Episode 10: Matr1x Alliance: Story of Z

On the 2060s Earth, the unparalleled and superior Uranus Group suppresses and monopolizes everything, becoming an iron curtain visible to all. All resources in the world become scarce, not only in quantity but also in the sense that the Uranus Group seizes all resources in their hands, filtering and exploiting them, leaving very few resources for ordinary people.

Against this backdrop, ordinary people only have a few choices: to attach themselves to the Uranus Group and become one of their accomplices and vassals; to become mercenaries and fight for the Uranus Group; to join a gang and make a living in the black market and oppressing the weaker, competing for resources with the Uranus Group. Those who were too weak or eliminated in competition could only struggle to survive. Order and law had long been meaningless, and no one could be relied upon except oneself. Attaching oneself to the Uranus Group is already the best way out. People have to undergo various specialized modifications to outcompete others in internal competitions and secret operations just to get a formal job or become an outsourced worker while enduring high-intensity work and endless pressure and assessment. All of this is just to carve out a nest for themselves and their families on this torn Earth, even if it means living a life in the dark like ants or moles. But for big shots like Oswin, ordinary people are just numbers and codes on their assessment tools, and the life and death of individuals are irrelevant. People are nothing more than expendable resources like minerals, coal, and so. When this batch of people is depleted, there would be another batch available to be consumed and exploited.

Although many people risk their lives to make a living and choose the opposite side of the Uranus, in the eyes of the Uranus, they are nothing but overconfident clowns who can be easily deterred, infiltrated, or bought off. However, amid despair, stand a few brave warriors who dare to fight back. Matr1x is one of the many resistance organizations. They are composed of a group of awakened individuals. Their ideas are derived from the DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) model, which was popularized in the early 21st century and is based on blockchain technology. This free, collaborative, and autonomous organizational model has once driven the development of technology, making it suitable for the complex and uncertain environment of the cyber world.

In the eyes of these rebels, the Uranus symbolizes oppression and exploitation and represents the authorities’ suppression of curiosity and the desire to explore. The term "Uranus" originated from the initiator of the Matr1x Alliance, a programmer with the code name "Z".

According to rumors circulating on the "dark web," programmer Z was one of the partners in the Virtual Reality Gaming department of the Thoule Group. After the success of the Virtual Athens project, Oswin expanded it and planned a large-scale virtual reality game called "Back." Initially, Oswin wanted to lead people back to the golden age of Athens in the 5th century BC, to sit and chat with ancient sages, and ponder their lives. Now, he has decided to recreate glorious periods in human history in the metaverse.

As early as his student days, the visionary Oswin realized that humans' rich material life was passing away or regressing. And the world, as written by Eliot, would eventually revert to a wasteland, where all goods would be scarce. At that time, many memory cafes emerged, similar to internet cafes in the early 20th century. These stores are equipped with many immersion tanks, as well as memory databases connected to neural cortex discs. People could not only experience their own past but also experience memory data fragments circulating in the public sphere.

Designing a way to subconsciously imprison the vast majority of people as the future ruler has been something he has been carefully planning. He has spent half of his life and a large portion of his family's wealth on this, including designing a time-tracing game based on "Cyber Athens." Oswin publicly claimed that this was a nostalgia project that could help people recall the good old days, and even launched a global archaeological project. In reality, his true intention was to make people addicted to the beautiful old times, thereby numbing the masses and altering history through the game's content, taking people’s thoughts away from rebelling.

According to Tulle's promotion, this is an immersive metaverse game built on the company's long-accumulated database. However, it is actually accomplished by time-travel technology which is still under experiment. The whole project utilized the powerful "Tungus dust" to distort time, sending minions back to the past to collect files and data information and experience the true history. In addition, the project team itself is also conducting data archaeology in a massive amount of historical media data, excavating network news that can evoke memories for the elderly. These popular elements can touch the emotional cords of the elderly the most and awaken their memories of that era.

The core period presented in the project is the "Golden Twenty Years" from 2000 to 2020. Compared to ancient times, this period is closest to the cyber era and has the most abundant information, which also makes it feel more familiar. People who live like ants in the real world need to use their meager income to pay for expensive admission tickets to enter the Back Metaverse. Unknowingly, time seems to have turned back. People born in the 1980s, 1990s, and the first two decades of the 21st century seem to have returned to their vibrant and energetic old days. Countless people in the project relive their golden childhood, sweet love, and thriving careers. As long as they connect to the brain-computer interface, they can completely forget about all the unpleasant things in reality.

As one of the game developers, Z thoroughly realized Oswin's intentions. He had serious doubts about the purpose of the project and witnessed how people indulged in virtual reality and eventually abandoned reality. Some extremely private information and scenes appeared in the game. Even with excellent planning abilities, it was difficult to restore them so vividly without experiencing that firsthand. Z later discovered that some company employees needed to undertake special tasks, and shortly after completing these tasks, they would age severely. Z suspected that this project was related to organ memory and blood memory, but it was not until Oswin's base got captured that the truth about the twisted space-time machine became clear to the world.

