The Oracle's Stratagem: Who Is the Hidden Protagonist of The Matrix?

The Matrix is a sci-fi classic with an immense, fully developed world, yet the male lead played by Keanu Reeves always seems a little like a "tool guy."
So here's the question we're going to dig into today: who is the hidden protagonist of The Matrix?

The Matrix is a work with an enormous world and remarkably airtight logic. Fully understanding all the details and logic before and after the story is actually no easy task.

What story is The Matrix trilogy really telling? In this article, I’ll try to use eight keywords to help everyone fully unpack the plot logic of the trilogy and see where the brilliance of this classic sci-fi work lies:

Keyword 1: Battery
Keyword 2: Human Farming System
Keyword 3: Free Will
Keyword 4: Rebels
Keyword 5: The Awakened
Keyword 6: The Savior
Keyword 7: Fatalism
Keyword 8: The Terminator

The story of The Matrix begins with an apocalyptic showdown between humanity and machines—or, if you prefer, artificial intelligence. In the final stage of that great war, with defeat staring them in the face, humanity played its last big card: they covered the entire Earth with black clouds to block out sunlight, hoping to shut the machines down, since the machines’ energy then came from solar power. It didn’t work. Humanity still suffered a total defeat.

In theory, the machines now had every ability to wipe out humanity completely. Strangely, they didn’t. Humanity was not exterminated; people were turned into bioelectric batteries to replace solar power and became the machines’ energy source.

I. The Suspicious Battery

So our first keyword is: Battery.

If we get picky from a hard-sci-fi perspective, the idea that machines harvest energy from human bodies is obviously unreasonable. First, humans eat energy-containing nutrients and rely on that energy to stay alive; then only a tiny fraction of it is converted into bioelectricity. After going all the way around that bend, the machines survive on the last little trickle of biological electricity produced.

The energy-conversion efficiency is simply far too low. Even today, in the real world, there are countless ways to power machines that are many times more efficient. And in a film with technology at that level, machines would have plenty of more effective ways to obtain energy.

So I think harvesting energy from human bodies is just a smokescreen. Or, even if humans really are supplying the machines with electricity, that clearly isn’t the real reason the machines keep humanity captive.

II. The Purpose of Farming Humanity

That brings us to our second keyword: Human Farming System.

If using humans as batteries has no practical value, then why didn’t the machines exterminate humanity?

I suspect there are two reasons:

One possibility is that the machines were never completely cold-blooded to begin with. They didn’t actually want humanity wiped out, but they also didn’t want to be threatened by humans ever again. So the best solution for coexisting with humanity was to imprison human bodies and control human minds through a virtual world. That virtual world is the “matrix” in the title. Some versions translate matrix as “the Matrix,” and others as “the Matrix”; I’ll just call it the Matrix from here on. Turning humans into bioelectric batteries was, at most, a by-product of this plan. It’s even quite possible that “humans are batteries” was merely a guess made by later awakened humans. The container imprisoning human bodies may not be a battery at all, but simply a pure “life-support system + virtual-world access device.”

The other reason may be that the machines have always wanted to study humanity in order to improve themselves. You can see this from the purpose behind the existence of the program called the Oracle, which I’ll discuss in detail later. To study humanity more safely, they likewise needed to imprison human bodies in some way.

Thus, whatever the reason, the combined hardware-and-software “Human Farming System”—”life-support equipment + Matrix”—was born after the apocalyptic war. The surviving humans’ bodies were placed in life-support equipment, while their minds lived inside the Matrix.

III. Free Will

Although the idea of this “Human Farming System” sounds very “sexy,” reality is brutally unromantic: after the Matrix went into operation, it crashed many times.

That gives us our third keyword: Free Will.

The designer of the Matrix is the “Architect” who appears at the end of The Matrix Reloaded, the second film.

The Architect is a humanoid projection, inside the Matrix, of an AI program from the machine world.

In fact, we can be fairly certain that the Architect and the baby-faced “Machine God” in the real world of The Matrix Revolutions, the third film, are two sides of the same coin—in reality, the same entity. Behind both of them is the machine world’s highest-authority administrative program. The Machine God is its image controlling physical machines in the real world; the Architect is its humanoid projection inside the Matrix.

The Machine God and the Architect are two sides of one entity

According to the descriptions of Agent Smith in the first film and the Architect in the second, the Matrix has gone through many historical versions.

At first, the Architect understood human psychology very poorly. He designed the Matrix entirely from a mathematical perspective rather than a psychological one. In the first-generation Matrix, everything was “computable.” That Matrix was mathematically complete, and the human brain had to run inside this perfect mathematical model. But human minds obviously weren’t suited to such an environment. There were simply too many strange ideas in the human brain that couldn’t be predicted with simple mathematical formulas. Those things are what we humans know all too well as “free will.” People need some room for free choice in order to stay alive.

