There was a film called The Matrix. Snape had absolutely no interest in seeing it, but it seemed to be hugely popular, with programs introducing it everywhere. It was roughly about how, after the real world of the future had gone through a nuclear war and humanity could no longer generate electricity, machines placed humans in cultivation tanks to provide bioelectricity like batteries, while human consciousness remained in the 1990s.
This virtual world was called the "Matrix." Although the modern matrix had been proposed by the nineteenth-century British mathematician Kerry, there had been other matrices in the distant past, such as Latin squares and magic squares.
Magic squares also had another name: the River Chart and Luo Writing. In this matrix, the sums of the numbers in every horizontal row, vertical column, and diagonal were equal... In short, matrices were common tools in higher algebra and were also often used in applied mathematics, including fields such as astrophysics and quantum mechanics.
Why not assume this was a virtual world similar to the "Matrix"? On the surface, she was in the early nineteenth century, but in reality, she was like Neo, who believed he was in the 1990s. The difference was that Neo needed an interface installed in his brain, while this world did not.
As for what Lyall Mayer had said—that "the people in this world are neither truly alive nor truly dead"—he meant that they were segments of "code," not that they were "nonexistent."
She remembered a scene involving a traitor. He no longer wanted to live a life of constantly hiding and drinking oatmeal porridge. Even though he knew that the steak he ate in the Matrix did not exist and was merely an illusion produced by various stimuli, he was still willing to serve the Matrix.
Without