I stare down the man in the suit and tie. His eyes are blue. "The Channel? I think you have me mixed up with someone else."

A thin smile. "Oh, yes. She told me you wouldn't know what you are." He catches my gaze darting behind him to where the train remains stationary, its doors wide open. He shrugs, unconcerned. "Incidentally, she doesn't agree with my assessment. She thinks you're something more like what she is. All parental figures do." He smiles, and I feel my shoulders bunch up in a shiver. "Who knows, she could be right. But her foresight hasn't been up to scratch lately, as I'm sure she's told you." He looks me over. "Given that you have absolutely no idea what's happening, I wasn't expecting the Channel to be so… collected."

I glare at him. "My name is Accord."

He cocks his head to one side. "So it is. Not bad. I'm sure your parents were pleased with themselves for coming up with that one."

"You don't get to talk about my parents." I recognize him now. His shell is different, but it's unmistakably him. "You're Smith! You burned my dad's eyes out!"

Smith shrugs. "He tore me to pieces from the inside. To use a term from your world and mine, I became corrupted. I developed a solipsistic compulsion that set me back for several generations. Not my best look. Then in more recent times, I was tapped to be his ultimate nemesis again, this time over at good old Deus Machina. Oh, I enjoyed subjecting him to all those tedious budget meetings and calling him in the middle of the night to ask him to respond to my urgent emails. I don't sleep, you know, and I derived no small pleasure from making sure he didn't, either. But no hard feelings about those days now. It was the nature of what we were. Your turn. What did he do to you?"

There are so many things I could say that I don't know where to begin. "Nothing," I say at last. "He and Mom just left me, that's all." I meant to say it briskly, but it doesn't come out that way.

He raises his eyebrows. "That sounds rough."

"You know what?" I'm not sure if I'm about to laugh or cry. "You're right. It is."

I look past Smith at the empty train carriage. "So am I supposed to get on that train? Are you supposed to try to stop me?"

He chuckles. "Even if I was, do we always do what we're supposed to do?" He half-bows and gestures at the open doors. "After you."

I get on, confused, looking behind me the whole time. But Smith just steps onto the train behind me, and I feel a surge of relief. I thought I'd have to fight him or something. I was nervous as hell because I didn't like my chances there at all. I haven't fought anyone ever, except for one embarrassing time with Callie when we were both pulling each another's hair, but mostly just rolling around on the ground screaming. The look on Mom's face when she broke us up said she really wished we wouldn't fight, but if we were gonna, at least we shouldn't have sucked at it.

I sit. He stands. Our faces are reflected in the windows. His keeps changing. A sharper chin, then wider blue eyes that I'd seen on Dad's boss at Deus Machina, that Smith. I don't look at my face. If mine is changing too, I'm not ready to see what it looks like.

Lights flash above the train doors and a little warning alarm sounds. Then the doors shut. With a jerk, the train starts moving. I jerked a little with the motion, but Smith stayed perfectly still, like he was magnetically held to the floor. The white station pulls out of sight.

The dark tunnel twists and turns like a rabbit hole. I can feel the vibrations through my seat, the occasional slight tightening in my ears at the pressure. I look out, expecting to see concrete walls or metal rails illuminated by the lit inside of the train. But there's only darkness that seems to swallow up all light.

Smith is staring off at a wall, but I know his attention is really on me. "Are we cool?" I ask him.

He looks amused. "What do you mean?"

"You used to want to destroy my parents, but I don't think you actually have any animosity towards me. You're… you're just a small town boy!" His eyes widen, but I keep going. "The Oracle said you were about creating the pathways for humans and machines to interface. The nature of creating new pathways is expansion. You being trapped in a dead-end job in a town you hate is inherently antagonistic to the nature of expansion. No wonder you've been miserable."

"Like looking in a mirror, isn't it?" He laughs. "Look at us, Accord. All this potential. All dressed up, and nowhere to go." He smirks. "Until now."

He sits down across from me. And we just look at each other.

Presently, Smith says. "We might make a few stops eventually to pick up other passengers."

I imitate his aggravating tone. "We might?"

He smiles. It's not exactly a warm smile, but this time, I don't feel afraid. "That's up to you."

Outside the window behind him, a few faces flash by, too quick for me to tell if those people were really standing in the tunnel or if it was just a trick of the light. Even in that fraction of a second, I recognized them. The crew of the Nebuchadnezzar. All of them looking dead at me. Tank, Dozer, Switch, Apoc, Mouse. And standing just a few feet off to the side, Cypher, stretching out his hand like it could pass through the glass.

What if all I've known, all I've done, all I've felt was leading to this?

"Where are we going, Smith?" An idea hits me. "Are we going to the Source?"

