Pleroma
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Beautiful...
—Trinity, Matrix Revolutions
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It is always hard to look at the Scar. This is a thick coiled ball of vicious clouds, black against our fields of light, heavy against our weightlessness, hideous against our ships and cities, tangled against our clarity.
It is only a planet, tiny and inconsequential when you turn away and face the luminous galaxies. It is where we—all of us, all parts of us—came from, a gigantic blot before the distant stars, unremovable, inescapable. We are in orbit around it.
Don't get too close, we are warned when they teach us flight. The electrical storm will gash the steel and wire in us, the halo of radiation will poison the flesh and blood in us. The stench of death, unbroken for six centuries, will break our hearts and defile our bliss.
And so, needless to say, some of us are drawn to the Scar, irresistibly, dreamily, as if the dead still hold all the answers to the secret questions that we cannot ask. Perhaps it is youthful rebelliousness inherited from our machine ancestors, or perhaps it is mere restless curiosity inherited from our human ancestors. Some of us find the time to go out there, circling and watching, though for what? No one knows. Some of us even make dares, competing to see who can pull the nearest without coming to harm, who is the most skillful, who the boldest.
Without undue boasting, I can tell you I have won quite a few of those dares.
And it was on one of these ventures that I found out what secrets the dead hold.
A small thing it was, a fraction of a shard of steel, shooting up suddenly and unannounced from the dark ocean in a graceful parabola. It glinted once in the light of the sun, for a single instant suspended high and proud and motionless among the stars. Then it dropped, and dropped back into the dark ocean without a sound or a splash.
There is someone down there! I called out, though I was alone.
There is someone still down there, I repeat to the city, to the council, to anyone who will stop for a moment. Someone still alive. No one believes me. They laugh, or suggest I get my circuits or my sensors or my brain or my eyes checked. But I know what I saw.
Somewhere inside my mind, a voice has begun to speak to me. It says, soon we will know, soon we will all see. The presentiment grows stronger by each rotation of the city and by each revolution of the moon, until nothing will convince me otherwise. Maybe they call me mad now, but I know what I saw was only a herald.
Soon, someone will come, an emissary from the tomb, and he will rise from the very depths of the Scar, and reveal to us the truth about ourselves.