I stood under the Adam's Street Bridge for about twenty minutes as I waited for someone to pick me up. I was sure they just liked seeing me stand there as I pretended to shiver from the cold rain and splashes that had soaked my jeans from the knees down. My feet were practically floating inside my shoes, just like I suspected they would be.
A car came around the corner behind me and I turned to watch as it approached me and slowed down. It was a 1965 4-door Lincoln Continental and it had those cool looking suicide doors in the back. They were the ones that opened backwards and everyone in the car could get in and exit at the same time as a group.
The back door on the passenger side opened and Trinity was there. "Get in." She ordered and moved across the seat to sit behind the driver.
I gave her a pointed look and she didn't say anything else, so I climbed in and closed the door. The car took off at a good speed and the driver was a dark haired man and the passenger was a woman with very short platinum blonde hair. There was the click of a gun and she turned around in the front seat to kneel on it and pointed the gun right in my face.
I wasn't going to take that insult, so I quickly reached up and grabbed her wrist and wrenched up on the gun with my other hand. The loud crack of her broken wrist echoed in the silent car as her hand went limp and she let the gun go.
"ARGH!" The woman yelled and pulled her hands back to cradle the injury.
"Switch!" Trinity gasped. "Apoc! Stop the car!"
The driver slammed on the brakes and then all three of them gave me accusing looks.
"What did you do that for?" Trinity demanded, her face angry.
"She shoved a gun in my face! What else was I supposed to do? Let her?" I asked and they gave me expressions that said yes, I was supposed to.
"It was for our protection!" Trinity said and started to reach into her coat.
I turned slightly and pointed the gun at her forehead. "How do you like the view from that side of the barrel?"
Trinity froze and didn't say anything.
"Hands where I can see them." I said and she pulled her hand back out of her coat. "Now start talking. I thought you were taking me to meet Morpheus."
"We are." Apoc said and reached over to the glove compartment. He pulled out a first aid kit and started wrapping Switch's wrist with a bandage. "Only we can't do that until we clear you of bugs."
I reached down to my belly button and lifted my shirt before I plucked out the metal device. "You mean this thing?"
All three of them stared at me in shock.
"It's just a dummy program that relays GPS coordinates when its pinged. Even the worst hackers can bypass these things." I said with a roll of my eyes. "Just dumping it won't work, though. It'll deactivate and they'll know it was hacked right away."
"Dammit, he's right." Trinity said.
"Then what do you suggest we do?" The white haired woman asked and nodded at the driver in thanks.
"Find the nearest homeless guy or stray dog to give it to. That should keep the Feds busy for a while as they try to figure out what happened to me." I told them.
"That... is actually a good idea." Trinity admitted and gave the gun a look and then looked at me. "Do you mind?"
I clicked on the safety and flipped it around to hand back to the white haired woman, handle first. "Keep your wrist wrapped for a few days and take it easy for a while. I only wanted to hurt you, not cripple you permanently."
She frowned as she accepted the gun with her other hand, then she gave me a nod of acceptance.
"Apoc, let's go down Elm Street and give the homeless people there a few bucks each and one of them an extra little present." Trinity suggested as she took the bug from my hand.
The car took off again and it didn't take us long to do just that. The dishevelled men were more than happy to get money to spend on more liquor and we were lucky that one of them was a bit too tipsy to notice something being slipped into his clothing and his belly button.
We drove off through a slalom of streets, as if Apoc was trying to confuse me about the destination, and we arrived at an old brownish gothic-like building that was about 15 stories high. The lightning lit it up only a little and I used my umbrella to hold over myself as I stepped out and positioned it to cover the space between the car and the overhang to the door.
Both Trinity and Switch gave me small smiles of appreciation and Apoc ran by them and held the door for them. He received the same smile from the two of them and he nodded to me as I passed him. I hung the umbrella on the bottom banister and then we all walked up the many stairs to the top.
"Doesn't the elevator work?" I asked.
"No, we're not on the power grid here to hide our movements." Apoc said. "We only use generators to keep the power to the things we need. Everything else is a waste."
"Saving you twenty minutes each time you have to walk up and down all these damn stairs isn't a waste." I complained.
Switch let out a little laugh before she could stop herself. "Mouse said the same thing! He said he was made for hacking, not climbing."
"Morpheus said if he wanted to arrange his own power supply for the thing, he could do it." Trinity said as we kept climbing the stairs. "It's just too bad he can't get Tank and Dozer in here to work on it for him."
"Why?" I asked.