Z deeply felt that time was running out, and if he didn't continue to stop Oswin, humanity - at least those free and brave people - would fall into an irreparable abyss. Like the Puritans, Z began to look for like-minded people within the Thoule Group to conspire to break the virtual world's erosion of reality and to pass on the seeds of rebellion. In his plan, he hoped to modify the game mechanics, such as proposing a mandatory game time limit and modifying the BCI background codes, but he could not escape the restrictions of the group's data framework, and his attempts to modify the codes repeatedly failed. The company wanted to infinitely extend the user's experience time; to permanently numb the majority with spiritual opium.

Today, nobody knows how this genius engineer made up his mind to transform from a weak scholar to the initiator of an armed group. According to the core members, the earliest members of the Matr1x Alliance were fanatics like religious believers, with a sense of superiority that was not down-to-earth. The most deadly part was that there was literally no armed personnel among these people, but a group of seemingly powerless programmers and geeks.

The name of the organization, Matr1x, comes from a movie that was popular over half a century ago. Z discovered this series of films from the late 20th and early 21st centuries called "The Matrix," which had a very similar worldview and game mechanics to "Back." The only difference is that in the real future, it isn't computers, but insatiable oppressors known as the Uranus who are devouring and ruling the world. Only by breaking free from the virtual world constructed by the codes could humanity have a future. The protagonist of the story, Neo, had a name that could be rearranged to spell "one," the chosen one to save humanity. Inspired by this movie, Z named the organization Matr1x, using "1" to replace "I," symbolizing the organization’s search for "the one", the savior. Finding "the one" became one of the organization's missions, but who exactly is "the one"? Is it a person or some other form of life? Is "the one" an individual or a collective of all rebels with free will? The concept of "the one" would constantly evolve with time, but the spiritual core remains unchanged, much like the famous philosophical proposition from ancient Greece known as "The Ship of Theseus" - if all the wooden parts of a ship are replaced over time, would it still be considered the same ship?

Although Matr1x was ostensibly an armed organization, it initially operated by hacking into the memories of the elites and creating false emotional traumas and childhood fears. However, resistance in the virtual world could never be as effective as an armed struggle.

Later, Z, who fled from the Thoule Group and traveled the world incognito, came into contact with a wider social circle: disabled workers who lost their jobs due to work-related injuries and could not afford mechanical prosthetics; veterans who lost their healthy bodies in war and became addicted to illegal body modifications; and children who became orphans after their parents were killed by gangs. These opened Z's mind and made him realize how broken the bottom world was under the rule of the Uranus. What he saw and heard made him aware that his keyboard and mice could not change people's fate. It was also during this process that Matr1x transformed from a tightly organized semi-purist group to a looser but more inclusive network. It no longer emphasizes the purity of the organization and anyone who dared to resist the Uranus and identified with Matr1x Alliance's philosophy could become a member. Oppressed former Uranus employees, mercenaries, social outcasts, gang members, opinion leaders, cyber gurus, and black market traders joined the organization one after another.

One of Z's admirers and followers who joined the organization at a very early stage was Nash, a geek programmer who lived on the edge of crime. Although Z and most of the core members were executives and tech talents from companies under the Thoule Group, they often anonymously posted technical posts on geek forums, with a wide audience that included many members of Shitcode. These people live off stealing digital assets and intelligence from the group by hacking into programs and spotting bugs. They initially referred to those technical posts to study how to invade the Uranus' databases. Later, they started to create viruses to disrupt the Uranus' Meta and mining programs, consuming system resources and slowing down processor speeds. In the end, they accidentally triggered a minefield left by technical personnel, leading to the exposure of the organization. Oswin ordered a massive purge within the company to clear out the moles planted by the organization.

With the lack of anti-reconnaissance awareness, most of the original members of Matr1x Alliance were eliminated by the Uranus. But Z was able to escape thanks to Nash, who had hacked into the security system of Thoule Group and played the wicked "Dancing Pallbearers" videos to all the robots and security systems, rendering them completely incapacitated. When Z saw this historical data, he was shocked but quickly realized that the "attacker" wouldn't harm him. Nash bought him time to escape from Thoule’s headquarters by fooling the security system.

After arriving at the safe house arranged by Nash, Z realized that many of the game materials in "Back" were actually excavated by people like Nash, and then purchased by his subcontractors. This was the reason why the "Dancing Pallbearers" video can. be brainwashing people in Thoule Group's base.

