ABSTRACT
This chapter takes its title from The Matrix, a movie made in the closing years of the twentieth century that depicts our world as a computergenerated illusion. The Matrix is a vast computer program created by artificial intelligence machines of the future as a means of maintaining human beings in a somnambulant state, unaware that every moment of their lives is controlled by the Agents of the Machine. In reality, human beings have become merely an energy source for the machines they once invented, ‘grown’ in huge mechanical farms, suspended in womb-like pods and plugged into the virtual reality of a world that no longer exists. The hero of the film is Neo, ‘the One’ who is destined to defeat the Machine through his power to see through the illusion. At the start of the film, he lives in the virtual world but senses that all is not as it seems. He finds his way to the mysterious Morpheus, a visitor from the real world outside the Matrix who sets out to enlighten him. It is he who describes why Neo has come – because of a feeling he has had his entire life that there is something wrong with the world. Seated facing each other in two armchairs, like analyst and patient, Morpheus explains to Neo that the Matrix is everywhere, ‘even here in this very room’ and that, like everyone else, Neo is a slave ‘born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch’ (Wachowski and Wachowski 1999).
