The Matrix is the property of Warner Bothers and/or the Wachowski brothers.  My use is in no way meant to challenge their copyrights.  This piece is not intended for any profit on the part of the writer, nor is it meant to detract from the commercial viability of the aforementioned (or any other) copyright.  Any similarity to any events or persons (either real or fictional) is unintended.

Author's Note:  My first (and probably only) Matrix fic.  Don't know if this resembles anything written by anyone else, but it conceivably could, so I apologize if it does.  Trust me, though – I haven't read anything like it (though I haven't read every story on this site).  Please take some time to review, and feel free to rip me a new one if you feel you can do so constructively.

The Science of the Matrix

by

Nevermore

            They all say so many things.  They say that they have rules, that older humans aren't ever removed from the Matrix because it's too great a shock to their systems.  That's a lie.  What they should say is that they have a rule against removing humans unless the potential rewards of indoctrinating the individual are worth the risk of driving him insane.  Am I insane?  Maybe.  They say I'm not, that I've adapted about as well as anyone ever has.  Like I said, though, they all say so many things…

            Now I guess it's time for me to say something, to tell my story.  After all, if I don't, no one else is ever likely to.  Everyone's so wrapped up in jumping on the Neo bandwagon nowadays.  It kinda pisses me off, actually.  I was the one that so many people had built their hopes around for so long.  I knew they never said it, but what they were actually doing was treating me like the second coming until The One actually showed up.  Maybe that's why I'm a little bitter.  If everyone had simply let me be, had just left me to do the job for which I was recruited, I would be a little happier.  Instead they built me up to be a hero, and then suddenly abandoned me as their true savior arrived.  I guess in the end I'm little more than a precursor, the John the Baptist to Neo's Jesus.  Maybe there are worse things, though.  At least no one's asked for my head on a platter… yet.

            For a little background, let me say that I was born Timothy Joseph Walker, or as my friends always called me – T.J.  Of course, none of that really happened, since it all occurred in the Matrix, but if reality is a state of mind, then I guess my past is real enough.  I was born in New York, the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, to be precise, and had a normal enough childhood.  Normal for anyone that that happens to be a mathematics and engineering prodigy, that is.  By the time I was fourteen I was in MIT, and at the age of nineteen I had doctorates in nonlinear mathematics, aerospace engineering, computer science, and mechanical engineering.  I was the best engineer in the world.  I know that because something in the Matrix said so, and that's what led Morpheus to me.  He was obsessed with finding The One, with taking the war to the machines.  He knew that The One, whoever it was, would be able to dominate the machines within the Matrix.  That was only half the battle, though.  We still had to win out in the 'real world,' and to do that he needed engineers.

            I was the first one he took, the first of ten, and I'm now the last.  All the others went mad, eventually killing themselves for one reason or another.  Maybe their minds just couldn't handle the fact that their entire lives had been an illusion.  Maybe they couldn't deal with the stresses of the real world, and just wanted to get back into the Matrix.  Maybe it was unfathomable to them that had been living in a computer-generated world designed to promote some basic level of happiness in the human mind, and they still couldn't get laid.  Personally, I just think they were all weak.

            Taking a page from Morpheus, who borrowed the name of an ancient god of dreams, I changed my own name to Daedalus, the mythic Greek who designed the labyrinth and also the wings that allowed him to escape it.  It seemed a fitting enough name, I think.

            I still remember the first question Morpheus asked me, once I was up to speaking, that is.  He asked, "How does the Matrix work?"  As if I was supposed to know...  The obvious problem, of course, is that one can't get more power out of a source of energy than one puts in.  The best one could hope for would be a full, 100% return, and even that doesn't happen because some energy is always lost to entropy in the exchange.  So how is it that the machines can hook up humans and use them as power sources, when feeding and warming them takes so much energy?  And keep in mind we're not even counting the amount of energy that it takes to keep the Matrix up and running, in addition to the power required to meet humans' physical needs.  How could the machines possibly have anything left to provide energy to themselves?

