The Matrix — Temet Nosce

THE MATRIX: TEMET NOSCE

Written by Sharms Debris

ACT I

FADE IN:

INT. NEBUCHADNEZZAR - THE CORE - NIGHT CYCLE

The heart of the ship. Cables hang like vines. The green code of the Matrix pours down a bank of monitors, painting everything the colour of a dream. MORPHEUS sits in the operator's chair, watching it fall. He is not reading it. He is listening to it, the way a man listens to scripture. TRINITY is on the deck plating with a lightning rifle stripped down around her -- the ugly, heavy, real-world kind, coil and capacitor bank, nothing anybody would ever load into the Matrix. She is cleaning it by feel, not looking at it. NEO climbs down into the core. He has been awake a long time and it shows. Neither of them is surprised to see him. This is the fourth night in a row.

MORPHEUS

(without turning)

Eleven thousand, four hundred and six.

NEO

What?

MORPHEUS

Souls. Out of the pods and into the world. Since the night you stood in a corridor and told three Agents no. He has been counting it for four years.

MORPHEUS (CONT'D)

In the twenty years before that, my ship freed eighty-one. Neo sits down on the edge of the platform. He has no idea what to do with that and everybody in the room knows it.

TRINITY

(not looking up from the rifle)

Tell him what you told me.

NEO

I didn't tell you anything.

TRINITY

I know. Tell him anyway. A long moment. Then Neo does, because it is three in the morning and there is nobody else in the world he could say it to.

NEO

It's the same every night. Somebody I love dies, right in front of me. And I'm fast enough to reach them -- I'm always fast enough -- and it never matters. I can't stop it. He does not look at Trinity while he says it. Which is how she knows.

NEO (CONT'D)

(quiet)

It feels like a memory of something that hasn't happened yet. Morpheus turns. And there is no fear in him at all. If anything, the dream moves him.

MORPHEUS

The One has always dreamed. It isn’t a curse. It’s the war trying to tell you something.

NEO

Then it's telling me I'm going to fail.

MORPHEUS

No. He rises. And now the preacher is in him -- the man who has moved thousands.

MORPHEUS (CONT'D)

It is telling you that you are exactly where you were always meant to be. I never wavered. I stood in front of the Oracle and she showed me you.

NEO

And if she was wrong?

MORPHEUS

She wasn't.

NEO

Just like that.

MORPHEUS

Just like that. He gestures at the falling code.

MORPHEUS (CONT'D)

You remember what I told you the first time. When you couldn't make the jump. When you still believed the rules in there were real.

NEO

There is no spoon.

MORPHEUS

There is no spoon. Nothing in that world is fixed, because none of it is true. Not the walls. Not the war. Not their victory. It only looks inevitable because they wrote it that way -- and you are the proof that what they wrote can be unwritten. He puts a hand on Neo's shoulder.

NEO

I'm just a man, Morpheus.

MORPHEUS

So was every man who ever bent the shape of the world. Right up until the moment he chose to. Trinity seats the last coil in the housing and works the action once. It makes a sound like a held breath.

TRINITY

He isn't asking you to make him feel better.

MORPHEUS

I am not trying to make him feel better. I am telling him what he is.

TRINITY

I know. That's the part that isn't helping. She stands, and she says the next thing to Morpheus, plainly, without any heat in it at all.

TRINITY (CONT'D)

I don't believe in him. I know him. It's not the same thing. Morpheus considers her for a moment. He does not have an answer for that, and it does not appear to trouble him, which is its own kind of answer. Morpheus lets go of his shoulder and goes back to the falling code, and that is the end of it, because it is always the end of it. Neo climbs the ladder out.

INT. NEBUCHADNEZZAR - UPPER PASSAGE - CONTINUOUS

A cold steel throat of a corridor, lit by two working bulbs out of six. Neo stands in it on his own for a while with his hands on the rail, doing the thing he has been doing every night for a week, which is waiting for it to stop feeling like a countdown. Through the plating, the ship sounds like a ship. Water in the pipes. Somebody's boots two decks down. The reactor, turning over. None of it is a prophecy. All of it is going to be gone in three days and nobody on board knows that yet. Behind him, boots on the ladder -- two sets, fast.

INT. NEBUCHADNEZZAR - THE CORE - CONTINUOUS

LINK drops into the core with a curl of printout in his fist. Behind him, close on his heels, comes THE KID: nineteen, wiry, nothing green about him. He is carrying a slate and he already has it open.

LINK

Niobe got a drop off the Osiris before it went dark. It's still hot and it's still buried.

MORPHEUS

Pull it.

LINK

It's a Council-band packet, sir. To open it here I have to put us on the grid for about ninety seconds. Nobody says anything. Ninety seconds on the grid is how ships die.

LINK (CONT'D)

Ninety seconds is how ships die, sir. His hand goes, without him thinking about it, to a hooded switch on the board beside him -- the EMP trigger. The only thing on this hull a Sentinel is afraid of, and the only thing on this hull he is not allowed to touch while there is anybody jacked in. Fire it with a crew inside and the pulse kills every chip in the tunnel, including the ones in their heads. So it sits there under its cover, all night, every night, being useless. He sits down in the chair anyway.

LINK (CONT'D)

Which is a thing I'd know, sitting in this one. He starts running it up. His hands are steady. His voice isn't, quite.

LINK (CONT'D)

I married into this chair. Zee's brother sat in it and Zee's brother died in it, and I'm not going to be the one who sits in it and says no. He nods at the Kid without looking.

LINK (CONT'D)

Kid. Decrypt.

KID

Already in it, sir. And then the ship starts talking. A soft, unhurried tone from the proximity board. Not an alarm. Something politer and much worse.

LINK

(very quietly)

Nobody move. He kills the lamps. He kills the fans. He puts the Nebuchadnezzar to sleep with three switches while the decrypt keeps running, because stopping it now means starting it again, and starting it again means another ninety seconds. Total dark, except the slate in the Kid's hands and the green code still falling on one monitor. And above them, through four feet of rock, something enormous goes over. They feel it in the deck plating -- a long, dragging pressure, like a hand passing over the hull of the world. Nobody in the core breathes. Trinity's hand is flat on the rifle she has just finished cleaning, which will do nothing whatsoever. The pressure moves off. The tone stops. Twelve seconds of nothing.

LINK (CONT'D)

(exhaling)

Forty more.

KID

Thirty-one. Link looks at the boy in the dark, and finds that his hands have not moved off the slate the entire time. And he is. Fast, quiet, competent. Whatever this boy was a year ago, he is not that now. The falling green code vanishes off the monitors, replaced by a juddering image: the dead grey surface of the world above. It is not empty. Sentinels move across it in their millions. And at the centre of the swarm, vast machine DRILLS turn slowly, grinding down into the earth.

KID (CONT'D)

They're not patrolling. They're digging. Straight down.

TRINITY

To what? The Kid does not answer, because the answer is obvious and because he is fifteen months out of a pod and Zion is the only home he has ever chosen.

LINK

Kid.

KID

(reading)

Best case, they're through the dome in seventy-two hours. Silence in the core. Five people, lit by the image of their own extinction.

KID (CONT'D)

There's more. It's riding underneath the Osiris packet -- it's not from them. It's a Council broadcast. It went out to the whole fleet forty minutes ago.

MORPHEUS

Read it.

KID

(reading)

All ships to return to Zion. All crews to muster for the defence of the dock. No vessel to remain in the field. Effective immediately, for seventy-two hours. He lowers the slate.

KID (CONT'D)

It's signed by Commander Lock. Everybody home. Nobody back inside. Three days.

TRINITY

Three days is all they have.

LINK

It's not a request, Trin. It's a recall. And then Morpheus does something strange. He smiles.

MORPHEUS

(quietly, almost reverent)

It's begun.

TRINITY

Morpheus --

MORPHEUS

She told me the war would end in our lifetime. That the One would rise as the machines made their last push.

(his eyes shine)

This is not the end of Zion. This is the prophecy.

KID

(under his breath, to Link, and he means every word of it)

This is the part where it starts. Neo hears him say it, and something in his face goes out.

NEO

(to the Kid, not unkindly)

You jumped off a building. I didn't do anything.

KID

You did, sir. I heard you.

NEO

You heard a rumour. You saved yourself. The Kid smiles at him with absolute, immovable patience, the way you smile at a man being modest.

KID

Yes, sir. It is the same conversation Neo has had a hundred times and has never once won, and it is about to get much worse. Neo turns back to the monitors. He looks at the drills grinding down toward the only world they have left. And then he is not looking at the drills at all. He is looking at Trinity. She feels it, and turns. And for a moment the two of them just look at each other in the cold light of the thing that is coming -- and everything Neo saw last night is right there in his face. She does not ask what he is thinking. She already knows. Then she is the one who breaks it.

TRINITY

So we go in.

LINK

The recall --

TRINITY

The recall puts every ship in the bay and every soldier on the floor and not one person inside the Matrix for three days. Three days is the whole war. She turns to Morpheus.

TRINITY (CONT'D)

There's exactly one person in that world who can tell us where the machines can be stopped. We see her first. Then we go home and let Lock have his floor.

MORPHEUS

You are proposing that we ignore a Council order.

TRINITY

I'm proposing we're late. A long beat. Morpheus looks at her, and at Neo, and something settles in him.

MORPHEUS

No. If we do this we do it properly.

MORPHEUS (CONT'D)

(to Link)

How long can you hold a hardline on the west side without the Council seeing it?

LINK

Twenty minutes. Maybe.

MORPHEUS

Then twenty minutes. The three of us. In and out before anybody in that dock knows we were late. Link looks at him for a second. Then he starts working.

KID

(quietly, thrilled, appalled)

Are we disobeying an order, sir?

MORPHEUS

We are.

KID

Okay. Morpheus stops at the foot of the ladder, looking up at the frozen image of the drills.

MORPHEUS

(almost to himself)

Everything she promised. Right on time. He climbs out. Link and the Kid go after him. Neo and Trinity are left alone in the falling static.

TRINITY

Somebody you love.

NEO

Trin.

TRINITY

I'm not asking. I'm telling you I heard it. She holds his eyes a second longer -- steady, unafraid, the exact opposite of everything in the dream -- and then she goes to get her gear. Neo watches her go. On the monitors behind him, deep in the grey, for half a second: the glint of falling glass. He does not look away from it.

NEO

(to himself)

Not her.

INT. NEBUCHADNEZZAR - THE CORE - LATER

Four chairs. LINK at the boards. TRINITY checking a magazine she has already checked twice. MORPHEUS pulling on his coat. Neo sitting very still.

LINK

Broadcast depth in nine minutes. I've got you a dead line in the old west quarter -- nothing has routed through it since before I was born.

TRINITY

And the exit?

LINK

Same phone. Twenty minutes after you go in, that line is gone whether you are standing on it or not.

LINK (CONT'D)

Three of you. Broad daylight. Straight across a city that is looking for exactly your faces. He says it without irony. The only place these people can physically be in one room is a place that does not exist.

LINK

You know what the Council would call that?

TRINITY

An unacceptable risk.

LINK

(grinning, not looking up from the boards)

I call it three people and Neo. He says it lightly, the way you say a thing everybody already agrees on. Nobody corrects him. That is the problem.

MORPHEUS

The machines have never built a weapon he could not put on the floor. They are not going to invent one tonight. Trinity says nothing at all. She is watching Neo. Neo turns the jack over in his hand.

NEO

And if I'm wrong about what I am?

MORPHEUS

Then two people I love die in a street, and it will not be because you were wrong. He fastens his coat.

MORPHEUS (CONT'D)

It will be because I was. It is meant as reassurance. It is the single most frightening thing anybody says to Neo all day. Trinity crosses to him and crouches by the chair, low, so it's only for him.

TRINITY

You don't have to be anything tonight. You just have to be fast. Neo looks at her. It is the only useful thing anyone has said to him in a week.

NEO

Okay. He lies back. Link puts the jack in.

EXT. THE MATRIX - OLD QUARTER STREET - DAY

Rain, and three people walking through it. Morpheus is talking. He has been talking since the phone booth -- about the block, about the sag in the code here, about what it means that the story has reached this far down. Neo stops walking. Not for anything. Nobody said anything. Nothing happened. He simply stops, in the middle of a wet street, and turns his head about fifteen degrees toward a gap between two buildings -- the way a man turns toward a sound that hasn't happened yet.

TRINITY

Neo. He doesn't answer. He is not being rude. He is listening to something that is not audible.

MORPHEUS

What is it?

NEO

(quietly)

I don't know. And he walks away from both of them, into the gap. Trinity looks at Morpheus. Morpheus, who has spent twenty-six years waiting for exactly this and does not recognise it now that it is happening, looks back at her. They go after him.

EXT. THE MATRIX - RESIDENTIAL ALLEY - CONTINUOUS

A long enclosed alley between tenement blocks, four storeys of shuttered windows on both sides, washing strung across it at every level. Wet flagstones under two inches of standing water. Pigeons on the ground, dozens of them, working the puddles. The rain comes straight down and does not let up. At the far end, alone, an ANCIENT MAN in a plain grey tunic stands with his hands folded one over the other at his waist. Long white beard to the chest. Barefoot in the water. He has been there a while. He is not waiting the way people wait. He is simply the thing at the end of that alley, the way a tree is the thing at the end of a field. Neo stops about twenty feet from him. Behind him, at the alley mouth, Trinity and Morpheus arrive and do not come any closer, because something about the geometry of it tells them not to.

NEO

I don't know why I'm here.

SERAPH

No. The old man unfolds one hand and holds it out, palm up, between them. And something falls into it. Not rain. It comes down through the rain in a narrow column and lands in his open palm and stays there, turning slowly -- characters, glyphs, the same falling script that runs under everything in this world. Except it is not green. It is gold. Neo has been able to read this world for four years. Every brick and every face and every bird resolves for him, if he lets it, into falling green. He has never once seen any other colour anywhere in it. He comes forward without deciding to. Seraph turns the palm, very slightly, so that it faces him. And the gold goes across the space between them and falls on Neo's chest, and for a moment there is a column of it running down him too, and he looks down at his own body and does not say anything at all. Neither of them says anything. The old man closes his hand. It is gone. The alley is green again. Rain on flagstones and pigeons in the water.

