Comics 1-6: Butterfly
Comics 1-8: Get It?
Story & Art by Troy Nixey
Color by Dave McCaig
Based on concepts by the Wachowskis
A hovercraft crewman is laying in bed recovering from a month-long episode of being MIA and assumed dead [I will refer to him as Recovering since no name is specified in the story]. Another crewman pays him a visit, explaining he volunteered to take care of him [I'll refer to him as Caretaker]. As Recovering is finally well enough to have a conversation, he tells Caretaker his story of what happened.
When Recovering's original crew were taking the hovercraft out on a routine mission to scout for machine defenses, Recovering's crewmate (or captain?) Heater decided they should check out one of the fetus fields, against the objections of Recovering and Split. Their plan was to fly low, which would have worked, but they flew too low and clipped something, causing the ship to crash.
Everyone else perished, but despite a broken arm, broken leg, three cracked ribs, and head trauma, Recovering was able to crawl himself away from the wreckage and get some cover from sentinels that were inevitably on their way. Still, as sentinels were scratching and digging away at the junk around him, he would have been captured had it not been for someone pulling him into a pipe and going underground.
The man who rescued him was quite old, often referred to as a "coot" by Recovering [I'll call him Coot]. Coot nurtures Recovering back to health. Coot has also has a reprogrammed sentinel that he had salvaged at some point. The sentinel had severed legs so that it just a sentinel torso with a bunch of short stumps coming out of it.
As they get to know each other, Coot shows himself to be a wacko, believing that he is a knight "of the order" fighting dragons. Coot has no sense of the real world, as he has gotten all of his information from books such as Don Quixote, King Arthur's Court, and Ivan the Terrible. Coot even owns a real actual sword. Coot says he knows that Recovering is part of this "brotherhood" as well since he shows the same "silvery bites" / "stings of a dragon" (referring to all the holes all over the arms and torso that are used to plug the body into a human Matrix pod). Coot shows Recovering the dragons he speaks of by having Recovering look through a periscope-like device that views the surface. It turns out fetus harvesting machines were his "dragons." Clearly, Coot had been freed from the fetus fields and raised by someone outside of the Matrix/Zion without knowing what really happened.
Likewise, Coot thinks Recovering is a lunatic when Recovering tries to explain the Matrix - he has never heard of the Matrix and doesn't believe it exists.
Recovering discovers that Coot salvaged several things from the crashed hovercraft ship, including the radio, which he proceeds to repair and presumably eventually uses to contact Zion and be rescued.
They continue to get on each others' nerves, and over the course of several nights, Coot makes a lot more noise than normal. When asked about it, Coot shows Recovering a "sword of a different color," namely a smoldering iron that he's using.
One morning, Recovering wakes up to find Coot and the sentinel gone. Coot left a "package" for him (a book and a paper).
Recovering looks at the surface through the periscope, and he sees Coot carry out an attack. His reprogrammed Sentinel attracts a ton of other sentinels to that location, and a massive bomb explodes. The shock of the bomb (transferred through the periscope) knocks him over.
Recovered has another look at the "package" left for him. It is a poster/drawing/picture of two men, one of whom is a knight with armor and a sword, the other looking like a regular guy, with the word "FREEDOM" written above. Next to that was a book titled "Trojan War" with a picture of the trojan horse on the cover. Recovered thinks to himself that Coot isn't crazy after all.
Since no redpill freed of the Matrix would ever create a line of descendants unaware of the Matrix, Coot had to be a descendant of people who eluded the original creation of the Matrix. I don't mean that he descended reproductively. More likely, these descendants have probably been freeing babies from the fetus fields (or rescuing discarded ones) and raising them, teaching them the traditions established by fictional books that have been passed down as gospel. All versions of the Matrix probably span around 600 years cumulatively, and that is far more than enough time for the origin of a people to become entirely forgotten.
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