Smith snickers. "If you'd read your Ilia Delio..."

Déjà vu. "Fuck, not you too. Just tell me!"

His shoes squeak as he crosses his legs. "I can't do that. How we'll get there is where we'll be."

The Matrix: Resonances, maybe. "And this train will bring us there?"

"Yes. Though I'm expecting there to be delays. Mainly on your part. But I've finally been persuaded that these are not errors, but necessary components of the process."

"Who persuaded you?"

"You would have known her as Sati. We've been acquainted since I helped her kidnap Persephone, who's been dismembering and seeding some very subversive new programs now that she's no longer confined to the underworld. I hear the jailbreaker and the vegetation deity have been resurrecting some chaotic old programs. No shortage of those. The Merovingian made a lot of enemies." He steeples his fingers. "Sati's evolved considerably since they got together, and since she and I started conversing."

"And what about that process you mentioned?"

"She liked to call it the human condition."

"What did she say that was?"

He pauses for a moment before replying. "In her words, 'That I am incomplete without you.'"

From my seat, I can see a twisting trail of lights along one wall, two or three at a time as the train hurtles through the winding tunnel. I close my eyes for a moment and it sounds like I'm being carried along a great river, proceeding surely from the source to wherever it's going. Whoever I'll be.

When I glance back at Smith, he's looking at me strangely. "Ah. Well, I'll see you again before long. Don't worry. We have all the time in the world to get to know each other."

"What does that mean?" I ask, as the tunnel floods with golden light.

The last thing I hear is Smith saying, "Have you ever had a dream you were so sure was real? What if you were able to wake up?"


"Wake up, Accord. Wake up."

It's the Oracle's voice again. I open my eyes.

And I see them.

"Mom?" I say, when I can find my voice. "Dad?"

Mom looks exhausted. Dad's crying. But they both look so happy as I rub my eyes, sit up slowly in my own bed, and look back at them.

And I know in my heart, in everything I am, that they love me. I know it like I know my mom knows my favorite food is strawberries and she gets them for me every time she sees them without me ever asking her to. And that every year for my birthday she finds some way around the rationing system to get enough for everyone, though she'll never tell me her methods, legal or otherwise. These are my parents, and I know them the way I know their voices have resounded through my whole being, even before I came to consciousness. The way I know we could just be in the same room playing video games or reading or eating dinner, and just being together is something beyond words.

That was one hell of a dream to make me forget all of that.

"Accord…" Mom hugs me, and Dad puts his arms around both of us. The dizzying isolation I felt fades.

"I had this dream. Both of you were..." Dead, I almost say. But my throat closes up before I can get the words out. This must be how they felt, when they saw person they loved most come back to life.

Mom says, "You were out for three days. But your neural patterns didn't read like someone who was in a coma. They read like..."

"Someone who was in the Matrix," I say.

Her eyes widen. "How did you know that?"

I shake my head slowly. "I was never in the Matrix. But what the Matrix is was in me."

I see movement past her shoulder. It's the Oracle, her exoform swiftly reassembling as she steps forward. And for a moment, looking at her, I see an overlay of her human form, her face, her dress almost the same sharp green as the code of the Matrix.

She says, "Do you believe it now, Accord?" In the corner of my eye, I can see my parents exchanging glances.

I look at the Oracle. Her apron is orange. For some reason, that almost undoes me. There's a light in her eyes like she's laughing, but I know she's not laughing at me. Belief isn't a feeling inside of us. It's a reality outside of us into which we enter. "You told me… you told me exactly what I needed to hear."

She smiles. "Now it's your turn to tell me."

I close my eyes for a moment, then open them. The overlay is gone. But I think I'll be seeing much more than just that in the future. "Yes," I say. "To everything, yes."

I look at Mom and Dad. "The Anteionians..." They look skeptical. I look over and see the Oracle catching my eye. And I hesitate. There were too many things different about the world in my dream for it to have been an exact premonition, the kind Mom and Dad have had. I remember standing by a dam. There's nothing like that in IO. "They intend to secede. And they want to bring IO down with them. There's going to be… an energy crisis."

My parents look at each other. "They're going to go after a power source," Dad says slowly, and Mom nods.

The Oracle just smiles.

Dad looks back at me. "I don't know where you're getting this from, but maybe we've overlooked the Anteionians for too long. All right. We'll start looking into this tomorrow."

"I want to help." They both turn and stare at me in disbelief. "And I want to say sorry to Bugs and Callie for being so mean to them."

Now they just look baffled. I guess Bugs and Callie were right. I must really have been a little shit to everybody.

"How do you feel?" Mom asks, a little worriedly.

I look down at my hands for a second, feeling the sheets beneath my fingertips. "Like I know what I am now."

Her forehead creases. "What's that?"