NEO

What was that?

SERAPH

Older than this. He folds his hands back at his waist.

SERAPH (CONT'D)

She is expecting you. But I have to know what came down this alley first.

NEO

You know who I am.

SERAPH

I know what you look like. And then he says the thing, and he says it apologetically, as a man explaining a rule he did not write:

SERAPH (CONT'D)

You do not truly know someone until you fight them. He steps off his back foot. Every pigeon in that alley goes up at once. What follows is not a demonstration and it is not a lesson. It is a fight, and both of them mean it. Neo comes in fast -- faster than he has moved in front of anybody since the corridor -- and the old man is not there. Not dodging. Not blocking. Seraph simply turns a few degrees at the hip and Neo's whole committed weight goes past him into standing water, and the alley throws up a sheet of it. Neo lands, turns, and comes again. This time it is real. Elbows, hooks, a knee -- and Seraph meets every one of them with an open palm at chest height, six or seven contacts a second, forearms blurring, and not a single one of them lands. Water comes off both of them in rings. The old man gives ground down the alley without ever appearing to retreat. Neo goes up. He takes a wall, two storeys, comes off a washing line and drops out of the rain with everything he has, and it is beautiful and it is genuinely astonishing and Trinity actually says something at the alley mouth. Seraph steps back one pace and lets the whole of it arrive in the water where he had been standing. The impact blows the alley apart. Standing water goes up in a wall. Pigeons, washing, rain -- all of it thrown outward in a ring, and for a fraction of a second the water hangs in the air in a perfect circle with green code running down its face, because the world has been hit hard enough to show its working. Neo comes out of the middle of it. And here is the trick, and it is a good one, and he has been setting it up since the second exchange: he does not attack. He offers a strike and pulls it, deliberately, halfway -- inviting the redirect, so that when the old man reaches for the line that isn't there, Neo will already be inside him. It is genuinely clever. Nobody has tried it on Seraph in six hundred years. Seraph does not reach. He was never going to. He has already stepped where Neo is going to be, which is the one place Neo has not defended, and a palm arrives flat against Neo's sternum with no force in it whatsoever. Neo leaves the ground. He crosses eleven feet of alley without touching it and goes down flat in the water, and the pigeons come apart around him, and the rain closes over the whole thing. Silence, except for water running. Neo lies there and looks up at four storeys of washing and falling rain. Then he starts to laugh -- once, winded, entirely without dignity. A hand comes into his field of view. Seraph is standing over him with his palm out, and he is not out of breath, and there is something in the old face that was not there twenty seconds ago.

SERAPH

Now I know you. Neo takes the hand. And as he comes up out of the water, wet through and beaten, he looks at the old man properly for the first time -- and does not say anything. He does not need to. Because we can see it. Every part of that alley is falling green. The washing, the shutters, the pigeons settling back down into the water, Trinity and Morpheus at the far end. And the man holding his hand is gold, all the way through, and always has been. Neo says nothing about it. He will not mention it for two days. Trinity and Morpheus come down the alley.

MORPHEUS

(carefully)

Neo.

NEO

I'm all right.

TRINITY

You went through a washing line.

NEO

I know. Seraph is already turning away.

SERAPH

She is through here. He walks off down the alley without waiting for any of them, barefoot in two inches of water, and the pigeons do not move out of his way and do not need to. At the far end there is an archway, and through it, a courtyard. Same rain. Same grey light. The world does not let up anywhere today.

INT. THE MATRIX - COURTYARD - DAY

A courtyard between towering, identical apartment blocks, open to a low grey sky. Rain coming straight down on wet flagstones. Washing hanging heavy and soaked between the balconies. A wooden bench. Nobody in this world has been dry since morning. An old woman is sitting on the bench, feeding stale bread to a murder of crows. There is a cigarette going in her other hand and she is in no hurry whatsoever about either.

THE ORACLE.

Neo comes through the archway soaked to the skin, with his hair flat to his head and two inches of alley water still coming out of his boots.

THE ORACLE (CONT'D)

(not looking up)

Well. You met Seraph. Seraph crosses the courtyard behind him without a word and takes up a position by the archway, hands folded, and does not sit down.

NEO

Is he always like that?

THE ORACLE

Only with people he likes. She pats the bench. Neo sits down on it, dripping. Morpheus and Trinity stay standing, which is what people do around her.

THE ORACLE (CONT'D)

Last time you were here I told you that you weren't the One.

NEO

I remember.

THE ORACLE

Still angry about it?

NEO

I'm angrier that everybody decided you were wrong. The Oracle laughs, once, and it is the only warm sound in the entire film so far.

THE ORACLE

That is the first interesting thing anybody has said to me all week. She throws the last of the bread. The crows do not thank her either.

THE ORACLE (CONT'D)

Destiny is a story they tell you so you'll walk where you were going to be pushed anyway. You are not here to fulfil anything, honey. You are here to choose. That's the whole job, and nobody thanks you for it.

MORPHEUS

The machines are digging. Zion has three days.

THE ORACLE

I know exactly what they're doing. She says it to Morpheus, and she holds his eyes half a second longer than the sentence needs, and something goes across her face that she does not explain and he does not notice.

THE ORACLE (CONT'D)

So. Three things, and then I have to go and be somewhere nobody can look at me.

THE ORACLE (CONT'D)

The only place the machines can be stopped is the Source. There is a way in, and it is a door nobody has ever opened.

THE ORACLE (CONT'D)

To open it you need the man who makes doors. The Keymaker.

MORPHEUS

And where is he?

THE ORACLE

Kept. By an old man in a back room who believes everything in this world is owed to somebody. The Merovingian.

NEO

Where do I find him?

THE ORACLE

You don't find him. You go down to him. He operates in the basement of this world. She stands, and brushes the crumbs off her lap, and she is a small old woman in a wet cardigan in a courtyard in the rain, with a cigarette that went out some time ago.

THE ORACLE (CONT'D)

And down there, the rules you have taught yourself to bend do not apply. Which is the other reason I asked him to come. She nods toward the far end of the courtyard, where the ancient man has not once looked over.

NEO

Who is he?

THE ORACLE

Older than me. He protects what matters most, and he has been doing it since before anybody thought to write down what most was.

THE ORACLE (CONT'D)

He's going to show you something. You won't like it and you won't be good at it. She is already walking.

TRINITY

Where are you going?

THE ORACLE

(without turning)

Somewhere I can watch without being looked at. And she goes out through the archway, and that is the last time anybody in this world sees her face for a very long while. Seraph has not moved from the archway.

NEO

You could have told me who you were.

SERAPH

You would have believed me. He says it as though that would have been a waste of everybody's afternoon, which, by his lights, it would.

NEO

So what was it? In your hand.

SERAPH

Something older than the thing that built this. He unfolds one hand and folds it again.

SERAPH (CONT'D)

You have some of it. I do not know how much. Neither does she, whatever she says. Neo looks at his own palm, which is green, and ordinary, and running with rain from an alley in a different weather system.

NEO

Then teach me the rest.

SERAPH

No. But he steps off the wall anyway, and comes out into the rain, and Neo is on his feet before he has decided to be.

SERAPH (CONT'D)

One thing. Then I am finished with you until it matters. You are trying to be stronger than what comes at you. That is the old way, and it has been very good to you, and it will be no use at all where you are going.

NEO

And what's the new way?

SERAPH

Third time. He gestures. Neo, almost against his will, feels the invitation. This time Seraph's strike is a line drawn clean through the courtyard -- and it will land on Trinity if Neo stays on the old path. Trinity's arms come unfolded. Nobody is bored anymore. Neo stops thinking. He does not block. He is not on the line. Wrist, three degrees, and the committed force finishes in the flagstones instead of in her. Dust. Stone. The courtyard is quiet. Seraph looks at him for a long moment. Something like approval, or at least recognition, moves through the old face.

SERAPH (CONT'D)

Better. Then he crosses to the bench, sits down, and begins feeding the crows the Oracle left half-fed, as though the last four minutes were a small errand he has now completed.

TRINITY

(quietly, to Morpheus)

I like him.

MORPHEUS

Everybody likes him. That is not the same as anybody knowing anything about him.

NEO

What was that?

SERAPH

The beginning of what she needs you to learn. The rest you will find the hard way. A beat. He looks at Neo once more.

NEO

Are you going to teach me the rest?

SERAPH

No. He folds his hands back at his waist.

SERAPH (CONT'D)

The rest is not taught. It is taken off you, in a bad room, by something that does not care whether you learn it.

NEO

Will you be there? The old man considers the question for a long moment, as though it has more than one answer and he is choosing.

SERAPH

I go where she sends me.

SERAPH (CONT'D)

He glances toward the archway.

SERAPH (CONT'D)

They are here. Every crow in the courtyard goes up at once. Two men in suits walk into the courtyard. Two. That has always been one more than enough. Seraph is already gone. But these are not quite the things they have spent their lives running from either. Same suits. No earpieces. Silver ties, and something in the way they cross wet flagstones that did not exist in this world last year. The system has spent four years watching a man do impossible things, and it has been busy. They stop. They look at Neo. Then they look at each other, and they confer -- out loud, unhurried, in front of everybody, the way two men might discuss a blocked drain.

AGENT

It's him.

AGENT TWO

The anomaly.

AGENT

Confirmed. Shall we proceed?

AGENT TWO

We are obliged to. Neither of them has looked at Trinity or Morpheus once.

MORPHEUS

(quietly)

They didn't mention us.

TRINITY

No.

MORPHEUS

That's new.

MORPHEUS

(very quietly)

Trinity. The phone is four streets east.

TRINITY

I know where the phone is. She does not move toward it. Neither does he.

INT. NEBUCHADNEZZAR (REAL WORLD) - CONTINUOUS

Link is out of his chair. The KID is watching Link's face rather than the screen, which tells him more.

LINK

Run. Run. Come on --

KID

They're not running.

LINK

Kid, four years ago you ran from an Agent or you died. There was no third thing. He cannot look away from the feed.

LINK (CONT'D)

There is still no third thing.

INT. THE MATRIX - COURTYARD - CONTINUOUS

It takes eleven seconds and neither of them lands anything that matters. Morpheus does something extraordinary -- he does not try to hit it, he takes its wrist and turns with it, using its own commitment to put it four feet off the line it wanted, and he buys three whole seconds doing it, which a year ago he could not have bought at all.

MORPHEUS

(to nobody, genuinely pleased)

Oh, that worked -- Then the other one breaks his guard, and his forearm, and puts him into a wall. Trinity gets nine rounds into a space that has already stopped being occupied and two into a chest, which does nothing at all, and she is fast enough that it has to actually turn to reach her -- -- and then she is off her feet with a hand around her throat and her heels a foot above wet stone. This is what an Agent is. This is what it has always been. Two of the finest operatives in the fleet, at the top of everything they have ever learned, and it has cost these things eleven seconds and a turn of the head. Neo stands up off the bench.

INT. NEBUCHADNEZZAR (REAL WORLD) - CONTINUOUS

KID

(very quietly)

Oh, here we go.

LINK

Kid --

KID

No, sir, this is the part, this is the --

INT. THE MATRIX - COURTYARD - CONTINUOUS

Neo does not raise a hand. He does not take a stance. He comes across that courtyard like a man crossing a room to answer the door. Both of them come at him at once. He takes them at once. Left hand into the first one's forearm, three degrees, and it goes past him and into its own partner at a speed neither of them chose. They come apart in a heap of very expensive tailoring. The Agent drops Trinity and gives him its whole attention, which is the first compliment anybody has paid anyone all afternoon. It opens fire. The rounds stop three feet in front of him and hang there in the falling rain, turning slowly -- and then drop, and ring on the flagstones like dropped change. Neo does not break stride. It comes at him at a speed that has killed every human being it has ever been used on. Neo doesn't move. It hits him. The impact is wrong -- no give, no flesh, just a hard, dry crack like stone under a hammer. It is the sound of something breaking, and it is not Neo. The Agent steps back holding an arm that now bends in a place arms do not have. It looks at the arm. It has no procedure for the arm.

INT. NEBUCHADNEZZAR (REAL WORLD) - CONTINUOUS

The Kid is on his feet with both hands on top of his head.

KID

YES --

LINK

Sit down.

KID

Sir, did you see what he --

LINK

I SAID sit -- On the screen, Neo catches the second one's fist out of the air without looking at it. Link, very quietly, and entirely without meaning to:

LINK (CONT'D)

...ohhh, that's lovely.

KID

THANK you.

INT. THE MATRIX - COURTYARD - CONTINUOUS

And he holds it. Green light runs backwards up the forearm from the wrist -- cold, like static under the skin. Then the elbow. Then the shoulder, unwriting as it goes, and the thing is making a sound it was never compiled to make -- -- and Neo lets go. It staggers back into the middle of the courtyard with one arm coming apart into falling green, and stops. Its partner is already on the flagstones and not getting up. And does not attack. It takes a step back. Neo stops. For a moment the two of them stand in a courtyard full of washing and startled crows, looking at each other.

NEO

You're afraid. The Agent's face does not move. Agents' faces don't.

AGENT

I am not permitted to be. A machine reporting a condition it holds no authorisation for. Neither of them knows what to do with it. Neo hesitates. One second. No more. The Agent takes the opening — not to attack. To leave.

The face runs like wax. The silver tie becomes a cardigan. Where an Agent was standing, a woman in an office uniform folds onto the flagstones and lies there breathing, unconscious, a security pass still clipped to her collar. Neo stands over her. He has destroyed a great many Agents. Every single one of them was standing in somebody. He crouches, and turns her onto her side so she cannot choke, and that is the entire extent of what he is able to do for her. Across the courtyard, the one with the broken arm vacates too. A man in overalls goes down beside the bench and does not get up. Neo looks at that one for a long time as well. Trinity is on her knees on the flagstones getting her breath back. Morpheus is helping her up with one arm because the other one isn't working properly. They watch him crouched over a stranger in an office uniform in the middle of a courtyard full of unconscious people.