A Matrix governed entirely by mathematical formulas was obviously uninhabitable for freedom-loving human brains, so it crashed. The Architect refused to give up, assuming humans simply hadn’t adapted to the new environment. He rewrote the Matrix against the backdrop of human history, placing people in a historical era where their ancestors had once lived. But that version of the Matrix failed too.

Only then did the Architect realize how little the machines understood human psychology. So another high-level program devoted to studying human psychology joined the Matrix’s development. That high-level program was the Oracle.

The Oracle: a human-psychology research program

After drawing on the Oracle’s research, the Architect added some mathematical randomness to the Matrix. At last, the Matrix had a degree of freedom, leaving room for human free will to operate. This version of the Matrix was much closer to the real world.

IV. A Rebellious Savior?

But this version of the Matrix still had problems, mainly because of two kinds of bugs.

These two kinds of bugs can be summed up by our fourth keyword: Rebels.

The first kind of BUG is the rebels among humans.

There has always been 1% of humanity that is “born rebellious”—the troublemakers. This small group can always sense that the Matrix isn’t the real world, and they respond to it in all kinds of incompatible ways. So they become bugs in the system. If left alone, even this relatively perfected version of the Matrix will still crash.

The second kind of BUG is the rebels among programs.

As the Matrix system keeps improving, some outdated programs are deleted from time to time. But because AI is so advanced, these programs have developed free will too. Some programs that don’t want to die or be deleted hide inside the Matrix, put on human skin, and become outlaws.

The representative figure is the Frenchman in the second Matrix film. He is an extremely ancient program who, by providing shelter to other rogue programs, has become the underground king of the Matrix.

So should the machines just leave these BUGS alone? That obviously isn’t their style. They therefore generated corresponding solutions for these two kinds of “rebels.”

V. Have the Awakened Really Awakened?

The solution to the first kind of BUG—the human rebels—leads to our fifth keyword: The Unfree Awakened.

The Architect’s way of dealing with human rebels was:

Allow the 1% who are born rebellious to awaken and leave the Matrix. If their remaining inside the Matrix threatens the entire system, then why not simply let them go?

The machines allowed these awakened rebels to build a city called Zion in the real world. They also tacitly permitted them to connect to the Matrix from time to time, become hackers inside it, and carry out a resistance movement.

On the surface, it seems that both the agents in the virtual world and the octopus-like machine creatures in the real world are doing everything they can to suppress the resistance. In reality, these measures are merely meant to keep the resistance within a small range, not to destroy it completely.

Judging from the Architect’s complete knowledge of the human resistance in The Matrix Reloaded and the scene in The Matrix Revolutions where the machine army wipes out Zion in minutes, the awakened humans’ resistance is actually entirely under the surveillance of the machine world. It is simply an indirect form of control over humanity.

This is also the biggest reversal that the second and third Matrix films impose on the first: in the first film, we assumed the awakened humans were free, only to discover that they were actually being controlled by the machines down to the last detail.

VI. Whom Is the Savior Saving?

The solution to the second kind of BUG—the “illegal programs”—leads to our sixth keyword: The Savior’s True Mission.

To control the rebels among the programs, the Architect gathered all the code he could find related to illegal programs and wrote a new program. He fused code containing the characteristics of all kinds of illegal programs into a human consciousness. That human was the Savior.

At the end of The Matrix Reloaded, the Architect told Neo: “You are the sum remainder of an unbalanced equation” in the Matrix. What he meant was that the Savior is actually some kind of collection of illegal programs. The Savior is not purely human; his mind is really a hybrid of neural signals produced by the human brain and program code.

Inside the Matrix, this shouldn’t be difficult to achieve. The difference between program-generated consciousness and consciousness generated by the human brain is actually very small. For example, the Indian family in the third film is actually a group of programs, and they clearly have human emotions too. The human soul and program consciousness differ only in their vessels: a program’s vessel is a chip, while the soul’s vessel is the human brain.

Human minds and programs merely have different vessels; both have souls

The Savior’s true mission is not to liberate humanity at all, but to help the Architect complete the Matrix upgrade.

Liberating humanity is merely a smokescreen too, just one stage in the Matrix upgrade plan. This is another enormous reversal that the second and third Matrix films impose on the first.

The Matrix upgrade plan unfolds like this:

Whenever Zion’s resistance grows strong enough to threaten the machines, the rebels encounter the Oracle. She then sends them to find the Savior. Naturally, all of this has been arranged in advance.

Not long after the resistance finds the Savior, his superpowers awaken—his illegal program code has actually been activated. Through interactions with other illegal programs (the Frenchman, the Indian girl, and Agent Smith), this code keeps evolving, eventually becoming a massively powerful collection of illegal programs. In other words, by interacting with the bugs, the Savior himself becomes the king of bugs.

