Disclaimer: The only character I own in this story is the narrator and Ray. All other characters belong to Andy and Larry Wachowski. Other characters, coming later, will also be mine. This fic was inspired by the Animatrix, in that it details events occurring outside the original canon.

You know when you have a pair of jeans, and they start to age? It starts to show in one little tear in the knee, which quickly grows into a gaping hole. This was similar; however, it took a gaping hole for me to spot all of the little tears that had been quietly appearing in the fabric of my little world, my reality.

They really were small things, but they were like those picture meant to be optical illusions- once you saw the picture, it was so hard to unsee.

A friend of mine, Ray, came over one night. He was in one of my computer classes back then, called Advanced Systems Theory, and we were supposed to hang out that night. We had tried dating, and the idea wasn't completely off the table.

Of course, the fact that I had just seem a plane of steel and glass ripple just a few weeks before had made me unusually quiet and moody, to put it nicely. I was on my way to becoming a recluse, staying up until the wee hours of the morning every night, looking into a topic that I had up until recently dismissed as crackpot hacker gossip.

When Ray came in, he saw what I had been looking at, since I hadn't bothered to turn off my monitor. "Jeez, Eva. You aren't actually starting to buy into this crap, are you?" He fixed me with a wary look most people reserve for old women who keep twenty cats in their home.

Shit, I thought to myself. "Oh, that?" I asked, forcing my voice to remain light and casual. Think fast, think, think… "Oh. I, ah…I'm doing a paper on post-modern theories on the nature of human existence. The only one I could come up with off the top of my head was existentialism, and, um, they make an interesting study-from a philosophical point of view of course." I blinked, managed a light laugh.

Ray continued looking at me as if I were a mental case for a few seconds, then shook his head and laughed. "Sorry. I almost thought you were joining the Pod people there for a second," he said, inclining his head towards the screen.

"Don't you dare tell ANYone about this," I warned.

Ray and I had been friends since first year, and in part at least, he understood my motivations for keeping this quiet. "No kidding. I wouldn't want people to think I was joining that hacker cult either." He looked concerned. "Are you okay? You don't look well. Are you sure you want to go out tonight?"

He was right. I had barely slept in the past few days, and it was starting to show. This very conversation had drained the blood from my face.

I had thought that the Matrix was a hacker myth too. Most students in my comp. science program treated it as a children's story; worse actually. It was taboo to get anywhere near it. I suppose that it that made their little world of ones and zeros feel threatened. I had no idea at the time how close that was to the underlying truth at the time, but the idea of the Matrix seemed so tantalizing an explanation for what I had seen.

"I-I'm just tired." No reason to give him an all-out lie, just some small omissions. "I've been trying to make this deadline for this other thing for a while…It's just piling up a bit. Just need some rest." I turned and my elbow caught the cheap little hand mirror I used to keep, knocking it from the edge of my dresser. It fell to the floor, making the tinkling sound of shattered glass.

I let out a steaming stream of curse words under my breath while I bent to clean it up, wincing as the tired muscles in my back protested vigorously to the activity. I was luck this time, it appeared. The glass had broken, but most of it had remained in the frame, so there was relatively little cleanup. Still, I thought darkly, I won't be able to go barefoot in here until I get a hold of a dust buster. Not unless I wanted feet full of splinters for the next few weeks anyhow.

I moved to pick up the mirror and froze. If the glass was still intact, the reflection sure as hell wasn't. My hand, hovering a few inches above the glass, as if the pieces were strewn all over the floor. But they weren't. They were almost all there.

I felt like I had been punched in the stomach.

Ray guffawed behind me, and my heart caught in my throat as I whirled around, But he wasn't looking at me. He had noticed the IM that had just popped up on the screen. "Looks like the Pod people are ready to initiate you."

I looked back at the crack mirror, passed a hand over it. Normal. Just a lot of broken glass. I shuddered, then stood up to see what he was looking at. My eyes widened.

The IM, a black background with green font, read:

YOU"RE NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE TOTO.

THE MATRIX HAS YOU…

I barely held in a gasp as I laughed along weakly with Ray. He let himself out only after I promised to get a decent night's sleep.

I didn't sleep a wink that night. Or the night after.