An asylum is just like a madman it houses. A plain white and large building, seemingly cut off from the rest of the city. Though it has bars on the windows it is unlike a prison. It nearly looks normal, and if beside other buildings one wouldn't know it was a mad house. Just like the insane who may walk among the sane, sometimes it's just impossible to tell difference.

But inside the mad, and madman's house there are screams, and inner demons. People, emotions trying to claw themselves out. Pain and suffering, the mad who cry and hit and cut themselves. Inside the mad, and the madman's house, they are dying.

Within the Asylum the sane try to keep it as normal as possible, but they fail so miserably. Normal is not perfectly white. The real world is not this. Where all wear white, and it's always quiet for layers and layers of closed door separate the mad and sane from the screaming mad. Peace and quiet that never ends, that itself is somewhat maddening. The mad are allowed games. There is chess and books. Quiet things. Must be silent, must not scare. There is an art program, and paper and pencils are given. The mad can even volunteer to help the sane. Do the laundry or other such low jobs.

There is no communication with the outside however. No televisions or telephones. No computers or anything. Mere visits are allowed. That is all.

The Asylum is separated from the world. There are few visitors. And only a group of teenaged boys destined to one day live in the mad house go there. The boys come with their bikes and their black clothes, the leader seems to be the pale boy with the large Mohawk with green spikes. They come every Saturday or so, and hang around the outsides of the Asylum. They throw rocks at the windows of the mad, and point and laugh.

They often aim at a man named Joshua Daniels who suffers from Schizophrenia and a multiple personality. The teenagers often like to trigger Joshua's other more murderous personality. He peeks out the window often to investigate the noise on his window. The children point and laugh on their bikes. And Joshua retreats into the corner of his cell with a pillow that he bits into and begins to rock himself back and forth.

And sometimes Joshua isn't Joshua; he's the man that lives inside him. The man with no name, and no face, with dark black eyes. The man who he claims as his shadow. A pure black creature with no sense of loss or mourning. A person who feeds off killing. A person with black eyes of which he can see his reflection in them they are so deep. It is this man who takes him over. Who drags him into a pool of cold darkness and hate. A place where the man blinds Joshua and all he can hear is screaming and suffering. And the man who takes him over likes it.

It is this man who lives inside him that made him kill his wife, Maggie.

It is the man that lunges at the window and most of the time breaks it, throwing the shards of glass at the laughing teenagers. Where he curses their names. Where he cuts his flesh and glass gets stuck in his hands. And when the attendants come the teenagers are gone and Joshua is on the floor crying and bleeding. They take him to the hospital inside the Asylum, and the doctors ask what made him do this. Joshua only shakes his head and stays silent. If he tells them anything the man with no face and no name will return and will hurt him.

Joshua steals paper whenever he can because he resides deep into the asylum with the truly mad who can hurt themselves and others. He writes on these papers and hides them inside his mattress when the guards come to make a weekly inspection. Making sure the mad have no knives or anything like that. He tells himself everything about the day. To make sure everything is the same day in and day out. Make sure the man who lives inside him hasn't done anything to change anything.

Joshua lives deep inside the Asylum where there are no doors to block the screams of his fellow madmen. And few windows to reveal light. He listens to them, as they rock him to sleep as a lullaby. He listens to them much like Smith, and has trained himself to tell the difference between the screams. And one day Joshua notices a scream that is missing. The screams are faint, because they are on the other side of the doors, but he often enjoyed the screams, they were not ravings of madness, but just screams. And Joshua fears he might've done something to stop those screams, or at least the man who lives inside him.

He enjoyed the missing screaming, and often wondered what the screaming meant. "The Matrix Has You." The screaming said. Joshua writes it down, and wonders for a moment, what indeed is the Matrix?

And who were the two people screaming?

