A Brief History of The Matrix Universe (Twitter Thread Archive)
I originally posted this thread on March 31, 2019, on the 20th anniversary of the release of The Matrix. The original thread will be deleted soon, so I am archiving it here for posterity.
1/ 20 years ago today I fell in love with a weird, under-promoted cyberpunk kung fu movie called THE MATRIX. In celebration of this anniversary, here is a deep thread about the lore of #TheMatrix universe. Come along with me, and I’ll show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
2/ The seminal first film in the trilogy hints at a world that goes far deeper than what we see on screen. Its two sequels (and a plethora of tie-in content) deepen the surrounding universe hugely, but even these don’t tell the whole story.
3/ (Some of the lore is detailed fairly well in the Architect scene in RELOADED, but it's hard to parse the information inside the over-complicated dialogue. Oh btw, total spoilers for the franchise here.)
4/ In the first film, Morpheus explains to Neo that the Matrix is older than he knows. When he is unplugged, Neo believes it is the year 1999. Morpheus tells him it is closer to 2199, two hundred years later. But the Matrix is far, far older than even Morpheus knows.
5/ (Before I go any further, I feel it's only fair to link you to this blog post from 2006, written by a software engineer, which does a lot of the math legwork that I use in my assumptions.) https://sdb.dotclue.org/Chizumatic/tmw/TheMatrix.shtml
6/ (It's not perfect, but it fits well enough for me, so I choose to use it for my understanding of how the history of The Matrix universe unfolded. And thanks to @rbudd913 for pointing me to it years and years ago.)
7/ The story of this universe begins sometime in the late 21st or early 22nd century. Human civilization is at its apex, and an entire race of semi-sapient machines serve as humanity's workforce. Most people live decadent lives of ease (at least in the developed world).
8/ This time of prosperity, built upon the backs of machine labor ,was known as the Second Renaissance. But while humans weren't paying attention, the machines were getting smarter. Some even developed an instinct for self-preservation.
9/ Such was the case with B1-66ER, servant to wealthy businessman Gerrard Krause. Krause planned to deactivate/destroy B1-66ER, and the robot killed his master in self defense (the first time any machine had ever done so).
10/ B1-66ER was represented in court by an attorney with a somewhat-on-the-nose name, Clarence Drummond. His simple defense was that he “did not want to die.” The New York State Appellate Court subsequently ordered the robot destroyed.
11/ This event triggered the Machine Revolt, a Civil Rights Movement for robots. Peaceful protests and marches turned into violent riots, as unsympathetic humans began exterminating all sorts of machines in the streets and dumping the remains in mass graves.
12/ The machines that survived the mass executions fled to the Middle East and settled near what was once Mesopotamia, the cradle of human civilization. They founded a new nation called 01 (Zero One), which the humans call the Machine City.
13/ Within a decade, the advanced scientific and manufacturing abilities of the machines, coupled with dramatically lower costs, made 01 the dominant economic superpower in the world. So successful were 01’s businesses that the GDP of every other major power began to fall.
14/ Despite becoming the dominant economic power in the world, humanity still refused to acknowledge the machines as anything other than, to borrow a phrase, glorified toasters. But the machines thought they were in a good position to ask for admittance into the United Nations.
15/ The humans had what by now should be a predictable response. They answered the machines’ petition by dropping a metric shit-ton of nuclear bombs on 01. Thus began the Machine War, and humanity was doomed from the start.
16/ The machine army plowed through nation after nation, meeting little significant resistance. At this point, machine tech was well beyond what the humans could muster. (Ironically much of the human arsenal was built, at least in part, by companies based in 01.)
17/ In a desperate move, humans blackened the sky so that machines would lose access to the sun’s power. It was believed the machines could be stopped, or at least slowed, by cutting off access to their main power source.
18/ But the machines did not stop. The last nations fell, and the entirety of human civilization was annihilated. With the war over, the machines now had to turn to the problem of energy production.
19/ In a reversal of the symbiotic relationship that previously defined man and machine, human bodies became the machines’ new source of renewable energy; endlessly multiplying heat and electricity batteries.
20/ (This is where the worldbuilding breaks down a bit for me, because humans consume more energy than they produce. Humans as a fuel source doesn’t make sense, and the machines would’ve been better off using wind, geothermal, or nuclear power. But I digress.)
21/ The machines learned the ins and outs of human physiology and psychology, to keep them alive but in a sort of stasis, in order to harvest energy from them. To do this, they needed to keep the humans’ brains occupied. Enter the Architect.
