Memorial
Author(s): Narsus
Email: Narsus@juggler.net
Pairing: Smith/The One (Neo's predecessor)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Why is Smith the Agent template used in the training program?
Series/sequel: Sequel to The Same
Genre: Slash/Angst
Warnings: None
Feedback: Comments welcome...
Author's Notes: A little odd but I figured it would be interesting to tell the story from Thomas’ point of view. And I guess we can assume that Mouse added the woman in the red dress to the training program at a later date.
Thomas stared at the disk in his hand: the Agent training program. It had been completed early this morning; he’d added the finishing touches himself, with painstaking care and detail. It was perfect, even if he did say so himself. Almost as perfect as… He closed his eyes, blocking out the train of thought that once started, would probably send him heading for the makeshift still with it’s paint stripper-quality alcohol.
He inserted the disk carefully, watching the program loading sequence on the display screens around. Loading finished, Thomas stared at the display as it changed to reveal the interior of the simulation.
Inside, the simulation showed nothing more sinister than a crowded street, office workers rushing about, random pedestrians, Thomas even fancied he could see the odd child hurrying to school. He let the simulation run, watching the simulated people move through this tiny section of simulated life.
Tapping few keys altered the parameters and triggered the program’s response for new rebel training. And there was suddenly a man standing there: a man in grey with sunglasses obscuring his eyes, pointing a gun at nothing.
Thomas froze the program, eyes fixed on the screen. Then he tapped a few more keys and sat in one of the loading chairs, to wait to enter the frozen simulation.
The loading sequence took only a fraction of a section and Thomas found himself within the frozen landscape. The stilled people were more than slightly disturbing but he still took his time looking at them. He didn’t touch them, just moved around them and peered in closely. Perhaps they weren’t so disturbing after all, he decided. They just looked like some complex video recording that had been paused on some crowd scene, which was essentially what had happened. The only difference was that this could be interactive, if you wanted it to be.
Of course he was aware that certain lonely individuals were creating their own tailor-made programs with certain specifications. It wasn’t something he’d tried himself, nor had he any intention to. Thought it certainly gave a whole new meaning to the term ‘cyber sex’. Thomas would have laughed at his own witticism, if it hadn’t been for the one figure that stood out starkly in the simulation. Thomas wasn’t sure he would have approved. In fact, he’d never been too keen on Thomas swearing either.
“Shit.” Thomas said, distinctly. He didn’t know why he was hesitating; it wasn’t as if it was really him standing there. It wasn’t as if he had ever been a real person, in fact. Then why…
Thomas clenched his fists briefly before purposefully striding up to the frozen Agent. “I…” He’d meant to say ‘I hate you’ but the words caught in his throat. He’d never been very good at lying. Instead he gently reached up to remove the sunglasses and found himself staring into determined blue eyes.
Slowly Thomas reached out and placed a hand against an immobile cheek, only remembering the level of detail in the simulation as he touched warm flesh.
“I… I love you still.” He said quietly, before brushing his lips gently against the simulated mouth of the one person that he’d so desperately wanted to save.
*********************
Thomas had been looking for him, ever since they’d found a way out of the Matrix. Every single time prospective individuals were found to be freed, Thomas always looked, always hoped that one day it might be him. He’d made a promise to go back, one day, once he’d found all the answers. And now the answers were there, the evidence right in front of his eyes… in the real world.
The real world definitely wasn’t pleasant but at least it was the truth. No simulation, no terrifying mechanical controls, just millions and millions of humans waiting to be free. They could do it, of that Thomas was convinced, one day they would all be free. One day…
Believing in the final end to the Matrix was what kept them going, believing that humanity would be saved from slavery. Some of them even believed in ‘the One’.
Thomas always found that a little disturbing, being an icon of the resistance. It always made him a little uneasy when they obeyed his orders blindly and with such enthusiasm. But he supposed it helped focus the resistance, gave them something physical to see rather than vague references to the cause. Sometimes he couldn’t help wonder if it was something to stave off the fear too, just in case… just in case they didn’t succeed, just in case the machines found a way to destroy them all.
Thinking about the machines brought the latest problem to the front of Thomas’ mind. The Agents within the Matrix. Sentient programs that were pretty much unstoppable. So far these Agents had killed several rebels, quite easily too. Apparently they were capable of simply appearing, utilising the code of still plugged-in individuals to appear whenever required. They looked much like Secret Service Agents or so he had been told, which immediately made Thomas loose his train of thought again. It was becoming more and more problematic, the constant distraction, the turning of his thoughts to the one he’d left behind…
It got worse with every passing day, even with the distraction of leading a rebellion against the machines. With every freed human, Thomas couldn’t help feeling a little more bitter. Here they had freedom, the possibility of a future; he had a reason to exist, an entire revolution to lead and yet what was the point? How could it matter when Thomas had left the one person who had mattered to him, behind? How could anything he did have meaning when he was still a slave to the machines?
Every time a new face appeared, it somehow made it worse. Every time another individual was suggested as the next target to be freed, Thomas grew more despairing. He couldn’t go on like this, he just couldn’t. And eventually those closest to the One discovered the reason for his growing lethargy. Thomas hadn’t mentioned the matter, not really expecting any amount of understanding or sympathy but that was what he found.
The suggestion, once made, was deceptively simple. They would find him and free him from the Matrix and then Thomas would stop fretting over his lover because they would be together and then the One could go back to the business of leading the revolution.
It should have been so simple.
The first problem had arisen when they’d started trying to locate him. No matter the means of searching, it was proving incredibly difficulty, an almost impossible task. Thomas was disheartened but refused to give up. Let the other rebels talk, whispering behind his back about his ‘obsession’. He didn’t care. Right now the rebellion could fail for all Thomas was bothered, right now the most important thing in his life was finding his lover and getting him out of the wretched prison that was the Matrix.