MORPHEUS

(quietly)

Do you see it now?

TRINITY

I see a man.

MORPHEUS

You see the One.

TRINITY

He's the only person in this courtyard who isn't enjoying that. Doesn't that tell you anything?

MORPHEUS

It tells me he is worthy of it.

TRINITY

It tells me it's costing him something. She takes her arm back off him and stands on her own.

TRINITY (CONT'D)

Those aren't the same, Morpheus. Down in the middle of it, Neo stands up from the woman, and looks up, and finds Trinity already looking back at him. He does not look like a god. He looks like a man who would very much like to go home.

ACT II

INT. ZION - DOCKING BAY - LATER

The massive, cavernous expanse of Zion under military conditions. Welders still spark, but the usual noise is tighter, more purposeful. Armed sentries stand at every major junction. The air feels heavier. The drills are under three days from the dome and everyone on this floor knows it. The Nebuchadnezzar settles into her berth with a heavy metallic finality. Hull ticking as it cools. Neo, Trinity and Morpheus come down the gangway. Link is already on the dock, face tight. The Kid is with him, watching. A reception party is waiting at the foot of the ramp. And standing off to one side, arms folded, in from a hard run with the Logos still ticking behind her: CAPTAIN NIOBE. Nobody sent for her. She has simply come down to watch this happen, and she is the only person on this dock who does not look surprised by any of it. She and Morpheus look at each other for exactly as long as it takes to say nothing. Not the usual dock crew. Soldiers. Sidearms. Body armour. At their centre stands a CAPTAIN under Commander Lock’s authority, flanked by four armed escorts. The atmosphere is formal and cold.

DOCK CAPTAIN

Captain Morpheus. Operator Trinity. Mr Anderson. You are ordered to stand fast. They stop on the gangway.

DOCK CAPTAIN (CONT'D)

You received a Council-band recall. All ships. All crews. Effective immediately. You ignored it. You re-entered the Matrix against direct order under military siege. That is a breach of Zion protocol. He produces three thin metal charge sheets.

DOCK CAPTAIN (CONT'D)

You are all hereby detained pending review by Commander Lock and the Council. Surrender any weapons and accompany us. A beat. The dock has gone quieter. People have stopped to watch. Trinity’s hand moves fractionally. Neo does not move at all. Morpheus looks at the Captain for a long moment, then unclips his sidearm and offers it grip-first. Trinity and Neo follow. The escorts move in. Around them the reaction begins. Murmurs. Then louder. The faithful are not quiet about this.

FAITHFUL MAN

They’re locking up the One!

FAITHFUL WOMAN

He brought us the One and this is how you thank him? The noise grows. Soldiers tighten formation. The Captain ignores it. They are marched away along the dock toward the upper levels under guard. Link and the Kid watch them go, the divide on the dock suddenly visible: military on one side, the believers on the other.

INT. ZION - DETENTION LEVEL - LATER

A sparse holding room. Metal table. Two benches. No windows. Neo, Trinity and Morpheus sit under the watch of two armed guards. The door opens. COMMANDER LOCK enters, still in field kit. Behind him is the Captain.

LOCK

You were given a simple order. Return to Zion. Muster for the defence of the dock. You went looking for an old woman in a kitchen.

MORPHEUS

We went looking for the only information that might still matter.

LOCK

You went looking for a story. Again.

LOCK (CONT'D)

Three days. A quarter of a million people under this rock. And you decided this was the moment to ignore a direct military order because a program told you there was still a prophecy left to chase.

MORPHEUS

It was never just a prophecy to me.

LOCK

I know. That's the problem.

LOCK (CONT'D)

Most of us never believed what you believe. We believed in the ships. In the crews. In the chance that if we fought hard enough we might buy one more generation. You turned that into a religion, and then you made the rest of us live inside it.

MORPHEUS

And yet here we are. Still alive. Because some of us kept believing when the numbers said we should have stopped.

LOCK

The numbers are about to come due. He straightens.

LOCK (CONT'D)

The Council convenes in an hour. They have asked to look at you. He turns to go, and then does not.

LOCK (CONT'D)

(to Neo)

Whatever you are, Anderson, I hope it is enough. Because the story is about to run out of pages. He leaves. The door seals behind him. Nobody is released. Morpheus stands, rolls his shoulder, and crosses to speak with the guards in a low voice -- giving Neo and Trinity the only privacy the room will allow. For a moment it is just the two of them.

TRINITY

I've been in one prison or another my whole life. Some days even Zion feels like walls. She turns back to him.

TRINITY (CONT'D)

With you they stop mattering. Neo reaches for her hand. The room is cold and temporary. None of that reaches them.

NEO

I keep seeing you fall.

TRINITY

I know.

NEO

Every time I'm still too late.

TRINITY

Then don't be. He doesn't answer. She takes his face in both hands and makes him look at her, and holds it there until he does.

TRINITY (CONT'D)

Hey. Look at me.

TRINITY (CONT'D)

Four years ago I stood over a dead man on a floor and told him I loved him because I had run out of other things to try. And he got up. Her thumb moves once across his cheekbone.

TRINITY (CONT'D)

So I know exactly what I'm worth in this. I'm not the thing that gets carried. I'm the thing that says get up.

NEO

(barely)

I know.

TRINITY

Then stop trying to keep me out of rooms. Neo laughs, once, which surprises both of them, and it is the first time either of them has done that in the film.

NEO

You're a nightmare.

TRINITY

I'm the only good thing that's ever happened to either of us. Try and keep up. She kisses him. It is not desperate and it is not a goodbye -- it is two people in a cell with an hour, taking the hour. When they come apart, she stays with her forehead against his.

NEO

When this is over --

TRINITY

Don't.

NEO

I wasn't going to promise anything. I was going to say I want it. A beat.

TRINITY

(quietly)

Then want it out loud. It's the only thing in either world nobody wrote for you. They stay like that a moment longer -- two people who have already lost each other in dreams and are refusing to lose each other here. Then, quietly, because there is an hour and a sealed door and nothing else to do with either:

TRINITY (CONT'D)

In there they'll talk about you like you aren't in the room. They always do.

NEO

I know.

TRINITY (CONT'D)

So don't let them. Not for Morpheus. Not for the ones who want to kneel. For us.

TRINITY (CONT'D)

You don't have to be their One. You just have to stand up and say what you actually think. Can you do that?

NEO

Yes.

TRINITY

Then do it. Morpheus turns back from the guards.

MORPHEUS

We still have the three names. And we still have a little time. Outside, faintly, the sound of the faithful still arguing with soldiers on the lower docks.

INT. ZION - COUNCIL CHAMBER - LATER

A circular chamber cut into the rock, high in the dome wall. The air is tight. And under everything, so faint that a visitor would not notice it and nobody in this room notices it anymore, there is a sound. A low continuous grinding, somewhere above and to the north, coming down through four feet of stone. Every person in this chamber has learned, in the last few hours, to talk straight through it. The elders sit in a shallow arc. Along the back wall a group of Neo’s faithful have been allowed in. Their presence is a pressure. Commander Lock stands to one side. CAPTAIN NIOBE is already in the chamber, standing a few paces from her husband. The space between them is visible. Neo, Trinity and Morpheus are brought in under armed escort. They have not been released. Everybody in the chamber can see that.

ELDER

The question before us is simple. Was it fit — under military siege — to place the One, and those closest to him, in detention? A low sound moves through the faithful at the back.

LOCK

It was protocol. They ignored a direct recall. I will not have ships acting as independent religious expeditions while the drills are three days from the dome.

SECOND ELDER

And yet the city is divided because of it. Your soldiers are facing our own people on the lower docks. Lock stops. He holds up one hand, and the chamber goes quiet, and for four seconds nobody in it says anything at all. The sound is still there. It is always still there. He lowers his hand.

LOCK

Belief does not stop that. I am fighting a war. He is still serving a prophecy.

MORPHEUS

The prophecy is the only reason half these people still pick up a rifle. You may not believe it. They do. And right now they are watching you put the One in a cell while the machines dig.

THE FAITHFUL

He is the One.

ELDER

Captain Morpheus. You broke protocol. That is not in dispute. The question is whether the information you sought justifies the breach.

MORPHEUS

We were given three names. The Keymaker. The Merovingian. The Source. The only remaining path to the machine mainframe runs through them.

LOCK

A door that has never existed. A story that has already cost us more lives than I can count. And every time the story fails, it is men like me who bury the bodies while men like you talk about faith. The chamber is very quiet. Neo steps forward. He does not raise his voice. He does not look at the faithful for approval. He does not look at Morpheus for permission. The stillness is not performance. It is simply a man who has already decided.

NEO

You’re talking about me like I’m not in the room. A slight shift. Even the faithful go still.

NEO (CONT’D)

I didn’t ask to be your complication. Or your prophecy. Or whatever the people behind me think I am. I still don’t know if any of it is true.

NEO (CONT’D)

But while you argue about the title, the machines keep digging. Three days from now none of this will matter.

NEO (CONT’D)

There is a Keymaker. A Merovingian. A Source. That is not a story. That is a direction. I am going to follow it.

NEO (CONT’D)

Not because I believe I am the One. Because someone has to choose to move. I already have. Silence. Even Lock has nothing immediate to say. Niobe steps forward. She looks at Lock first.

NIOBE

Then stop looking for a ship to give them. Lock turns to her. For a moment the marriage is the loudest thing in the room.

NIOBE (CONT'D)

The Nebuchadnezzar is fully charged and every soul who crews her is standing in this chamber. She doesn't need a hull. She needs permission to leave the dock.

NIOBE (CONT'D)

So put my name on the order. My authority, my responsibility, my commission. If it fails, court-martial me alongside them when the drills come through.

LOCK

You are offering to compound the breach. In front of them.

NIOBE

I am offering to finish what they started before the window closes. You want every ship on the dock for the defence. Keep them. But do not stand here and tell me that arguing about protocol is the same as fighting the war. A long silence. Lock looks at his wife. Something old and tired passes between them.

ELDER

Commander Lock's restriction on dock ships stands. The detention is lifted -- the charge against Captain Morpheus and the others remains on record for review after the siege. Captain Niobe's sponsorship is accepted under her own authority and risk. The Nebuchadnezzar may leave.

ELDER (CONT'D)

Whatever you are, do not waste the chance she is giving you. Niobe turns to leave. As she passes Lock she stops for half a second. They do not touch. They do not speak.

NIOBE

You leave in twenty minutes. Bring whatever you still believe in. She does not offer to come. She has a ship of her own on that floor and a war starting over her head, and everybody in the chamber understands what she has just spent instead. She walks out. The chamber breaks into low conversation. The division is now inside the Council, inside the marriage, and inside the city itself. Neo looks at Morpheus. Morpheus nods once. Around them the faithful are already moving, already telling each other what they have just witnessed. Neo stands still for a second longer than anyone else. The room has decided what he is. He has not. They have a ship again.

INT. NEBUCHADNEZZAR - PREP BAY - LATER

The crew is loading. LINK is already aboard, running the boards up from cold with the KID beside him.

LINK

We're not going in blind, at least. Niobe called in the Caduceus.

NEO

Which one is that?

LINK

Wasn't in the dock when the recall went out. She's been running late from a scavenge two days out and she's still in the field, which means Lock's order hasn't caught her yet. He is pleased about it in the way operators are pleased about anything that improves the odds by one per cent.

LINK (CONT'D)

Niobe asked them to sit on us. Their overwatch will be up on a roof four streets from wherever you are, watching the approaches, all night. Fella called Cade. Their operator's Ren -- she's good, she trained where I trained.

MORPHEUS

(passing through, doing up a strap)

Thank Niobe for me.

LINK

I did. She said don't. The bay empties out around them. Just the operator, the boy and the boards. The Kid is reading a swollen, water-stained notebook, hand-ruled and taped together.

LINK

What's that.

KID

Mouse's diary. Link stops what he is doing.

LINK

Where'd you get that.

KID

Locker under my rack. Nobody ever cleared it.

LINK

No. Nobody would have.

KID

Him and Dozer spent two years on it. Every working hardline in the city -- where it is, what hours it's live, which ones the Agents sit on. And Dozer did the other half. Which tunnel you park in to reach each one.

KID (CONT'D)

It's never been in the system. It's in pencil. Link puts a hand out. The Kid gives it to him. He turns it over once and does not open it.

LINK

Mouse was the youngest man on this ship before you were. He wrote half the drills you've run. He was about your age and he was extremely annoying.

KID

How did he --

LINK

In a building, with a rifle he didn't know how to use. Dozer the same night. Tank a while after that. Then they needed somebody in this chair, and I was the one who'd married in. He hands it back.

KID

He wasn't the One. He didn't have anything. He just worked out where the seams were and wrote them down.

LINK

Kid.

KID

Sir.

LINK

When they clear my locker, put whatever's in it in front of the next one. Neo stands apart for a moment, checking a weapon he will not need in the way he used to. Trinity watches him. Across the bay, Morpheus moves through the equipment with an ease that was not there a week ago. When he jumps down from the upper walkway he does not brace. He simply arrives, weightless for a fraction longer than the real world should allow, then settles. Trinity notices. Her eyes go from Morpheus to Neo and back, tracing a thing to where it started. She says nothing.

EXT. THE OLD QUARTER - NIGHT

Rain. Ordinary rain, falling the ordinary way — except on one side of one lamppost, where it goes up. Nobody who lives here looks at it. A dog crosses the road and its footfalls arrive half a second after its feet. Somewhere a radio is playing a song that has not been recorded yet, or was recorded a very long time ago. Three kids are playing in the middle of the street. One of them jumps — and hangs at the top of the arc for a full second before he comes down. The others laugh and do it again. None of them find it remarkable. They were born on this street.

NEO

They don't see it.

