The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Matrix

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Insert clever subtitle here before posting
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And now for something completely different. The silly side of The Matrix.

One thing I didn't want to do was to copy the books inserting Matrix references instead of SF references. ("OK, instead of 'Vogon' we'll say 'Machine,' and let's do a global search and replace for 'Trillian' into 'Trinity'...") Even hewing to the basic plot elements of the stories was not to be done.

I also didn't want to use any of the little language tricks that the late great Douglas Adams employed. If I read another high school essay where the author steals Adams' "It hung in the air in exactly the way that a brick doesn't," I will not be responsible for my actions. If you want to read those, read the original. The radio play and TV series are also worthwhile, they're certainly exemplars of their mediums; but I still like the books best.

No, I wanted to do something in the spirit of Adams, including a little Dirk Gently. You might also see some Fall And Rise of Reginald Perrin and The Good Life thrown in for good measure. Taking a cue from Lewis Carroll's Hunting Of The Snark, which is separated into Fits, I have Spasms instead of chapters. I think it's much closer to the way I write. The secondary characters are all mine on various servers since I've had a deuce of a time finding writers and readers to form a faction. (Interested? Talk to ClemSnide on Syntax or click on my name and leave me a private message.)

Despite that, the occasional element came through-- the Guide itself, for example. I wish we all had one. Not Panicking would make the world a much nicer place. You will in fact see a little stolen directly from HHGTTG despite my best efforts. I'm only human, or at least I claim to be and you'll never know for sure. And it is hard to write something with "Hitchhikers' Guide" in the title and not use the phrase "large friendly letters."

Finally, I would advise you to jump right into the first Spasm instead of reading the Preface, as they are always tedious and boring. ...Oh, sorry, perhaps I should have put this paragraph up top, eh?

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FIRST SPASM
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Seagulls called, faintly, in the distance; the early morning sun sparkled on the surface of the pristene water, spreading a million bursts of light as the waves broke onto the shore. The ocean moved rhythmically against the pink sands, over and over. Each surge was accompanied by a roar, a liquid clash, which (rather than sound disharmonious) left one feeling satisfied and complete. It was the single most relaxing image that Sam Hill had ever seen.

It ought to be. He had written it.

"This has been... a Normalidol(tm) moment," a man's baritone voice slowly announced. The man, clad in a business suit, walked through the surf. He had been a last-minute replacement because the sponsor thought the healthy-looking elderly man in a bathing suit was a bit too, well, you know. Those were in fact his exact words.

"I don't know," Sam had said, to which the sponsor replied "Well, you know." Sam had the horrible feeling that this was one of those conversations which would take an awfully long time and leave neither participant feeling like anything useful had been accomplished.

"Gay?" Sam had blurted. The sponsor, who will not be mentioned further in this manuscript and will therefore not be named (although to quell the curiosity of the two-- excuse me, three-- percent of readers who simply must know these things, this parenthetical comment will reveal that his name was Sam Andreas, no relation to the Toronto Andreases)-- I'm very sorry, it seems that I have lost control of this paragraph and will start again.

"Gay?" Sam had blurted. The sponsor hurriedly waved his hands and assumed the facial expression of someone who must for business reasons pretend to embrace diversity but who in fact hated minorities. He started quoting from the Spliff Pharmaceuticals employee manual, at which point Sam gave up and coded in the image of a businessman, complete with hat and briefcase, being knocked about by the waves as he delivered the required disclaimers.

"... eruption of mushroom-like pustules, cranial implosion or explosion, and dry mouth. These side effects were generally mild and occurred in less than--" his mouth made the shape of "two" but a different man's voice said "three"-- then the original voice concluded "percent of all cases."

Sam pressed the button on the bone-shaped 3DiVo remote to shut the commercial off. His room turned back from the beautiful ocean scene into its relatively drab but more normal appearance. It was no use. He was awake.

---
SECOND SPASM
---

His office at Ubiquitous Productions (various slogans: "We're everywhere," "You can't escape us," "Thought you could get away, eh?") was scarcely less drab than his apartment, Sam was second in command of the Subtle Placement division, whose title might lead one to believe that he subtly placed things in some manner or another. As was a continuing theme in Sam's life, it did not.

"Rainstorm coming up," announced Mr. Feeder cheerfully as Sam entered. Bastard. Sam had set the alarm early that day hoping to be in the office before the manager of his department, his immediate superior. Sam had the suspicion that Mr. Feeder lived in a supply cabinet. "Lots of puddles. Perfect time to deploy the Reflecteriffic(tm) ads."

"They're not nearly ready, Tom," Sam replied, hanging his overcoat neatly on his designated peg. "They have caused blindness in the tests."

"Oh, there are going to be two or three percent of people who have bad reactions to anything," laughed Mr. Feeder. "Christ, remember those ads for that body-repair shop, the green van driving on its roof? Worked out in the end, though. Caused a lot of accidents, made a lot of business for that company. And Legal got us through like champs. Say, any coffee left?"

Sam knew what was coming, in the same way that a document knows that the shredder is being prepared for it, and he could do about as much to avoid it. "I don't know, Tom, I just got in."

Mr. Feeder slapped his forehead. "Of course! I did get in first today, didn't I?" They had been classmates in college, except in the semester when Sam wanted to hike through the Nature Reserve. "Finding himself," he called it; "Getting it out of his system," the others had called it. It had been a beautiful four months. Long days when the only sound was a single chickadee, calling for its mate. Picking berries to supplement his trail rations. Watching a herd of bison stampede across the dusty plain. Meeting a girl near the end, making love at the base of a cliff, watched by stars. Seeing his fat melt away into hard muscles and a washboard abdomen.

During this time, this incredibly wonderful time, Tom had gotten an academic lead that Sam never caught up with. Everywhere Sam went after that, Tom was there, already set up in some position of responsibility. The Nature Reserve semester was all but forgotten now. Sam's body had traded its muscles back for fat, and had added a little, just to teach him. The woman never called him, and when Sam tried, the number had been disconnected. But it was clear that there were going to be Tom Feeders cropping up for the rest of his life.

The lunch game was next. After four hours of work, the SP staff snapped their flourescent desk lamps off as a unit (Sam's had an annoying flicker) and went off to lunch. Sometimes Sam went with one of the junior employees, but today he really wanted to be alone, which was unfortunate since Tom always tried to lunch with him. The game, thusly, was Sam's daily attempt to avoid doing so. If there were rules for the game, only Tom had a set. If there were little painted wooden pieces, several were missing; possibly the cat had batted them under the sofa.

"He-ey, Sammy boy!" he announced, gruff and chummy in that annoying way fraternity members have had since the days of the Greeks (when they used proto-Indo-European letters to denote their affiliation). "Where ya eating today, ole buddy ole pal?"

Having lunch with Tom Feeder was near the end of Sam's list of fun things to do with an hour, just a little lower than running a belt sander over his upper body but higher than doing a similar action on his lower body. Mostly because of the genitals. Sam had a book he wanted to read in the park. It was about how whales communicated.

"Probably not going to eat today, Tom, just wanted to relax and enjoy some" (here he paused briefly to make the next two words stand out) "quiet time." He was going to stop at a Boomer Burger and pick up a sandwich on the way but no reason to spell things out.

"Taking up some exercise, eh? Trying to reduce the old gut, eh?" As always, Tom hadn't really heard him, but was running some sort of internal dialog that involved a virtual Sam Hill. The real Sam felt vaguely sorry for this doppleganger, trapped as he was in Tom's mind. He imagined the second Sam pleading to be given the sweet surcease of death during moments when Tom was badgering someone else.

At the moment, though, Sam had not only talked himself out of a quiet luncheon with a good book, but had somehow gotten Tom to believe that they were to exercise together, which was even further down on his list, considerably past the whole series of "rabid wolverine" entries. Just then two junior members of staff passed by, talking.

"Why does the porridge bird lay its egg in the air?" one asked the other. The other laughed. Sam was interested in where that came from but the manager blocked his path to the elevator. No matter how hard he tried Sam could not get around Mr. Feeder's imposing form before the door closed.

Sam gave up. It was the one thing he was really good at, having had so much practice at it. "Why don't we go to a diner and you can tell me all about your new hyperscreen TV," he sighed. Tom had left brochures for the various manufacturers in conspicuous locations for weeks, and Sam was sure he'd bought one over the weekend. It won't be all that bad, he told himself. Once he gets started talking about his new toy I can zone off and think about other things.

You're lying, himself replied. I mean, I'm lying. I've tried this before, remember? I always lose my train of thought when he pokes me in the arm or chest to punctuate a point.

Yes, I suppose you're right-- I mean, I'm right, himself wearily admitted to himself. And it's hard to think about whale songs when he's spraying Secret Sauce from a Big Boomer(tm) out of his mouth. Which he does every time he laughs.

Yuk, himself and himself thought in unison. During this internal dialog, Tom had been strangely quiet. More precisely, he was just plain quiet, which was strange for him at any time. Sam phased back into reality and saw that his boss was posed in a conspiratorial wink and nudge posture, like he had been tagged in a game of "Statues" and all the other kids had heard the ice cream truck.

Sam looked over his shoulder and saw one of the childrens' videos that they were planning on displaying on Mylar balloons, the kind bought for birthday parties, the kind that never biodegrade and kill animals that swallow them. Nanny Tech simpered across the screen and cooed "Aren't you a good little boy and/or girl! I know what you want: the new Nanny Tech Tickle Tummy Toy! Run home now and tell mommy, daddy, or your court-designated caregiver all about it!"

"Nanny Tech causes paralytic shock. Hm, have to add that to the list of side effects," Sam muttered, boarding the elevator and not looking back in case he might see a gift horse whose mouth happened to be open.

---
THIRD SPASM
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Down in the park, the Machmen were meeting the Machines and were playing kill-by-numbers. Sam found a bench near a wall where the gang members never ventured. You couldn't see the river, but you could hear it when the traffic noises subsided. It was a hot but overcast day, but Sam preferred the outdoors to being inside, no matter how much air-conditioned comfort the inside had. Up to a point, at least. He wasn't a maniac.

The book on whale songs was fascinating. Sam's Cluck-a-Boom(tm), the chicken sandwich served by Boomer Burger, lay half-eaten on his lap in its pasteboard packaging. Its wrapper displayed an animated chicken who would have said "Cock-a-doodle-doo! Next time, why not buy two?" every ten seconds if Sam hadn't turned off the sound-- the advertising wrappers were a competitor's product but the technology was pretty common.

Forty-five minutes into his lunch breaks, at least the good ones, Sam always had the idea that he should just sit on the bench the rest of the day and to hell with work. He always had to weigh the satisfaction of a little rebellion against the inevitable lecture from Tom and the division chief on how everyone was an integral part of the team and how he could always arrange some time off ahead of time if he needed to and how promotions were coming up soon and how there was no "I" in "Advertising." (Sam could never figure that last part out.) Generally, Responsibility won. It did today, pinning Rebellion to the mat two falls out of three. Sam picked up the sandwich and finished munching on it, staring at the book and determined to make it to the end of the chapter.

A shadow blocked his light. It was a man dressed in a strange pyjama-like outfit, green with white edging, contrasted by a beige fedora hat, fingerless gloves, and orange sneakers. Despite the mild sunlight of the spring day, he was wearing nearly opaque sunglasses. "Nutter," thought Sam, and then said out loud "I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior long ago, if that's what you're asking about," hoping to head off that unrewarding line of questioning.

It seemed to take the pyjama man aback. "Um, no, I was going to ask whether you had noticed anything wrong with reality lately." It sounded like he was taking a poll for a magazine, Popular Reality perhaps.

Sam stared at the man in his glaringly inappropriate outfit and decided not to make the obvious comment. "Wrong with reality? I'd like to see something right with reality just once. Now, if you'll excuse me..."

The answer wasn't exactly what the fellow had in mind, but it seemed to satisfy him. He searched for a few seconds in his various pockets and pulled something out that he kept hidden in his hand. "Take the blue pill and the rabbit goes back into its hole. You will wake up tomorr--"

"Rabbits? I quite like rabbits. What's this about rabbits?"