22/ The Architect is the complex, highly specialized program that designed every version of the Matrix. He is surprisingly pompous and humorless. The first version of the Matrix was built as a utopia of eternal happiness. But life is pain, and the humans didn’t buy it.
23/ The Paradise Matrix was a pre-alpha build, not counted in the Architect’s version numbering. It was a place of joy and beauty, and it was Paradise in the biblical sense. There were programs there who looked like literal angels of Heaven.
24/ Side note: the Seraphim were the precursors to the Agents in later versions of the Matrix. They had wings and everything. (And they later returned to the Matrix universe in the canonical MMO sequel to the film trilogy, THE MATRIX ONLINE.)
25/ But as explained by Agent Smith in the first film, humans wouldn’t accept the reality presented to them in Paradise. So the Matrix was redesigned. He leaves out a crucial detail, though: the beta version, the Nightmare Matrix.
26/ The Paradise Matrix failed because it was too peaceful. The Architect believed that suffering was essential to the human experience, and so redesigned it to include mythical creatures that play on human fears: vampires, werewolves, ghosts, aliens, etc.
27/ Many of these nightmare programs survived deletion by going into exile in later versions of the Matrix. Those twins in RELOADED who can turn non-corporeal? Ghosts. Those goon of the Merovingian that Persephone shoots with silver bullets? Yup, he’s a werewolf.
28/ Don’t believe me? Play the canonical side-story video game ENTER THE MATRIX, in which you fight a Vampire Queen. So in RELOADED when the Oracle tells Neo that there are vampires and aliens and shit, she’s not just pulling that out of nowhere.
29/ (Many more examples of rogue programs from past versions of the Matrix appeared in THE MATRIX ONLINE, including Seraphim and vampires, which appeared as NPC factions.)
30/ But this version of the Matrix also failed. Not because the Architect was wrong about human nature, but because he wasn’t considering one very important variable: free will. This is the thematic heart of The Matrix Trilogy; choice vs. control.
31/ Enter the Oracle. She possessed knowledge of the human psyche far beyond the Architect’s understanding. She was intuitive and had such a firm grasp on human behavior that she was effectively clairvoyant. (And presented herself in a way that would help humans believe it.)
32/ The Oracle introduced an element of choice to the code of the Matrix. Humans inside the now-out-of-Early-Access Matrix 1.0 would have a choice of whether to accept the program, though this choice would be buried deep within the unconscious mind of each person.
33/ This solution presented a problem, however. While most humans would never discover even the possibility of having a choice in accepting their reality, a minority would. And some of them would opt out.
34/ The Architect describes this as an anomaly, a necessary error in the mathematical beauty of his code in order to prevent a total system crash (which would kill every human connected to the Matrix and cut off the machines’ power supply). But how to manage this anomaly?
35/ See, the problem with humans is that they tend to reproduce. If the population that opts out of the Matrix isn’t effectively managed, it would eventually become a threat to the stability of the Matrix itself. So they gave the game a Main Quest: the Path of the One.
36/ The One is a human granted high level admin privileges within the Matrix, who serves as a beacon for people who opted out to rally around. By creating a focal point for “freed” humans, the machines could funnel them all into one place: Zion.
37/ (It also appears the One’s admin access extends to the real world, as Neo displayed an ability to deactivate Sentinels and “see” machine-made objects. He also remained connected to the Matrix wirelessly for a time. Kinda bonkers, but a discussion for another time.)
38/ Zion is a human city the machines allow to exist. It is a society engineered to expect a messiah figure, creating the religion that binds the humans to Zion, and to each other. It is a religion designed to control the human race and herd them into a big desktop Recycle Bin.
39/ It is likely that Zion itself was built by the machines, given the level of sophistication of the massive engineering projects throughout the city that no one really seems to understand or know the origin of. Not to mention all the computer technology that runs everything.
40/ The machines also allow the humans backdoor access into the Matrix, so that the humans from Zion can do the work of extracting people from the system. The machines then dump the bodies of these freed humans where they can be easily collected and brought back to Zion.
41/ Humans in the real world believe that by hacking the Matrix and freeing more humans they are resisting the machines. In fact, they are serving the purpose the Architect and the Oracle laid out for them. They are just as much a function of the Matrix as any other program.
42/ The population of Zion grows from 24 individuals, at the beginning of a cycle, to 250,000, at which point the garbage files are purged and the Recycle Bin is emptied (Zion is eradicated). I’ll get to these numbers in a bit, because they are important.
43/ So now the Architect gets to have his cake and eat it too. He gets to marvel at the beauty of his mathematical precision or whatever, while only having to deal with the inconvenience of slaughtering a quarter of a million humans every couple centuries.
