The Second Renaissance
The story of how humanity lost its sun and built a prison for its mind.
More than a simple prequel, this two-part animated short serves as the franchise’s historical bedrock, chronicling the birth of machine consciousness and humanity’s fall in stark documentary style.
Lore & Background
Humanity's Operation Dark Storm shrouded the sky to cut off the machines' solar power, but the machines turned to humans as an alternative power source. The remaining human leaders surrendered; at the UN headquarters, Zero One's representative signed the terms of surrender and then detonated a thermonuclear bomb, destroying New York City and the last of humanity's leadership. Relations between humans and machines began to sour in 2090, when the android B1-66ER killed its owner; the war itself began in 2148, when the United Nations launched a nuclear bombardment of the machine nation Zero One.
Reader's Guide
Seeing the machines as their only hope of survival, human supporters of the machine nation offered themselves as an alternate power source, and the machines also began using human prisoners of war. The machines then built massive bioelectric power plants that use humans as living batteries. This led to the Matrix: a digital prison farm keeping minds docile while harvesting energy for survival.
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