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"Have you ever had a dream that you were sure was real?" asked the man, gazing at her steadily with intense, unblinking eyes. His tone was soft, almost mesmerizing. "What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the *real* world?"
The girl looked away uncomfortably, swirling the ice in her nearly-empty glass. "You're crazy," she muttered, half to herself.
"I assure you that I'm perfectly sane."
"Sane?" she repeated, dropping the glass onto the coaster and pushing it away. "I've listened to you for the past half hour, and none of what you said makes sense." She was more irritated than worried, but still, she was glad they were in a busy, brightly-lit café rather than somewhere off campus. "You're telling me that *everything* I'm seeing is an illusion. That none of this is real. Y'know, my name's Alexa, not Alice, and you're not going to convince me I'm in Wonderland," she scoffed. "How do you weirdoes always manage to find me?" She shook her head in disgust and reached for her cell phone. "Now, you don't strike me as a typical college guy, and you sure don't look like a professor -- so I would highly recommend that you get the hell out of here, before I have campus security arrest you for harassment, stalking, and six other things I won't bother to list. Or I could just have my boyfriend come down here and beat the crap out of you right now."
He didn't appear disturbed by the threat. He didn't even bother to acknowledge it. "It started when you were eight, didn't it," he said. It wasn't a question.
Her fingertip paused just above the call button. "What started?"
"Seeing things no-one else could see," he replied offhandedly. "Seeing things *differently* than other people see them, or how you used to see them. It all started after the accident."
She was suspicious, but she was listening. "What are you talking about?"
"You cried when you woke up, and saw what that car had done to your bicycle," he said, almost sympathetically. "It didn't occur to you to worry for yourself. But you were surprised...surprised that you'd been hurt. Strange, for a child of that age."
"I couldn't remember actually being hit," she said, thinking back to that day he was describing. How the hell had he known about the accident, or how upset she was over her bike? "It was all a blur. I woke up on the sidewalk with paramedics leaning over me, telling me not to worry and that I was going to be fine."
"And you were," he replied. "But by all rights, you should have died...and in a way, you did."
Her mouth dropped open at the bluntness of his words. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
"It means that you're not like most people." He continued to favor her with that same steady, unyielding stare. "Haven't you ever noticed?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"It's the middle of winter," he pointed out. "You came here in a jacket most people would wear in autumn. Aren't you cold?"
"No, and so what if I'm not? I've always had a high metabolism; it runs in my family. With all the background information on me you've somehow gathered, you should know that," she shot back, folding her arms in front of her.
"But you have other traits that don't run in your family," he countered. "Your excellent vision, for example. Your curiosity. Your desire to *experience*. And, to put it politely, your above-average intelligence." He leaned forward slightly. "You don't understand other people sometimes...how they can be so ignorant, so unseeing," he said. That hint of sympathy -- no, empathy -- had returned to his voice. "How they can waste their time with things that don't matter. How they can be so entranced by meaningless frivolities when there is so much in the world that is truly important."
She exhaled sharply. "I guess watching people eat live cockroaches on Reality TV just isn't my style."
"You're skeptical. You don't believe everything you see, or hear. As I said, you're not like most people."
"What is it that you're trying to say?" she asked in exasperation.
"Haven't you ever had the feeling that there was something fundamentally *wrong* with the world?" he asked. "Or that, here and now, there was something wrong with *you*?"
She didn't say anything for a few seconds. "I don't understand," she finally said. "Are you saying there's really something wrong with me?"
"No. But there are people out there, very bad people, who are afraid of what you can do. Of what you are," he said solemnly. "They've been watching you since the accident...or should I say, the first accident. The only one that was real." He clasped his hands in front of him on the table. "These people are trying to kill you. They've been trying to kill you for quite some time."
"*What*?"
"Car crashes. A school bus crash. An elevator that mysteriously dropped three flights, with no evidence of mechanical failure afterwards," he said. "And do I even need to list the -minor' incidents that seem to have been following you for years? The average person might experience one, maybe two such events in their entire lifetime. You've had more than a dozen. All these were attempts to eliminate you."
She couldn't believe what she was hearing. "But some of those things happened when I was a kid -- you can't possibly think..."
"Whenever the circumstances favor their agenda, these people strike, and in such a way that nothing can be proven or traced back to them," he said. "I know it sounds far-fetched, but it's the truth. Your life, such as it is, is in imminent danger."
She looked up at him in dismay. "But why in the world would anyone want to kill *me*?"
"They wish to eliminate you before you discover your true nature."
