Stray's Creations

[Stray]

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the Matrix

• Stray
  

[Stray]

Stray

Female
Human
28 years old
Born March 31st
Self-substantiated

Backstory told in her own words

It all started the day I was born.

At least that is what my parents . . . ah, hmm, . . . are they still my parents? I mean, do you think the machines actually used my mother and fathers DNA samples to create me in a test tube? . . . Well, no matter. When I was an infant, I went through periods where I just cried and screamed at the top of my lungs. Other parents and even doctors told them that I was a colic baby and it would go away in time. Weeks and months passed and still I cried.

After a while, my parents noticed that there was a pattern to my crying. I seemed to cry for about 30 minutes every day at about the same time of day. Some days, I cried several times a day. When I was one, they took me back to the physicians and told them what they had observed. That’s when the life of being a lab rat started. I had every test known to man done to me. Lab work after lab work. X-Rays and Cat scans. You name it, I’m sure I had it.

Nothing.

Absolutely, nothing was found to be wrong with me. Again, the physicians said it should go away in time.

Months and years passed. As I grew older and was able to communicate with my parents, I was able to tell them about the pain. I know it is somewhat cliché to say, but it literally felt like someone was taking an ice pick and poking it into my left eye. It would last 30 minutes. You could take a stopwatch and time it down to the second. And then the lab rat testing began again. The doctors even started given me cortisone shots at the base of my skull to see if that would help stop or ease the pain. Nothing was found to be wrong and nothing stopped the pain. They concluded that I was suffering from cluster headaches. It was unheard of in children and not very common in adults either.

I would just have to learn to live with it.

As the years passed, the frequency of my headaches lessened to about two or three times a week. Painful, but livable. Then in my early teens, I met a friend’s father who was a master of Tai Chi. My friend had told his father about my headaches and thought that the meditative martial arts of Tai Chi might be able to help me control my painful headaches.

He was right.

After years of studying Tai Chi, I was able to learn how to block the pain of my headaches. I began to understand myself from within and truly started to like and believe in myself. In my late teens and into my early twenties, I began exploring various other martial art forms until I found and settled into Jeet Kune Do.

That’s when the real fun began.

Basically, when a cluster headache started, I would go into my Yang style of Tai Chi, which is a very relaxed and slow moving form. Most of the time, I would close my eyes as I progressed through the moves.

Except one time.

That first time I opened my eyes and saw visual artifacts, I thought it was just a side effect of blocking my headaches pain, but later I realized that what I was seeing was much more than mere artifacts. It was strange, because only my left eye would see these artifacts. That’s the eye my headaches always focused in. My right eye vision was normal. It was as if I was seeing into the heart of the living and non-living objects around me. There was a great astronomer that once described that we were all made of “star stuff”. I felt that what I was seeing was this star stuff. It was in everything. It connected me to everything. Of course, now I realize that what I was seeing was the code of the Matrix, but I didn’t know that at the time.

It was only when I was having one of my headaches and practicing my Tai Chi that I would see the world in a different light. Not long after my first visual experience, I started to realize I could manipulate and control my environment. I would slip into Jeet Kune Do and started moving faster than I ever thought possible. My kicks and punches felt much more powerful and focused. It’s the most “alive” feeling I had ever had and became quickly became addicted to it. But it would only last 30 minutes at a time.

And then it happened.

I was in a regional martial arts tournament. Usually I don’t go for such things, but my instructor talked me into it. He wanted to promote his studio and was asking his top students to participate. He was a good friend, so I decided to help. My instructor and I ended up being at the top of our weight class. The top men and women of each class were asked to spar against each other. So, I was up against my instructor. I have never been able to beat him.

Just as the round started, one of my headaches kicked off. This had never happened before during a sparring match. It was as if the whole world slowed down. I could see his moves clearly and blocked and avoided his attacks with ease. Then I went on the attack. I caught him completely off-guard. I came at him with such speed and force that literally his jaw dropped. I landed a forceful hit into his chest that knocked him up and off his feet, landing him flat on his back off the mat. At that moment, I relaxed.

Then the pain hit.

The headache was none like I had ever had before. The pain was intense, sharp and searing into my brain. I collapsed onto the mat. Everything seemed to dissolve around me. That’s the last thing I remember about the Matrix. My next memory is nothing but a nightmare and I just remember bits and pieces. I’ve probably blocked most of it from my mind. Folks here in the real world say I’m a self-substantiated. That I freed myself and woke up. Fortunately, when I was flushed from the Matrix, your hovercraft was in the area, saw me ejected from the system and picked me up. I don’t remember that part, actually, but that’s what I’ve been told.

The Zion physicians said that my main neural pathway to the brain had a defective hardware component. My headache pain was basically brainwave feedback. It would take the machines 30 minutes to register a problem in my chamber, send out a unit to adjust the frequency of my main neural pathway to correct the issue, and then the headache would go away. It seems the machines only reacted to the symptoms and didn’t troubleshoot or fix the real issue. The Zion physicians have corrected that and I no longer have the headaches when jacked in.

Looking back on it now, I’m not so sure I would have traded the headaches for the truth. But I’m here now. I run missions for Zion from one of the barges, because they are my ticket back in. I stay jacked in as much as I can. My other barge mates call me Stray, because I tend to do my own thing. I’ll be honest with you; I’d rather be in there. Don’t get me wrong; I have no love for the machines for what they have done to our kind, but I’m not going out of my way to “free” others from their happy lives into this tortured hell.