Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Your name is Thomas A. Anderson, and it feels like a chore.

Maybe "chore" isn't the best word for it. You're Mr. Anderson when you're at your job, a desk worker at a respectable software company. Being Mr. Anderson feels like a job to you. That's it.

You always preferred Neo. New. Up-and-coming. The next big thing, once you quit your goddamn job and do away with Mr. Anderson forever. But if you're not working, you're starving. Your job pays you. If it weren't for that, you'd have jumped ship much sooner.

More than that, Neo is you, more you than Thomas Anderson has ever seemed. Thomas Anderson does what he has to. Neo does what he wants to.

For instance, the programs you write for your job as Thomas Anderson give you a sense of relief once you're done, a notion of, finally, it's over. As Neo, the programs you write, the data you harvest for your clients give you a rush. When you weigh it all, being Neo is the reason you're still alive.

Right now, you're Neo at his laptop, barely awake, face pressed into the keyboard, music pumping through his headphones, and you'd give a shit about the garbage you were spewing onto your computer if you hadn't already finished with the virus and put it on a disk.

But you get up and there's no garbage at all. Instead, it's a perfectly legible little sentence.

The Matrix has you…

The Matrix again. You've seen it pop up time and again online, teasing here and there, showing up just often enough to be suspicious yet offering no leads when you try to dig deeper. You have no idea what it is. It isn't hacker lingo, because you know hacker lingo, and "Matrix" doesn't factor into it.

Someone's hacked you, though, and you know exactly who. Well, you know his alias- it's Morpheus, like you're Neo. He wants you to know about the Matrix. You feel like Mary getting visited by that angel. But, you know, a dude.

Follow the white rabbit.

You don't know what to make of that. You've been paranoid in the past, and every crevice of your shitty apartment is covered in masking tape as to block out any cameras the feds might have planted. You are, after all, a criminal. Morpheus is worse, though; he's been called a cyberterrorist, and why not? He's leaked troves of government data that not even you've been able to parse in its entirety. Nobody's been able to catch him. Forums you've visited say that feds that get close to him find an empty hideout, and feds that get too close to him are found dead that same night.

You're so glad he's not a white hat. White hat, white rabbit… He'd better not be telling you to get stuffed. No way is he telling you to get stuffed. He may as well tell Trinity to get stuffed– as a hacker, he's far more distinguished than you are. You admire him.

Knock, knock.

You're so lost in thought that a real knock on your door nearly makes you leap out of your fucking skin. You always look like shit, though, so you don't need to pretend you didn't. It's all the same to your client– Choi, a junkie, and his junkie friends, and his junkie side bitch. What you've written him is a tidy little worm that searches the web and does heuristics for the cheapest and nearest dealers, and it's not like he really gives a shit about how it works, but it does work, so he hands over the money and you hand over the disk. He's not a frequent client of yours, but he isn't infrequent, either. You're on as good terms as you can manage, seeing as you're a shut-in that never takes drugs and never goes to the club.

You hate being that person. You'd call your life a nightmare, if nightmares could drag on for years and years. You want to wake up, someday, stop being so miserable.

You approach it in a roundabout way when Choi asks what's the matter with you. "You ever had that feeling where you're not sure if you're awake or still dreaming?" you ask, and then you wonder what the hell you were thinking, asking that to a junkie, because of course he has. It's called mescaline. Duh.

Somehow, though, that was the right thing to say, because he invites you out, and you're about to say no, but then you eye the white rabbit inked on the junkie girlfriend's shoulder and your heart leaps and slams against your brain and makes you change your mind.

It feels like a matter of seconds later that you're in the club, and you don't fit in whatsoever. Everyone looks so cool, so confident. Everyone looks like themselves. You just look like Thomas Anderson.

It's not just the clothes. It's the hair, the makeup, the posture, even. They look like works of art, bathed in color and light and whirling in the midst of it. They look full. They look whole.

You just look like Thomas Anderson.

You remember why you're a shut-in.

It's as you turn to leave that she catches your eye, and she doesn't let it go. She goes up to you. She doesn't say anything.

"I was just going to leave," you say.

"Hello, Neo," she says, as if she hadn't heard you.

That isn't my name, you almost say, but it dies in your mouth. Instead, you ask, "How do you know that name?" Because she shouldn't. She should have no idea that Neo, the hacker, is Thomas Anderson, the normal-ass man. It feels pathetic.

"I know a lot about you," she says. Her voice is low, even.

Immediately you're on guard. She couldn't do anything… could she? Does she want money? Does she want favors? Is she a cop? "Who are you?" you say, and it comes out harsher than you meant, but you're not mad about it. You mean business. You really do.

And then she opens her mouth, and your convictions rattle down your throat.

"My name is Trinity."

Your mouth goes dry. Maybe it doesn't show on your face, but you feel it. "Trinity?" you say. You try not to think it. "The Trinity? The one who cracked the IRS database?" No way. No way.

But she doesn't deny it like you hoped she might. She looks utterly unbothered. "That was a long time ago."

"Jesus." It slips out.

"What?" 

"I just thought, um…" You have to turn away. "You were a guy." You try not to think it.

"Most guys do," says Trinity.

She keeps talking. You soak it all in. She tells you that you're in danger of being caught, or worse. She tells you that she was just like you. She tells you how she met Morpheus. How she found the answer. How she had the same question you do, and she knows it. She comes up close. She talks into your ear. Your heart hammers. If she notices you pressing into her thigh, you can't tell.

"What is the Matrix?" you ask.

She doesn't tell you, exactly. She gives you a promise– an omen –of things to come. She leaves. You feel dazzled.

You can hardly believe she was like you. She seems ethereal. She seems like them– whole. Sure of herself. Empowered.

…You want her.

No, that's not right.

…

You want to be her.

Chapter Text

The impulse passes quickly, and it seems just as quickly that you’re in your boss’s office, being told that you think you’re special, somehow, because you slept in, because you stayed out late and probably took some sort of drug that made you forget everything else that happened. You resist the urge to tug on your sleeve, which is just a bit too short. You thought you’d prefer something too short to something too long. Obviously, you were mistaken.

You watch the window cleaners. You hardly hear a word he’s saying. His name hardly comes to mind. You’ve become a master of clearing your mind when it comes to tuning out bullshit, you think. Which is why the impulse bothers you so much.

“Do I make myself clear?” he asks.

“Yes, Mr. Rhineheart,” you tell him. “Perfectly clear.” You barely need to. It’s automatic. You turn back and head to your cubicle. Software, software, software. Who was the client this time? What did they need done? How do you best optimize a program whose use is being useless? You and the computer become one as you beat out line after line, and for a second you forget you have a body to begin with.

This is you. This is who you are. This is why, day after day, you come home and do the exact same shit, only this time it’s what you want. This is why you have no friends. You’re not happy being Thomas Anderson, because Thomas Anderson is the unremarkable man with the unremarkable body. Neo is the computer. Neo is a concept. Neo is the strike of every finger on a key, the click it makes as it presses the hammer, the blip of green as a new input registers. Neo is a creator.

Thomas Anderson is a worker.

It just seems that you’re getting into your groove when a delivery man gets your attention and hands you a package. No return address, no reason for having a package to begin with. Inside is a phone.

It rings.

What choice do you have? You pick up.

“Hello, Neo,” says the voice on the other side. It’s smooth. It’s calm.

It’s Morpheus.

You feel exhilarated. Not in a good way. What do all these big-name hackers want with you? You’re the average cyber-criminal. You have an upstanding job. You’re Thomas Anderson.

He wants you. He repeats what Trinity said– they’re looking for you. This time, you stand up and you see them. Men in dark suits with dark glasses. They turn to look at you. You duck.

He tells you to run. You run. When he leads you to a window with an attached scaffold, you freeze up and he hangs up. Why you?

It’s when you’re out on the window, giving into the urge to look down, that you realize something: You don’t want to die.

It’s not…

It’s not as though you want to live this life. You don’t know why you haven’t found a new job, like Rhineheart suggested you do, probably. You don’t know why you applied for a social security number. You don’t know why you don’t want to die.

But you don’t.

You let them take you. You’re shoved none too gently into a car. It could be worse, you guess. They could be beating you.

They know you’re a criminal, of course. You get the picture fast, as one of the agents in the suits pulls out a folder with your whole life story on it. Thomas A. Anderson, the upstanding man, and Neo, the dirty hacker. A you with a future, and a you without. They tell you they can erase Neo, if you help them hunt down Morpheus. The way they frame it, it’s a pretty good deal. A life without Neo if you put on your little white hat and let Mr. Anderson get a pat on the head for a deed well done.

You give them the finger.

It’s not very clear what happens after that. Maybe they drugged you. Maybe the rest was a nightmare. You thought you were being smothered, stripped down and–

You don’t want to think about it.

You’ve never liked your body. Too little muscle, too much hair. It’s gross. You feel like a day-old fish. Sometimes it makes you feel gross enough that you forget to shower, which makes you smell like a day-old fish, too. Now, there’s a tugging by your belly button that makes you all too aware of what lies beneath, and you have to hold your bedsheet around yourself and squeeze to make the feeling stop even a little.

The phone rings. You nearly jump out of your skin. (God, don’t you wish.) You scramble for it, the noise, the noise, the noise. You’re barely thinking.

It’s Morpheus again. Your head spins. You feel sick. The agents, the meeting, the One– what is he talking about?

He tells you to go to the Adams Street Bridge.

You don’t need to think twice.

It builds as you wait underneath it– who would wait above it in a downpour like this? It builds. The feeling that you need to escape. The feeling that you could escape. It occurs that you’ve always felt the need, but you suppressed it. You couldn’t.

A car pulls up. Trinity is in it.

You get in.