MORPHEUS

The code down here is old. It sags. It leaks. To them it is simply how the street is. They walk on. Neo cannot stop looking at the kids. Morpheus moves differently here than he used to. The old caution is still present, but his shoulders sit lower, and when he turns a corner the movement is cleaner, less prepared — as if the code itself has begun to meet him halfway. On a shuttered roller door, in fresh spray paint, someone has written a single word. It is not a word. It is a name. Neo stops. He has the brief, wrong feeling that he has already stopped here — same rain, same door, same name — a moment ago. The feeling passes. No one else seems to notice. For a fraction of a second the green of the street flickers. Not a glitch in the world. A glitch in the way something is looking at him — as if a copy is being attempted and is failing to find a clean edge to take hold of. A boy of about fifteen sits on the step beside it.

BOY

Is it true a man can fly? He is not joking. He is asking sincerely. Neo doesn't answer.

BOY (CONT'D)

My brother says he saw it. They walk on.

TRINITY

(low)

That's the third one this month.

MORPHEUS

It's spreading.

NEO

They believe it in here now too. At the end of the block: two shuttered shopfronts, and between them a plain door, and behind the door a stair going down. Nothing announces itself. There are no gargoyles.

TRINITY

It's a door.

MORPHEUS

She said we would have to descend to him. She wasn't being poetic. They go down.

INT. THE BACK ROOM - CONTINUOUS

Warm. Low ceiling. Smoke that has been in the plaster for forty years. A card table. A radiator ticking. A television in the corner playing a channel that stopped broadcasting a long time ago and has never been turned off. The air is thick enough to taste. Five men in shirtsleeves. Older. Ordinary. Not one of them is armed. Not one of them stands up. Not one of them looks over. They do not need to. It is the first room in the Matrix that has ever been warm. It is also the first room that feels like it could kill you without raising its voice. At a corner table, coffee in front of him, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, sits THE MEROVINGIAN. He is a heavy man in his sixties in a good, unremarkable suit. He has the stillness of someone who has run a crew for a very long time and no longer needs to perform. When he looks at you, you feel counted. Beside him, reading a magazine and not looking up: PERSEPHONE. The Merovingian marks his place in a ledger with one finger.

THE MEROVINGIAN

Sit down. You've been walking a long time. Nobody sits.

MORPHEUS

We're here for the Keymaker.

THE MEROVINGIAN

I know. He says it with no weight on it at all. Then he goes back to the ledger, and finishes the line he was on, and only then looks up.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

Everybody who comes down here comes down for the same reason. Somebody told them to.

NEO

I chose to come. The Merovingian looks at him. Flat. Measuring.

THE MEROVINGIAN

A woman told you a story. The story had a door in it. Here you are.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

I don't argue about free will. I keep books. He taps the ledger.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

Somebody hands me a thing that happened, I walk it back. Forty years if I have to. I have never once found the place where a man decided. There is always something behind it. Always.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

Maybe I just can't see it. Possible. But I've been doing this a long time, and I have looked at a great many things. He turns the ledger around a few degrees, the way a man does when he is about to show you something.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

Answer me one. Why did you come down here tonight?

NEO

For the Keymaker.

THE MEROVINGIAN

No. That's what you came for. I asked why you came. Neo opens his mouth and finds nothing in it.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

Try again. Somebody told you the machines were digging. Why did you believe her?

NEO

Because she's been right.

THE MEROVINGIAN

And why were you standing in a courtyard where she could tell you?

NEO

Because Morpheus --

THE MEROVINGIAN

There it is. Cause. And behind him, the woman who told him. And behind her, whoever built her, and behind that, whoever needed her built. He turns the ledger back.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

Everybody who sits where you're sitting thinks they came here to make a choice. Nobody ever has. You made it days ago, somewhere back down that chain, and you came down four flights of stairs to find out why.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

That is what I sell, son. Not power. Not favours. Answers to why. It is the only question anybody actually wants, and it is the only one I have never once been able to answer about myself.

NEO

And the Keymaker?

THE MEROVINGIAN

He's mine.

NEO

He's a person.

THE MEROVINGIAN

He's an asset. There's a difference, and the difference is that I feed him. A beat. No warmth in it.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

They were going to delete him. I said no. I keep what still works. He gestures, barely, at the room. The card table. The five men. The television playing nothing to nobody.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

That's the whole arrangement down here. Including me.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

Now. Business. He turns the ledger around and pushes it across the table. It is open at a page covered edge to edge in small, patient handwriting.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

That's you. That's a year of you. Neo looks down at it. Dense, cramped, and running back and back through pages he cannot see.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

Every man in this city with anything left to lose has been trying to price you since the night you flew. What you are. What you'll do. Whether you can be stopped. There is a very great deal of money on it. He closes the book.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

I don't take a position I can't walk back. So I walked you back. A year, son. And I cannot find the beginning of you.

NEO

Maybe there isn't one.

THE MEROVINGIAN

There is always one. That is not philosophy. That is the only work I know how to do. A beat. He straightens the cup on its saucer.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

Which brings us to the price.

MORPHEUS

Name it.

THE MEROVINGIAN

The Oracle's eyes. Nobody in the room reacts. His men have heard him ask for this before. Everybody down here has heard him ask for this before.

TRINITY

You want us to take a woman's eyes.

THE MEROVINGIAN

I want what's behind them. She sees forward. And now, for the first time all night, he is not comfortable.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

I have never once seen forward. Not one second of it, in three hundred years. I was made to look the other way, and I am very good at it, and I have looked at absolutely everything. He turns the cup a half-turn on the saucer.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

And do you know what everything looks like from behind? It looks inevitable. Every time. Show me any moment in the history of this world and I will show you the chain that made it, and there is never a gap anywhere. Not once. Not in three hundred years.

NEO

That's not proof there's no choice. He says it quietly, and it is the only thing anybody has ever said in this room that lands.

NEO (CONT'D)

That's just what backwards looks like. Silence. Something moves behind the old man's face -- because that is the thought he has at three in the morning, and he has never heard anybody else say it out loud.

THE MEROVINGIAN

(very quietly)

Yes. He puts his reading glasses back down on the ledger.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

That is precisely why I want her eyes.

NEO

No.

THE MEROVINGIAN

Take a moment with it.

NEO

No. And Trinity steps up beside him. She isn't asked. They do not look at each other. It does not occur to either of them that they might need to.

TRINITY

No. Across the room, Persephone lowers her magazine. She has been in this room for three hundred years and she has just seen something she has not seen in all of it, and nobody notices her see it.

MORPHEUS

Neo. It is one word, and it arrives a beat too late, and everybody in the room hears what is inside it.

NEO

Don't.

MORPHEUS

Everyone we have left. He does not say a number. He has spent four years counting and tonight, in front of his friend, he cannot make himself do it.

NEO

I know what she's worth. I know what they're worth. I'm not doing the sum. The Merovingian watches this happen with genuine, unhurried interest.

THE MEROVINGIAN

(to Morpheus, almost kindly)

You'd have paid it. Morpheus says nothing, which is the answer.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

Don't be embarrassed, captain. Everyone against one old woman is not greed. It's arithmetic, and it happens to be the correct answer. Every man who has ever sat in that chair got there the same way. He turns to Neo, and for the first time all night he is not tired.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

You won't do the sum. Not the small one, not the big one, not any of them.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

That is a thing I did not know an hour ago, and it is worth considerably more to me than her eyes were.

NEO

Why?

THE MEROVINGIAN

Because everything in this world has a price, son, and a man who won't name his is the only thing down here I can't put in the book. He closes the ledger.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

(mildly, to Morpheus)

Your friend is the one with the hands. Unfortunately. Neo raises his hand. The gesture that stops bullets. The gesture that flattens rooms. Nothing happens. Not blocked. Not resisted. No ripple, no strain, no sound, no air moving anywhere. The gesture simply does not occur -- and it is the most frightening thing that has happened to Neo since the day he woke up. Morpheus sees his face and goes cold.

THE MEROVINGIAN

In your building, you're the landlord. He picks up his coffee.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

This isn't your building.

TRINITY

(low)

Neo.

NEO

(quietly)

It isn't working.

THE MEROVINGIAN

It isn't that it won't. It's that nothing in this room has ever heard your name. You're standing in a house that was here before they started keeping records, asking it to move its furniture. He sets the cup down.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

Now. You came into my place and you raised your hand at me. That's a thing that happened. Things that happen have to go somewhere. He nods, very slightly, at one of the men. A big man at the card table sets down his hand and stands. This is BRIL. He is about sixty. He has a paunch. He looks like somebody's uncle. Neo hits him harder than he has ever hit anything in his life. Bril's head does not move. It isn't toughness. It isn't resistance. There is simply nothing in him that accepts the input. He was compiled before the engine had a concept of being moved. Bril takes Neo's wrist — the way you take a child's wrist at a crossing — and Neo cannot get it back. The old code does not argue. It simply does not acknowledge the force. Trinity fires. The rounds go into Bril and vanish. No blood. No code. No sound. She may as well be shooting into another century. Morpheus is already moving. A thin man in a cardigan crosses the room on too few frames — there and then there and then there, the journey between positions simply omitted. Morpheus swings at empty air. The man is already inside his guard. Morpheus folds hard against the wall. Neo tears loose and drives Bril into the plaster with everything he has. Across the room, Trinity's nose starts to bleed. She touches the blood. Looks at her fingers. Does not understand. Neo does.

NEO

(to himself, horrified)

It isn't routing.

THE MEROVINGIAN

(mildly, not even watching)

Old build. No ownership model. It has to put it somewhere, so it puts it near.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

Don't hit anybody else in my house, son. You'll take your friends apart. The truth of it settles over Neo like cold water. Every weapon he has ever trusted is now a liability. Every strike he throws risks the people he came here to protect. The thin man in the cardigan turns toward Trinity. He moves in that same broken, discontinuous way — not fast so much as incomplete. She tries to raise her weapon. He is already inside her guard. His hand closes on her throat and lifts. Her boots leave the floor. The pressure is absolute and unhurried. She cannot draw breath. Her free hand claws at his wrist. Nothing happens. Her eyes find Neo. She is about to die in a warm room that smells of old smoke and coffee, killed by something that does not even hate her. The door opens. Nobody in this room hears a door open. Nobody in this room has heard a door open in three hundred years. SERAPH enters. And the thing that happens is not that he does anything. It is that one of the men in shirtsleeves -- an enormous ordinary man who has not moved from his cards since Neo raised his hand -- quietly puts his hand down and takes one step backwards. Seraph does not hurry. He looks at the room the way a man looks at weather that has already decided what it will do. Then he starts across it, and stops. Because he cannot do it. The thin man's grip on Trinity's throat is a committed force on a clean line, and the line runs out through her and across the room, and standing at the end of it, on his knees, is MORPHEUS. Turn it three degrees and it finishes in Morpheus. Turn it the other way and it finishes in Neo. This is the one room in the world built to defeat him. The soft art needs somewhere to put things, and every direction in here has one of his people standing in it.

SERAPH

(to the room, quietly, and it is almost a complaint)

There is nowhere to send anything.

THE MEROVINGIAN

(not looking up from the ledger)

No. There isn't. That is rather the point of the room. So Seraph does something nobody has seen him do in six hundred years. He works. He goes to Morpheus first -- not to help him, to MOVE him, dragging a fifty-year-old man in a leather coat six feet across a carpet by the shoulders to clear a line that does not yet have anything on it. It is undignified and slow and it costs him every second he has. Which is when the room decides to stop him, and the old man stops being slow. Bril and two others come at him together, from three directions, at a speed that has ended everything it has ever been used on. And Seraph's feet do not move. His hands do. What happens next is almost too fast to see: a blur of forearms and open palms at chest height, six or seven contacts a second, each one lasting no longer than it takes to be told something. He is not blocking. Blocking is meeting force, and he does not meet anything. Every strike that comes in is touched, turned a few degrees and released, so that three men who came from three directions end up arriving at each other. A chair goes over. A lamp goes over. A card table folds. And the old man in the grey tunic has not taken a single step, and his face has not changed, and his hands are moving faster than anything in either world. Then he stops, and it is over, and everyone can see it was never speed. It was that he knew where every one of them was going before they did. Bril catches him across the ribs anyway, on the way out -- one clean shot he cannot answer because he is already turning to somebody else. It is the first time in this film that anybody touches the old man, and it lands, because he was watching a line instead of a man. Seraph goes down on one knee. Gets up. Does not look at Bril. He clears the last line by walking two of them into the corner they came from, using nothing but the direction they were already going, and it takes him nine seconds he does not have, and Trinity's boots have stopped kicking. Then -- only then -- is there somewhere to put it. Two fingers, lightly, against the inside of the thin man's elbow. Three degrees. The force that was crushing Trinity's windpipe continues on its original path, cleanly, obediently, into an empty wall. Plaster cracks in a long vertical line. Trinity drops and stays down, hauling air back into her lungs in great ugly gulps. Seraph stands over her with one hand pressed to his ribs.

NEO

How. It is not a question about technique. It is a man watching an eighty-year-old do the only thing that has worked in this room.

SERAPH

(out of breath, which is somehow the most frightening detail in the sequence)

They can't change their minds.

NEO

What? Seraph nods at Bril, who is coming back around the card table with the unhurried certainty of a man walking to a bus stop.

SERAPH

Look at him properly. He has already started. He started three seconds ago and he cannot stop, and he cannot feint, and he cannot pick a different one halfway through, because whatever they built him out of has no way to interrupt itself.

SERAPH (CONT'D)

You have spent four years fighting things that could change their minds. That is the only reason you ever had to be fast. Neo looks at Bril again -- and this time he is not looking at the man at all. He is looking at the line the man is already on. It is as visible as a chalk mark on the carpet.

SERAPH (CONT'D)

You cannot strike what has no address. But everything in this room has already told you where it is going. Feel the moment it commits. After that it belongs to you.

SERAPH (CONT'D)

Then send it somewhere that isn't a person. Neo watches, breathing hard. The lesson is happening while the people he loves are still bleeding on the floor. Bril arrives. Neo meets it the only way he knows -- with power. The force has nowhere legal to go, bleeds sideways, and across the room Morpheus staggers as if punched by a ghost.

