In the Matrix universe, a Bluepill and sometimes Blue Pill is a term that describes a human whose mind is unaware of the truth about the Matrix.
Role in The Matrix films
A bluepill describes two different types of people in the Matrix: those that are completely unaware since birth of their status as a pod-born human, and those who, at some point, are presented with a choice and choose to forget this information.
In The Matrix, the first feature film of the Matrix series, Morpheus finds a computer hacker who called himself Neo. Morpheus then offers Neo a choice of ingesting a red pill or a blue pill:
Some redpills, such as are harshly disillusioned by the grim existence outside the Matrix:
The results of this can be disastrous. These redpills may make deals with agents that involve betraying the hackers to the machines.
This term also was used at the beginning of the third Matrix feature film, The Matrix Revolutions. When the operator of the hovercraft Hammer searches within the Matrix for Niobe and Ghost, he says:
A bluepill is the opposite of a redpill.
Background
After a catastrophic war where humans lost against a race of intelligent machines that they originally created, humans are grown in massive fields by the Machines and placed in pods where they live out their lives in a virtual reality, unaware that they are living in a dream world. In return for this captivity where actual human bodies are kept docile, the Machines gain the use of the human brains as subprocessing units for the Matrix as well as generating some electrical power from their bodies.
The job of Zion hovercraft crews were to find human minds within the Matrix that questioned its reality and have their minds ejected from the Matrix and their bodies removed from the powerplant. To do this, they met with the person's avatar in secret, away from Agents or others who could jeopardize the operation or the safety of the crew.
Based on the events surrounding the central character Neo as seen in the original movie, The Matrix, an authorized member of the crew offers the prospective human a choice of digesting a red-colored pill, which would activate a trace program that allowed the crew to locate the human's body in the Matrix powerplant.
If the person refuses the offer to discover the truth about the Matrix, the person is instructed to take a blue-colored pill, which would likely activate a program jump in the human's mind (similar to what was done to Neo after his interrogation by Agents in the original movie) and return them to their homes or business to return to life in the Matrix.
In the original Matrix movie, Morpheus stated that after one took the blue pill, they would wake up in their bed with all of the current events having been only a dream, a prospect which would easily allow an unready or unwilling person to dismiss everything that had happened as nothing more than a very odd dream.
A story in The Matrix Comics involves a woman who rejects a red pill offered by Morpheus and the depression she experiences as she continues life within the Matrix, trapped by her own fear.
Role in The Matrix films
A bluepill describes two different types of people in the Matrix: those that are completely unaware since birth of their status as a pod-born human, and those who, at some point, are presented with a choice and choose to forget this information.
In The Matrix, the first feature film of the Matrix series, Morpheus finds a computer hacker who called himself Neo. Morpheus then offers Neo a choice of ingesting a red pill or a blue pill:
Some redpills, such as are harshly disillusioned by the grim existence outside the Matrix:
The results of this can be disastrous. These redpills may make deals with agents that involve betraying the hackers to the machines.
This term also was used at the beginning of the third Matrix feature film, The Matrix Revolutions. When the operator of the hovercraft Hammer searches within the Matrix for Niobe and Ghost, he says:
A bluepill is the opposite of a redpill.
Background
After a catastrophic war where humans lost against a race of intelligent machines that they originally created, humans are grown in massive fields by the Machines and placed in pods where they live out their lives in a virtual reality, unaware that they are living in a dream world. In return for this captivity where actual human bodies are kept docile, the Machines gain the use of the human brains as subprocessing units for the Matrix as well as generating some electrical power from their bodies.
The job of Zion hovercraft crews were to find human minds within the Matrix that questioned its reality and have their minds ejected from the Matrix and their bodies removed from the powerplant. To do this, they met with the person's avatar in secret, away from Agents or others who could jeopardize the operation or the safety of the crew.
Based on the events surrounding the central character Neo as seen in the original movie, The Matrix, an authorized member of the crew offers the prospective human a choice of digesting a red-colored pill, which would activate a trace program that allowed the crew to locate the human's body in the Matrix powerplant.
If the person refuses the offer to discover the truth about the Matrix, the person is instructed to take a blue-colored pill, which would likely activate a program jump in the human's mind (similar to what was done to Neo after his interrogation by Agents in the original movie) and return them to their homes or business to return to life in the Matrix.
In the original Matrix movie, Morpheus stated that after one took the blue pill, they would wake up in their bed with all of the current events having been only a dream, a prospect which would easily allow an unready or unwilling person to dismiss everything that had happened as nothing more than a very odd dream.
A story in The Matrix Comics involves a woman who rejects a red pill offered by Morpheus and the depression she experiences as she continues life within the Matrix, trapped by her own fear.
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.
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.
