Human

Neo walks into Simulatte and sits down. He looks up as Tiffany enters, looking afraid.

This is the part of the game that gets the most criticism. Because the only way to proceed is if she agrees to go with him. It has to be her choice.

There are actually more ways the scene can play out than most people have discovered. Depending on the dialogue options you choose for Neo, sometimes Tiffany remembers she's actually Trinity, sometimes she doesn't. You can pull in the Analyst and make him overplay his hand sooner. You can say nothing, if you look at her at just the right moment and execute the combo for what the forums call Neo's puppy eyes (yes, there really is a combo for that). But unless they leave together, the game ends here.

This was the first part of the game to get hacked extensively, because there were people who felt like they should have been able to have different options. So you can download a patch that lets you walk out of Simulatte as Neo and take off into the sky. You can play as Tiffany and reject him, or never walk in to the coffee shop at all. But by design, Neo and Trinity made it unmistakably clear that neither of them makes it out alive without the other. Believe me, I've tried everything else.


One of my earliest memories is of overhearing Mom tell Dad that what I lacked in cyber, I made up for in punk. I think she meant it as a compliment, but it just made me want to kick her.

I was five years old. Old enough to know that whenever Mom and Dad went off and boarded the Mnemosyne or went into their office and sat in their chairs and jacked in, that they were going to leave me for a long time and I'd have no idea when they were coming back. I hated it. I used to cry for days. When they finally returned, I'd either be really happy to see them, or I'd throw one hell of a tantrum. Even I didn't know which it was going to be until the moment they came back. As far as I can remember, I was always aware of the connection between what my parents spent all their time doing and what I wasn't.

Hearing the cyberpunk comment was the first time I did anything about it, though.

I ran to the kitchen and got all of our plant-based butter out of the fridge. I put in our biggest bowl and microwaved it until it was all liquid. Carrying the bowl with both hands, I ran into their office and poured it all over everything - their chairs and all the equipment attached to it, their computers, the keyboards, into every socket I could see. Then I threw the bowl at the biggest screen, knocking it over so it shattered on the floor.

The sound brought Mom and Dad running. They took one look at the room and me, and then they did that perfectly mirrored thing where they both look up to the heavens, or at least the bio-sky, anyway. And then Mom knelt down and put her arms around me, and I burst into tears.

They'd been logging a lot of time in the Construct debugging Smith. Yeah, Smith, the code that changed so much for coppertops and synthiants alike. So kind of a big deal. Dad claims the interruption actually helped him think around a problem they'd been stuck on, and it got them to crack the code faster as soon as they were able to get their backups online. I suspect he was just trying to make me feel better. Because it seems likelier to me that they were on the verge of cracking it – they'd been very excited all week – and instead they lost a ton of time redoing the progress they'd lost while trying to get their equipment replaced and the apartment cleaned up. Plus they had to explain to our downstairs neighbors why liquid butter was seeping through their ceiling.

So that was one of my first contributions to the enduring legacy of the One.

Also the Oracle and I were supposed to make cookies while Mom and Dad were working that day, and now we couldn't for the rest of the month until we could get our next butter rations. Everyone always says IO has so much more shit than Zion ever did, but you see how you feel about that when you're five years old and your family's all out of something and it's all your fault.


Resurrections was the only game Mom and Dad made together. Since they died, I've been playing it a lot.

The main storyline, if you can call it that, pretty much follows what really happened. After Neo and Trinity make it out of Simulatte, they have to get out of the swarm zone. The motorcycle chase is a crowd-pleaser. This part, you can play as either Trinity or Neo, and of course there's the co-op mode. Later you can unlock swarm mode and play as the swarm.

Fun fact, at first swarm mode was infinite. My parents predicted that people would have fun trying to break the record for how long they could last in survival mode, and they were right.

Of course, soon people started pulling all-nighters, going days without sleeping, fainting from dehydration or overcaffeination, all the shit that gamers do.

Dad always had a special horror of people dying from playing video games. He suspects it happened with the Matrix Trilogy and that Deus Machina just covered it up. When they found out what people were doing, they rewrote the code so that after three hours, sudden death mode kicks in, and you get a one minute countdown to rack up as many extra points as you can before the game ends.