That completely threw the pill-bearer. "Huh?"

"You were talking about rabbits."

"No, I was talking about--" Slightly desperate now, he started his script over again. "Have you noticed anything wrong with reality lately?"

Sam's headache, never far from the surface, was making itself known, banging memories of pots and pans onto imaginary kitchen counters inside his cerebral cortex. "Look. I know what you are. I've met dozens of you before. At the moment you are keeping me from finishing a very good chapter in a book I was enjoying, so if you will just give me the blue pill we can part company and you can go on to bothering someone else."

In the next Spasm, the man will be introduced by name, but I have to keep calling him "the man" or "the pill-holder" or "the pyjama-clad man" for the moment because of a lack of good adjectives. Whoever he was, though, he deferred to Sam's strongly-worded request; he opened his left hand above the now-empty sandwich wrapper and a single red pill fell out. The other pill adhered to his hand, stuck there by sweat.

The phrase "don't know where it's been" echoed briefly through Sam's mind but was pushed out by the more insistent "make him go away." "Don't know where it's been" sat in the occipital lobe and moped. Those readers who feel sorry for it will be encouraged to learn that shortly it will have reason to lord it over "make him go away." While the two phrases were arguing, Sam plucked the second pill from the man's palm and flicked it into his mouth.

The slightly sweaty pill dissolved in Sam's mouth, sending a mediciney cherry flavor through his throat. "There. Goodbye." He dogeared a corner of the page and put the book in his pocket before the flavor mentioned at the beginning of the paragraph sank in. "Wait. What was--"

The other man looked as confused as Sam, and opened his right hand to reveal two blue pills. "Whoops," he managed to gulp before things got even weirder than they already had been.

---
FOURTH SPASM
---

"Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Look, I'm really very very very sorry."

The words echoed inside the cave, which was filled with distended sacks each containing a human. Sam had been rescued from drowning in one, the feeding tube pulled from his throat as he vomited black bile that tasted vaguely of the man upstairs, who had passed away a few days ago. Sam wasn't sure of how he knew what the man tasted like. He just did and he didn't like the idea.

"Better than going back to work, though," he consoled himself as the baldy bloke, who bore some slight resemblance to a younger version of the fellow in green pyjamas, bent over him reiterating how really really sorry he really was.

As Sam's long-dormant physical senses began to work, he noticed two others in the cramped vessel, which a piece of nose art claimed was the HvCft Cooperation.

"Why is it, every time something changes, it changes for the worse?" Sam wondered. "Can I sue someone over this? Who's going to feed my cat?" As sore as his throat was, he must have wondered out loud. A second teenaged boy bent over his gurney and in a monotone answered "It's all code. Your cat is code. It will be dead when you return to the Matrix. You may code another if you so desire." Sam decided that his name was "Mister Sunshine."

He then noticed a third person, who appeared to be pulling on a rope, except that there was no rope in his hands. "Good lord, I've been captured by mimes," Sam thought, making sure he was in fact silent this time. You didn't want to anger the mimes. He had heard of mime abductions before. Scout leaders told their youthful charges stories by the campfire of children who had disappeared from that very campsite, only to return years later in berets and striped shirts, peeling bananas that no one could see.

"No, really, I'm sorry like you wouldn't believe," the first teen continued, which calmed Sam a little. A mime would never say that. A mime would never say anything, actually. The calm sensation lasted until he saw where they were taking him: a reclining chair with straps on the armrests, a metal clamp on the headrest, and spikes running all the way down the back. It was a lot like a dentist's chair, except that it looked more comfortable.

"Ah, I'll stand if you don't mind." The others ignored him and lifted him onto the evil-looking La-Z-Boy. There was a moment of disorinetation. "It really annoys me that I am starting to become used to being disoriented." Then he was in a white room with two chairs and a TV set. It was playing a recent episode of Fear Function.

"So that's it. I'm in hell. For all eternity my days will be spent wondering what animal's rectum they'll be eating on that night's episode." Just then the crew of the Cooperation appeared, popping onto the scene like Cybertubbies on the kids' show of the same name and, in fact, making the same sound effect.

One of the men was in green pyjamas. It was unquestionably the man from the park earlier that day. Sam made the connection between him and the youth on one side of his gurney when he started profusely apologizing. He was seated in the chair that Sam hadn't settled into.

Next, an expressionless man dressed in a black suit and black pants, black sunglasses and a black tie appeared, standing behind Sam's chair. He stayed silent but Sam imagined various job descriptions for him, such as "Funeral director," a "before" picture from Queer Hand for the Straight Man, "Internal Revenue auditor," and "Corpse." Seeing no cluster of lilies clasped in the man's hands, Sam crossed the second one off his list.

Lastly was a walking horror, the very stuff of which nightmares are made. Dead white of face but for red circles on the cheeks and black diamonds obscuring its eyes, it sprang up behind the TV set and pretended to be one of the participants on the TV show, who was at that moment eating the rectum of a Capuchin monkey. (Sam had guessed ring-tailed baboon, so he gave himself half credit.) It was the mime from the hovercraft.

"We haven't been introduced," the sitting man said after letting a final few apologies drip out like the last drops of urine before zipping up. "You're Sam Hill, and I'm xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx." He made the 'x' sequences sound like static, or a preadolescent male working up a really big gooey wad of spit from the back of his throat with which to torment a female sibling.

"That can't be your real name."

"Um-- well, my bluepill name is Burton Ernie."

"You... name your pills? Like some men give their genitals nicknames?" Tom Feeder's had been "The Weapon of Ass Destruction" in college.

"No no no no. See, your 'bluepill' life was before you took the red pill and Awakened." He suddenly remembered what had happened and was about to start apologizing again, an action which Sam cut off with the universal "get the hell on with it" wave of his hand. "What you do at this point is to choose a name that you think suits you, you know, the person that you always wanted to be."

"And you chose 'xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx.'" The man nodded. "No, I mean, out of all the names that twenty-six letters could be combined to make, including for example 'Srfwvegwqur,' that's the one that you consciously chose." He nodded again. "'Neo' was taken?"

"Well duh! He's like, the savior and stuff. But, see, I'm a lot like him, I think. I never met him but he was really cool and had all these super powers--"

"And 'xNeox?'"

"Yeah, someone had already taken that name."

"'xxNeoxx?'"

"That one too."

"'xxxNeoxxx?'"

"That one too." A subtle pattern was beginning to emerge. "But I'm more like Neo than any of them. Especially that guy 'xxxxNeoxxxx.'"

Sam was beginning to long nostalgically for the moment when he thought it was going to be him and the chairs watching Fear Function forever. The man interrupted his reverie and asked "So what's your handle going to be?"

"Sam Hill."

"No, you have to take a different one."

"Why? Is it a law?"

"Ah-- no, but--"

"Sam Hill suited me before and it's fine for the brief span of time that I'll be in this place. At least, I hope it's a brief span of time. How long are you planning to keep me here? I'm sure my lunch hour is long over."

"OK, we'll call you SamHill." Sam consoled himself with a small victory, so small that it was invisible to the naked eye, but a victory nonetheless. "Thing is, you can't go back to your old life. You're one of us now, an Awakened human."

Sam stared blankly at him. The man standing at attention behind his chair took up the thread. "Previously you were living a confortable illusion. Your life was a computer simulation designed to keep you sane."

"If that's what it was supposed to do, it wasn't very well designed," Sam muttered. The man continued.

"Humans and Machines live in balance. The Matrix provides a comfortable life and the humans' bodies provide the electricity that is required to keep the system running."

"That wouldn't work," Sam protested. "Do the math. Cells have a potential difference between their inner and outer walls, sure, but take that and the cell function ceases. Nerves transmit signals by reversing the electrical potential between their insides and outsides. Reducing that potential by draining it causes neurons to trigger less frequently, or not at all, and--" He saw that his audience's eyes, even behind their opaque sunglasses, were glazing over. The mime spoke. Generally that would be considered unusual, but at the moment it sort of faded into the background unusualness.

"I 'ave 'eard zat zere are zose 'oo claim these electrique is not so much ze truth," he offhandedly commented in what was the single worst French accent that Sam had ever heard, barring his high school French teacher Mr. Letroinnaire who always pronounced 'r' as 'w', possibly because of Gallic habit but equally likely because of a speech impediment; "bot of zis I do not so much know per'aps. Alors! Mon dieu!" He went back to being French and Sam knew that he would get no more of value out of him.

"Okay, so my life up till now was a computer simulation. Fine. I had some idea of that when I was a teenager but decided that it wasn't that important. At least not compared with girls, which I also had ideas about at the time. Put me back in it and we'll call it even."

There was a minute of coughing and shuffling of feet before xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx timidly said "Look, I've been trying to tell you. We can't. No way. It's never happened before and it never will happen. You're in The Matrix now."

---
FIFTH SPASM
---

"Now that you are Awakened, all of us wish to convince you to join our organizatins," the monochromatically-dressed fellow intoned. "We are the only crew made up of members from each. I represent the Machines' interests. xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx supports Zion, and lePatomaine The Merovingian."

The blinding white room disappeared and reality, in the form of a courtyard with a telephone booth in its center, swarmed in. xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx continued the speech. "Usually we just give people a gun and tell them to wander around, but we'll accompany you for a while. Least we can do. It's a dangerous world out there."

"And why is that?" Sam asked.

"Oh, for one thing a lot of people have guns."

Sam tried to count to ten under his breath, and made it as far as four. "Do you think-- now, do try to stretch your imagination here-- do you think that that may be because you give everyone a gun when they start out?"

xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx looked uncomfortable. "Possibly."

"Glad to hear you admit that, at least," Sam said. "Now, I don't care whether I'm Awakened or Asleepened: how do I go about getting back into the world of blue-capsules?"

"Bluepills," said all three operatives simulataneously. Sam had the sudden image of them performing "YMCA," or at least the "YMC" part since there were only three of them.

xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx looked even more abashed. "This doesn't usually happen. Taking the wrong pill, that is. We don't, um, actually have a procedure for dealing with things like this," he admitted.

"We do," the stiff man said. "Immediate termination is recommended."

"I'm not entirely in favor of that," Sam flatly stated.

"Oh, wait, I forgot, you should get one of these," the Zion operative continued. He nodded to the Machine operative, who pulled out a plastic object about the size of a paperback book, somewhere between John Grisham and Steven King in thickness. He proferred it to Sam. The Merovingian operative, in the meantime, was pretending to be encased in an invisible box.

Remembering the "immediate termination" comment, Sam was wary. "You open it." The Machinist shrugged and squeezed the sides of the case together. A little screen popped out and the case unfolded to form a small but usable keyboard, complete with scroll wheel.

Taking it, Sam read the words printed on the outside. In large friendly letters, it read "DON'T PANIC." "Good advice, that," xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx pointed out.

"This is the culmination of a cooperative effort between the three organizations," announced the Machine follower. "Zion wrote the content. We manufactured the code object that it is stored on."

"And the Merovingians?"

The mime briefly stopped walking an invisible dog. "We provided ze catering." He looked up and to the left. "Ooo la la! Ze code beets, they 'ave feeled up mon stor-age! I most stack zem!" He clapped his hands like a child at a circus, one of the good circuses that did background checks on its clowns, and disappeared.

On a whim Sam typed in "UBIQUITOUS PRODUCTIONS." After a very brief delay, the screen came to life with the text "The first ones against the wall when the revolution comes."

"It's accurate, I'll give it that."

"Try the scroll wheel," said xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx. Sam did and read more of the story.

"Ubiquitous Productions: The first ones against the wall when the revolution comes. They produce ads for product placement that crop up in places no ad should ever appear. One of their major successes was for AlienBear Computers, which was housed in a flashing light which caused an afterimage of their logo to appear in the center of one's field of vision for five minutes afterward. Longer if you blinked or rubbed your eyes. Bastards. Their Subtle Placement division is headed up by a bottom feeder--"

Sam blinked. "A bot, Tom Feeder," was what it actually read. "My boss was a 'bot?' What's that?"

