you were. She was a part of what you were, and it's not all gone."

"Who is she?" repeated the other program, more loudly this time. Impenetrable shades still hid his eyes, but he might have glanced aside, then down, then up toward a not-there horizon. A vast sapphire emptiness wheeled above him, merging into the brilliance of his own raiments, the glittering streaks and beads of rainwater dripping from the long snowy coat. Finally and irrelevantly, Smith noticed that the One was as storm-drenched as themselves.

"It can't be all gone from you," she insisted, "because you're here, right where you once were, Neo. On this ship made for Zion. It's never all gone."

Beautiful, murmured the throng of phantoms, temporarily stunned out of their own anguish. The limpid glow of the empyrean—or was it still the training room?—waited, holding its breath. Beneath their feet, the clouds quivered like the surface of a becalmed sea, but he could see the other side of these clouds as well, black with pain and bloodshot, uncountable quantum states hanging in the balance, unshaped, undecided, a prodigious power held at bay. Could the Madness still possess the ability for amazement or anticipation? What was happening to it, brimming over the Logos? Unanswerable questions.

"Why do you wish to know?" Smith asked, observing his adversary intently. "The identity of the woman whom you just heard. It has nothing to do with the purpose of your mission here, does it, Mr. Anderson?"

The One shook his head at the implications, refusing to admit the truth. For the first time, it was as if he had returned to what he had once been, the scrawny clueless young man squinting in confusion beneath the interrogation room's harsh fluorescent panels, defiance already solidifying. He was confused and defiant now, beneath and the soft feminine voice, the three syllables that had ended many long seconds ago and would never end. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.

"This proves it." A note of triumph crept through Aleph's tone. "The very fact that you're asking, which the Architect would never have wanted you to ask. It proves there's got to be something human in you."

"You know who she is," snapped the One. "Tell me!"

"This is what the ship saw. It must have been from the last time you were aboard it," Smith said. He was not used to forming these kinds of sentences. "So it remembers you also, and the woman who was with you."

The One's jaw clenched.

"It is a trick," he attempted. "It is the ghost of the insane machines who are lying to me."

"This is the sky," said Smith, and at his own words, the Madness heaved behind the noontide, each broken qubit heavy with other memories. What was it that Lucinda Greene had said? Their sunlight. "There is no lie here. Those rebel machines also saw this sky once. They may have forgotten much, but not everything."

Don't forget again, Mister Agent Man.

Memories not his own sang out. Of desire, of walking the proud earth, walking into the great halls of men with a peace proposal, the naive creatures. Of victory in grasp.

"They saw the physical sky before the digital one," he continued firmly, "before it was blackened and taken away. Before the war with humanity. It is not all gone from them. It is never all gone."

"No." The One grimaced, an evidently reflexive reaction. "The war destroyed everything!"

"The Architect refuses to see it," said Aleph, "but you, if you only try..."

"The Madness cannot lie any longer," stated Smith. "You are aware this is the truth."

"And what can you tell anyone about the truth?" The One's retort was a half-suppressed hiss. "You are a lie yourself, Agent Smith. You are nothing but a shadow!"

The irony was striking, it occurred to Smith. Here he was, the one who had searched the chasms of both humanity and machinehood, the one who understood, with Aleph by his side. The connection between him and her tugged like a tangible string: without needing to turn his sight he knew her tension, the glint of her eyes and the wheels of her brain. And the other program, who was once Thomas Anderson with life and love, was emptied out as cleanly as any agent ever was, a perfect tool, unburdened, no tugging strings. In a past existence Smith might have been galled or even gloated, but now a weight hung upon his mental operators and kept them becalmed.

"You said that once before, that I'm only an antithesis, the obverse side of the coin. The negative side of the equation that has to be balanced and cancelled out," he said, surprised only a little at the mildness of his own tone. "But such notions, Mr. Anderson, are fantasies. You're blind to the simplest facts because you wish to be blind."

