Der Doppelgänger

Part 1

... But only some...

The air shifted ever so slightly with the invisible green rain of the code, the signatures twisting and spiraling ever so slightly as a black blur resolved itself to being purple, and a pair of like-colored boots touched down upon a green rooftop. Or perhaps it was gray. Everything looked green around here. An emerald city stretched out far beneath those amethyst slippers, and she felt her lips rise into that well-practiced smile, the like only Da Vinci might fully appreciate.

Clicking her heels, she surveyed the metropolis below.

"There's no place like home," Liliane mused, mostly to herself.

"... Not that there's much to choose from," he answered, dully as usual.

She started a bit, wondering if she had spoken the thought aloud, or if he had managed to worm his way into her brain. The thought was disconcerting, to say the least. She already had enough machinery in there without worrying about viral attacks from the likes of him...

He matched her smile with one even less-noticable. But then, Liliane had known him for a very long time, and was a perceptive woman at that.

"You enjoy that, don't you?"

"... Enjoy...?"

She huffed. "Nevermind." Crossing her arms, she turned her gaze from him and looked below, following the Uriel spotlights as they traced figure-eights on the clouds. Or perhaps they were writing infinity, for as long as they could... maybe forever. She decided not to look back at the Void. She knew what he looked like, and it wasn't as though she needed to maintain eye-contact. It wasn't as though she even could.

"... I'd ask how long you've been standing there, but-"

"I'd say 'long enough'." he finished, with another smile that almost wasn't.

"Well, you never get off your rock unless you have a reason. How come you're here?"

He would've turned to regard her, but she wasn't looking at him anyway. Not that there was much point. "I need to meet with the Mad Hatter. I was hoping you could set things up for us."

She rolled her eyes. "I'm not his secretary, Void. Besides, you seem to get along fine with him. Why not ask him yourself?"

"Because, dear Liliane... He will come more readily to your call than any I know. And I would hardly think myself worthy of your respect if I didn't understand the nature of opportunity and when to use such as such."

Finally, it was her turn to smile again, even if the gesture was lost to him. "You sound almost like you used to."

"Perhaps I'm looking forward to something, for a change."

"You?"

"... You're right. It's probably simply instability in the System. But I suppose we'll see what happens, either way."

She finally turned to look in his direction. He didn't oblige the gesture with his own, as expected, but for a moment she regarded his form, his face, trying to read what would not be read - trying to read some glimmer of a life long past, where there might have been something, anything there.

"... What are you up to?" She asked, quirking a brow at him, half in curiosity and half in frustration with his concrete expression.

"Set up a meeting for me, and you'll find out. I'm sure he'll let you sit-in." He inclined his head ever so slightly, half in politeness and half in evidently having concluded what he needed to say.

Just then, one of the spotlights swept in an unusually wide arc, bathing the rooftop in sudden, bright light. Liliane blinked, raising her hand to shield herself from its glare. When her vision cleared, he was gone as abruptly as he had come. The slightest touch of her earlier smile returned to her purple lips.

"... There's no place like home," she repeated.

- Void

Part 2

Not-so-long ago...

Like the hands in a clock, time marched steadily onward. That was the way of things in the Matrix - the code was always in motion, and the wheels of the great and terrible Machine never stopped. Club Cyclo was a reminder of this, and was for that reason perhaps a very fitting place for their meeting.

... In all honesty, though, Liliane had chosen it because the lighting was purple. Sometimes it was better not to drown things in metaphor.

She had arrived on time. The Mad Hatter had indeed answered her call, and had arrived fashionably late - not too surprising, as he liked to maintain some level of perceived importance. If others waited on him, so much the better, as they would have to admit that they ultimately required his attendance.

He had found her waiting for him, alone.

She had been standing with her back to the doorway, facing the window that overlooked the city. It was a bit of a theme in this place - trying to look over all of it and take it all in. In truth, she was watching the reflection of that purple-lit room as it danced in the glass, waiting for either of their presences to make themselves known - especially Void's, as he had a habit of sneaking up on her. When she saw a reflection in the window, she had turned suddenly in the hopes of catching him, but upon seeing that it was the Mad Hatter, she turned quickly back to the window, lest Void have appeared while her back was turned.

She saw nothing. And not his kind of nothing.

"You seem on edge, my dear," he said, laying a hand on her shoulder.

"He's going to do that popping out of nowhere thing, and I'm not going to let him get the drop on me this time."

"Why does it bother you so?" he asked, seemingly missing the point. "Because of the inhuman nature of such a thing...?" he asked, probingly.

"Pfft," she replied, running a hand back through her hair. "I'm not bothered by it - I'm probably the last person with reason to fear him. It's just because he always manages to catch me by surprise, even when I've grown to expect it."

