"It was an accident. Apparently he was working late in some sort of experimental simulator. The techs had all gone home and something started to go wrong. Since Andy was in the Matrix working on a virtuality simulation, he didn’t know what was happening in the real world, and a bug had cut out the warning circuits. There was an explosion and a fire. He didn’t have a chance. Lola says that if they hadn’t known from the computer records that Andy was in the simulator, they wouldn’t have been able to identify him. The body was incinerated to ash."