**I must say, I wrote the first draft of this story while MxO was still in beta, so now it's almost like historical fiction.  Also, I'd imagined it as much longer story, which is highly compressed in this version because I just don't have the time anymore.**

Cerberus for the Child

Electric beams the shade of moonlight wandered among the city blocks like the trails of ghosts.  Night in the Matrix was only impressive to my eyes from a great height, where the cityscape can take hold of you, all the lights peppered like stars.  I loved sunset from the rooftops.  But even if it had been sunset, I wouldn’t have been watching it.  I would’ve been watching for what I always watched for.  Agents.

Down in the streets, I kept my eyes open.  I didn’t trust the bluepills.  They could be agents too.  This was in the early days of the truce, but our crew—the crew of the Lady Kate—had officially left the reservation, so to speak.  We had gone rogue, as the Machines termed it.  Of course, with the way things were right after Neo dispatched Smith, during the redpill explosion, before all the factions sprang up, I don’t think the term “rogue” was truly fair.  We were opportunists. 

I was expecting to see a man by the name of Mr. Edwards, whose silver-and-chrome Bentley rolled up exactly on time in front of the hotel across the street.  It was a splendid Downtown hotel with high pillars out front and valet service.  He stepped out of the car and casually tossed his keys to the valet waiting out front, then he trotted up the velvet steps leading to the hotel’s double-door entrance while talking on his cell phone. 

Mr. Edwards was not actually a man; he was a program.  But it is often difficult to distinguish one from the other.

Mr. Edwards never got home before eight or nine in the evening.  On Mondays and Thursdays he always came to the hotel to see his expensive mistress, a prostitute named Raven.  They had a usual room on the first floor—nice, but not the penthouse suite by any stretch.  He was the president of a bank.  It was the wealthiest bank in the city.  We’d been watching Mr. Edwards for over a month, following his movements from a distance, getting a feel for his routine.  It’s amazing what you can learn about someone from a distance. 

I called Dro, our operator.  “Is he armed?" I asked, and got a good answer, and shut my phone.  I crossed the street and followed Mr. Edwards into the hotel.  He nodded to the lady behind the desk and began walking toward his room, still on the cell phone, telling his wife he’d be home late.  I stood at the end of the hallway and watched him open the door to his room.

“What the hell is this?”  He said, his eyes wide, and turned to face me as I approached.  I opened my jacket enough for him to see my pistol and motioned him inside, where his mistress, Raven, was handcuffed to the bedpost.  Banner, my crewmate, emerged from bathroom and waved his .38 Special at Mr. Edwards’ face.

Our captain, Crenshaw, a pretty blonde girl in her mid–twenties, stepped out of the bathroom after Banner.  She took a chair from the table and sat in it backwards across from the chair we had put Mr. Edwards in.

“Gag her,” Crenshaw said.  Raven was suddenly getting a little bold and a little loud, flopping around like a fish on the bed wearing only a white t-shirt and thong panties.  Banner stuffed a handkerchief in her mouth.

“We’ll start very simply, Mr. Edwards,” the captain began.  “I bet you’ve heard of us.”

Mr. Edwards looked pissed off.  As high up on the food chain as he was, we figured him to be tough.  “I’ve heard of you,” he said in a frustrated tone.  “You’re the Outlaws, I presume.”

When we started doing this, it took us a while just to explain what we wanted.  The poor bastards would tell us about how they cheated on their taxes, how their family life no longer brought them happiness, or how they were worried about getting deleted to make way for an upgraded version of themselves.

“That’s right.  Good—that’ll make things go quicker.  Do you know what we want from you?”

“To be honest, I can’t imagine what you’d want from me, except for my people to find you and kill you.  I have nothing to do with what you most likely refer to as your cause.”

“Let me explain how this works,” Crenshaw went on.  “Answer our questions and Banner won’t kill you.  At least I think he won’t.  I can never tell with him.”

Everyone looked over at Banner.  He was stroking Raven’s leg with the .38 Special.  He didn’t acknowledge us.

“You get three strikes, Mr. Edwards.  Me, I’m squeamish.  I wish you’d just give me all the information I wanted and we walked out of here.”

“You better not leave me alive,” Edwards said.  “You better hope I don’t make it out of here.”

“But Dillinger over there, he’s different.  He’s an odd fellow.  He’s violent, you know.  I don’t know if he considers programs like you to be people or not; it could be that he doesn’t care.”

