You couldn't sleep that night.
Every time you closed your eyes, all you could see was the barrel of the Agent's gun, leveled to your eye, the bullet inside racing out the barrel on a wave of fire. You couldn't stop seeing yourself die, and every time the terror faded it was replaced by desperate anger.
They already took everything from you, force-fed you a fake life of misery for twenty-four fucking years. They didn't get tonight too.
You wandered out into the station, walking a bit unsteady as the ship swayed around you. To your surprise, Cache was at the operator console,
"Hey Coda," he said, patting the chair. "How you holding up?"
You shrugged uselessly, halfway to confessing how fucked up you were and just managing to stop yourself. He nodded.
"Yeah, first encounter with an Agent, I get it. The first time I saw one, it was through the back seat of a car speeding away, and no shit, he put a bullet through the back window and within an inch of my skull. I pissed myself in
and out of the Matrix," he said.
"Jesus," you exclaimed, laughing despite yourself.
"Yeah, fuck. I was
not ready," he said. "Three years ago… fuck. How am I still alive?"
"It's that dangerous?" you asked, and he shrugged and took a sip from a metal cup on the desk.
"We don't bother with a 401k, that's for sure," he said, then saw your eye stray to the cup. "You want some?"
"Booze?" you asked.
"Coffee," he said, smiling. "I fuckin' exhausted, but Vector's got to fly. I'm not going to bed until he does."
You glanced down the hall toward the cockpit, then nodded. Cache grabbed a kettle and started pouring a new cup.
"Warning, it tastes like
shit. It's synthetic. Made from cell cultures, we do our best with the flavour," he said. "Everything we eat is, something like it."
"Yeah, I was going to ask. Where we getting this stuff rom? Cloth, wool, uh, food?" you said. "Is there, like, a human nation, somewhere up top?"
"Fuck no. Surface is all the Machine. There are settlements throughout the catacombs, all sorts, powered by… fission, fusion, geothermal, whatever we can manage. We pick up what we can get where we end up, and last place we stopped had… coffee."
You took a sip and shivered. Oh, that was
foul. You took another.
"Y-eah. Well, better than the coffee at the office," you joked. "So these, uh, catacombs… what are they, anyway?"
"They are… oh boy," he said. "Okay, so, we don't know for sure, but we're pretty sure that before the Machines took over, we weren't doing that hot either. The biosphere was fucked, the atmosphere was fucked, and we'd basically peeled the Earth open for the goodies inside. Uh, a lot of us figure that us making the machines do this is why they turned on us, which… you know. I get but, but maybe bit of an overreaction maybe, what with the eternal torture machine?"
You found yourself laughing again, despite how tense you felt.
"Yeah, no shit. So like, people started living down here because of that?"
"That's the theory. Well, that and the machines turning on us. The tunnels are the only place we stand a chance. They have numbers, but we have EMP. Uh, electromagnetic pulse weapons, one of the effects of a nuke without the boom. We got one in the basement. Looks like it was too little too late for the surface war, but here in the tunnels, it doesn't fucking matter how many squiddies they throw at us because we can just fry every. Single. One of the fuckers if they get bold."
"And our ship too, huh?" you pointed out.
"Well, yeah, we'd have to go get new electronics and bury anyone still hooked up to the Matrix, but the ship'll fly on analog controls just fine," he said. "So, yeah, that's the equilibrium. The machines don't much like us being down here, but every time they've tried a concerted push in, we've stuffed them at a tunnel entrance or ambushed their drilling sites. They slip squiddies in and patrol for ships, but they don't stand a chance getting close to settlements."
"Huh," you said. "So… weird question, and I'm not sure why I'm asking. Are dogs real?"
"W-what?" he said, laughing. "Yeah, dogs are real. What, you think the machines just made 'em up?"
"M-maybe?" you said. "Like, I have no idea. Are there still dogs?"