Of course, Thomas’ close comrades kept searching, more to humour him than from any real hope though. They were secretly beginning to suspect that Thomas’ lover might have been killed by the machines as soon they discovered that the One had escaped the Matrix. It was a very real possibility that the One was steadfastly ignoring, as far as they could see.
In fact, Thomas hadn’t ignored that possibility. It was the most likely conclusion that haunted both his days and nights. What frightened him the most was the ease with which such an operation might have been carried out. Simply unplugging a human normally required various methods of compensation, as far as they could tell; stories to convince relatives and friends, an acceptable reason why the individual had disappeared… Normally that would take some effort on the part of the machines but not this time. MI6 Agents disappeared easily, leaving no trace; they were reassigned or simply killed on duty and no one ever had to know. No one dared to ask and once the memory of that individual had been hushed up, there most likely wouldn’t be any documented record either.
They had been searching for well over 6 months now and still found no trace. The machines were terribly efficient in removing people, it seemed.
Thomas despaired but didn’t break, as many had feared. Instead he became even more determined to find a way of shutting down the Matrix, of breaking the control of the machines. They would pay for all those destroyed lives, he vowed, all the lies they had told, all the people who had suffered… him included.
His new determination had inspired them all; unfortunately they still had the problem of the Matrix Agents to deal with.
Now that the machines had begun to take the threat of the resistance seriously, the fatalities were rising. Every expedition into the Matrix ran the risk of alerting the Agents, who were practically impossible to defeat. Each time the deaths mounted.
The rebels took to running.
Thomas began to study these Agents, looking for a flaw in their coding but finding none. Eventually he decided that the only way to find their weakness was to confront them but immediately found that the others considered it too risky for the One to attempt such action. Without him the rebellion would fail, they said. So he stayed behind, watching monitors while others faced the machines. Watching while others died.
Eventually the tactic of observing the Agents paid off and there were able to define some limitations, all of which meant nothing unless the rebel facing them was as capable of bending the rules of the Matrix as Thomas. Again he suggested letting him fight these Agents and again it was considering too risky.
Finally on one particular occasion Thomas ran out of patience. Three of his colleagues had gone into the Matrix and been confronted by Agents. The screens in front of him displayed the now familiar patterns. The Operator had been a new recruit and still in enough awe of the One to only manage to stammer a half-hearted protest when Thomas began to initiate the loading program.
He arrived just in time to watch the final rebel left alive be thrown through a wall by a particularly vicious Agent. The Agent stalked over to the dieing rebel and with a sneer, brought his foot down, crushing the rebel’s windpipe. Thomas was so horrified at the violence being melted out that it took him a moment to realise that the Agent looked terrifyingly familiar. He stared, too stunned to move.
It couldn’t be, it had to be some sort of sick joke by the machines. It wasn’t possible.
Thomas staggered against a wall, unintentionally remaining out of sight as the Agents surveyed the damage. There were three of them, he noticed peripherally, gaze riveted on one. He watched, as the Agent appeared to give orders to the other two. Could only watch numbly as the Agent walked away, stepping over the corpses left behind with a look of disgust plainly on his face.
How could it be? And yet the proof was there right in front of him, walking off in the other direction.
When they’d pulled Thomas back out of the Matrix, he’d still been in shock, silent and trembling as he stumbled away to his bunk. No one knew what it was that had disturbed him so much and he didn’t tell. Let them think what they wanted, he didn’t want to share the truth, couldn’t bring himself to admit it to himself even.
His lover, the man he’d wanted to save, was one of them; a machine… Perhaps it had been some sort of sick joke by the machines after all…
After the initial shock, Thomas tried to think about the situation rationally, or at least as rationally as anyone could think about the fact that they had been in love with a machine. That was all he had been, a program, a piece of code; a very sophisticated program but a program none the less. But didn’t they claim to be sentient programs? They were AI and that was supposed to make all the difference. Had it made any difference? Thomas didn’t know.
Of course, in the depths of the night, alone on his bunk, he hoped that it hadn’t all been a lie. That he had meant something to… the sentient program. He hoped but he would never be sure. Were programs, sentient or not, even capable of actually feeling? It had always seemed so from his point of view. After all, it couldn’t be possible that he might have been fooled so much as to believe that… that… well, surely it wasn’t possible, was it?
All the time they had spent together, all the things they had done came back to haunt him. How could all of it have been a lie? Or maybe that was the point, maybe it had all just been a grand charade, a perfect illusion and human that he was, he had been utterly fooled. The argument was circular, that much he could see clearly. There would be no resolution. And even that didn’t matter really. Not when, regardless of what reason might tell him, he had loved… still loved, a machine.
It was a situation worthy of some strange art-house film, Thomas thought, aware that some part of him was actually finding this amusing; even though the rest of him wanted to die.
********************
In the end it wasn’t a matter of truth or lies. Despite everything, Thomas still loved the man he had left behind. The saddest part, he decided, was that perhaps this tragedy might have been averted, if only he had stayed. He could have lived out his life oblivious to the truth, with the person he loved by his side.
Thomas stepped back from the frozen Agent in the simulation. Carefully replacing the sunglasses, he looked over this copy, just a part of a simulation. Nothing really and yet it was all that he had left. He supposed it was funny really, this lasting memorial, the one thing that would remain: this fragment, a rebel training program.
Exiting the simulation, he closed down the program, leaving it with the others used to train new recruits. They might still be needed if this all failed: this attempt to shut down the Matrix.
Of course, they might succeed and free humanity, which would affectively destroy all the machines or they might just be killed in the attempt.
Either way… today his life would end, figuratively or literally he didn’t know. But somehow he guessed even that wasn’t really in his own hands.
