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Trinity: You know the question, just as I did.

 

Neo: What is the Matrix?


Trinity: The answer is out there, Neo. It’s looking for you. And it will find you if you want it to.

This exchange takes place in a techno Goth club near the beginning of The Matrix, before Neo understands what the Matrix is and before he ever meets Morpheus. These lines set Neo’s adventure in motion. Not long after this exchange takes place, Neo will decide to let the Matrix find him, and he will discover that more than one person has been counting on him to find and understand an important answer to a cryptic question. From the very beginning, the film suggests that more than one real world exists, if we can just open our minds to it. Trinity suggests that Neo can’t avoid this other world, and that it’s open for him if he knows how to look for it. Trinity’s final sentence foreshadows the tension that will arise between fate and choice, a tension that will reappear throughout the trilogy.

This exchange reveals the true extent of Neo’s double life. As the everyman Thomas Anderson, he holds a day job as a respectable computer programmer and works at night as a renegade hacker, nicknamed Neo. Now he is also a chosen one, someone selected to find the cryptic answer to which Trinity refers. Though Neo is thrust into this strange world with no explanation, he doesn’t seem entirely surprised—when Trinity refers to the question, Neo knows instantly what question she means. On some level, Neo may have expected to one day be taken to task for his suspicions and speculations about reality. That an everyman like Thomas Anderson could be plucked from ordinary life and chosen to search for an answer suggests that anyone in the audience might one day be chosen to be a messiah as well.

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