- For the out of universe year, see 2003 (out of universe)
Log of the haunted house being reconfigured.
2003 is the year in the Matrix that the haunted house anomaly was reconfigured. The year in the Real World was many years beyond that.
Haunted house reconfiguration
For some time, local kids Pudgy, Manabu, Masa, Misha, Kenny and Sara had visited a haunted house in the neighborhood, which was in fact an anomaly in the Matrix.
On February 2, 2003, Yoko was searching for her cat Yuki, and asked three of the boys if they knew where she was. Their leader said she was in the haunted house where they were going, and led the way there to the dismay of the other kids. Yoko didn't manage to keep up on the way, and couldn't find them once she got there, but soon found Yuki. A girl appeared, saying she had figured it out the day before, and soon after the boys appeared, jumping from high up to just above the ground, where they stopped in mid-air.
As Yoko joined in with the physics defying games, a truck that had been dispatched to reconfigure the anomaly approached. Many rats appeared which the kids tried to chase off, and locals gathered on the other side of the gate. The truck crashed through the compound walls, and men in bio-hazard suits began to remove the kids. Yoko chased after Yuki, who had run off again, and found her scratching at a door inside the house. When she opened it, Yoko heard her voice repeating all the things she had said since she had been there, while the room itself seemed to be a total void. The men found her there, and ordered her to leave, taking her out of the house despite her struggles.
The next day, a couple of the kids cycled over to see if the house was still haunted, but found it was fenced off. Yoko turned up too as they were trying to reverse a bottle from smashing as they had been doing the day before, but having no success they left. Yoko picked up a can and looked through the fence; she dropped it and then noticed her finger was bleeding. As she watched, the blood dripped to the ground.
Interpretation
- The log which shows the year (pictured above) is in the exact style of the 1998 and 1999 call logs at the start and end of The Matrix, so presumably the creators of Beyond intended to set it 4 years after the events of The Matrix.
- However, as the Animatrix segments were produced before The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions were released, they did not know that the Matrix would be reloaded, or reset every year to 1999 as described by Tick Tock in The Matrix Online.
- By the end of The Matrix Revolutions, the 1999 cycle is broken by Neo through the Truce, thus possibly placing it years after the events of the original Matrix trilogy and presumably during The Matrix Online.
- Because of a lack of any continuity from any other media of The Matrix franchise, it is impossible to definitively place the events of Beyond in relation to any of the other events of the series, or to determine which specific iteration of the Matrix the events occurred.