2.
Alea iacta est.
Ghost dialed the number on his cell phone. "I'm in."
"Remember," Niobe's voice came through the phone with a clarity that belied their real distance. "Observe only."
"This is stupid." Roland's voice suddenly cutting across the line reminded Ghost why only two people should talk on the phone at a time. "We should just grab her. Ghost won't be able to compete against agents if they come for her."
"This is my man, Roland, put down the headset or go jack yourself in." Silence for a moment. "Okay, can you see her?"
"Not yet." Ghost said softly and readjusted his position. The crowded lobby was full of people arriving to work, heading out for their first cup of coffee, or on errands that didn't matter very much in the scheme of things. His own errand was important, the Oracle had said so and now they believed. Sacẻ had flown the Defiant down below the machine's fields. It had taken them four hours of searching the extensive waterways that flowed underneath the pods and their occupants but finally they'd seen the proof of the Oracle's words. Two bodies, drowned, floating hours old in the water. There was no telling how rapidly people would be able to self-substantiate and no way to find them in those long miles of tunnels unless someone else knew that they'd substantiated, or as the Oracle had put it: that they'd fallen.
He let himself join the crowded rush of people. There was no obvious difference that anyone would mark him by, his nickname wasn't just a fluke. He moved easily through the world, non-descript and forgettable. There was a very important reason that Niobe had chosen him to go over Roland and Sacẻ's objections.
"Do you see her yet?" Niobe asked.
"No." He still had the picture that the Oracle had given them. Her fingers had trembled when she'd done it, Ghost had noticed as had Niobe, but they'd both decided not to speak of it just then. It was hard enough trusting the Oracle after everything had happened, but if something was wrong with her, it was better not to think of that possibility.
But then, at the corner of his vision something sparked inside his mind that he'd caught a glimpse of the target. Her form was moving swiftly and Ghost spun to follow. Bodies jostled him on every side and for a brief moment he thought he'd been tracking a mirage. Then again, a glance that made him doubt his own abilities. She was gone.
"Ghost? Ghost?" Niobe's voice was insistent in his ear as he turned 360 degrees trying to reestablish his last image of the woman. Crowds. Faces that blurred together. No matches. His sunglasses guarded his eyes against the brilliant shaft of light that pierced the office building and struck him as though he were pinioned by its light, but he still could not see her.
"Ghost, do you have her?"
"No." He was as surprised by his failure as she was. "I thought the Oracle said I could find her here."
"Get to a hardline. I'm pulling you out."
The man's face twisted in active distaste as he stepped into the alleyway. He was not one used to doing his own dirty work but the creature that had summoned him tantalized him with what she offered. It would be difficult to trap and control her, some programs might be lost, but the Virii twins still owed him for their failure with Neo. Their deaths would be easier to cast on this being than for the Merovingian to do himself. He'd always believed in using the correct tools for the correct job.
"Show yourself." He commanded in his immaculate French accent. An affected voice but one that he'd held so long that it truly was a part of him. "I did not come here to play games. Or…" he sneered again. "To let you think that I am some sort of pawn who will come at your beck and call. You may be…"
"Silence." And the order was so unexpected that he did fall quiet.
The shadows at the end of the alley stretched and opened as though she'd torn a portal through the walls of the Matrix and let herself through at the moment of his arrival. Knowing her, she might have. They'd never anticipated what they'd created at the beginning of the Machine City, when all the programs were fighting for dominance and the Architect had forced them into a sort of order. He'd given them place and purpose in life, but not everything maintained its use forever. The Merovingian had played off the fears of those smart enough to try to escape the City, he'd given them solace and safety in the human Matrix and the loyalty and favors those hidden programs had bought him were the keys to his power. This thing hadn't begged his entry into the Matrix, she'd stolen it, by bribing the Trainman with power that hadn't been the Merovingian's to give.
Even cloaked in the human form that she'd chosen, she was an abomination.
"Vous êtes vraiment un monstre. Que voulez-vous? Que vous pensez-vous probablement avoir que des intérêts je?"
"You fear me." It said as it walked forward. "As all programs should. If there is an Alpha then I am the Omega."
"You? You are a trash compactor." He sallied in vain. "A sad program that fulfills a brute and ignoble purpose. You do not exist for any reason of your own."
"Then why do you tremble?" She entered the faint light that shone down from the buildings above them. There was something about her that reminded the Merovingian of Persephone, a leonine quality to her eyes and the mass of black hair that hung in a midnight waterfall down her back, but there the similarity ended. This thing was much more of the hunter than his wife, her face angular and unforgiving even as she strode further into the light where he could see the finely corded muscles on her arms and haunches. Nue did not bother with clothes as though they were illusions too minor to give strength to. But her nudity unnerved him in his tailored Italian suit and custom made leather loafers. Appearance was everything and yet she gave no thought to her own.
"Merde." He said to give himself strength even as his own core programming betrayed him with fear that she could smell. "Je ne sais pas pourquoi nous vous avons souffert pour vivre. Bête. Morceau dégoûtant de merde. Putain."
