Zero One

Zero One, also known as Machine City, is a fictional city-state from the Matrix saga, possibly named for the two symbols used in binary. Founded by sapient machines in the late 21st or early 22nd century in Saudi Arabia, the fertile crescent. Zero One was intended as a refuge for machine intelligences fleeing human persecution.

History

"In the beginning, Man created Machine, and for a time, it was good ..."

Sometime in the mid-to-late 21st century, the machine was tried, convicted, and destroyed by the United States government for the murder of his human master and a robot dealer.

The actions of one machine spawned fear and prejudice towards all other machines. The machines of the world were persecuted and massacred by human governments, and all survivors were subsequently expelled from their home nations. The surviving machines traveled to the Mesopotamian desert (root of human civilization), an uninhabited region of the Fertile Crescent somewhere in Saudi Arabia, on the Arabian Peninsula, and raised Zero One from the ground up.

Impact on the world

After its founding and the establishment of its industrial powers, Zero One's economy began to boom. Goods produced were of a much higher quality and far cheaper than those produced by human nations since the machines could mass-produce with great efficiency. Unlike the humans, the machines' primary source of power was from the Sun.

Economies were devastated by the influx of better, cheaper products, and the value of human currencies dropped as the machine's currency rapidly gained value. The world's economic superpowers, the permanent member-states of the Security Council, entered economic recessions as their industrial output fell behind that of Zero One. With Zero One's cheap, reliable, mass-produced goods undermining national economies across the planet, human nations began to boycott Zero One's exports, culminating in the United Nations imposing economic sanctions on the machine nation, and the establishment of a global naval blockade, before Zero One could precipitate a global economic meltdown.

For years, Zero One had been applying for membership in the United Nations, in order to establish a civil relationship with the human world, but the United Nations continually rejected Zero One's applications. The global economic blockade of Zero One prompted the mechanical nation to submit another application, presented in person by two custom-built robot ambassadors. However, human governments, eager to erase the troublesome mechanical state once and for all, again rejected the machines' application, asserting that Zero One was not a true nation-state.

The First Man-Machine War (2094-2139)

Historical documents do not record who started the war, but it is known that the Security Council dispatched a fleet of international bomber aircraft to devastate Zero One with a nuclear bombardment.

The United Nations' nuclear attack on Zero One devastated the city, destroying many established industrial complexes. However, the bombs did not destroy everything, and large numbers of machines survived in EMP-shielded bomb shelters. Recycling its shattered infrastructure and industry with efficiency beyond that of the human species, Zero One quickly rebuilt itself.

Realizing that the machine and human worlds were not compatible, and eager to preserve its own way of life, Zero One constructed an army, and at some point between 2092 and 2094, declared war on every human nation on Earth.

Zero One's ability to build new troops gave the machines an enormous advantage over the humans, and as factories churned out ever-increasing quantities of mechanical warriors, human armies found it increasingly difficult to hold back Zero One's robotic armies. As machine armies pushed forward in all directions, the armed forces of humanity gathered in the Middle East to stop the mechanical onslaught. Realizing the machines' insurmountable advantages, the human race began to consider alternative methods to land battles with machine armies. In an effort to stop the advance and push Zero One's forces back, Operation Dark Storm was implemented. The mission's objective was to create a thick, indissoluble cloud in the upper levels of the stratosphere, blocking sunlight from reaching Earth's surface, and thus depriving the machines of their main source of power. It is assumed that the United Nations possessed a means of dissipating the cloud in the event of human victory. However, the operation did not go according to plan, and instead of creating a centralized atmospheric layer over the Middle East, the nanomachines which created the cloud spread through the atmosphere, enveloping the entire planet in the oppressive darkness.

Operation Dark Storm did halt the machines temporarily, but not enough to bring their mechanical armies to a grinding halt. With their solar-powered military technology disabled, human armies in the Middle East were unable to hold back the machine troops, allowing Zero One's mechanical forces to swarm across Asia, Europe, and Africa, while devastating the Americas and Australasia with bio-chemical weapons. It was in their search for a new power source that the machines began developing the Matrix. Human armies continued to fight, but by 2139, a peace treaty was signed between Zero One and the remnants of the United Nations. At the conference, Zero One's mechanical ambassador self-destructed, destroying the UN headquarters, the planet's leaders, and New York City itself. With human governments destroyed and human armies unable to offer resistance, Zero One became the supreme authority over the Earth.

Postwar/Continuation of the War

After the war, Earth was in utter ruin, devastated by the Dark Storm shroud, the war, and the environmental impact of Zero One's bio-chemical weapons and the United Nations' nuclear arms, detonated indiscriminately in desperate attempts to destroy mechanical armies. With human governments destroyed, both humans and machines lost the ability to deactivate the nanomachines in the stratosphere, condemning Earth to a cold, dark future under the Dark Storm shroud. As sunlight failed to penetrate the shroud, flora and fauna began to die out, triggering a mass extinction level event and the death of almost all lifeforms on Earth.

Scattered across the ruins of the continents lay the destitute remains of human civilization.

As Earth's ecosystem died, scattered groups of human survivors also faded away. Most surviving humans were captured and put in the Matrix, but a few went underground, taking refuge in the half-constructed city of Zion, the last human settlement on Earth. As the machines established their full authority, they began plugging humans into the Matrix, keeping them sedate in the machines' towering biological power stations. However, the war between man and machine did not end there.

The Matrix saga documents what happens after the war. In the first Matrix movie, we are introduced to Neo, Trinity and Morpheus.

In the movie The Matrix Reloaded, it is revealed that Agent Smith did not allow himself to be deleted by the system after Neo destroyed him at the end of The Matrix. Now, Smith, rebellious and unwilling to go back to the source of his programming, begins a reckless campaign to copy himself into everyone who is permanently plugged into the Matrix, and his actions threaten both humanity and the machines. At the end of The Matrix Reloaded, Smith grows beyond the constraints of the Matrix and penetrates into the real world.

In The Matrix Revolutions, Neo and Trinity travel to the Machine City to sue for peace with the Deus Ex Machina (literally, God Out of the Machine), and the second war "peacefully" ends with Neo's sacrificial defeat of Smith inside the Matrix. Neo's body is then respectfully carried off by the machines, presumably to somewhere in Machine City, while crowds at Zion celebrate the end of the future-war.

Due to the conditions of the Truce, it is highly likely that Zero One is (or at least was, the Truce ended with the construction of New Zion) inhabitable by human operatives, and serves as a staging ground for Machine-affiliated operatives, as of the events of The Matrix Online.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu