Preface

Some how the world just didn't sit right, Even though he knew he was awake, everyday seemed to feel like a dream. Or more like a waking night mare. He just couldn't work out why. Whenever he said anything to his friends at school they just seemed to lok at him in a funny way and tell him to stop taking whatever it was he was taking.

Whatever it was, it had him on edge. It was like... like looking at life through a tinted lense, like a splinter through his mind, Always there, nagging away but he just couldn't get it to budge, couldn't get his vision to clear.

He needed to find a way, needed to wake up, needed to feel alive.

He just didn't know how


1.
The computer pinged and then the screen went blank. It wasn’t going to work, again. Jason had been trying to find a way round the security firewall for the whole night, and the night before, and the night before that. In fact he’d been trying to get in for nearly two weeks.

This time he’d thought he was in, he should have been, everything he’d done was right. All the hours of trying had taught him what was going on and the systems weaknesses. None of the alarms had been triggered, no one knew what he was trying to do but he still just couldn’t get through that final portal. He needed to know why, he needed to know where he had gone wrong, he needed to get in…. He needed to sleep.

And sleep he did, until well into the morning. He woke with a start, not sure what time it was, with that all to familiar feeling of disjointedness. He’d missed the start of school, not that it mattered. Everything was so basic, so boring to him. It just didn’t matter. Who cared if he could speak French or understand Shakespeare? What possible difference could that make in the grand scheme of things? Any way, his parents didn’t care, they were never around and even when they were they didn’t seem to notice him, they were too busy fighting.

So that was that. School could take a running jump. He had a mainframe to hack and he was getting a little p!$$ed off. It wasn’t about what he found when he got in, interesting as the NSA central archives no doubt were, but it was about the chase, beating the system, and so far there hadn’t been a system he could not crack and this one was not going to be the first. Already the name ‘Morpheus’ was gaining notoriety in high security circles and for 15-year old Jason Marsden that was beyond cool.

2
Jason was a cyber fiend. He spent as many of his waking hours as he could on the internet. Everything else stemmed from this and as far as he was concerned if he couldn’t find it with his computer it wasn’t worth looking at.

He had two main interests, hacking and conspiracy theories. His first major hack had come about by mistake. He was buying some computer parts on line and ordered the latest processing gear. When his Dad saw the credit card bill he want ape. A serious beating and two black eyes later there was no way he was sending the gear back like his Dad wanted. Instead he accessed his Dad’s account on line and tried to cancel the card. When that didn’t work he tried to speak to the banks manager, claiming that the card had been stolen. That didn’t work either. He set to and managed to brute force his way into the banks main frame and remove the invoices, not before he’d triggered at least one alarm alerted the banks security systems of his presence and been traced. That had earned him a visit from two very shady gentle men who threatened to remove his computer if he was ever caught pulling a stunt like that again. So since then he made sure that he was un catch-able. He had set up a complex series of shadow’s and mirrors, routing his path through at least 3 large companies. His password cracking program was like nothing to be found on the net and frankly, he was unstoppable. Since that day He had not had to pay for a thing, with 3 dummy I.D.’s and a credit card from almost every major country in the world

In the last few years he’d heard about hundreds of conspiracies on the net, a lot of them from the lurid underbelly and managed to disprove at least 80 percent of them That was probably how he ended up at the NSA’s virtual front door. He had heard on the grapevine about some sort of control system called the matrix, it sounded to him like the usual neo-military hokum the government would subscribe to but, some how this felt different.

Very nice Swampy.
I know this story will go great places.
I like it, keep up the good work.

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Interesting...good start! I like your flow...you've got a good sense of timing.

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Very nice. You got some talent Swampy. Keep it up.

If any of you guys are actually hackers then please forgive my bumbling guess at how it would be done. If this is anywhere near accurate then thats a bonus but beyond that I had to exercise my artistic license

3.
This time he was going to get in and no stupid slips were going to get in his way. He was Morpheus, king hacker, undefeated in all contests, about to enter the big time. He fired up his router, checked all his mirrors were secure, the last thing he needed was for some two-bit office IT buff to spot him bouncing off their server. Everything was fine. That done he fired up his shadow and his scrubber. Like playing in the snow, every move you made on line left a clear footprint for those inclined to look. The scrubber programme made sure that those footprints faded as quickly as they appeared.