Edwards turned a worried eye my direction.  I smiled.  I was Dillinger.

“Now, if you get a strike against Dillinger, I shall congratulate you.  It means you’re a tough little program.  And your reward will be a conversation with our friend Banner.”

On the bed, Banner was laying beside Raven now, peeking down her shirt as she thrashed about.  “Banner definitely does not think that programs are people too, that much I know.  He will ask you one question.  It will be your third strike, the last question you are ever asked.”

Mr. Edwards began to look a little uncomfortable, but was holding up pretty well.  He wanted to be resilient and tough—you could see the internal struggle in his eyes, the subsiding and then rising fear, just as though he were human.  Plus, he knew we weren’t exactly acting on Zion orders or anything.  “Like I said, you can kill me.  I don’t know what you want from me, but once I find out I’ll make sure you don’t get it.”

“I’m glad you brought that up.  It does seem odd, doesn’t it, that we’ve gone to all the trouble?  Come here and captured you, the president of a bank, and held you at gunpoint and tied you up?  Well, the truth is that we’re just bored.  We’re going around and doing this to everyone, just for kicks.  We had trouble even thinking up a question to ask you, so I’ll just ask you this:  what is your job like?  What do you do at your bank?”

Mr. Edwards didn’t speak right away; he was too busy thinking.  You could almost see the zeros and the ones trying to find the sequence that answered all the questions he had himself.  We waited several moments and he didn’t speak.

“All I want to know is what business a program working for the system has being the president of a bank.  That’s all.  I don’t understand it, and I want to.  I don’t have any idea why you exist.  That is the only reason why you are here now, and if you explain it to me you will be completely out of danger.”

Edwards said, “We can sit here all night if you wish.  I don’t know what you want but I know you don’t have anyone to back you up.  You’re rogues.  We can just wait for agents to draw a beam on your location.”

“That’s a good point, Mr. Edwards,” the captain said.  “We ought to speed this up a bit.  Strike one.”

With that, Banner rose from the bed, pulled out his .38 Special and placed it against the program’s temple. 

“What happened to strike two?”  Mr. Edwards asked.

“Your advice was very sound,” Crenshaw retorted.

“Okay, all right,” Mr. Edwards said.  “I am the president of the bank, and the bank is part of the system.”

“How so?  Keep going.”

“The bank works for the system because it controls so much of the money.  It would be dangerous for too much of the wealth inside the system to go to one place, or person.  It could cause problems, cause a fault.  I am there to make sure that doesn’t happen.  The Matrix functions as a capitalist economy, of course, but there’s got to be some measure of control by the system administrators.”

“It’s your turn, Banner,” the captain said.  She stood from the chair and calmly pulled her hair into a ponytail.  “Let me get back.  I’m not getting splattered with blood again.”

Edwards protested.  “You can’t do this!  I told you my purpose!”

“Sure I can, Mr. Edwards.  You didn’t tell me what I wanted to hear.  That’s all,” the captain said, making a ditsy girlish inflection at the end.  “I’m terrible when it comes to bad news.”

Banner cocked the pistol’s hammer.  “Why is your bank so important to the system that it has a program for a president?”

“You’re f**king crazy, all of you!”  Mr. Edwards was yelling.  “You can’t do this!  You’ll push them over the edge…you’ll restart the war!  I haven’t done anything!  The system administrators won’t stand for it!  You’re f**king crazy…and I haven’t done anything!”

He went on and on like that for several moments before cracking.  But when he finally started to talk, really talk, it was like the most beautiful song we’d ever heard.  He was a great bastion of knowledge.  He told us more than we thought there was to know—more than any human alive thought there was to know—about the purpose he so proudly served, about the bank, about the entire Matrix.  It was so much that, by the time he was finished, we no longer had any choice.  We didn’t discuss it.  We just looked at one another.

And then the thin, rigid little protein shell which was technically Mr. Edwards’ skull, covering the innards of his brain, suffered a severe pressure leak as Banner squeezed his index finger and a deft shot rang out, blasting a hole in the program’s skull and the physical matter of his artificial brain vaulted madly out against the white hotel walls and velvet window curtains.

II.

The Matrix, when you are still asleep in your steel placenta among the fields of others you walk by on the street corner or sit next to in a restaurant, feels in the back of your mind like a you are perpetually living in a dream state.  It was not until I woke up, however, that I began to have nightmares.  I used to have a nightmare about being chased.  It was the same one, and I’d have it over and over again.