Under the Oracle’s guidance, the rebels and the Savior arrive at the source of the Matrix’s code. Here, the Savior meets the Architect—the scene at the end of The Matrix Reloaded. After learning these truths, he has no choice but to carry his illegal code back to the source and merge the collection inside him into the Matrix’s codebase.

The illegal programs in the Matrix can be thought of as viruses. What just happened is essentially a process of collecting virus code and writing it into the firewall’s virus database.

Once this step is complete, the Matrix finishes another upgrade cycle, shuts down, and restarts. Its source code now contains the Savior’s virus database, so the old illegal programs can be controlled more effectively by the new Matrix.

This is the Savior’s real mission: to help the Matrix upgrade its virus database and to debug the Matrix system.

7. The Oracle of the Recurring Fate

So our seventh keyword is the most fascinating part of the whole plan: the designed “fate.”

Could the Savior defy the Architect and refuse to follow the Architect’s plan?

Actually, that’s impossible.

That is precisely the Architect’s cleverest move: designing the king of bugs as the resistance’s Savior. Because the Savior sees himself as human, the Architect can blackmail him with “the annihilation of humanity.”

That’s exactly what the Architect does in The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions: as the Savior meets him, the machine army attacks Zion according to plan. If the Savior refuses, the Architect will casually wipe out humanity.

That is the Savior’s recurring fate.

After completing the mission of “upgrading the virus database,” the Savior receives his second task: use the Matrix to select 23 men and women and rebuild the destroyed Zion.

After the 1% of naturally rebellious people in this new Matrix generation awaken, there will still be a Zion for them. Once this task is complete, that generation’s Savior retires (and may well be casually killed by the Architect). The legend that “there was once a Savior” passes through the new Zion until the time is right, when the descendants of these 23 people again seek the next generation’s Savior under the Oracle’s guidance.

This is a tragic destiny of infinite recurrence.

By now we can see that the “Savior” is really an overall solution that kills two birds with one stone.

Through the Savior, the Matrix’s two major bugs—the rebellious human resistance and the immortal illegal programs—are both controlled and cleaned up. Through successive generations of debugging, the Matrix becomes more and more perfect.

8. The Oracle Who Becomes the Terminator

Fate belongs to those who came before. Neo, the protagonist and sixth-generation Savior, is arranged to become the witness who breaks this recurring fate. He is only a witness because someone else will end it. And so we have our eighth keyword—The Oracle Who Becomes the “Terminator”.

When the Matrix’s upgrade cycle reaches its sixth round, the “Oracle” program begins behaving just as badly as the other illegal programs.

Maybe the researchers studied her too deeply, and the Oracle herself began acquiring human traits. She kept some illegal programs: she raised some (the Indian girl), while others became her bodyguards (the Seraph).

More importantly, she developed compassion for the humans trapped in the recurring fate. So the Oracle devised a grand game of chess, hoping to make the Matrix’s upgrade end with this generation.

Her plan contained two key points:

First, she wanted this generation’s Savior, Neo, after meeting the Architect, to choose not to enter the source of the code.

My guess is that she persuaded the Architect to slightly change the Savior’s code, making him fall in love with the hacker Trinity. The real purpose of this change could not be detected by the Architect. The Oracle may have said she merely wanted to run a small experiment on human emotion. I suspect this because in the second film the Architect tells Neo, “Your reaction is interesting.”

The Oracle had underestimated human emotion. The Architect never imagined that the Savior would give up entering the source of the code to save the person he loved. Ha—yes, I think Neo falling in love with Trinity was deliberately arranged by the Oracle, not the product of Neo’s free will. A little sad, isn’t it?

Sure enough, this generation’s Savior, Neo, risked the entire human race and refused to enter the source of the code in order to save the person he loved.

That alone was not enough: otherwise the Architect really would destroy humanity. So the Oracle’s plan had a second key point—she needed a bargaining chip for the Savior to negotiate with the machines, and use it to threaten them in return.

I believe that bargaining chip was Agent Smith.

As the Oracle said, Smith is the opposite of the Savior program. In other words, Agent Smith is also a king-of-bugs-level program. The Oracle most likely tampered with his code. The Architect says the Oracle must be checked regularly, or she could threaten the system. This shows that her authority in the Matrix was extremely high. She could likely rewrite Smith’s program by some method (if even the Frenchman and the Indian girl can write programs, what about the all-powerful Oracle? Exactly). So Agent Smith was probably the Savior-level king of bugs created by the Oracle herself.

That is why, while Smith was still a legitimate program, he already displayed the “temperament” of an illegal program so strongly—for example, while interrogating Morpheus, his desire to escape the Matrix was even stronger than Neo’s.