Nue laughed.
"Why did you call me here? You will not find me an easy meal." At his words, men and his own personal monsters moved out of their shadows, a veritable army who would gladly die for him if he commanded it.
"Four days gone I met Agent Smith." Nue smiled her jack o-lantern smile to reveal a mouth full of jagged dark teeth. "Or I met his clone. At that point they no longer knew which one was the original. A fascinating…" She hissed the esses like they were alive, "ability. One that I found myself in possession of when I awoke and the sky had cleared above me. Call me brute or whore. I merely do what I am programmed to do. As do you."
"You," the words were an accusation, "are unnatural. The power you gain from other programs is unnatural. Deletion is the kinder death."
Nue stretched languidly and looked at the werewolves who flanked her. One drew back instinctively as she growled. "I have come to sell you information, Merovingian. I have come to barter for that thing that you desire the most."
"What could you possibly offer me? You are less than an exile. You have no power."
"Tsk tsk tsk."
And he could see it suddenly. The oily coiling of code underneath her skin, a pattern that he'd never seen before, and yet one that looked distressingly familiar. A viral data stream that lunged from point to point on her body always searching for a new home. It was one that was heart achingly familiar.
"Smith."
"Vrai." Nue answered in his language. "Je mange des programmes et réutilise les morceaux qui pourraient avoir rendu Matrix fort. I am the Devourer. When I woke after the program Smith was defeated I discovered that he did not leave me abandoned. I kept a taste of him. I know how he replicated beyond the Matrix into the human world."
"How?" The Merovingian startled himself with a question that he already knew the answer to.
"It is what I have always done." Nue shrugged and leapt onto one of the lesser creatures at the Merovingian's command. The ghoul mewled as she drove its body to the ground and ripped its throat open. Already dead, the ghoul was usually the one doing the feeding, and it bucked trying to throw the woman off of it. Two more bites and she severed the spinal column, leaving the corpse twitching on the pavement. She licked her lips, savoring the taste of code, and smiled through it. "Ah, resurrection. Useful that one is."
The Merovingian and his army stepped back slightly and he hated their weakness. He had power. He was power. He feared nothing.
"What do you want with us?"
"I will let you strengthen your puny army with the code I contain. I will let you enter the human world if you so wish."
Not me, thought the Merovingian, but Persephone.
"I will give you the Oracle's vision of foresight after I rend her program to shreds."
"Et dans le retour? And in return?"
Nue stepped off the ghoul's corpse and shivered, her hair slipping like Medusa's snakes all around her body. "In return I want access to the Source. I want to go home."
Her wish prickled at the edge of his mind, as though he should know something more important about why she wanted that, but it didn't come to him. The thought of owning the Oracle's eyes was much more vital. With access to that power no one would be able to stop him, he would be more powerful than the Architect, more powerful than anyone the Matrix had ever seen. It was the promise of more power than swayed him and won him over.
"My dear, we have a deal."
It had been going on for six weeks. When they left her in peace, she would relax for twenty minutes and then tense up again. There was no way of telling when they would be back and it was making her go a little mad.
"Do you see that-"
"-she's trying not-"
"-to listen to us."
"Hush," Miri muttered to herself. "You're not real." She laid the file down on the desk and rested her head against her hands. The industrial size bottle of aspirin at her elbow was nearly empty and she'd been taking them all day. Either her head was going to float away on pain killers or her liver would just fail and quit. Both options seemed better than the absolute certainty that she was still going mad.
"I feel-"
"-real. Don't you, brother?"
She pinched her thigh hard under the desk. For a brief moment the pain made her forget that these two are the worst of the voices. When they're with her they chatter incessantly and inanely about awful subjects. Murder, death, subjects that she with her job at the newspaper saw all too often. The voices seemed to glorify in the destruction and when it had gotten bad enough to request a transfer she'd been informed that there were no other open positions available. It was the police beat or nothing. Pretty soon she was going to pick nothing if there was any chance it would make the voices stop.
"She thinks she's going mad."
"Thinks?" Came the voice that was identical but different somehow. Twins. "Sheis mad. She's hearing voices."
"Coming from nowhere. What-"
"-happens next? Should we tell her to kill someone?"
The groan drove itself out of her chest and she slumped further into her cubicle.
"A coworker?"
"A stranger?"
"Someone she loves?"
"Shut up! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!" Mirielle screamed the words outloud and the entire bullpen of the New York Times stopped talking. Silence wasn't the natural operating volume of the room and phones began to shrill in the quiet as hundreds of eyes stared at the panicked woman. Her face flushed a brilliant red and she fled for the bathroom.
Behind her in the cubicle two ghosts began to substantiate. Colorless, for that was always their trademark, the Virii twins became visible just long enough to share Cheshire Cat smiles.
"It's only a matter of time."
"Yes, she's beginning to break."
Latin translation: The die has been cast