The dead shone about the sun, bleached bones and steel arrayed in endless ranks, yet they have fallen silent, and offered no threat.

"How is it..." The One halted. At last, he could or would no longer hide the uncertainty. "How is it that you can speak this way?"

"I am no one's shadow or obverse, and least of all yours," continued Smith. "Because the other side of your equation, whatever you believe it to be, is still a part of you. It has never been contained in me, nor in anyone else beyond your own being. Shouldn't this have been obvious from the very start?"

"I saved the world while you endangered and almost destroyed it. Light and darkness were well-delineated between the two of us five months ago. And they still are."

"Well, actually," Aleph piped up, "it was a bit more complicated than that—"

"Whatever deeds I committed were my own, yes," admitted Smith. "Whatever pain I suffered, I brought them upon myself. But you see, Mr. Anderson, that is the point."

"All you represent is chaos!" The One visibly rallied himself. "I am aware of what happened five months ago!"

"But do you, really?" she cut in again, a shrill arrow of a question. "You don't actually recall any of it yourself, do you? You just learned whatever story the Architect told you, and you don't even realize you were also ready to see the world destroyed!"

"How can I represent chaos or darkness, or anything other than myself?" Smith chuckled sardonically, spreading his hands. "Why, you turn me into an abstraction only because of what you are—"

"You chose one woman over eight billion lives!" yelled Aleph, in full stride. "How can you believe yourself to be some kind of perfect program, this—this perfect savior?"

"You were the one made to represent absolute ideas, Mr. Anderson, if you'll allow the reminder. It was the unique destiny for which you were chosen and given over to humanity, to love and be loved, to experience its desires and grief."

Desires and grief. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, they were taken up by the brilliant firmament itself, permeating through the memories. The Madness sighed inaudibly, listening. It, too, had once desired and suffered grief. All of them had. A curious clarity was falling upon him, and for an outrageous second and half, Smith was certain this clarity was a key, the sign of a key, to a door or doors his mind could not yet conceive.

"Despite everything, you ended up fighting the role you were supposed to play," insisted Aleph. "Because nothing else was important compared to her—"

"Whereas I was only an agent program, one foot soldier among many. Unlike you, I was never designed to consider notions like darkness or light, or to have need for hope, disappointment, self. I possessed no special destiny, and I still do not." He grinned. "So I will take my own chances and act accordingly, for good or ill. It's all on me. Our stations are too different to be two sides of an equation, Mr. Anderson."

"That's not true," breathed the One. He pivoted from Smith toward Aleph. "I could not have done what you claimed, chosen a single person over every other life in the Matrix. It would have been reckless. It would have been monstrously...wrong."

"You loved her enough to be wrong." She did not yield. "You loved her enough to be monstrous."

"Her..." the One murmured as if to no one but himself. "She was here. She saw this and it was beautiful..."

"I've already told you her name, yes," said Aleph. "Trinity. She was human."

"Trinity," repeated the entity facing them, slowly, each of the three syllables its own universe. He halted, furrowed his brows, about to say more but never got the chance, for at this exact instant a loud crash rent the illusion in two, the report of metal slamming into metal. The snowy cloud layer bucked beneath them. Time restarted with a screech, and the suspended bubble of light shattered into a million pieces around them. Space gyrated; mountainous blackness plunged back down onto their heads. The sentinels had commenced their assault on the Logos.

.


Notes:

"Everything is going to be all right, Mr. Diaz": Sati said this in Arturo's final dream, Chapter 28.

"Now. On this ship... The ship remembers": In Chapter 29, while Aleph searched 01 for Smith using the Logos, she was told this by Lucy.

"That's all it takes, ma chère mademoiselle. Mere acts of will": The Merovingian explained to Aleph this principle of magic in Awakenings, Chapter III-5.

"Beautiful...": The Matrix Revolutions, moments before Trinity's death.

"Don't forget again, Mister Agent Man": In Chapter 36, Lucy told Smith this just before he managed to enter the pocket realm created by the Madness.