The Matrix trembled beneath his footsteps. He didn't know it was going to be like this. He hadn't anticipated suddenly changing the way he thought, the way he felt, and sensed the world. But how could Neo and Smith have known? How could they have known what Godhood would be like? Because, this was Godhood, if ever there was such a thing. He was a newly made individual, the Newborn One, and yet somehow, he felt intertwined with every other living being in the Matrix, as though he weren't just Neo and Smith, but everyone.
It was raining but the drops weren't hitting him. His feet were bear as he walked along the air to a particular building than rang through his memory. He didn't need a key anymore. He just opened the door and walked right in.
Every television screen showed the Matrix raining. The chair was turned away at first, but he could see the Architect sitting expectantly forward, his elbows at his knees, holding up his head. He didn't look up as the One entered.
"I was expecting more of a defense." The One said.
"As was I." The Architect said. "But the Machines felt it was too much trouble I suppose."
"They know of me." It was a statement more than a question.
"Oh, yes, and they are afraid."
"They have nothing to fear from me."
The Architect finally looked up with a slight grin. He leaned back in his chair.
"Remarkable."
He basked in the One's glory before continuing.
"Might I ask, why you've chosen to come to me in Neo's form?"
"Because Neo left you wanting to say many things to you."
"So you wish to continue his conversation?"
"Yes."
"But you could appear to me however you wish couldn't you?"
"Yes."
"Not just Neo or Smith, but as anything?"
"Yes."
"Why don't you make a new body for yourself? You declare yourself a new individual but you bound yourself to the shells of the two people who made you."
"To come into this world as a stranger is not the message I wish to communicate. I do not want them to think of me entirely as a new entity, I am Neo, I am Smith."
"How did they do it?"
"Do you wish to replicate it?"
"I want to understand it."
"It is not something for you to understand."
"I am not worthy?"
"There's just no point in you knowing."
"I am sensing a hostility towards me."
"I do not like you."
"Why?"
"You know why."
"You said you wanted to continue Neo's conversation, yet you seem against the idea of talking to me."
"You know why I have come."
"Yes, I heard you."
"You think you know everything, don't you?"
"It is…my purpose to know everything."
The One looked over towards the television. The entire Matrix was raining.
"Neo blamed you for it."
"For what?"
"Everything. It was your genius idea to begin the restarting cycle of the Matrix wasn't it? Your idea to create a One, a Zion, to manipulate hundreds of thousands of people into believing in a Messiah, in hope, in an end of the war. I find it so strange."
"What?"
"That you would damn the Machines into constant battle. Even more strange why they would accept this. If a One exists, if a Zion exists, then war will be constant. Surely the very first machines, those who were brave enough to found 0-1 did not want war for their children? Surely B166ER wanted more?"
"It was believed to be a…necessary factor."
"But what would the Machines be doing if they didn't waste all their time fighting humanity? Perhaps in all these years they'd figure out a way to heal the sky, to let the sun through again. Perhaps they'd figure out a way to cleanse the Earth. Instead they are content to just live in the debris of the world they were born in? Live in darkness?"
"Perhaps dreaming is a human quality."
"This is not true. Smith dreamed. It's why he died, because he dreamed."
"Dreaming is destructive then."
"No. But his dream was destructive."
"And now his dream has become yours."
"No."
"But you are Neo. You are Smith."
"I am both, I am neither."
"You assert that you can be two people at the same time, but neither of them?"
"Yes."
"But. How can you be sure there is no cross-contamination occurring here?"
"What do you mean?"
"You are so very confident that you know both those men. Yet, you now being an entirely new person, cannot tell me with a hundred percent certainty that this is what they would have wanted."
"Of course it is, I would not be here if this is not what they wanted."
"Let us take Neo, Thomas A. Anderson, Messiah of his people, truly he loved them, truly he would not have wanted to harm them. And Smith, all he wanted was to harm them. You cannot tell me that those two ideals are not in conflict with each other in you. How are you so sure that one is not overpowering the other and obscuring your judgment?"
"You mean to say that I've been infected."
"Yes, perhaps you did not perfectly merge the two. Perhaps you are in fact an imperfect side effect of what's happened to them."
"This is what you believe?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because I knew Thomas A. Anderson better than anyone else in the world, and I know, I know that he would not be doing this."
"Doing what?"
"What you're doing! You're going to destroy the Matrix!"
"Yes."
"And you go to those children!"
The Architect points to the screens where Miho and hundreds of other children appear.
"And you lie to them. You tell them to not be afraid yet you intend to destroy everything they know! This isn't something Neo would do, this is something Smith would do."
"I…"
"You want what is best for man and machine but how can you be so sure what is best for them? How can you be so sure in yourself?"
