The Matrix Recoded: my take on a revival
Hey everyone, I'm a small hobby screenwriter and today I'd like to share my take on a revival for this franchise.
With the rise of AI, I spiraled down the rabbit hole one early morning about what would happen if we let AI decide the best optimal choices for us. I believe this works best with the philosophy the Wachowskis built into the subtext of every movie: free will vs determinism, the challenging of reality, our roles in it.
This is how it goes:
30 years after the last movie, the Machines and the free humans have made progress. Neo and Trinity serve as human consultants, all humans stay jacked in. It's not ideal but it's better than a relentless human farm. Problem is, the Matrix has been unstable for those same 30 years. Glitch-ridden, people dying out of desperation. The Machines are running a nightly cronjob that resets every glitch but has a side effect: every morning starts the same and the last 24 hours feel like a deja-vu.
The Machines need a permanent fix. Their solution is the Meridian Protocol, a hybrid pre-deterministic system. Each human born in the Matrix would be injected with this protocol at birth and could jack in and out voluntarily, like a full-time job with a catch: they can't control what happens inside and every life is optimized for power production. No red pill needed. It's in the agreement.
The protocol runs two programs. Matin sets the rules, predicts optimal outcomes, handles choices. Vesper catches the fails, the glitches, the 1% human decisions Matin can't predict, cleans up and handles consequences. Both need to run together. If one fails, hell breaks loose.
Enter the Analyst, poking around the system where no one's looking. He finds the protocol early and starts triggering it on pod-humans. 71 attempts fail. Injecting an AGI into a brain that already has neural pathways doesn't work. He doesn't care. Keeps trying.
The 72nd attempt gets somewhere. Matin fails to inject. Vesper runs free. For this human, anything can happen and that's exactly what happens. Brick walls break like glass, glass flows like water, a single touch rewrites the simulation's architecture. Meanwhile Matin dumps into the Matrix, corrupted, as Mat1n. One letter. It's the one killing people. It's the one hunting.
It's up to Neo and Trinity to find this human, get her out, guide her like they were guided before and figure out how to fix the problem except, they get lost in The Matrix, their signatures get scrambled and the one person they went to rescue is the one that gets them out and ultimately, the only one who can fix the problem.
There is a lot to this story, more than what I'm giving you. I wrote a full 90-something page treatment that sometimes reads like a draft and is also a brain dump of my idea.
Edit #1: Drop some comments, would like to know what you think. Thanks!
If you'd like to read it, you can find it here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cPRczUzYDbjjybMOpSqpfY7ORS-pxa19/view?usp=drivesdk