            Well, the answer was simple, actually.  The machines have harvesters that cultivate yeast and algae, which are then transformed into a life supporting food product.  Breaking down the proteins in food to create kinetic energy from the stored potential energy is something the machines can't do, at least not efficiently – they needed organic machines, humans, to do the work for them.  So I guess it's more accurate to say that the fields of humans are not so much generators as they are transformers.  Cultivating the food is simple and efficient, and provides the raw materials for the energy production the machines need.

            Once that question was answered, however, my newfound comrades in the real world needed to know how to defeat the machines.  Humanity had already been all but completely defeated once, and that was when our species had been at the height of its power.  How could the remaining few, already struggling against descending into a Dark Age to rival that which existed after the fall of Rome, possibly defeat an enemy that had already taken the best our species could throw at it?  It was a tough question, and in actuality, it was the question that I had been recruited to answer.  All the other crap, about how the Matrix works and all, was really little more than information that was required in order to help our leaders choose their targets.  Now they needed a way to attack those targets, and come back alive once their objective had been achieved.

            That's the really tough thing, you know – taking out targets.  Like I said before, there are rules about bringing people out of the Matrix after a certain age.  We can't reasonably do that.  But as long as we leave them in there, their bodies will continue to provide energy for our enemies.  That means we have to eliminate them, just as old human civilizations would target each other's industrial centers during their wars.  The difference is that we aren't going out to destroy an inanimate power plant; now we're planning to destroy human-powered generators, inevitably killing thousands, even millions, of our own people in the process.  It's a two-step war of genocide, actually.  First we need to cripple the machines so that we have a fighting chance against them.  To do that, we essentially have to kill the vast majority of our own species that yet lives.  Then, once millions of humans are already dead, we can turn our attention on the real enemy – the machines – and undertake the second genocidal step in our war.  For all of this, we need weapons.  For weapons, we need engineers.  Again, that's why they need me.

            I am the maestro, the master builder, the visionary that can take the remaining pieces of our technology and come up with new and interesting ways to use them to cause death and destruction.  I was the one that perfected our EMP defense systems.  I was the one that fine-tuned our repulsorlift engines, allowing us to move about as quickly as the Sentinels.  I'm the one that read Welles' old book, War of the Worlds, and realized that just releasing a strain of the common cold among a few of our captured brothers and sisters would wipe out thousands of humans.  After all, they were produced in vats and never had the benefit of growing in a woman's womb, receiving white blood cells from a mother and thus inheriting some of her developed immune system.  I also came up with the Microsoft virus, a program we uploaded into the Matrix that created Microsoft as a corporation within the Matrix's artificial reality.  Predictably, programs within programs began to freeze up and crash, causing chaos and eating up a great deal of the machines' resources in finding a solution.  To date, they have not yet been successful.  It might seem like little more than a nuisance, but nuisances are things that machines simply can't deal with.  Being baffled by seemingly simple problems drives 'em absolutely wonky.  Finally, in the coup de grace, I got together with one of the natives, a man with a particular knack for genetic engineering, and we designed a new bacteria that will attack and kill the algae that's used as a food supply for the humans.  They'll starve, even as they suffer from the common cold, and eventually they'll die.

            I don't let myself think about the morality of my actions.  I can't allow that, of course.  So what if I'm destroying countless people, snuffing out lives with the casual indifference with which one might blow out a candle?  It's what I was recruited for, wasn't it?  Does it make me crazy that I take pride in the fact that I'm good at what I do?  If I am crazy, is it the result of this world, or the fact that I was torn away from the Matrix?  Who knows?

            All I can be sure of is that while Neo and his pals do their thing inside the Matrix, the rest of us have to wage this war in the real world.  Science, such as it is for those of us that cling desperately to the advances of a dead civilization, is the key to victory.  We have to win soon, too, before we're forced to start using sticks and stones against our would-be masters.

Fin