The Machines destroyed the General's base on the Earth's surface (as seen in the chapter 7.3 cinematic), driving him into hiding in the Matrix. With Sati rescued from the General's grasp, the weather in the simulation returned to its standard green-tinged overcast skies.
Zion and E Pluribus Neo pursued the simulacrum who had been appearing recently in the city, impersonating Morpheus. They found data appearing to suggest a link between the simulacrum and the General. The Machines, concerned that the simulacrum might try to threaten the System's stability as Morpheus himself did, questioned it, but decided that it was confused and non-violent, and only bore further monitoring.
Meanwhile, the Merovingian had begun using the Trainman to shuttle the General's com-mandos out of the Matrix, and back into the real world. The General himself delayed, leav-ing the train platform to confront his Morpheus simulacrum. He ordered the simulacrum to deactivate itself, but it refused, and successfully defended itself against the General, who was forced to leave. Returning late to the Trainman's station, the General was confronted there by Machine forces. The Trainman managed to shove the General onto the departing train, but suffered severe injury at the hands of the Machines.
Undeterred, the Merovingian put his plan to kill the Oracle into full execution, attempting to get his kill-code into the hands of an assassin planted in Zion's security teams. Zion found the assassin in time, forcing the Merovingian to resort to a new plan, using a stealth com-mando and a very special key to attempt to surprise the Oracle. She, however, was saved at the last moment by the Kid and E Pluribus Neo. The frustrated Frenchman consoled himself by activating on override code on the General and his Sentinels.
The Cypherites continued searching for information on the mysterious exodus of men and material from Zion. Cryptos, gradually recovered from Seraph's attack, took command of the organization back from the stubborn Veil, to the relief of Agent Gray and the Machines.
Veil, however, continued her ruthless quest for information, executing the crew of the Zion-ite hovercraft Pelageus when they refused to cooperate. In response, the Oracle could of-fer only dire-sounding predictions, saying that you can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved.
Cypherites
Cryptos wandered for some time in the Matrix, asking those he met about purpose, right, and wrong. He appeared to settle some question in his mind, however, and reasserted his control over the Cypherite organization during an operation in which he led Cypherites to capture a redpill whose attempts to awaken Bluepills freed by Seraph from Machine over-writing, like Cryptos, had led to the deaths of some of those civilians. The vindictive Cypherite controller, Veil, grudgingly agreed to recognize Cryptos as leader.
Veil continued leading operations designed to discover the mystery behind unregistered
workers and machinery slipping out of Zion, a topic of particular interest to the Machines.
She staged an attack on a E Pluribus Neo base as a distraction, while other Cypherite op-eratives successfully infiltrated a Zionite computer system, recovering data.
Her zealous pursuit of her task led her to hijack, and eventually execute, the crew of a Zionite hovercraft, the Pelageus. Agent Gray, who had supported Cryptos over the Veil's volatile leadership, questioned her methods, but Veil refused to curb her activities, re-sponding derisively when told that her actions threatened the truce between the Machines and Zion.
E Pluribus Neo
E Pluribus Neo, searching for information on the Morpheus simulacrum, discovered a hid-den network of old followers of Morpheus, still carrying on the rebel activities that led to Morpheus' death, including the distribution of seditious posters. One of these individuals, Joshua Maston, told the EPN members who found him that they had been distracted by Cypherites and super-villains from what was truly important, and that he fully expected to be killed by the Machines for his activities, but carried on because he believed that what he was doing was right. The Kid said that belief is important, but so is hope.
Recognizing the kill-code threat to the Oracle posed by the Merovingian, EPN asked Zion for permission to assist in guarding her; when the Oracle herself insisted, Zion agreed to share guard duties.
When the Frenchman finally launched his Elite Commando assassin at the Oracle, the Kid, on guard duty at the time, responded to her cry of alarm in time to intercept the fatal bullet with his body. Nearby EPN operatives pursued and eliminated the commando, while the Oracle watched over the stunned Kid. She said he would be all right, but would need rest. Once he reluctantly jacked out to his ship, the Oracle went outside to enjoy the fresh air for the first time in weeks, and moved back to her old home in Mara.