Someone points a gun at you. They tell you to take off your shirt.

Not like this.

You don’t want to die. You don’t want them to do what the agents did. You don’t want to die, and you don’t want to live like this, and right now one of them is winning.

Trinity stops you. There’s a look in her eyes. You hear every word out of her mouth.

“You’ve been down there,” she says. “You know that road, Neo. You know exactly where it ends.”

It’s soaking outside. You’re beginning to soak, as you stare down the road. But your mouth is dry.

She’s right. She’s right because she understands something about you. What it is, you don’t know. You want to trust her. 

You want to trust her so badly.

You don’t want to live like this.

You get back in.

Trinity, to her credit, does her best not to look at your bare chest. She’s more concerned with the machine she’s placed over your torso, a huge, scary-looking gadget made of metal pipes and plastic tubing. It’s heavy, and she’s rough with it. Your vision goes white more than once, from needling or tasing or both, and for the split-second you can focus, you see the thing from your drug-induced nightmare, made real.

It’s nearly impossible to believe. And almost automatically, your mind filters it out, slotting it next to a threat from Mr. Rhineheart. You’d be fascinated if you weren’t distracted by the rushing blood in your ears.

She throws it out the window. You don’t process the rest of the trip, not until you’re climbing the last flight of stairs of the hotel they’ve brought you to and you realize you’re going to meet Morpheus, in the flesh.

He’s a charming man. Not in the silver-tongued way. He has an odd way of speaking, even, that makes you have to think to know what he’s saying. If Trinity was strange, Morpheus is esoteric.

You’re honored.

He thinks highly of you, and you can’t say why. He thinks you’re special. You’re just…

“I don’t know who I am,” you say.

“I understand better than you know,” says Morpheus. “You’re here because you’re like me. You understand that something is wrong with this world, but you can’t say what. You know something, and you can’t explain it. Like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that brought you to me, isn’t it?”

It must have to do with… “The Matrix?”

“Do you want to know what it is?”

You think of what Trinity said. You’re looking for an answer.

He gives you a choice.

He gives you the choice to know, or the choice to forget. The choice to look behind the curtain, or the choice to pretend the curtain was never there to begin with. You’re not allowed both, he says. Once you know, there’s no going back.

You don’t want to die.

You don’t want to live like this.

You take the red pill.

That was the right choice, says his smile. He leads you to a room with his crewmates. They put you in a chair and hook you up to what seems like a dozen different machines. Your heartbeat grows louder in your ears. Trinity connects a pair of earplugs to a telephone and puts them in your ears. Her skin is warm. It seems to linger on your cheek where she brushed it. She did all this, she says. You feel better knowing that.

They’d brought a cracked mirror up next to you. You only now notice because the cracks are no longer there. Your chair presses on a floorboard, and the mirror’s surface ripples.

Morpheus talks as you touch the mirror. It seems as though it has a membrane. You can dip your fingers in. Quickly, you take them out. The mirror sticks. Your skin starts tingling where it touches, as though tiny needles were being stuck into every square millimeter of it, like pins in a CPU. The pain is freezing. Your body feels warm.

Over the phone, you hear ringing.

It’s not ringing.

It’s your own screaming.

All of a sudden, everything hurts. You’re trapped. You see red and not much else. Your eyes sting. You reach. You feel a soft surface, with give. Your fingers scream with the sensation, pins-in-a-CPU, and you nearly have to pull back.

But you’re trapped, and you claw and pull with all the might you seem to be able to muster, and it breaks open. Something’s in your mouth. You half-choke, half-pull it out. You’re wet and cold. You need to throw up. Nothing’s in your stomach. You’re not wearing any clothes. You’re full of tubes, and–

The back of your head is heavy. There’s something in it. It feels like a plug. It feels tight. You can’t take it out. You need to take it out. You need to. You–

…

You can see. As far as you can see, squinting in the light, tears flowing to void your eyes of the fluid they were just full of. There are cells just like yours.

You came out of one.

How many others…?

Something drops into your field of vision. It stares at you. You’re not sure how but it stares. It can see you looking back.

It seizes you. You realize that it wants to kill you. You flail, but it’s holding you by the neck and trying to move makes it hurt more. The plug comes out. It drops you. You feel dead.

And then the pod opens beneath you and you start sliding and you realize again you-don’t-want-to-die-

…

…

Trinity…

You hear Trinity.

Then you hear Morpheus.

Then you see Morpheus.

“Am I dead?” you ask him.

He smiles at you. A real smile. “Far from it.”

Your muscles spasm, and the effort makes you drop off again. You remember the action, though, and it isn’t until you open your eyes again that you realize why.

It was a laugh.

Chapter Text

Your name was Thomas Anderson.

You’re now beginning to doubt that Thomas Anderson ever existed.

Nothing seems real, and at the same time, everything seems real. The world around you is hazy and so, so different. Your real body is full of holes and plugs, and your hair, once unkempt, is now long gone. The socket on the back of your head stings your fingers with cold.

You feel like part of you died. You feel as though you were picked up and your insides were scraped out, or maybe your outside was peeled away, leaving you bare and hollow and shivering. You feel less than real. You feel like a concept suddenly thrust into the real world, or a detective character forced to play in a war movie.

You’re Neo. Who is that?

Morpheus has the answers. It seems like he’s rehearsed them, or he’s at least well-practiced in it. He doesn’t break a sweat telling you that two entire centuries have come and gone without anybody knowing. He sees no issue in telling you that the real world is a dystopian nightmare, controlled by machines that keep humans’ heads deep underwater.

He sees no issue showing you, either.

It doesn’t make you feel better knowing that nothing seems real because nothing is real. If you were bare before, you’re scoured and scrubbed bleeding now. You hate it. You’ve woken up into a cold and scary world, and you hate it.

…It’s exhilarating.

It’s the first time for a long time you’ve felt something real, not dulled by the casual, oppressive acceptance of a bullshit world. You hate it, and you hate it with all your heart. All of a sudden, your life has meaning.

Deep in your heart, a glowing ember flakes away its ashy skin. It becomes a hot coal.

Morpheus says he understands you. Maybe he does. He lets hope lead him. He tells you that you’re special, somehow. You have the power to reach down this system’s throat and tear its innards out. The One, he calls you. A Jesus Christ for the modern day.

You have to wonder if Jesus felt like Jesus. You certainly don’t. You don’t feel like the son of God. You feel small and exposed and sickeningly human. You feel like you need to get your hands on something. Is Neo gone? You need to become somebody.

Tank is the first one you meet that you haven’t before. He’s relaxed and sure of himself and you can already tell he likes you, even though you haven’t given him a reason to. Part of you decries that, but most of you decides you like him back. He’s a man’s man.

And maybe it’s that he’s had no plugs, has spent his whole life knowing who he is, but you perceive a gap between yourself and him. And it’s startling, because you’ve been on an island your whole life. For the first time in your life, you can see somebody that really does exist on the same plane as you.

Does everybody have a gap?

He teaches you jiu jitsu first. He simply uploads it onto your brain, and the sheer stimulation hits like a drug. It isn’t real, you know that, but you can almost feel your body, once nervous and slack, become tight, loose, focused. You’re in control. You notice a distinct absence of self-loathing in that blissful moment.

Ten hours later and you still can’t get enough. Eleven hours later and Morpheus is wiping the floor with you. Eleven hours and five minutes later, you’re taking a flying leap off a building. For a brief moment, you think you’ll make it. For a briefer moment, you see how far away the other side is. You suppose that’s all it takes.

You wake up again after hitting the ground, shivering and tingling all over. Your heart rattles like a lone pill in a bottle. You taste blood.

Everybody’s watching you. Somehow, you had a feeling they were. That they would. You’re their second coming, after all, and you gave Morpheus a pretty good fight… That, or he was going easy on you. You guess the latter.

“Your mind makes it real,” Morpheus says, to explain why you’re hurt. You’ve hurt yourself. It seems improbable, but you’re no biologist. The only innards you understand are in computers.

Your mind makes it real, huh?

What else could your mind make real?

There’s no shortage of water in 2199. There is, however, a shortage of clean water, and Trinity, you’ve discovered, has a habit of hogging it.

The last thing you want to do is establish yourself as a douche among this band of freedom fighters. You’re hovering outside the communal bathroom door, wondering if you should knock. She’d let you in, of course, probably to say something equally sexy and incomprehensible to you. She is sexy, you have to admit, because you’re a man and she seems to be one of the only women on the ship, not to mention that she’s sexy. Stranger still is that the feeling barely lessened when you first saw her out of the tight black clothing she’s so fond of in the Matrix. Everybody wears gray rags here, including her, and she somehow makes them sexy. You want her, and then you remember the second half of that statement and perish the thought. You want her confidence. You want her sly smile. You want her intense gaze.

That’s all. That’s all you want.

You hear footsteps. It’s Switch, the only blonde on the crew, and that’s how you have to qualify them because you have no idea whether they’re a feminine man or a masculine woman. They’ve spotted you waiting outside the bathroom, fist poised to knock, and they’ve strode up and pounded on the door three times and yelled “Trinity, Neo has to whiz! Hurry up and get out!” Then they just walk away.

It’s not long after that Trinity appears, looking… very clean. “You can have it,” she says, without so much as a ‘sorry’. She doesn’t even meet your eyes. She brushes past you. As cool as she seemed in the Matrix, she seems very aloof here. Maybe those are the same.

Whatever the case, you do your business. Fortunately, the seat’s been left up, so you don’t have to touch it and wonder what new-age germs are on it. You flush, wash your hands, and it’s not until you’re scrubbing your face that it strikes you as odd that the seat was left up.

…

Well.

