The Plot of The Matrix

        If you have not seen the movie, it gives nothing important away to tell you that this young computer programmer comes to realize that the life he believes he is living is a simulation piped into his brain, and his controlled imagination is trapped in an endlessly hibernating, dormant body.  That body is a mere unit in one of the world's "cities" of such sleeping, dreaming humans whose waste body heat helps power the intelligent machines who now run the world.  The androids defeated their human masters in a terrible war, and now human beings are to those machines what a battery is to your MP3 player, a passive source of energy.  Waking up requires Neo to learn to control the illusions with which the machines control the human imagination.  From being a programmer of machines, he graduates (as it were) to becoming a de-programmer of human beings.