Can you be invincible in the Matrix? [closed]

Question

In the Matrix, you can do anything you believe you can do. Can you therefore be invincible in the Matrix? In real life games you can be invincible (like super star in Mario) and since the Matrix is a video game that you can change could you be invincible and win at everything?

Answer 1

First off, you cannot just "believe" anything you want in the Matrix and have it come true. Like any virtual environment, there are rules. Someone had to program Mario's invincibility, for instance.

In the Matrix, Neo believes simply because he has faith in himself and his abilities. This makes him more confident. He simply has the skill, whether developed over time or some innate ability, to "visualise" the source code, see and understand the Matrix and its Agents on a different level, and even abuse the source code to a limited degree.

This is seen when Neo flies. It's not something anyone else does - not even the Agents themselves mostly. You could say that Neo learns how to abuse the source code of the Matrix. Thinking about it in programming parlance, he may have found an old "CanFly" boolean in the attributes of his own avatar and turned it to true. For stopping bullets, he may find the attributes of each bullet and turn its "Momentum" attribute to 0. He's making small modifications.

So far (I haven't seen Resurrections), he hasn't found a "MakeThisAvatarInvincible" attribute. Maybe there isn't one. Or even an "AvatarHitPoints". As such, he'd have to make some pretty hefty changes if he wanted to make himself invincible, probably rewriting (however that would be done) his own avatar so that, if anything hit him, make it deliver 0 hit points, or cause no damage. That would take a lot of time, not to mention the machines probably noticing.

Put simply, it seems that Neo can make "small" changes, and we don't know exactly what to and how. He can stop bullets, though we don't know exactly how - presumably turning their momentum to 0. However, it seems he can't stop big trucks, maybe because they're a lot more complicated objects - you can't simply stop one part of a truck at a time - or perhaps because they're much larger. Making himself invincible would be a lot more difficult.

Answer 2

We see him lose initially to the army of Smith clones. In addition, he got a cut while blocking a sword with his hand.

Valorum mentioned the twins. However, even the twins are not invincible, as technically it is thought that Morpheus killed them in an explosion (though they later came back). See this answer on this site.

Lastly, any program/software (like the twins, Smith, Neo, Trinity, etc.) can be deleted. Even if the Matrix didn't let them be deleted, or even though Neo and Trinity exist in the real world, if the real world Neo and Trinity or person is killed, or if the physical Matrix is blown up, then anyone will die in the matrix.