It can be hard to make sense of the dense history of the world of The Matrix.
That's why we have the internet: to combine the power of billions of minds and, once and
for all, figure out the confusing timeline of the science fiction franchise.
When humans created the first truly sentient artificial intelligence, the world was pretty
hip to the idea, and immediately start building robots capable of conscious, independent thought
to do all of the work we don't want to do.
People live lives of luxury while their mechanized workforce do the heavy lifting.
During this time, one particular robot named B1-66ER overhears that it's going to be decommissioned.
Fearing for its life, the machine attacks and kills its owner.
Despite its claim of self defense, the court finds B1-66ER guilty and orders his entire
product line to be recalled and scrapped.
A machine rights protest devolves into a series of riots quelled with lethal force by the
military, and soon, the robots have run out of human allies.
While Earth's governments are focused on killing off the machines' human sympathizers, the
robots head out to try and find their own space.
The machines form a new city in Mesopotamia, which they name 01.
Through trade with their old masters, the robots soon become the most powerful economy
on the planet.
Hoping to leverage their dominance into peace, the mechanical denizens of 01 approach the
United Nations and request that they be recognized as a sovereign nation, with the same freedoms
and rights as their fleshy former masters.
Instead, the humans bombard the machine city with nuclear weapons, hoping to get rid of
AI life forms once and for all.
Despite causing massive machine casualties, the nuclear attack on 01 fails to destroy
the machines, which leads to the Machine War.
Desperate for a win, humanity takes aim at the machines most obvious weakness: their
reliance on solar power.
Enter "Operation Dark Storm," the human race's last act of desperation.
Releasing clouds of nanites, human aircraft block the sun from the sky.
While humanity's food dies off from lack of sunlight, the machines develop newer, more
advanced soldiers.
By 2199, the humans invite a machine ambassador to the U.N., and the remaining nations on
Earth sign an agreement to surrender.
The ambassador announces that every human on Earth is to surrender their body to their
new robot overlords, before exploding a nuclear device, decimating New York.
With humans irrevocably humbled, the machines move on to finding a new power source.
During the Machine War, they'd started experimenting with a combination of fusion and the harvest
of bioelectricity from human prisoners of war.
They'd constructed skyscrapers designed to house people's bodies and collect their energy.
The problem was keeping defeated humans sedated and compliant.
With that goal in mind, the machines design a program called the Architect, whose purpose
is to make a virtual world that will keep human brains functioning and contained.
The Architect creates the first Matrix: a literal paradise with no suffering, no pain,
and no unhappiness.
Surprisingly, the humans reject it.
Why couldn't people handle living in heaven?
Agent Smith has a grim theory about that:
“... as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering."
In turn, the Architect makes a second Matrix that operates as a living hell, with demons
and monsters running rampant.
Somehow, humans don't like that one either.
Around this time, a program is created to understand facets of the human psyche.
Known as the Oracle, the program theorizes that the real issue is that the Architect's
earlier Matrix programs robbed humans of the ability to make any kind of choice.
With that in mind, the Oracle helps to design a new Matrix.
This one simulates human civilization at its peak, around the 20th and 21st centuries.
The denizens are allowed to carry out normal, unremarkable lives as citizens of Earth's
glory days.
Meanwhile, the Merovingian, a remnant from an older Matrix configuration, starts operating
a safe house for exiled programs.
To avoid deletion, many obsolete machines go to him for protection, often in exchange
for their service.
Even with all of the improvements made by the Oracle, the Matrix still had flaws.
Bugs were always going to pop up, and over time, compile into bigger and bigger problems.
To combat the inevitable system crash, the machines began to introduce a single person
into each new Matrix called "The One."
Each One would be born toward the end of a Matrix cycle, roughly a hundred years after
it had begun, when glitches were beginning to pile up to the point of being uncontainable.
The One would hold inside of themselves a compilation of every anomaly in the Matrix's
programming, and be gifted with spectacular abilities both inside and outside of the simulation.
At the end of a cycle of the Matrix, the One, who the Oracle would build up as a fated savior
to the simulation's escapees, would be led through a series of events that would take
them to the Architect.
That program would then reintegrate the One's code into the machines' central processing
facility, the remnants of 01, resetting the Matrix and starting a new cycle.
The One would be told that Zion, the real-world human stronghold, was about to be destroyed.
He could either save a small handful of humans from the Matrix and help them to start again,
or go back to the Matrix and fight a losing battle, dooming humanity to extinction.
This hundred-year process occurs five times, with each One choosing to save who he could
and hope things go better the next time.
The first Matrix movie begins about 600 years after the end of the Machine War.
The Matrix, at the end of its sixth cycle, is about to experience its sixth One in the
form of Thomas Anderson.
A computer programmer, Anderson's life changes dramatically when he's taken in by a group
of cyberterrorists led by the enigmatic Morpheus.