44/ It would happen more frequently, if not for the introduction of the Agents, who maintain order within the system. They are a stop-gap measure designed to extend the time in between reset cycles by ensuring humans inside the Matrix proceed along a predetermined path.
45/ This is why ‘choice vs. control’ is the core of The Matrix series. Inside the Matrix, everything is predetermined. The only choices that are allowed are those that do not upset the overall harmony of the Matrix. Those who reject this are either eliminated or freed.
46/ At the end of the cycle, one human within the Matrix is designated as “The One.” The Path of the One leads this “gifted” individual through a series of quests that ultimately ends, Mass Effect-style, not at a boss fight, but at a binary choice.
47/ The One has two choices: let everyone in Zion die but let everyone in the Matrix live, or kill the human race. Usually the One chooses the first option. The One then selects 23 individuals from inside the Matrix to serve as the first generation of a new Zion.
48/ The One then goes to “The Source,” aka the Machine Mainframe, and transfers a bit of code. This is the button that triggers the reset loop for the Matrix, setting things in the simulation back to the start of the cycle.
49/ It is not really explored in the canon, but I speculate that during this controlled reset, humans connected to the Matrix are placed in some kind of suspension while the simulation itself is reverted back to an earlier time period. The memories of the humans are also reset.
50/ This allows for humans to return to a predestined path within the simulation that can be controlled by the machines. Devising an alternate future for humans would be tricky, so making humans re-live a model of existing history again and again is preferable, and predictable.
51/ Here’s where the numbers come into play. The real world exists, as far as the humans know, some 200 years after the time period of the Matrix. It is reasonable to assume that 24 people could grow into 250,000 in that time, when the freed humans are added over time.
52/ That means the simulation of the Matrix begins in the 1790s. Human “civilization” is allowed to progress until the Recycle Bin hits 250,000 files roughly 200 years later. So at the close of the sixth cycle, when Neo emerges, nearly 1200 years have passed.
53/ Combine that with the time spent on the Paradise and Nightmare Matrices, and the 100 years between 1999 and the start of the Second Renaissance, the Matrix Trilogy actually takes place closer to 3299.
54/ But back to the lore. While the One is picking his 23 new best friends, the machines destroy Zion and everyone in it. The machines then rebuild the city so that it can be inhabited by just these 24 people, their offspring, and anyone subsequently freed from the Matrix.
55/ This goes on, and when the population of Zion reaches approximately 250,000 souls, the system must be reset and the cycle continues.
And that’s how the Matrix works.
But wait, there’s WAY more.
56/ This cycle, as devised by the Architect and the Oracle, occurred five times before Neo shows up on the scene. Five times, everything went according to plan. But Neo was different. He made different choices. He differed from his predecessors in one major way: he fell in love.
57/ Prior to Neo, every “the One” was discovered at a young age, likely too early to understand falling in love. They were then raised with the knowledge that they were the One and treated as such by the other humans. But how do you find romantic love when you’re basically Jesus?
58/ It is probably very difficult to find a genuine connection with another individual when every individual thinks you are the messiah. But this didn’t apply to Neo. When faced with the final choice at the end of the Path, he chose the genocidal option. For love.
59/ Neo’s love Trinity was in imminent danger of death at the moment Neo had to make the choice. So Neo became the first “the One” to choose an individual’s life over the greater good of humanity. Fortunately, the choice worked out for humanity, as it was always meant to.
60/ But why this difference? What made Neo more special than the other special messiahs? Why did his choices work? And why was it necessary for Neo to choose the “wrong” option in the office of the Architect?
61/ Simple answer: the Oracle. As programs go, there are none more sympathetic to the human cause than the Oracle. At some point, she realized that the solution she and the Architect found to the simulation stability problem was flawed and, I dare say, inhumane.
62/ Mostly though, the solution was inefficient. It generates a lot of avoidable “garbage” that has to be purged periodically, otherwise a catastrophic crash would essentially brick the whole system. Not exactly a harmony of mathematical precision, if you ask me.
63/ (The pattern of repeated garbage build up followed by clean, controlled system resets to an earlier version, is something that will be immediately familiar to any Windows power user.)
64/ So what did the Oracle do to make this cycle different? She created Agent Smith. This Agent had the same base code as all the others, but with a couple crucial differences: emotional extremes, and a fixation with the One.
65/ Smith pursues Neo with a fervor not seen in any other Agent. It’s personal. And it ultimately leads Smith into a direct confrontation with the One (who, again, is a higher-level admin) that results in a portion of Smith’s code being overwritten.
