Title: The Best Homework Excuse Ever
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I do not claim to own the Matrix trilogy, the canon characters, story or anything related. I can only wish that I did. I make no profit from this – I am merely exercising my writing skills for the reading pleasure of readers. However, I own this story. I own the character Chase, and Lady Delerith owns Ari.
Authors' Notes:
Solia: Okay, people. This is the last chapter of this story. This is the end of Chase and Ari's adventures as year ten Australian schoolgirls. After this, there might be a few orientation chapters (to let you know what's happening in the years between this story and their next adventure) and then we'll post the real story (this was a prelude, remember) as chapters of this.
I never really made this clear – this story takes place three years, six months before the first Matrix film, so that's four years before Reloaded and Revolutions. The next adventure takes place exactly three years after this.
And by the way – thanks to everyone who's ever read and reviewed this. (Wipes tear from eye.) It's truly inspired me... No, really, this was the first story I ever finished to my liking. Since then, I've finished a whole heap more.
This story was dedicated to Delerith's and my year nine English teacher, Mr B. During many English classes, and also during an entire substitute lesson of German, we argued with him about the Matrix – is it a good thing or a bad thing? He insists to this day that it's good, because it makes a great substitute reality. But the point of this fiction was to prove him otherwise. Delerith and I set out to prove him wrong. And okay, maybe this story doesn't exactly prove anything, but it does support the moral at the bottom of this page.
THE BEST HOMEWORK EXCUSE EVER: Chapter six
Ari looked one last time at Chase, then turned firmly toward the mirror. She was dying to touch the surface of the mirror. When she reached out, Chase didn't stop her. The glass wasn't glass any more – it was more like liquid silver. She dipped her fingers into it. It was very cold, and soft and gooey. Ari, amazed more than scared, pulled her hand free, and when the mirror finally broke apart, it bounced back into shape and left a small amount of the quicksilver stuff on her hand. Which spread slowly up her wrist and all over her hand...
"I'm dreaming," Chase said in disbelief, staring at Ari's hand. "I fell asleep at school, maybe serving my detention."
"If you had a dream, a dream so real that you were convinced that it was really happening, what difference is there to the waking world?" Morpheus asked calmly. "Is there a difference? Would you know it? And what if you were born into that dream, never having been truly awake? What if your entire life was a dream? How would you wake to see whether there was a difference? Would you want to wake?"
Chase silently touched Ari's silvered hand. The stuff spread onto her, but she didn't look panicked. Just interested.
Then it started moving faster, on both of them. Covering their skin, headed for their faces.
"It's freezing!" Ari murmured, unconsciously tilting her head away from the ever-spreading mirror-turned-quicksilver. Chase suddenly seemed to realise exactly what was happening, and tried to rub it off. This just allowed the silver to get onto her other hand. Without thinking, she brushed a strand of her chocolate brown hair from her face – big mistake. The silvery stuff started spreading from there.
"Almost locked," somebody called. The people in the room seemed distant to Ari. All she could think of was preventing the silver from reaching her face. It crept up her neck...
"Tank, how are we going?" Morpheus' voice. What was going on? Why was no one helping Ari and Chase?
Ari felt the silver, once a harmless mirror, slip over her jawbone. Within a second it was at her lips.
She screamed. A second scream (Chase?) joined it, and then the offending silver stuff entered her mouth...
Blackness... She was dead. What other explanation for this second of darkness was there?
Then everything became a blurred, pinkish red. The sound of a loud heartbeat filled Ari's ears. She felt weird – all of her senses felt weird, scattered.
She got many realisations at once. She couldn't breathe. There was something in her mouth and throat. Her body felt weak. That heartbeat was her own. She was inside a large glassy pod of some sort, surrounded by a gooey, pink liquid. She was completely naked, alone and trapped.
Terrified, she struggled to sit up. Her hands touched a layer of gooey membrane, which she pushed through. Her sore, blurry eyes blurred further as she almost lost consciousness from suffocation. Ari grabbed the mask from over her mouth and nose and pulled it off. She felt the sickening feeling as a tube in her throat slipped out of her mouth. She dropped the mask and retched. There was nothing in her stomach to throw up. She breathed heavily and gratefully.