The Machines
The Machines tracked the fleeing General through the Matrix, rooting him out of the tem-porary safety of the Merovingian's chateau with the assistance of the Cypherites, and then
from the Trainman's tunnel system. They caught up to the General at the train station as he was about to exit the simulation, but the Trainman sacrificed his own chance to escape in order to make sure that his appointed passenger made it aboard the departing train.
With the General out of the Matrix, the Machines switched targets within the simulation, now locating and questioning the Morpheus simulacrum, which showed some indication that it might take up Morpheus' old terrorist tendencies. They found that it had the capabil-ity of simulating redpill jack-out and reconstruction. The simulacrum, however, appeared to be non-violent, and the Machines determined that careful monitoring of its activities was a sufficient precaution.
Agent Pace ran an operation in which a special party was staged as a trap for the Mer-ovingian, with the intent of punishing the Frenchman for his role in the General's escape.
The Merovingian, however, sent his wife in his stead, and she escaped when loyal operat-ives pounced on the Agent sent to infiltrate the club. A massive Machinist onslaught cleared the club, however, and Agent Pace decided that this demonstration had served its purpose.
Ever-increasing concerns about the purpose behind materials and manpower sneaking out of Zion led the Machines to attempt gathering information through their own contacts, but this proved less efficient than employing the Cypherites, although Cypherite produc-tion, from the Machine point of view, continued to suffer under Veil's stubborn leadership.
Cryptos' re-assumption of Cypherite command came as a relief to the Machines, but ten-sions with Zion caused by their activities remained high, particularly after Veil's hijacking and execution of the crew of the Zionite hovercraft Pelageus.
The Merovingian
The Merovingian forced the harried General to give him control over the program used by the commandos to move between the Matrix and the real world. With this in his posses-sion, the Frenchman employed the Trainman to transfer the General's commandos out of the simulation, saving them for the time being from extermination at the hands of the Ma-chines, but losing the Trainman to the Machines in the process. The Trainman managed to limp away from a Machine attack into his own private construct, but it was unclear if the paranoid Exile would survive his injuries.
The Merovingian attempted to send the kill-code made to terminate the Oracle to a spy placed on the Oracle's security detail, but Zion detected the intrusion, and forced the Frenchman to extricate the kill-code from their systems.
In need of an alternate means of getting the deadly code near the Oracle, the Merovingian seized upon a key dug up by the Landlord at the Mahath Tower construction site, formerly occupied by the government building used by Neo to reach the Architect; when this build-ing self-destructed with the body of the Keymaker inside, the key he had been makbuild-ing in the Merovingian's dungeon was buried in the rubble. The Frenchman had originally planned to use this key, capable of transporting the user to a portal near a specific target, to kill the Oracle's previous shell.
After several false starts, the Effectuator managed to transport a borrowed Elite Com-mando squad back into the city. Seraph detected and hunted the comCom-mandos, but Mer-ovingian operatives managed to save most of them, and finally one of them, equipped with the key and the kill-code, attempted to assassinate the Oracle, but the Kid blocked the shot at the last moment.
Frustrated with this failure, which he blamed on the General's soldier, the Merovingian ex-ecuted a hidden override program the Trainman had inserted into the General and his men when they were transferred out of the Matrix; the program compels the General and his Sentinels to obey the Merovingian's commands in the real world.
Zion
Zion tracked down the Morpheus simulacrum, finding evidence of some sort of connection between the unpredictable simulacrum and the General; this connection was confirmed in dramatic fashion when the General himself confronted the simulacrum, berating it for fail-ing in its designated task of re-ignitfail-ing conflict between the Machines and Zion. Cheered on by surrounding operatives, the simulacrum refused to obey the General's command to deactivate itself, and successfully defended itself when the incensed Sentinel leader at-tacked.
Meanwhile, Zion found indications that the Merovingian had transferred his Oracle kill-code into their own network. They managed to find the Frenchman's undercover team of operatives, and his spy within Zion, forcing the Merovingian to abort his plan, and extricate the kill-code from Zion's systems.
