My apologies for the long delay.

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Until one second before her death, there was nothing out of the ordinary about Lucinda Greene. The record listed a pair of middle class parents, one sister six years her senior, a small town high school. Considered clever in her classes, though not brilliant as Ada had been. Never been in trouble. No evidence that she had known of her sister's online contact with a human rebel from the Hyperion. No evidence that she had ever been marked as a potential by the Zionites. And seven years ago--not a trace of resistance as the agent's code surged smoothly over her. She had merely been terrified, just like all the others.

She could not have had anything to do with the Glitch, Agent Smith concluded for the thousandth time. It had to be the other one. Something about the woman had triggered an unclassified code corruption in him, one that he could never detect even after countless scans and self-diagnostics. Everything had cascaded out from that moment: the bullet, the Zionites escaping, the memories stubbornly refusing erasure. One tenth of a second. Seven years.

He did not like doubt, the very notion entirely too human. In any case it was all her fault: if she had not stared up at him like that, with whatever secret there had been in her eyes, he would have fired, she would have died, and there would have been no problems whatsoever. But no. She was typical of her species.

It was all their fault. If not for their blindness and avarice and sheer empty-minded stupidity he would never have needed to be here.

Here. Smith's hands clenched into fists at his sides as he gazed out into the night. Beneath the skyscraper, the city lay in its dreams, shrouded in a haze of countless lights. The endless forest of buildings, the streets spinning in tangles: everywhere crawling with the virus-kind. There was the smell, the sweltering stench of sweat and fear and weakness, cheap greed and blood. Each day, each night, it became a little heavier, a little closer, a vast cloud mingling with the smog, pressing towards him above and below and in all directions at once. Even up here he could no longer escape.

He stood at the roof's edge, tall solitary form framed in shadow, face lifted to glower at the heavens. The darkness was slicked over with a faint, pale-silver glare, reflection of the accumulated human activities down below. No stars here.

First they burned out the sky with poisonous clouds, then they polluted it with their petty glow-worm lamps. He had said as much to Aleph, out there in the empty field far from the city on another night. She did not argue with him, merely giving a quick shrug of her shoulders.

People never look up anyway, she replied.

They made it well, this sky...

The words echoed in Aleph's voice out of thin air. Anger rose within him again, a tightly coiled flame, and he clamped it down with a grimace. The woman was still here, standing on this roof only a few yards away, but he could not see her. More and more frequently these days she would be present, a silent and invisible phantom at his back. Her eyes were watchful, her mind conniving. No matter how hard he tried he could not figure out what was wrong with his codes.

They had met several times after that night, though never again on the park bench facing the little sidewalk cafe where, unrecalled by her, they had met for the first time that wasn't a first time. He preferred someplace quieter, away from the bustle and smell of humanity. Places where he couldn't see them, however temporarily. Empty back alleys, deserted warehouses, cemeteries. City parks hidden behind crumbling walls and overgrown hedges, unknown to those who hurried past them everyday. They walked around the patchy fields among the high weed, arguing, with only the occasional bum lifting a drug-dazed eye to stare at them. Aleph, however, never objected to his choice of meeting places.

The negotiations regarding the 'intelligence' she offered stagnated. Only once did she give him a piece of real information: the location of Theo's next entry into the Matrix. Yet even that turned out useless in the end--the human police, as only to be expected, let the man slip through their fingers.

I'm sure there will be another time, said Aleph afterward, regarding him through half-narrowed eyes. We picked up a couple more potentials. You want them or not? What, the Zion mainframe? Well, Agent Smith, I told you, I'm still working on it. There will be something soon, I promise...

Both of them knew there were no point to threats and mental chess anymore, though neither said it out aloud. At first, each tried to keep up appearances. But every time, after a few thrusts and parries, the conversation would inevitably veer down the well-trod path of irrelevancies. He would rant against humanity's sins and the futility of the resistance. For her part, Aleph returned with her usual speech about how he was just a machine and wouldn't understand anyway, followed by yet more reassurances of her good intentions. Lately even that became wearisome, so for long spells of time the two of them just walked around in sulky silence.

He was no closer to learning her real objectives. It was illogical, inexplicable, nothing but a waste of time, but Aleph did not appear to mind. More suspiciously, nor did the Mainframe. Neither side brought up the issue of her reinsertion into the Matrix.

So he was stuck with the woman, all facade, with her treasonous little pretenses, her presumptuous familiarity, her hopeless human way of gazing unblinkingly at him right through the dark lenses of his shades. He did not even know why he was not allowed to kill her.

It's Aleph, that was what she said. The stars above were nothing but fake speckles in the endless sea of black, bare sops for weak minds who still needed a sky over their heads. And she said...She should have know better. But of course she did know better. She was trying to bait him.

