The Next Generation

Written by Anakin McFly

Chapter One: It Starts

There were times when Robert wondered about his father: who he was, what he was like. He had never known him; the story went that his father had mysteriously disappeared one day, leaving behind his pregnant wife. The rumours went that he had left her for another woman, and Robert’s mother generally did not like to talk about it. When he was younger, Robert had learnt the hard way that the majority of children had a father whose whereabouts were more or less known to the family. There were those whose parents had divorced, or whose parents were dead, but Robert was the only one whose father had ‘mysteriously disappeared’.

Robert had also come to learn that his mother was at her most talkative on the matter when she was drunk.

“He was an idiot,” he recalled her saying once, remembering how she struggled to stand straight as she rambled on, not particularly aware of Robert’s presence. “Always messing about with those computers. I told him. I told him it wasn’t good for him. But he wouldn’t listen. Oh no. He wouldn’t. Then one day they came for him. Serves him right. Computer still running and everything, weird stuff on it, something about the Matrix, whatever that is. Idiot. I told him. Wouldn’t listen.”

Many a night had Robert spent lying awake in his bed wondering who They were. He fantasised about the possibilities: aliens, perhaps? He imagined his father struggling valiantly against the little green forces from outer space, bravely refusing to divulge the secrets of… of something or other, something important anyway, maybe related to the Matrix or whatever it was his mother had seen on that computer, and so the aliens had stunned him with their alien stun guns and dragged him off to their spaceship, never to be seen again. Not by this world, anyway. Maybe his father had become a hero on some far flung planet out there in the cosmos, and would one day return to Earth on his own spaceship and take Robert and his mother away on wild intergalactic adventures.

But now Robert was already an adult – technically; he’d turned twenty-one that week – and saw such fantastic ideas as nothing more than childish dreams. Besides, at his age, no one really cared whether or not you had both parents accounted for. Robert brought his motorbike to a sputtering halt in front of a regular suburban house with a nice garden. The windows in the house were lit, and raucous noise could be heard coming through the open door. A party was in full swing.

Robert got off the motorbike and went over to the back of it to withdraw several boxes of piping hot pizza from the insulated container. He stacked them neatly on one arm, then closed the container and walked smartly up to the front door of the house to make his delivery.

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Ivan Reid sat hunched up by his computer in the darkness, the only light being that of the computer screen. He knew it was bad for his eyes – after all, this particular habit of his was probably one of the factors that had contributed towards the need for him to wear spectacles – but there was something fascinatingly antisocial about it. Light meant people, and noise. Light meant being bright and happy and full of goodwill towards the stupid, ignorant masses, until you became one of them.

Ivan wasn’t one of them. He knew better.

He knew, for instance, that there was something wrong with the world. He wasn’t quite sure what it was; he just knew that there was something wrong with it. Sometimes he might be looking at a tree and then suddenly get the feeling that the tree wasn’t really there physically, but was rather just a construct in his mind; if he stared harder he sometimes saw – or thought he saw – the tree break down temporarily into little green symbols and numbers, like… Like code. Computer code.

But the moment always passed. Ivan didn’t know if other people ever experienced what he did. Probably not, he thought, for Other People cared only for the superficialities of this world: friends, money, relationships, the latest trends, sex, drugs, rock n’ roll…

Although there were also others like him, all of them people whom Ivan had met online. Many of them had mentioned something called the Matrix. No one really knew what it was, but Ivan suspected that it was something big, and probably something to do with the weirdness he saw in the world.

It was strange, actually. At one point there had supposedly been a deluge of information regarding the Matrix available on the Internet. A lot of people – if you believed the stories – had vanished during that time, but then suddenly all that had stopped. Information was withdrawn. Ivan had managed to dredge up some of that, but never enough to tell him much. Which meant that the people behind it were probably fairly powerful and good with computers. Not many people come hide information on the Internet from Ivan when he was determined to uncover it.

He liked to think of himself as the greatest hacker in the history of the world. He knew it probably wasn’t true, but it was still nice to think of it like that. Besides, there was always the age factor. He was still only seventeen. There was plenty more time for him to grow and hone his skills.

Online, they knew him as Xenos: the stranger. Someone different, apart from this world. Perhaps one day its ruler. World domination aspiration might be clichéd, but they were always fun.

Meanwhile, anyone who dared to refer to him as ‘Xena’ would be saying hello to the utter corruption of their computers’ hard drives.

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“YAAAAAAAHHHH!” Kevlar exclaimed in joyous glee as he ran – arms raised triumphantly over his head – straight into a wall. He slammed into it, bounced off, and fell back onto the floor with a dazed but exuberant grin on his four-year-old face. Kevlar MacMillan had an extremely high threshold of pain, and he took great delight in showing it off.

Janie Watson tried to ignore him and concentrate on her book.

Kevlar stumbled to his feet and looked for something else he could run into. He decided that his eldest brother Keith looked like a possible target.

