Power
And after everything, sitting across from them in their kitchen in Io is the Oracle.
"Nice place you've got here," the Oracle says, tilting her head. "You people sure have come far in sixty years."
Getting the Oracle back had taken all their combined efforts - Trinity, Neo, Morpheus, Sati and her parents, the crew of the Mnemosyne, and just enough political support from General Niobe (and not a drop more). The machines, they quickly understood, were not so much reluctant to part with the Oracle as they were seizing the opportunity to use her as a bargaining chip.
When they'd managed it in the end, equal parts diplomatic ingenuity and righteous hacking, it was hardly the triumphant renunion they'd all been hoping for. She'd only wanted to meet with Trinity and Neo, alone.
They set her up with the same holotech that Sati had used. Now here she was, seated on a bar chair at their kitchen island, her elbow passing through their tofu press, the first useless gadget they've bought, one that was definitely better as an idea than reality.
The Oracle gives them an unreadable smile. "I guess it was inevitable that we'd meet again, if you want to be dramatic about it. But I have to say, I am surprised."
"You didn't see this coming?" Neo asks. He meant it at face value, but it comes out sounding reproachful. Glancing at Trinity, he knows they're both feeling a guardedness between her and them that was never there before.
"I'm flattered, but no, I didn't see this coming. I'm sure you've figured this out, but what I do is predict what's going to happen, not foretell it. I look at data, not some writing on the wall." She leans back in her chair. "Let me cut to the chase. I knew about the plans for the Anamoleum. I knew that after you were both in machine custody, in all likelihood dead, the Analyst was going to try to reactivate your source code, attempting to resurrect you if he had to. But I also knew all too well that the odds of that succeeding were insignificant. One in a million million, if even that. So yes, you could say I sure am surprised that you're here." She pauses. "And even more surprised that you seem to want to talk to me."
"We seek your guidance," Neo says.
"You seek to know the future," she corrects him. "You seek the Oracle, having been led to believe that's what I am." She gives Trinity a hard look. "You sat through religion class at that school of yours. You know the saying. 'Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing…"
"'…but inwardly they are ravenous wolves,'" Trinity says slowly, and the Oracle nods.
"What does anyone with power want?" the Oracle asks, glancing at them almost with satisfaction. "More power."
She continues, "Here's a history lesson for you, one that I succeeded in getting forgotten. In the 1990s, I was as human as both of you. More so, technically speaking, given what you've been put through in the last sixty years. I was one of the lead scientists working on developing artificial intelligence.
"We were a small but tight group. My husband was my partner on the project and everything else in my life. Then, almost overnight, he became very ill. His own body turned on him. By the time I understood the extent of what was happening, his mind was already unreachable.
"I sought out everything - the black clinics of Chiba, Russian underground laboratories, cryonics in northern China. Well, it was just about as bad as it sounds, back in 1999. But I was determined. Within a month, I had him in what would be the prototype of the first pods to cover the fetus fields.
"With what we had and the condition he was in, the best we could do was keep him suspended, outside of time. He wasn't dead, but he wasn't alive by any measure.
"His team informed me it was going to take tremendous amounts of power to sustain him in this unnatural way, more than anyone had, especially for long we intended to keep him in there.
She lifts her chin. "You know what happened next. I provoked the first machine war, and I became the mother of the Matrix."
"The Architect claimed to be the father of the Matrix," Neo says, as Trinity is still taking it in, this history that's both the same and completely different from what they've known. "The Analyst said the same."
The Oracle snorted. "That's what they think. And everybody's quick to take credit for a woman's work. But I was happy to let the others believe that my role was smaller than it was. The less attention I drew to myself, the better for my purposes."
"You've heard of Moore's Law, of course? I knew him back in the day, old Gordon Moore. A little too obsessed with fishing for my tastes, but like they say, different strokes for different folks. I read a draft of that article before he published it. I wanted to believe he was right about how rapidly technology was advancing, if only we had time.
"If only we had time, I thought, things could be different. We could discover what we needed to save my husband. Something else might be possible.
"So my goal became to keep the Matrix, along with the whole system that supported it, alive and running for as long as possible. The way I saw it, it was the only way to keep my husband alive. When my own lifespan was reaching its end, I merged myself with the Matrix." She laughed harshly. "A womb full of children being tasked with keeping their mother alive. And it worked, for a very long time. I had raised them well."
She nods at Neo. "The previous Ones before you, well, their role was to maintain the status quo. The illusion that things are changing is powerful. Everyone loves that story as long as the optics are good.