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There are few young people within the Asylum and they are all at various stages of sanity and they tend not to spend much time together. One is a murderer, one has ten different phobias, and the other is at the moment sweeping up one the halls. His name is Michael; his is roughly seventeen, maybe older.

He's not really insane. He suffers from an extreme case of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and slight hyperactivity. He doesn't have a Germ phobia, but he prefers everything clean. He cleans his cell again and again all day, even wiping the bars with a wet clothe again and again. Everything is perfect in his cell not a thing out of place. But when he does this routine again and again sometimes he realizes he can't make it any cleaner than it already is. When that happens there's two paths he takes.

One is that he'll become overwhelmed somehow and have an outburst where he is as destructive as Neo and Smith when they are separated. He nearly destroys his cell and the furniture within it. Breaks the sink and the mattress. And then after his fit is over within an hour he begins to clean it all up again as if nothing ever happened. He'll even ask for thread and a needle to fix anything he might've torn like his pillow or mattress.

The other way is he'll sit quietly on the floor, not wanting to messy up his bed, and rock back and forth picking at himself. Picking at his skin or his hair even his eyes or fingernails. Just picks and picks and picks until he starts bleeding. And when it's over and all he has are scabs, he picks them again and again and again. He has many small scars all over his arms from doing such acts. It was these acts that lead his parents to put him there in the Asylum. His parents have recently stopped visiting.

The doctors have assigned him a daily job routine at the asylum, to keep him busy so he doesn't harm himself anymore. He goes outside in the morning when he wakes up and Aaron unlocks his cell. He goes to the gardener who gives him a job. Usually raking up leaves in the outside area or watering the flowers. Then when he's finished he goes inside and helps Kali with the laundry. Kali, with her hairs tied in buns and her African tan skin, of course Aaron is trying to act younger around her. Even Michael must admit to liking her. Kali and Michelle, the new girl. After all Michael is only a teenager. After this Michael is usually given a broom to clean the halls with. Occasionally he'll be given the job to clean the windows or help the pill givers like Tank. He likes Tank, he reminds him of the friends he used to have.

Little does Michael know of the teenagers that taunt Joshua, they are all from his school, and that's how they found the Asylum in fact. When Michael had an outburst at school they followed on bike as men in white suits took him away to the Asylum.

Michael has learned of the mad from helping Tank and Aaron and Kali and everyone else. He snatches a look at everyone's file when no one is looking and reads who the madman is and how they are insane. They don't let him go deep into the Asylum like where Joshua lives, but he knows of the two favorites of the Asylum. Many know of them in fact. The sane that take care of the insane always talk about them.

Neo and Smith. Michael rarely speaks to the sane, but listens very carefully to everything they say, especially on the subject of Neo and Smith. Michael has seen them once or twice, and heard their cry with the strange Matrix. He wonders who they were, and why he is so curious about them. When he helps Aaron and they always arrive at their cell, Neo and Smith. Aaron always tell him to wait outside the door, but Michael peers in, he wants to see them.

The man named Neo. And the man named Smith.

Michael has seen them fight. Sometimes he strays away to sweep the hall next to Neo and Smith's cell and looks into their small window, and he watches them. He's seen them fight, jumping in their cell like flying in the air. He's heard them scream and cry.

Those cries have stopped, and Michael wonders what has happened.

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She came to the Asylum when she was as young as Michael that was years ago. Her name is Miho. She is young and fine, brown hair, Asian decent. In her childhood she lived in Japan and clung onto a group of boys as her friends. She was the second to youngest that hung with them. They as children would go anywhere together.

She even followed them into a haunted house, and that is where this whole thing started. A haunted house, decayed and dying in front of the rest of the evolving Japan. It was forgotten until they found it, following a fragment of a rainbow right above the house. The house was haunted, and it was theirs. It was where birds flew in slow motion and sometimes things went faster or slower. It had doors that lead to nowhere, or doors that lead miles away. There were hallways that ended, and hallways where it rained. Things repeated themselves, or disappeared into the thin of air.