Of course, people hacked this too. I've hung out in some of those hardcore underground places (yeah, I know that all of IO is already underground) where people are still trying to break the current record of 149 hours, 33 minutes and 11 seconds held by some eighteen year-old coppertop savant named Joe. He claims he wasn't even on steroids, and it scares me that I believe him.

I'd say that sudden death mode was one of Mom and Dad's best-received modifications to the game, in terms of winning over the community's acceptance. Most people think it made the game more interesting, more challenging, more fun. They also appreciated that the game doesn't reward you for overtaxing the human body.

Me, I'm still fucking pissed that I passed out three days into my best run and woke up to everyone in the room laughing at me.


As I open my eyes and reach across the bed for my phone, I remember what day it is.

Fuck.

I have to get up. I have to get out of here. Before Bugs shows up to try to drag me to IO's Founding Day gathering.

My computer's still on where I left it last night, showing a revolving preview of the bike I was customizing in Resurrections. After you beat the game for the first time, the first minigame you unlock is Tiffany's workshop where you can customize the bike. Yeah, I've seen everything in the PvP racing mode it comes with. Some people have skinned the bike so it's a unicorn, a white rabbit, a giant hot dog, even a lemon. Why a lemon? Some kind of deep in-joke, I guess. People are weird. Mine just had a pattern of rushing waves along the sides. Nothing too wild by anyone's standards, but I'd sunk a lot of hours into getting the animation to look the way I wanted it to, with the waves going faster as the bike accelerates.

You get to ride your customized bike through the main storyline if you replay it, all the way through the swarms until you reach the building and head up to the roof. There's a little more combat with the soldiers and the helicopters. After the explosion, there's a cutscene where Trinity wakes up and sees the sky, the birds glitching. They say their famous lines to each other – We can't go back. We won't.

And then she and Neo hold hands and jump off the building, in perfect silence as they fall.

"What were you thinking when you did that?" I asked my parents once. "Did you believe you could make the jump? Did you think you could fly?"

"No," Dad said.

"Not for a second," Mom agreed.

That was not what I'd wanted to hear. "What was it, then? Were you so bent on not to going back to your pods that you were just going to kill yourselves?"

"No," Mom said after a moment. She looked at Dad. "We didn't exactly talk about it. But it felt the way it always has for us. We just knew that we were going to make it or die trying."

And I knew the difference between them and me. If I ever had to make a jump like that, it would have been for that other reason.


Making Resurrections wasn't the original plan. What Neo and Trinity had been working on was a program for the Construct. The idea was that people could jack in and get to experience all the powers of the One. They'd be able to fly, stop bullets, toggle through all the different kinds of vision that let you see multiple levels of reality. They were also working on some way to make it so that if you died in the program, you wouldn't die in real life, though it's possible even they wouldn't have cracked this. Beneath all conscious belief, the mind knows that just because something is a construct doesn't necessarily mean that it is false; it resists being tricked more than we give it credit for. There were still looking into that part when they took a trip into the Matrix with Sati to get the Oracle's old shell back.

Sati was the one who told me that story, which is funny in itself because she was the most humorless program I've ever met. One of the last of the old guard. It was her first time accompanying my parents into the Matrix. She'd been kind of doing her own thing already, but the Oracle's old shell felt personal to her. Besides the nostalgia factor, the Oracle had embedded some important code in there, encrypted in a way that only she could get out.

Even though the Merovingian had been exiled, apparently the machines weren't able to get Persephone out of his domain. Something to do with the terms and agreements of how she'd ended up imprisoned there in the first place. With her still in there, it couldn't be erased. So his realm persisted, though Persephone took some liberties with the place each time she migrated it into a new version of the Matrix. Sati described making their way through overgrown ruins in a rainforest. Occasionally, she said, you'd step in a pile of broken chandelier pendalogues or a toppled banister engraved with rotting fleur-de-lis.

Persephone, barefoot in the rubble, was waiting for them. To Neo and Trinity, she said, "I always knew you two would be back." Then she looked at Sati with glittering eyes. "But you. A great price was paid for your redemption. Yet you return to play with fire."

"Nice neighborhood you've got here," Neo said. "We like what you've done with the place."

Persephone smirked. ""Did you know that one root of the word human is humus?"

