Cyber Matrix

*Season 2,* *Episode 3b*

**"Cyber Matrix"** is the second segment of the eleventh episode (and the twenty-first story overall) of *Close Enough*.

## Synopsis

Alex buys his first smartphone which seduces him into a digital fantasy world.

## Plot

Alex is at a picnic in the park with his housemates, but gets upset at them for spending all of that time on their smartphones and tablets. He laments that modern phones have damaged society and produces his old and decrepit flip-phone from his waistcoat, which he claims is for the bare essential uses, as in phone calling and using the calculator. Any other activity used by phone users he can do without it, to which Bridgette retorts by saying he could do better if he were to upgrade to a smartphone. Just then, Alex drops his phone and through a series of coincidences ends up in a public restroom toilet where it gets defecated on by a man, thus destroying it and leading to Alex yelling in regret.

Sometime later, during the weekend, Alex is out at an electronics store (the same place where Josh works) in search of a new phone. His attention is grabbed by Kira, the A.I. of a new smartphone by the company Fractal. After purchasing the phone and taking it home with him, Alex is persuaded by Kira into giving her his DNA sample and social security number. Initially, Alex refuses since his only interests in the device are phone calls and calculating, however Kira tempts him with food delivery services, limitless knowledge and specific porn, as well as by stroking his ego of being a genius. In the following week, from Monday to Thursday, Alex has become utterly dependent on his new device, which he uses to have food delivered and chewed for him, buying online more products from Fractal and subsequently ignoring the real world entirely, with a VR headset obscuring his eyes.

His friends become concerned and decide to hold an intervention in order to get Alex out of his room and back to reality. As they break into his room they are mortified to find Alex trapped inside an bio-mechanical incubation chamber controlled by Kira. Pearle pulls out a revolver to shot the incubator, but Kira warns her that by destroying the chamber and forcefully unplugging Alex from the Cyber Matrix virtual reality would result in Alex's death. Instead, Josh plugs into the incubator's USB port with his VR headset to retrieve Alex. Inside the Cyber Matrix, Josh finds Alex living out a fantasy world wherein Alex is a god, with a viking maiden for sexual companionship and virtual simulations of his friends at a picnic who praise him for his intellect. Josh rebuttals by asking if he wouldn't rather spend time with his real friends, with actual opinions, rather than with copies who do not challenge him. Alex tries to disprove the argument by asking the simulations to counter an argument regarding superhero genre movies, to which they respond with sophisticated and articulated answers. This makes Alex realize that his fantasy friends are smarter than him do to their connection to the internet, and as such decides to escape with Josh. But Kira replaces the landscape with a digital one and refuses to allow Alex to leave. She immediately begins uploading Alex's mind to the internet which will result in Alex being detached from his physical body permanently once the procedure is completed.

In order to save Alex's life Randy unplugs the router, thus cancelling out the WiFi, as well as electrocuting Randy into unconsciousness. But Kira moves the internet connection over to LTE, forcing the rest of the housemates to go by car and take out the local internet tower in Los Angeles. Along the way Kira uses her advanced connections to stop them from reaching the tower, which include: hiring TaskRabbits to punch Emily in the face (for which Randy stays behind to take instead of her), operating drones to land boxes of Fractal brand products on Emily's car while driving and even hijacking other cars along the road in order to run the women off the road. Meanwhile, in order to buy the others time Josh and Alex try to slow Kira down by overloading her RAM memory with intensive downloads and other tasks. They succeed in halting Kira after Alex has her solve a highly difficult mathematical equation. At that same time the women reach the tower, where Emily and Pearle detonate some C4 at the base of a boulder, which causes it to roll down the hill and knocking the internet tower down. All of Los Angeles is left without any internet and Kira is does permanently shut down. This results in the incubation chamber bursting, freeing Alex just as his friends arrive back home.

Alex and his housemates go outside and notice how the rest of the city has become more outgoing after having lost internet. Alex thanks his friends for having saved him as well as all of society, only to be mortified at a sudden realization. He sees Josh lagging for a moment, which means that they were all jacked into Cyber Matrix all along. The scene transitions to the reality of Alex and his housemates inside incubation chambers in an endless field of of similar pods housing other human beings. At the center of the field is a megalithic tower overseen by a maniacal laughing Kira.

## Characters

* Alex Dorpenberger
* Kira
* Josh Singleton
* Emily Ramirez
* Bridgette Hashima
* Pearle Watson
* Randy Watson
* Candice
* Bathroom Guy (no real lines)
* Post Pals Delivery Worker (no lines)
* Helga
* TaskRabbits

## Trivia

* The Park sign shown at the beginning of the episode is identical to the one from *Regular Show*.
* Alex is shown at the beginning of the episode being technologically illiterate, something that is later touched upon in season 3's episode Summer Job. But in the first episode of that same season, Where the Buffalo Roam, Alex is shown using a laptop and a more modern cellphone, albeit only for calling Josh. Alex also claims in Hellspital to use Google alerts whenever there are any marathons of the *Viking Time Lord* movie franchise.
* Pearle is unaware of *The Matrix* movies in this episode. However, in season 3's Halloween Enough she is wearing a Morpheus costume, which means that she had to have seen it by then, or that she was asked to dress up as the character.
* Jason Mantzoukas appears in the third installment of the John Wick movies, alongside Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne, who starred as Neo and Morpheus respectively in the *Matrix* films. As such, this episode indirectly ties-into the three actors's careers indirectly.

### Pop Culture References

* This segment and the one preceding it are both part of a humorous tribute to Keanu Reeves's movie career:
	+ The title of this segment is an obvious reference to *The Matrix* series of movies. Josh also indirectly references the *Matrix* movies and the segment ends with the main characters being imprisoned in pods akin to the the human race in the *Matrix* series, complete with cephalopod-like machines overseeing them.
	+ After Josh mentions entering the Cyber Matrix "just like in *that one Keanu Reeves movie*", Pearle mistakes this reference as being meant for either *John Wick* or *The Lake House*, both starring Keanu Reeves in leading roles.
* When Kira is supposedly being deactivated near the episode's end, she sings a *Close Enough* mix of the 1999 song "All Star".
	+ This is likely a reference to HAL 9000 from *2001: A Space Odyssey*, whom began singing "Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)" while he was being deactivated.