Chapter Text
Little is known about the early life of the One. Some believe his mastery over the matrix manifested in childhood (cf. Illustrior, Doomsday), others that he came into his powers as an adult (cf. Scrutinist, Hurricane & Loupgarou; see Appendix 6 for a summary of the scholarship on each theory). It is widely accepted, however, that by his early twenties he had developed the ability to manipulate and transcend the physical laws of the matrix (e.g., gravity, conservation of mass, the arro w of time) and of his encoded body (e.g., reaction speed, fatigue, vulnerability), and that by the age of thirty he had escaped the matrix entirely and begun building the city of Zion with a small group of perceptive malcontents he had identified and extracted (what are now typically referred to as “red-pills” [see Tinker for details on the development and functioning of the red/blue pill programs]).
Neo sighed and closed the book. He had found the slim, hand-bound volume on the floor of his cabin when he’d jolted awake an hour or so earlier into the quiet gloom of the Neb’s night cycle. A Miracle in the Matrix: Perspectives on the Life of the One. A note tucked between the first two pages read, “Rest well, Neo. This may shine some light on your path. -M”
A few feet away from the book, he’d found a tray of food and a tin cup of water. It was the same grayish glop they ate at every meal but, famished from his grueling day of training, he’d eaten it quickly and gratefully.
Now he lay staring up at the rust-eaten ceiling, remembering the violent rush of air that afternoon as he’d plummeted helplessly to the pavement below. Morpheus was so certain he was the second coming of a superhuman savior who had busted out of the matrix all on his own in his twenties. Neo was a thirty-seven year old office drone who had just failed his first and most basic test. None of it made sense.
He closed his eyes, willing himself to go back to sleep, but images from the nightmare that had awoken him hovered just behind his eyelids. Another artificial city, another terrifying fall, the despair of failure and imminent loss.
Sighing again, Neo sat up. More sleep was not going to be an option. He picked up the tray and headed out toward the mess hall. Might as well wash the dishes and stretch his sore legs a bit.
Dishes done, mind still in turmoil, Neo was about to turn back toward his cabin when he noticed a soft light emanating from the other end of the passageway, from the direction of the Core. Unlike the cool blue fluorescents that typically lit the Neb, this light was warm and orange. Inviting. Human. He changed direction.
Slipping through the open door, he found its source, a metal and glass candle lantern set on the ledge of the operator’s station. Most of the monitors were dark, but the four central ones showed a steadily falling torrent of green code. Facing away from him in the operator’s chair, legs crossed beneath her and hands wrapped around a mug in her lap, sat Trinity.
Neo watched her for a moment, fascinated by the way the flickering candlelight and the bright green glyphs played their clashing colors along her skin, brought out distinctive highlights in her hair. As he had been in the club, and every time he’d seen her since, Neo was stunned by her beauty. But not only that - her steadiness, her focus, her serenity. Amid this maelstrom he’d been thrown into, Trinity’s presence felt like a waveless harbor.
He was certain he hadn’t made a sound, but she turned toward him anyway, blinking into the gloom where he lingered. “Neo?” she called softly. “Is that you?”
He cleared his throat. “Yeah, sorry, I didn’t mean to sneak up on you. I just- I couldn’t sleep.” He stepped closer, into the halo of candlelight.
“It’s alright.” She gave him a small smile. “I couldn’t sleep either, so I came to relieve Cypher a little early. Or… a lot early, really.”
“What are you doing?” he gestured at the monitors. “Is that—“
“The matrix? Yes. We typically keep two watches going around the clock. Tonight I’m monitoring the matrix for unusual activity and keeping tabs on some potential red-pills. Mouse is up in the cockpit monitoring the comms and looking out for threats in the real world.”
“Hm,” Neo nodded, and they both watched the cascading symbols in silence for a moment. In the shelter of Trinity’s proximity, he felt some of his tension ebb away. “You always look at it encoded?”
“We have to,” she explained. “The image translators don’t work for the matrix, it’s too complex. But after awhile your brain starts to decode it on its own. You recognize the sets of glyphs that represent people, common objects, actions, events. Right now I’m keeping an eye on a potential named Nerezza.” She gestured to an area of the monitor where the code was fizzing and flickering rapidly. “That’s her right there. She’s up late, scouring the web for answers.” She paused, looked back at him. “The way you used to do, sometimes.”
That brought him up short. “You watched me like this?”
“We did. I’m sorry, I know it’s a bit - well, creepy. But it’s too risky to make contact until we’re confident the target is ready to learn the truth.”
Neo nodded. To his surprise, the thought of Trinity surveilling him didn’t bother him at all. Even realizing some of the private things she must have seen. It was a strange comfort to think that, through all his confusion and loneliness as reality began to unravel around him those last few months in the matrix, Trinity had been sitting at this station bathed in candlelight, watching over him.
“So,” he said, gesturing at the code that represented Nerezza, “will she be ready to take the red pill soon?”
“Maybe,” Trinity said. “But if so, we’ll have to ask another ship to extract her. Right now Morpheus wants all our focus on you.”
Neo’s stomach clenched. “Because he thinks I’m the One.”
“Ah. He told you that.”
“Yeah.”
“What did he say?” Her voice had cooled, become more cautious.
