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What would have happened, within the canon of The Matrix, if Neo had taken both the blue pill and the red pill at the same time?

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Let's assume Morpheus wasn't quick enough to stop him.

Valorum
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nine9
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6 Answers6

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Both pills have a very specific physiological impact. The blue pill appears to have some sort of sedative effect inside the Matrix whereas the red pill disrupts the individual's "carrier signal" outside the Matrix, causing them to hallucinate and then be ejected from the Matrix.

Taking both pills would most likely result in the taker becoming unconscious inside the Matrix, then being ejected from the Matrix. So basically there would be no difference in the final outcome, albeit the mirror hallucination sequence would have been far less interesting with a sleeping Neo.

Community
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Valorum
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    You could possibly interpret an existential answer to this. The choice between the blue and red pills could be purely symbolic in terms of how Neo progresses through (or out of) the Matrix. There's only the choice of having either one or the other - he can't choose both, he can't choose neither. It's the left or right in the fork in the road... –  Oct 11 '16 at 09:34
  • @Pete - Except that you can actually boil them down to the physical effects. There's no need to get all metaphysical about it :-) – Valorum Oct 11 '16 at 09:48
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    Yes, you're right - I was confusing this with the pill in "Total Recall", I'm always making that mistake... –  Oct 11 '16 at 09:52
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    @Valorum Except that you can't. I'll cover why in my answer. – Graham Oct 11 '16 at 12:29
  • @Graham - I shall be most interested to see any evidence-based answer that says that you can't – Valorum Oct 11 '16 at 12:43
  • I always thought the pills actually did nothing (placebo), and only displayed the persons willingness? Which pill they decided to take determined Morpheus's next actions. – Zack Oct 11 '16 at 13:55
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    @zack - If you follow the links, you'll see that they have demonstrable, physical actions. The red pill disrupts your carrier code, the blue pill is a tranquiliser of some sort. "Does either pill actually do anything?" – Valorum Oct 11 '16 at 14:03
  • This answer makes the most sense to me. I can't see evidence which indicates that the pills are mutually exclusive (like a window on a PC with only two options). – nine9 Oct 12 '16 at 13:16
  • This answer is pretty much perfectly phrased. Don't forget the blue pill is "no big deal", it's more a matter of "not wanting the red pill"; the blue pill is just a sedative or other unimportant drug: http://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/39986/31333 In contrast, the red pill utterly changes the nature of reality. If you were a smarty pants and said I'll take the red pill - and! the blue pill - the overwhelming fact is that you are taking the red pill. The blue pill is of no consequence. – Fattie Oct 12 '16 at 15:13
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    I disagree with parts of this answer. The blue pill is more than a sedative. Morpheus says "Take the blue pill, you wake up and remember nothing". So it is also a memory wipe of meeting Morpheus (and probably more). Thus if we follow your conclusion in this answer, taking both would result in you being ejected from the Matrix, but with no memory at all of the events that might have caused it. Morpheus might still be there to pick you up, but you'd have no clue what was going on (even less clue than Neo actually had). – Simba Oct 12 '16 at 16:24
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    @Simba - Except that isn't what Morpheus says. What he says is "You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe**". – Valorum Oct 12 '16 at 16:29
  • @Simba - valorum's point is good, but also note that many sedatives have a side effect of causing retrograde amnesia. If it contains a strong traditional sedative, neo may well wake up the next morning and not remember exactly what happened. – Periata Breatta Oct 12 '16 at 21:12
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    @PeriataBreatta - For the record, we have at least one example of someone inside the Matrix choosing the blue pill; http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/39907/what-does-the-blue-pill-in-the-matrix-actually-do/52880#52880. There's no evident memory loss. – Valorum Oct 12 '16 at 21:14
  • +1 for finding a canonical answer to this kind of question. Those who disagree has apparently chose to "believe whatever they want to believe". Nevertheless, good job! – Renttutar Oct 14 '16 at 08:20
  • @Renttutar - The problem with the Matrix is that they left an awful lot unexplained and the Directors largely refused to do any post-film interviews or a commentary track that might have gone deeper into the technical details. – Valorum Oct 14 '16 at 15:24
  • Yeah, and every sci-fi/fantasy fan were left screaming for answers. Good to have a place like this where you have even some sort of possibility to get answers. – Renttutar Oct 16 '16 at 14:00
  • If the blue pill acts as a strong sedative, would the user be heavily sedated when they are ejected from the matrix, and likely drown when they are discarded to the pool of... refuse? Note, the ship took a short bit of time to pinpoint Neo's floundering body with searchlights and fish him out. An unresponsive body would slip in to the water and be far harder to locate and retrieve before they inevitably drown. – Shorlan Aug 23 '19 at 21:52
  • @Shorlan - I see no good reason why an in-universe sedative would cause you to have the same effect outside the Matrix. Then again... "your mind makes it real" – Valorum Aug 23 '19 at 21:57
  • Though the question/answer/comments are old, and at the time I made my answer I was completely wrong about the blue pill altering one's memory, The Matrix: Resurrections has since been released, in which we see Neo being given Blue Pills by The Analyst to suppress his memories of being The One. There's no guarantee that they're the same "blue pills", of course, but it's interesting nonetheless. – DisturbedNeo Jun 16 '22 at 15:28
  • @DisturbedNeo - It's a completely different Matrix. I see no good reason why pills used by the Analyst would bear any similarity to the pills used by the Zionese rebels, other than a similarity in colour. – Valorum Jun 16 '22 at 16:12
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The Matrix is a computer simulation, not physical reality. This is actually a very common point of confusion in real-world software as well: an object representing a square is not actually a square but a logical model of a square no matter how square-like it looks or behaves. If you say "But I see a square drawn on my screen", then I can modify that object so that it no longer draws a square. The logical object itself is not a square.

