AN: Three games into the new Mets season and one of our big name pitchers has gone down with an injury. That's right; in his first start of the season Pedro Martinez went down with an injury and will miss a whole mess of starts. Sometimes I wonder why the Mets even bother keeping him around. I get he use to be a good pitcher and that he's popular and everything but he breaks down more than an old car. That's never good for a baseball team. Nothing against minor league pitchers, but they're not always the best choice in big spots. I mean, after the amazing collapse of 2007, the Mets need to come out strong and having some kids pitch isn't really going to do that. Anyway, thanks to anyone out there reading this mess of a story, I appreciate the time you take out of your day to read it. Remember, please leave a review to let me know how I'm doing. Good, bad, or indifferent…I don't care! Just let me know what you think!

Disclaimer: I own nothing except the characters I made up and their Real World alter egos. I don't own The Matrix, The Animatrix, or any of that cool stuff. I'm broke and I just finished graduate school for my Master's Degree. All I own are my Pointe shoes.

"Now it's suppertime and his momma calls,
little boy starts home with his bat and ball.
Says, "I am the greatest, that is a fact,
But even I didn't know I could pitch like that!"" (From "The Greatest" by Kenny Rogers)

Robert, Wheeler, whoever he was at the moment-- maybe he was one of the, maybe he was both. The young man just didn't know anymore. Maybe Robert and Wheeler were one and the same and maybe they were two different people living in one body. It was hard to tell most days. --had turned fifteen years of age only a few months earlier.

Even to him, what he was thinking sounded insane. It wasn't supposed to be a decision someone his age should have been thinking about making. Wheeler figured that he was supposed to be having fun, messing around with his friends on the baseball team and doing whatever it was normal fifteen year olds did in Arcadia, Texas.

There wasn't much to do in the small town anyway. The options, for him and for many of the people he knew, were play sports and got into some kind of trouble….not at the same time of course. No one liked getting into trouble on the football field or the baseball diamond, whatever your sport of choice was. There was also the always popular option of dating the small pool of girls their age in the hopes of finding that "sweetheart" they were going to marry someday. That was also considered acceptable behavior for someone his age in Arcadia.

Wheeler-- Though he hated to admit it, he found that his created persona fit him better than the one he'd been born into. --had tried doing almost all of that. He'd tried being just a normal kid from Arcadia. He'd tried acting the part just because Wheeler knew that would make his parents happy. Everyone around him acted one specific way, had always acted one specific way, and Wheeler knew that fact. He tried to make himself act that way, too, just to make things a little easier on his family. His mother liked gossip just as much as the next housewife in Arcadia but when the gossip was about her or her family, well, things changed drastically.

For some reason, though, it just didn't work for Wheeler anymore. The fifteen year old knew that it use to work for him-- He use to be just like everyone else in his hometown. --but now, for some reason, it stopped. For no apparent reason his parents or friends would understand, he couldn't force himself to be "one of the boys." It felt like he was a square peg and his parents, his coaches, his friends, the entire town was trying to shove him in a round hole.

No matter how hard they banged, it just wasn't going to happen. All they were going to do was get hurt. "They" meant both him and everyone around him. Sure it would hurt in different ways but the idea was still the same.

In an almost comical way, Wheeler knew exactly what was making him feel different from those around him. It wasn't something, he figured, everyone would understand but he knew…or, at least, he felt as if he knew. The fifteen year old just couldn't be sure. He could guess though, and like throwing a certain pitch to a player you'd never seen before, sometimes guessing was all you could do.

Wheeler was almost sure it was the same thing Calyx had felt before she'd "run off." It was probably the reason why she'd run off with Elric all those years earlier. It was a sense of almost…wrongness…about the world around him. There was something really rotten in Arcadia-- maybe the entire world too but, like his reasons for feeling as he did, Wheeler couldn't be sure. --but Wheeler couldn't put his finger on it. Maybe it was that sense that had forced Calyx to leave with Elric. Maybe he'd been able to give her the reason behind the wrong feelings.

As Wheeler sat at the end of the pine bench in the dugout, staring out at his high school's baseball diamond, the young boy felt distinctly and sharply out of place. The sense of wrongness has returned with a vengeance though Wheeler didn't really know why he felt like there was something wrong now. He was supposed to be paying attention to the game and not to the world around him.