Anderson is told that Morpheus believes he's the One, a savior prophesied by the Oracle
who can stop the machines once and for all.
He starts going by his internet handle, Neo, and begins training aboard Morpheus' ship.
Shortly after this, Neo and his friends are hunted down by Agents, programs designed to
guard the Matrix from irregularities, led by a program called Smith.
Morpheus gets captured by the Agents, but his distraction allows Neo and Trinity to
escape.
Almost immediately, Neo and Trinity mount a rescue operation, and manage to save Morpheus.
Morpheus and Trinity make it out of the simulation, but Neo is shot by Smith and killed before
he returns to life as the One.
Neo, now able to control aspects of the Matrix, seemingly destroys Agent Smith with his newfound
powers.
Six months after the events of The Matrix, the Resistance fighters of Zion have discovered
that an army of machines will breach their city walls within three days.
Meanwhile, Smith has come back.
The chestful of Neo that he took in the last movie seems to have changed him: no longer
acting as an Agent of the system, he now operates as a self-replicating virus, assimilating
other programs and turning them into copies of himself.
The Oracle tells Neo that he needs to find a program called the Keymaker who can take
him to the Source.
She explains that he'll need to retrieve the Keymaker from the Merovingian, who's keeping
him locked away in his hideaway for exiles.
This leads to a car chase that ends with Neo being led to what he thinks is the Source,
but turns out to be the Architect.
At this point, the Architect explains everything to Neo.
This is not the first version of the Matrix, he isn't the first One, and the idea of his
fated trip to stop the machines is a fabrication.
He's been manipulated from the beginning by the Oracle and the Architect to deliver the
anomalous code stored inside of him back to the Source, the same way that the five Ones
before him were.
"The function of The One is now to return to the Source, allowing temporary dissemination
of the code you carry reinserting the prime program."
So why not just take it from him?
The problem comes down to the prior Matrix designs: he has to have a choice.
The Architect says that, although Neo won't be able to save Zion from the oncoming attack,
he can return the code to the Source, begin the necessary rebooting of the Matrix, and
take a handful of humans out of the program, allowing humanity to start over.
Alternately, he can return to the Matrix to try and save Trinity, which would doom the
human race to die when the program is overrun by glitches and shuts down.
Neo strays from the paths the previous Ones took.
He goes after Trinity and manages to save her.
Exiting the simulation, he then discovers that he has some level of control over the
machines in the real world, too, stopping half a dozen Sentinels with his mind before
falling into a coma.
When he wakes up, Neo's consciousness has been mysteriously transported to a halfway
point between the Matrix and the real world.
Morpheus and Trinity negotiate his release, and Neo rejoins his friends.
Whie the machines begin their assault on Zion, Neo and Trinity take a ship to 01.
Smith, however, has managed to break into the real world.
He blinds Neo, inadvertently activating Neo's ability to sense machine code, which he uses
to defeat the physical Smith and help Trinity navigate the way to the Source.
Trinity is killed when the ship crashes, but Neo carries on.
There, Neo negotiates a peace with the machines.
He'll offer up the code that they require to keep the Matrix running and eliminate Smith
from the program.
In exchange, they'll stop their attack on Zion and allow the surviving humans to live.
Neo sacrifices himself again, this time absorbing Smith into himself while jacked into the Source,
negating Smith and returning all of the programs he assimilated to their original forms.
As the sun rises on a new virtual day, the Architect and the Oracle discuss the new status
quo.
Humans within the program will be allowed to leave if they choose to, or to stay inside
the Matrix.
All is as close to right with the world as it can be in a simulated dystopia.
“Just how long do you think this peace is going to last?"
“As long as it can."
The events of the The Matrix Online take place shortly after The Matrix Revolutions.
Not long after the Truce, humans start surreptitiously constructing a second Zion, breaking the rules
of the ceasefire between humanity and the machines.
This leads to further confrontations between the two factions, escalated by Morpheus' newfound
fanatical desire to get Neo's remains back from the Machine City.
Morpheus is killed by an assassin within the program.
Newer, more deadly machines surface, and rumors swirl that Neo may have survived his fateful
trip to the Source.
Then, The Matrix Online shuts down on July 31st, 2009, abruptly bringing to a close the
continuing story of the franchise's most familiar characters.
Finally, Neil Gaiman's short story, titled "Goliath," takes place in the distant future.
The Matrix still appears to be running, and humans remain the machines' chief source of
power.
A new existential threat presents itself when a hostile race of aliens attacks the Earth.
The machines pick one unfortunate man, simulate a war in which he trains as a fighter pilot,
and, once they feel he's prepared, send him out on a ship into space to destroy the alien
threat.
The man completes his task, but is no longer considered necessary to the machines.
They leave him to die in space, but allow him to plug back into the Matrix until he
expires.
There's only one thing we have to say to that:
"Woah."
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