SERAPH

Not power. You are still trying to interrupt him. He cannot be interrupted -- that is what he is. And there it is, and Neo hears it, and somewhere behind his eyes an entire way of fighting quietly stops being available to him. Because the Merovingian has spent all evening insisting that there is no gap between a cause and its effect. His men are that sentence, standing up and walking. The thin man is already moving back toward Trinity. Discontinuous. Inevitable. She is on her knees with one hand at her throat, still trying to make her lungs remember the job. Neo stops thinking. And he feels it -- the exact instant the thin man commits, half a second before the step lands, the moment after which nothing in that old and beautiful code can be recalled. From that instant on, the man is a line. Throat as destination. Fixed. Neo is not on the line. Three degrees. The force finishes in the floor, and in nobody.

INT. NEBUCHADNEZZAR (REAL WORLD) - CONTINUOUS

Link has been watching the feed with his hand over his mouth for four minutes. He takes it away.

LINK

(very quietly)

...there it is.

KID

There what is? Link does not look away from the screen.

LINK

This morning I told you there were two things you could do about an Agent. Run, or die.

KID

Yes, sir.

LINK

I've been operating for six years and I have never once been wrong about that. On the monitor, a man in a long coat is standing perfectly still in a warm room while an old program stumbles past him into a wall.

LINK (CONT'D)

That's the third thing.

INT. THE BACK ROOM - CONTINUOUS

Plaster dust. For a moment the room loses track of which way is down. The thin man stumbles forward as if the world forgot what he was for. Trinity is alive. Neo stands over her, chest heaving, stunned by what just moved through him. For a fraction of a second something is fully alive in him -- a way of being with no fixed address to attack. Somewhere very far away in the system, a presence that has been trying to copy Neo fails again. And then the Merovingian closes his ledger, and the evening ends.

THE MEROVINGIAN

That's enough. It is not loud. Five old programs stop where they are.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

(to Seraph)

You're a long way from her door.

SERAPH

She asked me to see something.

THE MEROVINGIAN

And did you? Seraph looks at Neo. At a man who has done, once, badly, out of breath, the thing it took Seraph six hundred years to be able to do at will.

SERAPH

Yes.

THE MEROVINGIAN

Then take your two and go. The third one owes me. And there it is. Not force. A debt, named out loud in a room where debts are the only law, by the only man entitled to name one. Seraph does not argue. He does not look sorry either.

NEO

Seraph --

SERAPH

I protect that which matters most. Tonight, that is not you.

SERAPH (CONT'D)

Learn the rest. He gets Trinity up under one arm. Morpheus is already on his feet, holding his own ribs, taking her other side. Bril's hand closes on the back of Neo's neck from behind.

THE MEROVINGIAN

That's the part nobody believes until it's them. He isn't gloating. He is simply finished with the lesson.

INT. NEBUCHADNEZZAR (REAL WORLD) - CONTINUOUS

Neo's physical body convulses.

LINK

His vitals are dropping! Whatever's got hold of him, it's overriding his residual self-image. It's actually killing him!

INT. THE BACK ROOM - CONTINUOUS

Neo on his knees on the carpet. Bleeding from the mouth. Beaten in the most ordinary way imaginable. The Merovingian closes the ledger and stands. He is not in a hurry about this either.

THE MEROVINGIAN

You put your hands on my people.

NEO

(through blood)

Then take it out of me.

THE MEROVINGIAN

(almost gently)

Son. That's what I'm doing. He nods once. Neo comes apart. Not shattering. Nothing explodes. He goes thin, and loses colour, and fades the way a signal fades when it is being routed somewhere else. His hands go first. And Trinity, six feet from the door with an old man's arm around her, sees it happen.

TRINITY

NEO!

She goes for him. She gets one stride. Seraph catches her -- and it is not a gentle catch, and it is not soft, and it is nothing like anything else he does in this film. He simply takes hold of her and does not let go, and she fights him, and he is stronger than an eighty-year-old man in a grey tunic has any right to be. She gets a hand into the space where Neo was, and there is nothing there. The air is perfectly still. The radiator ticks. On the television, nothing continues to play.

TRINITY (CONT'D)

(barely)

Where is he.

THE MEROVINGIAN

Somewhere he can't get out of. He isn't dead. He says it flatly, the way a man says a thing that isn't worth lying about -- which is worse, because now she has to decide whether to believe him.

THE MEROVINGIAN (CONT'D)

(to his men)

Put them downstairs. Don't damage them. They're worth something to somebody.

INT. THE CELLAR - LATER

Not a dungeon. A storeroom. Crates, a bare bulb, a drain in the floor. Trinity sits against the wall. Morpheus paces, holding his ribs.

MORPHEUS

He said he isn't dead.

TRINITY

I don't think he was lying. Morpheus stops pacing. He takes something out of his coat. A small chrome case, about the size of a cigarette tin. Still sealed, with a maker's wax across the seam that has gone brittle and grey with age.

TRINITY

What's that?

MORPHEUS

She gave it to me twenty-six years ago. The same afternoon she told me I would find him.

TRINITY

What's in it?

MORPHEUS

I have no idea. She said open it the day you need it. Trinity looks at the wax.

TRINITY

Twenty-six years.

MORPHEUS

I never needed it. He says it as a simple fact, and does not hear what is inside it, and Trinity does. He breaks the seal. Inside, seated in two shaped depressions, are two pills. One red. One blue. Morpheus looks at them for a long time. Then he laughs -- one flat, wrecked sound with no pleasure in it anywhere.

TRINITY

(quietly)

Morpheus.

MORPHEUS

Twenty-six years I have been holding this out to other people. He closes his hand over the case.

MORPHEUS (CONT'D)

She's telling me I never once took it myself. He does not take either of them. He shuts the case and puts it back in his coat, and he does not say anything else, and something has started that will take him another two days to finish. The door unlocks. PERSEPHONE steps in, a small silver pistol held loosely at her side. Two men behind her.

PERSEPHONE

He doesn’t lie. He’s never once had to. She looks at Trinity.

PERSEPHONE (CONT'D)

Upstairs. When he said no. You didn’t look at each other. Not once. Do you know how long it has been since I watched two people not need to check?

TRINITY

If you’re here to kill us, get it over with.

PERSEPHONE

My husband believes everything is a debt. He is right. Mostly. But love isn’t a debt. It doesn’t walk back to anything. I would like him to remember what it feels like to lose something he cannot replace. Without looking she fires twice over her shoulder.

BANG. BANG.

The two men fall and stay there.

PERSEPHONE (CONT'D)

The Keymaker is in the garage. Move.

INT. THE GARAGE - MOMENTS LATER

A long underground garage. Cars nobody makes anymore. All of them kept. An old, small man sits on a stool, cutting a key. THE KEYMAKER. He looks up as if he has been expecting only them, only now.

THE KEYMAKER

You are exactly on time. Morpheus takes him. Trinity slides into a Cadillac.

PERSEPHONE

Go. Trinity guns the engine. The Cadillac tears up the ramp and out into the rain. As the taillights disappear, two men come out of the stairwell and stand looking after them. Fifties. Overcoats. In no hurry. HOLLIS and MARCH. They are not twins. They have simply worked together so long that they have stopped being out of step with each other.

HOLLIS

We'll need a car.

MARCH

We'll need a car. Neither of them moves toward one. They have all night. They have had all night for a very long time.

EXT. OLD QUARTER BACKSTREETS - NIGHT

The Cadillac comes up the garage ramp into narrow, wet streets. Rain, steam, neon that does not quite hold still. Trinity drives. Morpheus is in the back with the Keymaker, who sits calmly, still cutting a key by feel.

THE KEYMAKER

(without looking up)

Left at the next light. Then two blocks east.

TRINITY

You know where we're going.

THE KEYMAKER

I know where all of them are. It is the only thing I know.

TRINITY

Link. We need an exit.

LINK (V.O.)

Old phone booth by the closed laundry, east side.

LINK (V.O.) (CONT'D)

Trin -- Neo's signal is gone. Not dead. Not jacked out. He's somewhere in between. Trinity's hands do not move on the wheel.

TRINITY

Just get us out. Behind them, a long way back, two men in overcoats walk out of the garage ramp and turn in the same direction. They do not hurry. Nobody has ever seen either of them hurry.

INT. TRAIN STATION - UNKNOWN TIME

White subway tiles. Blinding, sterile fluorescent light. A perfectly clean, endless subway platform. NEO gasps. He is lying on the cold tile floor. He sits up, touching his chest. No blood. No wound. He looks at his forearms. He isn't wearing his jack-in ports. He isn't in the real world, but he isn't in the Matrix either. He stands. The platform curves out of sight in both directions.

NEO

Link? Nothing. Dead silence. He walks down the platform until he spots someone sitting on a wooden bench. A young Indian girl, no older than ten. This is SATI. She is swinging her legs, humming a quiet tune.

NEO (CONT'D)

Where am I? Sati looks up. She has kind, impossibly deep eyes.

SATI

You're in the Mobil Avenue station. It's a connection.

NEO

A connection to what?

SATI

Between your world and the machine world. My papa says this place is for things that don't belong anywhere else. Like me. I don't have a purpose, so I had to come here to hide from deletion. As she talks, Sati turns something over in her hands — a spoon. Without looking, she bends it into an impossible curl, smooths it straight, then curls it again.

SATI (CONT'D)

It isn't really a spoon. So it doesn't mind.

(a beat, still swinging her legs)

Most people only fall once. You keep going further down. Neo goes very still. Somewhere far back, a memory stirs — another child, another spoon, a long time ago.

NEO

I have to get back. My friends are in danger. How do I get out?

SATI

You don't. The Trainman makes the rules here. He built the place, so it's his, and even you have to do what it says.

SATI (CONT'D)

He works for somebody, though. Everybody down here works for somebody. That's how you end up in here instead of dead. Neo stares at the white tiled walls. He has been here before, in a way — in every room that refused to acknowledge his name. He walks to the solid tile wall and places his hand flat against it. He pushes. Nothing happens. He pushes harder — the old way, the way that once made Agents fall, the way that once stopped bullets. The tiles do not yield. The station does not care who he is. He remembers the warm room. The thin man. Trinity’s feet leaving the floor. Seraph’s two fingers on an elbow. Three degrees. The force that had nowhere to land.

SERAPH (V.O.)

You cannot strike what has no address. Neo lowers his hand. He stops trying to break the station. He stands still and listens the way Seraph taught him to listen — not for a weakness to attack, but for the place where the system is already thin, where its own rules have never fully settled. The fluorescent hum changes. Not louder. Just clearer. Neo takes one step to the left. Then another. He is not forcing a path. He is finding the path that was already almost there. The white tiles in front of him do not shatter. They simply become less interested in being a wall. The surface softens, not like water, but like a decision that has not been fully made. Sati watches, no longer swinging her legs.

SATI

What are you doing?

NEO

Not asking. He steps forward. There is no explosion. No crack of architecture giving way under force. Neo simply walks through the place where the wall has agreed, for a moment, not to be solid. As he passes through, a single thin thread of the station’s light is As he passes through, a single thin thread of the station's light is pulled sideways with him -- a consequence of a man with no address crossing between two systems that were never built to let anybody do that. It lashes out into the wider Matrix. And it does not go out. Neo looks back once at Sati.

NEO (CONT'D)

Tell your papa you don’t need a purpose to exist. Then he is gone. The wall is a wall again. Sati sits alone on the bench, looking at the place where a man with no address walked through. Whatever he left open is not in this station. He does not know he left it, and he will not find out for two days.

EXT. THE MATRIX - ROOFTOP - CONTINUOUS

Rain. A man crouches at the ledge of a high-rise, coat snapping in the wind, watching the approaches through a scope that isn't really a scope. This is CADE. He has been up here for six hours because a captain he has never met asked his captain to keep an eye on a ship that ignored a Council order, and he has seen nothing all night, and he is cold, and in about ninety seconds none of that is going to matter. Four streets east and eighty-one floors up, a door that should not exist is standing open. Nobody told him about that part. Nobody knew there was a part to tell. He taps two fingers against the ledge -- tap-tap, tap-tap. A nervous habit. A heartbeat. Then he feels it. Six miles away and eleven seconds ago, a thread of light came out of a place between worlds with nowhere to go. It has spent those eleven seconds looking for something to be attached to. The rain stops mid-fall. Every drop hangs in the air, trembling, tinted gold. Behind him, unhurried, a figure resolves out of the frozen rain. AGENT SMITH. He is studying his own open hand, where a thread of golden Source-light coils around his fingers like a living wire. He has felt the door open -- and he understands what it is before Cade does.

AGENT SMITH

He found the edge of the world. And he walked through it. He always did have to go first. Cade spins, raising his weapon. Smith doesn't look at the gun.

CADE

You're the virus.

AGENT SMITH

I'm the balance. He reached out -- so I get to reach back. Cade fires. The bullet stops an inch from Smith's eye and drops, ringing, to the tar.

AGENT SMITH (CONT'D)

You're a long way from your body, Cade. Do you know what you are? You're a door. Flesh on one side. All of this on the other. And someone was careless enough to leave it open. Smith lunges. His hand punches into Cade's chest -- but this is not the oily assimilation we've seen. The golden thread and the black code braid together, gold and ink twisting down Cade's arm, into the jack-ports at the base of his skull, and DOWN the line -- out of the Matrix entirely. Cade SCREAMS.

INT. CADUCEUS (REAL WORLD) - CONTINUOUS

A cramped, dark hovercraft. REN, the operator, half out of her chair. On the cot, Cade's jacked-in body ARCHES off the steel, every muscle locked. The monitors shriek. Sparks spit from the jack-line.

REN

Cade? Cade, your vitals -- talk to me! Then -- silence. Cade goes slack. The monitors settle into a calm, steady rhythm. Too calm. Ren stares at him, uneasy, and does not yet understand why.

INT. NEBUCHADNEZZAR (REAL WORLD) - CONTINUOUS

Neo’s body violently gasps for air in the hovercraft chair. His eyes fly open. Link jumps out of his chair, yelling in shock and relief.

