Red pill and blue pill

Template:Spoiler Redpill is a term that describes a human that has been freed from the Matrix, a 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. Redpill is the opposite of bluepill.

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.

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 digesting 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 them bodily 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.

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.

Redpills can join a hovercraft crew and reenter the Matrix to aid in freeing more minds, or live permanently as a citizen in the last human city, Zion.

The use of a red pill is part of a allusion to the use 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 offered the red pill to Neo, he said that by taking the red pill, he would show Neo "how far the rabbit hole goes."

In the multiplayer game The Matrix Online, set in the events after The Matrix Reloaded, all game players are redpills.