Former football player who tried out for a spot on the Pittsburgh Steelers as an offensive lineman, who at the time was the tallest person ever to try out for an NFL team. Boffey though turned down the offer to play after trying out, and has since gone on to be a leader in the field of counseling, and is a head director of one of the Aloha Foundation camps, Lanakila.
An APU (Armored Personnel Unit) is a fictional vehicle in the of films. The APUs are charged with the greater part of the defense of Zion.
Captain Mifune is the leader of the APU unit, as well as the most experienced pilot (though he never completed its basic training).
Usage
An APU is a bipedal, sapient-like robotic tank - albeit without armour - that is similar in design and function to some types of mecha. The pilot sits in a rollcage-like cockpit and controls the APU with foot pedals and flexible control arms which move the APU's arms and aim and fire its weapons. Movement appears to be based on not only the movements of the APU caused by the pilot, but also the pilot's own sense of balance.
The APU is armed with two belt-feed "slug thrower" 20 mm cannons mounted on its arms; the guns are effective against the Sentinels, as it commonly requires only one direct hit to disable a "Squiddy." An APU actually acts as a team with two parts, the APU itself (in constant combat conditions) and a reloading crew. When the APU's ammunition is exhausted, the pilot calls for a reload; the reloading crew brings the ammo to the APU on a motorized rack and feeds the ammo into the back of the APU. As shown during the combat in The Matrix Revolutions, the reloading crews are highly vulnerable to Sentinel attacks; thus, the crews are a three-man operation, one person to carry the ammo and the other two covering using plasma guns.
The APU was used in the first human-machine war (2097-2139), as shown in The Animatrix. The APU did possess armour, but it proved ineffective against the machines. As depicted in the The Second Renaissance, the machines were able to tear through an APU's armor and kill its pilot with great ease. Later variations of APUs, as seen in the Matrix Revolutions, possessed limited armor, probably because the humans do not have the resources to add armor on every APU, leaving its pilot almost completely exposed. This proved to be a disadvantage, as it sped up Captain Mifune's death.
APUs were also highly vulnerable in close-quarter combat. As seen in the 'Matrix Revolutions', Sentinels that were able to evade an APU's fire long enough to close with it, could use their mechanical arms to bind the APU's guns and kill its human pilot. Captain Mifune and several APU pilots fought in trios, back to back, possibly to counter this weakness by using the APUs' multi-directional firing to cover all directions of attack. However, as the battle wore on, and his fellow pilots were killed one by one, Mifune found himself alone and vulnerable to Sentinel swarms.
There were about 150 APUs defending Zion during the Matrix Revolution.
Captain Mifune is the leader of the APU unit, as well as the most experienced pilot (though he never completed its basic training).
Usage
An APU is a bipedal, sapient-like robotic tank - albeit without armour - that is similar in design and function to some types of mecha. The pilot sits in a rollcage-like cockpit and controls the APU with foot pedals and flexible control arms which move the APU's arms and aim and fire its weapons. Movement appears to be based on not only the movements of the APU caused by the pilot, but also the pilot's own sense of balance.
The APU is armed with two belt-feed "slug thrower" 20 mm cannons mounted on its arms; the guns are effective against the Sentinels, as it commonly requires only one direct hit to disable a "Squiddy." An APU actually acts as a team with two parts, the APU itself (in constant combat conditions) and a reloading crew. When the APU's ammunition is exhausted, the pilot calls for a reload; the reloading crew brings the ammo to the APU on a motorized rack and feeds the ammo into the back of the APU. As shown during the combat in The Matrix Revolutions, the reloading crews are highly vulnerable to Sentinel attacks; thus, the crews are a three-man operation, one person to carry the ammo and the other two covering using plasma guns.
The APU was used in the first human-machine war (2097-2139), as shown in The Animatrix. The APU did possess armour, but it proved ineffective against the machines. As depicted in the The Second Renaissance, the machines were able to tear through an APU's armor and kill its pilot with great ease. Later variations of APUs, as seen in the Matrix Revolutions, possessed limited armor, probably because the humans do not have the resources to add armor on every APU, leaving its pilot almost completely exposed. This proved to be a disadvantage, as it sped up Captain Mifune's death.
APUs were also highly vulnerable in close-quarter combat. As seen in the 'Matrix Revolutions', Sentinels that were able to evade an APU's fire long enough to close with it, could use their mechanical arms to bind the APU's guns and kill its human pilot. Captain Mifune and several APU pilots fought in trios, back to back, possibly to counter this weakness by using the APUs' multi-directional firing to cover all directions of attack. However, as the battle wore on, and his fellow pilots were killed one by one, Mifune found himself alone and vulnerable to Sentinel swarms.
There were about 150 APUs defending Zion during the Matrix Revolution.