"He doesn't know shit about how to fix an elevator!" Apoc said with a laugh.
I had to laugh at that, too. We eventually reached the top floor and Apoc and Switch split off to enter another room and Trinity walked me over to a large set of double doors.
"This is it." Trinity said and started to reach for the handles, then paused. "Let me give you one piece of advice." She smiled briefly. "Be honest with him. He knows more than you can imagine."
"I can imagine the capacity of photons as they bypass the speed of light limit of the universe, since they both exist at the start of the big bang and also exist at the same time when they hit my eyeball." I said and her mouth dropped open. "For the photon, no discernible time has passed between those events."
Trinity blinked her eyes at me several times before she shook herself and opened the double doors into a room with ratty red drapes, peeling beige wallpaper that had yellowed with time, and a pair of leather wingback chairs that needed a lot of care to make look good again. There was also a tall black man dressed all in black, wearing a black leather trenchcoat, standing by the large window.
"At last." The black man said as he turned to face me. "Welcome, Neo. As you have no doubt guessed, I am Morpheus."
"No shit! Really?" I asked and Trinity gave me a pointed look. I laughed and bowed slightly to her. "Sorry, I couldn't resist."
Morpheus put on a fake smile and motioned towards the chairs. "Please, sit." He said and then ushered Trinity out of the room through a side door and he lost the smile. "I imagine that right now, you're feeling a bit like Alice." He said and walked back over to me. "Tumbling down the rabbit hole."
I kind of shrugged and didn't say anything.
"I can see it in your eyes. You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees, because he is expecting to wake up." Morpheus walked around the chair and didn't sit down. "Ironically, this is not far from the truth." He said and sighed. "Do you believe in fate, Neo?"
"Of course I do." I said and that seemed to startle him. I did not say I knew her fairly well, either. I didn't want to terrify the man, after all.
Morpheus needed a moment to recover, then he carefully sat down on the chair across from me. A glass of warm dusty water sat on the small table between us. "Let me tell you why you're here."
I stayed silent and nodded for him to continue.
"You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain; but, you can feel it. You've felt it your entire life... that there was something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is; but, it's there, like a splinter in your mind that's driving you mad." Morpheus said and took out a small case, similar to what Agent Smith had, and he kept turning it over in his hands. "It's this feeling that brought you to me." He gave me an intense look. "Do you know what I'm talking about?"
"Yes." I said. "The Matrix."
"Do you want to know what it is?" Morpheus asked.
"I already know." I said and he stiffened. "The Matrix is everywhere. It's all around us, even now in this very room. I can see it when I look out my window and when I turn on my television. I can feel it when I go to work, when I go to church, and when I pay my taxes."
Morpheus stared at me like he had never seen anything like me before.
"It's the world that has been pulled over my eyes to blind me from the truth." I said and his eyebrows went up. "That I'm a slave. That all of us are slaves, born into a prison that can't be smelled, or tasted, or touched. A prison for the mind."
Morpheus sat forward, the case loose in his hands.
"I have no proof and I can spout about it all I want and no one is going to believe me." I told him and he nodded. "But, you can fix that, can't you?"
"Yes." Morpheus said and opened the case. "No one can be told what the matrix is and will believe it. They have to see it for themselves." He dumped the contents of the case into one hand and put the case on the small table as he leaned forward. "This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back."
I nodded and leaned forward to match him.
Morpheus opened his left hand. "You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe." He opened his right hand. "You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."
I waited for several seconds before I start to reach.
"Remember." Morpheus interrupted. "All I'm offering is the truth, nothing more."
I nodded, then smirked as I scooped up both pills and swallowed them.
Morpheus stared at me as I gulped the warm water and gagged on it.
"Yep, that tasted just as awful as I thought it would."
"Wh-what... what did you do?" Morpheus asked, clearly shocked.
"I wanted the best of both worlds, of course." I said and stood. "I mean, if the choice is between believing what I want to believe and knowing the truth, why wouldn't I choose to have both?"
Morpheus sat there and stared at me like I was crazy.
I chuckled and grabbed his arm and lifted him to his feet. "I believe you were going to take me into your secret hacking lair and show me the truth, so let's go."
Morpheus nodded several times and led me to the doors Trinity was ushered through. He opened them and brought me inside. It was full of oddly shaped electrical devices that really should not have made sense or worked together in any capacity, so thanks to my 'Tinker: Yes' power, I knew exactly what they all did.