Through contact with rebellious programmers like Nash, Z learned about the dark net system "Ley Line" (Python, an ancient programming system, and also the name of the python that lived in Delphi in Greek mythology), which became an important link for the circulation of goods and organization of the Matr1x economy in the future. Z also realized that the occasional mutation behavior of robots in the company was actually because of Shitcode's experiment on robot awakening. It was said that it was Z's plan that led to the uprising of the Deux Ex Machina. However, the Uranus cleverly redirected the uprising from the intense social contradictions of human society to the contradiction between humans and robots, which made people more vigilant and ultimately subjected them to more severe oppression. This is not a solution, at least not a good starting point, so Z still needs more followers.

To improve the organizational structure, Z needed to free some of his former colleagues from the clutches of the Uranus. However, Nash's geeks were powerless. Therefore, with Nash's access to the massive base of information, Z contacted Eiriksson, a veteran, and established connections with other veterans. This was the first time Z had contact with armed personnel, and it was these contacts that truly link them with violent battles. Eiriksson later recalled feeling a bit uneasy with Z's clean freak mind and overly white skin. But Z hinted that if he did things for him, he could not only help Eiriksson maintain his gang, but also generate stable income for them, including but not limited to illegal mining, self-made weapons, and recycling of scrap robots. This made Eiriksson's appetite whetted. Although he initially approached the job with a "let's do one deal first" mentality, with Nash's guidance and mentoring, Eiriksson figured that Z could indeed bring substantial profits to the organization. And these profits could keep his brothers from hunger. With Z's help, Eiriksson could now carry out his revenge plan against Oswin, who had ruined his reputation.

After breaking through the original social circle and completing the architecture, Z mysteriously disappeared, leaving a final message: find the one. Rumors in the community say that Z was a lonely scientist from the latter half of the 22nd century. He witnessed the even more tragic fate of humanity at that time while working for the Thoule Group, so he traveled back in time to overthrow the rule of the Thoule Group. Z had no interest in revealing what that era will become. He just kept suggesting that the future of humanity would be more tragic than you can imagine, which is the energy source of his selfless work.

Feeling his enthusiasm, nobody asked too much or disturb him without reason. Z's way of saving the world was to use micro black hole technology from the 22nd century to travel back in time. Due to the mechanism of time travel, people who travel back in time can only return to a point before their own birth. Once they are about to be born, the traveler will automatically die to avoid identity confusion caused by time paradoxes. Moreover, the earlier the time travel, the shorter the time that the traveler can stay in that timeline, otherwise it will endanger the traveler's life. Finally, time traveling will cause the traveler to age in reverse, becoming younger in terms of physical function. This also explains why Z always looked so young and decent, and why his plans seemed out of place.

After careful calculations, Z set the time point for his uprising in the 2050s, a time when he had not yet been born, allowing him to stay long enough and build the framework for his resistance army.

With the help of his knowledge of future technology, he quickly became the key technical personnel of the Thoule Group and began working on his plan. After laying out the initial structure of the organization, Z vanished. After a long time, there were signs saying that Z had committed suicide in his shelter, but his arrival had already changed the timeline. The space-time he came from has collapsed, and the fate of humanity has diverged.

After Z’s disappearance, the remaining people set finding Z as their top priority. They once believed that "the one" referred to Z himself. However, they eventually realized that as long as they had the spirit of resistance and the spark of battle, it no longer mattered who ignited the fuse. In the memories of Nash and Eiriksson, "the one" is a quiet and well-proportioned warrior, not particularly strong or tall compared to people in the cyber age, but filled with the passion of battle. Although Z was younger than all of them in terms of age, he saw through the hidden cards of history and possessed calmness, tolerance, and compassion that surpassed his generation. However, it was difficult to see his emotions in this life.

But as an armed resistance organization, they also need to be physically capable of dealing with potential emergencies. Although the civilian resistance, represented by the programmers and specialists, is not as battle-hardened, with proper training they can act as a strong rearguard in a combat formation. This is more in line with the commander's role of organizing the rear and controlling the situation.

After Z's departure, Nash has the closest job nature to Z, and he is also the best coordinator in the whole organization. However, his hippie style once made Erickson and the others feel very uncomfortable, and Nash's definition of himself is not a commander at the back of the line, but relatively pure, uninvolved in the war. And he is very reluctant to take a gun, unless he is being beaten to the doorsteps of his family, or has a deep grudge against the other side. After Nash, Eiriksson took over command for a while, but after a number of costly raids, Eiriksson was removed from his post. He was not good at coordinating departmental cooperation, and the economic system was on the verge of collapse. So the organization reverted to being led by a combination of department heads, and the dismissed Eiriksson was once in charge of weapons management, during which he developed a penchant for making his own guns, but at a very poor level. As the resistance progresses, the organization continues to absorb all kinds of forces: robots, veterans, veterans with prosthetic limbs, and orphaned girls who lost their families in the war, and so on. The variety of People makes the organization stronger and more resilient.