So far, everything was going like every other hack he’d ever tried. Like clockwork. He was starting to get the usual tingles down his spine that he always got, the rush was just starting to come. He typed the server’s FTP address and fired up his password programme. It was the finest piece of AI programming he’d ever come across, all the more so as he’d written it himself. Each previous attempt the software remembered what didn’t work, narrowing the search and minimising the time he needed to be stood on the doorstep. With that in place he fired up his brute force programmes.

Computers were like women, the best way to get the responses you want and the way to really make them sing was to give them just the right mix of pleasure and pain. Or so he’d been told. Jason’s experience of women was very limited, he’d seen plenty of porn, the net was flooded with it but as far as real life went he was limited to a drunken fumble at the school Christmas party with one of the ugliest girls in the school. It had put him off a bit.

The password programme started ticking through a series of codes at the website door. He fired up his brute force and set it loose on the ftp access codes. The adrenaline was starting to course through his blood. His fingers danced across the keyboard and the screen changed. HE WAS IN! The best the US government had to offer, foiled by the best hacker in the world. Come on!

lmao-I don't think anyone would be a hackerin here. Good piece you've got there...still it doesn't sound like its Morpheus you're describing here. Marsden...doesn't that remind me of an X-men character?

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I realise that it doesn't sound like the uber-cool Morpheus we all recognise but he is only in his formative years at this stage of the tale. Also if you look at the difference between part one Mr Anderson and Revolutions Neo, the characters grow very quickly. I have a plan, which will unfold later... wait and see!

Oh and the marsden and x-men link, James Marsden plays Cyclops in the recent movies

4
With every other hack he’d done, the thrill was the breaking and entering. This one was slightly different. Anyone could say they’d hacked the NSA, but he needed to be able to prove he had. As he searched he found all sorts, hidden Vietnamese intelligence sources, Soviet missile plans, Contacts in the Columbian cartels, he even stumbled across a file on ‘Morpheus’, still very small but he copied it any way.

As he dug further in he found what he was looking for, a file entitled ‘Matrix developments: Freed minds enquiry’. Freed minds? What the hell? He copied it across and continued to search, but as he did his mind kept returning to the file and he wondered what it contained. All thoughts of boasting had now gone from his mind. He had to find out what the deal with this ‘matrix’ was and what it meant by ‘free minds’. That bit sounded like hippy s#!t if ever he heard it.

It was time to pull out. He’d been hooked up long enough and even the most secure link was made riskier by spending too long with your fingers in the bad guys wallet. He closed the brute force programme and logged out of the mainframe. He withdrew his tentacles from across the net, and slowly shut everything off, leaving nothing running but the scrubber programme to hide his trail.

It was time for some caffeine. He got up and went to the kitchen to fetch a cup of strong, fresh ground Columbian java before returning to the screen to see what he’d brought out of the NSA’s mainframe. As he went back into his room, down under the stairs and into the cellar, he felt a strange sensation come over him, as if he was being watched. As he opened the door at the bottom he could see the screen had changed. ‘This is not good’ he though to himself as he sat down, the images of the two men he had met last time he’d been caught flooding back into his mind, All black suits and sunglasses with a strange little earpiece.

He read what was written on the screen ‘THE MATRIX HAS YOU’. Jason dropped his coffee, he pulled the modem lead out of the back of his machine, disconnected the power to his modem and unplugged his hardware from the mains. He exhaled his breath and turned back to the screen trying to figure out how he had been traced, only to discover the message was still there. Text started to appear on the screen. How was it doing that? He’d removed the power and everything, what was going….’MORPHEUS, IT IS YOUR TIME.’ ‘Time for what?’ he said. As if in answer the screen changed again: ‘ANSWER THE TELEPHONE MORPHEUS.’ Answer the teleph…. RING-RING, RING-RING, RING-RING