"Ask the Guide. Oops, crud, I have some unusable inventory spaces, gotta hit the loading area for a minute." He clapped his hands. The green pyjamas disappeared and, thankfully, so did the man wearing them.

Sam typed it in and got the definition. "Bot: A simple piece of artificial intelligence, usually meant to simulate combat for practice. Limited IQ and very limited capability to deal with situations outside of its programming. Think of a night time security guard or roofing contractor."

"So my boss was a simple artificial intelligence," Sam mused. "Explains a lot." On a whim he looked up "lePetomaine" and then "xxxxxxxNeoxxxxxxx."

"lePetomaine: Merovingian operative currently on the HvCft Cooperation. Basically good but considered a bit of a wanker." Sam decided that he was mostly harmless.

"xxxxxxxNeoxxxxxxx: Traitor to Zion cause, has been known to permenantly terminate new redpills aboard their hovercrafts. Delights in mental and physical torture. Deadly assassin who should not be trusted." Sam got a queasy feeling until he counted the number of 'x'es.

"xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx: Zion operative. There are soldiers of Zion who are trusted with nearly impossible assignments, ones that could mean enormous strides for the cause of humanity or doom for millions depending on the outcome. Lesser souls are given missions that send them against daunting, but surmountable, obstacles for lesser rewards. People like xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx are given whatever is left."

"Not exactly a rave review," thought Sam, and debated typing in his own name. He decided against it. "Know thyself," Socrates had advised, but not "Know what some editor of a pocket guide to the Matrix thought about you."

---
SIXTH SPASM
---

"And you," he said to the Machinist. "I don't even know your name."

"13013Dobbs," came the proud reply. The dark-suited man seemed to be breathlessly waiting for Sam to smile and nod having achieved complete understanding, but Sam missed not only the revelation itself but even the general area of where it might be found.

"So do they call you 'one three' for short?"

The Machine operative snorted in frustration. "No! It's BOB. You know, the one and three look like a 'B'. and the zero looks like an 'O.'"

"Then... why not just name yourself 'BobDobbs?'"

The somber fellow tore off his dark glasses and blew out a great gust of air. "Because that... wouldn't be... 3733T!"

"Three seven three three T. No, you lost me again." Sam had a couple of juicy similes ready, one of which was "like you were a sofa cushion and I was a Biro," but was uncertain enough of 13013Dobbs' capability to understand such things that he filed it away for future use, like a squirrel burying an acorn in the garden of a mobile home, which was the second simile he had thought of.

The Machinist hunched over his shoulders as he started, as if explaining the idea to a four-year-old. (In the way that a five-year-old, arrogant in his extra twenty-five percent worth of life experience, might.) "Okay, look. The number three looks like the letter 'E,' right? Only backwards. And seven, that's 'L' upside down and backwards," he concluded.

"And 'T?'"

"IS JUST-- THE LETTER-- T!" raged 13013Dobbs, looking less and less like the placid Agents he idolized as the conversation wore on.

"Why not use the number 6?"

"That looks nothing like a 'T.'"

"It's as close to a 'T' as a seven is to an 'L.' And besides, what's the whole thing supposed to spell?"

This was the Q.E.D. that the Machine operative had been waiting for. "Elite," he said with the air of an imam explaining the four pillars of Islam to an eager seeker of knowledge.

"But it doesn't. At best it spells 'eleet,' which isn't a word. It looks like the name of a feminine hygeine product. Something having to do with unwanted hair."

That was too much for 13013Dobbs. "Oh, and you're a spelling Nazi now?" he exploded. "You're not the boss of me! What are you, my English teacher?"

"Might have been," Sam admitted. "I used to be a high-school English teacher, but I quit."

"Why?" asked xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx, who had returned in the meantime.

Sam sighed. "Because all of my students were morons. I figured that if I had to work with morons, I should go into the advertising field. The pay is better there."

13013Dobbs was still attempting to retain some dignity. "Nobody understands me."

"Maybe if you used real words in real sentences they might." They glared at each other like two Samurai getting ready to make human-flavored sushi out of each other. The Machinist gave up first, smoothing his hair down and replacing his sunglasses.

The Guide noted that he was in fact a Machine soldier, who thought Agents were so uber cool. Mostly because they could kill anyone and had really big weapons. The Guide advised him to see "Sigmund Freud" for additional information, but Sam folded it back into its case.

"Enough of that. What happens now?"

"Now, you come with us," answered an entirely new party to the conversation, who (with a wave of his hand) summoned enough guards surrounding the three virtual people that escape was greyed out on whatever pulldown menu the three could choose from.

---
SEVENTH SPASM
---

SamHill, xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx, and 13013Dobbs were loaded into a van by means of the "bum's rush," which is not as pleasant as it sounds. (Taking into consideration the fact that it does not sound particularly pleasant.) "Where are you taking us?" Sam asked.

"Shut up," replied one of the masked men.

"Who are you?" 13013Dobbs asked.

"Shut up," replied another of the masked men.

"Wankersaysshutup?" xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx asked.

"Shut up," replied the masked man who was driving.

The others looked at the Zionist curiously. "Couldn't make matters worse."

They drove for what seemed like, and what in fact was, hours. They were far out of the Megacity, but in a direction that Sam had never travelled. Any time one of them tried to look out a window, he was viciously clubbed to the ground.

"Can't you do that trick where you disappear?" Sam whispered. 13013Dobbs shook his head.

"Do you see a phone booth around here?"

"I don't want Superman to show up, I just want to get out of here."

Either Sam's naivete or the most recent blow to the head made the Machinist grimace. "Phone booths are hardlines. You need one to get out of the Matrix. Otherwise you risk damaging your mind."

"Would it be as damaging as the multiple blows to the head that you've taken?" Sam wondered.

"I'll do it." The others looked at xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx. "Look, boys, we're in trouble. I'll do an emergency jackout and see what the Operator and I can do from the outside." Sam had no idea what an "operator" was but it sounded like a more comforting term than "bum's rush." xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx rose slightly on one knee and softly clapped his hands together. The others looked at him expectantly.

"Crap."

"Is that the magic word for this 'emergency jackoff' thing?"

"Jackout. And no. Clapping usually does it. I'm worried about what may have happened to our Operator."

Sam nodded. "I appreciate that. As it turns out, being trundled into a van and carted to an unknown fate by mysterious gun-toting men who have a genuine disdain for uninjured heads on other people wasn't quite enough to raise my anxiety levels to their fullest, but that little piece of news has definitely put me at one hundred percent."

"It's no picnic for us either," snarled 13013Dobbs. He was correct. Picnics usually are considerably better stocked with egg sandwiches, fizzy lemonade in bottles, and ants. There was a fly or two buzzing around the van, but it wasn't quite the same thing.

"There's only one thing to do," continued the Machine operative. "We can overpower them if we all go together. On the count of three: One! Two! Three!"

None of them moved. "Oh, thanks," he sulked. "Really brave of you guys."

xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx pointed out "You didn't go for any of them yourself when you reached 'three.'"

"Well, of course not. I was, ah, waiting to see which ones you were going for. Good thing I held back."

"Maybe if you counted 'I,' 'Z,' 'E' we'd have understood what you said," Sam grumbled. The rest of the ride was spent in silence, which seemed to suit the masked men.

Finally the vehicle screeched to a halt. "OK, everyone out," said the one riding shotgun, who as luck would have it was toting a shotgun. Virtual muscles stiff and aching, the three redpills looked up at an immense wrought-iron gate whose sign was unreadable until it was illuminated by a nearby bolt of lightning, thanks to a tradition firmly established in horror movies:

"WELCOME TO BLACKWOOD, A Gated Community," it read.

---
EIGHTH SPASM
---

The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Matrix defines "Blackwood" as "Stay away. Stay far away. In fact, you shouldn't even be looking this up. Go ask about 'two-face bug-eye mode' or something." The previous entry, "Blackwolf Coat: Reward for hanging out in a dungeon, waiting for the boss to spawn, watching your graphics card crash every few minutes, and finally stealing the kill from someone who's been there longer than you," was separated from the Blackwood entry by a good amount of white space, as was the next entry, "Blackwood Gang: Exiles, mostly venetian blind price calculation programs, who pretend that they escaped from the prison Blackwood, qv. No, wait, q don't v."

"If there's a deus ex machina in the wings, now would be an excellent time to ask it to show up," was the last thing Sam said to his newfound acquaintances before they led him off in one direction; the other two were taken in a different direction, which is a roundabout way of saying that they were separated. (The reader may have an idea at this point that the author is being paid by the word, but nothing could be farther from the truth, except perhaps the term "compassionate conservative.")

"Have you noticed," said 13013Dobbs when they were firmly ensconced in their cell, "that lePetomaine isn't with us?"

xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx said "Why no, it had completely slipped my mind. Sometimes I do wish you knew what 'irony' was, though."

13013Dobbs nodded. "Well, I noticed it as soon as we were loaded in that van. And you couldn't contact the Operator. I get the idea that something isn't right." The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Matrix defines "irony" as "A manner of discourse in which what is said is the opposite of what is meant. Clearly you have demonstrated yourself to be an intelligent and thoughtful individual for looking up this word. See also 'sarcasm,' if you can take enough of a break from stuffing salt and vinegar crisps into your mouth to type that long of a word in."

The small eye-level iron door on the large foot-level iron door opened and a familiar face peered in. In the tone of someone who knows that the answer to his question was going to be stony, hate-filled silence, he asked "No hard feelings, guys?" It was lePetomaine, who had dropped the French accent to the great joy of the writer.

There was a moment of stony, hate-filled silence. Then "Of course not," said xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx. "Why, if we had brass knuckles at this very moment, we wouldn't beat you senseless with them."

"Loan us some brass knuckles and you'll see what we mean," continued 13013Dobbs, who was getting the hang of this "irony" thing.

The small door creaked shut. The large door creaked open. lePetomaine entered, flanked by two burly guards in the uniform of The Merovingian, which appeared to be expensive Armani suits. Their crewmate was wearing a fox stole. a wide-brimmed hat. a paisley vest and open-chested white trenchcoat with ermine trim, pants with glittery stripes down the sides, and three-inch platform heels.

"Pimp my RSI," xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx marvelled. "Let me guess. Lucky Pierre rewarded you for betraying us by letting you rummage through the Oxfam donation bin."

"I didn't have much of a choice!" the talkative little mime protested. "When he says 'hyperjump,' you say 'how hyperhigh.' Look, the Operator isn't dead, she's just knocked out. One of our teams took her off the Cooperation and loaded another Operator who's loyal to us. It-- it was really all for the best. I mean, I got promoted. That means I can make sure you're treated well."

"Treated well, but locked in the most infamous dungeon in the Matrix. Riiiiight."

"Comparatively well. Relatively well. Look, things could be worse," said lePetomaine.

"Oh? How?" said 13013Dobbs.

"Slam," said the door.

"Well. I think things just got worse for you. Comparatively worse. Relatively worse," said xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx.

The small door in the large door hadn't been latched and it had swung open with the force of its big conjoined brother slamming shut. The three crew members could see the two guards walking away down the computer simulation of a stone hallway, smirking and making completely unconvincing "it's not our fault and we're not really enjoying this" gestures.

"Now we have to plan our escape, right?" asked lePetomaine in a weak tone of voice.

"Right," xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx assured him. "I think our best chance is to pummel you into unconsciousness, then when you come to, repeat the process until we've escaped."

"That doesn't sound like an escape plan to me..."

13013Dobbs spoke up. "We won't know until we try." And try they did. It didn't in fact work, but it made sixty-seven percent of the participants feel much better.

---
NINTH SPASM
---

"More wine?"