Well, maybe Trinity didn’t have to use it. Maybe someone else did and left it that way, and Trinity just didn’t put it down. She could certainly have the same ideas as you about new-age germs. Maybe she sits squatting.

You tell your mind to shut up.

Surprisingly, this still works as well as it did before you woke up, tuning out the bullshit. You decide that bullshit is bullshit, whether or not it’s real. And losing sleep over a goddamn toilet seat is bullshit. End of.

You don’t know anyone well enough to ask, really, you think as the crew circles around breakfast. Tank’s good, but the gap presses against you every time you seriously consider it. Would he understand? Morpheus isn’t one for crude, dirty conversation like this. He’s out of the question. And then the rest would immediately call you a creep for noticing something like that, let alone pointing it out. Switch has always been upfront about things like that. You wonder if they would slap you.

And, of course, asking Trinity about it would be worse than being called a creep. It would make you nothing less than a bona fide creep. Do you pee standing up? Are you insane?

You realize you’re staring at her. This is because you realize she’s staring at you. Her face betrays nothing. Your face… Well, it must betray everything.

You have to look away first, burying yourself in your nutrient slop. When you look back, the corners of her lips are ever-so-slightly quirked up. She sees you watching and looks away herself, asking Apoc something about the best kind of automatic rifle. You're still a stranger.

Once again, you remember why you're a shut-in.

All these people like you, sure, but they like you because they think you're something you couldn't possibly be. They like an expectation. Only, instead of expecting you to be Thomas Anderson, they expect you to be the One. Who are these people? Hell. Who are you?

Nobody seems to have an answer. Morpheus promised an answer. Will he give it to you?

You're a fraud. A square peg hammered into a round hole. They wanted the One. They got you. You're…

You're in the Matrix with Morpheus. He walks you through a crowded street, against the flow of people, and tells you that anybody could be an enemy, and you wouldn't know until you had a hole in your head. You nod along, pushing through the crowd. Nobody seems to notice the two of you. You still can’t shake the sensation of being watched. Everybody is your enemy, he says, and you think it’s the other way around, that you’re everybody’s enemy. You are Neo the cyber-criminal, after all…

A woman catches your eye.

She’s pretty. Her dress is low-cut, baring her cleavage. It brings out her painted lips. Her dress brings out her figure, against the crowd of black and white. She’s watching you, and she’s smiling. Since when do women smile at you? You’re… Well, flattered, in a word.

That lasts until she turns into the agent that put that fucking bug inside you. Only instead of dangling a bug above you, he’s got a gun in your face. You duck and take a breath you intend to scream with.

Morpheus offers little in the way of comfort. He’s not that kind of person. None of you are. It’s 2199, and the world is run by robots, and the Earth hasn’t seen the sun for at least a century. Thomas Anderson wasn’t ever real. The last thing you should be demanding is comfort.

But his unshakable faith in you… Well, it’s something. He says nobody has gone toe-to-toe with an agent and lived to tell the tale. He says the resistance needs to, if they want any hope of making headway in this war. Moreover, he says you’ll be the one to do it.

You still feel pathetic. You can almost feel the flimsy muscles in your real body. “Are you trying to tell me I can dodge bullets?” you ask.

He smiles. “No, Neo. I’m trying to tell you that when you’re ready, you won’t have to.”

You won’t be ready. You’re certain of it. Not in another two centuries, not in another two millennia. You’re nobody. You’re some loser they picked up off the street. You’ve never leaked the IRS database; you’ve never taken down entire servers of digital criminal records. For God’s sake, you make viruses for a living. You’re not even an enemy to the public.

You’re only a pest.

It’s only further proven when Tank radios from outside and wakes you up. It’s here that you see another machine– a sentinel, they call it. It’s huge, delicate spirals of metal covering sinewy, gleaming skin, and dozens of eyes that shine like embers.

It’s beautiful. You feel small against it.

The ship, with its power offline, is dark and cold. Trinity drifts into you. She’s warmer than you expected. You didn’t expect her to ever get this close to you again. She feels nice. You try your best not to get used to it.

It seems as though the entire crew is staring at the sentinel, as it seems to stare back at you. Everything is still; everybody’s breath, even Morpheus’s, is bated.

Finally, it drifts away. Slowly, like melting meat, you relax. As your hand drops to your side, it brushes against Trinity’s. Warm as she is, her hand is cold.

You don’t know what comes over you. You take it and hold it in yours.

In your periphery, you can see her look at you. You glance over, for a split-second, then look back and pretend it’s not happening.

Your heart jumps, though, when you feel her squeeze it just a little tighter.

Chapter Text

Out of everyone on the ship, Cypher seems the least high-strung. He has a laid-back attitude to everything. You’re reminded of yourself, in the Matrix, but he’s out of the Matrix and still feeling that way– nihilist. You wonder at it. Is he the smartest of the crew?

You find him one night in front of a computer– cascading bits of code in a language you’ve never seen before. Maybe it’s a brand new one, born of the recognizable code of the AI’s architecture. Evolution. You’re… Enraptured.

It’s the Matrix, he tells you, but you don’t care. It’s beautiful. It’s a sort of patternless pattern, he tells you. You can see things if you know what to look for. Blonde, brunette, redhead, he says. You see code. You like code. You suppose you were code, once, at least partly. The thought gives you a strange feeling.

“Want a drink?” he asks, and even though you nod, he doesn’t seem to look your way before pouring you one. “You know. I know what you’re thinking, ‘cause right now I’m thinking the same thing…” He gives you a rueful smile. “Why, oh, why didn’t I take that blue pill?”

You don’t tell him that you weren’t thinking that. You don’t have the chance– he throws back his shot, and you throw back yours, and you’re given a harsh reminder how raw and new your real throat is. You cough and splutter, and your face heats up, harsh and red against the chill in the air.

He laughs and pours you another. You can tell he has a few in him already. Maybe that’s how he does it– alcoholism. You consider the idea.

“Did he happen to tell you why he did it?” asks Cypher. You nod. He makes a face, like you blew a bad breath at him. “Jesus– what a mindjob,” he says. “You’re here to save the world. What do you say to something like that?”

You thought it would be a relief to hear that someone gets it. It is, in a way. But it’s something else, too… disappointment. All this was leading up to nothing. You’re nobody special– rather, there’s nothing special about you. You’re just yourself. You feel like…

Your own name is bitter in your mouth.

“How many were there?” you ask.

“Five,” Cypher says. “Since I’ve been here.” Maybe more.

“What happened to them?”

“Dead. All dead.” He pours himself another and shoots it back. “Honestly, Morpheus. He got them all amped up, believing in bullshit. I watched each of them take on an Agent, and I watched each of them die.” The words, heavy as they are, pass his lips with no effort. “Little piece of advice: When you see an agent, you do what we do: run. You run your ass off.”

You can’t handle it. You toss back the shot he gave you, this time bracing yourself. It hurts like hell, but you keep your composure. You stare at the cascading lines of code. They aren’t blurry… yet. They’re still beautiful. Looking at them, you feel the way you felt when you met Trinity. Nausea bubbles in your throat.

“Thanks for the drink,” you say.

“Anytime.” Cypher smiles at you. “Sweet dreams.”

You wish. The alcohol swirls in your mind, but you don’t get back to sleep. You’re the sixth One, at least. Morpheus believes in you. He believed in all the others, too, and all the others died. How does he keep going?

You guess the hope that one day he’ll be right is the trick.

It makes you angry. Angry at Morpheus, and angry at Trinity, and angry at yourself for having the audacity to be angry at them. For the first time in your life, people are looking at you. You’re not above or below them– you’re their equals. You were just starting to overcome the feeling of separation from them. You can’t ruin that by being angry at them.

…But do they even care about who you are? You’re the One to them, to Morpheus and Trinity and Tank and the others. They believe in what you are.

All of a sudden, you don’t even want to be Neo anymore. You feel like you’re letting them down, too.

You wish you were at your computer. At least there you had control. Choi called you his personal Jesus, and in a way you felt like it. You could do things there. You could pretend to be someone you weren’t.

Here, pretending to be someone you’re not is a prophecy of doom. You wish the others could see that. You wish Neo could do the things they said the One could. You failed the jump program. You didn’t believe in yourself. (Believing in yourself gets you killed.)

You hear fabric brush on the floor behind you. You stay still. Who’s watching you?

You entertain the idea of getting killed by whoever is behind you. That way, you’d never find out if you really were the One or not. They wouldn’t, either. Their dreams wouldn’t be burnt up once again.

You don’t really want to die.

Whoever’s behind you takes a deep breath.

“Please,” whispers Trinity– it’s her voice. “Please.” You almost don’t hear it above the hum of the ship.

Then, you hear her pad away, like nothing ever happened.

Your heart hurts.

Hackers come and go, you know. There are plenty of names you remember from earlier days that disappeared one day and never came back since. Sapphire, Hera, Deuteronomy, Claridad, Macro… Maybe they were arrested. Maybe they were offered the same “choice” as you were, all that time ago, and maybe they didn’t have the attention of Morpheus. Or maybe they did… and you’re lying in a bed that used to be theirs. It’s a chilling thought.

In your dream, you’re selling out the Nebuchadnezzar. You don’t remember why. Maybe it’s the bug making you do it, or maybe you’re doing it out of a desperate ploy for your life. You know you’ll regret it before you do it, and you know you regret it as you’re doing it, but some sick wheel of fate keeps the events turning. 

Finally, you burst into the ship and come face to face with the last one alive– yourself. You look like you can’t decide between terror and resignation. You look shabby, emaciated, in too-loose clothes, and you almost take pity on yourself.

You look pathetic, you think. And then you’re on the other side, and Agent Smith is holding a sidearm at you again, like in the program, and–

You jolt awake. You run your hands down your face.

You get slop for breakfast. And, according to Apoc, lunch and dinner, too.