She tried to adjust her eyes. It was darkish.
As she had expected, she was naked, her skin ghostly pale, and wet, covered in that smelly, gooey liquid. But the oddest thing – there was black pipes attached to her skin, on her arms, just below her collarbone, etc.
No, that wasn't the oddest thing, not at all. Not after Ari had looked around and seen the most unbelievable sight of them all.
Dozens of gigantic cylindric black pillars, a hundred or more metres in width, with little red 'buds' on them in straight lines. No, not buds – little pods like her own.
Ari glanced either side of her and saw more glassy pods containing the pink liquid, black pipes and unconscious people lying uniformly on their backs. She was sitting in a pod of pink fluid that was also attached to one of those pillars.
Chase – where was Chase?
"Chase?" she croaked. Her voice was weak and croaky all of a sudden.
Only one and a half minutes ago Chase had been sitting right beside Ari, but now Ari was in a completely different place. What had that silver stuff done to them? Where had Morpheus and Trinity and their friends gotten to?
Where was Ari herself?
Suddenly there was a strange buzzing noise as a machine approached. Ari couldn't see where it was, but she looked around still. She was careful – she was perhaps kilometres from the ground, judging by the fact that the most distant thing she could see when she looked over the edge of the pod was mist, and didn't want to fall.
Again, she noticed something strange. The buzzing noise was getting closer, but for the moment she ignored it. Aside from the presence of the liquid, the weight on her head felt distorted and different.
Must be the wet stuff in my hair, she thought, reaching up a hand to touch her hair and to judge how hard it would be to get the fluid out of it but not her dye. To her shock, her fingers didn't touch any hair – only her bald, wet scalp. With a noise of disbelief, she ran her hands over her hairless head. Her hair was gone completely! It was worse than if the mahogany dye were to wash out – now it wasn't even black, just gone!
Ari was just thinking that it would be typical if her earrings had been lost in the unconscious journey to get here (how else could she have gotten here so quickly?) when she lowered one hand to her ears and discovered that they weren't even pierced!
The other hand ran behind her head and touched something as weird and unreal as anything else she had seen over the past few minutes: a metal outlet from the back of her skull. A thick pipe protruding from her head like a metal ponytail. No way was this possible.
A spider-like, beach-ball-sized machine rose up into view. For a moment, Ari stared at it. This so wasn't happening. It was a dream. Maybe it understood English?
"Can you help me?" she asked. Her voice sounded surprisingly forced and soft, and it felt difficult.
The machine thing all but ignored her question. It suddenly expanded, stretching its long metallic legs out around her and grabbing that outlet behind her head. While she struggled against the uncomfortable hold, it inspected her closely with its glassy black vision things.
After a few seconds, it did something, because the thing attached to her head, which must be deep inside her head, started twisting as though it was unscrewing it. She tried to cry out, but no one could hear her. When the plug came free from her head, the spider thing released her and backed away. Ari weakly righted herself in the pod of liquid, in which she didn't want to drown. She felt a sharp pain as the pipes all over body burst free, and she grabbed the edge of the pod to keep herself out of the watery stuff. There was a sucking sound behind her, near where her head had been before, and the liquid inside the pod got sucked out the hole that had opened up. Ari meant to stand up and find a way out of here, but she slipped on the slippery bottom of the pod and fell through the hole with a gasping cry.
For almost a minute, she slid down what seemed to be a dark tunnel slide at breakneck speed, her thoughts coming to her in scattered, confused pieces. Suddenly, when she supposed that she had gone further than the distance from her pod to the ground, the tunnel was gone, and she was falling freely. She splashed into water a few metres below.
Now, Ari had taken swimming lessons and knew perfectly well how to keep herself afloat in water, but faced with this challenge, she found that she was too weak to swim properly.
There was a loud noise above her, spotlights searching for her position in the darkness, and then a block of light opened up – a door of some sort. A mechanic claw was quickly lowered to her and clamped about her weak body, pulling her out of the water.
