All Matrix characters except Krys and this particular incarnation of Hoppity (the RL Hoppity, of course, is her own creation) are the creations of the Wachowski Brothers and belong to them, Village Roadshow and Warner Brothers. All Buffy characters are the property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy and Warner Brothers.
Part Two
The group talked long into the night. While there was fundamental agreement on goals, there were some immediate obstacles Buffy raised, the foremost being the Sunnydale Simulation itself.
"I can't get out. Believe me, I've tried. But the lockdown they put on this place is extreme. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out. The enemy here is the only thing I know of that we're almost afraid of. Or rather, it was until you came along," she added, giving Neo a telling look. "I'm sure they fear you." Neo blushed.
Morpheus distracted her. "Earlier, you said virus. What did you mean?"
Buffy turned to him. "That's what it is, a computer virus. An extremely elaborate one, but fundamentally no different from Robert Morris' worm, or Chernobyl. Zi'On got it in here somehow, and it had infected thousands of nodes before we could stop it. From Zi'On's point of view though, it was a failure. Sure, power flow was less efficient and reliable, but it didn't stop. As long as the virus stays shut up in here, it can't hurt the machines, but if it's unleashed on the whole matrix..."
"Virtual Armageddon," Morpheus finished.
Buffy nodded. "Millions would die. Yes, the machines would be seriously affected, but they'll recover eventually. The biological loss however would be catastrophic."
"So, it sounds like what you're saying is in order to unlock the door and get you out, we have to eliminate this virus." Hoppity had been quiet most of the night, but Willow could see the wheels turning at the prospect of the coding challenge this would represent.
Again, Buffy nodded. "Yes, but if it were that simple, I've have gotten out of here years ago. I'm code myself. If I get too close to the virus, I run the risk of contamination."
"What about a two-fronted attack--one from in here and another from outside?"
Buffy considered. "It would have to be extremely closely coordinated. The First is highly adaptable. It can react to defend itself immediately upon sensing a threat. The best I've been able to do is stalemate."
"We have a few tricks of our own," Morpheus said, glancing at Neo.
Willow, who'd been even quieter than Hoppity, finally spoke up. "Will someone please explain what's so special about Neo? Tank called him The One. What does that mean?"
Neo cleared his throat. "I'm like Buffy, only biological. I can do things no one else can."
"Like what?" Willow challenged.
Neo looked around the room, then pointed to a lamp on a side table. "Watch."
Willow looked at the lamp. Which was suddenly not there. And then, just as suddenly, it was back, but with a different shade, which, as she watched slowly morphed back to the original. She turned back to him, eyes wide. It was Morpheus who explained.
"Basically, everything you see around you is code; endless streams of 1s and 0s. Neo can rewrite the code with his mind; change it to suit his needs.
Willow looked at Neo. "And this is different from my witchcraft?"
Neo nodded, then paused. "Well, yes and no. It's mostly a matter of scale. A lot of what you do is the same basic thing. When you float a pencil, you're changing the code that tells the pencil gravity should be acting on it. But to actually delete the lines that create the pencil is something else entirely."
Hoppity jumped in. "In our part of the matrix, Neo's a legend. The ultimate hacker. As a matter of fact, I always thought he *was* a legend. When Morpheus brought me out, and I met Neo for real, I thought he was just using the name. Borrowed glory. Then I saw him dodge bullets."
Willow said nothing and basically retreated from the conversation at that. Heretofore she had been fairly unimpressed with Neo. He was a competent hacker, and damn fine to look at, but he always had this slightly confused expression on his face, like he was trying to keep up with everything going on around him and not having much luck. Trinity was the real brains of the pair. The idea that Neo had some kind of almost god like power was a bit more than she could take. It took her a while to catch back up with the conversation, and when she did, she discovered Buffy was talking about her least favourite person.
"Faith is me. I am Faith."
"Yeah, except you're not deranged!" Willow interrupted.
Buffy sighed. "It's all my fault. This host died, so I did what I'm programmed to do; I replicated to a new host. But then her friends brought her back to life, and since this is by far the best host I've had in decades, I decided to keep using it instead of the new one. The replication hadn't finished anyway, so I thought it would delete itself, but it didn't. It's highly unstable, but it is viable. And now it's found an emotionally disturbed host and has been completely corrupted by exposure to Agent Wilkins. But, she's still me, with all my skills and strength."
"Can we disable her from the outside?" Morpheus asked.
"What do you mean?"
"Well, if you gave us the source code, we could find a way to shut her down."
