Operation Dark Storm
From The Black Vault Encyclopedia Project
Operation Dark Storm is a fictional military operation in The Matrix saga that was executed in order to take away the main source of power for the machines, the Sun. It is featured in The Animatrix short film The Second Renaissance.
The operation was initiated by the United States military and involved creating an insoluable cloud of thick black smoke (composed of nanomachines, according to the short's director's commentary) so the machines would not be able to power themselves. This action was done in the hopes of ending the machine-human war, in which the Earth was being overrun by the massive machine army forces. United Nations bombers deployed the weapon over the planet in 2086, and the cloud spread over the entire planet, trapping the machines and the unfortunate humans. The shroud appeared to be indissoluable, thus creating a dark, cold hell on Earth. Given the continued existence of the cloud over a long period of time, it seems likely that the nanomachines are capable of reproducing themselves from widely available starting materials.
The machines were only slowed by the temporary lack of power the Sun was providing them. After crushing humankind, they then created the Matrix and began using human beings as their energy source. Humans were kept in tubes in the machine city of Zero One and other powerplants constructed over the ruins of human cities. Humans who had their minds freed were forced to live underground in the city of Zion, the last human city on Earth located deep underground for warmth, due to the fact that Earth's surface was too cold from lack of sunlight. The human's option of manufacturing spaceships and escaping the Earth to settle on another planet wasn't possible, as the clouds disabled propulsion systems for both machines and humans.
Creating the smoke and blackening the sky actually caused an adverse effect for humans. As a result the Earth became universally too cold to live in, flora and fauna were unanimously destroyed and the dark, indissoluable smoke constantly created thunder and lightning because of its adverse effects on clouds and precipitation.
In The Matrix Revolutions, Neo and Trinity fly above the darkened clouds to avoid machine Sentinels and see that the Sun still shines, but their engines shut down (presumably the machines did not enter the cloud for this very reason) and they plummet to the ground.
