1266> No, a choice of doors does not mean Zion is part of the Matrix, how did you get that idea? The machines exist outside the Matrix, which is STILL ONLY a virtual reality with programs, digital selves and AIs running around. The Architect tells Neo, that unless he freely chooses the door to the Source, not only will the sentinels destroy all humans in Zion, but a cataclysmic system crash will kill every human still plugged into the Matrix.
Xabbu> But the avatars/digital selves ARE programs. Smart and sentient programs, controlled by humans, but still programs. The Matrix is a virtual world, it’s a program, and you can’t stick anything into that save other programs. Back in the early pascal-days, I both could (and did) stick more programming lines into an already working program, and it not only worked, it even did more than before. Just as Neo, after having chosen to become the One, has the anomaly code but ONLY in his digital self (he can’t perform his feats in the real world).
As Morpheus tells Neo in M1, when Neo falls from the test skyscraper and Neo says “I thought you said it wasn’t real”, we get the answer that the body can’t function without the mind. If the mind believes it dies in the virtual world, the body dies in the real world.
Bane gets infected while IN the Matrix. Smith infects Banes digital self, his “mental projection of his digital self”, and once the mind is de-digitalized (if you like) back to electro-chemical signals in Banes brain, there is Smith.
The Oracle told the truth. She told neo that he had the gift, but it looked like he was waiting for something, maybe his next life. Neo dies when Smith shoots him, Trinity resurrects Neo with a kiss, and now, in his “next life” he is the One.
A loop would be 100 years, since Morpheus tells us it’s been 100 years since the previous One. An as for the real world being real, please re-read previous post by this signature.
All rebels get wiped out at the end of a loop. The One is allowed to chose 23 people FROM the matrix (hence the stories of the man who freed the first of “us”).
The machines need Zion to survive, otherwise, what would the Architect use to blackmail the One to choose the Source? That is the easiest solution. Create a myth, a legend, a religion, a prophecy even of a One that will end the war. Then make sure the anomaly returns to the Source.
If Zion was part of the Matrix, 1 % of its inhabitants would reject that world, too. None have done that. The Matrix only works if people accept it even if it is only on a nearly unconscious level. And 99 % do so.
Agent Smith hated, amongst things, the smell. It’s probably not better in the real world. He wanted to access codes to end the war, too.