"Now!"
"Hold on baby"
Deep beneath the ruined surface of the Earth was Zion, the last human city. It’s first
line of defence against the Machines was a fleet of hovercraft, salvaged from the remains
of the Old World. Or so humanity believed.
These hovercraft were also required for hacking into and freeing minds from the Matrix, as
access was only possible close to the surface, far above the relatively safe depth of Zion.
Hacking features Freeing minds required efforts in both worlds.
Those crewmembers who had the implanted hardware that enabled connection to the Matrix contacted
the avatar of a mind to be freed, and gave them a tracing program that allowed the hovercrafts
operator to find the real world location of their body and to disconnect it.
The newly freed person was then retrieved and taken to the ships med bay, where their
atrophied muscles were rapidly grown. Once this was done, they were either taken back
to Zion, or remained on board as a new member of the crew.
The hardware that allowed hovercraft crew to jack in to the Matrix also allowed for
rapid training through direct upload to the brain. This was all done by the ships operator,
who could also generate constructs, miniature simulated worlds for sparring, practice
and generating equipment to be taken on missions. While their main role was doing the hacks
for placing jacked in crew into the Matrix, the operator also provided mission support
through intelligence, directions and setting up exits. They could also supply on-the-fly
training uploads if needed.
The ships reached broadcast depth through the use of hoverpads. These afforded all hovercraft
an extreme amount of maneuverability; even the heaviest and largest of them could make
incredibly sharp turns at the hands of a skilled pilot.
One downside of these pads is that they emitted potentially dangerous electrical arcs, with
the amount of arcing proportional to how hard the pads were working. Due to this, the landing
pads at Zions dock were surrounded by lightning rods to protect anyone nearby.
While travelling to and from Zion, hovercraft crews had to protect themselves from packs
of Sentinels, search and destroy machines that patrolled the vast tunnel system below
the surface. As the best defence was simply not being found, the ships landed in out of
the way areas and limited power usage to only mission critical systems.
If the hovercraft was found while landed, and Sentinels were in range, an EMP could
be used to disable all nearby electronics, including the hovercraft itself. If someone
was currently jacked in to the Matrix, the crew had to make the choice of killing them,
since the EMP disconnected the mind from the body,
"The body cannot live without the mind."
or trying to buy time for them to reach an exit by defending the ship with handheld lightning
guns.
As the EMP could not be safely used in flight, a hovercraft that was on the move was forced
to run while preventing Sentinels from landing on the hull. To do this, each ship had a number
of gun turrets to shoot them down before they got too close. If Sentinels did manage to
land, the hovercraft had extremely tough outer hulls to further delay their entry. These
hulls were so strong they could even be used to batter through obstacles, and could easily
survive crash landings.
After an EMP was burned, the crew typically left their ship and hid nearby to wait for
another hovercraft to find them. The two ships were then connected together in order to jumpstart
or charge the batteries on the powered down one.
These highly developed defensive procedures and systems made a lot of sense, with each
layer providing the most chance of crew survivability in each situation.
There are some unanswered questions about the origins of the hovercraft fleet due to
the real age of the Matrix. Humanity believed that the year was roughly 2199, 100 years
since the first minds were freed from the Matrix. Hovercraft were supposedly from before
the Machine war, with humanity salvaging them from the ruins of the old world.
In actuality, the Matrix had gone through multiple cycles.
"This will be the sixth time we have destroyed it."
This means that after the end of each cycle and the destruction of Zion, the machines
meticulously sterilised the city, the tunnels and the surface of all evidence of the previous
cycle. This included the remains of any and all hovercraft, removing all on-board equipment
related to jacking in to the Matrix.
It’s unlikely that the machines simply refit the hovercraft to a pre-Matrix state, as many
were so severely damaged during the war that they would be unusable, leading to a steadily
diminishing number of craft over the centuries. A number of new facsimiles of ships would’ve
had to have been created in each cycle for humanity to find and salvage.
Hovercraft were hardy, agile vessels that provided the only link that the people of
Zion had to the Matrix, and those trapped within it. This meant that the ships and their
crews were a precious resource, integral to the continued survival of free humanity.
Because of this high value, the ships primarily relied on hiding from Sentinels rather than
directly engaging them. If they were discovered, they had a well developed set of procedures
designed to keep the crew alive and the ship intact for later recovery.
In order for the machines to maintain the facade concealing the cyclical nature of the
Matrix, the alleged Old World origin of hovercraft has to be incorrect, or at least
obfuscated. Along with the role that the ships played in freeing the One and allowing them
to jack in to the Matrix to return to the Source, meant that ultimately, hovercraft
were just another element of control exerted by the machines.
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