"Actually, yes," Trinity said.

"Meaning dirt," Persephone continued. "An honest thing. Yet you are foolish enough to judge by appearances. You know only what you see, even when what you see is only..." She blinked.

"You were saying?" Trinity asked.

"There is something different about you today." A slow smile spread across her face.

"What are you so goddamned happy about?"

Persephone laughed, delighted. "Oh, but of course, you do not know yet. Did the Oracle send you to me?"

Trinity just glared at her.

Persephone looked at her and Neo with excitement. "I see that you are afraid. You fear this is a trap. You fear the time has come at last, and she has turned on you by sending you to me. I assure you, for the time being you will be safer with me than anyone else. You should leave the Matrix, however. I will give you that which you came for today. As well as my protection. My gift to the both of you."

She clapped her hands, laughing again. "The Oracle sent you to the right program. It was my original domain, you know. Fertility."

"That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard," I'd said to Sati, when she told me.

"I agree," Sati had replied. "I had really wanted to kick her ass, after all she and the Merovingian had put my parents through."

I'd snickered. "Is revenge the only thing you ever think about?"

Sati had opened her mouth to respond, then closed it again.

Maybe she would have told me a few more stories before she headed off to the frontier if I hadn't pissed her off so much.

But anyway, that's the story of how the Oracle got her groove back, and how everyone found out Mom was pregnant. I never said my family was normal.


In Resurrections, Neo and Trinity are falling through the air when the music cuts back in. The controller vibrates like crazy, if you have the settings on for that. And suddenly the controls work again. You can fly.

This is the end of the main storyline. At this point, the game becomes magical, pretty open world. You can toggle between regular vision, seeing the code, and seeing the machines as golden light. At first, it's a binary thing, on/off. But as you gain more experience with it, you start being able to adjust the transparency so you can see all the overlays at the same time. Something as simple as looking seeing the circuitry under the ground at the same time as you see its mundane surface is pretty amazing. Windows and mirrors are unbelievable. And as someone who's played as Neo looking at Trinity or Trinity looking at Neo, hundreds of hours in, I can tell you that you keep seeing new things, every one of them beautiful.

And yeah. When they were alive, what I wanted was space, and now that they're gone, anything I can get is never going to be enough.


For a certain kind of player, the best part is realizing you can send Neo and Trinity back to Simulatte, where they get coffee and talk for hours. To our credit as a species, there are a lot of shippers among us.

Yeah, a lot of it's just them going on cute coffee dates and talking about their relationship. But sometimes they'll also discuss what they thought of IO's governance, their philosophy on ethical game design, how being Tiffany and Thomas changed their perspective on a lot of things, where they felt the previous Ones had gone wrong. There's something for everyone.

For a long time, I didn't explore this area much because I figured I knew most of it already. But one day I was really missing them. So I had them go in and order cortados and sit at their favorite table and talk. There's kind of a daily limit on this because after two or three cups of coffee, Trinity declines another, and that's about all the conversation you'll get out of them. But you can leave Neo there if you want. He will drink literally unlimited coffee with a big dopey smile on his face.

I looked at them looking at each other. Even in this fake world, this game, with these two fake representations of all they really were, I could feel the energy of their connection, the way they knew what the other person was thinking. The look that says, could we stay right here till the end of time, until the earth stops turning?

And suddenly something came to my mind. Two cutscenes from Revolutions. The first was when Trinity went with Morpheus to see the Oracle.

Trinity: Do you know what happened to Neo?

Oracle: Yes. He's trapped in a place between this world and the machine world. The link is controlled by a program called the Trainman. He uses it to smuggle programs in and out of the Matrix. If he finds out where Neo is before you get to him, then I'm afraid our choices are going to become difficult.

Trinity: Why?

Oracle: Because of who the Trainman works for.

Morpheus: The Merovingian.

The second scene comes soon after that, when Neo is talking to Rama-Kandra, in the train station.

Neo: Who's the Trainman?

Rama-Kandra: He works for the Frenchman.

Neo: Why'd I know you were going to say that?

It's a funny moment, the dramatic irony that the audience gets. But I started thinking about Dad's question. Why did he know?

Because Mom had just found out.