What he felt was something more than the fact Arcadia was, well, Arcadia, a world unto itself. A world that felt, to Wheeler anyway, as if it was stuck in its own private little time warp. Something other than the fact he hadn't started a baseball game in almost a year and a half now. Something more than the fact the team's coach claimed he was a "hot head--" just because he got short with one of the outfielders during a practice because he'd been heckling him for throwing as hard as he did --and benched him for it.

The heckling thing was strange in and of itself. Wheeler always assumed he was, at least, acquaintances with everyone on the team and heckling wasn't exactly the best way to foster team spirit. He still counted Ben, who was catching at the moment since their regular catcher had a sprained thumb, as one of his best friends but Wheeler couldn't deny that they weren't as good friends as they'd been before starting high school. Something had driven a wedge-- one that started out small but had rapidly grown --between the once best friends. Now it was wide enough for others, including Ben, to notice it.

When Ben, finally, confronted Wheeler about the growing divide between them, the former starting pitcher didn't really have an answer for Ben. Not an answer that Ben was going to be able to accept and understand anyway. Instead, Wheeler gave his former battery mate the same lame answer about school work he used on his parents when they wanted to know what he'd been up to and why he was up so late some nights.

The funny thing was that Ben, just like his parents, accepted that as a valid answer. After all, between baseball and school they were all just a little busy.

It wasn't really school that was driving the two friends apart, no matter what Wheeler had told Ben. There was something else, something Wheeler couldn't tell Ben because the catcher wouldn't really understand. Despite his big talk about how he was going to leave Arcadia behind him someday and play for the New York Yankees or San Francisco Giants, Ben was just like everyone else in the small town they called home. He was content to stay in the sleepy little Texan town, just like his parents before him and his grandparents before that. Wheeler knew Ben would fit in nicely in Arcadia, probably take up his father's business-- Running the local green grocer --after his father retired.

Looking at the field-- a green gem under even under the harsh lights --, trying his best to focus on the game that had taken up so much of his attention, his time and his life, Wheeler put his head in his hands and sighed. The game, with all its plays and grand traditions, didn't seem so important now that he thought about it. Now that he found himself sitting, watching a game he knew he should have started if not for the run-in with his coach and the fact they, the coach and his staff, felt he threw too hard to start the game didn't seem as spectacular. If anything, it seemed more frustrating than anything else.

Besides there were bigger games being played. Games that didn't involve knowing the number of outs or just who was on base or even the score of the game itself. The games he was thinking about, the ones he'd found himself wanting to talk about, were ones that were being played with people's minds…or so one of the many stories he'd found went.

The little query he'd posted about the Matrix, the single line in some message board that had been taken down for some unknown reason, had turned into something else entirely. The more he looked for things about the Matrix, the more he found himself questioning just what the Matrix was…if it was anything at all.

The Matrix, Wheeler was quick to learn, was something that was hotly debated in hacker circles. Some said it was the combined governments controlling the world while others claimed it was nothing more that some clever advertising for what they hoped was going to be one really good video game or a movie or something to that effect. Ideas ran as wild as the information about the Matrix. Everyone had their own thoughts and theories and most of them were not shy about sharing them with others.

No matter what everyone thought, though, there was one constant. One thing that almost everyone claimed to know. Those who didn't, well, they were mocked and were "told" tales in an attempt to have their minds changed about their opinion.

The constant was the tales about people being taken out of the Matrix, just like Calyx had been years before. The details of how these people were freed were sketchy at best-- every story was based on something someone's friend told someone else's friend who told someone else who told them --but there was one constant even within the stories that were told. There was one thing that all the "believers," those who were sure people were somehow being taken out of the Matrix, felt was true.

In order to be freed from the Matrix, you had to know certain people. You had to come in contact with someone-- who this person or people were was also a hotly debated topic. To Wheeler, it seemed that there were many people who had the "ability" to take one out of the Matrix. --who had a way to get you out somehow. Just as Calyx had the now fallen Elric, you had to ask the right questions, walk down the right path, and muddle your way through a mess of information before you could get out of the Matrix.

If indeed you could get out of the Matrix, actually. No one was quite sure those stories were true either. It depended on who you spoke to and what their take on the whole Matrix thing was to begin with.

"I guess they'd all be on by now. Probably talking about something good tonight too," Wheeler mused, his mind wandering away from the game he was supposed to be paying attention to and heading towards the computer his father had bought for him as a birthday gift.