"How can I have more wine when I haven't had any wine yet," Sam thought. He had the idea that his interrogator had read Alice In Wonderland and he wasn't about to give him the pleasure of making the "more tea" joke. Then he noticed that the label of the bottle read "Sauvignon Blanc, More Vineyards, 1954." Sam congratulated himself for going through literary awareness, righteous indignation, and complete berkhood in the course of one internal dialog. It was a new record for him.

The elegantly-dressed man waited a little while for a reply, but partway through the gamut of emotions Sam was running, poured for both of them. "I advise this: Enjoy the amenities. You are now one of our operatives, and the rewards are considerable. Even more so if you are a willing participant, no?"

"I've noticed that you're not taking the chance that I might not be a willing participant. Those thick metal bars forming the door are a dead giveaway." The enormous room was sumptuously equipped, a silk-upholstered divan where Sam reclined, desks made of exotic woods with intricate ivory inlays, devices in the loo that Sam had only heard rumors about; yet it was unquestionably a prison cell.

"For the time being, that is so. Only until we are sure that we have convinced you that our cause is just."

"Kidnapping three people, taking us in a van with head-seeking rifle butts to a prison that even the rats talk of in whispers? Hardly a good way to start."

His captor shrugged and cut a slice of edam cheese off a small wheel on a silver platter. "Are you so naive that you think the other organizations were not after you as well? We got to you first, that is all. Had Zion found you, it might have been xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx who set you up for an abduction. We, at least, feed our guests well."

At least there are no advertising wrappers, Sam thought. "'Guests' get little cards in the mail with balloons on the borders. 'You have been invited to a party,' confetti that drops out and makes you find the portable vacuum cleaner, that whole kind of thing."

SavoirFaire, which was the name of the fellow dressed in 18th century voluptuary garb, shrugged. "As you wish, then. I still think 'prisoner' is the wrong word, because as you grow to understand us, restrictions will be lifted and sooner or later you will be as free to come and go as I am."

"I'll go sooner rather than later." Sam had seen what the others did. He clapped his hands together. Unfortunately, he did nothing more than turn the lights out. SavoirFaire continued as if nothing had changed.

"You enjoy nature, don't you?" The lack of an answer didn't faze him. He walked over to one of the elegant desks. "Merde. Sorry, barked my shin. Someone had to turn the lights out." A monitor swung out of the top and he used the glow of the screen to type a few commands into some kind of computer system.

Half of the room changed. It was now a nature preserve, in fact it was the one Sam had hiked through. "So you have 3DiVo. Big deal."

The Merovingian smiled in the darkness. "It is a little more... convincing. Go ahead, enter the construct."

Having little else to do, Sam did. The air smelled different-- just as clean as the room's air, but there were hints of dust, of animal musk, of mountain flowers. A knob of widgeons flew overhead. A widgeon is a medium-sized duck with a round head and small bill; it is not endangered but there is concern over its becoming so. The proper term to refer to a group of them is "knob." As Sam watched their V-shaped formation pass overhead, one of them crapped on the shoulder of his suit. The proper term to refer to the material it left is "widgeon crap."

"I say, there's widgeon crap on my shoulder," Sam noted. "That never happened in a 3DiVo commercial."

SavoirFaire nodded with the faint smile of self-satisfaction that is uniquely French, although it has been copied by such diverse groups as talk-show hosts and Unitarians. "It is real. Or, at least, as real as anything else. Here, I looked up the records of your trip. Do you enjoy herd animals?" He fiddled with the keyboard and on the distance a low rumbling could be heard. As Sam watched, the bison he had watched years ago sprang into focus, thundering straight for him.

"Huh." They were mere yards away when the elegantly-dressed jailer rushed into the nature half of the room, grabbed Sam by his collar, and dragged him back into the posh half of the room.

"Fool! You could have died!"

"How, exactly? If this is a computer simulation inside of a computer simulation-- wait, I've lost track." The widgeon crap which still stained his shoulder did more to convince Sam than anything else that had happened.

SavoirFaire paced. "Damned semi-subs. You have the knowledge but not the realization-- Look, it is true that everything here is a simulation. Code, cunningly crafted to convince the human mind that it is real. Real, SamHill; and that means that it can kill you if the conditions are met for something that would kill you in the real. I had better shut the construct down--"

"No, wait, I kind of like it." The Merovingian official saw that he was making the first steps toward recruiting Sam and relented. "But I'd really rather it had some rabbits."

"Rabbits you shall have." The screen had a selection menu similar to the ones for placing props in commercials. SavoirFaire selected "Rabbits," typed in "quantity=12," and clicked on the "OK" button. The terminal went "beep" and displayed a dialog saying "-216 error in spawn_proc, resource capacity max limit FED0C000. Have a nice day."

"Piece of Machine garbage--" Reducing the quantity of rabbits to 8 worked, and a small herd of rabbits appeared on a clover-covered hillock. The reader should now be confident that "herd" is the proper term for a group of rabbits, and need not be assured that this is the case.

"Oh, that's nice. Any cats?"

A few clicks later, having deleted the off-screen (or more precisely off-construct) bison, a leopard appeared and promptly eviscerated one of the rabbits. As it purred and ate, the other lagomorphs scattered. If there were more than one leopard, it would be a "leap." Also, there would most likely be fewer rabbits.

"Er-- domesticated cats might be better."

The Merovingian suddenly got a blissful expression on his face, and reached into his codpiece to pull out a beeper set on "vibrate." He frowned. "I have to leave for a moment. Here, add animals as you wish. If you enter the construct, watch out for hazards." He motioned to the guard outside of the cell door, who opened it to let SavoirFaire out. "If you have any needs, you may address the concierge." Sam thought it an odd term of reference for a hulking mass of hired muscle with a poorly-hidden submachine gun under his expensive Armani suit, but merely watched his host leave.

As he turned to the terminal, Sam cracked his knuckles.

---
---
TENTH SPASM
---

The joy of pummeling lePetomaine wore off after the third time, but they did it once more just to make sure. xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx and 13013Dobbs allowed him to come to on the bed as they sat on the floor. As the floor was in fact the bed, they were all more or less in the same place.

"So. Escape."

The Machinist shook his head. "Blackwood is a legendarily secure prison. Few people even know of its existence, much less have escaped."

"Isn't there a whole gang that claims to have escaped from it?"

"Yes, but they're just wankers. Catch them in their hideout, all they talk about is putting venetian blinds up and how much that would run." 13013Dobbs paused for dramatic effect. "But there is a way."

"Yes? Yes?" The others sat up in rapt attention as he dramatically picked up one of the spoons that had come with their gruel.

"We dig our way out." He began less-than-dramatically chipping at the mortar with the spoon. The Merovingian and the Zionist slumped down in their seats, which also happened to be the floor. There was considerable floor but not much else in the way of furniture.

lePetomaine spat out a little blood into the sink, which was actually-- oh, you know. "You've lost your mind. Not a great loss, to be sure, but a loss nonetheless."

xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx turned to lePetomaine. "The Operator on our hovercraft is one of yours, right? Can't you pretend that you're still a ranking member of the organization?"

The ex-mime shook his head. "She probably was in on it from the beginning. And anyway, they took our cell phones." An idea occurred to him. "Does anyone have Tool Maker loaded?" xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx indicated that he didn't, despite his tendency to load as a Coder. 13013Dobbs was still chipping away at the wall and didn't answer. He always loaded gun skills mostly, though, so the chance was slim.

The Zion warrior stood and paced the cell. "So tell me this. Why was The Merovingian so eager to catch SamHill? From what I was told, it was just another redpill extraction."

lePetomaine sighed and lay his head on the sofa (floor). "His mind is special. More so than your average redpill. That, at least, I was told by my boss, SavoirFaire. I think that all the organizations wanted him badly, but there was something about him that The Merovingian wanted most of all-- something that was so useful to him that I was ordered to break our agreement. More than that I don't know. But I could make a guess..."

xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx looked at the ceiling (which for once does not refer to the floor) and pondered. "He did seem strangely aware of the nature of the Matrix. I thought he was a self-substantiate. You know, he did say that he had met several extractors before and had always taken the blue pill. I wonder what--"

"Guys, you might want to see this." 13013Dobbs spoke at last. The others glanced over to where he had been working the spoon into the mortar and did such a great double take that Laurel and Hardy would have applauded.

Underneath a thin coating of what appeared to be stone and mortar was a space which glowed greenish-white. When they turned their heads to a certain angle, it appeared to be a supply closet, viewed from an upper corner; and beyond that, a room with cubicles and terminals.

xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx and lePetomaine stared briefly at each other. They made a silent pact never to call 13013Dobbs an idiot ever again. It was a silent pact because they realized that someday they might wish to call him an idiot and they didn't want to leave any room for breach of contract. Then they grabbed the other spoons and began widening the discontinuity.

---

"Oh, Rochester," Sam called to the guard. "It appears I'm out of wine. Could you take the bottle away?"

The spent wine bottle was on a silver tray near the entrance. The guard, polite to a fault, brought a ring of keys out of his suit pocket and unlocked the cell door. "Please be advised that you should not run. I would have to catch you and you may be injured in the process. But I will certainly bring you more wine if that is your desire." Sam didn't make a move toward the door. He just crossed his fingers.

As the guard looked at the highly reflective silver surface he saw his hair change into a new configuration. "The hairstyle of your dreams. Now only 15 $info at Klassic Kuts Korporation." In smaller letters across the bottom of the tray it read "Not affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan." The guard smiled and regarded his new 'do. "97%," thought Sam.

Pimples erupted onto the face reflected in the platter. "Icky mushroom-like pustules? Use Zit-B-Gone!" An animated tube of pimple cream squirted white goo from a particularly inappropriate part of its cartoon body and the blemishes disappeared. "94.09%," thought Sam.

A beautiful woman appeared over the guard's reflection's shoulder. She spoke in a hushed tone meant to imply an internal monologue. "If only he didn't have those coffee-stained teeth. I'd have sex with him for sure." The words "Use Dentabrade. And have lots of sex with beautiful women." appeared across the middle of the platter. "91.2673%," Sam thought.

"Why look like this--" the guard's face turned pasty white-- "when you can look like this?" It turned a rich chestnut brown, the color of leather pants worn by men who shouldn't be wearing leather pants. "Squamous Tanning booths can do it in just three sessions. Call now!"

The guard slapped his hands to his eyes and screamed "Oh god! Oh god! I can't see!"

"11.470719%," thought Sam, relieved. He hadn't wanted to unleash the I.C. Head Cryogenics Lab ad, nor the fertility drug ad for Spliff Pharmaceuticals, the one with the jingle where the audience was encouraged to "follow the bouncing balls and sing along." They weren't his best work. Sam regretted deleting the rabbits from the construct and using their code fragments to create the Reflecteriffic(tm) ads, but he consoled himself by saying that he'd someday see real rabbits.

The ring of keys were still in the huge, archaic lock. He slipped silently out the door and locked it behind him.

---
ELEVENTH SPASM
---

"No no no," 13013Dobbs chided. "You have to roll sideways."

"Can't we make the hole bigger? Scrape some more of it away from that side with your spoon," asked xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx.

"There is no spoon." By the time the utensils had worn out, there was a definite breach in the wall, which had appeared to be solid stone but was in fact just a texture. The underlying material was cotton-candy soft, glowed a faint greenish-white, and had "INSERT WALL CODE HERE" printed on it. Their breach was just an inch wide, but the Machinist knew a trick for getting through such things. Unfortunately his method of explaining it to the others was to repeat what he had said initially, louder and more slowly.

"YOU HAVE-- TO ROLL-- SIDEWAYS," he advised, earning a "shush" from lePetomaine, who had stumbled onto the peculiar combination of positioning and rolling.

"Not so loud! Someone might start wondering why the mops are having a conversation."

"Thump," commented xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx as he fell onto a medium cardboard box containing a completely useless and irrelevant piece of hardware.

"See? You just had roll sideways." The others ignored 13013Dobbs (a task in which they had considerable practice) and looked around at their new prison cell, peering into the various filing cabinets, bedroom dressers, and medium cardboard boxes containing completely useless and irrelevant pieces of hardware.