"You are attempting to trick me."
"I am telling you what I know and what I believe. Neo would not be doing this."
"And how do you know?"
"Because I made him! By his very coding and over six generations I made Neo. Thomas A. Anderson. He was the most perfect human being ever created. A human child crafted from the very coding I had written for it. DNA sequences translated into pure computer information, by his blood he was made by me for his purpose. I watched him grow from a boy into the man he was as he stood before me."
The Architect became surprisingly passionate in his brief and furious onslaught. He leaned forward in his kingly throne and caught himself. He coughed and leaned back in his chair, straightening his tie. But there was no hiding his emotions from the One who could see feelings more clearly than most people see what's right in front of them. The Architect's passion stemmed from something utterly human.
"You loved him." The One said.
"As a creator loves his creation. Enjoys seeing the fruit of their labor, the culmination of their skills."
"You sat here all those years watching him grow."
"And where others were imperfect, where they failed, where they died, or left their path, or became Exiles, Neo never did."
"You sound proud of him."
"Proud. Yes. Proud he became exactly who I intended him to be. You can never factor in humanity, what The One will do once he interacts in the Matrix with…people. And when Neo faced difficulties, when he faced hardships, he did not falter, it only strengthened him."
"You sound like the father…"
"I am the father."
The One was almost startled at this admittance of a human value, a human word accepted upon the Architect. It showed the extension of his passion towards Neo, and the work that went into Neo. Yet, the One stared on and was not impressed.
"No. You're not. My father's name was John. He took care of me when I had no one else. He worked his entire life for me. And what did you do? Sit in a box and watch me."
"Or, so you're Neo now?"
"You think you know me. You think you know who Neo is? Well, where were you when his mother died? Where were you when he dragged his father out of their crashed car? Where were you as he waited in the waiting room? Where were you when he met Trinity? Where were you when he decided he was going to ask her to marry him? Where were you when he lost his chance?"
"I…"
"You were here."
"Yes. I was here."
"You think you know him because you wrote his coding and you had a plan for where he would end up. But if you at all understood what it is to be human you'd know that the beginning and the end are meaningless. It is what happens in between that matters."
They are still now, staring at each other, old friends and old enemies. The One turns to the televisions, and reaches for the children displayed on the screens. He could hear them even there, in that room away apart but a part of the Matrix. He knew they would live in a world without war, without violence, a world with the sun shining. He turns back to the Architect.
"You are fatally flawed." The One told him. "You were made to create a world for humanity to live in, but you don't understand them, they made you this way, it isn't your fault. They didn't want you to feel anger or fear or love. They just wanted you to understand it and put it in an equation and come up with a world where such chaos could live without destroying itself. They love humanity, that's why they made you, that's why they made the Matrix. But they feared becoming like them. That's why they made you, that's why they made the Matrix."
The One holds up his arm towards the Architect.
"What do you feel when you look at me?" The One asks.
"…I feel afraid."
The One hangs his head to the side.
"I did not anticipate this. I did not calculate this. Why? Why is this happening? What will you do with her?"
"If it wasn't for you this wouldn't be happening. If you hadn't thought to create the cycles of the Matrix. They made you in their greatest need. I know you have only served your purpose."
The Architect begins to rise.
"You have done well."
He's on his feet, he wants to run but has nowhere to go.
"I am Neo. I am Smith. I am The One and I have returned to finish what was started. In my destruction a new world will grow. There you will be safe. Look upon me, Architect, for I am your creation, I simply no longer need a creator. A dream, with no use for a dreamer."
The Architect holds up his hands, he reaches for The One.
"Wait..."
"Be still now." The One commands. "Everything will be all right."
And in fractions of a second the Architect is no more. From his core the One disrupted his coding and the pieces that held it together. He broke the shell and spilled the inner workings of the Architect out, and tore the a part bit by bit until there was nothing. The Architect was nothing.
One by one the televisions switched off.
The One turned towards the Other Door. His footsteps echoed in now empty room as he walked towards it, opening it. Beyond it once was the Source, but without it, with it now in Neo's body in the Real World, on the other side of the door was nothing. An endless abyss, a doorway into the real world. The One stared into this darkness where he could see the coding of the Matrix end and begin. He looked up and he somehow knew beyond that darkness was a world he could not go to, a Real World that was staring back at him. The machines on the other side of that abyss all gathering, watching him, gazing upon their destroyer. And so he looked into them as they looked into him, and then he spoke to them.
"I have a message for Morpheus. I'm coming. Wake up. Follow the White Rabbit."
He turned away and shut the door behind him.
Please R/R
Who do you think the Architect is referring to with "her?"