(Posted on behalf of a friend)
[Frozen]
Like so many other redpills, I sometimes go into the old mission archives. Completed operations, recorded and played back for the benefit of newer operatives, to show them how we got to where we are today. My redpill colleagues think I do it for the $information, or for the potential boost to my neurokinetic level, so I just smile at them amiably and nod. But I know they’re wrong.
I always go back to the same mission. I can’t help myself. Like each time before, I silently buy the same ticket and activate it, and then mindlessly rush through until I reach the point I care about, the only part that matters to me.
My heartrate increasing slightly, I enter the Machine building. Sometimes I want to run inside, sometimes I want to delay it as long as possible. But it doesn’t matter, because each and every time I still go in. No matter what I happen to be feeling that particular day, I always go in.
Each time, I enter this segment of the recording of the past, ignoring the prime movers. They’re not who I’m here to see. Instead, I search out the background players. And when I find the one I’m looking for, I stop and I stare into my own face. It is always unsettling.
I look up into my own eyes, and I remember that my eyes were blue, even though I cannot see them clearly behind the dark glasses. Sometimes I want to freeze the program, and see myself as I used to be, just for a little while. Sometimes I want to scream at him to run, to not let himself/myself take part in this, this perversion, but I know it would be no use. It’s just a recording. He/I am a just a recording, a projected image with very limited responses, and what’s done is done. But there are also many times when I enter this archive with a broad smile on my face, and I tell him/me “yes, you must agree to this, because you will gain so much more than you will ever lose, more than you ever would have thought possible.” My previous self just looks at me curiously when I do that, because he doesn’t understand, which usually makes me smile again. I really have changed. But in the end it doesn’t matter, because he’s/I’m just a recording, after all.
In the archived mission, I look into what was once my own face. My face, for countless years of hunting down redpills, of protecting the simulation and our civilization that depended on it. But now I can smile at my own bland, impassive expression, as my new self tries to challenge his old ways of thinking. Because I know what’s going to happen to him.
There are times when I’d like to shake him, or slap him, or kiss him…to do something, anything, to wipe that non-expression off his face. To shock him. To hint at the horrors and wonders of what he’ll come to know, and what he’ll become. But because I know this is simply a recording, I’m satisfied with his quizzical look of not-understanding, because I know he’s not prepared to accept these changes. Not yet. Not now.
Maybe not ever.
Not that knowing the future would have mattered, in the long run. Refusing an order would have resulted in a swift return to the Source. What was done is done, and it cannot be undone…assuming, of course, that Seraph never regains his cheat-code enhanced abilities and rips me out of what is now mine. And it is very much mine, just as much as the body I’m looking at used to be mine. And I will fight for it to remain mine.
He’s still staring at me with that same puzzled expression. And as I look from what I was once to what I am now – a living, breathing human being – I wonder again why I keep coming here.
“Operator,” I say softly, my eyes never leaving his face. “Freeze program.”