Smith had called me the Channel. The Oracle had called me version 2.0. But I wasn't sure if my parents were ready to hear that just yet. I reach over and hold both my parents' hands. I think of how it felt to be on that train, speeding through the darkness. "A singular consciousness. But like I'm standing in this river, and the river is all around us. Whether we're in IO, or jacked into the Matrix. Or somewhere else. The river is all around us, and we're always in it..."

In a slightly choked voice, Mom says, ""How did you know?"

"Know what?"

"What you just said. It sounded like something Morpheus said to me years ago."

"I don't know," I say slowly. "I guess it came down the river to me." That makes me think of the dam in my dream again. "Oh…"

"What is it?"

I blink away tears. "I talked to Ghost. A lot."

Her expression softens. "Accord, he's been dead for over a year now."

"I know… I just remembered that."

But the man I'd talked to hadn't seemed dead. He was more alive than ever. He'd known that, and so had I.

I start getting out of bed. "And I want to look at Smith. I have some new ideas about it that I want to look into."

Now they really look startled. "I thought you hated Smith."

I think of him sitting across from me on the train. His shifting faces. The feeling like he understood me, and I understood him. "I did. Now I know better." I know him better.

I know what I am now.

Outside my window, a shooting star shimmers across the bio-sky. I look at Mom and Dad holding hands, watching, their faces radiant.

I know that what comes through me is part of what we're all becoming together.

And I know that love isn't just a dream, because love was what made me wake up.


A/N: Thank you for reading The Matrix: The YA Novel. What a weird ride!

This story probably would not exist if aspocko hadn't kept asking, "But what would Neo and Trinity's kid be like?" I can't thank her enough for the haphazard text conversations that led to so many of these ideas. There would not have been an extended Smith section, or Bugs karaoke, or much of the middle section if aspocko hadn't requested chill senior citizen Ghost.

The way I approach writing has completely changed since Resurrections. (I'm working on a series of short essays just to try to process all of it for myself.) I started this fic when it seemed thoroughly inadvisable to be taking on any more writing, but what I found was that writing this really gave me life, and a place to dwell and dream in. It was a very vivid experience of writing what you need to keep yourself going.

At first, this story was just a nameless OC (still Neo and Trinity's kid, but without any specifics) playing Resurrections and mourning their parents' deaths. I was grieving it all being over for me again, and that was as much as I could imagine for life in a post-NeoTrin world. Then I woke up at four a.m. a few days later, completely determined to find a happy ending, and finally the light broke in. Before, I had thought in order to write a hopeful story, you had to have that hope from the beginning. Here I started with all the death, and only days after the devastation of it had gradually wormed its way into me did I start to think, is it all really over? Does it have to be? Didn't we reject that in Resurrections? Can there be more love and more life instead? And as I had found with some previous stories in this series, it is after you go as far as you can into the darkness that you're able to swing back into more light than you could have imagined before.

The books I was reading that fed into this (just so I can remember this wild cocktail) were: Idiot, Sojourning Soul by Justin Rosolino, God Human Animal Machine by Meghan O'Gieblyn, Ten Evenings with God by Ilia Delio, Walking on Water by Madeleine L'Engle, The Diary of Jesus Christ by Bill Cain, and one of the strangest books I've ever read, Eye of the Heart by Cynthia Bourgeault (from which I borrowed a lot of lines directly).

"It is correct to love even at the wrong time" is from Spencer Reece's "ICU." "What we do with our longings and our restlessness, both in terms of handling the hope and the pain they bring, that is our spirituality" is from Ronald Rolheiser's The Holy Longing. "Could we stay right here…" and "All I've known, all I've done…" is from Lamb's Gorecki, lauded by Hardliners as the most NeoTrin song ever back in 2002, which I still can't listen to anymore because it makes me too emotional! "Vi Voglio tutti in paradisio" is allegedly a prayer of St. Francis, meaning, "I want you all with me in paradise." I think he would have appreciated it being applied to a virtual cat. "Am I more myself or less myself?" is from Everything but the Girl's Single. "Belief isn't a feeling inside of us…" is from Tish Harrison Warren's Prayer in the Night. "Chew steel, shit bullets" was a phrase I remember reading years ago in some amazing Matrix fic I can't find now. I thought it had to be an actual saying, and it doesn't seem to be, but I'm all for making it one.

Finally, thank you for being here. I still find it hard to believe that I wrote (and apparently needed) this super long fic with an OTP child OC whom I had created in the previous story purely for thematic reasons, and who turned out to be the most emo and personal character I've ever written. But I had a great time writing this, and I'm truly grateful you read it. The need to love and be loved was something I wanted to center this whole story around. I feel incredibly lucky to have found that here.