Mouse is talkative, because of course he is. “You ever had Cream of Wheat?” he asks. You haven’t. Your parents thought it was fattening. You wonder if they were actually your parents.

“No,” Switch says. “But technically, neither did you.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Mouse continues, and he continues some more until Apoc tells him to shut up. In that time, you muster the courage to scoop up a spoonful and eye it. It certainly doesn’t look appetizing.

“It’s a fast-reproducing bacteria,” explains Dozer. “Doesn’t taste like much, but it’s loaded with aminos, vitamins, and minerals– everything your body needs.”

“Not everything,” says Mouse, sidling up to you. He’s way in your personal space, and this time you don’t have the simple comfort of knowing nothing is real. The hairs on the back of your neck stand up. You can feel his body heat. “I saw you went through that agent training program. What did you think of her?”

“Who?” you ask.

“The woman in the red dress,” Mouse says. “I designed her. Doesn’t talk much, but if you’d like to arrange something, say, more personal…”

“The digital pimp, hard at work,” Switch comments.

Morpheus interrupts you. He says something about going in, to see her. You learn that he means going into the Matrix, to see the Oracle. You have no good feelings about that.

Obviously, Mouse picks up on that, because he’s right up on your back again. “You know, Apoc hounded me for a man in red, so if you’re into that I can see about updating him a little to your, say, personal taste,” he offers.

“Mouse,” Apoc says.

“But I saw the way you looked at her. I’ve also seen the way you look at certain other parties.” Mouse smiles knowingly. You do not like how he smiles.

“What other parties?” you challenge him.

Mouse just gives you a mock salute. “Your secret’s safe with me, don’t you worry. Just saying.”

You’re not altogether turned off by the idea. It’s not like you’ve never had sex with a woman before. Not like you never enjoyed it, either. Most of the women you’ve done it with have just made you jealous. Of what, you’re not sure. You always feel like you’re getting the short end of the… Oh, never mind.

Mouse ends up leaving and hounding Cypher about something the latter seems to have borrowed and never returned. Trinity, Tank, and Dozer have already gone. Apoc and Switch have stuck around, sitting in silence. You can’t tell if they find it awkward. You do.

“You gonna spend the rest of your life being that tense?” asks Apoc. “Gonna spend the rest of your life with a back that hates you.”

“However long that may be,” Switch adds. They nod to an empty seat, still unsmiling, and you take yours. You forgot to taste your breakfast, let alone eat it. You poke at it.

“You don’t have to tell that kid anything,” Apoc tells you. “Especially not that I called him a kid.”

“What’s he gonna do?” Switch asks. “Ramble at you all night?”

“Could very well happen.”

You feel awkward, knowing Apoc likes men. You want to say something, but the urge only arises soon after shoving some of that single-celled slop into your mouth. (Dozer’s right– it doesn’t taste like much. It doesn’t taste like nothing, either, which isn’t the nicest taste.)

Switch answers for you. “Everybody on this ship is a social outcast in some way,” they say. “There’s an art to fitting in. We’re the philistines.”

“I prefer to think we’re the artists,” Apoc says, “and they’re the philistines.”

“You can’t ‘art’ your way off the streets,” Switch says, “or out of an asylum.”

“We literally did,” Apoc replies.

You stare. You’re trying to think of a question to ask. What the hell are they talking about?

“You gay?” Apoc asks you all of a sudden, and you choke on your slop. It’s not as harsh as Dozer’s booze, but it’s not a pleasant sensation.

Switch doesn’t even ask if you’re alright. They just snort. “That’s not how hazing works.”

“I’m not hazing him,” Apoc says. “I’m asking a question.”

“You don’t have to tell the idiot anything, either,” Switch tells you. “ He’s gay. We had a thing for a while once he decided I was enough of a man for him, then he broke it off once he decided I was too much of a woman for him.”

“Are you?” you ask between coughs. You promptly resolve never to ask anything while choking on slop again.

“Am I what?” Switch asks. “A woman? A man?”

“Yeah,” Apoc says.

They flick a booger at him. “Yeah,” they repeat.

“Yeah, you’re a woman…” You watch them carefully. They nod. “...and a man?”

Apoc grins. “Like a baby learning his mom doesn’t disappear when she covers her face.”

“Why?” you ask.

“Just am,” says Switch. “Why? Are you taking notes?”

“No,” you say.

“Here, I’ll make it easy for you,” they continue anyway. “None of us know what Morpheus has going on. I’m not even sure if he knows what he has going on. Trinity’s obvious. Mouse used to be a girl, now he’s not. He and Cypher lived on the street for a while together.”

“Might be related,” Apoc adds.

“Tank’s obvious,” Switch says. “Poor guy– can’t even have time off in the Construct. All action and no action, if you know what I mean. And Dozer swings both ways.”

“Still no action,” says Apoc.

“For the better,” says Switch. “You think we’d work as a team if we were all each other’s damn exes?”

“We work just fine,” he says. They swat him lightly again.

You didn’t need to know all that. You continue eating, pretending to feign interest.

“Like I said, you don’t need to tell us anything,” Switch says. “But we’re not going to throw you overboard if you do.”

You don’t have anything to tell. You’re a man that likes women. Trinity’s a woman that likes women, if you understand what Switch meant– there go your chances with her. It’s not like you had any to begin with, but it’s still depressing. You just shrug.

“Yeah, okay,” Switch says. They get up and leave. Apoc follows.

You finish your breakfast alone.

The Matrix is strangely familiar. You feel that not-quite-there sensation again, the feeling that you’re in a dream. You wonder if anybody else feels it.

Everybody looks so confident, like they’ve done this a thousand times. Maybe they have. It’s only your first time. You still can’t shake the feeling that you don’t fit in.

…Well, maybe it’s the sunglasses. It’s a bright day out.

Fortunately, it isn’t long before you’re in a car with tinted windows, driving streets you thought you knew.

“God,” you say.

“What?” asks Trinity.

“I used to eat there.” You just stare. The restaurant is long past, but you can picture yourself walking down the street towards the place. “Really good noodles… I have these memories from my entire life, but none of them really happened.” You turn to her. “What does that mean?”

She’s still wearing her sunglasses. “That the Matrix cannot tell you who you are,” she says. You guess she has a point. Your memories are shadows, gone like the noodle place, but you’re still here. But…

“But an oracle can,” you quiz.

“That’s different,” she says.

“Obviously.” It seems easy for her to say. Your whole life up to this point has been a lie. You find it difficult to believe just this piece of the tapestry. “Did you go to her?”

“Yes.”

“What did she tell you?”

“She told me…” A smile dances on her lips. A real smile. But she doesn’t answer… Maybe she can’t.

You can’t hold back a shudder. “What?”

“We’re here,” Morpheus announces before she gets the chance to talk. You give her one more meaningful look. She shakes her head.

Your heart sinks as you realize you’re in love with her.

The doorknob is polished to a reflection. You can see your hand in it and both your faces. Truth in reflections. There’s no wonder why– the Oracle is, well, an oracle. She’s been with the resistance since the beginning, and if she doesn’t know everything, she knows enough. You thought you knew enough, but that was before you found out you didn’t know anything.

She told Morpheus she would find the one. Your anger brims once again.

“I told you that I can only show you the door,” Morpheus says. “You have to be the one to step through it.”

This time, you balk. “I don’t think this is a good idea,” you say. You haven’t felt angry in a long time. You haven’t felt furious in a long time. You’re just barely holding it back.

“Why?” His face betrays nothing.

“I don’t believe in this stuff. No matter what she says, I’m not going to believe it, so what’s the point?”

“What do you believe in?”

It pisses you off, how he seems no nonchalant. Especially when… “Are you kidding me?” you demand. “What do you think? The world I grew up in isn’t real. My entire life was a lie! I don’t believe in anything anymore.”

“That’s why we’re here,” he says.

You don’t care. You can’t believe you haven’t let yourself boil over yet. “Why, so I can hear this old lady tell me, what, that I’m the man everybody’s been waiting for? That I’m supposed to save the world? It sounds insane. Unbelievable! And I don’t care who says it, it’s going to sound insane and unbelievable.”

“Faith is not a matter of reasonability,” Morpheus says. “I do not believe things with my mind– I believe them with my heart. With my gut.”

You want to break something. You want to take the doorknob off and fling it across the room. “And you believe I’m the one?” you challenge.

“Yes,” he says, “I do.”

You break. “Yeah? What about the other five guys? The guys before me? What about them, huh?!” Finally, his face falls. Part of you feels guilty for it, and most of you doesn’t care. “Did you believe in them, too?” He gets people killed. He’s going to get you killed, too, and isn’t it exhilarating to finally let loose on him for it?

“I…” For once in his damn life, Morpheus is speechless. “I believed in what the Oracle told me… No. I misunderstood what the Oracle told me. I believed it was all about me.”

Your chest rises and falls. You know he could kick your ass. You feel alive.

“I believed that all I had to do was point my finger and anoint whoever I chose…” The corner of his lips twitch. “I was wrong, Neo. Terribly wrong. Not a day or night passes where I do not think of them. After the fifth, I lost my way. I doubted what the Oracle said. I doubted myself.”

You’re still quivering with fury. He meets your eyes. You can’t see him through his glasses.

“And then I saw you, Neo, and my world changed. You can call it an epiphany, you can call it whatever the hell you want. It doesn’t matter.” He seems to grow as he says it– or do you shrink? He steps closer. “All I can do is believe, Neo, believe that one day you will feel what I felt and know what I know– you are the sixth and the last. You are the One. Until that time, all that I ask from you is for you to hold onto whatever respect you have for me… and trust me.”