This non-thingness of everything in the Matrix was Neo's breakthrough when he realized there was no spoon. The spoon wasn't a spoon, but simply code that at that moment was rendering a spoon in the Matrix, but which he could modify for his own purpose. I think the woman in the red dress was another explicit example of this, but it's been a long time since I last watched it so I don't remember exactly.

Morpheus wasn't physically offering Neo two colored pills, but providing him with two mutually exclusive options in a purely logical sense. It was effectively a confirmation window with "OK" and "Cancel" buttons. And the operation would be "destructive" in that whichever option was selected would close off the other option. "Both" was not a valid choice. Or at least that was the premise he presented, and there's no reason to doubt him considering he was the one presenting the option.

Daniel Maxson
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    I think you may have misunderstood the scene. To quote the makers of the film; What kind of drug does the red pill contain? WachowskiBros: It’s like a computer virus that’s meant to disrupt Neo’s life signal so that they can pinpoint where Neo’s body is in the power plant.. - So the pills don't represent a metaphysical choice, they're simply programs that have a very specific physiological response (much like the orgasm cake seen in Matrix Reloaded). – Valorum Oct 11 '16 at 13:09
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    @Valorum A computer virus is comprised of code, which is exactly what Daniel is saying is "contained" in the pills. I don't think he is misunderstanding anything here. – Zack Oct 11 '16 at 13:59
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    @Zack - There's a marked difference between a hand-crafted code that has a dramatically unexpected effect (q.v. the orgasm cake) and simply utilising the sort of pre-made codes that you find in the Matrix (eggs, flour, mundane ingredients, etc.). It's likely that the Blue Pill is simply Thorazine. or something similar. – Valorum Oct 11 '16 at 14:00
  • The woman in the red dress wasn't actually in the Matrix, and yes, did demonstrate the "non-thingness" of people's "physical" bodies in the Matrix, but was more importantly a demonstration of how nobody can be trusted because they could be overtaken by an agent at any time. – Devsman Oct 11 '16 at 14:21
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    There is nothing in the movie to support your conclusion that these options are exclusive. – Davor Oct 11 '16 at 17:08
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    This still doesn't really answer the question though of what would have happened if he took both pills. Are you saying he would have physically or mentally been prevented from making such a decision by the Matrix itself? – Ajedi32 Oct 12 '16 at 16:13
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From my programming perspective, it depends on the order he takes them in, and no, I will not be examining "He takes them both at the exact same moment" as an argument, because it's almost certain that one pill will hit his "stomach" and run its code at least a couple of milliseconds before the other even if he swallowed both at the exact same moment, and the topic of what happens if both run concurrently as coroutines is virtually impossible to answer without being able to analyse the exact code used in the pills, which we can't.