The Mad Hatter laughed, bringing a hand to his lips to still them, in case she found offense in the sound. "That's probably why he does it. They say he's without emotion, but I believe he retains some sense of humor."

Looking around the room, he sighed a little. "Well, he isn't here yet. Would you care for a drink?"

She motioned to the endtable beside the black leather couch backed against the window. "I just finished a berry martini, actually."

"Ah. Well, sit with me, then. He can't float outside the window, and there's no ledge, so he'll have to come from the stairs."

Liliane could appreciate the logic in that, and sat beside him on the couch, ruffling her hair with her fingers, which caused it to fall back in what she would term perfect disarray, as always. It was all just programming, and programming could always be expected to do what it was designed to do, or at least to get close to it. Even the Merovingian and such exiles as he kept in his employ were pleasantly consistent, even the Void... Even the Hatter, for that matter.

She looked over at him and smiled; he returned the gesture. As if on cue, they leaned in toward one another, though their eyes never left the stairs. It provided a bit of excitement, knowing that at any moment they might be joined. It was somewhat like the feeling of youthful freedom.

"I hope I'm not interrupting any terribly important discussions."

Liliane swore. The Hatter simply stiffened and looked toward the corner of the room, where their expected company was somehow unexpectedly standing.

Consistent, he was. But pleasant? Not so much. It countered the feeling of youthful freedom by startling her a bit further into old age and madness. Then again, she suspected that Hatter was right about one thing - he hadn't lost a certain sense of humor. Even if she wasn't exactly in the mood to appreciate it.

"Void."

"Hatter." He paused, then bowed his head. "Liliane."

"Hmph," she replied hautily. Being in Void's presence was something like watching a spider on the wall - it was better to know where it was than not to know. Liliane wasn't scared of spiders, but she wasn't fond of them ending up inside her shoes for lack of attention to their habits.

"You wanted to see me?" asked the Mad Hatter, eager to get to business.

"No, I gave up on any hope of that a long time ago," Void answered, in a monotone that would've made a telegraph machine proud. "I do, however, need to speak with you regarding... the allocation of our resources."

He paused, for a moment, reading something...

"Speaking of which, you seem to be wearing one of our new allies," he finished, his lips turning into a smile that only Liliane noticed. The Mad Hatter simply nodded and answered, as the stability of his program made him wont to do.

"They seem to have stepped out of line... And I never did care for them, or the Tin Soldier."

Void nodded, the smile growing imperceptibly more present. "... I suppose we're allowed to dispatch them?"

"The ones that have stepped out of line, yes. To ensure that the remaining ones will be... loyal."

"... And their resources...?" Here the smile could be noticed by both, but the Mad Hatter did not find it at all worrisome. Then again, he didn't know Void as well as his company did.

"There are certain... 'benefits' from recovering them. It is a challenge, mind you... More than that, I don't know," the Hatter replied, expelling the remainder of his knowledge on the subject, which in Void's mind ended his immediate usefulness.

"Very well... As long as we're authorized to do so." He bowed politely.

Liliane spoke up, knowing him and what such a gesture meant. "Leaving so soon, Void?"

The Void smiled, almost as his former self had done... But it wasn't the human sort of smile. This was something new, something cold. Something frightening, though Liliane knew that he would not likely bring harm to her or those on her side. Even so, the alien nature of it was shocking... even if it was on some level expected of him.

"As you said, Liliane... War gives us all something to do.

... I have something that needs to be done."

- Void

Part 3

Somewhere...

Some-when...

The hallways were obsessively white, and time and space became meaningless in the long corridors, especially after an extended stay. How long had it been since he had last seen the Matrix proper? It might be the next door over, or three doors back... And despite the assurance that these doors always led somewhere or other, he found himself always back where he had started from - a black dot stranded on a white shore, or perhaps drowned in an endless sea of blue doors.

There had been no change in the atmosphere or lighting for some time, now, and the sheer quiet of the place was both off-putting and maddening. There had been no one to talk to, and his earpiece had transmitted silence, or static, since he had walked through a door what seemed a million doors ago.

The constant light of the place belied its dark designs. This was a mad hall, in a madhouse. The hospital-white of an asylum for the misfortunate. Only a disciplined mind - the mind of a program - could maintain any semblance of duty in a place such as this one. Every so often, the hum of the lights or the real-or-imagined sound of doors being opened and shut would shake loose idle thoughts and old memories, such as they were...

Perhaps it had been a mistake to come here in the first place. He wondered if the others thought the same way... He knew there were others. There had to be. Not all of the doors opening and closing could be hallucinations of the auditory processor. Programs, like himself, walked these halls, though he had yet to see any of them. Redpills traveled these corridors, as well. These were avoided, or in more perilous situations engaged as hostile targets. He had shot several of them already, their bodies always fading away into a flash of green light as the System resolved their disconnection with its customary efficiency.