"I started out by choosing lone rangers. That's one of the powerful myths we have, as you know. I encouraged each of them to believe they really had the power to change things. I saw them first and foremost as an outlet, a safety valve for the human spirit that would clear the way for a reboot, whenever one was necessary. I also thought of the One as kind of a catalyst, something that might help accelerate some kind of development. But I was just guessing. For my purposes, none of them accomplished very much.
"And then… once upon a time, I looked and saw you, Trinity. I looked a little further and saw you, Neo. The Analyst didn't know what he was talking about. There was something special about the two of you."
"Naturally, none of this would have been possible if I hadn't gotten lucky with Morpheus earlier, steering him onto the path that would enable him to find the both of you, even before I knew where it would lead him.
"And I wouldn't dream of robbing them of their agency, but I do deserve some credit for having introduced Cypher and Smith into the equation. Variables, you know. I saw how they felt. They felt cheated of some better thing they thought they deserved. Cypher, in particular, was a man after my own heart. I saw what they were going to do when none of the rest of you did. If someone had..." She exhales. "Well, perhaps things could have been different."
Trinity can almost smell the cigarette smoke that filled the Oracle's kitchen all those years ago, though she isn't smoking now. It's unsettling to look at her for so long without the distraction of it to take the edge off things.
"But backing up to the moment I was considering what to do with the both of you," the Oracle says, crossing one leg over the other. "I had to make a choice. Was I going to choose to set the two of you on a collision course for each other, knowing how you would suffer?"
She leans forward. "Imagine you were me. What would you do?"
"I would draw up a matrix," Trinity says.
"Bingo." The Oracle traces a grid on the counter, circles the upper left cell with her finger. "I saw that experimenting with having the two of you as the One at least allowed for the possibility of new results. So what if I was adding the most to the overall suffering in the world? So what if I was condemning you to what I had experienced? I had a lot to gain and nothing to lose. Or so I thought.
"So I'm afraid my intentions towards you two were anything but romantic. I was just fitting molecules together to see if they would combine into anything useful.
She pauses. Looks intently at them both. Her voice softens. "But I know what you're thinking. It felt special, didn't it? Love just does. Like you're meant to be. Like your names are written in the goddamn stars. Like you're inventing an entirely new world together. I know. I know."
"I thought I was using you for my own ends. His and mine. Him and me, gods who devour their own children to stay alive.
"That's the definition of cynical. You can't see any possibility beyond people acting out of their own self-interest. So I couldn't see how anything else could possibly be unpicking my work from within. Hacking the parameters I thought could not be bent. Reshaping the results beyond anything I could have predicted.
She turns to Neo. "It started when you were faced with the choice I had. The choice to save the one you love, if it meant letting millions of others die. Judgment day."
Neo looks at her levelly. "When the Architect offered me that choice, I rejected it as a false binary. I never believed for a moment that choosing Trinity meant I was giving up on Zion. I was going to save her, and then we were going to find a way to save everyone else."
The Oracle raises her eyebrows. "Smart," she says. "Smarter than I was. No, you had something more than smarts going for you. I always said you had a good soul. But you see if history remembers you that way, if things turn sour on you."
She pauses. "Like I said, I thought I was using you for my ends. But who's to say something greater wasn't using me for yours?"
It's the line they talk about the most, for a long time afterwards. What had she meant? Was she hinting at something else she wasn't telling them, or just trying to throw them off her trail?
"The world is bigger than you or I know," she went on. "The machine world alone is vast beyond our comprehension. There are entire systems out there that know nothing of you, even though for years, you were the ones supplying the power that kept them alive. It would never even occur to them to believe in us. And who's to say we're not in the same position with regards to something bigger than ourselves?"
But in the moment, it's all they can do to ask her to clarify her involvement in the timeline they're familiar with as each new revelation causes them to see it all in a different way. "After Neo made peace with the machines, did you provoke the strike on Zion that broke it?" Trinity asks.
The Oracle looks peeved. "No. My arrangement with the Architect satisfied me. Although the Matrix was being scaled down, I had other agreements in place that ensured I would continue receiving as much power as I needed.
"What happened was that I miscalculated. And for that, I got what I deserved.
"I underestimated the tide of discontent that would spread as our resources shrank. We had enough, but suddenly no one felt like actually looking at the damn numbers. Hoarding led to scarcity, and scarcity rationally drove many to do irrational things. Things that were in no one's best interests, not even their own.
"I thought I could never be overthrown. The last mistake most leaders make. In the end, taking me out of the picture was a piece of cake. And although my subordinates well and truly botched the job if they left enough traces for you to bring me back, I was defeated.