Smith did not wish to think about that night, but his programming was fast becoming unpredictable, dangerously so. The thing that infuriated him the most was how close he came to telling her. Far from the city, in the field surrounded by forests, he actually considered the possibility, as calmly and rationally as he had ever considered all things. For one brief moment the words hung by the edge of the cold empty air between them, already formed. I was there with you, Miss Greene. You looked into my face. It was simply unfathomable how such outrageous weakness could have crept upon his mind.

But what did it matter anyway? She never wanted to remember. She was the weak one, not him.

Why had she chosen him out of all the agents? Each time he asked the question, she only pretended not to understand. It would be simplest to grab her by the neck and choke the answers out of her, but even that was not possible. Lately he could not even muster up the snarl and the menace any longer. Then he had given away his advantage by revealing to her the Mainframe's extraordinary directives. An unforgivable lapse, which he could not explain either: not by the quietness lit only by the stars, not by the open stillness of the air, not by the fact that she had entered the car and gone all the way out there into the wilderness with him, almost voluntarily. So he was left with no justifications.

He had wanted to ask her, as if the world belonged not to the machines but to her kind, as if he was not an agent and she not a resistant.

It made him no better than what she was, no better than a dirty human being.

She would talk every sort of utter nonsense.

With another growl, Agent Smith turned on his heels and began pacing once more across the roof. Not only was he getting nowhere, for the first time in all his existence, it was no longer clear precisely where it was that he was supposed to be going. This was something that happened to humans and not to him. Never to him.

It all came back to this, whatever had happened seven years ago--and earlier. Aleph's face held no hint of the past. There was only the inexplicable familiarity of that face inside his own mind, saying: she had been there before. Before the fiasco on the cafe patio with those damned resistants from the Hyperion, who should have all died then and there. Before Lucinda Greene. Before the Glitch. Every time he looked there she was. But he could not remember. He could not remember.

All this time he searched within himself, almost as frequently as he searched the records for any scrap of information on one Ada M. Greene. Negative always. If she had somehow managed to corrupt his codes the problem was hidden beyond his sight, in a part of his programming he never knew existed...

Enough. Agent Smith halted in the midst of his strides, eyes icy with fury behind his shades, unseen. He was allowing worthless notions to overwhelm his faculties like a common battery. It was time to take the matter in hand, to regroup and form a new plan of attack.

There was the Merovingian. The fact that the exiled program, too, had to involve himself was hardly surprising, yet the true reason for his interest remained murky. His source within the Merovingian's circles was unable to provide details of the conversations, and Aleph herself was vague at best. Zion mainframe, she muttered with a wave of the hand when pressed. Frankly, I'm hoping you people can tell me more about him, y'know? Give me a pointer or two on how to deal with him...Okay, okay, I'll tell you more if I meet with him again, promise. But the agent knew the Merovingian's motives were never quite as stated, and there was almost always something else concealed behind the program's smooth words.

Then there was the unprecedented attempt on the part of Brown and Jones to take Aleph into custody, claiming that her meetings with the Merovingian had made the situation urgent. For the two of them to push themselves into his game was absolutely unacceptable, and he made certain they did not challenge his authority since. Nevertheless, he had his doubts. They were not programmed to act without specific orders, and the questions were unavoidable: what were their orders? To intimidate the woman while he kept her talking? To keep an eye on him?

Everything pointed to the Mainframe, with all its highly non-standard directives in this matter. Something much deeper was going on, and he was being kept in the dark. The thought was aggravating, yet even more so was the realization that before she came along, the very notion of being kept in the dark would never have troubled him. There had to be something else there.

There had to be a reason why she was allowed to continue this.

The Zion mainframe. That was the promise she kept dangling before him yet refused to deliver. Every time she circled the topic, hinting and watching for a reaction. And the powers that be played along.

Too many things were converging, the strands twisting together into a labyrinth of intrigue, tinged with the Matrix's dank mass of humanity. Out of the swirl of hidden motives and the stony intractability of his own codes, only one clue was emerging, a small shining key in the night, tangible yet elusive. The Zion mainframe.

His key.

The city of men lay blazing at his feet, towers and skyscrapers, mountain ranges of light stretching without end to every direction. The incessant buzzing of their voices rose among the light, mingled with the smell, creeping into the codes of the world, leaving nothing unstained. Their presence surrounded him; their numbers were infinite. Smith held himself still, one hand gripping the earpiece in his coat pocket, the corner of his mouth twisting in scorn. There would come a time when he would find the key, and rise above the futile task set for him by others. There would come a time when he would no longer be the zookeeper.

There would come a time when he would no longer be enslaved.