Hackers, Wheeler had always thought, were solitary creatures. They were people who were sort of dorks, who didn't like being around other people because they were, well, dorks. They were sort of socially stunted and didn't know what to do around other people. That was why they worked alone. It was just easier than working with other people. They wouldn't have to deal with uncomfortable situations since they were alone.

People kind of like Reaper--Gregory--, though he did have Able and Booth, Timothy and Marshall respectively, so maybe there were exceptions to the rule. Maybe not all hackers were loners. Just most of them, then, were loners who guarded what information they had like it was gold and refused to give any of their secrets out unless they "trusted" you.

Though, as Wheeler had learned, winning the trust of a hacker was not an easy thing. They were not a trusting bunch, hackers were.

Other than the three boys from Arcadia, Wheeler had managed to earn the tentative trust of a hacker who caked himself KWAN. It was Kwan that had brought Wheeler into his little circle of hackers. He-- at least Wheeler thought KWAN was a he. One could never be too sure about those kinds of things --wasn't exactly a famous hacker, not on par with any of the hackers who were supposed to be able to take you out of the Matrix, or anything but he did claim to know a thing or two about the Matrix. Kwan had a small circle of friends, Peanut, Angelfighter, Chian, and, most recently, Pixie, and it was with that small circle of friends that Wheeler found his virtual home.

Most nights, when his parents weren't checking on him every five minutes to see what he was up to, it was with that small group of hackers that Wheeler spent his time. He figured that, despite the fact hacking was, well, illegal; at least he wasn't doing anything too bad. He was just spending his evenings chatting with friends. Of course, he knew that if his parents ever got wind of that, well, things wouldn't be pretty.

The hackers he spent his time with were a…unique…bunch as far as hackers went, he figured. Each of them had their own theories on the Matrix, ranging from Peanut's conviction that the Matrix was just another way to sell video games to Pixie's philosophical musings on the Matrix, which seemed odd because she was only a handful of months younger than he. None of them was sure who was right and who was wrong when it came to the Matrix but the conversations they had were always lively and a whole lot more interesting than the game he was watching.

After all, and no matter what guise he was wearing, Wheeler always hated watching his team lose.

"Hey, LaLuce," shouted one of the seniors on the team, shoving Wheeler backwards against the dugout wall with a sneering laugh. "Coach wants to talk to you. I guess your sorry rear end is up. Someone's got to bail out the disaster on the mound."

Shaking himself free of his reverie, Robert-- no longer Wheeler because, really, Wheeler didn't play baseball. Wheeler preferred his computer to the leather covered spheroid Robert threw. --stood and walked along the length of the dugout bench. He knew he should have been glad to get the opportunity to pitch but he couldn't force himself to be. He didn't want to go out there on that mound, that lonely island in the middle of the green baseball diamond. Once upon a time, he might have wanted to in the worst way but not now, not today. He didn't want to be the one thrown out there because the team was losing. That was pity pitching at its worst.

Still, knowing that his parents were watching him, Robert took the ball from the coach and walked over to their makeshift bullpen. He had to get in a few tosses before he took the mound. Wouldn't want to hurt that arm of his, of course. Wouldn't want to ruin that part of his future...even though part of him did.

Maybe that was why he liked being Wheeler. No pressure on him, on the personality he'd created for himself. All the people who knew Wheeler were concerned about was how much he knew about the Matrix. They didn't care about what he'd do on the mound that night, in front of the angry Arcadia crowd

They'd be more interested in the information he'd found before the game started. That was just how they were. Pixie, fifteen like him, would be the most interested of all. He might not have actually known her but that fact he was sure of. She was the one who'd brought philosophy to their little chat room, despite her young age.

"Cut the speed, LaLuce," the bullpen catcher shouted as he caught Robert's pitch. "Ease up, man or you're going to hurt yourself."

"Sorry," the young boy called, catching the toss back to him. "Just how I pitch I guess."

"Oh right, Wheeler," the bullpen catcher, a freshman, sneered. "I heard about you. Now cut the speed. We're losing as it is and you're just going out there to get some work in. We all know that."

That might have been true but still Robert threw the ball as hard as he could, partly out of frustration and partly because that was just how he threw. He'd always just wheeled back and threw. Robert felt no need to change that now, that was the one place where he and Wheeler crossed. It was the one thing they had in common; it was the one place where the two parts of his personality intersected. Besides, maybe he could turn the game around and squeak a win out of the mess the game had become.