Buffy grimaced. "Forgive me if I'm not all rah-rah for that plan. If you can shut her down, you can shut me down. I do have some self-preservation instinct. I created the problem; I'll fix it."
"Fair enough," Morpheus smiled. "You'll deal with Faith. How about this Agent Wilkins?"
"I can take care of him," Neo said, "assuming he's no different from the rest of the standard matrix agents."
Buffy shook her head. "Not really, he's just warped and unpredictable. However, we need to stop tangoing around the real problem, which is the virus. Until that's dealt with, taking out Faith and Wilkins won't be all that productive."
"I may have an idea there," Hoppity said thoughtfully. "If Zi'On wrote it originally¼"
"¼then Zi'On probably has the code for it. Excellent, Hoppity," Morpheus said. "Okay, let's start planning."
* * *
Her mom was easy. Once she stopped by the house and assured her she was fine, just working on a project that required her to go out of town periodically, Sheila went right back into her normal parenting mode. "That's nice dear. Just do be careful around some of those LA people. You know, the incidence of psychotic behaviour is way up among while males ages 18-34 since the riots there."
Giles was a little harder. "What do you mean, defeat the Mayor? You know very well he's impervious to harm until this Ascension business coming up. "
"Yes, Giles, but I have some new information. Just, trust me. Buffy and I have already talked, and she'll fill you in."
And then there was Xander and Oz. It was close which was more painful.
"I just don't understand how you could disappear like that without telling anyone. Willow, we've been friends since we were eating sand together at the playground, and not even a phone call."
Willow hung her head and avoided eye contact with the man who'd been part of her life for so long. "I know Xander, and I've said I'm sorry. I had my reasons. And I still do. Please. I'm doing something very important here, and I need your help. I'm your friend and I trust you. Now, I need you to trust me."
Xander studied her carefully. "Okay, but you got some 'splaining to do, Lucy." His terrible Ricky Ricardo impression helped break the tension, and the two old friends laughed and turned the talk to trivialities.
Oz wasn't quite so easily dissuaded, because unlike Xander, he had some other information. "You don't smell right."
"What do you mean? I bathed quite recently, thank you very much." Her attempt at distracting him with a joke didn't work.
"You smell like you're far away. Like you're not really here."
Willow pondered how to get around this. She hadn't counted on his lycanthropic senses being so keenly tuned as to be able to tell she wasn't wetwired into the system anymore. After considering and discarding a few approaches, she decided to be blunt. "You're right. I am someplace other than you think I am. But the part of me that's important is right here, right now, in front of you."
"Willow, that makes no sense whatsoever."
"It does if you know what I know."
"So tell me what you know."
Willow sighed. "I'm sorry Oz, I just can't. Not yet. There are some things¼ Well, let's just say that if what we have planned goes right, the whole world is going to change. Then I can tell you."
"And if it goes wrong?"
"It won't matter." Because you'll all be dead, she mentally finished up. "I'm asking for your faith. Can you give that to me? Please?"
Oz nodded, but she could see the doubt in his eyes.
* * *
*dark rushing falling into a wall of noise and static and*
"Uh!" a gasp of air, a moment of confusion. She blinked and recovered herself from the matrix. She felt Krys leaning over her, then an unpleasant ripping sensation as the probe was withdrawn. Krys helped her out of the chair. Her knees buckled, but she caught her just in time.
"Careful! You were in there a little long, we were starting to get worried. Everyone else has been back for a while."
Willow tried to shake off the feel of the matrix, regain her sense of balance, and bring herself back to the real world. "I needed to talk to a few people."
"Well, everyone else is waiting for you. We can't get into the Zi'On mainframe when we're jacked in, because of the security risks. Hoppity will be glad to know you're back. Oh, and Morpheus wanted to talk to you. He's on the flight deck."
Still a little wobbly, Willow went off, finding Morpheus hunched over a console, studying something Willow couldn't quite see. "Ah Willow, good to have you back. I trust everything was okay with your friends and family." Willow nodded, glumly. "What's the matter? You seem a little down."
Willow sighed. "It was kind of hard to see them, knowing the truth, and not say anything. Oz actually lives in a puddle full of slime, not in that nice old Victorian on Oak, and he's a werewolf because of some 200 year old computer virus. It does have an effect¼"
Morpheus nodded solemnly. "It does. But if this all goes well, we can wake him up from the puddle and he'll know the truth. Neo tells me good things about that young man. I'm sure he'd be an asset for the cause."
Willow laughed in spite of herself. "Oz is brilliant, don't get me wrong, but unless you can dance to it, he doesn't want to be part of your revolution. He's not exactly the militant type."