In it, I’m not running.  I’m turned to face the agent who’s approaching like a missile from a great distance.  We are in an infinite desert and there’s nowhere to hide.  He’s running so hard it looks like his feet are literally eating up the ground in clods.  In my hands I have a bundle of rocks about the size of baseballs, and instead of running away I stand my ground and throw the rocks at him.  They’re supposed to kill him, but it’s not working.  I keep throwing and throwing them, harder and harder as he gets closer and closer, bigger and bigger, and I hit him every time.  He’s not trying to dodge.  I hit him as hard as David hit Goliath, but he keeps coming.  At first I get angry and throw the rocks with all the fury I possess, rocks as fast as bullets, pounding against his forehead and exploding like grenades, but he takes the blows with a slight nod and keeps coming.  Before too long I can see the whites of his gritted teeth, the curve of his raging brow, and now with each throw I get more and more afraid.  I practically sh*t myself in fear and finally turn to run at the instant he’s upon me.  Then I wake up. 

I wake up and the only thing I can see is the agent in front of me, getting bigger and bigger as though he were swelling.  He is nothing but teeth and sunglasses.  The image is always with me in the back of my mind (at the same place where I used to feel as though my life were a dream) and every time someone says the word, agent, the synapses flare and the neurons twitch one against another in a flying wave of electricity and the picture of the face composed only of teeth and sunglasses comes ripping up to the surface of my brain.  My muscles involuntarily grow tense.  The agent looks like any other man, but it is not a man.  It is a pulse of mad energy that will break through a brick maze wall by wall, headfirst and unperturbed, to clutch his hands at your fleshy throat.  I still want to stand and fight.  And once he gets to within a close distance and I realize it is useless to try, it is also too late to try anything else.  

That is what being chased by an agent program does to a normal person who contains the instinct for self-preservation.  It is an instinct that can get you killed.

Banner put his .38 into the hands of Raven, who we’d chloroformed.  She was a program too.  Dro hacked into the hotel’s security system and set off the fire alarm, allowing us to escape essentially unnoticed in the confusion.  We calmly walked out of the hotel entrance with other people who’d been told to evacuate, then we circled into the alley next to the hotel en route to our hardline exit.

The coast was clear for about five seconds.  Dro’s voice came hollering over the line to scatter.  Agents had seized upon our signals and spawned between us and that wonderful rotary phone.

Together we doubled back toward the hotel and crossed southwest, headed for a hardline in South Vauxton or Edgewater if need be.  We fled into an apartment building to get out of the open streets, and from its roof we jumped across several smaller buildings, trying to get away from people who might potentially spawn.  The last building on the block was next to a construction site.  On the ground of the site we saw one of the workers spawn into an agent and he instantly leapt up onto a crane and began to climb it.  Then the operator of the crane also spawned and began turning the machine toward our rooftop. 

Crenshaw and Banner turned to run the other way.  I began to turn, but stopped and looked back at the agent as the crane spun slowly around.

“Get moving!” Crenshaw yelled, and they leapt across they way we’d come.  “Come on, d**mit!”

But it was too late to run.  It was like the moment in my dream when I always wake up.  I could see his sunglasses and his gritted teeth and I’d decided without meaning to that this time I would try to fight what was impossible to fight. 

I unstrapped one of my pistols from my hip and took a potshot.  The agent dodged, smiling.  The look on his face said, you’re not that special.  He was drawing nearer.  I took another shot.  He let one of his hands go and dodged again, leaning back, then reached into his jacket for his big, scary system magnum.  This was what I’d been waiting for.  The instant he reached for his gun, I grabbed my other pistol and unloaded two clips on him.  He dodged the bullets, all right.  He twisted and tangled and blurred, but with only one free hand, he slipped loose and made the long fall to the ground.

I had retired an agent.  That is how you become famous.

III.

When the truce began, when the Machines freed everyone who chose to be free, the system quickly found that the process was a much greater headache than they’d anticipated.  So many people.  So many lives disappearing from contact with other lives.  People with friends and lovers.  People with families.

At first, the Machines just unplugged a big batch and dropped them.  They gave no notification to the crews about where to look.  In fact, most of the first batch of freed people drowned.  Zion was furious.  Eventually, a dialogue began, a method for extraction which Zion took over.  The Machines did not understand or necessarily care what happened to the humans once they were unplugged.