Although Zion's agreement to allow E Pluribus Neo to help guard the Oracle, at her own insistence, paid off when the Kid saved her from the kill-code-laced bullet fired by an Elite Commando, Zion subsequently suffered the loss of the crew of their hovercraft Pelageus at the hands of EPN's sworn enemies, the Cypherites. The Oracle tried to console Zion over the loss, but could not keep a sense of foreboding out of her message.
Chapter 8.1 War
Cypherite spies discover that Zion has built a new, strongly defended city. The Machines declare that Zion has broken the Truce. Open hostilities between Zion and the Machines begin. The Merovingian, skeptical about the Morpheus simulacrum's story of humans used as batteries, sends his commando Sentinels to scout the Machine "fields" and pods.
• Cypherite spies discovered that Zion has been constructing a new city, situated in a vast complex of natural and artificial caverns far beneath the Earth's surface, protected by a combination of heavy sediment layers, EMP devices embedded in the rock, and live EMP fields powered by geothermal energy. The Machines declared this base, pop-ularly termed "New Zion," to be a violation of the truce, and revoked Zion's privilege of recruiting humans who reject the Matrix simulation.
• Machine forces moved swiftly to neutralize Zion's systems within the Matrix, achieving rapid early success. Zion operatives found themselves under attack by Agents any-where outside of the Richland slums.
• E Pluribus Neo began examining possible ways in which they could strike back at the Machines, possible outside of the simulation itself. Concerned lest Zion fall to the Ma-chines, the Kid offered to assist Zion hovercraft, under fire from hostile Sentinel patrols.
• The Merovingian threw a party, gloating over the possibilities for profit opened up by the return of the war between Zion and the Machines.
• Zion attempted to put an emergency firewall system in place to protect their network in-terfaces from the Machines, but the Machines quickly bypassed the new System, and inserted viral routines into the Zion network, impairing their communication system.
• As a fall-back plan, Zion established a temporary network uplink, that they could use to get data directly out of the simulation.
• The Machines began attacking Zionite extraction points, seeking to prevent Zion from
"unplugging" more humans from the pods.
• The Merovingian stole tunnel mapping data from Zion, and used this information to keep the General's Sentinels from being found by Machine patrols in the Real. The Merovingian informed the General that he must stay within certain designated areas, or be shut down by an override command.
• In the Matrix, the Merovingian verified the allegiance of other powerful Exiles, including Yttri, Amber, Cerulean, Madame T, and the Auditor. The Exile named Synn insisted on more protection from Agent intrusion.
• Cypherites continued stealing information from Zionite data clusters, despite increased resistance from Zion.
• Zion managed to get sensitive broadcast control data out of the simulation thanks to in-tervention by the Merovingian, who sent Beirn to stop the Machine Agent threatening Zion's uplink portal. With the preserved data, Zion was able to keep their broadcast control system essentially intact, although because it is now shared from ship to ship, their hovercraft must rise closer to the surface to send signals into the Matrix.
• Zion finally tracked down Daelyn, a Cypherite spy who'd been smuggling information to Veil. The Cypherites, however, obtained the address of a Zionite recruiting official from a potential Zion recruit, killed in a crossfire with Zion defenders. The Machines cap-tured the official, and then the high-level recruiting data to which he had access.
• Meanwhile, a flight of Sentinels dispatched to probe New Zion's defenses were deac-tivated by hidden EMP charges. The Kid, pointing out the danger to even Zion's new city, urged Niobe to consider opening a direct offensive against the Machines in the Real, but Niobe did not seem inclined to consider such a gamble.
• The Merovingian, besides taking a little time to discipline the unruly Murasaki Exile, Synn, became increasingly curious to probe Machine capabilities. An attack by the Twins and operatives at a leading Downtown company, Metacortex, provoked only a relatively meager Machine response. Deigning to question the Oracle, the Frenchman was told that "power isn't everything," and was prompted to look around for himself.