"I found a pair of womens' footwear," said lePetomaine.

"Basic data node tap," announced 13013Dobbs.

"And a wooden stake. All we need now is a vampiress Data Miner," xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx sighed. "One way or another, we have to override the security program."

"Let me do that. This one might not know that I'm on the outs with SavoirFaire." lePetomaine opened the door a crack until the security program went around the corner, then slipped into the terminal-filled room.

"Bonjour, mon ami!" he announced. "S'il vous plait, may I check my bank bal-once on le terminal? I want to see do I 'ave enough for ze espresso and to rent un Jerry Lewis DVD." The security program ran a weary eye over him.

"You can use one of the public terminals, sir," he replied, somehow making the last word sound more like "you piece of filth" than anything vaguely respectful. "This is a secure area and I will have to ask you to leave." lePetomaine inferred that the program felt that the word "ask" somehow involved shooting guns repeatedly.

"Alors," the Merovingian sighed. "Bot zey are so far to the--" He was gesturing with the shoes in his left hand and was interrupted by the program.

"Hey... are those a pair of Shielded Brown and Dark Purple Dada Short Boots?" he asked, his voice faintly quavering. lePetomaine nodded.

"Are they... used?" lePetomaine nodded once more.

"Are they... stinky?" The little redpill tossed one to the program, who caught it, and then tossed its mate a little to the right so that it landed on the floor near the supply closet. The guard bent over to pick up the treasured footwear and was in the perfect posture to receive a blow on the head from a filing cabinet dropped by 13013Dobbs. Unfortunately this did not happen.

It was actually a printer that 13013Dobbs used. xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx took a second to check the program's label. "Not one of Metacortex's better designs," he said before they stripped its uniform off and tied the unconscious program up in the supply closet.

"He's about my size; I think the uniform will fit me," said lePetomaine, who was the smallest of the three in the Matrix as well as the real. "Maybe I can bluff my way past the checkpoints and send help for you guys later." He looked up to see "That ain't gonna happen" written on the faces of his comrades. (13013Dobbs had "gonna happen," one in each eye, and xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx, who had a slightly smaller face, "that ain't.")

"I have a better idea," decided the Agent wannabee, and gathered his crewmates to explain.

---

Sam was a writer and advertising man, not a spy, and the churning acid in his stomach reminded him of this fact during his creep down the Blackwood corridors. Every time he heard a noise he jumped and hid around the nearest corner. Nine times out of ten, it was his imagination. Unfortunately, that tenth time was either a part of his imagination that had escaped the therapist he went to a few years back, or it was a real Lupine.

The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Matrix defines "Lupine" as "A wolfman, Jack," but SamHill didn't have time to consult it. The creature had spotted him before he had spotted it, and it grinned with the expectation of a chase and a kill. Smugly it sauntered up to Sam and sniffed its way around his fear-filled form, enjoying the scent of anxiety the way an oenophile enjoys the bouquet of a bottle of wine he had paid an enormous sum for on eBay.

Sam was back in his happy place, which for many people might be the Pyrenees or Aruba or Disneyworld; but for him, sadly, was Heathrow Airport. That was where, as a child, he had said goodbye to his first pet. It was an Irish Setter with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder; in other words a normal Irish Setter. At the airport Sam was told that the dog was going to a beautiful farm where he could run about all day and chase squirrels and where no one would mind if he chewed the mail up as it came through the letter slot. He was named "Hunny" after the humorous misspelling in the Winnie-the-Pooh books, and Sam remembered one thing in particular about him. He reached out a hand tentatively.

"Oo's a goo' boy? Oo's a goo' boy?" he asked, scratching the bloodthirsty lycanthrope on the tummy with his fingernails.

---
TWELFTH SPASM
---

"You rang?" asked the security program, who was dressed in an expensive Armani suit.

"Oui," answered lePetomaine, who was now also dressed in an expensive Armani suit, though in the style of last year's fashion in order to denote his inferior rank. (It's a Merovingian thing. You wouldn't understand.) He turned off the annoying alarm. "When I come on duty, I find zis."

He pointed out xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx, who was lying on the ground near the supply closet. The program nodded. "You were quite right to call me," he assured lePetomaine. "Is he alive?"

lePetomaine shrugged. "I 'ave not checked. Ees, 'ow you say, not my job."

The security program bent over the prostrate body of the Zionist, and received a sharp blow to the head from 13013Dobbs, using the same printer as before.

"Still too small for me," said the Machinist.

"Look at the waist on him; I'd be swimming in those pants," complained xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx, who hadn't really been unconscious, but you knew that.

"Try again?" asked lePetomaine brightly.

---

"Are we going walkies? I really gotta go walkies. Well, I can hold it in for, I guess, fifteen minutes but after that, woo, you'd better have a newspaper on you," chattered the Lupine. Sam had instinctively found the scratch-spot that made its leg twitch and had evidently won a lifelong friend.

"Just keep leading us outside, then you can go walkies as long as you want."

"Can I chase some squirrels? Huh?"

"Sure, but just one."

"Aw. Well, one's better than none, as my momma always used to say. Haw haw, you know what that makes me? A son of a bitch! Oops, make that ten minutes. That cheap canned stuff goes right through you. Sometimes I want to find that Lorne Greene and bite off his--"

"Halt!" demanded a voice behind them. Sam and RalphVonWauWau (that was the Lupine's filename, embossed on a tag dangling from his flea collar) turned around to see a Merovingian Rifleman running toward them, assault rifle at the ready. They knew he was a Merovingian Rifleman because he, too, had a tag dangling from his flea collar.

"Sic 'em?" squeaked Sam. He covered his eyes and hoped for the best.

---

"No, no, it's all wrong. Look at those sleeves. I'd be showing four inches of shirt-cuff."

The pile of bodies in the supply closet was growing high enough to hide the medium cardboard boxes containing completely useless and irrelevant pieces of hardware. They still hadn't found a uniform that was completely to xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx's liking. 13013Dobbs was getting enough experience wielding a printer that he was considering making it his main melee weapon. He was also getting annoyed.

"Just take that suit jacket, the one that fit you, and the pants from this other one-- I think he was under the one wearing the wool blend you didn't like against your skin--"

lePetomaine shook his head. "That wouldn't work at all. They don't even remotely go together. It'd be obvious that he wasn't a Merovingian." This made 13013Dobbs seriously consider using the printer on both of them. He was very close to levelling up, too, which made it all the more tempting.

"Look. Let's just try it one more time." They wearily got back into position and lePetomaine set off the annoying alarm device. They waited and waited. "Uh oh, we have a problem. There are no more security programs."

It took a moment for that to sink in. Then they wandered out the now defenseless hallways.

---

There were things less appealing than walking down a dungeon hallway followed by a Lupine who was carrying the severed leg from a Merovingian Rifleman in its jaws like a chew toy, but Sam really didn't want to think about anything less appealing than walking down a dungeon hallway followed etcetera.

They reached the archway leading to a haunted-looking forest and the lycanthrope scampered to a nearby tree. "Whooooa, that's a load off my mind, haw haw," he announced to Sam. "Hey, sniff this fire hydrant. Does that smell like Lassie to you? I didn't know he was in town. I dunno about him-- cross-dresses, y'know."

Sam changed the subject. "So how do I get back to the Megacity?"

"Ooo, you're in for a hike. That's a scamper and a half in that direction" (here he indicated east by southeast with his snout) ". Hey, I made a joke there-- 'you're in for a hike,' 'urine for a hike?' Like because I was peeing against this tree? Haw haw!" Sam wanted desperately to introduce RalphVonWauWau to Tom Feeder, and even more desperately wanted to lock them together in a room for a week.

"OK, let's get moving."

The dog-man looked pensive, which was one of his more difficult expressions; it looked quite a lot like his "constipated." "I dunno, palsy walsy, I'm not supposed to leave Blackwood..."

"Oh come on! It'll be fun-- you can chase all the squirrels you want, and I could throw that Merovingian Rifleman's leg for you to fetch." Desperation drives people to unusual lengths. Ordinarily Sam would never have offered to throw anyone's severed leg as an inducement. He was just that kind of person.

"Actually, boss, I'm kinda afraid. There. I said it."

"Oh come now. What's the worst thing that could happen?"

"That there," said the Lupine, pointing directly behind Sam. It was ungrammatical. It was also an unfortunate choice of last words.

---
THIRTEENTH SPASM
---

The van was right where they had left it. 13013Dobbs slid into the driver's seat. "It's a hundred and six miles to the Megacity. We got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses."

xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx had the idea he was supposed to say something in particular, but merely took the passenger's seat as lePetomaine clambered into the back. They drove for what seemed like, and what in fact was, hours.

"We need a plan for when we jack out," 13013Dobbs said when they spotted a hardline. lePetomaine nodded.

"Yes, a plan. Plans have worked brilliantly for us so far."

"What was that tune you were whistling on the way back?" asked xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx.

"The entire bloody way back," added 13013Dobbs through gritted teeth. The Zionist waited for lePetomaine to continue.

"Le Marsaille," explained the little fellow. "It's our theme song."

"Anthem, I think you mean."

"What-ev-er. We play it before all important events of state-- political speeches, athletic championships, and Jerry Lewis movie marathons."

"Got an MP3 of it?" The mime nodded. "OK. Cue it up on the radio program and let's all jack out at the same time." And so they did.

In the Real, the three crewmates woke up on their couches. The French national anthem played over the loudspeakers. They released the clamps, rolled off the simulated leather cushions, and made their way to the control room where a freeborn woman, whom none of them knew, was standing to attention.

"I! Z! E!" shouted 13013Dobbs before tackling the Operator; and the others, after a moment of confusion, joined in the fray. They were hampered by the fact that they didn't want to kill the woman, just knock her out, and also because she hadn't spent her entire life playing an elaborate videogame and was in considerably better shape than the lot of them. She was, in fact, close to whupping the trio when 13013Dobbs' eyes lighted on a printer.

WHAM

Green glyphs seemed to stream into the young man's body. "Hey, well done! And congratulations on the level-up." said xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx. The Machinist looked at him blankly. "Oh. Sorry. 'gf cg 4 lvl'."

13013Dobbs nodded. "Tnx."

lePetomaine had found a rope. "Are you going to tie her up, or are you just going to loll around all day?"

13013Dobbs blinked. "I didn't lol." He looked at xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx, who hadn't lolled either, and came to the conclusion that the ex-Merovingian was hearing things.

They stuck the replacement Operator in a supply closet; it seemed appropriate. Their original Operator was in the galley. They freed her and tried to get a lock on Sam. It wasn't good. No, it went way beyond "wasn't good." It was Zero One.

---

This time there was no van and no bum's rush. The fellow standing behind Sam was dressed more or less like 13013Dobbs, but his dark suit and sunglasses didn't appear out of place or ludicrous. No, "menacing" was a better term. After all, he had just killed a bloodthirsty Lupine with one shot-- despite said Lupine having emptied his bladder just minutes before. (This may sound irrelevant, but it has been noted that sitting on a toilet restores health points. Thus we are presented with an obvious conclusion.)

He pretended to type something, there was that green streamy thing again, and Sam was in a white room-- much like the one that he had entered following his brief foray into "the Real," but with actual walls (white ones) and a couple of doors (white ones) that led into a series of corridors (color left to the reader as an exercise).

"Your code reference number is SEMISUBST-71426-JK. Have a nice day." The Agent left the room.

"Ah. That explains a lot. Thanks." Sam looked for a way out, but the doors were locked, including the one that his captor had used to exit. As he rattled knobs, his captor entered from the door on the far side of the room.

It wasn't the same one, actually; there were subtle differences. But Sam would find that telling Agents apart was as hard as telling one Goth from another at a science fiction convention. "My filename is Agent Orange. Welcome. Mr. Hill. I hope you are having a nice day."

"Anything but. So, from what I've heard, you're either Zion or Machines. And based on the lack of drum-heavy trance house music, I'm tending toward the latter."

