History
Following the United Nations attack upon the newly-established machine civilization of Zero One, a global nuclear war between both factions began for control of the Earth. After several desperate plans to halt the seemingly never-ending waves of robot-soldiers, the human leaders realized that the Machines had a good chance of winning. The human leaders began the construction of an entirely underground city, called Zion, that was built for the purpose of preserving the human race. When the war ended in the Machines' favor, the remnants of humanity were left struggling to survive on the cold, dangerous and desolate surface. It was quickly becoming uninhabitable due to the cloud created by Operation Dark Storm. The Machines captured or killed almost all humans with the exception of the inhabitants of the unfinished Zion. The captured survivors were imprisoned and put into the newly-constructed bio-electric towers with their minds placed in the Matrix to keep them docile. Twenty-three prisoners were freed by a mysterious Matrix-controlling figure referred to as "The One" and led to the unfinished Zion where they worked to complete it. After making the city operational and regaining technological usage from geothermal energy from the Earth's core, the One taught the humans to continue building and maintaining a war effort, and to fight inside and outside the Matrix. After the One's death, the humans learned to survive on their own and began waging a partial-guerrilla war from Zion against the Machines, and at the same time trying to free the Matrix's population from their virtual "prison".
Read more about this topic: Zion (The Matrix)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“These anyway might think it was important
That human history should not be shortened.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)