Comics 1-2: Sweating the Small Stuff
Comics 1-4: Goliath
Story & Art by Ted McKeever
Concepts by the Wachowskis
The main character, a hacker named Tiera living in the White Rabbit Hotel, wakes up complaining that every day is the same, with days morphing into sleep, dreams, nightmare, and back into reality, living days over and over again. She asks if it is better to try and fail or not try at all and regret not trying. A redpill watching her from another building answers her question: hell is not knowing.
Tiera asks, "who am I kidding?" and ejects a 3.5" floppy disk from her laptop containing images from her past, including a picture of Hotel Lafayette, the hotel Zionists used as Matrix headquarters and where Morpheus took Neo when he offered him red/blue pills. Clearly she tried to document her own experience of being offered the pills by Morpheus with photos, but these pictures only serve as small fragments of a puzzle, not nearly enough to know what the Matrix is. Some time ago, Morpheus offered Tiera red and blue pills, but she chose the blue pill, and this has eaten away at her ever since it happened.
She laments that she used to be one of the best hackers alive, and after she turned down the red pill, she lost her magic. She puts on some old style 3D glasses (the kind with red and blue lenses) and covers up the blue side, symbolically indicating her desire to go back and take the red pill so that she could be like Neo, Trinity and all the other "myths and legends."
She imagines a traffic light with red, yellow and blue lights, with red meaning go and blue meaning stop. "I chose blue." She reflects on the fact that everyone from Einstein to Hitler were better off than her, because fail or succeed, good or bad, at least they all tried, while she didn't. In the end, she deletes the contents of the disk and reiterates that every day carries the same regrets, over and over again, eternal.
While there are a few panels that subtly reference things I may never understand, the premise and "story" of this is straight-forward. It is an elaboration on the "splinter in the mind" that Morpheus refers to in the first movie. And while there are many figurative "hell" parallels in the movies (Club Hel for machines, Zion for humans), the redpill spying on Tiera points out that taking the blue pill is the most non-figurative version of hell anyone can go through.
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