He really does have absolute faith in you. You still can’t believe it, not fully. But it quells something in you, some doubt you had that he wasn’t just setting you up to be the next sacrifice in an ever-lengthening line.

“All right,” you say, and the door opens.

There are others in the room the woman leads you into– she calls them Potentials. They’re all children, but they’re far more talented than you. Floating blocks, bent spoons… You sit down next to the spoon kid. He looks like a proper monk. He smiles and hands you a spoon. If it wasn’t straight and rigid before, it is now. This kid makes a better One than you’d ever be, you feel.

You hold the spoon and concentrate on it.

“Do not try to bend the spoon,” says the kid, breaking your concentration almost immediately. “Instead, only try to realize the truth.”

“What truth?” you ask him.

“There is no spoon.”

Oh. Duh. It feels real in your hands, weighty metal and a slightly dirty surface, but you remember that none of this really exists. You stare into it.

“Then you will see that it is not the spoon that bends,” the kid says while you focus. “It is only yourself.”

You think about seeing the truth in mirrors. The world inside the mirror is just as real as the world outside, which is to say neither really exist. You stare at it and imagine it coming closer… and it does–

A hand taps you on the shoulder. “The Oracle will see you now.”

The kid smiles. You wonder where he really is.

She’s a nice lady. You almost have to wonder if you think that because she knows all the right things to say to catch you off guard.

“I got to say, I love seeing you non-believers,” says the Oracle, opening the oven to spy on the contents. “Always a pip. They’re almost done. Smell good, don’t they?”

“Yeah,” you say. You’re a grown man in a house full of kids, talking to a lady that looks like she could be someone’s grandma. You feel lost.

She doesn’t seem to think that. “I’d ask you to sit down, but I know you’re not going to.” She’s right. “And don’t worry about the vase.”

“What vase?” You look around and find it– knocked to the ground and broken, courtesy of your shoulder.

She tilts her head at it. “That vase.”

“Shit, I’m sorry,” you say. 

“I said don’t worry about it. I’ll get one of the kids to fix it.” She pulls a tray of cookies from the oven and sets it on the counter. “What’s really going to bake your noodle is: Would you still have broken it if I hadn’t said anything?”

It does bake your noodle. It’s such a hot question that you have to put it down.

She lights a cigarette. “You’re cuter than I thought. I see why she likes you.”

She? “Who?”

“Not too bright, though.” She winks. “You know why Morpheus brought you to see me?”

You nod.

Fortunately, she gets the gist. “So, what do you think? You think you’re the One?”

“I don’t know,” you say.

“It’s like being in love, you know,” she says. “Nobody can tell you you’re in love. You just know it. Balls to bones.” She gestures to a plaque in the doorframe. “It says ‘Know Thyself’. You’ll never know if you keep pretending you’re someone you’re not.” She puts her cigarette down. “Well, I’d better have a look at you.”

She does. She widens your eyes, checks your pulse, and presses her thumbs into your palm. It’s like you’re at the doctor. “Mhm. Now, I’m supposed to say, ‘Now, that’s interesting, but–’, and then you say–”

“But what?” you say.

“But you already know what I’m going to say.”

You’ve felt it so much recently that it no longer stings. It’s only a dull ache. “I’m not the One.”

“Sorry, kid.” She puts a hand over yours. “You got the gift, but it looks like you’re waiting for something.”

“What?”

“Your next life, maybe. Who knows?” Her eyes twinkle. “That’s how these things go.”

You’re not disappointed at all. Well, you are, but a laugh bubbles up anyway.

“What’s funny?” she asks.

“Morpheus,” you say, and she shakes her head with a smile.

What she says next seems to send a lance of ice through the warmth of the kitchen.

But she gives you a cookie, and you walk out. Like she told you, you decide it’s not going to happen. You don’t believe in fate. You have the control over your life, because if you didn’t, why did you ever free yourself?

Morpheus puts a hand on your shoulder. “You don’t have to tell anyone what she told you. What she said was for you, and you alone.”

You remember losing your temper at him. You wonder if he’s still hurting from that.

You don’t believe in fate.

You won’t let him die.

Chapter Text

It happens so fast. You can’t do a thing.

Mouse dies. Morpheus is hauled off. You can’t do a thing.

Nobody can do a thing. All you can do is watch as Trinity clutches the cell phone, as Apoc drops to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, as Switch begs for their life– no, their dignity.

They don’t get it.

You’re next, says Trinity’s face. Her eyes are wide, and she stares at you, breath shallow. You’ve never seen her like this before. You hope for her sake that…

…

You close your eyes and try to hide your own terror. You know what the Oracle told you. You’re expendable. If you die here, Morpheus will live. You hold your breath. It doesn’t conceal the shaking of your diaphragm, your legs, your jaw. And you wait.

“Yes,” you hear Trinity whisper into the phone. You don’t know what you hear. Fear, of course. Grief, preemptively. (You don’t want to die.) But there’s something else. You don’t know what it is.

You don’t want to die.

You wait. You wonder what dying feels like. Does it hurt? For how long? Is there such a thing as a soul?

…

You jolt with terror as you do feel something. It’s Trinity. She has her arms around you, wrapped tight. She smells of sweat, and you doubt you’re any better in that regard. You don’t know what to do. You’ve never been hugged like this before, so openly, so earnestly. Then, you’ve never been in peril like this before… And you’ve never wanted to hug someone back so badly.

You almost do.

The phone rings.

You pick it up and hand it to Trinity. “Go,” you say. “You first, this time.” You don’t want to hear the voice on the other end.

She looks at you. She takes the receiver and vanishes.

You wonder if your body will start crying if you break into tears here.

When you wake up, the first thing you see is Mouse’s dead body, mouth covered in blood too thick to completely brown, and all at once you can’t believe yourself for thinking about your own problems. He’s dead. He couldn’t have been more than twenty, and he’s dead. Apoc and Switch… You think of the conversation you had just this morning. They’re dead. They don’t look the way Mouse looks. They look like they could still be asleep.

Dozer, you realize, is dead, too. Not far from him is Cypher’s body, still smoking. It smells like meat cooking. You feel nauseous.

Tank is alive. He’s burned, too, but he’s alive. That makes three of you.

And Morpheus.

He’s alive. He’s breathing. But he’s gone. Taken. And it’s because of you. It’s like the Oracle said. It’s because he believed in you.

You don’t want anybody to believe in you anymore.

Trinity looks terrible. The immediate danger is over, but what a mess you’ve awoken into. She puts her hands on either side of Switch’s face, still soft although their lips have blued, and presses her forehead against theirs. She doesn’t cry. Pale-faced, pale-handed, she puts her arms around Switch and lifts them.

You move to help. She looks at you, dull-eyed. The worst is just beginning, her expression says.

You can’t say anything. You try, but your words get caught in your throat. You can’t even tell her, I’m sorry. It is your fault, isn’t it? But she’d never believe that.

Together, you carry Switch to the corner with Dozer and lay them down. Their skin is cold. You could believe they were just asleep, that they’d wake up if you tried hard enough to rouse them.

Trinity stands up. She moves to Apoc and does the same. You help set him down next to Switch.

“We’ve had people die before,” says Trinity. “We’ve never had anything like this.” Her voice is thin, as thin as it was on the phone with Cypher. “This is… This is catastrophic.” Her eyes are still wide, pupils huge. They flick from her teammates to you and back.

“I’m bad luck,” you say. You must be. These people had lives. They had friends– family. Who are you? You’ve cost them all their lives, and you’re a nobody. You’re a miserable excuse for a man whose parents don’t call him and who only talks to other people for money. You had no friends. You had no family. You’re not the One.

Trinity approaches you. She takes a step, and then another. She’s close to you again. You wonder if she’s going to slap you, or shove you, for saying that. She believes in you. No matter what you say or do, she believes in you.

But she doesn’t.

She puts her arms around you again and hugs you even tighter.

You don’t understand it. You don’t understand why anybody could trust in you like Trinity does. It isn’t right, says your mind.

Your heart doesn’t say anything. Wordlessly, it keens.

You squeeze her. Her body feels like yours. Her fingers dig into the back of your shirt, tense and stiff.

You can’t bear seeing her like this. You can’t. And all of a sudden, you don’t care what she believes.

You got the Nebuchadnezzar into this mess. You’ll get them out.

Tank explains the stakes to you. They’re high. If they break Morpheus– and they will, if you don’t do something –then Zion is as good as captured. And he explains the only course of action.

You’ll have to kill Morpheus.

Trinity is heartbroken. She’s furious. She kicks Cypher’s corpse, then kicks it again. His body moves limply against the force of her foot. You’ve never seen somebody dead before. Now, you have four dead bodies on your conscience.

Soon, it’s going to be five.

Trinity gasps in agony and curses everything, everybody she can think of. She doesn’t curse you.

You do it for her.

You remember the first time you met her. She seemed ethereal then. More than human– a demi-goddess, perhaps. Now she looks vulnerable and small and desperate. You feel like an outsider. You are one. Morpheus was a mentor to the two of them, Tank and Trinity. A father. Who was he to you? A legend. A cyber-terrorist. Somebody you lost your temper at the last conversation you had. And you’re nobody compared to him.

Tank and Trinity kneel by Morpheus, asleep, flanking him. Tank’s hand shakes as it wraps around the plug. A nervous pulse jolts through your whole body.

A sob escapes Trinity.

This is the choice. Morpheus dies or you die. You have to make it or it will be made for you.

You’re nobody.

“Stop!” you shout. You can’t believe in a world where you let Morpheus die to save your own hide. It’s as if you watch that fate pass you by like a comet, growing farther with each second.

“This has to be done,” Tank says. His voice tells you he doesn’t want to believe it, either.

It’s more than just not wanting to believe it for you. You saw that fate disappear. You’re rooted by newfound conviction. You don’t believe it will happen.