“Not much. A bit about the history - the prophecy. But nothing about why he thinks I would be special. Oh, and he left me a book about the first One. If he thought that would clear things up for me, it hasn’t.” He let out a small laugh. “I couldn’t get more than a few pages into it.”
“Oh, don’t tell me he gave you that Perspectives book,” she scoffed. “He loves it, I have no idea why. It’s completely unreadable.”
“Yeah,” Neo laughed quietly.
“So is that why you’re up at this hour?” she asked. “Morpheus gave you homework?”
“No. I was sleeping earlier but I, uh, had a dream.”
She looked up at him again. “A nightmare?”
He took a deep breath. “I was falling.”
“Ah. Those dreams are common after your first time in the jump program. It’s designed to scare the shit out of you.”
He nodded, intending to leave it at that, but something about the way she was looking at him compelled him to tell her all of it. “It was different, though.”
“Different how?”
“I’ve never had a dream like it before. It was so bright, so sharp. The city was different, and it wasn’t just me falling, it felt like someone else was with me.” He shook his head, breathing rapidly. “I couldn’t see them but I knew I had to save them. I couldn’t, though, and I —" he choked suddenly over the words.
“Whoa, Neo,” she said softly, placing her mug down and turning to face him more fully. Looking up at him with eyes so open and luminous he had to turn away. “Are you alright?”
“Yeah, yeah,” he gasped, taking a second to get his breathing under control. “Sorry. It’s not hard to interpret, I know. I’m supposed to be the One, but here I am falling to my death alongside some vague representation of the entire human race I can’t save either.” He tried for a laugh, didn’t quite succeed.
“Neo,” she said again, her tone warmer than he’d ever heard it. He turned back to her; she was looking down, shaking her head. “I wish Morpheus hadn’t told you any of that yet. You’re still so new.”
“I don’t understand it at all,” he said. “Why would anyone ever think I was destined to save humanity? I spent my days writing software nobody cared about and my nights surfing the web trying to figure out why the world felt all wrong.” He laughed darkly. “Oh, and sometimes for fun I hacked into government mainframes just to prove that I could. That was my life, Trinity.”
“I don’t think being the One has anything to do with how you spend your time. That’s not what we’re looking for.”
“What do you look for then?”
“Well, Morpheus describes it as a kind of attainable capacity. A potential power you have access to but haven’t harnessed yet. He says he can see it in the way your subconscious rejects your reality, the way you implicitly identify the glitches and the flaws in the code. He looks for people who have... established an intuitive cartography of the subsurface of the virtual construct, is how he puts it.”
“You think I did that? I’m not even sure what that means.”
“Honestly, I’m not either. But your code, Neo, the way your mind expresses itself within the matrix, it’s—" She took a breath, searching for a word and settling on, “unusual.”
“Unusual?”
“Your code is clean. It’s sharp, it’s deliberate. It’s fascinating to watch, It’s like, in a mess of a program designed by half-trained hacks, your code looks like the work of a master. It’s—"
She stopped, looked down. Neo almost thought he could see a blush bloom across her cheeks, and he felt warmth rush through him. “It’s what?”
“It’s beautiful, really. Speaking, um, as a programmer who appreciates an elegant bit of coding.”
“Huh,” he said softly, swept away by the notion that she found him - any manifestation of him - beautiful.
“The others didn’t see it, what made your code different,” she continued quickly. “I’m not sure how they missed it, but not all of them have monitored the matrix for as long as I have. Sometimes — well. The others weren’t always sure what Morpheus and I saw in you.”
“You mean, they weren’t sure how a guy who eats Cap’n Crunch for dinner and wears the same clothes three days in a row could be the savior of humanity?”
She laughed quietly. “Something like that.”
“But you, you agree with Morpheus? That I could be the One?”
Her eyes snapped up to meet his, an anxious unguarded look flickering across her face before her typical composure returned. She took a long breath. “Yes,” she said finally. “I think you could be.”
He paused for a moment, buoyed by her belief in him before he remembered all of his doubts. His fall. “But you’re not sure yet.”
Her gaze was level. Open. Honest. “I promise, I’ll let you know when I am.”
They had settled into a comfortable silence, both watching the flickering displays. Seeing Neo sway on his feet, Trinity had offered him the chair and now hovered behind him, occasionally pointing out aspects of the code, teaching him to recognize the logic behind the jumbled rain of symbols. The candlelight had reduced the cavernous Core to an intimate circle, and Neo felt blanketed in a warm drowsiness he had never before experienced in the real world. He had considered, multiple times in the past hour, trying to get some more sleep before what promised to be another long, exhausting day of training. But every time he pictured himself walking away from Trinity and returning to his cold, empty cabin, he came up with another reason to stay. Just a little longer.
“So if you look out for this pattern here,” she was saying quietly, pointing out a repeating cluster of glyphs, “you can tell that there are—"
A loud buzz jolted them both out of their placidity, and Mouse’s voice crackled over the intercom. “Hey, Trinity? You there?”
Looking down at Neo apologetically, she reached for the mouthpiece. “Yeah Mouse, what is it?”
“I got Ghost on the line up here, says he needs a favor. Wants a small team to meet them matrix-side.”
Trinity stood up straighter, her voice sharpening. “What, now?”
“He says they have a situation. Says it’s urgent.”