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Red pill and blue pill

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For Adobe Photoshop CS3 (codenamed Red Pill), see Adobe Photoshop.

Redpill is a term that describes a human that has been freed from the Matrix, a fictional computer-generated world set at the end of the 20th Century. This term was not used in The Matrix trilogy of movies, but is commonly used in the online multiplayer game The Matrix Online and in The Matrix: Path of Neo. Redpill is the opposite of bluepill.

It is also the name of a technique to detect the presence of a virtual machine developed by Joanna Rutkowska.[1]

Background

After a catastrophic war where Man lost against a race of intelligent Machines they originally created, humans are grown in massive fields by the Machines and placed in pods where they live out their lives in a virtual reality, unaware that they are living in a dream world. In return for this captivity where humans are kept docile, the Machines gain the use of the human brains as subprocessing units for the Matrix as well as generating some electrical power from their bodies - effectively creating a massive powerplant.

The job of Zion hovercraft crews were to find human minds within the Matrix that questioned its reality and have their minds ejected from the Matrix and their bodies removed from the powerplant. To do this, they met with the person in secret, away from Agents or others who could jeopardize the operation or the safety of the crew.

Based on the events surrounding the central character Neo as seen in the original movie, The Matrix, an authorized member of the crew offers the prospective human a choice of ingesting a red-colored pill, which would activate a trace program that allowed the crew to locate the human's body in the Matrix powerplant. Once the person was found, commands would be sent to the pod to awaken the person.

Machines that tend the powerplant would automatically sense that the person was awake, disconnect their support cables and eject their body from the powerplant into the cold, ancient sewer system of the dead world. The hovercraft crew would rescue the person, repair damage or remove unneeded devices on the person's body, and perform other rehabilitation to allow the person to live, freed from the Matrix, in the real world. Redpills appear to have either seen glitches from the Matrix (i.e. a book continuously respawning on a shelf, regardless of attempts to remove the book), or have such a nature and/or awareness as to question their life within the Matrix, and refuse to dismiss the strange events - basically those who have figured out the illusion of the Matrix.

Exiting the Matrix can be traumatic, particularly to those who have lived in it for too long. As a rule, crews normally recover minds only while they are young, no older than teen-age. After that, the risk of denial and psychotic episodes from the reality of separation could increase. This rule was violated by Morpheus in rescuing Neo, who was approximately 30 years old.

  • The use of a red pill is an allusion to the use of a similar device in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The Matrix movies commonly use references from this other work of fiction. For instance, when Morpheus offers the red pill to Neo, he says that by taking the red pill, he would show Neo "how deep the rabbit hole goes."
  • The red pill also features in the movie Total Recall. In this movie the protagonist Quaid is purported to be having a schizo-paranoia episode, resulting in the situation he finds himself in on Mars. The red pill is, here, the path 'out' of this episode and back to a normal life.
  • Singapore-based Business Strategy Consulting firm RedPill Solutions([1]) also uses the Matrix reference to explain its brand name.
  • Redpill AB is a Open Source company in Sweden and Norway. They work mostly with Eventum, SugarCRM and JBoss.
  • The reference to the pills is also implemented in a special type of malware that utilizes the virtualisation techniques of modern CPUs to execute as a hypervisor; as a virtual platform on which the entire operating system runs, it is capable of examining the entire state of the machine and to cause any behavior with full privilege, while the operating system believes it's running directly on physical hardware, creating a parallel to the illusionary Matrix. Blue Pill describes the concept of infecting a machine while red pill techniques help the operating system to detect the presence of such a hypervisor.
  • In the Nokia 770 and N800 Internet Tablets' package application installer, certain advanced features are unlocked by a "Red Pill Mode" easter egg. This is activated by starting to add a catalog called "matrix" and then choosing to cancel. A dialog box appears with the choices "Red Pill" or "Blue Pill", allowing the user to enter red pill mode.[2]

See also

References

  1. ^ http://invisiblethings.org/papers/redpill.html
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