"Ah well. Maybe later we can discuss this some more. In the meantime, we have two corrupt agents and a virus to overcome. And you are going to be crucial in this."
"What can I do?"
"For starters, you can survive." At Willow's perplexed face, he turned the console toward her. "I've been going over the medical readings from our time in the Sunnydale Simulation. Hoppity and I were in the danger zone. Trinity wasn't doing very well. Even Neo showed an elevated pressure and some odd brain patterns. But you? Just fine. Not a single blip. From now until we actually mount the confrontation, you'll be the only one going in. I've already told the others. You'll be the liaison and coordinate with Buffy and anyone else you get involved."
Willow opened her mouth, then closed it again, and blinked rapidly. "By myself?"
"You're the only one who can do this. As a native Sunnydalian, you're the only one of us who can spend an extended amount of time in the Sunnydale Simulation without suffering any ill effects. And you know the terrain. You're the one."
Willow blushed. "Okay."
That aside, the two got down to brass tacks.
The next few weeks were a frenetic hodgepodge of activity. After an intense search, Zi'On found some of the programmer's notes and the source code for the virus, much to Hoppity's glee. She kept going on about how ingenious it was; something about interleaving bubbles. It was also extremely dangerous. Zi'On had it stored across three independent systems, to keep the subroutines from contacting each other. Hoppity worked on it at a standalone station Krys jury-rigged, but she still had to be extremely careful. Neo and Trinity did an exhaustive inventory of everything, friend and foe, in the Sunnydale Simulation, and what effect they might have. Morpheus maintained his benevolent control over the whole thing, as usual. And Willow was in and out of Sunnydale at least two times a day. It was getting to be disorienting. One minute she'd be on a rusting ship full of people whose grandparents had been born after humanity lost the sun, and the next she'd be in Sunnydale, where the darker truth was hidden by the splendid weather and beauty of Southern California.
The evening before the attack, Willow went in one last time. Morpheus had been about to question her timing, but the look on her face made him think otherwise. She strolled through the streets of her town, watching the sun start to set, thinking thoughts of gilded prisons. Her feet carried her automatically to where she wanted to go. From outside, she could hear the band warming up. The first few people were just starting to arrive, laughing and looking forward to an evening with friends. Just another night at the Bronze. She went in.
As planned, Buffy was there, in the back. Willow wove her way through the pool tables, taking a seat on the sofa next to her friend.
"I told the others to be here in about half an hour. Gives us a chance to talk," the blonde said.
"Great." Willow said, and then the two reviewed every step of the plan. Krys had gussied up the engines to keep them one step ahead of the Sentinels. Tank and Morpheus had gone over the programming with a fine tooth comb, making sure everything was up to par. Hoppity had built a virus attack program that would disable its defenses and hopefully keep it busy long enough to distract it from Neo, Trinity, and Willow, who were the only three going in. They would take out Agent Wilkins and Faith, and confirm the destruction of the virus. Tank had littered the entire simulation with exit points, in case Trinity got into medical trouble.
After the finished, Willow was silent for a moment. "I've been thinking, you know, about¼ after. What are we going to do when the Sunnydale Simulation is opened."
"Me too. I figure you'll wake up Oz and Xander. Cordelia will probably want to stay here. She's not going to be too hip on living in a world where you can't get a tan."
Willow laughed. It felt good to laugh. It had been so long¼ "That's true. I really want Giles, but Morpheus says he's too old."
"This is true."
"And, of course, you."
Buffy stared at Willow. "Willow, you can't wake me. I don't exist out there, remember?"
"But there is a Buffy. We could wake her up."
"Yes, I am currently living as part of a host named Buffy. But if you were to wake Buffy, you wouldn't get me. I'm the combination of Buffy and the Chosen One agent program. It's only together that I am the person you know. If you were to take my host off the matrix, I'd just have to find another one."
"I just can't bear the thought of you, in one of those pods. You're my friend."
Buffy took Willow's hand. "I understand. And if it means so much to you, I'll give up this host and find a new one so you can wake me up. It's just that I'm just very attached to Buffy. She's by far the strongest host I've had in years. I've been more effective in the last 3 years than I was for the entire 50 years preceding them. I can genuinely do you more good, after Sunnydale is opened up, if you let me keep her. I know it's cruel to talk about another human being like she's a toy, or a suit you take one and off, but I'm an agent. This is how I live."
Willow was silent at that, and Buffy didn't continue. So it was that Xander and Oz found them, each lost in their own thoughts. It was only with a great deal of Xander's usual frenetic capering around and Oz's quiet humour that they were able to get the two women to finally open up and have fun, just like old times.
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