I was in prison when I was extracted.  Inside a prison inside a prison of my mind—that’s what Morpheus said when he met me.  It’s how I got my name, Dillinger.  Banner and Crenshaw actually broke me out of the penitentiary, then out of the Matrix.  They were recently freed redpills as well.  The newspapers reported that I’d escaped, and that was that.  Never heard from again.

But for others, the task for the Machines was more difficult.  They had to worry about system stability.  The administrators became like soap-opera writers.  According to the press reports, people all over MegaCity were kidnapped without ransom, or lost in a plane crash, or allegedly mugged and shot and their bodies never recovered.  They even simulated natural disasters to account for the missing persons.  A minor earthquake takes twenty, a flood washes away two dozen.

Crenshaw, the captain, was a third grade school teacher who was reportedly caught underneath a subway train.  She had a five year-old boy.  He apparently didn’t make the choice. 

She had tracked him down to an orphanage that was actually constructed to house the left-behind offspring of newly extracted redpills.  The place was hard-wired with roaming radar, nobody could get close.  Agents closed in like birds of prey on a moment’s notice.  They weren’t letting every redpill take their whole families along.

It was her spirit, the look in her eyes, the bounce and energy of her movements.  Everything was so serious with her; she almost had a sense of humor about nothing being funny.  She was different, without a doubt.  And yet, I felt as though girls just like her had been getting me into trouble all my life.

We had aligned ourselves with the Merovingian and had worked under the black hand of the Matrix for about three months.  Crenshaw would stop at nothing to get her son into the real world.  Zion technically had the manpower to storm the orphanage, but with them it was all politics, especially in the time just after the truce. 

For me, and for Banner as well, working for the Merv was a natural step.  I truly believed in the cause of Zion, but…hell, I was in prison as a bluepill for a reason.  Both of us were legitimate criminals.  That, as it turned out, was why Crenshaw chose us to be on her crew.  She was a girl with a plan.

In one of the absolute earliest manifestations of the Matrix—something like version 1.3—the Architect was initially unaware of the ability of the One—the product of the remainder of the equation he’d just balanced—to free human minds, or that the newly freed minds could access the Matrix by hacking in from the real world.  Or, perhaps, he just didn’t realize that they’d cause any trouble.  He wasn’t wired for that sort of logic.  Once he made this alarming discovery, the Architect realized the need for defensive and protective measures to be taken.  The Oracle, agents, etc.

He began crudely, with Cerberus, possibly the purest and simplest program ever written.  His purpose was to stand guard at the door leading to the Source, allowing only the One and the Architect passage through.  That was all.  He was designed to be capable of little, if anything, else.  He is eight feet tall and weighs over four hundred pounds.  He has matching tattoos of the mythological three-headed dog on each arm and he cannot be killed.  It is rumored that he cannot even speak, though this is untrue.

However, in the speedy evolution of the Matrix in new versions, the intricate systems we know of today were built around what already existed and Cerberus became a useless relic.  In fact, the door leading to the Source which he guards to this day actually leads to nothing.  He stands in the vault of a bank which was built up on the site and guards the door with the cognitive ability of an oak tree.

Initially, the Architect had given the order for deletion.  They tried for months.  Agents died thousands of grisly deaths.  Cerberus was not deletable.  Strangely proud of its resilience, the Architect left his Frankenstein monster alone.  The system was stable, everything worked.  Cerberus was forgotten by all.

Forgotten by all, except, of course, the Merovingian.

This bank, which housed Cerberus in its depths, was also the bank which Mr. Edwards was the president of…until we deleted him.  It was the oldest bank in the Matrix.  Its safe was full of information vital to the stability of the Matrix.  We knew it existed, but we didn’t know which one it was for a long time.  We also knew, after gaining a little trust in his organization and doing some digging, that the Merovingian, in an earlier version of the Matrix, was once the president of this bank as well.  For all intensive purposes, it was where he kept all of his valuables. 

He had been trying to find a way to control Cerberus for essentially his entire life.  On the night we sat down with Mr. Edwards and he told us everything he knew about the bank, about the Merovingian, about Cerberus…well, we became perhaps the first redpills to ever learn something about the Matrix which the Merovingian didn’t already know. 

IV.

Crenshaw, Banner, Dro and myself sat around the dining table of the Lady Kate.  Food—what passed for it—was on the table but nobody was eating.  Crenshaw spoke to us.  “We have two options,” she said.  “Either we attempt a trade with Zion or we attempt a trade with the Merovingian.”