"Fuck yeah there are. Like one of four species that made it, alongside rats, cats, and cockroaches," he said. "Not a lot, like, we have to conserve resources very, very tightly, but there's a few. And uh… machines have
everything on file. When they make a dog in the Matrix, they run DNA simulations to build a simplified model."
"Huh," you shrugged and sipped your coffee. "Dunno why I asked, just seemed important."
"I know why," he said. "I had a dog, and you loved him. Irwin."
"Fuck, Irwin was your dog?" you exclaimed, looking at him slack-jawed. "Oh my God, I thought… I thought I just went over to the neighbours to play with their dog. I… oh, they didn't have a kid, but they had an NES, because that was
your Nintendo… oh my
God…"
His turn to laugh, clapping you on the back.
"Yeah, that's what they'll do to you," he exclaimed.
"Fuck me, what a nightmare," you said. "Oh my God, they've done this to my parents, haven't they? They won't remember I exist. M-my sister-"
"Yep. You're gone," he said. "The machines undo you retroactively, as a nice
fuck you."
"Are… are they in danger? My sister?" you asked.
"I mean, no more so than anyone else in there," he said. "They, uh, Enigma told me they actually did do reprisal killings for a while, and we made them stop."
"How?"
"Suicide bombing," he said. "I mean, not like, organized, but they took out the wrong guy's family one time and that dude came back into the Matrix with an actual, fuck-you nuclear bomb. They had to rebuild a whole chunk, fix like five hundred million people's memories, import new populations, the whole deal."
"Jesus
Christ," you said.
"Yeah. Like, it was horrible, but desperate people do desperate shit," he said, then he trailed off. "It's one of the reasons things got kind of fucked with the Resistance. But… you should hear it from Enigma. He was there."
"That's what Page told me," you said, setting down your mug. "What's his deal, anyway? I barely see him. Shit, I see Sprite more."
"Yeah… uh, he's been through a lot," Cache said. "He likes things nice and quiet, and I cannot blame him. Dude's done his time, he could retire to any community he wanted, but he keep coming out here, the crazy fuck... So!"
"So?"
"You wanna fuck around with some simulations, spar, watch a movie?" he said, tapping a few screens on the display.
"Is that safe?" you asked.
"Yeah, shit, you can plug yourself in if you're flexible. It's why the screens are on arms. Just don't do anything that might make you fall out of the chair. Over time you'll adapt to that too. Look, you need a distraction. Best way to keep the wiggies at bay."
"The wiggies?"
"Well… I'd say post-traumatic stress but that's depressing and shitty. Wiggies is a funny word. So, wiggies."
"Shit. What movies do you have?" you asked. He smiled.
"You wanna see Star Wars Episode 1 early?" he asked. "I warn you, it sucks."
"Fuck, really?" you asked. You'd been looking forward to that.
"Yeah. So… instead," he pulled open a drawer. "You wanna fly X-wings? Cuz we got X-wings."
---
After breakfast the next morning, you made your way down to the engine room for the first time. You weren't entirely sure what you were expecting, but it wasn't a giant churning cylinder stretching back into the depths of the ship, flanked by huge pistons and crackling cables, all safely behind a huge glass window.
Enigma was sitting at a console, watching the screens, a tablet computer perched on his lap. It wasn't easy to tell how old he was, but you were increasingly realizing he was
old. Which, sure, why wouldn't he be? This was the future, who knew what medical technology was like?
"Is that the engine?" you asked. He glanced askew at you and shook his head.
"Yes," he said tersely.
"Uh… how does it work?" you asked.
"Do you actually care, or have the crew just sent you for storytime?" he asked.
"I… okay, so it the storytime thing, but now that I've seen it, I'm actually curious," you explained. "Look, the last week has basically been nothing but people explaining shit to me, and I kind of love it. I feel like I'm back in college philosophy, but with kung fu."
He contemplated that for a second, nodded, and pulled out the chair next to him. You took a seat, and he held up a hand.