Seconds later, the eleven-year-old was chasing the human projectile around the house, threatening murder and limb dislocation.

Janie tried to concentrate on the amount of money she would be paid for this, if only she could survive the night. It was probably also a condition of payment that none of the kids she was babysitting ended up dead. No breakages would be a bonus as well, although with five young boys – one of whom had ADHD – running around, that much seemed unlikely.

There was a loud crash as Kevlar knocked over something breakable in his attempts to get away from Keith.

Janie checked her watch and took some comfort in the fact that there were only two hours left before she could leave this place.

The MacMillan kids were legendary in the neighbourhood, due largely to Kevlar, who seemed intent in living up to his unusual namesake. Five boys: Keith, Kenneth, Kevin, Keanu and Kevlar. Their parents had a thing for names starting with ‘Ke’. They had also expected several girls, because then they could have names like Kelly, Keisha, Kendra, Keira and so on. The first three sons were fine. For the fourth, they had to resort to obscure Hawaiian names. And for the fifth – well, Kevlar.

Angry loud yells erupted from the next room as Kevlar ran straight into a LEGO tower that Kevin and Keanu had been painstakingly constructing. Pieces of LEGO scattered over the carpet, and a fight broke out.

Janie decided not to watch. It might make her feel guilty. After all, there was also the agreement that she had made with the kids: if she let them stay up past their bedtime and do whatever they wanted, they wouldn’t tell their parents that all she had done was coop up in the living room reading storybooks and eating popcorn.

The sound of more yells and crashes reached her ears.

Janie shook her head slowly.

Her handphone rang, and she reached over to answer it.

“Hello? …Hey, Bob… Yeah. I’m at the MacMillan house. …Yeah. …Well, it depends on how you define ‘okay’.” She threw a popcorn into her mouth. “Yeah, you can come over if you like. They won’t be back for a couple of hours. …Yeah. Sure, you can bring a pizza. I could do with some food. …See you, then. …Love you too.”

Janie hung up and scooped up more popcorn in her hand. The last two hours didn’t look so bad any more.

Chapter Two: Downtown

The sky of the real world was always dark, but it never rained. There was thunder and lightning in it, but no rain. Rain gave life, something suited for a vibrant and bustling biosphere completely unlike this dead world. Perhaps it could not truly be considered dead yet, for humans – living things – still inhabited it; although by sheer force of numbers, the rule of the planet really belonged to the cold artificial intelligence of the machines.

Yes, the war was over. But that fact did not undo the damage that had been ravaged on the planet during the war. The blackened sky was one of the many testaments to that.

Somehow, when people in the past dreamt about a future after the war, they had imagined things being the same as they had before everything started. They had imagined tall skyscrapers glinting in the sunlight, traffic plying the roads of expansive human cities, huge rolling fields of green where children laughed and played. They had imagined a world much like the one some of them had known in the Matrix, only real.

Whereas the truth was that nothing much had changed.

They had been trying, of course. For over a decade, in fact. But they had yet to discover a way to clear the skies, and that was an integral part of the Earth’s healing process. They needed the sunlight, because with sunlight plants could grow on their own in large quantities instead of in small amounts under electric lights. Plants were needed for food, for both humans and animals, although it was widely believed that all the animals had since died out from lack of food.

Without the sun, the plants had died, and the animals had fed off those plants had died, and the animals that fed off those animals had died, creating a long line of death all the way up the food chain. Although if humans had managed to survive, perhaps other creatures had as well.

The last human city of Zion was almost out of room to house its growing population. There had been a rush of people coming in during the early days after the war, the result of attempts at freeing minds from the mental prison that was the Matrix. It had been a foolish move, many realised too late.

Firstly, there was the problem of the newly unplugged people being unable to come to terms with reality. In the past, there had been a rule that said nobody was to be unplugged once they had passed a certain age. For some reason, this rule was neglected after the war, with disastrous consequences. There had been suicides, murder, people going mad. And so they stopped freeing minds for the moment.

Secondly, there was the simple problem of insufficient space and supplies for the population of Zion. Living conditions had become cramped, and food and water were increasingly hard to come by. It began to seem a better alternative to let the Matrix go on as it had done in the past. There was the issue of continuing to insert human babies into the Matrix, a practice that had, unfortunately, to continue. People in the Matrix would become suspicious if there were suddenly no more babies. Suspicion would lead to problems. A breakdown in the system. They could not afford that.

A little way from one of the entrances to the underground city of Zion, there had been erected a crude village made largely of metals and plastics, one of humankind’s pathetic attempts to reclaim the surface. Some people lived in there, able to take the cold. It was always dark, and so the electric lights always shone through the windows. They lent a modicum of life to the otherwise bleak landscape.

One half of this village rose up a hill of earth. At the top of this hill, two gravestones stood side by side on top of their respective graves. The gravestones were marked simply. One read ‘Neo’ and the other, ‘Trinity’.

Here there be corpses.