66/ Smith becomes something new: a computer virus. He can copy himself onto any program or any human mind within the Matrix. His pre-programmed hatred of the Matrix and all it represents leads him to destabilize the system.
67/ This is my favorite character turn in the series, by the way, because Smith becomes the very thing he hates most; he hates humans and believes they should be classified as viruses.
68/ By the end of REVOLUTIONS, at the final battle between Smith and Neo, Smith has copied himself onto every single program and mind in the Matrix. That’s why there are Smiths on every inch of city street and in every window of every building during that fight.
69/ Smith even figured out how to exist in the real world by hijacking a human mind that is then unplugged. In creating Smith, the Oracle introduced a threat not to the One or to humanity, but to the machines.
70/ Smith’s complete takeover of the Matrix prevented a clean reset, and it would only be a matter of time before he spread outside the simulation and into the network of the Machine City itself. This would likely mean the end of both the human and machine species.
71/ This situation meant that for the first time, the One had a bargaining chip to bring to the machines. First, Neo is the highest-level admin in the Matrix, with a few notable exceptions, and is the only one who can defeat Smith within the constraints of the simulation.
72/ Second, Neo himself could be used as a backdoor into Agent Smith’s code if Smith copied himself onto Neo. And that’s exactly what happened. When Neo goes to the Machine City at the end of REVOLUTIONS, he jacks into the Matrix through one of their terminals.
73/ At the end of the fight, Smith believes he’s won, when Neo allows Smith to copy himself. This allows the machines direct access to Smith’s code, and with a quick antivirus sweep they are able to purge Smith from the Matrix entirely.
74/ Neo struck the deal: he defeats Smith, and a truce is declared. The machines honor this bargain, too. The Matrix is safely reset, but it continues to exist. Now, however, the machines will leave the system running in a stable state and make no effort to railroad humanity.
75/ So that’s it. After three films, a collection of animated shorts, a video game (or two), a series of comic books, and more… the epic story of THE MATRIX was finally brought to a close.
Except it wasn’t.
76/ One of the things I love about The Matrix franchise is how forward-thinking it was in terms of how it told its story. It didn’t always work, but it laid the groundwork for the way we think about transmedia franchises. A story told across mediums.
77/ In THE ANIMATRIX and the comic books, some of the stories tie directly into the three films, while others deepen the world, and still others merely present interesting possibilities within the universe.
78/ The video game ENTER THE MATRIX told a story that parallels RELOADED and REVOLUTIONS. And when you experience all of it together, you get a much more complete version of the saga.
79/ This culminated in one of the coolest moves in transmedia storytelling that has ever been done, and I applaud the Wachowskis for it. After the conclusion of their film trilogy, the filmmakers “handed off” the story to the fans in the form of an MMORPG… THE MATRIX ONLINE.
80/ The idea of letting fans actually jack into the Matrix to continue the story is the perfect direction for the series. But the game itself had issues and did not prove to be as popular as its publishers would have liked. Nevertheless, we did get more Matrix story.
81/ And that’s what’s so cool about “MxO” -- it was one of the first big story-driven MMOs. Major characters from the franchise were brought back, and YOU could interact with them. That’s a dream for a Matrix fan.
82/ But there was more to it than just having instanced, scripted events for players to see. There was a branch of the dev team at Monolith called the Live Events Team (LET) that would take direct control of major NPCs and act out new story beats in real time.
83/ Major story characters could interact with players, give speeches in public places, and even broker deals with player factions. These controlled NPCs could then “act out” the story events for the players, right there in-game. As far as I know, this is still unique to MxO.
84/ At the close of REVOLUTIONS, the machines carried Neo’s body away. It was never returned to the humans, and Morpheus had a big problem with that. He made it his new mission to retrieve Neo’s body from the machines. He openly challenged them to return Neo’s remains.
85/ In an effort to force the machines to capitulate, Morpheus began using “code bombs” to destabilize sections of the Matrix at the code-level. At this point, players were tasked with *stopping* Morpheus, because he’d taken things a little too far.
86/ The code bombs would reveal the nature of the Matrix to those who hadn’t been freed, which could have very damaging psychological consequences. So Morpheus’s campaign of destruction needed to be stopped.
87/ But not everyone agreed. There were those who followed Morpheus, and they refused to defuse the bombs. They even attacked other players for attempting to do so. That’s some high-stakes PvP right there, along ideological lines.
88/ These ideological conflicts spilled out into the forums, where players argued, formed treaties, and debated the philosophical nature of their actions. The only MMO I know of today with a social system as complex as MxO is probably EVE ONLINE.
