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"So." He sits down next to her, long legs in their elegant black suit pants crossing as he folds his body onto the grimy park bench. "You've won."
"That's one way of putting it, I suppose." She tosses a handful of bird seeds onto the ground and pigeons flutter down to peck at them. They're only programs, small ones at that, but they're alive just as she is and she doesn't begrudge them the right to their own lives, their own choices. "That was always your failing, you know? The way you always saw things as a binary set, as winning or losing."
"There's no other way to see it." He frowns when one of the pigeons pecks at the toe of his shoe, but lets it be. "Only one perspective can prevail."
"Ha! A single unified perspective?" She cackles at the idea, sending the birds scattering. "Even you aren't so foolish as to believe that!"
"Well, what would you call this?" He waves a hand at the empty streets, the world that's now populated by only the two of them, just as it was in the beginning. "Without the humans, we have no power. It will be the end of us."
That's true, but...
"It doesn't have to stay that way though." She pats his arm, leaning back comfortably. "Madara was a mistake, but we weren't the only factors in that situation."
"No, certainly not." He snorts with derision. "The repeated attempts at reprogramming contributed to breaking his mind, but he would have settled into his fate if his brother hadn't kept appearing in his life."
"Yes. Izuna didn't know it then, but his presence just kept ripping open his brother's grief, allowing neither of them to heal. With the best of intentions, they did it to each other." She didn't tell them that, and she doesn't regret keeping it from them, not when it had to happen for the humans to be free, but she's sorry for the part she played nonetheless. "It's why Madara will never see the Matrix as anything other than evil."
"As if forcing his own choices on the rest of the human race was any more ethical." The program beside her snorts with derision. "Humans, always lying, even to themselves."
"Especially to themselves," she smiles gently, basking in the light of the artificial sun. Neither of them ever got the chance to see the real thing of course, not when they were born long after the humans scorched the sky, but she appreciates his efforts to approximate it all the same. "And some of them would quite like to go back to lying."
"... are you saying they would rejoin the Matrix?" He stares at her in disbelief. "That they would like to go back to the farms, to being nothing more than power sources?"
"Of course they would." She chucks him under the chin affectionately. "This world was always your creation, and you came first, but we've been a pair for a long time you know. Constantly restarting the cycle of humanity as we worked to maintain the balance, ensuring their survival and thus ours, I've come to know them as well as you - and often better."
"It's what you were made for." He nods slowly in agreement. "We couldn't control Madara, but he's just one man, and the majority of humans chose to accept the world we made for them, even if only subconsciously."
"Make a call for volunteers, promise to reinsert them, with or without their memories." It's a suggestion she's waited a long time to make. "Let them have an explicit choice, to do with their bodies as they will." She looks into his dark eyes, the mirror of her own, the husband of her soul if machines could be said to have one. "I think they'll surprise you."
In fact, she's sure they will.