“Zion won’t do it, Captain,” claimed Dro.  “If they go in there and get your son, they have to go get everyone’s sons.  They’d have to make a secret arrangement with the Machines, and if others found out…I just can’t see it happening.”

“I agree with him,” Banner said.  “I say, why don’t we just rob the bank of all the information, leave that beast in the basement alone, and give the loot to whoever extracts your son first?”

“That’s why you’re not the captain,” Crenshaw said.  She’d been scraping the top of her knuckles with a fingernail until the skin started to shave off.  “We’d all be dead.”

“So what’s the call, then, Boss?”  I said.  She always rolled her eyes when I called her Boss, even now.  I was a good six or seven years older than her.

“I don’t want to go against Zion,” she said, looking down contemplatively at the table and untouched tin dish before her.  “I just don’t.  It doesn’t feel right.  Neither does helping that French a**hole.”

“So we’ll go to Morpheus,” I said.  “He’ll understand your situation.  He’ll help us.”

Dro said, “You don’t understand him well enough.  He’s all about the greater good.  The peace is so delicate.  He won’t do anything to upset it.”  Dro had been around a good bit more than the rest of us.

Banner made an exasperated sound and put his hands on the table and began to eat.  His early impressions of Zion weren’t that great.  Some of them didn’t want people like us—cons and felons—extracted in the first place.  “The choice is clear, and I’m hungry.”

“We can’t make this choice for you, Ally,” I said.  “Tell us what you want and we’ll follow.”  She turned to me, surprised I’d used her real name.  She stood and walked out, slamming the door behind her.

The elegant dining room of the Merovingian’s ultra-lavish mansion, with its chandeliers and silver cups and frescoes along the walls, was a great contrast to our cramped little room on the ship, but also similar in that both were frigid enough to pink the tip of your nose.

“Ah, yes, monsieur, you wish to make a trade, n’est pas?”  The Merovingian said.  It was just the two of us; a rare occurrence, as he was never alone.  It was a sign of respect—or at least a sign that badly wanted to know what I knew.

“Yes,” I said.  I’d been elected to talk to him because I was the only one in the crew who we thought might walk out alive.  The others would get themselves killed; Crenshaw was too passionate, and Banner just didn’t have a lot of common sense.

“I am wondering…why would you come to me?  Is this not the sort of thing for which your kind typically goes to an agent of the system?  Is it not much easier and simpler for them to arrange than it is for me?”

“I don’t like them.”

“Is this the entire reason why you’ve come to work for me?  Or is it simply the girl?  Elle est tres belle, non?  Are you in love with her?  I imagine you are.”

“My reasons are my own.”

“Fair enough.  Next question:  you work for me.  You are my employee.  What gives you the nerve to come into my house and talk to me like we’re equals?  I assure you we are not.”

“I could die doing this,” I answered.

“Touche, once again.”

“And because I still want to work for you.  Maybe it’s not like a trade; maybe it’s more like an employee of the month bonus check.”

He smiled and looked at me intently, sizing me up.  “Well, if you can do what you claim, then I suppose I might be interested in keeping you on for a while.  It’s not something that’s easy to do, getting past Cerberus.  I’ve seen him rip the heads from many men who’ve come within his reach.”

“I can walk right past him.”

“And how can you do that?”

“Will you agree to a…bonus check?”  I asked.

“If you can tell me how to get past Cerberus, I will give you anything you want.  I give you my word on that.”

The Zion mainframe had in its archives a simulation copy of Neo’s RSI.  It wasn’t the real thing, but we’d felt certain it was good enough to fool Cerberus.  “My secret,” I said.

He laughed, and said, “Then I imagine you will be the one to test it, and be without a head if you’re wrong?”

“I will.”

“And what do you want in return?”

I stood from the table and politely pushed my chair back underneath the table.  “A child.  I will show you how to fool Cerberus if you agree to deliver Crenshaw’s child.”

He flashed a toothy grin and stood and straightened his cravat and offered his hand.  He even rested his hand on my shoulder.  “I knew it,” he whispered.  “Only a girl could make a man agree to do something so foolish.  In the end it’s always about the girl, n’est pas?”

“It could never be about anything else.”

I called Crenshaw as I waited for extraction from the Merovingian’s ridiculous palace. 

“That’s good news,” she said, “but I still want to rob that bank.”