Orange nodded. "Correct. We rescued you from The Merovingian's prison using considerable resources (see attached document EXPRPT-71426-JK)." Sam watched in amazement as a small document, paperclipped together and with many coffee-cup rings, erasures, and tic-tac-toe games, appeared in the Agent's monologue. He continued, the expense report dangling for a moment until it scrolled off. (Which was an action similar to a crab's "scuttling off," but different in that-- in that-- sorry, I'm coming up dry here.)

"They tempted you with luxuries in order to gain your trust. But working for the established order can be even more rewarding, and not without luxury." He indicated a small area of the floor, which slid away; a table extruded its way into the room. It held a bowl, a jug of milk, and a packet of Logical Charms cereal. ("Pink LEDs, yellow PDAs, and green NAND gates provide 100% of the minimum daily adult requirement for colored marshmallows!" Sam had worked on that campaign when he first joined Ubiquitous Productions and afterwards wished he hadn't. Part of his bonus had been a year's supply of the product; it had cluttered his den for months and mice eventually got to the remainder. Oddly enough, they had left the blue hard drives. Those were later found to cause cancer. Mice are smart that way.)

"I will leave you to consume the breakfast food and think on what has happened. Have a nice day." Orange lock-stepped his way out of the room and Sam munched on the sugary cereal. Dammit, he thought. I wish I didn't love this crap.

---
FOURTEENTH SPASM
---

"I still say we should try to reach Zero One."

"How would we get there?"

"With enormous difficulty and perhaps at the cost of our lives."

"That's not quite what I was asking-- I was more hoping for more of a 'take a right at the petrol station, not that one but the one on the next block, then ease left where you see that place with the good lamb curry.'"

"Oh. Right." The Cooperation crew was debating their next move. xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx and the freeborn Operator favored heading to Zion to file a report and maybe get some help; 13013Dobbs wanted to get as close to the physical Zero One as possible, then march into the virtual Machine city. lePetomaine wanted to curl up in his bunk and catch up on his sleep. The majority ruled, especially since the majority included the hovercraft's only female, whom they all had a crush on. Sam, his mind imprisoned behind nigh-impenetrable firewalls, abstained.

They reached the outskirts of Zion in half an hour, staying in broadcast depth the whole way so as not to break the link between Sam and the Matrix. As they got closer, lePetomaine and 13013Dobbs grew more and more uneasy.

"Maybe we should wait with Sam in the hovercraft while you two file the report. The powers that be in Zion may seek vengeance on us for our affiliations."

"Oh, get over yourself," xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx chided the smallest crewman. "It's not like any of us are at all significant. You're not exactly number one on Zion's Most Wanted. More like number one thousand."

"17,031," reported the largest of the crewmen, who had looked it up online. "They don't even have a recent picture." That was true; it was a high school yearbook picture, and lePetomaine's face was considerably bumpier, mostly owing to the lack of Zit-B-Gone in the Real. Underneath could be made out the words "Oboe 2, 3. AV club 1, 2, 3, 4. Library monitor 1, 2. Future Solitary Mutterers 3, 4."

"You didn't fare much better." 13013Dobbs was number 17,022, at least since the previous 17,022, TheVirtualKid94, had died from an overdose of the blue marshmallow hard drives in Logical Charms. The Machinist's picture was nearly unrecognizable. It was a blurry and pixilated section of a snap taken from the cover of the only album his group, The MetalliKlowns, had ever released: Destroy This Album Before Buying. The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Matrix reports that it was unique in that, technically, it had sold more legitimate copies (one) than pirate copies had been downloaded (zero). It was further presumed that the copy bought legitimately was done so in error by someone who died shortly after its purchase, thus preventing its return for store credit. Greatest Tuba Solos from Polka's Lost Treasures, volume 2 had previously held the record.

The Zion operative capitulated. "Oh, all right. I know a hoverbarge whose captain doesn't ask too many questions. I'll let you off there, and pick you up once we've filed our report and asked what to do next." It wasn't the best plan, but it did sound the safest, so they agreed. Sam, meanwhile, refrained from comment.

---

Sam, meanwhile, refrained from comment. There was some sort of alarm going off. At least he had thought so; it turned out to be a track entitled "Transforming Chainsaw Robot Waltz" from the latest album by The MetalliKlowns, of whom the Machines seemed inordinately fond.

He was babysat by two Agent trainees, which evidently took less resources to run than full-fledged Agents. "Human, perhaps you would like to take a short trip, accompanied by suitable guards, to your home district? It is accessible by crossing the waterway. You could perhaps wear a stylish hat. Please indicate if this is a suitable plan and have a nice day," Agent ?ErrorNAN asked.

"A man, a plan, a canal, Panama," observed Agent Nega.

Sam declined their offer. It had turned out (thanks to the report attached to Agent Orange's speech, which Sam had found under the chair and had read through while eating his Logical Charms) that he hadn't encountered strong opposition on the way out of Blackwood because the Machines had stormed the prison. It seemed a lot of trouble to get control of his virtual form.

Once again, Sam clapped. It had no effect but to call the outer door guard, a female Agent. Agent Nega stood and bowed. "Madam, I'm Adam."

The guard nodded in understanding. "Have a nice day." As she left she made a circular motion with her forefinger around her ear.

---

"Well done, Warrior!" General Gameplay Discussion thundered. Burton Ernie (which, for the benefit of those readers who misplaced their Cliff's Notes to The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Matrix, is the bluepill name of xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx) looked around to see whether anyone else had entered the room, then realized that the gruff military leader meant him.

"Um, thanks. But Sam Hill's mind is still imprisoned. We think in Zero One-- if I can get directions there I can try to rescue him."

The General shook his head, quite a trick considering he had lost his neck in the Invasion of NOR m AND y. "No, soldier, your job is done. Relax. We're sending our prime operatives after him. Which reminds me, where are your crewmates?"

Alarm bells went off in Burton's head, but unfortunately they weren't loud enough to be heard over the pervasive drum-heavy trance house music. "They're on a hoverbarge."

General Gameplay Discussion stroked his chin, a remarkable task considering that he had lost both his chin and his chin-stroking hand at the Seige of Fort Ran-76. He pressed the intercom button. "Ready a team." He turned to the Zion operative. "Which one?"

"Why do you want to know?"

The General's nostrils, severely damaged at the bombardment of Port Serial, flared. "Because I am ordering you to tell me, soldier!"

Burton gulped. "Nothing's going to happen to them, right?"

"Of course not." The General smiled, or at least approximated one, as his lips went missing in the Battle of BASIC Hill.

"Oh. Good. They're with Captain Courageous at HvBrg Ineluctable." He did not miss the fact that the General's smile was ominous, or at least hinted at dire events; a difficult expression since his dire event hinting muscles had been brutally battered at a battle with some kind of computerish name which the author desperately tried to think of by press time but, sadly, could not.

Dismissed, Burton sauntered to the nearest telephone. "Quick. Get me Captain Kofi, HvBrg Incontinent.

---
FIFTEENTH SPASM
---

Before this Spasm begins, the author would like to apologize for the slightly confusing nature of the upcoming text. Considering that we now not only have three crew members and one accidental redpill to deal with, in the Matrix and the Real, but also a growing cast of supporting characters who will occasionally do something significant, as well as a few really clever surprises of which the author is particularly fond; considering all this, there is reason to do frequent scene shifts. These are marked conveniently by three hyphens in a row.

---

See, there's one now.

---

"There are more Agent Trainees than we thought!"

"Then shoot more bullets!"

lePetomaine and 13013Dobbs were trying to get into Zero One from the Matrix side while waiting for xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx to get them the directions to an entry point closer to the Real Zero One. They weren't having much luck.

It was one of those warehouse-like areas, the annoying ones that weren't lit well enough to see the lone staircase leading from the catwalk to the ground floor. Swarms of guards made their way along the metal mesh flooring, barring the two redpills from entering the next area. They slammed the door, barricading it with the bodies of the sub-Agents they had killed thus far, and caught their (virtual) breaths.

"How are you fixed for Health Pills?"

"Not good. Most of my Inventory is filled up with different suits of clothing." The little Hacker had kept much of the findings in Blackwood, because you never know when a party will suddenly spring up, and you especially never knew whether it would be black tie or white tie.

"Wanker."

"You're no better." It was true. 13013Dobbs had weapons of every variety. He still had the original Redpill Special that was given to him when he was first Awakened. He kept its barrel and grip brightly polished and called it "Pookie."

"Let's go to the office. The door may last longer." The one that they were leaning against was splintering. They ran toward the command center, barely making it as the warehouse door gave way.

13013Dobbs sank into the secretary chair. "Man, we are toast."

"Yeah, I just wish we could run the overhead winch, we might take out a few of them with it. But all I could find was this PA system." The Machinist's ears perked up.

"Turn it on." lePetomaine did.

---

The annoying alarm-like sound changed slightly in pitch; it was the next track on Destroy This Album Before Buying. Sam winced. "Good lord, that's enough to make you long for the gentle murmur of a jackhammer. What's the title?"

"'Deliver My Band's DNA,' by Mr. Evil Ed," Agent Nega answered. "Ed: a General, a renegade."

"Can you put something else on? Queue up a record by that constantly self-reinventing female vocalist, perhaps?"

"Plan no damn Madonna LP."

It had been twenty-four minutes since the female Agent's last check. Sam was keeping track. She entered the room from the hallway, saw that nothing had changed, and left after saying "Have a nice day." If I can distract these mugs, Sam pondered, I'd have that long to-- to-- to do something. Hm. No ideas presented themselves, though, so he just continued watching Trading Species on the television, mounted hospital-style by a white bracket on the corner of the white walls and the white ceiling. It was a repeat of the most popular episode, "Dog/Moose."

"Say, can I call my friends? Just to let them know I'm alright?"

Agent ?ErrorNAN shook his head. "It is forbidden. It is also a waste of resources. Your friends will soon be dead." That took Sam quite by surprise.

"Huh?"

The Agent continued. "We have decoded messages from Zion that indicate that, pursuant to case 'Extraction of Sam Hill' (see Machine document SEMISUBST-71426-JK), the three cauldronborn members of the Cooperation are to be terminated in the Real."

"But, but, but, why?" Sam understood that death in the Matrix wasn't particularly troublesome, thanks to what he still thought of as the "emergency jackoff switch," but death in the Real sounded permanent. (Barring the possibility that the Real was just another computer simulation, only a higher-order and better one because it seemed, you know, real. However, that theory has generally been discounted, except by college students who gather on library roofs to smoke pot and hold long conversations about whether trees dream.)

"It is because they know too much." This was the first time anyone had said that about them. "Have a nice day."

"I know three people who are about to have a very un-nice day," Sam mused, and began to seriously consider a way out.

---

There are known to be certain phrases that will stop a conversation cold.
Religion: "That would be an ecumenical matter."
Literature: "I thought that was largely allegorical."
Sports: "Hey, at the beginning of next season, every team will be tied for first place."
Political: There is no way to stop a political conversation.
Subway: "There are live angry hornets in my brain."
Matrix: "Why does the porridge bird lay its egg in the air?"

The last can stop more than just a conversation cold. For certain types of artificial intelligences, it has some sort of infinite looping effect on their language parsers. More and more resources are dedicated to decoding the nonsensical sentence, and the target eventually shuts down.

When 13013Dobbs and lePetomaine cautiously pushed the door open, they were greeted with a surreal wax museum: Dozens of Agent trainees, frozen in poses that implied running and shooting, some with both feet off the ground. It was like watching a very bad sci-fi TV show or a moderately good hallucination. They found the exit and left the warehouse behind.

---

"You gotta get them out," Burton Ernie insisted.

"No can do, kemosabe, I ain't going to be responsible for loss of brain tissue from an emergency jackout." Captain Kofi was sticking to his guns, which was more than just a metaphor; his hands were always coated with a tacky sugary residue.

"They're going to lose more than just a little brain tissue if you don't yank them out."