That's the feeling I got as I looked at these video game characters of them holding their coffees and gazing into each other's eyes. Like I knew, and I knew why I knew.

I pulled up the input interface and typed in ACCORD.

And they started talking about me.

Mom smiled at Dad over her cup. "Remember when you said you were done making video games?"

He chuckled. "Yeah."

"And here we are now."

"Not bad, huh?" He took another sip of his coffee.

"If she's anything like you, I think she'll like it."

He reached over and took her hand. "If our daughter likes video games, I'll make a hundred."


I typed in ACCORD again. They had a different conversation. There were a lot, it seemed. And they were all about me. The other names they'd considered for me. How they felt about getting ready to be the cyborg parents of a freeborn kid. Whether they were going to cut back on their missions as the One, or whether they needed to do even more now that they cared about making the world better in a way they hadn't before.

From what I can tell, most of these conversations were recorded when Mom was pregnant, which lines up with the time the two of them worked the most on this game. After that, they got busier. Looking after me, for one thing. Maybe if I hadn't given them such a hard time, they would have had more time to add more stuff.

I trawled every forum I could find online, dmed all the players who'd racked up the most hours, talked to few neologists, everything I could think of. No one else seems to have found these so far. I wondered if Mom and Dad had coded something that responded to my username somehow. I made another account. typed in ACCORD. It still worked. I tried it on a computer not in my apartment and still worked. One afternoon I even called Bugs and asked her to try it in her account. Nothing, she told me. I waited a few minutes, then hacked into her account and tried it. It worked again. That was spooky. Somehow, it was responding to me. I looked at the code and couldn't find anything that was controlling how it interfaced with me. But it knew.

Look, they were my parents. I have mixed feelings about hearing them talk about me. But they left it as my choice, how much I wanted to engage with it. I know they tried hard not to impose too much on me. There was already so much about my life and who I was and what people would expect me to be that I didn't choose. In a way, that was their life, too, as the One. So as much as I told them they didn't really understand me, they still understood me better than anyone else.


When I was still at the academy, I stopped hanging out with the other freeborn kids because after a while, I'd just feel sorry for myself. It seemed we were always talking all the things we'd do in the Matrix. We weren't supposed to, because everyone was always telling us that if we knew how awful it really was to be in there, we'd never wish to experience it ourselves. But it seemed like all we talked about. We dreamed about how we'd have cool clothes in different colors, go hiking in the mountains, try Cheetos and lick the orange coating off our fingers, catch snowflakes on our tongues, ride the subway to work, read books that were printed on paper, eat ice cream, and not have our whole lives revolve around a war that was never going to end.

One time Callie caught a few of us cutting AP Transhumanism and smoking cigarettes behind the music building. But the part that pissed her off most was that we were playing that game where we went around saying what we wanted to do in the Matrix. She laid into us for half an hour about, and I quote, "romanticizing the hellscape." It totally ate into my lunch period. The part that really sucked was that it got to Mom because Callie was the vice principal at the academy and also my half-sister, kind of, when Mom was Tiffany and her mom before she was unplugged. So it was kind of a sore subject for her, when I was already a sore subject for her to begin with.

I never shared this with anyone, but the thing I want most is to hold a cat. I hear cats don't like that, in addition to not liking most people. But in my dreams, I'm one of the special few that they do.

You bet I've clocked more hours than anyone else I know on the cat minigames in Resurrections.

Everyone loves the one where you take over the Architect's house and get to remodel it however you want, including blowing it up and leave it gaping open. Either way, you get to feed Déjà Vu and pet her and groom her and point a laser at the floor and watch her pounce on it. I've logged weeks there. You can find other cats in the city and get kittens. You can name them whatever you like, or you can go with the game defaults. You bet this game doesn't have normie default cat names like Teddy and Cocoa and Dusty. I only use the default names because that's the part of the game where you can see my parents' weird sense of humor the most. You can kind of tell who added which name. I have over a hundred cats now, including Tank, Noodles, Simulacra, Ducati, Alice, Nebuchadnezzar, Seraph, Kung Fu, Mr. Wizard, and Tastee Wheat.

I am a total cat lady. I've filled that whole fucking house with cats. As an example of how Resurrections is stuffed with dad joke type humor, you can dress up the cats, too. Their accessories include bow ties, top hats, aviator goggles, and of course, all kinds of mirrored shades.