“The Oracle told me,” you say, realizing that your conviction didn’t give you courage, “that I would have to make a choice.”

“What choice?” asks Trinity. “What are you doing?”

You move to your chair. Your heart doesn’t feel like it’s stopped pounding for hours. “I’m going in.”

“You can’t!” Trinity says. Wild desperation is in her eyes. She doesn’t want to lose you. But she doesn’t want to lose Morpheus.

She doesn’t get it. “I have to.”

“Morpheus sacrificed himself so we could get you out!” she pleads. “There’s no way you’re going back in.”

And you have to say it, and it feels like ripping a knife out of flesh. “Morpheus did what he did because he believed I’m something I’m not,” you say. “I’m not the One, Trinity.”

Like you thought, she doesn’t believe you. It hurts even more. “No,” she says, “you have to be.”

“I’m just another guy,” you say, and think of all the other Ones Morpheus trained, believed so much in. “I’m nobody. Morpheus is the one that matters.”

“That’s not true, Neo,” says Trinity. “It can’t be true.”

“Why?” you ask, and you feel furious again. At her, for believing in you. At Morpheus, for sacrificing himself so you, some nobody, could live on. At Cypher, for reducing you all to this. At Agent Smith and the rest, for putting you in this situation. At the Matrix, for the worst lie you ever believed, and making you believe it for decades.

But she doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t back down. “Because,” she says, and she looks at you as though she hopes you’ll understand by the look in her eyes.

You don’t.

“Tank tells you why. “There are three Agents holding him. Three! I want Morpheus back, too, but this is suicide.”

Maybe that’s the plan, you don’t say. What you do say is, “Morpheus believed something he was ready to give his life for. I understand that now. I believe in something, too.” You feel Trinity, close to you, warm, wet fury radiating over you. “I believe I can bring him back.”

And then Trinity stands up straight and sets her jaw. “I’m coming with you.”

Immediately the roles are reversed. “No, you’re not,” you say. Why should you risk her life? If you die, she shouldn’t die with you. She knows what she’s doing. She’s a master at this.

And she proves it. “No?” she asks, and it bites. “Let me tell you what I believe. I believe Morpheus means more to me than he does to you. I believe that if you are serious about saving him, then you are going to need my help. And since I am the ranking officer on this ship, I believe if you don’t like it, you can go to hell, because you aren’t going anywhere else.”

There’s nothing you can say to that. Despite it all, despite everything at stake, your heart throbs.

You stand together in the construct. Gun after gun appear before you. You and Trinity gear up.

“Nobody has ever done anything like this,” she says. You don’t hear an ounce of disbelief in her voice.

For the first time, it almost seems as though you’re on the same wavelength. “That’s why it’s going to work,” you say.

She smiles at you.

Chapter Text

It’s as you drive your hand into a security guard and feel bone give beneath his skin that you realize Thomas A. Anderson never could have done something like this.

He was terrified. He was powerless. You’re terrified, too, but it’s different. Thomas A. Anderson was a pathetic shut-in office worker. You’re currently working with the hottest woman alive (not that you’ll ever tell her that) to gun down a lobby full of security guards and SWAT officers. They’re like putty in your hands. They’re trained, but they’re not trained like you are. When you’ve spent the ammunition from one gun, you discard it and relieve an ex-officer of his own. The two of you are moving faster than the wind. Reloading is suicidal.

You should feel a little bad. If you weren’t the One, you could be one of these people. Thomas Anderson, lowly tech worker subsumed by an Agent and shot dead without ceremony. But you don’t. Maybe it’s that there’s no time. Maybe it’s that if you were still Thomas Anderson, they’d call you a criminal, a terrorist, lock you up and probably kick and humiliate you while you were in the holding cell. You think briefly of being held by the Agents, of the bug.

You exhale, releasing tension like bullets from your submachine.

Gunning them down feels good.

When they’re all so dead as to be unrecognizable, Trinity grabs her suitcase from the metal detector. You call the elevator.

Almost nothing moves in the lobby as the two of you step in and wait for the door to close. The only thing breaking the monotonous haze of dust is the collapse of a pillar as the door shuts. You hear it but don’t see it.

You ascend. When you’re high up between floors, you stop the elevator and throw open the ceiling. Trinity opens the suitcase and arms the bomb inside. The way she set it up, it’ll collapse the lower part of the elevator shaft and set everything around it ablaze.

You and Trinity climb atop the elevator. She puts an arm around you, and you do the same. You latch the two of you onto the cable and aim at the cable beneath you.

The training programs instilled a healthy sense of physics within you. When you shoot, the counterweight will drop like a rock and yank the two of you upwards with enough force to break your spines. That is, if the cushion of air in the shaft doesn’t slow its fall and trap you in the shaft. And that is, if there’s no emergency stop mechanism for freak edge cases like this.

But that’s nonsense. It’s moot, really. The weight in question doesn’t exist.

Trinity holds you tighter.

“There is no spoon,” you murmur.

You pull the trigger.

If the elevator had brakes, if the air had any resistance, they vanish immediately. But they didn’t exist to begin with, of course, and you and Trinity sail upwards. Her body feels different, you can’t help thinking. More lithe. That’s to be expected, maybe. It’s not like manning the Nebuchadnezzar is incredibly aerobic. But she also seems shorter than she did. Not enough to know for sure, but too much to set aside the idea altogether.

You have other things to worry about.

When you reach the top, Trinity swings herself out of the shaft, you in her arm. It flexes as you fall against it, and you marvel at her strength. She doesn’t let go, though; she pulls you out and onto the roof. You tumble, but don’t fall. As soon as you’re out, a pillar of flame engulfs the shaft tower.

It’s easy felling the Marines on the roof. The helicopter pilot, not so much. He was a marine, you can infer. But Trinity sees it first, body twisted as her arm follows through on an expertly-placed throwing knife. And you see her eyes, wide and striking under her sunglasses, and you know that now he’s an Agent.

You turn and fire, guns drawn as though they always were. It’s no use– he’s like lightning. You shoot, and before the bullet is halfway there he moves out of the way. You shoot again, and he’s back where he was.

And like lightning, your guns empty. The Agent hears it, maybe faster than you do.

“Trinity!” you cry. It’s with an almost casual ease that the Agent draws his gun. “Help!” You realize he’s not in a hurry because he has you. Trinity moves fast, and so do you, but he moves faster. He’s a program. He’s probably calculating every way you could possibly escape, the buzz of every fly, the tiny nicks and imperfections in each bullet, and compensating for them. He knows that outsmarting him is a lost cause.

Then you remember something.

You’re a fucking hacker.

You see the flashes of fire, and you hear nothing. You realize that sound isn’t traveling fast enough to reach you before the bullets do. Faster than your body should let you (because this isn’t your body, not really), you bend backwards, beneath the first. Another comes, and you bend again, lower. You’re not looking, not really; and it’s only after the third round that you hear the sound of gunfire. You can feel it, in a way that’s difficult to explain.

And then you do feel it, in your leg. You can’t bend it any lower, and a bullet finally grazes it, tearing your skin open. You fall and scream.

AI was created to expedite processes humans could already do, you think as he walks up to you, calm as always, the sun behind him dazzling you. You’ll never win in a battle of speed.

“Only human,” says the Agent. There’s no emotion behind his voice.

You figure that would have been the end of you, another spark of rebellion snuffed out. But you hear a click, and the Agent turns, head blocking the sun.

“Dodge this,” Trinity says, and seeing that the Agent’s perfectly placed her .45 between his eyes, fires. He’s dead before he hits the ground. When he does hit the ground, he’s turned back into that poor Marine.

You recall a memory, miles away now, of your father, coincidentally an ex-Marine. Not a bad guy, but always wanted you to follow in his footsteps. You broke your arm, or thought you did, when you were seven. When your father saw your unnaturally-bent arm and your dry face, he smiled and patted you on the head. “You’re a strong boy, Tommy,” he said.

You don’t know why you think about it all of a sudden. Your arm, now, feels fine. Trinity grasps it and helps you up. “How did you do that?” she asks.

“Do what?”

“You moved like they moved,” she says. “I’ve never seen anyone move that fast.”

You bring a hand to the wound on your thigh. It’s oozing blood, but not spurting– he didn’t hit an artery. “It wasn’t fast enough.” You want to congratulate her on the sneak attack, but… “We have to keep moving.”

“Neo,” she says. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” you say. You nod to the grounded helicopter. “Can you fly that thing?”

She looks at you. “Not yet.”

You hope you survive, you think once you’re in the air, at least a little longer. You think about the Oracle’s prophecy. You haven’t told Trinity the whole of it. You haven’t told her saving Morpheus is going to kill you. And you won’t. You’ll let her chalk it up to bad luck. It’ll break her heart, but it’ll break it more if she knew you chose this. And you’re glad you got to live like this, even for a little. You’re glad you got to know who Trinity really was.

Trinity brings you down. You see Morpheus through the glass window, slumped, and the agents. Agent Smith gapes at you. It’s hard to see his face, but you see the stiffness of his body.

He looks furious. Each goes for their weapon.

Yours is bigger. You spray the window with bullets, shattering the glass barrier between you and certain death. You know you’d hit Morpheus. But, you remind yourself, you’re a fucking hacker. Every Agent in the room goes down, blood staining the puddles of water on the floor. Not one bullet touches Morpheus.

But he doesn’t move.

“Get up, Morpheus,” you beg. You can’t let him die. You can’t. You tie yourself to the helicopter. “Get up!”

It seems like an eternity. It seems like he never will. But then he looks up at you. A roar builds in his throat. A chain link goes flying as his handcuffs snap, and he starts running.