Where did they go beyond that? He didn't truly know, and wasn't programmed to. Some said that since the Truce the Redpills had managed to develop a system that jacked them out of the Matrix when they sustained mortal damage, to prevent them from truly dying. Some said that such a system was inefficient, and some went so far as to claim that it was an outright fabrication.

Again, he wasn't programmed to know. As far as he was aware, none of his targets had ever managed to 'come back to life' in such a way. Then again, even the state of death was an enviable quality compared with door after door of limbo with no reprieve in sight.

Something moved up ahead... A door opening, someone coming through. Another black dot on the white shore... But this one wasn't an ally. This was a target - and as such, could not be ignored. Perhaps this was the reason he had come to this place in the first place, to dispatch such threats. After all, that was what he was programmed to do, wasn't it? He had been alone for so long that it was hard to remember what to do... But as the other figure came into clearer view, and as it stopped to regard him, he remembered what his purpose was.

Slowly, he took aim, raising his weapon, finger sliding with practiced motion off of the trigger guard to find the killswitch for this or any other misbegotten program with delusions of grandeur. He had killed countless humans and their allies since becoming lost in this place - one more would be a statistically simple task. The thing didn't speak, didn't look at him. In fact, it barely seemed to move at all...

... until suddenly it was standing inside the reach of his rifle, a single pistol firing a single shot at point-blank range.

The last thing he saw as the infra-red vision of his visor became a cloudy haze of his own simulated fluids was the bullet casing spiraling back in slow-motion, over the shoulder of the inferior program... over the shoulder of his killer.

They both hit the floor at the same time, the bell tone of the spent shell echoing down the hallway where the crack of the gun had just faded into distance and distortion, and the muffled slump of the body which remained professionally quiet even in death.

Void smirked, if only a bit, humming in satisfaction to the maddening tune of the electric lights that did absolutely nothing to help or hinder his work in this place. The first few Commandos he had killed weren't quite right - they had been driven too far into Exile in their wandering through these endless doorways - but the coding of this one was exquisite. It had remembered itself and its purpose at just the right time, and that identity was now perfectly preserved in death.

Void knelt beside the mummified body even as the blood began to pool about his shoes and the hemline of his duster. Tracing a finger down from the wound, just beneath the program's visor, he followed the code as it continued to flow. The Commando's code was alive even in death, which was unsurprising in a world where the hardest thing to do was simply and truly to stand still. The code always flowed inward and outward again. Things were always in motion, systems coming together, systems coming apart...

... For all the accusations, Void had never eaten anyone. He had, however, taken several people apart. This Commando - or rather, this body formerly a Commando, was to be no exception. Its code could be later recompiled from local memory and studied in solitude. For now, it was best simply to decompile the object as any object in this place might be decompiled... and that was what he did, before leaving through the same door he had entered by - a door that would put him not far at all from Yeung Park, and the next step of his plan.

He left nothing of the Commando behind - no pool of blood, no unnecessary bodyparts, not even scuffmarks on the floor nor fingerprints on the doorknob. The one thing that remained to mark the occasion at all, in the center of the hall where it had fallen, was a single spent bullet casing, that might once have sounded the bell to ferry a wayward program homeward from a foreign white shore, across a sea of blue doors...

- Void

Part 4

Approaching the present...

Grass of the finest jade bent in the wind, playing at the edge of tranquil waters whose shape mirrored the reflecting waves of the stalks and branches of ancient trees, while its surface was the gold of the setting sun. A beautiful sunset, with no one to see it. The park held, as it had lately, only one occupant - and he would never see the beauty of that perfect sunset.

Not that he desired to, so it really made no difference to him. Atop a stone sculpture that rose above everything else in the park, the Void sat as he customarily did, contemplating what calculations as an alien mind might. He could feel the wind on his body as it whipped over the rock, bringing in the night to swallow the day. He could hear the rustling in the grass and the low, ghostly moaning of the air being forced through holes in the rock... His rock, he supposed, though it was largely pointless to claim territory or position in this place. He had never tried to keep anyone out of Yeung Park...

... He had simply killed them all whenever he needed time to sit alone and concentrate on some problem. Here, now, the bodies of a few foolish Black Tigers, effortlessly slaughtered in the blinking of an eye. Not his, of course.

There were a few bluepills here, as well. They would no doubt be found in the morning, taken away, the news broken to their undoubtedly grieving families. Initially, the blue response had been to station more police officers patrolling the park, particularly at night - the blues had a particular fear of the night, or perhaps of having limited visibility.