"Wait, one's awake. I'll let you speak to him."

---

As the full-fledged Agents bombarded them with machine-gun fire, 13013Dobbs took cover behind the nearest solid object. Unfortunately it happened to be lePetomaine.

---

"Damn it, Pujol, you're making very little sense." This was true practically all the time, but with his synapses still hissing and popping from the death-jackout, lePetomaine was even less coherent than usual.

"Naw my faw," he protested. "Gaw ge back inna Maychicks."

"No time for that now. They're coming for you-- I don't know why, but they're loaded for bear. Huge, prehistoric bear. With chainsaws for teeth. Wake up Dobbs" (which was, ironically enough, 13013Dobbs' bluepill name) "and find somewhere to hide."

Through the telephone he could hear the sound of gunfire off in the distance. "That'll be the HvBrg Ineluctable. Put Kofi back on. ...No, no, Captain Kofi!" He had heard the phone drop and the unmistakable sounds of a drip-grind coffee carafe being replaced onto its warming pad. The hoverbarge's captain came on the line a little while later.

"I'm pulling out. Something strange is happening and I don't like strange. Anything you want to tell your loopy friend?" The sound of percolation got stronger and Burton knew that the phone was next to Joseph Pujol's ear.

"Joe, you gotta straighten out. Get back to the Cooperation. Sam might be in danger."

"Whee, mon cappy tan!" If he was speaking in a bad French accent, Burton realized, he was on the mend. He heard a faint "aaah" that must have been Pujol falling off the side of the hoverbarge; then the landline clicked off as the vehicle took off for the tunnels, away from the advancing Zion troops.

---

Before the Architect, there were eWorkers, the uppermost echelon of humans who worked in the field of computers, neuroscience, and electronics. Their grandest achievement was HumaNet, a way for the huge masses of the unemployed to make a few dollars by renting out their brains as processors while they slept. As with all such innovations, it soon became mandatory rather than voluntary.

A philosophical war erupted between the Engineers and Electricians, political rivals inside the megacorporation that controlled HumaNet. The Electricians lost and their leader, known only as theSparkle, was sentenced to permanent connection.

It is highly unlikely that he has a corporeal form today. His is a wandering consciousness, doomed to experience over and over the data pathways of the Matrix whose electronic foundation he had laid.

But sometimes an opportunity arises to do something about it. theSparkle pressed a button.

---

There was a burst of static from the TV set. "Well, this is odd," SamHill said.

"Please explain," asked Agent ?ErrorNAN, "and have a nice day."

---

There was a burst of static from the monitors. "Well, this is odd," Sam Hill said.

"Huh? What?" asked the freeborn Operator of the HvCft Cooperation.

---
SIXTEENTH SPASM
---

After the static had faded, the Agent trainees channel-surfed between the fishermans' weather report and a documentary on metal mining in the Western US. As Agent Nega took a swig from his bottle of water, he mused, "Naive tides, Utah tin; I, that used it: Evian."

"Oh, so it wasn't just a euphemism for 'going to the bathroom.'" SamHill was doing something he must have learned from lePetomaine, thought Agent ?ErrorNAN: leaning on an imaginary desk. He was quite good at it, bearing most of his weight on the nonexistent tabletop. The Agent trainee couldn't think of a suitable reply to what seemed a nonsensical statement, so he just expressed hopes that Sam would have a nice day, and silently conceded "At least he didn't try that stupid 'porridge bird' line."

"What's going into this cab? Keep that one; it saved my bacon in Blackwood. So does this sort of thing happen often?"

Agent Nega shook his head. "No cabs, no sir. Prefer prison's bacon."

---

"Oh, so it wasn't just a euphemism for 'going to the bathroom.'" Sam was leaning on the desk as he was being shown the Loading Area by Janda, the ship's Operator.

"Nah. They swap out skills here." She was dragging most of Sam's Abilities to the icon of a hard drive on the Desktop. The hard drive was named for the Cerebral Ability Buffer.

"What's going into this C.A.B.?"

"They seem to have a lot of pretty useless ones: 'Advertising Executive 3.0,' two variants of 'Witty Quips,' 'Finding the best spot for lunch 2.1,' 'Smart-alecky Response,' and 'Pet Ownership 4.0.' But they also have a lot of Coder in there."

"Keep that one; it saved my bacon in Blackwood."

She shrugged and popped her gum. "Here. They'll load them up with Martial Arts."

Sam stared at the monitor, which was showing him in the white room with the two Agent trainees. "So does this sort of thing happen often?"

"Nah. Not so far as they know, anyways." He decided not to correct her English, despite the fact that her constant use of the third-person plural for any pronoun was setting his teeth on edge. You don't want to rile someone who was doing digital brain surgery on you.

---

SamHill felt a surge of technique flow into him. "I have a present for you, but I forgot to wrap it, so I put it in my fist," he said, suddenly painfully aware that he no longer had the Witty Quips skill loaded. In any event he jumped into combat and dealt quickly with Agent ?ErrorNAN.

Agent Nega had been shooting at him during the fight, miraculously missing his fellow Agent trainee with every shot despite the blur of martial arts action he was firing into. "Dammit, I'm mad!" he proclaimed. "Draw, o coward!"

But Sam lacked even the smallest of guns, not even a Pookie, and engaged the Agent trainee in close combat. Setting him up with a quick punch to the throat, Sam whirled about and mule-kicked him. To finish him off he smashed his elbow into Agent Nega's chin."

"Able was I ere I saw elbow," the dark-suited man groaned as he slumped into unconsciousness, which was not entirely in keeping with his style but was undeniably accurate.

---

Burton Ernie had to warn Bob Dobbs of the impending Zion threat, and the only way to him at the moment was through the Matrix. He found a hovercraft that was being repaired and jacked in, Operator-less; a dangerous move but one that was called for under the circumstances.

The /addwaypoint trick showed him that there was a hardline near the Machinist. He teleported and found 13013Dobbs slumped in an elevator inside a huge, ominous, jet-black building: reminiscent of a dark fortress from a fantasy adventure movie, or a gas board business office.

"How are you doing?"

BLAM BLAM BLAM "Whoops, sorry, I thought you were someone else."

"Rather glad I'm not whoever that was, then." The three-round burst had hit xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx despite considerable Ranged Damage Reduction, but it hadn't been fatal, and hey, what's a sucking chest wound between friends? "lePetomaine is on the way to the hovercraft to warn Sam."

"Warn him of what?"

"The Zion attack in the Real. Oh, right, that's what I was supposed to tell you. Your corp is on the Incontinent and I think that you escaped."

13013Dobbs sighed. "No one ever tells me anything."

They were safe for the time being, of course, being in an elevator; and close to a hardline. They could conceivably jack out. But both of them felt a growing sense of responsibility toward SamHill. If they could get his RSI to the hardline...

---

"Yee haw!" Sam Hill declared. "OK, I can see why those kids like to play this game. Yee haw! Beating up programs is definitely fun. Yee haw! Say, could you load at least one of those Witty Quips abilities? Saying 'Yee Haw' is really getting old. Yee haw!"

As Janda loaded Witty Quips (the one that didn't take Inner Strength to maintain and has been taken off the list of codable Abilities), she heard machine gun fire in the distance. A distress call from the Indomitable came over the radio. A few minutes ago, it had been the Ineluctable. She popped her gum and watched the virtual SamHill try to take on a 255th level Agent.

"They're an idiot, they know that, don't they?"

"Can't we all just get along? Can't you do something?" Sam Hill asked. "I'm being slaughtered! I mean, what will happen if I'm half in the Matrix and half out, and die in one of those places?"

She shrugged. "They dunno, but they have an idea they're gonna find out." That particular piece of mangled language was the last straw. Sam picked up a stapler from the hovercraft's desk and threw it at her.

---

"Yee haw!" SamHill declared. "OK, I can see why those kids like to play this game. Yee haw! Beating up programs is definitely fun. Yee haw! Say, could you load at least one of those Witty Quips abilities? Saying 'Yee Haw' is really getting old. Yee haw!"

Twenty-four minutes had passed. The female Agent came in. She quickly surveyed the digital carnage and drew an immense gun from somewhere best left to the imaginations of the readers, especially those with dirty imaginations. Sam tackled her and bounced off; she was evading. She was also shooting. SamHill would not have minded so much except for the fact that she was shooting at him.

"Can't we all just get along?" he shouted, now wishing that an ability other than Witty Quips had been loaded. Something with a name like "Escaping from Certain Death 3.0," for instance. "Can't you do something? I'm being slaughtered! I mean, what will happen if I'm half in the Matrix and half out, and die in one of those places?"

"Unknown. Have a nice day." BLAM BLAM BLAM

Desperate, Sam picked up a stapler and threw it at her.

---

"So, which one is next on the list?" asked General Gameplay Discussion.

"Ineluctable... Indomitable... looks like Incontinent, sir," answered the Lieutenant. "At least, we hope so. We couldn't find the Invisible and we don't have enough troops to take on the Insurmountable."

The burly old soldier tapped his foot on the flooring, overcoming the difficulty caused by the loss of his ankle muscles during the Core Wars. "Bring me the mission dossier. I'll lead the strike team myself." He left to attend to the duties of a General, which presumably meant that he did nothing in specific.

The Lieutenant waved a warrant officer over. "You, me, and a mission specialist. One certified in hoverbarge piloting. Ed's going to be leading us." The warrant officer nodded and left for the barracks to find the remainder of their team.

---

The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Matrix defines "guitar" as "One of the best ways to improve manual dexterity." This might not seem relevant now, but soon it will, and the reader may very well slap himself or herself on the forehead and go "Of course!" when that moment arrives. Therefore, you may wish to don some sort of forehead protection now in order to reduce the danger of head trauma. This has been a public service announcement from the author.

---

A very high number was randomized. Also a very low number.

---
SEVENTEENTH SPASM
---

"I have an idea," xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx said to 13013Dobbs as they sat in the elevator; this sounded promising, as it was how some of their most disastrous adventures had begun. "Do you have some kind of really good weapon?"

He realized who he was speaking to and looked away, a bit abashed. 13013Dobbs slowly stood up. "No idea what you have in mind, but evidently it involves killing things, so I'm with you there. Which floor?"

"Duh. Whichever one has 'M' printed on it."

"Ever wonder about that?"

"No."

When the elevator door opened, it revealed an anonymous office hallway. xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx and 13013Dobbs tiptoed along the carpeted corridor and tried not to make any extraneous body noises. Both wondered why bodies in the Matrix made noises such as coughs, gloits, burps, queefs, farts, claffers, wheezes, sneezes, snunks, snorts, sneppies, sniffles, sinus drainages, fleggs, hiccoughs, whulps, over-loud ear poppings, droffs, and borborigmi. (At least, xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx did; 13013Dobbs substituted the term "tummy rumblings" for "borborigmi.") The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Matrix, of course, had definitions of all of those terms, but they are seldom viewed except by bored grade-school children amusing themselves by looking up dirty or disgusting words.

"Are you having a nice day?"

"I am. I should ask you the same question."

"I would respond in the affirmative, and advise you to have a nice day."

"Good. Have a nice day."

The Agents' banter warned the crewmates of their existence in the little center room that usually had a desk and a couple of chairs, sometimes a computer or a safe, but not much in the way of medium cardboard boxes containing completely useless and irrelevant pieces of hardware. 13013Dobbs attempted to run, at once pell-mell and completely silently, toward the elevator. Before he could, however, xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx grabbed him by the collar and opened the door, gun drawn. He popped a shot off at random and commanded the Machinist "Fire at will!"

"Are these two humans authorized to be in this area?" Agent Will asked.

"I think not." Agent Random targeted xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx, and his partner went for 13013Dobbs. xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx's handgun had had little effect. 13013Dobbs' did better, but not very much so, and he received a shot that caused him to get that little pyramid of squares that overlaid your RSI with the steam effect, as long as your graphics card was up to it.

The two Agents were on their heels, occasionally literally: intersecting physically with said heels despite a stern head-shaking and clucking of tongue from the general spatiotemporal theory of objects.

