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I'm pretty sure I've read somewhere that the original concept was along those lines, but test audiences didn't understand it or react to it as well, so they went with the "coppertop" idea instead.

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I've heard the same, though in the version I heard it was executives (I guess at WB?) who thought humans-as-IaaS was too complex.

It's probably a sensible choice for other reasons too: if that had been the explanation, it would have introduced a Chekhov's gun that would probably have to bear plot relevance later, but the battery idea is too mundane for that.

Well in my 'head-canon' the way it comes up later is how these people are able to influence the matrix with superpowers. They themselves are part of the computational network that runs the simulation. A sort of p2p mesh multiplayer game. In this scenario - a single client might be able to influence their immediate surrounding if there aren't enough redundant checks in place.

>In this scenario - a single client might be able to influence their immediate surrounding if there aren't enough redundant checks in place.

When it came out, hex editing was still the easiest way to cheat at computer games and as such that is how I saw the loading of weapons and even altering local physics like Neo could do.

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