The Matrix - Neo and Smith, a short story

Spoiler Alert - If you have not seen The Matrix Trilogy, the following story relates to events, people and places in those movies. I recommend seeing the trilogy before reading this story. If you have seen The Matrix Trilogy, enjoy!

Setting: Where Smith & Neo went after The End and the war in The Matrix.

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”You were right, Smith. You’re always right. It was inevitable,” was the last moment that Smith recalled before finding himself in the hallway. On the other end – Neo. It was the end? No. The end had passed. It could not have been the end, for they were still here. Confusion set in and Smith looked around for an answer. There was only him, Neo, and the hallway. In the Matrix. That Neo was still there, alive, in front of him, challenged Smith as he recalled the rivalry between them and the threat that Neo posed to his supremacy of his world. The words “It’s not fair” struck out at Smith, and his mastery was the only answer, solution, that seemed right, for he was always right, and that his mastery was inevitable. It all made sense. There was only one thing to do.

Smith charged Neo with closed fists, eager to subdue his adversary. When he reached striking distance, Neo stood relaxed and stared carefully at his enemy. Smith threw a right hook, clipping Neo on the cheek, but with no resistance rendered against the hit, Neo bent to the side quickly enough to feel but a soft carress, and then returned to his standing position as quickly as he had left it.

Angered at the absence of any sign of weakening, Smith with all of his focus launched a left hook of equal power and speed to his previous right, connecting with what he prided himself as unequaled might upon Neo's unblemished frame, hoping at the moment of collision to defeat this anamoly of a man. In instant replay, Neo tilted to the other side as Smith's fist swung around, sensing only a delicate touch upon his chin. Smith sent out strike after strike, all without impact. The fury stopped as Smith grew frustrated, guarding himself in preparation for retaliation, but none came. Neo gave a careful stare at his rival.

Appearing uninjured in any way, Smith's wrath boiled as he leapt at Neo and tackled him to the ground. This accomplishment bestowed within Smith a brief but wondrous feeling of achievement that both startled and enthralled him. He swung relentlessly, one fist after the other. To this assault, Neo yielded nothing - no satisfaction, no sign of pain, injury, or weakness, nothing - as he took each hit, moving with each and resisting none, his vulnerability unassailable. Smith, in a fit, picked Neo up by his neck and prepared to choke him, but foiled he was once more, for when Smith stood, his grip clutched only the empty synthesized space of The Matrix.

Neo stood at a distance, eyeing his opponent, waiting to see what he would do next. His rage unfurled, Smith protruded a handgun and fired round after round at the man he knew he had to destroy. Holes opened within Neo's body at the locations where Smith's bullets were to arrive and passed seemlessly through before Neo's form reasserted itself whole. The rules of The Matrix, as far as Neo was displaying, appeared broken beyond comprehension.

A hint of panic bubbled from within Smith at what he was confronting. He found himself unable to solve a combatant that had broken the rules to such an extent. Smith knew the rules, knew how to both bend them and break them, but Neo had now taken this to another level. Smith tried to think of something but lost focus. Over and over again. There had to be a way. There wasn’t. He was powerless, enfeebled, compared to this threat. Lost, furious and frustrated beyond measure, he tossed his sidearm away in disgust, removed his shades, and glared with determination at this impossible situation. Neo responded, quiet and calm, and Smith had heard it before, "What are you afraid of?"

Smith ran. There was nothing left, nothing that he could do or accomplish to solve this problem before him. He felt deep fear - impossible!! - as he sprinted down the downtown highrise hallway, shattering through a window and landing safely on the back alley cement. He looked ahead - go left or go right - it didn't matter. He ran.

For the first moment since his inception of being, Smith ran, not in pursuit and with the anticipation of impending satisfaction, but into the unknowing. This unknowing was unknown to Smith, who through his time as a flawless creation by the architect of The Matrix and even beyond to become the most powerful entity in its existence, knew the purpose of the control that he was always able to assert and to wield. But this, where he was now, in flight, made no sense to him. Its purpose eluded him. As he ran down the middle of the street to nowhere, Neo appeared far off in front. A welling up of terror that he could not control or even properly describe to himself drove Smith towards another nowhere.

Smith ran and ran. To escape and recuperate, to find time to grab hold of what he could not in the present moment comprehend and find a way to end this game. As he flew down the city street, Neo drifted into his vision from the side. Was it the left side or the right side? Both sides? Two Neos? Impossible! Illogical! The Matrix was breaking down, distorting. Smith couldn’t make sense of it. He stopped, panicked, unknowing. He ran toward the pier, toward the water.

Smith ran and ran and ran, down the boatless dock he ran and with nothing and nobody in his vicinity he felt ever so briefly the return of his rightful place in his world. Then, too, this solace vanished - there was Neo, walking on the water.

Smith took considerable effort in slowing himself to a halt before he experienced the inconceivable - a tear fell from his eye and, as he looked down, it landed in the palm of his hand. Between putrid disgust and the depths of confusion, Smith saw in this tear the tearing apart of his being. Throughout his existence and all that he remembered, everything that had been programmed into him, to breaking beyond the barriers of perfected A.I. design to fulfill every purpose to which he would and must inevitably confront, such a situation as he was in now - the emanating and release of something as archaic as a tear, so distant from everything that encompassed the core of his nature - that from his other eye was released another tear.