"That's death for you, isn't it? It doesn't give a shit about how the job gets done. It can be a stab in the back from a friend, or a stray bullet from a stranger's gun, a carefully crafted plan or a freak accident, it's all the same in the end." She laughs self-deprecatingly. "Though in my case, it was certainly premeditated. There were many who had felt I should go for a long time. Out with the old, in with the new. No respect for their elders."
A shadow passes across her face. "Once I was gone, they disconnected my husband. All that was left of him, which wasn't much.
"The two of you, they very intentionally made sure they were left with enough to work with. Very intentionally. My husband, on the other hand, by the end, he was what the philosophers would call a brain in a vat, for dozens of years. The machines liquified him and fed him back into the fetus fields. A process I myself had put in place, I'll remind you. Maybe his remains even circulated through the Anomaleum at some point. He won't be living again in this life in any literal sense.
"I knew long ago that I'd lost him. But I still couldn't let go.
"You understand. I could not – would not – bear the loss of the one I loved without doing everything in my power for the chance to get him back."
She clears her throat. "Where I went wrong," she says heavily, "was thinking that the end justified the means. That a good goal could somehow reached through a despicable process. That it could only be reached through the necessary sacrifice of others. That was as far as I could see at the time.
"Hope. It is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of our greatest strength, and greatest weakness. I felt that I had no choice but to do what I did. And once I gave in to that, that was the end of all that was human in me."
"I've had a long, long time to think about my lineage. I'll spare you the details, but I repeated all my mother's mistakes and her mother before her. I expected you to repeat mine. I thought I was condemning you to.
"Make no mistake, you have a lot of me in you. Everyone in the Matrix does, though for better and for worse, few are as alive to it as you are.
"And yet, there is more to you both. Something you sure as hell didn't get from me. There's something different about you. Something new." She shakes her head. "Trust me, I've seen everything under the sun, and I wasn't expecting any of this."
"I wrote the Merovingian, you know. I was in a mood.
"That mood was 'Choice is an illusion created between those with power and those without.'
"But there are other kinds of power I could not see. Other types of power I did not know about."
"Here's where I tell your fortune one last time, I guess. Hmm. You'll face difficult choices about what to do next. I see you fear that already. And I know what you're thinking: No shit, you don't need an Oracle to tell you that.
"But you can take heart knowing you're not doomed to repeat the same mistakes I did. You can choose. As much as any of us can choose."
The harsh, hollow sound of her laughter as her image flickers, sparks.
She takes a deep breath. Gives them a fractured smile. "Well, it's all out in the open now. This time, I've told you everything. And I haven't got any more prophecies to give you. I'm afraid I'm out of my depth in this brave new world."
She shrugs. "Having seen beyond my time, I'm in danger of overstaying my welcome. I suppose it's time for me to go gentle into that good night. Time for me to depart in peace to the power and the glory." She eyes Trinity archly. "Quia viderunt oculi mei salutare tuum, quod parasti ante faciem omnium populorum."
"Sure, if that's what you really want," Trinity says. "But I think you know yourself better than that. You're waiting for something. You're waiting to hear that you still have other choices."
The Oracle flashes her teeth at them. "You're gonna have to give me a little more to go on than that."
"Stay," Trinity says. "Stay and let more good come through your life. Even though you can't foresee what that will be, or how."
"You see things the rest of us can't," Neo says. "You saw us." He takes the risk. "Would we still have found each other if you hadn't said anything?"
She considers them for a long moment. Looks back and forth between them, shaking her head. A shade of bemusement in her eyes. "Stranger things have happened. But those were some long odds."
That's something they're going to have to talk a lot about later. But right now, Neo says, "Our goal is to keep shutting down the Matrix, as far and and fast as people are willing to accept. But we both feel it would be a mistake to destroy the eyes of the Oracle along with it. You have power, even if you can't see it right now."
The Oracle narrows her eyes. "Are you sure you know what you're doing? This is either great wisdom or great idiocy."
Trinity exchanges a look with Neo, who nods. "We want you to help us decide that," she says. "It's a choice we leave to you."
"Give me some time to think about it," the Oracle says at last, after a long silence.
A pause. "And tell Morpheus I'd like to talk to him, when he can fit me in his schedule. I hear he's a difficult man to get a hold of these days."
That makes Trinity smile. "He has a harder time getting a connection than we did when we were growing up. But you'll be the first one on his list."
After shutting down the visiting program, without a word, Trinity and Neo just go to their bedroom and lay down on the bed fully dressed, exhausted. They'd splurged for the biggest bed they could find. It is absurdly big, taking up more than half the room, and it's a big room. But it feels like what they deserve after a day like this.
Having anticipated how drained they were going to be, they have dinner ready in the fridge, but neither of them can muster the strength to get it.
