Matrix Resolution

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For all of the philosophical musings written about the Matrix movie series, I've yet to encounter any comment that resolves a fundamental issue in the science fiction premise of the story arc. In other words, how does this fictional world, on its own physical terms, actually work?

To be more honest, I've yet to encounter a fanboy who understands as well as I do what is really going on in the three worlds of the epic: the virtual reality of the Matrix itself, the Machine World on the surface, and the subterranean home of humans, Zion. These three are tied together thematically at the conclusion, but I think it is pretty clear that nobody but me and the Wachowskis understands how.

I bought a Blu-ray set of all the movies in the series, a set that includes the most important "documentation" of the science fiction premise, The Animatrix, nine animated shorts commissioned by the Wachowski siblings (now brother and sister). Without information supplied by The Animatrix, the storyline in the trilogy has gaps that only a stickler for consistency would notice. (Who, me?)

The biggest consistency gaps are 1) the true nature of "The Source" and 2) the true nature of what Neo sees with his extrasensory perception (after having his eyes charred), which he and the philosophical commentators alike take as the machines being "made of light." In this essay I will explain that the true source and the aura of light are the same, something well foreshadowed by the storyline, when The Animatrix prequel episode, "The Second Renaissance" is included.

Here's the backstory presented by "The Second Renaissance": In humanity's desperate struggle against the machines, people seed the sky with nanobots or nanites, nano-scale particle-like constructions that envelope the planet in artificial clouds, thus cutting off the machines' source of power, the sun.

This works physically but not as a strategy. The machines adapt by using capsulized human bodies as their source of power and they control human psyches by placing human consciousness in the simulated world of The Matrix.

The nanites are the central actors in this model, even though they are seldom mentioned in either the movies or the animated short that explains the "scorching of the sky".

My contention (I'm being modest about what I intuitively know to be fundamental truth) is that over the centuries since their introduction, the nanites evolved to pervade the planet. They are the true source of connectivity, the means by which Neo can exert his virtual reality powers in the physical world. They are what Neo sees in Machine City as a aural golden glow, a flow of nanites enveloping all machinery and programs. Their power is as great as the sunlight bathing the outer edges of the atmosphere, and they can connect all partitions that the machines have made of the planet.

When Neo zaps the attacking sentinels in the physical world, falling into a coma while his psyche awakens in a limbo way station (anagrammed as Mobil Station) between the Machine World and the Matrix, he taps into this nanite ether for his zap power, and for his psychic transport to Mobile Station, not actually in the Matrix proper, and thus, not reachable by jacking in. The Trainman engineered this underground railway by programming nanite presence without realizing the underpinnings of what he was doing.

It is clear throughout that neither the humans nor the machines (even in program form as uber artificial intelligences, such as the Oracle or the Architect) understand what is really going on at the highest level. Both species are equal in their unawareness of nanite influence. They both think their reality is all there is.

I guess the ultimate revelation that they are connected by a nanite ether will have to come for both in the fourth installment, which I would title,

Matrix: Resolution

I'd write it, but the Wachowski siblings own the franchise.