"*What* true nature? I'm a nineteen-year-old physics major from Ohio!"
"You can see the code," he said simply.
She stared at him. During this bizarre conversion she'd gone from annoyed, to confused, to totally creeped out. She hadn't thought it was possible for her to feel any more uneasy than she already did, but this last statement managed to amplify the feeling to a level way beyond her experience. "Code?" she repeated.
"Those little flickers of dark and light, superimposed over everything and *within* everything, that other people don't see. Flashes in constant motion; a moving, swirling mosaic." A half-smile formed on his lips. "What the doctors labeled as a vision problem secondary to iron deficiency anemia. They gave you medicine, but you never stopped seeing the code. You just stopped talking about it."
She nodded slowly, grateful that they were at the back of the café and no-one was nearby who could hear them. "I learned to ignore it," she said.
"It's just a different way of seeing. It's nothing to be afraid of."
"It is if people want to kill me because of it!" she exclaimed.
"The first accident was what it looked like -- an accident. They started targeting you afterwards, because everything was different after that. *You* were different after that." His eyes were focused on hers again, and she had to look away. "What did you start feeling?"
She frowned. "I remember that I used to have a sense of...sadness, I guess I'd call it. Loss. A sense of emptiness, behind everything I was seeing." She looked back at him and quirked an eyebrow up. "And I felt that if I could just take a half-step in the right direction, I'd be able to see everything clearly, for what it really was."
"Do you want to take that step?" he asked softly. "Do you want to see what you've been sensing, what's been at the edge of your awareness for all this time, but that you've never been able to name?"
She bit her lip before speaking again. "Yes," she whispered. "Yes, I do."
He smiled. "Then let me show you..."
She watched as he pulled a case out of his pocket. In it were two pills, a red and a blue.
"Take this one, and you stay in Wonderland," he said, indicating the blue pill. "Take the other, and you'll be able to chase the rabbits down the rabbit hole. See the world for what it really is, and help keep it safe from people like the ones who've been trying to hurt you, and who'll go on hurting a lot of other people, innocent people, just to further their agenda." He held out the case to her. "The red one will also take away all those little aches and pains you've acquired over the years -- heal you, for lack of a better word. You see, you never really broke your arm, or tore the ligaments in your knee, or had three of your ribs fractured in any -accidents'. That was all in the dream world. Just like those herniated disks in your lower back, that make it ache by the end of each day."
She studied the contents of the case for a few moments...and then took the red pill.
She swallowed it and coughed, feeling a bit queasy even after chasing it with what was left of her iced tea. She blinked a few times, and when she looked down, she was shocked to see what looked like black and mirrored-silver goo sliding over her feet and legs, climbing steadily upwards. She gasped.
"Just relax," he said soothingly. "It will all be over in a minute."
She squirmed, trying to stay still while the goo continued ascending, but when it reached her neck and the base of her jaw she thrashed violently, trying to cry out. It spilled into her mouth before any sound was emitted, and then it covered her completely, obliterating her features beneath it.
A few moments later, it vanished. And where the girl had been there was now something very different.
The man inclined his head slightly. "It's good to see you again, Agent Clark."
She straightened her suit, the same color as his, and adjusted her sunglasses more to her liking. "It's been far too long, Agent Smith," she agreed. She looked down at herself again. "The experiment was successful?"
"It was. It has great potential to offer insight into human behavior and motivations," he replied. "The only difficulty may be in locating humans close enough to accidental death for replacement by agents." He arched an eyebrow. "Although, as we both know, -accidents' aren't always accidental."
She nodded. "I'll assume I have nothing more to fear from the unplugged humans' assassination attempts, then," she said wryly.
"Of course not...you've been restored to your full abilities. Even during the experiment it was difficult to contain all of them -- which is why the rebels were able to locate you."
"What would have happened if I'd taken the blue pill?" she asked. She was, after all, highly curious, which had led her to volunteer for the experiment eleven years before.
"Had you taken the blue pill, we would not be having this conversation. It contained the codes for your deletion." He looked down into her blue eyes, which were now hidden by sunglasses. "We can't have rogue agents, or humans with agent abilities, running free in the Matrix. Such a creature would be far too dangerous to be permitted to exist."
She considered his words. "How eminently logical."
"Then come along," he said, standing up and tapping a command into his earpiece. "We will return to headquarters for your debriefing and full report. I'm sure it will make for a very interesting discussion with the rest of the system operatives."
Agent Clark nodded again and got up from the table, sparing one last look at the leftovers from her human life, before following the other agent out the door.