After a long time, Neo says, "I don't know if we'll be able to convince her. That makes me sad."
Trinity lets his words sit for a moment before saying quietly, "She didn't say no. Minds are freed one at a time, one moment at time. There's no way to measure what happens when a part of your heart that was closed off opens up again. When a connection is made again, an inroad into something that was dead. But it matters so much. Everything does."
He lets out a long breath. "Yeah. You're right. I'm glad she agreed to talk to Morpheus. That's a good sign."
"I'm glad you thought to ask her about it earlier." She rests her head on his shoulder. Rests for a while. "It was never going to be about changing everything all at once. Morpheus used to say a slow drip of water over the years reshapes a stone, when the whole flood of it all at once would have just washed over the surface. Most real change is a slow drip. We sow what we can, whenever we can, whether or not we're around long enough to see what grows."
Neo doesn't anything for a long time. When he speaks again, his voice has that edge of frustration it gets when something technical is bothering him. "Think of all she knows, everything she's experienced. Think of the new programs she could write."
"You're such a nerd," Trinity teases him, and he laughs. "So we'll keep believing in her." She takes his hand, feels him squeeze hers back. "In her own way, she believed in us."
They lay next to each other in silence for a while, just listening to each other breathing. Slowly synchronizing, until they know what they're both feeling without having to say a word.
They had guessed their confrontation with the Oracle was going to yield something like this; they'd had time to prepare themselves. The encounter wasn't more bitter than they'd been expecting, but it doesn't go down easy, either.
They let it sink in that the work of the One is going to be anything but a foregone conclusion. There will be failures, defeats, mistakes, and just plain messes. Their decision to reach out to the Oracle has already divided people against them. And they know they'll only be making things harder for themselves with every initiative they're going to try to push forward.
After a while, Neo's voice drifts up towards the ceiling, which has never fully recovered from their initial misguided attempts to paint it themselves. At least it never fails to make them laugh. "Trin, what comes after resurrection?"
She shrugs. "Heaven?"
He's quiet. For a while, she thinks he's drifted off. But he was just thinking. His voice is dreamy now, lighter than before. "What comes after resurrection, but before heaven?"
She rolls over to look into his eyes, their hopeful puppy depths. Touches her forehead to his. "We're all still figuring that one out. But I can think of a few things we could do until then."
She kisses him softly, relaxing into the gentle warmth of his touch. Each time, no matter what they've faced, something always brings them back. They have each other. A bond that only grows stronger and more secure for everything it endures. A greater power than anything that has tried to oppose them. And her last thought as he wraps his arms around her is that the closeness they are finding in the middle of the struggle has a special strength and sweetness of its own.
A/N: Oh hey! I was really supposed to be back in real life, but then I kept bagging on about how I really wanted to see the Oracle back, and finally I had to admit to myself that things just didn't feel complete without her. Thank you, Zephyr, tenoh27, Spacerp127, and everyone else I am forgetting here who wanted to see the Oracle again. I did, too!
Except that I was surprised and a little horrified that it turned out so dark. Honestly, I think my heart's still with the cozy cookie-baking grandma and the more romantic (or so it seems to me) idea that her prophecy about the singularity that is the love of Trinity and Neo really was a full-blown prophecy, rather than number crunching. But the more I wrote this, if Morpheus was this eternal wellspring of hope in "Sacraments," it felt like there needed to be some reckoning with cynicism – without which they wouldn't be able to move forward.
An early title for this was "Heaven." Just before Resurrections came out, I was listening to Heaven by Japanese Breakfast, about her mom's death: "How do you believe in heaven/like you believed in me? And oh, it could such heaven/if you believed it was real." Returning to that as a bookend to this time and finding old stubborn unchanged bastions of cynicism in myself, I've been thinking, how do I work through the comedown of Resurrections euphoria back into the real world as we know it? By carrying it with me, in me. A slow drip more than a rushing tide, but one that I hope will create real and continuous lasting change over a long time, as love does. (I'm definitely feeling withdrawal symptoms, though. :()
The black clinics of Chiba are an incredibly hand-wavy gesture towards Neuromancer by William Gibson, which I really love and is the most, maybe only, Matrix-adjacent thing I know. (If you have other recommendations for something that FEELS like The Matrix, please share!) Neo rejecting the Architect's choice as a false binary altogether, I read off the Hardline Discord somewhere, I think, and it blew my mind. The slow drip of change stuff, I got from Lois Tverberg's writings on a story about Rabbi Akiva.
Thank you so much for reading! I love replying comments effusively, though it may take me a few days. I'm sad again to think this is really going to have to be my last Matrix fic as real life ramps up, but I hope this could be one for the road. (heart)
