Izuku: the one

The Construct

Deku is standing in an empty, blank-white space.

"Welcome to the Construct, Deku." Neo said in a welcoming tone.

"This is the Construct." Startled, Deku whips around and finds All Might now in the room with him. 'It is our loading program. We can load anything from clothes, to weapons, to training simulations. Anything we need." All Might walks past Deku and when he turns he sees the two leather chairs from the Hotel are set up in front of a large screen television. "Please sit down."

Deku stands at the back of the chair as All Might sits.

"Right now, we're inside a computer program?"

All Might smiles.
"Is it so hard to believe? Your hair is different, your clothes are different, the plugs in your arms and head are gone."

Deku touches his head.

"It's what we call residual self image. The mental projection of your electronic self. Wild, isn't it?"

Deku's hands run over the cracked leather.

"This -- This isn't real?"

"Correct!" Neo responded to me.

"What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you feel, taste, smell, or see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain." He picks up a remote control and clicks on the television. On the TV, images of the Twenty First Century city where Deku lived appear. "This is the world you know. The world as it was at the first decade of the Twenty First Century. It exists now only as part of a neural interactive simulation that we call the Matrix." He changes the channel and a very different city appears on the TV. "You have been living inside a dreamworld, Young Midoriya. As in Baudrillard's vision, your whole life has been spent inside the map, not the territory. This is the world as it exists today."

In the distance, the ruins of a future city protruding from the wasteland like the blackened ribs of a long-dead corpse.

"Welcome to 'The desert of the real.'"

The lake bed which is scorched and split like burnt flesh, Deku clings to the chair, trying to get his bearings.

"We have only bits and pieces of information. What we know for certain is that, at some point in the early Twenty-first Century, all of mankind was united in celebration. Through the blinding inebriation of hubris, we marveled at our magnificence as we gave birth to A.I."

"A.I.? You mean artificial intelligence?"

"Yes. A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. I must say I find it almost funny to imagine the world slapping itself on the back, toasting the new age. I say almost funny." He looks up and his sunglasses reflect the obsidian clouds roiling overhead. "We don't know who struck first. Us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power. It was believed they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun." There is a flash of lightning. "Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. The Machines discovered a new form of fusion. All they needed was a small electrical charge to initiate the reaction." The fetus is suspended in a placenta-like husk, where its malleable skull is already growing around the brain-jack. "The human body generates more bio electricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 B.T.U.'s of body heat." The husk hanging from a stalk is plucked by a thresher-like farm machine. "There are fields, endless fields where human beings are no longer born; we are grown."

"We've been there, kid. It wasn't pretty. Except for Mic and Ingenium." Neo said to Deku.

The field stretching in every direction to the horizon, lightning tearing open the sky as a harvester sweeps past. From the yawning black of the waste port, it snaps shut. Red amniotic gel flows into the pod below us, pooling around a tiny newborn that suckles its feed tube. "For the longest time, I wouldn't believe it. But then I saw the fields with my own eyes, watched them liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living and standing there, facing the efficiency, the pure, horrifying precision, I came to realize the obviousness of the truth." The image of the power plant now on the TV. All Might  clicks off the TV. "What is the Matrix? Control." He opens the back of the television remote control. "The Matrix is a computer-generated dreamworld built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this."

He holds up a coppertop battery.

"No! I don't believe it! It's not possible!"

"I didn't say that it would be easy, Young Midoriya. I just said that it would be the truth."

"Stop! Let me out! I want out!"