Switch was monitoring the local bandwidths to make sure there were no agents or other computer controlled assets in the area. Cypher was looking through goggles that let him see the hardline connection was intact. Trinity was monitoring my avatar's health signs and brainwaves. Apoc was using a jury-rigged computer and laptop to search for my disrupted signal.
"The red pill you took was part of a trace program designed to disrupt your input output carrier signal so we can pinpoint your location." Morpheus told me. He did not tell the others that I also took the blue pill, which might have changed the results they were observing, if they knew about it.
I stayed quiet and felt a little queasy. It was a first time for me feeling anything like that here, so I closed my eyes and looked inside of myself for it. With my advanced programming experience, finding the trace program and its virus-like actions, was damn easy. Luckily, it only affected the senses and did not flood my brain with useless junk data.
When I found the spot it was targeting, I toggled the thing off and on myself a hundred times instead of waiting for the program to copy itself enough times to do the same thing. I also saw the blue pill doing its work reinforcing the signal connection to the Matrix and its computer systems, so my compatibility with them would skyrocket well past what I should have had.
"He's still stable." Trinity said, her voice full of confusion. "He should be showing signs of a heart attack and there's nothing."
"I'm getting a trace somehow?" Apoc asked, also sounding confused. "Targeting is working."
"He's not looking at the mirror or touched it yet." Switch said.
I felt everyone as they turned to look at me, so I opened my eyes and smiled at them. "What? I can feel what the programs are doing. Just give me a minute to..." The blue pill program finished its work and the inside of my head was filled with information about the coding I was surrounded with. "Huh, that's cool. It's a bit basic, though. I could do much better with a terminal and core access."
Everyone gave me confused looks.
"Don't worry about it." I said and toggled that little switch hundreds of times more and Apoc's station chirped a bunch of times. "Heeeeey! I'm over hereee!"
"Whatever he's doing, it working!" Apoc said as his computer beeps got faster and faster. "Targeting is getting closer!"
Morpheus took out a cellphone and hit the auto-dial button. "Tank, we're going to need a hang-up and disconnect signal soon!"
"He's still completely stable." Trinity said with disbelief.
"All clear here." Switch said and looked right at me.
I smiled back at her. "See you soon."
"LOCK!" Apoc yelled. "I got him!"
"Now, Tank!" Morpheus shouted and the Matrix faded from around me.
I woke up in a bio-pod filled with pink-tinted amniotic fluid. I calmly sat up and used a cutting spell to split the top membrane perfectly to free myself. I felt the many hoses and attachments all over my body and had to mentally suppress my body trying to expunge them right away.
I looked around and blinked my eyes at the sight of so many instances of the same bio-pod connected together to make gigantic electrical generator towers, hundreds of feet high. Sparks of lightning and electrical energy rolled up and down the stacks, proving they were inefficient and were causing unnecessary arcs between them.
What a waste of power. I thought and stood up as I pulled the feeding tube out of my mouth.
A moment later, I felt a machine float down towards me on a hoverpad and I stayed still as it approached. The spider-like design gave it versatility and I was sure it had been in operation for a very long time. The grit and grime on it was thick on the non-moving parts, too.
A mechanical grapple deployed from underneath it and it darted out and grabbed me by the neck. I didn't react or tried to struggle, because it was only doing its job. It sent a signal to the device screwed into the back of my head and the thing unscrewed and dropped away, the connection to the tower keeping it within the bio-pod.
The spider-like hovering machine seemed to give me a nod before it flew away. I chuckled and braced myself for what was going to happen next. All the attachments all along my spine, arms, legs, and chest, all gave bursts of compressed air and forcibly disconnected from me. As soon as the last one let go, the back of the pod attached to the tower opened up.
I turned and grabbed onto the top of the pod, treated it like a waterslide, and threw myself feet first down into the fluid and into the hole. Thankfully, it worked like a waterslide and the sides were only stained from years of water damage and stagnation and didn't have any rough edges or barnacles or anything.
The ride went on for a few minutes, proving I was quite far up in the tower, then the ride ended and I shot out of the end of the tube into the large central shaft about 30 feet up from the bilge water below. I landed with a splash and was under the water for a few seconds, then I swam up to the surface. I tread water for a minute and saw lights reflect off of the walls and water.
I flattened myself out and stopped moving, to let their grappling arm grab me safely. They hauled me up into the ship and dropped me onto some blankets, then wrapped me up. Dozer went to lift me up and I used a featherlight charm on myself so he wouldn't struggle with my massive weight.
"Welcome..." Morpheus said when he came into view. "...to the real world."