Today at work I was talking with co-workers who were searching for an answer to a problem. The meeting dispersed without an actual answer being given. Jerry said, “Wait, do we know the answer?” I, for some reason, decided to be ultrageek and say “There is no question, you are seeking an answer for something that doesn’t exist.”

Now, what I said was true, we didn’t actually need an answer to the question of procedure, what we were doing was fine. But then I got back to my desk and couldn’t get The Matrix out of my head!

Let us go back to The Matrix:

Spoon Boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon Boy: There is no spoon.

Since there is no spoon, and existence is only generated by a pre-established reality that the machines have placed us in then we must assume everything is artificial. The problem is that not everything is artificial, the people are real. Their thoughts and decisions form how the reality changes and moves. In the artificial reality of the Matrix, however, people are of all different weights and sizes.

Jerry, my co-worker/boss, is a big guy, so I started thinking about the pods humans were kept in. We are all plugged into this pod full of sludge. Are people who are fat in the Matrix also fat in “real life,” while plugged into the pod? I mean, you would need a completely different sized pod for myself as compared to Andre the Giant. I can accept that, but what about my size versus a 450lb man? They would need a much wider pod to keep them in.

Outside of a larger pod, there are other intrinsic problems with this. We know that people who weigh more are tended to dieing decades earlier than other, healthier, people. So, the heavier people would die earlier and therefore stop providing energy for the machines faster than thinner people. On top of that, fatter people need a higher caloric intake to retain a larger figure and therefore there would be more energy placed in harvesting energy from someone who would be producing less net power.

So maybe the machines are much smarter than us. Maybe people who are fat in the Matrix reality are not, in fact, fat in the “real” pod life. I can accept this. Remember: there is no spoon. But then there was another problem! People exist in Zion and are fat. Were they fat before or did they gain weight after they were unplugged. That is no way to progress our fledgling human society.

Not to mention, where did they get their food from? As far as I could see, not much other organic life survived. Maybe they unplug someone every once and a while so that they can feed themselves during a troublesome week. Mmmmm, cannibalistic Zionistic society.