• Questioning the Morpheus simulacrum, who reiterated the widespread story of a Ma-chine civilization powered by humans trapped in pods, combined with a form of fusion, the Merovingian was struck by the lack of key factual data to support the story.
• Armed with lists of potential awakening subjects captured from Zion, the Machines ag-gressively pursued Zion extraction and recruiting operations. One bluepill in particular, Navin Manohar, was arrested, terminated, and replaced with a specially prepared bluepill, one partially overwritten by a Machine program. After being reconfigured by operatives to resemble the original Mr. Manohar, the overwritten bluepill was sent back to Manohar's residence.
• E Pluribus Neo, attempting to save as many compromised potentials from the Ma-chines as possible, confronted and eventually extracted Rachel Dunkirk, friend of a wo-man named Sarah Edmontons, who had disappeared from a hospital several years earlier, apparently walking out under her own power despite having been on life sup-port machines for over a month with almost zero brainwave activity.
• Zion strove to save their compromised recruiting teams and potential awakening sub-jects from the Machines, with some success. The Machines, however, gained informa-tion on the locainforma-tion and configurainforma-tion of the Zion mainframe when they tricked Zion into attempting to extract a subject who had secretly been overwritten with a Machine pro-gram designed to exploit a security hole in the red pill trace propro-gram.
• The Merovingian had Raini and Silver questioned about fusion and biological power generation; the questions stemmed from Morpheus' account of humans in the pods and the Machine energy source. Information gathered made the Merovingian question the efficiency of the supposed Machine system of a form of fusion combined with
hu-mans as energy-generating devices, and he determined to learn the truth for himself by sending the General's Sentinels to scout the fields and pods.
• Ghost had a run-in with Pace while on a recruiting mission; Pace hinted that "your pro-gram is compromised," and that she was visiting other Zion potentials.
• The Cypherite controller, Veil, and Cypherite operatives strove to counter Zion's re-cruiting efforts with Bluepills, and succeeded in putting a number of potentials "back to sleep" with the pills, although one had to be fed the pill by force.
• Malphas and several operatives won back a feather from Seraph, stolen by Seraphim.
Malphas explained that Seraph's feathers were stripped from him as punishment for his betrayal of the Merovingian, in the days when he served the Merovingian as an en-forcer.
• Niobe came close to losing data she was attempting to rescue from Machine capture, but E Pluribus Neo operatives saved her from Machine forces in the nick of time.
• The Merovingian held a "peace party" for all operatives in Tabor Park, but turned it into a bloodbath after tempting Redpills from all organizations into close proximity with cake, dancing, and Ookami.
• The Exile leader Dame White was involved in some wheeling and dealing, first getting a new Exile program that controlled animal emotions stolen from her by Persephone, the Effectuator, and Merovingian operatives, and then tipping off E Pluribus Neo that the Merovingian might have access to detailed information on Machine power lines in the Real, in exchange for information they gave her, obtained from Cypherites, about a mysterious "Mr. G."
• As it turned out, "Mr. G." was Itarrot, a long-missing Cypherite officer. Having serious RSI trouble due to fried systems on his hijacked hovercraft, Itarrot was found and res-cued by Cypherite operatives, and restored to his old position on Cryptos' hovercraft,
"The Blue Dreamer."
• The Cypherites also rescued the crew of the Solstice, held by Zion since trying to de-fect to the Cypherite cause. Cypherite operatives staged a party in Club Sphinx, hand-ing out blue pills as a distraction, while a team of high level Cypherite operatives broke into the Zion outpost where the crew was held, and liberated them.
• Zion and the Machines clashed in the Zero One construct, as Zion conducted a des-perate search for a Machine hacker who was threatening a vital Zion system. Despite efforts by Machine operatives and Agent Pace, Zionite operatives managed to locate the hacker and disrupt his efforts. After this success, the assembled Zionites attacked Agent Pace en masse, temporarily damaging her RSI and forcing her to retreat from the construct. Ghost warned, however, that Zion's systems were still under heavy Ma-chine attack on multiple fronts, and that it would be vital to get all of these systems transferred to the safety of Zion's new city.