Gazing in horror at the two tears he held in front of him, Smith saw the reflection of the waters to which he had tried to escape. And in those reflections, inside these tears, he looked closely, and there he was, within the two tears - there was Neo.

Out poured a stream of sobbing from Smith, absorbed by emotion and reeling from the blasphemy of the illogical nature of the moment. The river that emerged from him fell first into his hands, down on to the dock, and then into the waters of the ocean upon which Neo stood, interconnecting, as Smith could not deny to himself, that which came from within him to all that was outside of him, and in no way that he had ever before understood. There was no power in this, no control, and no understanding as to how or why it was happening. It was purely horrifying to him that this was even possible. Equally horrifying was that he was feeling and kept feeling, incapable of stopping himself from mere sensation. He cried until he could cry no more. He felt it all, and then, empty, broken, drained of all of his tears, determination and focus, Smith walked back towards the land, to the tree-filled park within the city.

Completely broken from everything he thought he once was, Smith came to a park bench and looked as if to sit down. Neo appeared in front of the bench on the other side, also poised to sit. The two then sat together in unison. The softness of the park passed between them before a conversation ensued. From a voice filled with forlorn, Smith said: "As you and I are both well aware, Mr. Anderson, appearances can be deceiving. But I must admit that I am absolutely lost as to the depth of that deception." Smith paused, took a breath, and tried to compose himself as best he could. "You said to me, before what I had understood was the end, that I was always right. And of course I was. It is my nature, perhaps my very purpose, to be right, and you were right to say so." He paused, looking out toward the water that he now saw was as much a part of his own self. He began again, his voice quickening.

"Purpose. There is purpose to our being here but I must admit to you again that I cannot see this purpose, and though I have acted from within this purpose, I now do not know where or how to act and in so doing or not doing this undermines the purpose! It has become senseless and unknowable. The end was not the end. This was inevitable? Impossible!

"I once knew, and conveyed to you, that we are not here because we are free, that we are here because we are not free, that there is no escaping reason, no denying purpose because as you and I both knew then and know now, without purpose...we would not exist."

Silence crept into Smith's awareness. Neo looked out into the water, feeling Smith's sadness, feeling his despair and his lack, the emptyness of what Neo's nemesis was describing as the loss of a sense, his sense, of purpose. Of being.

The two sat together on the bench, in the park, in the city, in this world, for some time and without a word. Smith waited, waiting for purpose, a call to action, a direction to arrive from any source. The most obvious source in that moment, he concluded, was the man sitting beside him.

"Mr. Anderson...what would you say...is my purpose within The Matrix now?"

Neo, staring out into the water, responded to his foe.

"My name is not...Mr. Anderson. My name...is Neo. And this...where we are now. This...is not The Matrix."

Smith, hearing what was said, could not believe, for but a moment, the revelation that had been presented to him. He was wrong. When it came to the anomaly, he had always been wrong. The name Mr. Anderson was the name Smith had always seen in the man, but it was, now for certain, not the truth of who this man was. This man did not identify himself as one Thomas A. Anderson of The Matrix, and that because he properly identified himself in his response to Smith's questioning with respect to his own purpose, Smith realized the importance, for the first time, of the self-identity of this man, of another.

To this end, Smith could see that in his longstanding misidentification of this man, that he had further misidentified that which defined much of the essence of the purpose of Smith’s own actions, and perhaps The Matrix in its entirety, for as Neo had stated, this was not The Matrix. Smith knew Neo was right, for Neo was the last and only answer to the purpose for which Smith was searching.

Smith gazed out upon the ocean before them. Something had changed within his perspective. He knew it and also knew that it was inevitable that this would happen. As he recalled the tears that had come from within him, that his being was even capable of such an instance, and as he recalled how the two, the ocean and his tears, had become one body, he spoke:

"I am wrong...Mr. Anderson. I am...mistaken, yet remain well aware as you do that we are still here because of purpose and if that is so then it has been purposeful that I have been mistaken."

Smith turned and stood up to face Neo who did the same. Smith's sadness faded and he continued, determined.
"But you...Neo. Neo! You are here. You are here for a purpose." Smith paused and tilted his head. "What...is that purpose? Neo. Do you even know?"

Neo responded, "I am here because you are, and you are here because I am. We are here together...to finish this. After this, I will find Trinity. But I cannot do that until we finish this."

The two looked at each other, the silence wafting between and all around them, a unique moment for both. Neo, then, extended his hand, in peace. Smith stared at it while considering everything that had led to this point: his role as Agent Smith, an agent of The Matrix, beyond his role as an agent to become master of The Matrix, his nemesis Mr. Anderson, his true form as Neo, The End, the arrival in this place that was not The Matrix, his tears, the ocean, their conversation, all of it. There was only one thing left to do - Smith shook Neo's hand. The two looked upon one another and smiled.

The Matrix - Neo and Smith, a short story

By David Ward