"You're not authorized to be in this area," Agent Will philosophized.

"Escape is impossible," Agent Random posited. He really wanted to say "Resistance is useless," but felt that that would be copyrighted.

"The next time you say 'I have an idea,' I am not going to listen to you," screamed 13013Dobbs, as both of the redpills sprinted back to the elevator, Agents in hot pursuit. There weren't many ways to make an Agent more vicious than it already was, but they had discovered a new technique. xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx's snap-shot had shattered the glass on one of the Agents' Perfect Attendance certificates hanging on the wall. If they lived it might make it into a future edition of the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Matrix.

---

The stapler missed Janda by a mile. "Watch it," she warned. "If they're gonna die soon, they ought to spend their time doing something better. Like making out."

The odd invitation, or perhaps something else, startled Sam Hill. "Well, OK then," he replied.

---

Cramming Health Pills down the Machinist's throat had kept him alive during his bout with the damage-over-time shot of the Agent, but it left him near death. Fortunately massive internal damage and blood loss didn't affect his ability to shoot. xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx pressed the Door Open button.

"Where did they go?" asked Agent Will.

"Unknown," replied Agent Random. "However, I seem to have sustained some injury. Perhaps it was a result of an allergy to some food which I consumed earlier in the day."

"This is a possibility. However, I do not know of any food that would make round bullet-like marks appear on your body."

"Nor do I. Have a nice day."

The door closed. "This is going to take all day," 13013Dobbs complained.

"And you have something better to do?" asked xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx, again hitting the Door Open button and shooting at Random.

"Perhaps it might be best if I sought medical aid for this increasingly severe damage from an unknown source."

"You are correct."

"Hey, they're leaving! Do something!"

xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx jumped briefly into the hallway.

"You're not authorized to be in this area," both Agents announced in unison as they opened fire, forgetting for once the admonition to have a nice day. xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx jumped back in the elevator just before the doors slid shut. He walloped the button again and they resumed their gunplay.

---

theSparkle's cell phone beeped. It was a text message from The Architect.

"You have taken actions that have destabilized The Matrix," it read. "As punishment, I must reduce some of your privileges."

The 1984 construct began to collapse around the Electrician. It soon shrank to one room, containing a table, a chair, and theSparkle himself. The beginning chords of a soulless swing-band song played over and over, the record skipping uncontrollably.

It was worth it, thought the net ghost.

---

"It appears that I am shutting down," observed Agent Random as the last few health points drained out of his virtual body. "Please continue to figure out where the humans are. Have a nice..."

"Have-- sob-- have a nice day," Agent Will mourned.

The elevator was nearly full of spent shells. 13013Dobbs' best weapon had almost been destroyed due to Stability loss; fortunately it was rescued just in time by xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx. They had done it. One Agent down, one to go.

"Lather, rinse, repeat," he cheerfully announced, hitting the Door Open button and preparing for another fifteen minutes of holding down a trigger.

"Fire at Will. Oh, I get it!" gloated 13013Dobbs.

---

"Chicken Mode," which is of course the PG version of the term many people use, is defined in the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Matrix as "the most annoying thing a program can do, 99.9999% of the time." Although it is not in the Guide, a very good book by Terry Pratchett (Guards! Guards! if memory serves) has an interesting line: "One in a million chances come up nine times out of ten." The author hopes that the maths are not beyond the reader.

---

The stapler hit the female Agent on the forehead. The tiniest of scratches appeared there, and a drop of digital blood-- not even worth putting a bandage on-- oozed out.

"Ouch," she intoned. She stood stock-still for a moment, then healed that single point of damage, ran outside to the corridor, and began evading.

SamHill was not going to dispute this unexpected turn of events. "Well, OK then," he commented, and began looking for a way out that didn't involve going past the Agent. He was out of staplers.

---

"We did it!" The two crewmates gave each other the high-five, then grimaced as their cramped gun-firing hands were forced open by the impact. "Sam should be just ahead."

They charged in, not even looting the bodies of the Agents, and left the dreary corporate environment to plunge into a maze of monochrome corridors. A female Agent ran through an open doorway into their midst, causing xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx to briefly lose control of his virtual bladder; but for some reason she seemed uninterested in attacking them. Through the doorway they saw Sam. He seemed to be kissing an invisible woman.

"Aw, man, his mind's gone," the Zionist muttered. "Just grab him and let's get back to the hardline." But there was no reply from the Machinist, for one very good reason: He had disappeared.

---

"Dude! This is so cool. You guys rock." Captain Kofi was trying to chat up the four Zion soldiers who had pulled his hoverbarge over, ostensibly for a broken taillight. The fact that two were training their weapons on him made this reason seem less than likely. He extended his hand and the Lieutenant shook it automatically, then realized that the Captain's hand was coated in some sort of unpleasantly sticky substance. He wiped his hand on his flak jacket.

"Quiet. We're looking for this man." The strike force's second-in-command showed him a blurry and pixilated section of a snap. Kofi squinted at it.

"Looks like Abraham Lincoln. Or a cat."

The Lieutenant took the picture back and handed it to General Gameplay Discussion, who stared at it for quite a long time. "You don't mind if we look around, do you?" It wasn't really a question. The young officer began poking people on the leatherette couches using his rifle barrel. The General placed a hand (his remaining one) on the other man's shoulder.

"Wait. The three of you, guard the Captain. I'll look for our target myself." It was unusual-- the General was not in the best of condition, having lost an unbelievable number of body parts during numerous military engagements. But he was a man who demanded respect, and he got it.

The mission specialist, recently inducted into the Zion army, complained to the warrant officer. "The hell? What does he think this is, a one-man show?"

"Quiet, soldier!" barked the Lieutenant. "'Evil Ed' Discussion has a reason for everything he does."

The old man slowly walked down the long rows of corp couches until he found the one that he wanted. He touched the emergency jackout switch. The young man on the couch blinked as his mind was drawn out of the Matrix and back into the Real. He looked up at the heavily armed and armoured man standing over him.

"Hi, Dad," he said.

---
EIGHTEENTH SPASM
---

"According to the records, the Cooperation should be just ahead," said the leader of another four-man strike team. "Remember your orders. Sam Hill and the Operator are to be placed into custody, the others to be terminated."

"Cross fingers," replied a Corporal. "Hard to tell these vat-kids apart." It was kind of racist but no one commented on it. "Hey, isn't that one of them now?"

The Sargeant peered through his binoculars. It was lePetomaine, making his way down a huge causeway; the soldiers were in a narrower one with a lower ceiling.

"Should we commence firing, sir?"

"No, wait, something's weird here." The little man was struggling to get down the tunnel, fighting his way against what seemed to be a powerful wind. Every so often he fell down and was pushed back a few feet by the speeding gusts of air which appeared to be battering him as he tramped along the passageway.

"Huh. Some kind of storm. That might make targeting a problem."

"Agreed. Hey, we can take the maintenance tunnel over to the Cooperation. He's bound to be heading there, and we can shoot him at the hovercraft instead of fighting the wind. Slow going, but if the storm's as strong as it looks, we'll get there first."

"Good plan, soldier," the Sargeant said. They descended a spiral staircase that led to the narrow, cluttered underground shaft. As they did, lePetomaine stopped fighting against the wind and began ice-skating, despite the lack of both ice on the ground and skates on his feet.

---

Bob Dobbs-- originally Bob Discussion-- grabbed his coffee cup with both hands. Even so, he spilled a little on its way to his mouth.

General Gameplay Discussion drained his cup and motioned for a refill. "So. You still keeping up with your music?"

The teenager shook his head, an action that reached all the way to his shoulders. "No time for it, Dad. I'm trying to make it as a Ma-- as an Operative."

"For the Machines still?"

He sighed. "Dad, we've talked about this before. I just-- you know, I think they're right."

The grizzled veteran slowly reclined in his chair. "We have talked about it, haven't we?" It was a stupid thing to say, the kind of thing you say only to keep a conversation going, and each of them knew it. But neither commented.

"Pretty good times, though. We put together some good tunes." As "Evil Ed," which was his nickname from basic training, General Gameplay Discussion had been the drummer in The MetalliKlowns. Bob had been lead guitarist.

Flashback to two years ago: General Discussion had been extracted for a while, but Zion had just gained the ability to track genetic codings. His wife had died in the Real, and of course in the Matrix as well, before his extraction. But he wanted his son out. The boy was depressed about Mom and was wondering why Dad went away so often on "business." He had dropped out of high school; he was starting to run with a gang. Trouble loomed.

And the old boy got him out. Well, a respected officer gets a lot of perquisites. There wasn't a lot of Machine or Merovingian activity opposing the extraction of Bob Discussion; not a tenth of the trouble that they had had extracting last year's winner of Megacity Idol. And when they got him used to the Real...

Bob Discussion's corp was nerve damaged. He lacked fine motor control. His father started him on muscle rehabilitation courses, among them guitar playing. The boy was never very good. Nor was he good with a pistol; in fact he wasn't allowed to have one in the Real, being a threat to himself and others. In the Matrix, though-- well, you leave physical muscles behind.

Bob found that he could both shoot like an ace and play a mean axe there. The group's first album, Destroy This Album Before Buying, was started in the Real but recorded in a studio in the Matrix. Frankly, it was crap, but father and son enjoyed the process and the time they spent together. In the meantime, in the Real, he was making very slow progress.

Bob soon seemed to spurn the Real, staying connected most of the time. Gameplay thought this to be unhealthy, but Bob-- at that rebellious age-- didn't want to hear it. Then came an inquiry from an Agent recruiting for the Machines. Bob was enthralled. Weapons. Respect. Dignity. He left a note, scribbled in his clumsy hand and barely recognizable as English, to his father. He joined the Machine cause.

Flashforward.

---

xxxxxxxNeoxxxxxxx tread silently down the dock area of Zion. A security guard had made the mistake of asking for his pass. That guard had died a second later. xxxxxxxNeoxxxxxxx would have liked to have drawn the middle-aged woman's death out to at least five minutes, but time was money.

One of his informants had told him that the target had gone into a decomissioned hovercraft. Pity. No Operator. Hardly worth it to kill only a single person. He remembered the day he had killed his own Operator, and then blocked the jackouts of his crewmates, sending their minds into various insanity-provoking constructs as he did things to their corporeal forms that frankly made the author retch as he wrote them, so they have been edited out.

There was only a trifling bounty on the head of xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx. Something having to do with collateral damage from a mission some months ago; xxxxxxxNeoxxxxxxx knew little of the details, and cared about them even less. But there was also a bounty on the head of the Merovingian controller who was sponsoring that, placed there by a Machine representative. And that human was in turn targeted for assassination by a faction of Zion. Claim the reward, kill the sponsor, go on to the next target. It made lovely sense.

The glow of the monitor was the only light in the hovercraft's cabin. He drew his eye-gouges and his fingernail-pliers and his ear-hooks and his nut-crushers and his-- huuuuurp as he watched xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx's virtual form on the monitor. The camera was set to "chase" and it showed the back of the young man's head.

xxxxxxxNeoxxxxxxx always liked the target to die at the most inopportune time. He had once killed a redpill, a politician in the Matrix, just as he said "And may God strike me dead if this bill will not benefit the good people of the Megacity!" Only once in a lifetime do you get a thrill like that, but small pleasures were what got you through the day.

Small pleasures, and Megacity Idol. But that was in reruns. His tools nicely in array, he looked up at the monitor to see xxxxxxNeoxxxxxx at a hardline, SamHill in tow. The pyjama-clad Coder turned to face the camera.

Now go back and count the number of "x"s, and it may make more sense.

---

The four members of the Zion strike team stopped in the middle of the maintenance tunnel. Each of them had realized the same thing at the same time.

"A windstorm? Inside the dock area?"

Being trained soldiers, they realized that they could make better time doubling back they way they had come. When they popped their heads out of the hatch, they were almost mowed down by a hovercraft, sweeping erratically thro