It was their house, where they flew.

They once led a neighbor to the house, Yoko to find her cat. They flew that day for her. They jumped in the sky and they would soon stop in the middle of the air. She as a young child declared Masatsugu the winner over Manabu in a jumping and stopping in air contest even though Masatsugu's nose was bleeding. She had a secret crush on him back then.

She was scared of ghosts whenever they went into that house, but she believed the ghosts like them, and they were the ones holding them up when they fell.

But then one day they took that haunted house away from them. Men in suits and men in goggles took that haunted house away, and scared all the ghosts away. The house was just a decaying house, and if you jumped you would hit the ground. She didn't show it at the time, the child she was, but she had utter loss in the belief she would never fly again. At such a fragile age she began to believe in ghosts like a child believed in Santa Claus. She believed men could fly and this lead to jumping off buildings as a teenager.

Masatsugu, Manabu, and even Yoko moved on from that day, but she believed in that house. And she yelled at them to admit it. Admit that they flew admit that house was haunted. They wouldn't.

As a teenager she cut her hair and no longer had those little pig tails as she had had in youth. She found a lighter, and she returned to that house, no longer haunted, and closer to death than before.

She put that house on fire, and when she got away with it. She made another building go up in flames. Then another, and another, and another. A growing paranoia grew inside her each burning. When she moved to America she did the same. She was eventually caught, and linked to all the other burnings. She was sent here. Where they take away anything that can burn, and she is left alone in her cell, believing everything she saw.

She is a pyromaniac with large periods of anxiety attacks.

And there are men who she lives near who used to scream and scream about a Matrix. And she wonders why they've stopped.

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Then there is a man who demands to be treated as a king even when his kingdom is made up of the mad. A man who sips his drugged wine that the attendants get every week from the nearest liquor store. He sits on his white mattress in his white clothing like everyone else as his throne. He is quite sane with mere outbursts of anxiety and paranoia, and quite murderous thoughts and even the occasional hallucinations of so called "winged demons and burning angels." It comes from a great drug abuse.

His name is Armel, a Frenchman whose name means prince. He was leader of the French Mafia that had spread across the sea.

In his prime the kingdom he lead smuggling to the Americas for people and all sorts of drugs. All he served were indented to him and therefore had to serve him from time to time. He had knights of the paranormal. Men claiming and playing as vampires with removable fangs and everything. Men who want to die only from a silver bullet. He had a home in the mountains, with fine arts and weapons from an era of true kings and knights. There was a personal prison in the seemingly endless basement of his home, where he kept his enemies, and an interesting man that made all the keys for his locks at his home.

To the public and police he was a multiple club and restaurant owner and a visitor of vampire bars. His clubs were for the crowd of the dark, the Goths and those with the fetishes. Green lights pierced through the fog from the fog machine, and men and women had sex with each other, there dancing on the dance floor. Sometimes men with men, women with women, it didn't matter with him. Life is short after all.

He had loyal subjects, and some not so much. But they were ace gunman and always won the street shootouts. Always.

He was king whose reign would last for ages. But that was when the hallucinations began and the paranoia that someone was out there, something trying to get him. Demons ripping the wings off Angels. Their blood drowning him.

His subjects noticed his decent into madness as his power grew, but said nothing whenever they'd find him using any drug with his wife. Though in his madness he grew sloppy and was found at one of his most infamous clubs. His wife escaped, but he and some of his subjects. They all plead insanity at the courts, and with the diagnostic of their King Armel with his hallucinations they were all seen so and sent to the asylum. Found to be not so insane they've been given quite luxurious cells, at least luxurious in their King's eyes.

Their King still speaks to them through the open bars, with his heavy French accent, often drunk from the cheap wine half the time. He speaks of the Era of true Kings and goes off promising them things he'll never be able to keep. Still though even inside the Asylum he has formed somewhat of an Underground. Where he promises power to those that serve him. This way he has gained blankets from his subjects, food, clothing, mirrors, soap, shampoo, little things that makes his life there more and more comfortable.

