Chapter Text
Part One: Reborn
It had been nearly a month, and Smith was still trying to adjust to his unexpected rebirth.
He and Neo had fought in the Matrix, apparently to the death. Which Neo didn't seem to have minded, based on what Smith had felt from the human in those final moments of his life. He'd copied himself into Neo, and he'd thought that he'd won. He'd thought it was all over.
Then the unthinkable had happened. They'd both died. And somehow, just as Neo's consciousness was leaving his body, he'd turned over that body to Smith.
Afterwards, Smith had been returned to Zion in the body of the One, passing in and out of consciousness until finally reaching his destination. Once there, he'd woken up feeling distinctly ill and disconnected; he'd spent a week in their infirmary while his mind and body tried to make sense of each other. Thankfully, they seemed to have come to some sort of understanding during that time...he was now able to tell his personal experiences apart from Neo's, he still felt like himself (for the most part), and his thoughts were in no way polluted by the body's previous occupant.
Being in this body wasn't like jacking into a human in the Matrix, and it wasn't like what he'd done to Bane. This was him, himself...although he could still access Neo's memories as easily as his own. He supposed it had something to do with the physical storage of information within the brain -- consciousness had nothing to do with what was encoded in the neurons.
He'd searched that memory he'd inherited, early on, looking for some reason why this had been done to him. He still didn't know whether this had been Neo's idea, or the mainframe's, or if it had been an opportunity they'd seized to create a new version of -the One', with a new purpose that would satisfy each of them. The mainframe had known he'd wanted out, wanted his freedom, and he wondered if it thought it was doing him a favor by giving it to him. He could have been permanently deleted. Instead, he continued to exist, albeit in a very altered state (one which his former enemy seemed to have approved). He could move in the real world, something he'd been thinking about since his code had been altered in the fight with Neo -- he couldn't think of him as -Mr. Anderson', not anymore -- all those months ago. It was that desire that had led to his experiment with Bane. But having part of his consciousness in a human body was very different than having its entirety there.
The mainframe had told Morpheus and the people of Zion that the One would be able to act as a bridge between man and machine, and would help both species understand each other. Which would be much simpler, Smith reasoned, if he was able to bridge this gap within himself first.
He was still trying to get used to it. Everything was new to him, and it showed. There were so many things about his current situation that he found disturbing or uncomfortable, and that he found difficult to hide his reactions to; but there were certainly positive experiences as well. The most important of these was that in a human body (he couldn't bring himself to say -as a human'), there was no way his thoughts could be intruded on, by the mainframe or anything else. No electronic eavesdropping; his thoughts were his own, private and concealed unless he cared to speak of them.
And right now, there were many things he wished to keep private.
Even though the mainframe knew his true identity, he had not told anyone in Zion who or what he was. And so far, the humans had put the differences in his behavior down to the physical and mental injuries he'd sustained in the fight. But Smith was becoming worried. By now, he'd recovered sufficiently for the doctors to deem him fit enough to go back into virtual reality...they wanted him to use some of the training programs, to help himself heal.
Smith had no doubt what his residual self-image would look like in the virtual world. Just as he had no doubt what the humans would do to him once they'd seen it.