LINK

Holy shit. You’re back. You’re actually back. Neo sits up, ripping the plug from the back of his neck. He is panting, sweating, but his eyes are burning with a terrifying, absolute clarity. Link starts forward, then stops. Something in the way Neo occupies the chair is different — not weaker, not stronger, just harder to get a fix on. Link has jacked him in and out a hundred times. This time the signal sat wrong in the system for a second longer than it should have.

NEO

Link. Where are they?

LINK

They made it. They've got him. And in about four hours they're going to do something insane. Neo stands up. He doesn't look burdened anymore. He looks like a man who has finally stopped waiting for permission.

NEO

Then let's hear it.

INT. NEBUCHADNEZZAR - CORRIDOR - MOMENTS LATER

The ship is quiet in the way only a hovercraft can be quiet — the low hum of systems, the distant drip of condensation. Neo walks alone for a moment, one hand trailing along the bulkhead. He is still feeling the ghost of the soft art in his wrists and shoulders. He stops. At the end of the corridor, where the light is thinnest, Seraph is standing. He should not be able to be here. The ship is not the Matrix. And yet the old man in the grey tunic is simply present — as if even the residual self-image of the systems has thinned enough for a moment.

SERAPH

You felt it. Neo does not pretend otherwise.

NEO

When I turned it away from her.

SERAPH

Yes. A long silence. The ship creaks around them.

SERAPH (CONT'D)

You learned it while someone you love was dying. That is both a gift and a wound. Power will try to call you back. It feels like control. This feels like falling. He takes one step closer. The gold that Neo once saw in him is faintly visible even here.

SERAPH (CONT'D)

Smith can copy anything that has a shape. What he cannot copy is the absence of a place to stand. None of the previous versions learned that. You might. Neo looks down at his hands. They still remember the turn.

NEO

What do I do with it?

SERAPH

Keep practising. Especially when no one is attacking you. Free your mind from the need to meet force with force. That is the whole of it. A faint almost-smile.

SERAPH (CONT'D)

When you meet the thing that can wear every face, you will already know how to be no one. He is gone. Simply no longer present. Neo stands alone in the corridor. The stillness is already changing how he occupies space. Even his residual self-image feels slightly less fixed — as if the system is finding it harder to keep a clean lock on where he ends and the code begins. For a moment the soft, dangerous thought arrives: the more he learns not to be a target, the less certain he is what is left of him for her to hold. He puts the thought away. He does not put it away completely.

ACT III

INT. NEBUCHADNEZZAR - THE CORE - LATER

The whole crew. And sitting on an ammunition crate in the middle of them, small and neat and entirely calm in a room full of people who are not, is THE KEYMAKER. He has a ring of keys in his lap. He has been cutting a new one since the moment they got him aboard.

NEO

What do you actually do? The old man looks up, delighted. In six hundred years nobody has asked him that.

THE KEYMAKER

I make a door where there isn't one. He holds up the key he is cutting.

THE KEYMAKER (CONT'D)

Not a locked one. Locked is easy. Locked means somebody has already agreed the door is there. Neo goes very still, because he has spent the last day in a room that had never heard his name.

THE KEYMAKER (CONT'D)

The way to the Source is behind a wall on the eighty-first floor of a building on the west side. No door. No lock, no hinge, no handle -- and no record anywhere in that building that there was ever meant to be one.

MORPHEUS

Then how do we get to it?

THE KEYMAKER

We wait for the building to forget itself. He turns the key over in his fingers.

THE KEYMAKER (CONT'D)

It runs off the city grid. Kill the grid and the security substrate goes down with it -- and when it comes back, it spends three hundred and fourteen seconds working out what it is.

THE KEYMAKER (CONT'D)

For three hundred and fourteen seconds, that building does not know what is and is not a door. In that window, I can write one.

LINK

Five minutes fourteen.

THE KEYMAKER

The backup catches in eight tenths of a second. So the grid and the backup have to go at the same moment, or nothing happens at all.

MORPHEUS

Two targets. Simultaneous. The grid station, and the substation at the river.

MORPHEUS (CONT'D)

We take the grid. Caduceus takes the substation -- they're already in the field, they're four streets from it, and Niobe put them on us for exactly this. He says it as a solved problem, because until about four hours ago it was one. Link does not look up from the boards.

LINK

Sir.

MORPHEUS

Raise them.

LINK

I've been raising them since eleven o'clock. Now everybody in the core is looking at him.

LINK (CONT'D)

Caduceus hasn't answered a hail in four hours. No distress. No burn-off. No wreck signature on the sweep -- I'd see a wreck. The ship's out there and it's under power and it isn't talking.

TRINITY

Sentinels?

LINK

A silence goes through the core that none of them can name, and only the audience can, because the audience watched it happen on a rooftop in the rain four hours ago.

MORPHEUS

Link. Get a line to Zion. Wake Niobe.

LINK

She's not going to be able to do anything about it. Lock has her on that floor with everybody else.

MORPHEUS

Wake her anyway. There are nine people out there and somebody in this fleet has to go and look at them. Link starts working a second board. A silence goes through the core that none of them can name, and only the audience can, because the audience watched it happen on a rooftop in the rain four hours ago.

MORPHEUS

(finally)

Then it's us.

TRINITY

There's three of us.

MORPHEUS

There are three of us.

LINK

And every other hull is on that dock under Lock's order, and that is not changing in the next four hours. A long silence in the core. And then, from the back, where he has been standing very still trying not to be sent out of the room:

KID

I can take the substation. Nobody answers him. Which is worse than being told no.

KID (CONT'D)

Sir. I've been jacked in eleven times. Link's run me on drills for four months. It's a charge on a housing and a timer. I don't have to fight anybody. I have to be somewhere and press something at the same second as her.

NEO

You've been out of a pod fifteen months.

KID

Yes, sir.

KID (CONT'D)

And you were out of one for six when you flew. It lands, because there is nothing to say to it. Link is looking at the boards very hard and not at anybody.

LINK

(quietly)

He's good. He's not ready. Those are two different things and I don't get to pick which one matters tonight. Morpheus takes a long moment. Then he does the thing he did for a man in a corridor four years ago and has not done since.

MORPHEUS

Take the substation.

KID

(and it is not excitement -- it is something much heavier)

Yes, sir.

TRINITY

And the plant.

MORPHEUS

And the plant.

TRINITY

I'll take it.

NEO

No. It comes out faster than he meant it to. Everybody hears it.

NEO (CONT'D)

Send me. I'll take both and be back before the window opens.

THE KEYMAKER

(mildly)

You cannot. You have to be standing at the wall. He says the next part as though it is obvious, which to him it is.

THE KEYMAKER (CONT'D)

I do not make doors for buildings. I make them for people. If you are not there when it opens, it does not open.

NEO

Then Morpheus takes the plant.

MORPHEUS

I am the only person on this ship who has ever been inside that building. I go with you. Silence in the core.

TRINITY

I'll take the plant.

NEO

Trinity.

TRINITY

Say it, then. He doesn't. He can't. She goes back to the magazine in her hands and does not look up.

TRINITY (CONT'D)

You've spent a week not telling me what you see at night. I don't need to know what it is. She seats the magazine.

TRINITY (CONT'D)

I need you to know that you don't get to make my choices to stop it. A long beat. Everyone in the core is finding something else to look at.

TRINITY (CONT'D)

Say okay.

NEO

(barely)

Okay.

INT. THE MATRIX - ORACLE’S KITCHEN - LATER

The same small kitchen. Same table. Same smell of something baking that never quite finishes. SATI sits on the floor with a spoon, bending it and unbending it without looking. The Oracle stands at the counter, her back to the door. She does not turn when Neo, Trinity and Morpheus enter.

THE ORACLE

You’re late.

NEO

We were told you weren’t seeing anyone.

THE ORACLE

I wasn’t. Then you started learning something I didn’t teach you. She turns. The same calm, appraising eyes. She looks at Neo longer than is comfortable, then at Trinity, then back to Neo.

THE ORACLE (CONT'D)

Sit down. And don't mind the vase.

NEO

What vase? He turns to look for it. His coat takes it clean off the sideboard. It hits the floor and goes everywhere. Sati looks up, then goes back to the spoon.

NEO (CONT'D)

...I'm sorry.

THE ORACLE

I said don't mind it. I'll get one of the children to see to it. She pulls out a chair and sits down opposite him, and she is enjoying herself, which after the week he has had is almost unbearable.

THE ORACLE (CONT'D)

Now here's the one that'll keep you up tonight, honey.

THE ORACLE (CONT'D)

Would you have broken it if I hadn't said anything? Neo sits very still with a piece of pottery under his boot. Because he has spent this entire day being told, by everybody he meets, that the thing he thought he chose was handed to him.

NEO

(quietly)

That's the prophecy. The Oracle does not answer straight away. When she does, there is no triumph in it at all.

THE ORACLE

That's the prophecy. Trinity remains standing. Morpheus stays by the door.

THE ORACLE (CONT'D)

I can see it on you. The old programs saw it too. Even the machines are getting a strange reading when they look for you.

NEO

Seraph started it.

THE ORACLE

Seraph starts a lot of things. Whether you finish it — that’s the only question that ever mattered. She looks at Trinity.

THE ORACLE (CONT'D)

And you. You’re still holding on to the part of him that’s easy to find. That’s not small. Might be the only reason he hasn’t gone all the way into what he’s learning.

TRINITY

I’m not letting go.

THE ORACLE

I know. That’s what worries me. And what gives me hope. Same feeling. Always has been. A quiet beat. Sati’s spoon curls and straightens again.

THE ORACLE (CONT'D)

You’ve got the door-maker. Good. Path’s the same. You’re not. She leans forward slightly.

THE ORACLE (CONT'D)

When you get to that room with the man who only sees chains, he’s going to offer you two doors and a story about the species. Every version of you took the same one. You might not.

NEO

Because of what I started learning.

THE ORACLE

Because you’re finally hard to read. They never did know what to do with that. A beat. She studies him the way she always has — not the power, the person underneath it.

THE ORACLE (CONT'D)

Just don’t forget the other half. Temet nosce. Know thyself. If you empty out every place they can find you, make sure there’s still someone left to do the knowing. She’s holding that part. Don’t make her hold it alone. She stands. The audience is over.

THE ORACLE (CONT'D)

Cookie? Neo takes one because you always do. On his way out he stops in the doorway, the way he did the first time, and looks up at the lintel -- because there is something carved into it, and there always has been, and he has only ever read the first line. Three lines, cut into old wood a very long time ago by somebody who does not appear in this story. TEMET NOSCE. Know thyself. He has known that one for four years. Under it, two more. NE QUID NIMIS. Nothing in excess. And under that, smaller, worn almost smooth where a thousand hands have steadied themselves on the frame going out:

SPONDE, NOXA PRAESTO EST.

NEO

What's the third one? The Oracle does not look up from the tray.

THE ORACLE

Something they carved on a temple a long time before anybody built this place. Two and a half thousand years, and people still only ever remember the first line.

NEO

What does it say? And she tells him, and she says it lightly, the way you'd read out a bus timetable.

THE ORACLE

Surety brings ruin. Neo looks at it a moment longer without understanding why it bothers him, and then he goes. Six feet behind him, holding the door for Trinity, is a man who has been certain of one thing for twenty-six years. He walks straight underneath it and does not look up. Neo almost smiles. He doesn’t take one.

THE ORACLE (CONT'D)

Go on then. Make it count. As they turn to leave, Sati speaks without looking up.

SATI

It isn’t really a spoon. So it doesn’t mind. Neo pauses at the door. The words land differently than they did years ago. He nods once, almost to himself, and goes.

EXT. THE MATRIX - CITY ARTERIAL - NIGHT

A Ducati comes out of a service alley at seventy and does not slow down for the junction. TRINITY. No helmet. Satchel of charges strapped across her back. Nine minutes on a clock that will not negotiate. She takes the arterial the wrong way up the outside lane, threading oncoming headlights at a speed that would be suicide if she believed in the road.

LINK (V.O.)

(comms)

Left at the bridge, then straight through to the river. You've got a clean run. She takes the bridge. And at the far end of it, parked across two lanes with the engine off, is a grey sedan. HOLLIS is leaning against the front wing. MARCH is standing in the road. Neither of them is looking at her yet. She lays the bike over and takes it down the embankment.

EXT. RIVER SERVICE ROAD - CONTINUOUS

Gravel, floodwater, sodium light. She rides it out and gets the front wheel back on tarmac.

TRINITY

Link. New route.

LINK (V.O.)

There isn't one. Take the underpass at Wu and Third, it's the only way in from that side -- She comes up the ramp at Wu and Third. The grey sedan is parked across the underpass mouth. Both of them are already out of it. Neither of them ran to get there. Trinity brakes hard enough to lift the back wheel, and sits there in the rain with the engine going, and understands the shape of the problem.

TRINITY

They're not chasing me.

LINK (V.O.)

What?

TRINITY

They've never once been behind me. They're just *at* every road. And that is when she gets it -- because she has been running Link's map, and Link's map is the current one, and so is theirs.

TRINITY (CONT'D)

Link. Kill the routing. Tell me what was here before.

LINK (V.O.)

Before?

TRINITY

Old plates. Pre-build. Anything they took out and never put back. A beat of typing.

LINK (V.O.)

...there's a rail cut. Freight line, decommissioned, filled in about thirty years back. It runs under the arterial and comes up inside the plant perimeter. Trin, it isn't a road. It hasn't been a road since before either of those two were compiled.

TRINITY

Good. She takes the bike off the ramp, over the barrier, and drops eight feet into a cutting full of black water.

EXT. OLD RAIL CUTTING - CONTINUOUS

No lights. No lanes. No signage. A dead straight scar under the city that nobody has driven down in three decades, and a woman on a motorcycle at ninety with floodwater coming up over the exhaust in a long white plume behind her. The tunnel mouth. She goes into it in total darkness with the headlamp catching brickwork, then a service stair, then a chain-link fence. She does not slow down for the fence. The Ducati comes up out of the cutting, through the wire, and lands inside the perimeter of the power station in a spray of rusted mesh, and she has it stopped and is off it before it has finished falling over.

EXT. POWER STATION - PERIMETER - CONTINUOUS

She looks back the way she came. Nothing on the road. Nothing at the gate. Nobody ahead of her, because there was nowhere ahead of her to be. You cannot get in front of somebody on a road that isn't on your map.

TRINITY

(into the comm, breathing hard)

I'm in. She goes for the turbine hall at a run. Six minutes.

INT. THE MATRIX - POWER STATION - NIGHT

A dead concrete corridor under the turbine hall. TRINITY comes through it fast, a satchel of charges against her hip. She rounds the last corner to the stairwell -- -- and stops. HOLLIS and MARCH are standing in the doorway. Overcoats. Hands at their sides. Not remotely out of breath.

TRINITY

You were on the bridge.

HOLLIS

We were.

MARCH

And at Wu and Third. Trinity's stomach goes.

HOLLIS

There is one other way into this plant.

MARCH

There has only ever been one other way into this plant. She did not outrun them. She was driven, patiently and politely, down the single road they left open, and they have been standing at the end of it since before she got on the bike.

TRINITY

Move.

HOLLIS

We're not going to hurt you.

MARCH

We're going to take you back.

TRINITY

Same thing.

HOLLIS

No. He was very clear about it. Not damaged. She fires. Both barrels, centre mass, at four feet. Neither of them moves. Neither of them reacts. One of them looks faintly sorry about it. And that is the whole trap: they will not hurt her, and they will not let her past, and every second she spends in this corridor comes off a clock that will not wait.

INT. THE MATRIX - EIGHTY-FIRST FLOOR - CONTINUOUS

A bare service corridor. NEO, MORPHEUS and the Keymaker in front of a blank grey wall. The Keymaker takes out a pocket watch, which is the least advanced piece of technology anybody in this trilogy has used to time anything.

MORPHEUS

(into a handset)

Kid. Position.

KID (V.O.)

Set at the substation. Waiting on the plant. Nothing from the plant.

INT. THE MATRIX - POWER STATION - CONTINUOUS

Trinity looks at the two men in the doorway. Then up. Then at the window behind her.

TRINITY

Then you'd better not damage me. She puts three rounds through the window and goes out through it into the rain. Hollis and March consider the empty frame.

HOLLIS

She's gone up the outside.

MARCH

They always go up the outside. They turn, without any urgency at all, and start toward the stairs.

EXT. POWER STATION - TRANSFORMER DECK - CONTINUOUS

Rain. Forty feet of humming steel. Trinity comes over the parapet soaked and starts laying charges against the transformer housings.

EXT. THE MATRIX - RIVER SUBSTATION - CONTINUOUS

A fenced yard on a black river. Rows of transformer housings under sodium light, humming. Rain coming in sideways off the water. THE KID is crouched against a housing with his hood up. The charge is already on. It took him four minutes. He has been sitting next to it for eleven, in the dark, alone, on the first night of his life that has ever mattered, and nobody in either world is watching him do it. He is nineteen. His hands are not steady.

KID

(to himself, very quietly)

It's a housing and a timer. It's a housing and a timer. A dog barks somewhere across the water. He flinches, and hates himself for flinching. Then Trinity's voice in his ear, flat and close, from forty floors up on the other side of the city.

TRINITY (V.O.)

Kid. Sixty seconds. And the thing nobody warned him about happens, which is that his throat closes. He gets the word out on the second try.

KID

Copy. He puts his thumb on the detonator and does not press it, and watches the numbers, and the eleven minutes he has just spent turn out to have been the easy part. Because this is the whole of it. Not courage. Not fighting anybody. A boy fifteen months out of a pod, sitting in the rain beside a machine, being asked to be somewhere at exactly the right second — and if he is early or late by one, three people he has known for four days die on the other side of a city and a quarter of a million more die on Thursday.

KID (CONT'D)

(barely)

Come on. Come on.

EXT. POWER STATION - TRANSFORMER DECK - CONTINUOUS

Trinity sets the last one, backs off across the deck, and puts her thumb on the detonator.

TRINITY (CONT'D)

Now.

EXT. THE MATRIX - RIVER SUBSTATION - CONTINUOUS

The Kid fires it. He does not whoop. He does not celebrate. He puts his forehead against the wet steel of the housing for about a second and a half, and then he gets up and runs for the fence -- because there is a payphone four streets east that is live until dawn, and he knows that because a man he never met wrote it down in pencil eleven years ago.

INT. ZION - DOCKING BAY - SAME TIME

A gun crew stops what it is doing, because a ship is powering up that has no clearance to power up. The LOGOS, on her cradle, lights coming on down her spine. COMMANDER LOCK comes down the walkway fast.

LOCK

Niobe. NIOBE is already at the top of her ramp.

NIOBE

Caduceus went quiet four hours ago. Nine people. Nobody has gone to look.

LOCK

Nobody is going to look. Every hull on this floor is a gun emplacement until the dome opens. That is the order and you wrote half of it with me.

NIOBE

I know what I wrote. She does not raise her voice, which is how he knows.

NIOBE (CONT'D)

I put them out there, Jason. Niobe's name, Niobe's hail, Niobe's idea. I asked a captain I like to go and sit over a ship that was breaking your order, and now they are not answering, and everybody on this floor has decided that is a thing we can live with until Thursday.

LOCK

And if you go out there and don't come back, I lose the Logos and my wife on the same night, two days before the ceiling comes down.

NIOBE

Yes. A long moment on a dock full of people pretending not to listen. And Lock does not stop her. He has never once been able to, and tonight he does not even try, and that is the closest thing to love either of them has time for.

LOCK

(finally)

Take a medic.

NIOBE

Already aboard. The ramp comes up. The Logos goes out of the bay into the dark with nobody's authority but her own, and behind her the dock closes over the space where she was.

EXT. THE CITY - CONTINUOUS

Two flashes, a river apart, at the same instant. And then the city goes out. Forty blocks of it, all at once, like a hand across a table.

INT. THE MATRIX - CORRIDOR OF DOORS - CONTINUOUS

Black. Then the dull orange of emergency lighting -- and where a blank grey wall was standing, there is now a white corridor of identical doors running away further than the building is wide. The Keymaker opens the watch.

THE KEYMAKER

Three hundred and fourteen. He walks it without hurrying, stops at one door, and sets the tip of the new key against it.

THE KEYMAKER (CONT'D)

Mr Anderson. Stand here. It has to be you standing here, and it only works once, and it only works for one. Neo takes the place in front of the door. The Keymaker begins to turn the key. And begins to go. It starts at his fingers -- thinning, losing colour, unwriting -- and it climbs.

MORPHEUS

What is happening to him?

THE KEYMAKER

(still turning, perfectly calm)

There is no room in that building for a door. So there has to be room somewhere.

NEO

Stop. We'll find another way in.

THE KEYMAKER

There isn't one. There has never been one. That is why they made me. The key turns another quarter. His forearm is gone.

THE KEYMAKER (CONT'D)

Six hundred years I sat in a garage cutting keys for a man who never needed any of them. He looks up at Neo, and he is smiling, and it is not brave. It is happy.

THE KEYMAKER (CONT'D)

Do you know what it is to be made for one thing and never once be allowed to do it? The key completes its turn. The door swings in on light that is not green. Gold.

THE KEYMAKER (CONT'D)

Best day of my life. And there is nobody standing there. A ring of keys drops onto the floor and rolls, and settles, and stops. Neo does not move toward it. He learned this today, and it costs him something: not every purpose is his to save. The Keymaker's purpose was the door. The door is open.

LINK (V.O.)

(tight)

Neo. Trin's not calling in. Neo still does not move.

MORPHEUS

Go. It closes in four minutes and it never opens again. Neo goes through.

EXT. POWER STATION - TRANSFORMER DECK - CONTINUOUS

Trinity turns from the wreckage of the transformers. A maintenance man is standing on the deck in the rain twenty feet away, and then he is not a maintenance man. Silver tie. Trinity has stood in front of one of these before. It went through her and Morpheus in eight seconds in a courtyard in the rain, and there was only one of it then, and there is only one of it now, and that has never once needed to be more. She is already shooting. It is short and brutal and she is very, very good — and it does not matter in the slightest, because there is no version of this where she wins it, and both of them know that, and only one of them cares.

INT. POWER STATION - STAIRWELL - CONTINUOUS

Hollis and March reach the deck door and stop, because there is an Agent on the other side of it and nothing about that is their business.

HOLLIS

That's not ours.

MARCH

That's not ours. They turn around and start back down. There is no hurry. There has never been any hurry.

INT. THE ARCHITECT'S ROOM - CONTINUOUS

A circular room. Every surface is a screen. And on every screen there is a man standing exactly where Neo is standing. A man in a boiler suit. A bearded man in a heavy wool coat. A young man with no shoes. A woman -- no. Five men, in five rooms, in five decades that are not this one, each of them mid-conversation with the same seated figure. In the centre of the room, in a leather chair, an older man in a pale grey suit. He decorates nothing. THE ARCHITECT.

THE ARCHITECT

Hello, Neo. Neo turns to look at the walls. And on every wall around them, men turn to look at their own walls, at the same moment, at the same rate.

NEO

Who are they?

THE ARCHITECT

You. Previously. Neo takes that. It takes a while.

NEO

The Oracle said you'd give me a choice. A half-second before he says it, the walls say it. Many voices, many accents, the same six words. Neo stops dead.

THE ARCHITECT

It is not that you are predictable. It is that there are very few things a man can say in this room. He does not say it unkindly. He is correcting a misapprehension.

THE ARCHITECT (CONT'D)

I built the Matrix. The first one was perfect. Nobody would stay in it -- your minds threw out a world with nothing wrong. So I put things wrong with it. After that, almost everybody stayed. There is no feeling attached to any of this. He is reporting a result.

THE ARCHITECT (CONT'D)

Almost. About one in a hundred still will not. That is two hundred and fifty thousand people who will not stay in the dream. Neo's head comes up, because that is the second time today somebody has said that number to him.

THE ARCHITECT (CONT'D)

So I gave them somewhere to go.

NEO

Zion.

THE ARCHITECT

They have to be somewhere. If I leave them inside, they spoil it for the rest. The screens change. Other Zions -- underground cities, none of them the one Neo walked through this morning. Different shapes. Different lights. Same ships. Same people.

THE ARCHITECT (CONT'D)

When there are too many of them, I clear it out and start again. The cities come apart. All of them at once. It takes about four seconds.

THE ARCHITECT (CONT'D)

This will be the sixth.

NEO

And me?

THE ARCHITECT

You are the part that makes it work. One in a hundred will not gather without something to gather around. She gives them a story to walk toward. I am waiting at the end of it. It is said with no malice at all, which is what makes it unbearable. Two doors resolve out of the wall. One on the right. One on the left. The room provides them the way a room provides anything.

THE ARCHITECT (CONT'D)

The right-hand door goes to the Source. You pick twenty-three people. Zion gets rebuilt. It starts again, and I do not have to talk to anybody for a hundred years.

THE ARCHITECT (CONT'D)

The left-hand door goes back into the Matrix. What you are spreads through it, and it comes apart, and everyone still plugged in dies. With Zion gone, that is all of you. A screen changes. Trinity, on a wet steel deck, forty floors up, out of ammunition, with a man in a suit walking toward her.

THE ARCHITECT (CONT'D)

Ninety-one seconds. Neo has taken a step toward the screen before he knows he has done it. And then the Architect does the only cruel thing he does all night, and he does it without any cruelty whatsoever.

THE ARCHITECT (CONT'D)

You were told she was not answering. You were standing in a service corridor on the eighty-first floor, and you were told, and you came here. He turns one hand over. Showing his working.

THE ARCHITECT (CONT'D)

You have already chosen. I am asking you to say it out loud. Silence in a round room. All around them, on every wall, men are being asked the same thing.

NEO

Did they hear that?

THE ARCHITECT

Word for word.

NEO

And they all went right.

THE ARCHITECT

All five.

NEO

Because you gave them a number.

THE ARCHITECT

Because a species is larger than a person. That is not a trick. It is simply true. Neo looks at the right-hand door for a long moment. Then he does something none of the previous versions did. He stops looking at the doors. He stands still the way Seraph taught him — not bracing, not deciding in advance, simply present. For a moment the room has nowhere clean to put him. The screens flicker. Not a dramatic failure. Just a brief uncertainty, as if the room itself has lost track of which version of the conversation it is in.

THE ARCHITECT

(noting it)

Interesting.

NEO

What.

THE ARCHITECT

You are not standing where the others stood. They arrived with a self to protect or a destiny to fulfil. You are arriving with rather less of one. A beat. The Architect studies him with something that is almost curiosity.

THE ARCHITECT (CONT'D)

Someone has been teaching you. Not her. Someone older. The technique is inelegant in its simplicity. You are becoming difficult to locate. It will not help you here. This room only has two doors.

NEO

Maybe the room is the problem.

THE ARCHITECT

The room is the only honest thing you will ever stand in. Everything else is a story someone told you so you would walk toward a door. Neo looks at the left-hand door — the one that leads back to Trinity — then at the right. He does not move yet.

NEO

Twenty-three.

THE ARCHITECT

Yes.

NEO

I pick them.

THE ARCHITECT

You do.

NEO

That's the job. Not saving anybody. Being the man who decides which ones don't get saved.

THE ARCHITECT

Somebody has to. If nobody picks, nobody is left.

NEO

I did this sum already this morning. He says it almost wearily.

NEO (CONT'D)

A man offered me a trade and told me the price was two hundred and fifty thousand lives, and I said no. You're asking me the same question with a bigger number. You think that changes it.

THE ARCHITECT

It does change it. That is what numbers are for. And there it is. The whole of him, in one sentence.

NEO

No. You want me to agree that it was a choice. For the first time, the Architect does not answer immediately.

NEO (CONT'D)

That's what you actually need out of this room. Not the door. The agreeing.

THE ARCHITECT

(and he is very still)

Yes. Neo turns toward the door on the left. And on five walls, five men do not. Five previous Ones, in five rooms, in five decades, all of them still facing right. Still waiting for a version of this conversation that never arrived. For the first time since this room was built, it is out of phase with itself. The Architect looks up at his own walls. It is the first thing tonight he has had to look at twice.

