Disclaimer: The Matrix is the property of Warner Bros. and the Wachowski brothers.

Lock and Key

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He's being held prisoner by a very dangerous program...

—The Oracle, Matrix Reloaded

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To the Merovingian, he is a valuable pawn, a part of this most dangerous game of power and survival, not to be let go or given up to anyone, not without hell to pay in a hail of bullets. But the old man sitting in the deepest hidden chamber of the chateau, if he were to learn of all this, would simply have found such notions incredible. For between imprisonment and freedom there lies only a locked door, and the Keymaker, of all people, knows that locks mean nothing at all.

Racks of keys cover every wall of the room, which is dim except for the late sunbeams filtering down from the single window above, swirling gently with motes of dust. The old man is at his worktable, concentrating on the final touches of a key. A key—though the untrained eye will not have recognized it as such, for the thing in his hand resembles a mere braid of wire, a bit bent at the end. Its cunning is invisible, and fills even him with pride. It is the key to the door of this cell.

A moment ago, he put his ear to the door, and heard only silence. The guards stationed just outside were unusually quiet; even the television was off. But at this point, they hardly matter anymore. He is close, very close.

Ever since he came here he has been working on this. The hardest part turned out to be the door itself, which, needless to say, had neither keyhole nor handle on the inside. The solid metal was several inches thick, but even then it would not have taken so long but for his fear that the guards would hear his drill. So he worked only for an hour each day, and on weekdays only, at four o'clock in the afternoon, when the television outside would be on and the volume at its highest. With his ear pressed against the door he would hear the roar of a crowd, and a voice bawling about something called the "WWF". He did not know what that was, except that it would be loud. Then he would crank patiently at the hard dark steel with a little hand drill, stopping from moment to moment to make sure the noise was still on. The progress each day was barely to be seen, but frustration was foreign to his nature. He covered the tiny hole in the door with the schematic diagram of an ancient Egyptian box, the kind that shot poisoned arrows at the incautious fool, which he drew himself. An unnecessary precaution, as it happened, for no one ever entered the room. If not for this he would not have kept count of the days.

In the other hours, to pass the time, he would try to recall all the important and dangerous doors that he had seen in the world, secured with the strongest and most complex locks. He made keys for them, and soon his collection covered the walls. When the hole was a quarter of an inch deep, he exhausted them all—all save one. So he started to invent locks that did not yet exist, mere possibilities in the mind. He was good at this since to be a proficient maker of keys, one must also be a maker of locks. He imagined intricate locks on doors that had only one side, or were visible only to those that did not seek it. He imagined doors that opened only to the same room that one was already in, or simply to the empty abyss, unless one has the right key. Doors that did not even exist, unless one already has the right key. But since he was the one who concocted their secrets in the first place, it was uninteresting to make keys for them.

When the hole in the door was half an inch deep, he began to think about simple doors and common locks, and created keys that would make them lead to other places, stranger and more distant. He remembered the back entrance of a diner that he had passed on the street, where the waitresses would stand by the dumpsters smoking their cigarettes, and made a key that would open it to the courtyard of a farmhouse, walled with clay bricks painted bright red beneath the Himalayan sky. He remembered a closet in Penn Station that he had once glimpsed, drab beige and marked with the words "Custodians Only". The key he made for it opened to a hall in Paris filled with soft glow and priceless Renaissance masterpieces.

One day when the hole was nearly an inch deep, he laid a hand over it, and felt the lock. The thing was extraordinarily complicated and fairly pulsed with power, for the Merovingian was both the strongest programmer in the world and one of the most clever. Covering the hole as usual, he put away the drill, and went to his table to begin work on the key.

He spent quite some time sitting and staring at the door of the prison after that, thinking about how to break the puzzle. He saw the lock from the inside, all the linked layers and the perfectly balanced forces and counterweights, as if he himself was part of them. Once in a while he would cross the room, and grind a little more at a small piece of metal fitted to the worktable. He worked it down to a sliver of wire; he twisted and turned it, sat and thought, then turned it some more.

During this time, he found himself more and more often thinking about another lock, another key that he still had to make. It was the first lock he ever saw, when he had just been created. If he slept or dreamed he would have said that the lock troubled his dreams, but as things were, it merely preoccupied his mind whenever he wasn't considering the one in front of his eyes. He visualized it unchanged, at the end of the white corridor. From the outside the door looked like all the others. Somewhere along the way, the two locks began to merge and mingle, and at times he would catch himself seeing that far-away door while staring at the solid expanse of the one before him. Then he would have to start all over again.

At one point, he estimated—with complete dispassion—that by his skills he should have already defeated the lock, and the realization came to him that he was hampered by his inability to think like the Merovingian. After all, he was never very good at understanding others, or living things in general. Yet he never became discouraged.

And now it is done.

The sunlight has faded, and the Keymaker flips on a switch. Going to the door, he lowers himself carefully to knee-level and removes the taped drawing. For the last time, he lays an ear against the cool thick metal. Not a sound. He knows he will not see these guards in any case.

Slowly, meticulously, he pushes the key into the tiny hole, and gives it a half-turn. There is a nearly inaudible click.

The old man smiles. For a brief while, he is curious about the place on the other side, the one thing that he does not yet know. Is it the bustling streets of a city? Is it a palace? The inside of a hut on the wide African plain? The white corridor? Somebody's apartment?

Chuckling quietly, the Keymaker shakes his head. Not that it matters. If the door of each room leads to any and every possible place, then all the rooms in the world are precisely the same. There's nothing out there anyway.

All the rooms except one, he corrects himself.

With the same slow, steady movement, the old man pulls the key out, leaving the door unlocked. Satisfied by the victory, yet also a little disappointed at his adversary, he puts it away among the others, and returns to his worktable. It is time to start on that other key now, for that other door which will need unlocking, one of these days. He already has an idea about the mechanism, and here he will at least be undisturbed—until the moment comes.

Laying out a new drill bit on the table, he wonders how long it will take for the Merovingian to realize that the door has been beaten. Not too long, he hopes. Perhaps the other man will create an even more powerful lock then, one that is more challenging.

Between imprisonment and freedom there lies only a locked door, and the Keymaker, of all people, knows that doors mean nothing at all.