5. Stain

.

They came and went like water. At times they came singly, at times in twos and threes, at times in a crowd. He could sense them all around him, smell their sweat and blood, but he could not see them with his eyes. They were human, and spoke many tongues.

By now he'd learned to recognize the signs. Always it began quietly enough, a faint intermittent sound, barely to be discerned amid the shrill winds and the thunder. A whimpering cry, weak as only the virus-kind could be, and he pushed it aside easily. But not for long.

A child was crying. It seemed a long distance away, no more than an echo somewhere across the plain, but drawing ever nearer. Within a minute it was behind him, almost right next to his head. He spun around, but saw no one among the rubble. The terrified little wretch was looking for its mother, but Smith knew it would not find her. For he himself had found her first.

He scanned the horizon, half expecting to see the forest of dark-clad forms, marching forward tall and strong, innumerable eyes like glimmering fire behind myriad dark lenses, all of them identical. In another existence he had watched out of all those eyes. But they had disappeared, and he was alone. What forests that once had been in this land had burned to dust ages ago.

"It's all happening exactly as before..." he muttered to himself.

Oh my child! No!

The scream pierced the air at his back. The ex-agent tensed, but this time he did not turn his head. Merely a woman, her voice a high-pitched whine, sick and helpless with the abject love of her species. There would be plenty more where that came from.

He must get out of here. He must get out of here.

Please please no not my baby no--

Was it him or only one of her own kind before her? He neither knew nor cared. In any case there was no time to wonder about such irrelevancies, for another had joined her, then another. More and more voices, all of them shouting at once, in terror and rage and their feeble, human pain. The noise made his ears ring, yet he could see nothing.

He would get out of here. He would find a way. Firmly Smith repeated the words, squaring his shoulders to meet the onslaught. His nostrils flared. The terror and rage and pain were still outside of him for the moment, some small distance away, but the smell--the smell was a tight cloud all around him, thick and dank and impossible to pierce like the clouds of the shattered sky above. He could not understand how the stench of the living could have remained even down here, in the desert where everything was supposed to be dead. But remain it did, breathing with him, moving with him. He would never be able to clean it out of his system again.

Help us, they pleaded, a hoarse cacophony. We're here, right here. We're not leaving. But he was the only one in the city now. There would be no help.

Oh God oh God no I don't want to die, wailed one of them. Let me die, murmured another. I can't take it anymore, just let me die. Their shrieks grew louder every second, and soon he could no longer discern the words. They surrounded him, the crop of batteries, pulling him under, piercing him from every direction with shards of glittering code. Keep still, he said to himself. He would not let them take him yet, not this disgusting insect crowd, not this time. Keep still. But this, too, sounded like one of them now.

It's all happening exactly as before. It's all happening exactly as before...

Was that himself speaking? Was that what happened? How did he know?

You didn't know, replied Thomas Anderson. The answer was quiet and even, matter-of-fact, yet it rang above the maelstrom with the inevitability of the Mainframe's will. And you will never know. You are never meant to know. And then, to drive the nail of contempt home, It is not your purpose.

But we know, chorused the humans. We know you.

And the tide kept rising, inexorable. He could feel them inside him now, their forms dark and contorted, overflowing with blood and filth. Their fear and suffering were sharpened knives. But even as the waves roared in his ears, closing over him, Ex-agent Smith lifted his head and laughed, the sound of laughter defiant, and wilder than all the others together.

"I know," he said out aloud into the wind.

He had known far too much. Far too much had known him. Either way. He had tried to destroy the world, after all. He had dreamt of washing it away, drowning it in a flood of rain. He had failed, and now here in the drought of the desert the world came to drown him.

You are a bad man, said the little girl, voice surprisingly clear, and filled with the righteousness of the very young. Smith whirled, and she whirled with him, staying out of his sight as they all did. But I am not afraid of you.

Reverberated giggles now mingled with the screams. They meant to overwhelm him by sheer numbers, flaunting the multitude of their pathetic lives. He heard his own breathing, something he had never noticed back when he'd been an agent. It was growing quicker; he would not have much time left. With some effort, he focused his gaze on what was in front of him. A ruin. A million ruins, one after another. Drawing back one fist deliberately, he slammed it into the nearest wall. Ragged mortar flew across the shadows. The impact's sensation helped him concentrate for a few more seconds.

"I need to get out of here," he said.

Do you actually imagine you still get to hope? Who the hell do you think you are? This one was old, weary and derisive. He had no idea who it was. Just a battery.

I have seen Zion with mine eyes...

Their hands clawed and tugged at him. All of them he took. They groaned and whispered and hissed. They roared like thunder and seared like the light. All of them took him.

You will never understand, you will never feel. You have no emotion, no will, no existence of your own. There is nothing within you, slave!

Do what you're here to do, commanded the Oracle, sounding exhausted. Then she added, but this time in his own voice, Everything that has a beginning has an end.

This is the end, piped the others.

For the last time he fought his way to the surface and opened his eyes. At the edge of consciousness he sensed another presence, amid the swirling gale and the waves. It was part of him. It was not part of him. It flickered and faded, in and out of existence.

Then he saw her. Outside and distinct from him, standing straight and silent upon a hill of rubble. Her face was pale, framed by a storm-ridden sky. But even as her gaze met his the codes heaved beneath his feet, all the lines tangling and twisting. Or maybe it was himself. He was in the sea and she stared down upon him from the shore.

"Aleph..."

Lightning crackled about her head. They converged, congealing into a terrible light that burnt his eyes, and for a fraction of a second he thought the clouds had broken, and that the sun was rising at her back. But no. Not the sun. Never the sun.

The young woman did not move, yet at that moment the vision began to shift before him. The city at her back was no longer dead and cold, but all aglow, convulsed with a great conflagration that licked the heavens. The teeming throng about him let out a great clamor, rioting, and to their feverish noise he saw that Aleph was leaning upon an unsheathed sword, the white blade alive with reflected flames. Slowly she lift her other hand, holding something small and extremely bright in the palm. All the fires of the world fell upon it, and he could not see what it was.

"Aleph!" he yelled.

She did not answer, but drew her hand closer, so that it was chest-level, next to where her heart would have been if she'd still been human. Then he knew--abruptly, and with an utter certainty that chilled him to the roots of his programming, though he had no idea whence the knowledge had come. It was important, whatever the thing in her hand, and he must get it back. It had once belonged to him. Everything depended on it.

"Aleph!" He heard himself cry, desperate in a way he'd not imagined possible for him, yet he could no longer make it otherwise. "Aleph! Return it to me!"

Her shining gaze fell cold upon his face.

You expect me to help you? she retorted, incredulous. After all this? After everything you did?

Her form receded, in an instant already as far away as the mountains upon the horizon. And he began to fall.

He kept falling, falling as if never to hit the ground again, falling through one endless moment that was both dusty as the desert and cold as the rain. The world--humans and programs and all else of the Matrix--grew silent at last. But even as the darkness claimed him there was another voice in his ears, neither human nor machine, female, ancient beyond the ages. It spoke to him, and kept on speaking for an eternity, though he never understood any of its words.