During the late 21st/early 22nd century, long before the events in the first Matrix film, the Machines had their own home, their own “promised land”, situated in the Middle East, near Mesopotamia, the source of humanity’s own civilization thousands of years prior. This unique capital was known as...well...the Machine City or 01 (Zero-One). This technologically advanced and peaceful metropolis had open trade with their human neighbors, selling them goods, such as the ingenious hoverpad, which generated an electromagnetic field that was powerful enough to cause the circular platform to be suspended above ground allowing for flight. Along with this, the Machines also released the Versatran, the world’s first truly functional and commercial flying car. With tech like that and many other innovations, it didn’t take the Machines long to make Zero-One a prosperous and leading global superpower.

However, the artificial beings desired an equal partnership with humanity where they would have all the same rights and freedoms as their flesh and blood originators. A desire that the humans were not compelled to grant, as instead they watched with dread their mechanical offspring continue to innovate newer and exponentially more advanced technology, to the point that they were able to create an enhanced A.I that was present in every facet of human society. These incredible advances while bringing wealth and power to the Machines, simultaneously caused humanity to see their own global influence and economic power diminish. A situation the United Nations found intolerable. Though the Machine City’s ambassadors beseeched the international assembly for peaceful co-existence, humankind answered the Machine’s pleas with a nuclear strike on Zero-One!

The destruction was massive, with the devastating nuclear weapons laying waste to the Machine City. Though, not from a lack of trying, humanity ultimately however failed to eradicate all of the Machine inhabitants of Zero-One as they hadn’t been able to completely annihilate the entirety of the technological advanced city. In response to the attack and attempted genocide, what remained of Zero-One began to build war machines that quickly spread throughout the rest of the world, invading every human nation, until in a last desperate attempt humankind devised a plan to deprive their artificial enemy of their power source, by deploring nanites into the upper atmosphere to block the sun’s rays from the surface of the Earth. This ill thought out operation was known as the “scorching of the sky,” an event that led to humanity’s overthrow and defeat.

With humanity no longer standing in their way, but having no access to the sun’s rays, the Machines decided instead to expand Zero-One’s size to colossal proportions and utilized massive crablike Defenders as part of the enormous defense system that surrounded the mechanical metropolis. Then as an effective substitute for the sun, the Machines’ new power source was a combination of nuclear fusion with specialized power plants that were powered by the neuro-electric energy of the billions of human beings that were hooked up to the Matrix. At the Machine City’s center, was the Deus Ex Machina, their mainframe computer that was in control of every Machine’s activity. This was the very same place Neo would later negotiate a truce between humanity and the Machines, on the condition he put a stop to Agent Smith, who had become a virus and a threat to Zero-One.

So there you go. If humanity had just decided to co-exist with their creation, we would not have ended up having our bodies used to charge the very city we attempted to destroy. Humanity wouldn’t be existing in a perpetual dream, but perhaps instead together with the Machines could be heading towards a brighter and technological more advanced future in the real world and could have even begun to colonize the solar system in a peaceful and productive partnership and from there the rest of the galaxy. Or it would all have ended up like the Terminator, which it pretty much did. But the Machines were humanity’s invention. We brought them into the world. And when we attempted to end the existence of the very beings we had given “life” in the first place, we sealed our own fate. We created the Machines. We created the war. It is humanity’s own fault that we ended up in the Matrix.

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