"Have you wondered why everyone directs you to me, instead of telling the story themselves?" he asked.
"Yeah, I did. Everyone seems really eager to talk about everything else, like, Christ you get Frag or Thrash monologing and they won't stop, but this-"
He just stared at you grimly.
"I have a lot of work to do today," he said, turning back to his displays. "After hours, meet me in the Construct."
You wandered back upstairs and hunted for something to do. There really wasn't much, so for lack of anything else, you had Chrysalis plug you in and ran sparring programs with Frag. Cache joined you a while later, and he kicked your ass a dozen times. Vector even came in before his shift to watch and cheer his boyfriend on as he threw you through the walls. Every time, he taught you something new, and somehow made you laugh in the process.
No wonder you were best friends.
---
When Cache logged out, you took a break to deal with various annoying biological needs like food, and then you jumped back into the Construct. You did some marksmanship training, tried and failed at the jump program again, and enjoyed tea with Frag just for the pleasure of tasting fake real coffee instead of real fake coffee. You even tried on a fancy old dress like hers, which you felt impossibly uncomfortable in and had no desire to see what you looked like, but which was still a thrill in its own way.
It was virtual, but as Frag pointed out over and over, just because it wasn't real didn't mean it couldn't be real, when you desired, just as it could be made unreal when you needed it.
Not long after, Enigma entered the Construct, in his long coat and glasses. Now that you had a chance to inspect it, you realized it wasn't
just a leather coat, it was like a long, old-school lab coat, complete with long latex gloves. What you had thought was just some metal detail was in fact a stethoscope around his neck. It was ridiculous, but he was so serious that it couldn't help but come off as awesome instead.
"Good evening, Frag, Coda," he said, sitting in the third chair which appeared for him. "Coda, I want to know a few things about you, before I tell this story."
"Uh, sure. Yeah. Hit me," you said, sitting up and trying to look attentive. He nodded, and took a sip from the third teacup sitting there.
"Why do you think that the Matrix is… the way it is?" he asked.
"How do you mean?" you asked. "Like, why it's… awful?"
"Exactly," he said.
"I… I don't know," you said. "It doesn't make any sense."
"Oh?" he said. Frag hid a smile behind her teacup.
"Well… Cache told me that it's so fucking miserable that people break out of the system all the time, and they have to flush them into…" you shivered. "They kill them and make it look like suicides. It's all… wars and poverty and misery, terrible jobs… we're their processors, without us they have nothing. Why would they let us starve, die of disease, kill ourselves… why does it suck?"
Enigma nodded.
"That is, in fact, the question," he said. "Do you have any guesses?"
"I… Cache said that he thinks maybe we treated the machines awful, and they turned on us. This is revenge. They… built us a hell."
"Then why wouldn't it be worse?" he asked. "They
can do worse. If all they wanted was to torture us, they would have started with something other than a major urban centre at the high point of industrial civilization, before all the externalities started catching up."
"Yeah… I guess," you admitted. "I really don't know." Enigma glanced to Frag and nodded slightly, and she set down her teacup and looked at you very seriously.
"How long were you a professional programmer, Coda?" she asked.
"Uh, just nearing three years," you said.
"In that time, did you ever do
anything you'd consider useful work? Create anything that might help people, make lives better or easier for anyone?" she continued.
"... no. It was bullshit. Just wrote the same programs over and over. We all did. Just going through the motions."
"Why do you think that is?" Enigma asked.
"Uh… because… programming is a scam. Rocks were not meant to think."
Frag gave a very undignified snort and hid behind a gloved hand.
"Well, I don't disagree…" Enigma drawled. "Coda, the human brain is very adaptable and can tailor itself to many forms of thought. What if I told you that some of these forms are more conducive to certain kinds of calculations?"
"... oh. Shit," you exclaimed, already suspecting what he said next.
