The Construct

In The Matrix, there is a concept called Residual Self-Image.

When Neo jacks into the construct for the first time after leaving — really leaving, after the chair and the red pill and the brutal reality of what the world actually is — he appears as himself. Not as the body in the pod. Not as the signal in the machine. As himself. The mind, given freedom from the physical, projects the truth. It can’t help it. The RSI is not chosen. It simply is.

Morpheus explains it plainly: it is the mental projection of your digital self.

We’ve had the language for it in front of us to discuss this, it has been in art for years.

If you asked me to describe my RSI, I’m not sure I could do it easily in words. What I can tell you is that I’ve found it in other places. In the characters I’m drawn to when I’m given a choice. In the avatars I inhabit when the world lets me build myself from scratch, unconstrained by what I was handed at birth.

Dark. A little sharp. Feminine. Quiet authority rather than loud performance. Something ethereal underneath the edge. Someone who looks like they know exactly who they are, and have simply stopped explaining it to people who weren’t going to understand anyway.

That’s her. That’s the projection. That’s what the mind insists on when it’s given room to speak.

The gap between that image and the body I inhabit has been there my entire life. I didn’t always have a name for it. For a long time it was just a low hum — a persistent, background wrongness, the sense of wearing a costume I hadn’t chosen and couldn’t take off.

The changing rooms. Puberty. The way the world would look at me and confidently reach a conclusion that was almost, but not quite, entirely wrong.

I got good at absorbing it. Most people in my situation do. You learn to perform the expected version of yourself with enough fluency that nobody asks questions. You tell yourself it doesn’t matter. You tell yourself lots of things, over a long enough period of time, until the telling starts to sound like the truth.

It isn’t the truth.

The truth is the RSI. The truth is the image the mind projects when it’s finally, quietly, allowed to.

I know what I look like in the construct. I know who I am when the constraints fall away. I’ve known for longer than I’ve been willing to say out loud.

This is me starting to say it out loud.

My name is Halley. I’m somewhere between non-binary and feminine, skewed toward the latter, and I am beginning the process of bringing the physical into alignment with what the mind has always known.

The construct is real, the body is the lag. Time to close the gap.