He had made sure to kill those officers in broad daylight. They had been found after they had suddenly stopped responding to radio contact all around the same time... After that, people just avoided the park, calling it haunted, except for the local Exile gang who still attempted to move into its territory now and again. Even their brash words grew conspicuously quiet each time day sank into the inky black of night. That time belonged to something else. Something which grew a little less-human every day.

Again as was so often the case, Void couldn't really sympathize with this illogical fear of darkness. He didn't even bother to tell the night from the day anymore. It didn't make any appreciable difference to the cycle of the code... He couldn't see the code, of course. But he sensed it, felt it all around his rock - this place had been chosen, not because of the superstitions of red or blue, but because it was a place where the code tended to gather - a node where the patterns could be more easily ascertained. It was a graveyard of sorts, where old code broke apart and decomposed. That was, perhaps, why the scenery was so natural. Its simplicity allowed it to survive in the inherent chaos.

Void enjoyed sitting in it. It concealed him from the watchful eyes of the System, and it reminded him that technically speaking he wasn't anything of consequence, or much of anything at all. It allowed him to concentrate on other patterns - the code rising off of the freshly-killed Black Tigers, running through their leaking blood, into the grayed-jade of the once-brilliant grass. It permeated the dull shine of the oily black waters, once glimmering and bright with fading fire. It crept up the stone legs of his rock; it whistled that ghostly sound through the cracks and crevices in the old sculpture... And finally, it blended with his body, as his own vacated to join the night sky.

It was all a part of him, and he was all a part of it. Such was the nature of a constantly-shifting world. By such logic, the Commando's code was already his. He simply needed to isolate the bits he needed from all the trash he might cast away into the graveyard to be decomposed and recycled. 

The Merovingian had authorized override routines to be put into their code... Those certainly weren't advisable. He didn't need the Commando's personality traits or RSI shell... Conceptually, he knew that the code was visible for the time being, as the reactions were too much for the System to appropriately mask. Having dispatched anyone from the park, however, he doubted it would attract much attention. Any casual onlookers would merely see a strange green glow coming from atop the Dawei Sculpture, and if their eyes were exceptional perhaps an indistinguishable black shape in its midst.

Void wondered if he had a shape, if no one was there to observe it. Feeling oneself in the code was a bit like swimming through dark water - though not the same dark water that ebbed and flowed beneath the rock. It was a liquid state, and one not terribly conducive to maintaining a solid form... He pondered this, idly, even as his primary processors poured over the code of the Commando's body, continuing to strip away all the unnecessary bits until he was left with the proper code for his intended purpose.

And yet... Even with a complete copy of what was left sitting in front of him, coding it back into something useful was not an easy task. Void had never had to write drivers for an external piece of hardware, before. He had never had to code in such a way that it would affect things in the other world. He had always been trapped here - trapped in a world of code upon code, a world in which he fully existed without truly existing at all.

Part 5

Decaying in their long disuse, the tunnels of Man's once-great civilization stood vacant, scrap piled upon itself like some rusted exhibit in a museum not fit for casual observers - or perhaps more like a holocaust monument, the torn and jagged metal and stone - symbolic and sobering to those whose eyes were able to see its history laid out before them, or rather, behind them.

The art of Man's hubris itself was, like much of the world, a twisted mockery of its former self, a dead thing which, bearing as much sentience as a bookend, thought of itself roughly the same way, which is to say that none of it considered itself in the least. In fact, in the sense that inanimate objects and settings only exist when observed by the living, the tunnel came into sudden being when it was splashed by the light of the first hovercraft's flood-lamps. The path to New Zion might have been charted, but the tunnels were always treacherous, not only by the unpredictability of their indeterminable age, but by the fact that every crevice might hide an enemy.

One of the subsequent crafts took a turn in the tunnel a bit too wide, and as it scraped the wall, it dislodged a piece of scrap, which crumbled downward into the darkness...

It fell for some time, clattering off more metal and stone, before resting in a pile of similar fare at the bottom of a long, dark expanse, like a mine-shaft deep into the cavernous earth. Perhaps it had once been an access tunnel to the sewer system further below. Perhaps it had once been the connector to a power station or an underground railway. What it once had been was hardly of consequence, for now it was little more than a grave.

And yet, at the bottom, something stirred in the pitch blackness. A hand which was not a hand snapped out deftly, snatching the scrap metal before it could come to its own final resting place. The talons scraped over it, tapping at it, testing it, feeling it... Other sensors took in the sound of metal on metal as it was squeezed, bent, cracked, crushed. Then, an arm which was not an arm whipped out, tossing it back into the senseless depths, where it echoed once, and twice more, before falling silent forever.

And from that deep darkness, a few lights began to burn a vengeful red...

- Void

((Note: While the Sentinel model above is really nice, I can't claim credit for making it. It came off of a google image search, and I only did minor editing to the picture to make it fit the theme.))