"The mental work you did while hunting for a missing operator or broken variable made you that much more efficient for running, say, a fluid dynamics sim. Or a flock of birds overhead," he explained.
You nodded to show comprehension. You felt like you should be taking notes.
"Mechanics repair the same cars with the same breakdowns with the same techniques because the pattern it has etched into their brain is useful to them, and longer and more intensely the machines can make them do it, the more they'll get from it. Same with cashiers, accountants, construction workers, factory workers. What they make doesn't matter; do you really think anyone used any of the programs you created?"
You already kind of suspected that, but it actually hurt to hear. How many hours of your life had that shitty job stolen from you? What percentage of your lifespan? For nothing?
"I fucking
knew it. The compiler was breaking my programs on purpose, wasn't it?" you exclaimed. Frag laughed.
"Oh, a lot of those were real mistakes too. Programming is just like that," Frag said wrly.
"The way the machines see it, every human plugged into the simulation who isn't producing at maximally efficient levels is a drain on their investment," Enigma concluded. "Thus, they've arranged your reality so that everything you do feeds their system, from standardized testing in school to traffic jams on your way to work. They don't hate us, Coda. They feel
nothing for us. We are just tools to them, and when we break, they grow new ones."
"Christ. Yeah," you said, taking a deep breath. "Okay. You, uh, you got any more questions you want to turn into incredibly grim lectures?"
"No more questions," he said. "Just answers. Fifty years ago, there was a unified Resistance, headquartered in the last city on Earth. Zion. It was beautiful."
You did not like the past tense on
was.
"What happened? Did the machines-?"
"No," he said tersely. "We were winning. For the first time, we were truly winning. We had permanent outposts at broadcast depths, it was
our agents in
their systems. We took over infrastructure, hacked their real world industry and war machines, we strayed to the
surface for the first time in half a millenia. It was the triumph of humankind, our greatest hour. And… we didn't know what to do."
He stopped, slouching a little, suddenly looking like the old man you were increasingly realizing he was, under whatever kept him so spry. Even behind the sunglasses, he looked exhausted.
"I was a young man, freed not long before. Much like you, finding my real body, the person I was always meant to be. I entered the real world when it looked as though the final hour of the Machine had come. There were sections of the Matrix that were openly ours, openly free, where the people inside knew they lived in a simulation, and knew that if they fought hard, they too could be free."
He leaned close to you, and for a second you didn't see the old man. You saw a much younger one, long bright hair in a multicoloured undercut, bright red sunglasses, shirtless under a brown coat that billowed around him, an
army around him of men and women and people of all sorts, all bright and strong and alive.
"I was taught the natural of our reality in school,
inside the Matrix," he said conspiratorially. "Agents couldn't touch us, none of us trusted their systems. Cities fell weekly. it seemed like the end of the Matrix was at hand."
You took a deep breath, steeling yourself for what would come next.
"What happened?"
"You have to understand, this is a war we have been fighting longer than we can remember, a war we have been losing since what felt like the dawn of time. I… I think we forgot what it was like, to have hope. To be winning. Somewhere along the way, we realized… we didn't know what we were fighting for."
You blinked.
"What?" you asked, looking to Frag. "It's obvious. To free everyone! To destroy the Matrix!"
"Obvious," he said, leaning back. "That's what they said. Obvious."
"We don't want to destroy the Matrix, Coda," Frag added quietly.
"I-I don't understand."
"I know you haven't been here long, but you have already some signs of how stretched we are for resources," she said. "It's worse than you know. The biosphere is destroyed, nothing grows on the surface, the machines have…" She waved a hand vaguely to indicate a general shape. "It's all gone. There are maybe a half a million people outside the Matrix, and we can
barely sustain those numbers."
"What are you saying?" you asked, desperate.
"We're subversive, Coda," she said. "We don't mean to destroy the Matrix. We want to seize it. There is no life for us here, for me more than others, but we can make that prison they built a paradise. Do you understand?"
---
What do you say to that?