As Ari was lifted into the light, she heard a soft scream and a splash as someone else fell into the water. She didn't give it a lot of thought. She was lifted into a metallic room and gently lowered onto a cold steel floor. The claw let her go. Someone draped a warm, rough blanket around her and helped her to her feet.
Ari tried to focus her blurry, tired eyes on the faces of those around her. A woman with dark hair was standing in front of her, and someone else was helping her stand. People were talking about something, and the noise of the claw was still going.
"What's... what's happening?" Ari managed to ask, blinking. No one answered. The woman moved away, and someone else came over.
"Welcome to the real world, Ari," Morpheus said. Ari nodded vaguely, not comprehending but choosing to remain polite at least. The person supporting her started to lead her away. She could still hear the voices behind her, discussing something, and, as the man helped her through a door, she heard the claw's noises stop. It had done its purpose.
"Who're you?" Ari asked thickly, hoping that she didn't fall asleep while she was still walking. She had to keep herself occupied for now.
"Dais," the man answered. "I work for Morpheus."
"Oh." Ari couldn't think of anything else to ask as Dais helped her into another room and onto a hospital bunk. She lay down and fell asleep almost instantly.
When she woke up hours later, she rolled over, keeping the blanket covering her body. On another hospital bed lay another pale-skinned girl her own age, also without hair, black plugs on her skin, her dark eyes staring at the roof.
It was Chase, believe it or not.
"Chase!" Ari said, pleased to see a familiar face. The girl turned her head.
"You too?" she asked, definitely Chase, although she sounded softer. "At least I'm not alone."
"Do you know what happened to us? After the silver stuff? And where are we? How did I end up in that pod?"
"I don't know any more than you do, Ari," Chase answered with a sigh. "I guess we can ask Trinity or Morpheus if we see them again."
"I thought I was dead," Ari admitted a moment later.
"Me, too," Chase agreed. "I was wondering if my family would ever know what had happened to me." She hesitated. "Ari, where do you think we are? Do you think I'll... see my sisters again?"
"I don't know," Ari answered honestly. Silence.
"Ari?"
"Mm?"
"Do you think my hair will grow back? And yours?"
"It had better." Another lapse of silence. "Chase? Do you think that maybe you were right? That maybe I fell asleep when I was doing my detention this afternoon?"
"If you did, that would be weird, because I must be dreaming, too," Chase answered thoughtfully. "I mean, this can't be real, can it?"
"I guess not," Ari agreed. She paused. There was only one way to check. She lifted her head from the bed, surprised by the effort it took, and reached a trembling hand behind it.
The plug wouldn't be there.
Her fingertips touched the steely cold metal plug in the back of her skull, and, feeling ill, she realised that this was all too real.
"We aren't sleeping, are we?" Chase murmured.
"No, we aren't." Ari brought her hands back in front of her face. She was surprised to notice that her suicide scars were gone, as though those entire episodes had been wiped clean out of her life. Out of who she was.
"You want to know something good?"
"Okay. What?" Ari was willing for any good news.
"If we're here in this freakish place, then we can't be at school in a few hours, can we?"
"I guess not. Why is that so wonderful? My new timetable said that I have computer technology class first up tomorrow," Ari countered.
"Exactly," Chase said, smiling and looking up at the ceiling again. "That means we won't have to sit through an entire lesson of listening to Mr Abbreviations-are-evil-Barry. Don't know about you, but I like that idea."
"Did you get any homework for tonight?" Ari asked, studying the dents in the metal roof.
"Yes, I did. For maths. I was hoping to come up with a good excuse by tomorrow, though, because I didn't feel like doing it."
"Well, Chase, we've found our excuse," Ari smirked, closing her eyes. "We were picked up by the side of the road by hacker terrorists, driven through dangerous traffic, shot at, taken to Morpheus, given some alien pills, covered in melted mirror, then we woke up in a completely different place in gooey pods. Then we got sucked down a tunnel and got picked up by a claw from the pool at the bottom. See? Perfectly valid excuse."
"The perfect homework excuse," Chase agreed. "It's even better than the dog ate it."
The moral of the story: The Matrix is bad because it contains single-sex schools.