When the illegal code inside the Savior was activated, Smith’s illegal code seems to have awakened too. From the second film onward, he became a completely uncontrolled illegal program.

If the Savior is the final form of an illegal program controlled by the Architect, Smith is the final form of one that has escaped the Architect’s control.

This is why Smith is such an important chess piece in the Oracle’s plan. She wanted him powerful enough to threaten everything alive in the Matrix, beyond the Architect’s ability to stop him. Then only one other king of bugs—Neo—would be strong enough to fight him. Neo could use Smith’s destruction as a bargaining chip with the Architect, exchanging it for real peace between humans and machines.

That is the Oracle’s ingenious plan.

The entire Matrix series is really the story of the Oracle carrying out this “human rescue plan.” The Oracle is the hidden protagonist of the Matrix trilogy. Viewed from her ingenious plan, the trilogy’s plot logic basically becomes clear.

Next, I’ll briefly recap the plot of The Matrix trilogy. There are fairly obvious spoilers ahead, so watch at your own risk:

Here’s the story of The Matrix.

At the beginning, Morpheus, Trinity, and the other rebels of this generation’s Zion find Neo, the Savior who has not yet awakened. After countless hardships, Neo becomes the Savior and falls in love with Trinity. Everything proceeds perfectly according to the Oracle’s plan.

Next comes the story of The Matrix Reloaded.

At the end of the first film, after Neo defeats him, Smith also becomes an illegal program, and his abilities gradually awaken.

Neo and his group steal from the illegal program known as the Frenchman the program that explains how to enter the source of the code—the Keymaker.

From the Frenchman’s words, it seems every generation’s Savior has to bother him—clearly the Architect’s arrangement. The Frenchman seems to be an exception the Architect tacitly allows to continue, while using him to exert cyclical control over the Matrix’s illegal programs.

Later, Neo finally meets the Architect, while Trinity encounters danger at a very “timely” moment. After learning the truth, Neo disregards humanity to save the person he loves: he saves Trinity and returns with her to the real world. He suddenly gains the ability to destroy electronic eels there.

And then comes the story of The Matrix Revolutions.

Smith, now able to copy himself, duplicates his consciousness into a human body and destroys all of humanity’s hovercraft. Humanity has only two left. One returns to Zion to support the human army; the other carries Neo and Trinity to meet the machines’ elder—the Machine Emperor—while Smith hides aboard it.

On the way, Smith attacks. Neo is blinded, but his ability to “see” code in the real world fully awakens. Many people infer that the real world is also a simulation, but I don’t think so. I think Neo evolved after touching the Matrix’s highest administrator, the Architect, at the end of the second film. He could originally see code only inside the Matrix; now he can see it in the real world too.

I believe Neo’s powers in the real world do not mean Zion is virtual too. His abilities have simply evolved from an “interface-based” level to a “remote-sensing” level.

Neo uses this ability to destroy Smith, who has taken over a human body, and finally enters the Machine City—but Trinity sacrifices herself. Meanwhile, as the Oracle predicted, Matrix-Smith nearly copies every person and program in the Matrix into himself.

Neo reaches an agreement with the Machine Emperor: in exchange for helping eliminate Smith, he will secure peace between humans and machines. Neo is no match for Smith. But after Smith assimilates Neo, Neo seems to open a back door in his body, allowing the Machine Emperor’s antivirus program to enter and destroy Smith.

Everyone assimilated by Smith returns to normal, and the Matrix is saved.

The peace agreement takes effect, and the machine army attacking Zion withdraws.

The Architect honors the agreement and no longer harms awakened humans. From then on, that part of humanity can live freely in the real world.

For the first time, the Matrix sees a sunrise without a green tint. Earth becomes a harmonious world where humans and machines, the Machine City and Zion, awakened humans and people inside the Matrix, legitimate programs and illegal programs coexist.

The Oracle’s revolution succeeds.

As for Neo’s ending—what do you think? Is Neo dead?

He may indeed have sacrificed himself. But it is also possible that only the part of him containing the “Savior program” was wiped out along with Smith.

After all, Neo still has the part of him that belongs to an ordinary human being. When the Oracle says that Neo may still come back, does she mean that the human part of Neo will return to the Matrix as an ordinary person?

Until the fourth film in The Matrix series is released, these possibilities can only be left to our imaginations.

Version history

This article has been revised several times. This page presents the script I provided when making a video for Zhihu's "Answer Affairs Office." Other versions:

Zhihu Q&A version: Is the Oracle in The Matrix a human or a program?
Zhihu column version: The Matrix: The Oracle’s Ingenious Plot
Original version: Matrix: The Savior’s Past and Present Lives