DeConick A.D

K
CHAPTER ONE
The Matrix of Ancient Spirituality
Thomas Anderson
Thomas Anderson has been living two lives. During the day, he works a
mind-numbing job as a computer geek for a software company. At night,
he hacks systems as Neo. He is the intense guy who can get anything for
anyone for a price. Then, messages start to come through the computer
from a mysterious entity named Morpheus. Bits and pieces of sentences.
A word or two. Neo is perplexed. Confused. Driven to paranoia. One
morning, exhausted, he sees these words fixed across his screen: “Wake
up, Neo . . . the Matrix has you.”
What is the Matrix that Neo discovers in the Wachowski brothers’ science
fiction film? In a horrifying scene of human beings trapped in metallic
pods perched along an immense beehive structure, Neo learns that
the Matrix is a computer program in which humans live their lives. It is a
virtual reality created by intelligent machines to control humans. The machines
incubate and grow humans to extract from their bodies the energy
that the machines need to survive (figure 1.1).
To keep humans passive, the machines wire them into the Matrix,
where they happily live out virtual lives on twentieth-century Earth while
encased in goo in a pod, with extraction wires bored into their bodies.
The Matrix is the humans’ only reality. It is what gives their lives purpose
and meaning. Asleep like babies, they never know that they are living out
their lives from the perspective of the Matrix, which is nothing more than
a software program they are wired into.