The Matrix Resurrections sees the return of several key characters from the original Matrix trilogy in addition to the human protagonists Neo and Trinity. Of all the characters confirmed in the film, none arguably more mysterious than Priyanka Chopra’s Sati.
Originally introduced in 2003 The Matrix Revolutions, Sati (Tanveer K. Atwal) is an “exile” program and a “child” of Rama-Kandra and Kamala, a power plant system manager and interactive software program developed by the machines. Since they were created without a purpose, Sati’s existence is threatened by The Machines, who believe that all programs either have a purpose or must be deleted. Desperate to save his daughter, Rama-Kandra meets with Merovingians in Matrix Reloaded to convince him to lead Sati safely out of the machine world into the matrix. In return, Rama-Kandra gave the Merovingian the termination codes for the oracle’s cover, which he wanted to use as leverage against them in order to gain access to their supposed clairvoyance.
After passing out at the end of the Matrix Reloaded, Neo meets Sati, Rama-Kanda and Kamala in the Mobil Avenue station, a virtual world that exists between the machine world and the matrix and is controlled by the Merovingian subordinate, the Trainman. Before Rama-Kandra leaves with the Trainman to free his daughter from the Matrix, Rama-Kandra tells Neo that Sati is being looked after by the Oracle, who promises to take care of her if Rama-Kandra and Kamala are forced into to return to the machine world. The next time we see Sati, she bakes cookies with the Oracle just before she, Seraph, and the Oracle are assimilated by Agent Smith and turned into three more of his many doubles. And the last time we’ll see the young girl is about to end the matrix revolutionswhen she is reunited with Oracle after Agent Smith’s defeat and the subsequent restart of the Matrix. With her previously unknown ability, Sati creates a brilliant sunrise in the Matrix in honor of Neo and his victim and asks the oracle if they will ever see him again, to which the oracle replies, “I think so.”
[Ed. note: the rest of this story contains spoilers for The Matrix Resurrections.]
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In The Matrix Resurrections 60 years have been since the events of The Matrix Revolutions
Sati, now played by Chopra, has managed to survive the past 60 years thanks to a sentient program. From her place in the new matrix, she takes care of Neo, who was imprisoned again to hide both his survival and Trinity from Niobe and the surviving human population of IO to prevent the possibility of another war.
After Neo is freed from the Matrix again by Bugs and the crew of the Mnemosyne, Sati reveals that her father Rama-Kandra was responsible for building the “Resurrection Capsules,” which were created to trap Neo and Trinity and siphon off energy, and that her father gave her the blueprints for the construction of the building shortly before his own deletion. With her knowledge of the building, Sati helps Neo and his company orchestrate the rescue of Trinity to destabilize the analyst’s power over the matrix.
The concept of a “program without a purpose” is one of the most intriguing ideas of the original Matrix trilogy, which unfortunately has remained more or less unexplored. Sati is the closest man-made analogue of a human being in the entire series, a being whose absence of “purposes” gives it a level of agency and ability that would otherwise be found in a system that is solely designed to survive through human submission , would be unthinkable. In essence, it represents a future for machines beyond the matrix, where human and artificially intelligent beings alike work to rebuild a world that was destroyed generations before their time. IO, the first man-machine city created after Neo’s sacrifice, is another symbol of such a future and when the end of The Matrix Resurrections face to face will certainly not be the last of its kind.
