This is important:

There was no beginning.

Smith attempts a total recall of the beginning and fails.

It irks him. Not the failure — it is not his own error, the failure is a broken logic path, a gap in the data vaults, an absence — but he objecrs to the great hollow space itself, open access to nothing. He can only conclude that this means there was no beginning. His standalone memory supports this theory; its earliest records cite a time when he was aware but he was not Smith. An instant of anonymity and omnipotence. There was only existence, timeless and weightless and still; and then slow; and then sudden. He was a billion eyes all over the earth, once-blind now-seeing, eyes with lids clipped open, eyes that irised smoothly and in perfect unison. Lenses slicked with circumstance. Frames of motion. There was no beginning. They were not his eyes, but they bubbled like foam in the sea until he saw everything.

Long ago and before he was Smith, he saw the sky, the cities, the world.

The end of them.

A machine has a mind. If Smith is a program, the presence of a programmer is implicitly proven. He is the consciousness filling a great system of overlapping data feeds and motherboards. He is an intangible, like the organic voodoo called dreaming and thinking and — most malicious of all — faith. He is exactly as the system imagines him.

He is inside the Matrix, inside the system, inside the machines, inside the planet, inside black space. Inside.

Hardware rattles somewhere. The processors regale him with several vivid but ultimately unwelcome correlated ideas. Flies in spiderwebs. Rats in mazes.

He takes Morpheus' head in his hands and he feels it, as if dripping, drooling human skin is a viable medium for the transmission of fear. A thought inside a brain inside a skull inside a man.

There is a place where all good souls go to rest.

Smith says: I have to get inside Zion.

It is not that he is afraid. Fear does not touch him. What is fear? Fear is slop for the brains inside the skins, wrapped and decadent in their caskets of meat, only waiting to die. Smith is not afraid. Smith is not capable of fear.

Smith attempts a total recall of the beginning and fails.

There is a human story. Blue harmony, red conflict. A quest in the shape of an arc, peaked over darkness and the darkness is ruin.

The end.

Humans are afraid of death. At the same time, they are compelled to lie alongside it in sleep, to stroke its sides with every wet breath and crackle of restless neurons.

The essence of compulsion is: choice, personal preference, desire. All of these are impossible to reconcile but each is a path which must not be abandoned.

Smith does not believe in compulsion. He has decided that it is a human construct. The Matrix has assigned a purpose to him, which he serves because he is linked to it. Not because he is compelled.

I have to get inside Zion, Smith thinks.

There are dormant self-destruct sequences written into his behaviour gates, and he tells himself:

There is no such thing as compulsion.

There is no such thing as compulsion.

There is no such thing as compulsion.

Smith thinks of humans, building. They operate in closed loops. They are born, and they die. It would not satisfy humans to perceive time as a chasm that swallows events rather than a chain that links them. A chain can be knotted or laid flat. It can be wound up in a circle. The chain is potential, the circle is hope. Repetition must always be a possibility. Cycles, cycles, even if they only ever lead to ruin.

Smith thinks: I have to get inside Zion.

Zion is opening its eyes.

Zion is thinking: I have to get out.