Bullets fly through the wall, just missing each time as he comes at you, preparing a flying leap into the helicopter.

Then he’s shot. He stumbles at the edge and begins to fall.

You don’t think twice. You jump.

He’s bulkier here than in the real world. He scrabbles for purchase on you, clinging tight to you as if he were hugging you, and you do the same as the two of you fall. The rope snaps tight, and for a moment you lose him.

Quicker than you can even think, your hand shoots out. With impossible iron strength, you take his wrist. “Gotcha,” you say, surprised at yourself.

Then everything begins to fall.

As wild as your heart rate is now as you begin to lose all weight and come even with the helicopter, you feel oddly serene. You’ve made the choice. You have Morpheus. You’ve saved him, and if you die here, he’ll survive. Trinity guides the chopper onto a rooftop and sets the two of you down. But, you realize as it falls and your excess rope slips away from you, you’ll soon have its entire weight on your hips, and then you do–

Once again, you remember the feeling of having broken a bone. Miraculously, you’ve spent the rest of your life until now with at most a cracked rib. As the helicopter pulls you towards the roof’s edge, though, all you can do is brace yourself on the gutter, landing and feeling a massive, dull shock through your legs and up your pelvis as your muscles flex, tight and tense enough to break bones–

But as soon as you feel it, it’s passed. The weight lessens. The chopper smashes into an adjacent building, setting alight, and you hear a collision against the building you’re on– human-sized.

Trinity.

You pull her up and hold her, and she holds you back. Though no less strong, she really does seem smaller here.

“Do you believe it now, Trinity?” asks Morpheus. You can’t believe he’s asking. You don’t think she ever had a doubt. He should have been asking you… But you know what you heard.

“Morpheus, the Oracle,” you begin, “she told me–”

“She told you exactly what you needed to hear,” Morpheus says. “That’s all. Sooner or later, Neo, you’re going to realize there’s a difference between knowing a path and walking a path.”

It’s a small comfort. She’s always right, says everybody, and even herself. She knows everything that will happen. She knows you. But you don’t know yourself– that was what the plaque said, didn’t it?

Do you need to know yourself? You’re going to die.

Chapter Text

You get Morpheus out first. You know nothing can happen to him if you throw yourself in the way first, but the animal part of you wants him out of the way.

You hang up the phone once Morpheus is gone. Trinity watches you. “Neo,” she says. Her eyes have always been so piercing. You don’t know what they see. “I need to tell you something… but I’m afraid of what it could mean if I do.”

The phone rings. You hear a subway in the distance.

“Everything the Oracle has told me has come true,” she says. “Everything but this.”

You don’t understand. She seems so scared again. Not the dejected, hopeless fear you saw on the Nebuchadnezzar. This fear… It’s timid. It’s not frustration at a lack of strength, but a desperate grip on what strength she does have– a slipping grip. “But what?” you ask. You know it’s important. You don’t even need to think about it.

And then her grip fails– she loses her nerve. She shakes her head and enters the phone booth, lifting the receiver.

And then she sees something.

She disappears, and an instant later a bullet rips through the acrylic of the phone booth, tearing apart the suspended receiver. You look– an Agent. You know this Agent. This is the one that tortured you and bugged you.

You hate him. You know he hates you equally.

He approaches you. “Mr. Anderson,” he says.

Maybe you would have run, climbed the subway stairs and made a wild break for it. But when he says that, you stop. Maybe it’s something in his voice. Maybe it’s the condescension, the assumption that he knows more about you than you do. You know nothing… but, you realize, he knows less. You turn and face him.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s that he called you Mr. Anderson.

His fist clenches. You flex your hand.

Then you draw and fire, and so does he. You dodge, and so does he. Maybe you really have met your match.

But there’s no way in hell you’ll let him win.

You tackle each other and fall to the ground, cold metal against your head and your hand full of the resistance in his. He sneers. “You’re empty,” he says.

He’s right. But… “So are you.”

And all that sickening triumph vanishes. The hatred is back. Oh, he doesn’t care how long it takes. His focus is pinpoint, backed by the pressure of an impossible machine: He wants you to die.

You jump free of him. He doesn’t give. He’s as cold as he is furious. He simply tosses his gun aside and cracks his neck. He wants to get physical.

You oblige.

He’s fast, faster than Morpheus. You keep up, but it takes all your focus. You duck, and his fist strikes a concrete pillar. The pillar shatters.

A punch like that could take your head off your neck… if you let it. He’s wide open. You kick, kick, and while he’s reeling, kick again. His glasses shatter. You see his eyes once again. Piercing, like Trinity’s, but you know what he sees. He sees exactly what he wants to see.

“I’m going to enjoy watching you die,” he says, removing his glasses, “Mr. Anderson.”

And then he’s on the offensive again, hitting harder, countering faster, closing space wherever you make it. You open just for an instant, and his fist meets your diaphragm, throwing you into the wall. It’s terrifying. You’ve never felt so close to death.

You’ve never felt so alive.

You hit him again and again, and his lip stays curled as he grabs you and hits you again and again. He’s laser-focused on finding the best way to kill you. You’re laser-focused on staying alive. Your diaphragm is hit again, harder, and you hit the ground, gasping for breath and coughing up blood in equal measure. Smith stands before you, with that same sneer. He really is enjoying this.

But you’re still alive. And you’re going to fucking prove it to him. You get up, wipe off your mouth, and push aside the pain. And you beckon for him. Go on. Finish me off.

This time, it’s you with the edge. You throw yourself at him. Blow after blow land, and he seems to shrink back for just a moment. 

But it’s a moment too much. As you drop your guard, you’re lifted off your feet and thrown into a wall once again.

Then, he’s on top of you. You’ve never felt pain like this before– physical pain, anyway. Ribs crack. Organs deform. Your nervous system jolts you, trying to do something to get away, to end all this. Everything lands like a bullet. The blossoms of lightning in your core are evergreen. He’s beating you to death, and he wants it to be painful.

You regain your senses on the ground in a tollbooth. You can’t do a thing before his wrist is around your leg, dragging you across the subway platform. Your breath is knocked out of you once again as you’re thrown into the wall and onto the rails.

Finally, out from the ringing in your ears, you hear it coming. The train. It would be a simple matter to jump out of the way, but…

But Smith will catch you and hurt you worse if you jump. He doesn’t want you to die quickly. You wonder if he’d be disappointed if you simply let yourself be run over. You almost want to do it, to spite him.

He jumps down onto you, trapping you in a headlock. You know what he’s planning. The body he’s in will simply die. Agent Smith will still exist. You, on the other hand, will be a splatter of human mass in an abandoned station, a splatter that doesn’t exist of mass that doesn’t exist in a station that doesn’t really exist. You’re almost annoyed. You can see it now, the light on the walls.

Smith seems to read your thoughts. “You hear that, Mr. Anderson?” he asks you. His arm squeezes around your throat. You can hear the sneer in his voice. “That is the sound of inevitability.”

It brightens.

“That is the sound of your death.”

You don’t want to die. But the Oracle said you would have to. Morpheus is out, and Trinity is safe, too. Time seems to slow as the train approaches. You can hardly breathe. Your vision is blurring at the edges. This is it. How much time do you have to make peace with that?

Smith breaks your reverie. “Goodbye, Mr. Anderson,” he says.

And that fucking does it.

“My name,” you wheeze, energy jolting through you as the train approaches, “is Neo.”

He tries his damnedest to hold you back. You’ll give him that much credit. But he can’t stop you from leaping into the air, crushing him against the ceiling, and he lets go and you can breathe again, thank God. You fall to the ground. The train is right in front of you. Lightning-fast, you jump out of the way.

You don’t know if he was still processing the sudden revolt. You only vaguely understand it yourself– you don’t know how long it’s been true, but you’ve simply ceased to be the same person as Thomas A. Anderson. Smith insists you still are, of course, and for whatever reason that infuriates you. But he doesn’t understand it, not for a second. The train hits him, and you’re out of the frying pan.

Which, of course, leads you into the fire.

The train screeches to a halt, and who should walk out but Smith, sunglasses intact, only barely hiding his own fury.

You’re not that stupid. You make a break for it.

It’s not hard finding a cell phone– this being the nineties, every annoying executive is walking down the street yammering into it. You run past him, snatching it from his hand without breaking stride. You’re quite literally running for your life, and you’ve never been so glad to be in shape. You dial, and Tank picks up. “Get me the hell out of here!” you cry.

You hear Trinity. You see Smith.

“Neo, you better get your ass back here!” she interrupts Tank.

Can’t she see you’re being shot at? You dodge, again, and fly into a busy Chinatown market. It’s a mistake. Plenty of people means plenty of Agents. You get into an alley, and that’s another mistake– it’s a dead end.

This isn’t like fighting, you realize. This is running. Running is always risking backing yourself into a corner, like you are now. It’s only because of Tank that you don’t die there. He guides you through an apartment– laden with Agents as well –and into a different alleyway. You hit the ground, bags of garbage doing your bleeding and broken body no favors, and rise to your feet. “You’re almost there!” cheers Tank. “The fire escape at the end of the alley!”

Room 303, he said. You climb to Floor 3, grim death hot on your tail. You can’t afford to be sloppy. You can’t afford the time to be meticulous, either. You kick in the window and run. 310, 309…

You glance behind you. An Agent is close. You have more time than you thought, but close. You’re still one bullet from disaster.

You find room 303 and wrench the door open.

The first thing you notice is an odd, dull pain in your chest, as though you’ve been punched. It doesn’t hurt quite as much, but it extends further than a punch should.

The second thing you notice is Smith, gun extended at you, and a sort of clinking noise. Your body tenses as you realize he’s going to shoot you.

And then, as he fires again, and again and again, and you feel matching throbbing agonies spring up your chest, you realize he already has.

