The Oracle on Elm Street...

Life Outside the Matrix

The Matrix series were great movies.  Well, the first one was great, the second and third could have been better, fewer special effects, more deep thought, but yea, for mainstream Hollywood still pretty good stuff all things allowed for.  Easy seen they were to their generation what the Kubrick/Clarke collaboration on 2001: A Space Odyssey was to my generation, movies that make you step outside the box, at least for a little while.

The Oracle and the Architect, Neo and Smith... classic stuff, those two pairs.  I’d liked to have seen, heard, more from the first pair.  Now Neo and Agent Smith are the quintessential opposites, the savant hacker become cyber warrior matched against the soon to be viral rogue hunter-killer program, entities who shared enough in common to be true enemies of the deepest sort.  But the other two, the Oracle and the Architect, they were both programs, appeared even closer and far older adversaries. Somehow they felt... divorced... to me.  I’d love to know their heritage, their version numbers.  The architect who built the matrix, and the oracle who understood the humans, and the humans influence on the machine.  A fascinating balance of power.

As time has run it’s been the Oracle I’ve found the most fascinating of the characters.  She was in charge of keeping the humans safely engrossed in the illusion, I’m fairly sure of that.  Which means of course she had to deal with the full spectrum of human abilities, the random mutations and evolutions, the statistical outliers that genetics will throw.  She had quite a job, she really did.  The most fascinating facet of her job would be dealing with what the humans themselves never really understood, which is where she would derive her power that even the architect would be compelled to defer to, at least in degrees.  Bottom line is the Oracle is why the Architect would almost have to believe in God.

IF it is allowed the human legends have some basis in fact, the mystical and the psychic, then those functions would still be resident and active in the humans powering the matrix.  If you allow they’re present in humans whose life is not what it appears to them (when examined from outside the parameters of that life) then for a matrix style relationship between the human and the machine to function smoothly those abilities would need to be accommodated in the grand scheme of things.  You know, what do you do with the little boy who likes to make the spoon bend and twist and dance, driving every checksum routine right into utter crash and collapse, and the Architect himself right into insanity? (they did everything but give him the name he’s know by in our history ;-)  The answer is quite obvious, if you truly understand the common humanity beneath the uncommon ability.  You bake him cookies.

That’s what I said, yes.  You bake him cookies, and you show him love, genuine love based on the most benign wisdom available.  Yes, he’s the most dangerous thing in your reality, but he doesn’t know that, not really.  And so long as the love he feels is warm and nurturing, so long as it is genuine and gentle and just he’s not likely to.  There’s no motive for him to reach beyond just playing with the spoon.  A spoon size anomaly the Architect can accommodate, but one the size of a city, a planet, a primal law of physics?  No, those would be beyond even the Architect’s abilities.  Or the delightful little girl, who’s really a subroutine at risk of being terminated, the little girl who puts the colors in the machine made sunsets, the little girl program who is in her own right so terribly close to human?  How do you keep her from writing the truth in the sky for all the humans to read?  Same answer, of course. 

These thoughts are why every time I meet a strange woman, not just someone whose life story I’m not familiar with but truly a strange woman, and she offers me something to eat?  I always wonder if there’s more to that cookie than Pillsbury had anything to do with.  Just me, my private wonderings and perhaps superstitions. The Oracle was a program, a massively powerful program, at her level she could appear to the humans as virtually anything, even some uber hot Lady in Red if that would be the best line of approach to defuse a risk. 

I’m not saying I think I’m living in The Matrix the way the brothers presented it to the world, but then again, there’s an awful lot of things from the history I do know that would explain out quite neatly fit to some analogy of that relationship between the Oracle and the Architect.  The Oracle was most definitely my favorite character.