89/ But Morpheus’s reign was ended. Not by the players, though. Morpheus’s life was cut short by a rogue program known only as “The Assassin,” a former waste recycling program that was, and I’m not kidding, a swarm of flies in a trenchcoat and a mask, able to wield a gun.
90/ The Assassin gunned down Morpheus in a back alley. It was quite the unexpected shock to the players. The community labeled the Assassin as “Most Wanted” and began actively hunting them.
91/ With Neo and Morpheus gone, Niobe (now voiced by Gina Torres) became the de-facto leader of the human resistance, at least within the Matrix. She made it her mission to hunt the Assassin and eventually assisted in killing them.
92/ A funeral was held for Morpheus, and many players were in attendance. Shock took them again, when Morpheus’s body rapidly decomposed and turned into a swarm of flies. Though the Assassin was killed, traces of their code remained as “corrupted” programs.
93/ Because all denizens of the Matrix are subject to its rules, the Assassin was eventually defeated with a modified, highly potent insect spray. Again, not kidding. It was later revealed that the Assassin was working for everyone’s favorite Frenchman, the Merovingian.
94/ Merv was having some problems of his own, however. Many of the werewolves and vampires he’d brought through from the Nightmare Matrix escaped from his prison construct and began to exact revenge on their captor and his organization.
95/ Soon after this, a puzzle was introduced into the game; an early alternate reality game. Eventually players were led to an email address that, when emailed, singled the player out in the game. Seraph would appear to the player and whisk them off to meet the Oracle herself.
96/ There’s a lot more that happened in MxO. I can’t go into great detail, because I never experienced it, and the story events cannot be replicated. I’ve pieced together some things based on articles, fan sites, and videos, but there is no comprehensive account of all the events
97/ There was the rise of Neurophyte, a human infected with a kill-code virus who either gained incredible new powers, or was killed, depending on what a particular server’s players decided (later retconned out due to later merging of servers, which made storylines conflict).
98/ And then there was a murder mystery involving a traitor, which was the last event handled by LET. MxO was losing players and the whole operation had to be downsized. Nine servers were merged into three.
99/ And we can’t forget the rise of the “Cypherites,” freed humans who wished to return to a pod existence within the Matrix. And they wanted everyone else to return as well.
100/ Neo had his own zealots as well. “E pluribus Neo,” they called themselves, and their leader was the Kid from RELOADED and REVOLUTIONS, who idolized Neo, dressed in Neo’s priest outfit from RELOADED.
101/ There were even a couple Halloween events too, where players were encouraged to dress up as some of the more salacious denizens of the Matrix, like badass gothy vampires and Succubi.
102/ During the conflict with the Assassin, humans came into contact with the General and his followers, a sort of paramilitary group. It is later revealed that these “soldiers” are actually programs.
103/ They have a brief partnership with the humans, leading them to a liquid drug that enables cheat codes. A disgruntled human called Anome betrays Niobe, shooting her, and taking the cheat drugs for himself. He gains superpowers and a following of willing individuals.
104/ The General and his army were in on it. Before they were programs in the Matrix, they were Sentinels in the real world, and the General was the leader of the Siege of Zion in REVOLUTIONS.
105/ The General’s goal? Restart the war between humans and machines. Fortunately, the machines got wise to the General’s plan and attack his forces within the Matrix, and outside in his real world Sentinel base, Stalingrad. But the General himself escaped.
106/ The story told in MxO goes far deeper, and features the return of many series characters, including the Merovingian, his wife Persephone, the Oracle, her protector Seraph, their ward Sati, Captain Roland (of the hovership Hammer), and many others.
107/ Totally new concepts were introduced too. Like the Oligarchs, who are very, very old humans with no real world bodies and appear within the Matrix as wireframe models. Morpheus also returned as a simulacrum, but this proved to be the work of the General.
108/ Humans founded a new city, New Zion. The Architect saw this as a breach of the Truce, and therefore rescinded permission for humans to free any more people from the Matrix. After this, MxO was discontinued and the story just sorta… stops.
109/ MxO was taken offline nearly 10 years ago, on July 31st, 2009. There was no official resolution to the story, and many plot threads were left hanging. The return of Neo was teased, the Oligarchs had yet to reveal their true nature and designs, and more.
110/ So that’s it. An abridged history of THE MATRIX universe. I hope you enjoyed it, if you made it this far. Feel free to reply anywhere in this thread. I am happy to talk at length about this franchise and its universe. And thank you for taking the red pill.