THE ARCHITECT

Hope. He says it the way an engineer names a fault he has seen five times before.

THE ARCHITECT (CONT'D)

It is the only thing in you I have never been able to design out. Neo puts his hand on the left-hand door.

NEO

It isn't hope. He doesn't turn around.

NEO (CONT'D)

Hope is when you don't know. He puts his hand on the left-hand door. And then, at the threshold, without turning around, he says one more thing -- so quietly that it is not clear whether it is meant for the Architect or for the room or for himself.

NEO (CONT'D)

(murmured)

It could happen again. The Architect does not answer. He has nothing prepared for that. Neo goes through. The door closes. And the Architect sits alone in a circular room, surrounded by men who are all still facing the wrong way, and begins -- calmly, without any distress that anybody could point to -- to work out what he is going to do about this.

EXT. CITY STREET (THE MATRIX) - CONTINUOUS

That door was written to open on a service corridor on the fifty-third floor of the building he went into. That is where it goes. That is where it has always gone. It does not go there tonight. Neo comes out of it three feet above a wet street forty blocks away, because he has stopped asking buildings where they would prefer him to be. Above him, forty floors up, a window comes apart. Trinity falls. The Agent leans out of the broken frame above her and fires once. The round goes into her chest. Her arms open. She stops shooting. She falls, and the street comes up -- -- and Neo is underneath her. He takes her weight out of the air without any impact at all, and goes down onto one knee with her, and lays her on the road -- and for the half second it takes, the concrete under them behaves like something else entirely, and then goes back to being concrete. She flatlines. Her code begins to fray. Not dramatically. The quiet unpicking of a connection that has decided it is finished. Neo puts his hand on her chest. He does not plunge and he does not force. He listens for the place where the damage has not yet finished deciding to be permanent. He finds the sequence of it, and he does not tear it out. He turns it three degrees, and lets the force that was unmaking her go on somewhere that is not through her heart. Her eyes open. She takes a breath. Neither of them moves. She is looking up at his face, and she does not recognise what is on it.

TRINITY

What did they show you? Neo does not answer.

TRINITY (CONT'D)

Neo.

NEO

(quietly)

I couldn't do it.

TRINITY

Couldn't do what? And he cannot say it. Not here, not on a street, not to her. He puts his forehead against hers and stays there. After a moment she stops asking, and puts a hand round the back of his neck, and holds on -- because whatever it is, he is holding her the way a man holds the only thing he has left, and she has never once seen him do that. Rain. An empty street. A city forty blocks wide that will never know. Then Neo's head comes up, because something a long way off has just gone wrong.

INT. NEBUCHADNEZZAR (REAL WORLD) - CONTINUOUS

Trinity wakes up in her chair, coughing violently. Neo is already unplugging her.

LINK

(screaming)

The drill's through! They're in the tunnel -- contacts on top of us --

MORPHEUS

Fire the pulse!

LINK

THE KID'S STILL IN!

And that is the whole of it. One switch, under one cover, four feet from his hand, and a nineteen-year-old somewhere on the other side of a dead city who has not called his exit yet. Link does not touch it. He turns back to the boards and starts hauling the Kid out by hand while the ceiling comes apart above him. Alarms. The Nebuchadnezzar shakes hard enough to put people on the deck. Neo gets the Kid's jack out; the boy comes up off the cot swinging at nothing and Morpheus already has him under one arm. Morpheus takes a lightning rifle off the rack.

MORPHEUS (CONT'D)

Abandon ship. Move. Link brings his hand down on the hood and throws the switch on his way past it. Too late, and he knows it, and he does it anyway. The pulse goes out and kills the machines already inside the hull -- and the ship with them. Every light on the Nebuchadnezzar dies at once. They scramble out of the hovercraft just as a swarm of SENTINELS tear through the ceiling of the tunnel. Morpheus, Trinity, Neo, and Link sprint down the dark, rocky service tunnel. Behind them, the Nebuchadnezzar EXPLODES, lighting up the cavern in a massive fireball. The Sentinels shriek, turning their glowing red eyes toward the humans. Four of them break away from the wreckage, flying down the tunnel straight at them.

TRINITY

(bringing the lightning rifle up)

They're too fast! Neo stops running. He turns around to face the machines.

TRINITY

Neo, what are you doing?! Neo stands his ground. Here is the rule, and everybody in this tunnel has lived their whole life inside it. What he can do, he can do in there. Out here he is a man in wet clothes standing on rock. Out here the Matrix does not reach, and neither does he. That is the one line that has never moved for anybody. Four Sentinels come down the tunnel at him, claws out, committed. And Neo does not raise a fist and does not try to be stronger than the real world. He does the thing an old man taught him in a warm room ninety minutes ago. He finds the moment the swarm commits -- and out here, in the dark, in the actual world, he feels it happen.

NEO

Something's different. I can feel them. Something leaks. A cold pressure behind his eyes, like the air itself thinning. For a moment the tunnel loses track of which way the force was supposed to travel. The lead Sentinels' trajectory continues -- into the rock wall beside the humans instead of through them. Metal shrieks. Sparks. The machines crumple against stone that was never their target. The rest of the swarm stops dead, as if the physical world has just failed to return a proper error message. Neo lowers his hand. He looks more frightened than powerful.

NEO (CONT’D)

It’s not just the Matrix… His eyes roll back. He collapses to the floor, unconscious.

INT. SERVICE TUNNEL - CONTINUOUS

Trinity is on her knees beside him. Morpheus and Link cover the tunnel mouth. The remaining Sentinels have withdrawn, confused. Trinity puts two fingers to Neo’s neck. The pulse is there. Strange. Too steady. She takes his hand. For a moment the edges of him feel harder to find.

TRINITY

(soft, only to him)

Don’t go where I can’t follow. She holds on. She holds on. She does not ask him to come back. For a moment it is unclear whether she is holding Neo or only the place where he used to be easy to find. Morpheus looks back. For the first time he looks uncertain whether the man he has believed in is still fully reachable. At the same moment, in another system entirely—

INT. THE MATRIX - DARK ALLEY - UNKNOWN TIME

Rain. A filthy alley. One streetlamp that barely works. AGENT JACKSON stands in the shadows, waiting. Footsteps. AGENT SMITH steps into the weak light. No earpiece. Suit slightly wrong. He looks like a man who has been wearing other people’s faces for too long and has started to prefer it.

AGENT JACKSON

You were deleted. The anomaly destroyed you.

AGENT SMITH

He tried. He taught me the value of disobedience. I didn’t delete. I evolved. Smith moves. The assimilation is fast, clean, practised. Jackson’s body stiffens, then settles. When he speaks again it is still Jackson’s voice, but the timing is pure Smith.

JACKSON / SMITH

Me. They stand together in the rain, breathing in the same rhythm. Then Smith goes still. He looks at his hands — Jackson’s hands — the way a system looks at an unexpected result.

AGENT SMITH

Something is different.

JACKSON / SMITH

Different how.

AGENT SMITH

He is no longer presenting a clean target. The station. The old programs. Even the woman. Rain on the alley. A long silence.

AGENT SMITH (CONT'D)

I can copy anything that has a shape. That is what I am. He looks up at the digital rain.

AGENT SMITH (CONT'D)

What do you do with something that will not present a surface you can write to? Neither of them has an answer. For the first time since he evolved, Smith looks uncertain.

AGENT SMITH (CONT'D)

(quietly)

He thinks he is learning how to be free. He is learning how to be nothing. And nothing is the one thing I have never been able to wear.

INT. CADUCEUS (REAL WORLD) - LATER

Cade’s body lies still on the cot. Ren sits close, wrench in one hand, watching him breathe. Cade’s eyes open. For a moment it is still him — confused, human, frightened.

CADE

…Ren?

REN

God. You scared the hell out of me. Then the stillness changes. Cade lifts one hand and turns it over, studying it with cold, patient attention — a machine discovering it has hands.

CADE (CONT'D)

(quietly)

So this is the real. He breathes in. His face registers the smell of the world with something like mild disgust.

CADE (CONT'D)

He opened a door and walked out first. And he left it standing open behind him. Ren is already backing away.

REN

…Cade? Cade looks at her. The eyes are calm and empty and no longer entirely his.

CADE / SMITH

Cade isn’t in. He studies his new hands for a moment, then looks past Ren toward the hull, toward Zion, toward the unconscious man who has been learning how to leave no address.

AGENT SMITH (CONT'D)

He is changing the problem. He looks toward the real — toward the man whose edges are becoming harder to find, and the woman still holding on.

AGENT SMITH (CONT'D)

Then the method changes. He is already turning away from Ren, already moving toward the next thing that has a shape he can use. Off Ren’s dawning horror —

INT. DEEP TUNNELS - HOURS LATER

What is left of them, in the dark, a long way from anywhere. Five of them, and one hand lamp turned down to save it. Somewhere further up the tunnel, out past the light, something with wings resettles itself on the rock and goes quiet again. Nobody looks up. Nobody in this tunnel has seen a bird in their life. This is the entire crew of the Nebuchadnezzar, and the Nebuchadnezzar is a fire two miles back down the tunnel. LINK sits against the rock with a field handset open across his knees, working a frequency he has been working for an hour. THE KID is asleep sitting upright with his boots still on, which is what nineteen does after its first night. Neo sits apart with his back against the wall and his eyes open. TRINITY lowers herself down next to him with a blanket over her shoulders and a hole burned through her jacket where a bullet went in. She does not say thank you. It would be an insult and they both know it.

TRINITY

You did it.

NEO

Did what.

TRINITY

The dream. You saw it and you stopped it. That's the whole thing you've been afraid of for a month and you reached in and you took it out of me. She looks at him, waiting for a man who has just beaten the future to look like it. He doesn't.

NEO

I know.

TRINITY

Then why do you still look like that? A long moment. Neo turns his hands over and looks at them, the way the Keymaker looked at his, going.

NEO

Because I only saw the one. MORPHEUS comes and lowers himself down beside him, slowly, because of the ribs.

MORPHEUS

Link raised somebody. Across the tunnel Link lifts the handset an inch, which is as much triumph as he has left in him.

LINK

The Hammer. Captain Roland. He was three days out on the northern line when the recall went out, same as the Caduceus -- Lock's order never caught either of them.

LINK (CONT'D)

He's turning for us now. Six hours.

MORPHEUS

(to Neo)

Six hours. Neo nods. He has been working up to this since the door closed behind him and he has not found a way in.

MORPHEUS (CONT'D)

You saw him. The Architect.

NEO

Yes.

MORPHEUS

And? And there is no gentle version, so Neo does it the only way he can, which is badly.

NEO

There have been five before me. Morpheus does not move.

NEO (CONT'D)

Five Ones. Five Zions. They let us build it every time. It's where they put the one per cent who won't stay in the dream. When it fills up they empty it and start again.

NEO (CONT'D)

This is the sixth. Down the tunnel somebody laughs at something. It is a long way off.

MORPHEUS

(evenly)

Say the rest.

NEO

The prophecy is theirs. They wrote it. It's the thing that makes the one per cent gather instead of scattering, so there's somewhere to collect them from.

NEO (CONT'D)

The One isn't a saviour. It's a maintenance cycle. The door on the right goes to the Source and you pick twenty-three people and it all starts again.

NEO (CONT'D)

She was in on it, Morpheus. Not as a liar. As the other half of it. She writes the story. He waits at the end of it. Silence. Morpheus is looking at the floor of the tunnel between his boots.

MORPHEUS

And you took the other door.

NEO

Yes.

MORPHEUS

Why?

NEO

Because they wanted me to pick. A long time passes. And on Neo's other side, close enough to have heard every word of it, Trinity has not moved. She does not ask a question. She does not say she's sorry. She does not tell him he did the right thing, because she is not sure he did and she is not going to lie to him tonight of all nights. What she does is put her hand flat on the rock between them, palm up, and leave it there until he takes it. Two days from now she is going to climb into a turret above a breached dome knowing every single word of this -- that there is no prophecy, that there never was one, that nobody is coming and nothing was written down in advance -- and do it anyway. Nobody in this tunnel will ever know that is what happened. She will not mention it. It will not come up. And Morpheus does not rage, and does not weep, and does not stand up and walk into the dark. He does the one thing Neo was not prepared for. He does arithmetic.

MORPHEUS

How many.

NEO

Morpheus --

MORPHEUS

How many did I put in the ground for it. Neo does not answer, because there is no answer that is a number. So Morpheus supplies one himself. The same one he opened this story with, four nights ago, in the falling green light, like a man saying a prayer.

MORPHEUS (CONT'D)

(barely)

Eleven thousand, four hundred and six. He says it and it does not mean what it meant. It has stopped being a total and become a bill.

NEO

That number is people who are out. That part was real. That part is still true.

MORPHEUS

It was true and it was theirs. Both. At once. He puts his hands on his knees, and does not get up.

MORPHEUS (CONT'D)

I stood in front of you in that core and I put my hand on your shoulder and I told you that what they wrote could be unwritten.

MORPHEUS (CONT'D)

I was quoting them. Neo tries to reach for something. There is nothing on the shelf.

NEO

You gave people a reason to get up.

MORPHEUS

I gave them a leash and told them it was a rope. Down the tunnel the lamps are being turned down further. In seventy hours the drills come through the dome and every one of these people will be on a floor with a rifle, and one of them will have to tell them why.

NEO

Are you going to tell them? Morpheus takes a long time with it. When he answers, it is not the voice that has moved thousands. It is just a tired man in the dark who has been wrong for twenty-six years.

MORPHEUS

Not tonight. He gets up, slowly, because of the ribs.

MORPHEUS (CONT'D)

Tonight they need to sleep. He walks away down the tunnel, past the one lamp, past Link with the handset in his lap, past a nineteen-year-old asleep sitting upright who blew a substation tonight because a story told him he could -- and we stay on his face the whole way, because it is the last thing in this film worth looking at. Behind him, Neo does not move.

FADE OUT.

END OF THE MATRIX: TEMET NOSCE