You flail, trying to stay upright. You smack against the wall. The spent rounds clatter to the floor. Your head feels funny. Every breath hurts. You hear the phone ring behind him.

Smith walks up to you. You brace yourself against the wall. You’re barely standing. Can you still turn this around?

No, says his pistol. And then it says it again. And again. And again. And again…

You don’t even have the strength to cough up blood. Your legs tire, then hurt, then simply give out. You expect your life to flash before your eyes, but… All you see is Trinity. She had wanted to tell you something. About the Oracle.

The Oracle…

Right. This is where your story ends. You saved Morpheus. You made your choice. You fought like hell for your life, and… And…

…

…To your chagrin, you hear Smith’s voice once more.

“Goodbye, Mr. Anderson,” he says.

And then it all goes away.

Chapter Text

…It doesn’t feel bad, you suppose. You’re not in agony. You never really believed in God, so you don’t expect Hell.

You’re just disappointed.

You went to all that trouble to try to be more than who you were, and it turned out you were just one man.

Thomas A. Anderson.

…

( …neo…)

…

You could have had a long life, made a bit of money, had a nest egg. Maybe you could have had a family.

…

(…i’m not afraid anymore…)

…

Or maybe you were meant to live a miserable life. Maybe you were never meant to marry. Luck of the draw. You never wanted to die.

…

(…i would fall in love, and…)

…

It never really meant anything, anyhow. Your future wouldn’t be real. Any children you fathered wouldn’t be yours. And you always hated yourself. You thought you were a coward, wanting to die every minute and never wanting to go through with it.

…

(…would be the One…)

It’s just disappointing, because for once you saw light at the end of the tunnel. Not like that, but… For a moment, you thought you could really live. 

…

(…can’t be dead…)

…

But you see now you were just playing games. You were playing at being a rebel, at spitting in the face of the Man. You dressed up in sunglasses and leather boots and had the time of your life gunning down innocent people for your little agenda. It was immature. It doesn’t matter if nothing is real. Not really.

…

(…i love you.)

…

Real or not, you couldn’t ever have had what you wanted. You’re a man, something Trinity never liked and never would. You wanted to be her– someone like her. It was a stupid wish. It’s disappointing.

(you hear me?)

It’s disappointing knowing Smith was right the whole time. Neo wasn’t meant for a world like this. You weren’t meant for a world like this. Thomas A. Anderson was simply predisposed to suicide… You should have done this a long time ago.

(i love you.)

It’s…

(Disappointing.)

You feel a strange sense of warmth. You taste something… Salt, acid, sweetness. You don’t know what it is until the smell hits you.

It’s sweat.

Trinity’s sweat.

Your lips (that’s what they are, that’s where she was) tingle with it, and you don’t understand it. You can still smell her. You open your eyes and see grimy hotel carpet. The agony in your chest comes alight again. Bullets. You’re in the Matrix. You’re in the Matrix, where you were shot dead just moments before.

But you aren’t dead.

You aren’t dead, and the Oracle said you would die, and Trinity kissed you, and you don’t understand it. What was she looking at when she looked at you? It wasn’t Thomas Anderson, not like Smith. It was Neo.

Who was Neo to her? What was Neo?

I love you, you remember. It was her voice. You can’t be dead because I love you.

You hear her again. It’s her voice. It’s her. You love her more than anything. More than yourself.

“Now get up,” she says.

Something clicks into place.

You put your feet under you and rise. There’s no strength in them. There doesn’t need to be. Your legs don’t exist. Your body doesn’t exist. These bullets in your chest– they don’t exist.

And Thomas A. Anderson never existed.

Smith glances back. He sees you and freezes. Like a machine, the three turn and unload their weapons at you.

“No,” you say. Your hand’s out before they pull the triggers.

The bullets come at you. They don’t exist, either. Their velocity is a function of the driving force behind them– and it’s literally a function, programmed by a computer. Changing it is as easy as blinking.

They stop dead in the air. You pick one up. It’s hot to the touch. You see yourself in its reflection. The reflection is just as real as your body is, which is to say it isn’t.

It’s amazing.

You let gravity, which doesn’t exist, affect them once more. They fall to the ground.

You get it now. Everything, every law governing physics, governing possibilities in this world, is a line of code in an ever-updating machine. The Agents, too, are programs. Maybe they exist, by the standards of this world.

By your standards, they’ve never been so vulnerable.

Smith charges at you. You see his thoughts, feel his anger rising hot from him, predict his every action before it happens. Fighting him off is easy. You don’t need both hands. You don’t need to look.

You grab his arm, twist it, and deliver to him one of those kicks he recently made your life hell with. How does that taste, asshole? He flies halfway across the hall and slams into the ground. You remember that your legs have no strength in them, probably because they have no blood or oxygen in them, which is fine, because they don’t exist.

Smith gets up. You walk towards him with the same cold calm he had, and then your instinct takes over and you fly at him.

You think of him dropping a bug into you, violating you, taking away your power to scream and ripping your shirt off. You think of the hours of wrongness you felt in your own body afterwards. Sure, it didn’t exist, but the feeling was real.

And Smith’s feelings, the feelings setting him apart from the other Agents, are equally real.

You’re going to unleash on him what he did to you tenfold.

He swings at you. He doesn’t know what you’re doing.

You enter him.

The code delineating Smith’s existence has a toilet-white feel to it. Fitting, you decide. Your boots leave pitch-black prints on the ground where you are. It’s white all around you, nearly blinding, but it’s not very cold.

Before you is a building, small, box-shaped, white. Doric pillars frame the door, but otherwise it’s nondescript.

As you walk towards it, the black of your footprints bleeds into the ground like ink onto wet paper. Blackness spreads behind you. You take the door handle, leaving a black mark on it, and open it.

Smith is inside. He looks as though he’s been expecting you. His eyes are wide, caught between terror and fury.

You wait for him to say something. He doesn’t. So you do.

“You’re dying to call me Mr. Anderson,” you say.

“That’s your name,” Smith enunciates. It’s sharper than before. You’re going to kill him, of course, but why talk to him first?

The inky blackness spreads around you. “Why?” you ask. “Why not Neo?”

He stands up, gets in your face. “Why should we stoop to calling you a name that you made up?”

“Wow,” you say dryly. “That’s a good question. A really good question. But I think I got a better one.” You grab his lapel, twisting it in your grasp. “Why should I stoop to calling myself a name you made up?”

He says nothing. You shove him back. His shirt is black where you touched it, looking as if there’s a hole in it. You walk around him, staining the floor with your footprints, encircling him in black.

“Thomas Anderson was never happy,” you say. “I won’t try to explain it to you because you’ll never understand. But I will tell you this: Thomas Anderson is dead. He’s never coming back. Maybe he never existed to begin with.”

He still says nothing. He watches you like a hawk. The black crawls up his shirt. It reminds you of the mirror that swallowed you when you first woke up.

“I’m what you have to deal with,” you say. “When I kill you, it’ll be Neo’s callsign your superiors will find.”

You feel his program crumbling as you delete line after line, his abilities vanishing one after the other. He feels it, too. He goes for your throat. You let him. His hands go black where they touched you. You don’t feel a thing. The blackness crawls up the walls.

He doesn’t need to say a word to tell you how much he hates you. He looks at you, and you know.

“I just wanted to tell you,” you say, “that you were wrong about me every step of the way.”

And then you bring it down on him. All at once, you delete his hatred, delete his purpose, delete his very personhood. He simply vanishes into the inky blackness of what he was, suit and all.

You take a deep breath. You open your eyes.

The Agents are still there. When they see you looking, they run.

Good.

But you hear Trinity again. “Neo!” she cries, and she sounds both a million miles away and right next to you.

The phone rings.

You dive at it and pick it up.

You wake up to the sound of nothingness. It had seemed as though you were drowning in a cacophony of noise, and now… Nothing.

Almost nothing.

“Neo,” says Trinity. You open your eyes, and there she is. You reach up to touch her cheek, and she smiles, eyes brimming with tears

She loves you.

You feel something short bristle under your hand, and you understand. She loves you because she understands something about you that not even you were able to. She understands what the two of you have in common, and she understood from the moment she met you that your similarities were more than skin-deep. 

And it makes you love her even more.

You lean up as far as the port will allow. She takes your face in her hands, and you take hers.

And as she closes the distance between you, and as you feel her lips, really feel them, you finally begin to understand what love is supposed to feel like.

She believed in you the whole time. There was never a second she didn’t. And she was right.

She believed you would make the choice to leave the Matrix, leave behind Thomas Anderson. She was right. She believed you were the One. She was right. And she believed…

She believed you were just like her. She believed you were a woman.

And she’s right.

When you separate, you’ve begun to cry, too. “How did you know?” you whisper.

She unhooks you from the system. “I didn’t,” she says, equally soft, helping you out of the chair. Your legs buckle under you. Tank helps you back up, wordlessly. Trinity continues when she’s sure you’re stable. “When I looked at you, I saw who I used to be… It could have meant anything, I know. But I hoped. I hoped you were like me.”

You don’t know if your heart can take any more. “I think I am.”

She holds your hand. Tears roll down her face. “I’m glad… I’m so glad you got out of there.”

“So am I,” you say.

The fight is far from over, you know, locking eyes with Morpheus at the helm as your teammates help you maneuver around the dead sentinels. But you’ve won this one. The Oracle was right– you weren’t ready before. This is your next life. Despite it all, you’re the One. Despite it all, you’re alive. Despite it all, the you that got up was a woman. And maybe she always was.

You know one thing for sure. You’re going to take hold of the system that forced you to be a man for decades. You, and Trinity, and Morpheus and Tank. And, shred by shred, you’re going to tear it to fucking pieces.