It was on this hill that Andy now stood, gazing respectfully at the graves as a cold breeze blew through his dark hair. His father had been close to the deceased. Andy had heard the stories about those two, especially the one about how they had risked all to fly to Machine City and finally end the war. They had given their lives for this cause. For that, both the humans and the machines were grateful.

The machines had, since the start of the first Matrix, been growing humans for their fields, and it was as a show of thanks that they grew an additional one – the artificially created offspring of Neo and Trinity. It was a way of continuing their legacy.

The baby was plugged into the Matrix along with the regular batch, for at least in the Matrix it would be able to grow up under the care of parents and be able to lead some kind of normal life.

So the machines plugged it in, and the storks took care of the delivery as usual.

“Nice weather today,” Filament remarked, climbing up the hill to where Andy was standing. He gazed thoughtfully at the sky. “Doesn’t look like rain any time soon.”

“Perfect for a day at the seaside,” Andy agreed.

“Or a camping trip up in the mountains.”

In the Matrix, Filament had been known as John. He’d been one of those unplugged in the massive post-war-mind-freeing-frenzy, and when entering the real world he had discovered that everyone else had more interesting names than he did. So he changed it.

“Filament?” they asked incredulously. “What kind of a name is that?”

“Uh, well, uh, filaments give off light, see, so it’s like I’m a sort of, uh, beacon kinda thing… uh… Oh, and they’re made of tungsten, which, uh, can withstand really high temperatures, so, um… yeah.”

“Wanna go downtown?” Filament asked. “We can check out that huge building we found last time.”

“Sure,” Andy said. “I’ve nothing to do, anyway.”

Downtown was their name for the nearby city ruins of the real world. The buildings were all old and dark and creepy, but that was what made it exciting. There was a certain thrill to walking down dark deserted streets knowing that you were probably all alone. What was more, all sorts of treasures lay hidden in the old city, mostly artefacts from the time before the war. It was a scavenger’s haven.

And even if you didn’t find anything, it was always fun to poke around.

For Andy, downtown was also the closest he could get to experiencing a real human city. The son of Morpheus and Niobe, he had been born into the real world the natural way. He had never been inside the Matrix. He could only guess at the wonders that it appeared to hold. He heard – and saw in videos – about strange and wonderful things like the sun, a huge light that shone down from the sky; and plants; and animals. He wondered if he would ever be able to discover first-hand what all those things were.

Downtown looked the same as it always had. Debris scattered around the roads. Junk, mostly, that had never been cleared, as well as the occasional weapon, or part of a machine – remnants from the early stages of the war, when humans still tried to retain their hold on the surface. Many things had been abandoned in the streets when the humans fled.

Under the perpetually overcast sky, Andy and Filament made their way to a large building that sat in the middle of an old car park. The car park still held several cars, parked neatly in their lots, never to be driven again.

“I wonder if those still work,” Andy mused, indicating the cars as they passed them.

“Probably not,” Filament concluded after a quick inspection. “Ignition keys aren’t there. And they’ve been lying here for ages. Internal systems are probably all corroded by now.”

Andy wondered what it would be like to drive a car.

The huge building that they now headed for had once been a shopping complex. Names of retail companies could still be made out on its exterior walls in faded paint. The walls had once been white, but now they – like practically everything else out there – were a dull shade of grey and scorched in areas.

The automatic glass doors no longer worked, but they smashed easily after several well-placed kicks. The two teenagers stepped around the remaining shards of glass on the floor and entered into the darkness.

They took out their torches and switched them on, casting two beams of light into the place. “Wow,” Filament commented.

The interior of the shopping complex had remained miraculously intact, almost untouched by the damage that was a common sight in other parts of the city.

Andy made his way to a rack of clothes, over which hung a faded sign announcing some sale or other. The clothes still lay neatly on the rack, although the fabric was old and crumbled between Andy’s fingers.

There was a small café near them, and they went in. The food had long been decomposed. Drinks clung to the sides of their containers. Whatever could be evaporated had long ago done so, leaving behind nothing but semi-solid residue.

“Hey, Fil, check this out,” Andy said some time later. They were in what appeared to be an electronics store. Andy shone his torchlight onto a box he had just opened. Inside gleamed a brand new DVD player, still shiny after all these years, protected by its packaging.

“Amazing how they’ve lasted so long,” Filament said. He jerked his thumb towards another part of the store. “There’re video cameras over there. All new. Still in their boxes, like these.”

Andy had never seen a real video camera before, and he lifted one out of its box with awe. “Maybe if we take some back, we can get ‘em working,” he suggested.

“The batteries would be corroded by now,” Filament replied. “Let me look at that…”

He turned the video camera over in his hands and found the catch to open the battery cover. It still looked new, and slightly different from the ones he had known in the Matrix. Future technology from the early part of the twenty-first century.

“I guess we could try,” Filament said.

They did a little more exploring, then trudged back with their loot to what passed for human civilisation.

To Be Continued...

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