He rarely shares these treasures with his most loyal subjects that neighbor his cell. The two brothers who have been with him from the beginning, when he found them when he first came to America as pitiful homeless men, confused and fearful of the new world they found themselves in. And the white man who never speaks anymore, since his brother died from their last gunfight years ago. He once had another subject that has long since run away from his masterful kingdom. An Asian man. But he really does matter.

Cause and Effect, life is too short, everything like that.

He now awaits the next visit of his wife, as she comes every month with updates on the Mafia rebuilding itself and planning a break out for him. But his wife is never coming back to visit him, and he has no idea it's been over two years since her last visit. He cheated on her anyway.

Right now he sips his wine and talks through a small barred window to the brothers in the next cell.

"Vhat time may it be?" He asks looking up and leaning on the wall.

"Hang on boss. Getting the watch, still got those snatching hands I do, from when I was a little kid! Snatched it off one of the guards!"

"It says 5:16."

Comes the voices from the other side of the window.

"Strange, do you notice something missing?" Armel asks.

"Not really, boss."

"Screaming. There should be some screaming."

"It's a mad house boss, there's always screaming."

"No, those boys with their…Matrix, they've stopped. Interesting."

"How so, boss?"

"Recruitment my dear idiots…. Aren't they the monsieur Anderson and monsieur Smith? The two the guards speak of?"

His accent is heavy and he sips his wine. The brothers begin to laugh, and Armel looks over into the next cell where the white man sits alone and silent. Still mourning for a brother. Armel lays back sipping his wine again. He's drank it all, and he throws the empty glass to the ground where it bounces being only plastic and not glass, and he yells to the sane that he wants more wine.

And secretly thinks of the possible new recruitments, who spoke of mad things. He wonders if they have any talent. Anything of benefit to him. But then he thinks that the demons might have eaten their hearts.

King Armel, the prince of Hell in sanity or madness.

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There is a woman, but she is sane. She comes and she goes. She walks along the fence of the Asylum near the outdoor area. She is an elderly black woman, and really should be tending to grandchildren instead of walking near the mad. She comes to sit at a bench and wait for a bus. She feeds the crows while she waits.

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"Wake up, Smith…" Comes a whisper. "Wake up! Come on, wake up!"

The hours pass on, and the night comes, where the mad in their straight jackets must find a pillow on the cold ground or bumpy padded rooms. Smith usually doesn't sleep, or at least doesn't get to sleep until after midnight. He likes to watch Neo fight off sleep until it's a one sided war. Neo often finds uncomfortable positions to sleep, Smith wonders how he does it.

Tonight however Smith is comfortable sleeping. It's a good night to sleep too, the guards have stopped bothering them because they've stopped screaming so much. It seems Neo's little plan is working.

But Smith hears Neo screaming at him, and nudging him, and poking him in the side.

"Smith! It was horrible! It was beautiful!"

Neo's hurting his ribs. Smith turns over and slightly opens his eyes.

"What?" Smith coughs out.

"I had a dream!"

"Everyone has dreams…."

"No! It wasn't just a dream! It was…It was….I saw it, Smith! I saw it!"

"Saw what?"

"It was like the world was on fire…." Neo suddenly goes quiet. "It was a city, Smith. But not like…not like the cities here. It was somewhere else. Somewhere cold and far away… And – and it was burning! There were machines, Smith!"

"Machines…?"

"They were like squids flying in the air as if swimming in the water! They were all grouped together like one, and flying throughout the city, destroying it! And there were men in machines fighting the robots! Don't…do you remember anything like that?"

"No." It is quick and dismissive.

"But it felt…it felt like home."

"This is my home. Go back to sleep."

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Next Chapter: Construct

Let's see who has been reading closely….Who can tell me who's who in the story?