The other minigames are pretty sweet, too. You hack into Deux Machina's computer system and can play the beta version of Binary, a neat little isometric. It ends abruptly where it got canceled, true to life, but some people have built mods for it that finish it off.

The most famous one, this one's easy. In Revolutions, in Club Hel, when Trinity draws her gun and points it at the Merovingian, you just hit the button that makes her holster it again. Then Morpheus yells, "Dance battle!" and the lights start flashing red and blue, and if you're in single player mode you get to choose if you want to be Morpheus or Merv.

Persephone snickers if the Merovingian loses and seethes if he wins. Otherwise, she just sits there giving off the vibe that she would rather be elsewhere, doing other things.

But you can play as either character to unlock her line when you top the leaderboards. These days the score is so high you actually need to approach it like co-op mode, actually coordinating with whoever you're playing against so together you can execute the combo responses that get you the highest points. If you get to the top, she eyes you and says, "I envy you, but such a thing is not meant to last." I spent days before I finally managed it as Morpheus, but it was worth it. My username's in the archives forever, along with my winning set list:

Don't Stop Me Now

Who Wants to Live Forever?

Sweet Dreams Are Made of These


I brush my teeth, get dressed, and look for something to eat. I don't really remember the last time I got groceries. I wish there was some coffee, at least, but even the instant granulated mushroom stuff is all gone. Most coppertops like my parents won't touch the stuff. Leave it to IOnians to be coffee snobs even after the planet has been ravaged by ecological apocalypse. I'll admit I was hooked as soon as my parents started letting me drink real coffee at Wake Up! when I was about twelve. Unlike them, I actually like mine black, but then I've never had it any other way. I started drinking mushroom coffee a few years later to be like the other freeborn kids at the academy. The first sip wasn't great but it gets better as you go, or at least it seems that way. A metaphor for something, surely.

In the end, I make do with the last protein bar in a box Bugs must have dropped off last week.

Mom and Dad lived in a fucking palace, by IO standards. I moved out to one of the standard issue crew studios after I started operating. I'd wanted one of my own ever since Bugs used to have me over to her place when I was a kid. Bugs was like the best and worst babysitter of all time. Part let's jump on the bed until we're so dizzy we can pretend we're the sun and the solar system revolves around us, and part crazy aunt who makes you look at every item in her massive collection of sacraments dedicated to the One.

She hosted my twelfth birthday party in her apartment. It was the golden age of our relationship. She adored me, and I worshipped her. I dressed like her, which wasn't saying much because there's not that much to choose from in IO, but I mean, I even got my hair cut just like hers, even though it just looked kind of stupid on me. I'm glad that my parents insisted I wait until I was sixteen before I could get a tattoo because today I'd be really embarrassed to have the matching white rabbit I wanted so badly back then. But Bugs would draw one on for me with eyeliner. At my request, she gave everyone one at my party.

The coolest thing about Bugs' place was that she had a karaoke machine. We got it out that night after everyone else had gone home. The one thing that would have embarrassed Bugs was singing coppertop songs in front of other people, even Lexy. I'll say this for myself, I kept this our special thing.

Bugs threw her head back and belted, "Just a small town girl, livin' in a lonely world, she took the midnight train going anywhere."

I sang, "Just a city boy, born and raised in south Detroit, he took the midnight train going anywhere."

We harmonized when we hit the chorus:

STRANGERS WAITING
UP AND DOWN THE BOULEVARD
THEIR SHADOWS SEARCHING IN THE NIGHT~

"Bugs, what's a midnight train?" I asked hoarsely afterwards, as I poured us both more juice.

She shrugged. "A train that leaves at midnight, I guess. Come to think of it, I took a few of those, but they're not all they're cracked up to be. You start to feel the size of the country in your ass."

I laughed, but inside I was feeling like I'd lost something. I realized I had pictured a raven-dark train, a machine animated by spirits with a shaman conductor. Bullet-sleek intention. Coal fires and madness. Engineering, witchcraft, and mystery.

That seemed like the only thing that could bring two lonely, isolated strangers together. Living just to find emotion. Hiding somewhere in the night.