If the order is Blue -> Red, he would fall asleep and have his memory wiped, only to then have his I/O carrier signal disrupted and his body ejected from The Matrix. He would then most likely wake up on the Nebuchadnezzar with no memory of the past day's events. He would know about Morpheus and Trinity, as he knew them before anyway, but he would not remember having met them or being interrogated by Agents. The whole experience probably would have been a lot more jarring.

If the order is Red -> Blue, however, an interesting thing happens from a programming perspective. Neo's I/O carrier signal gets disrupted and his body is ejected from The Matrix. After this code has executed, the blue pill's code then attempts to send him to sleep and wipe his memory, except Neo is no longer connected to The Matrix thanks to the red pill, so the blue pill gets what is called a NullReferenceException. This means that whatever reference it needed to run, in this case, a reference to Neo's brain, no longer existed and one of two things will happen, depending on just how well the machines programmed this version of The Matrix.

  1. (Most likely) The machines have cleverly programmed in a null check that prevents such a thing from happening in the first place and nothing happens, Neo wakes up in the machine fields and is rescued exactly the same as in the first movie.
  2. (Very unlikely, but possible) The null reference causes the entire system to crash. Every program inside stops working, and every human inside, again depending on the nature of the Matrix's programming, either dies or is woken up.

So, basically, the most likely scenario is that nothing really changes. He wakes up on the Nebuchadnezzar whatever happens. The only difference is whether or not he keeps his memory of meeting Morpheus and Trinity.

DisturbedNeo
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    So, did you get that username by taking both the pills at the same time? – Fiksdal Oct 11 '16 at 14:15
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    Does this mean the multiple stomachs of a cow or sheep are a type of parrallel processing in order to avoid race conditions in foodstuff consumption ;-) – ian Oct 11 '16 at 15:17
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    @iain Parallel processing would increase the likelihood of race conditions... Also, the extra chambers in a ruminant's stomach are more of a multi-stage pipeline than multiple processors. – 8bittree Oct 11 '16 at 16:16
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    You know, @Fiksdal, I didn't even think about that as I typed this post XD but yeah, that's what happened. I took both, went craaaazy, and they had to get Keanu Reeves instead. This is now canon. The Wachowski sisters can fight me for it if they disagree. – DisturbedNeo Oct 11 '16 at 17:06
  • @8bittree Not if you write your code properly. – ian Oct 11 '16 at 17:10
  • That's a joke, btw. Poe's Law is an easy trap to fall into. – ian Oct 11 '16 at 17:11
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    @iain The wink kind of gave it away. I was pointing out that the premises didn't fit though. And the coding properly argument works with single processors as well. – 8bittree Oct 11 '16 at 17:41
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    @8bittree Unfortunately, I was unable to come up with a joke that fit. Parallel programming really is hard! :D – ian Oct 12 '16 at 10:40
  • I don't think this answer works. We know that the red pill works outside the matrix and is almost instantaneous, but we have no such knowledge about the blue pill... for all we know it has an effect purely within the matrix's simulated physics and which would therefore take some time, probably many minutes, to have any effect at all. – Periata Breatta Oct 12 '16 at 21:10
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    This is why I structured my answer as one where the pills run in series, with one piece of code executing only after the other has finished. Like I said, without knowing the exact code running in each pill, which we don't, there's no way to know how quickly they affect anything, so analysing what would happen were they to run concurrently is virtually impossible beyond extremely rough guesses, which aren't fit for a SE answer. My answer assumes that one pill only activates after the other has finished and that both are put on the stack so they are guaranteed to run. That's all. – DisturbedNeo Oct 13 '16 at 08:49
  • The machines didn't create the code for the red and blue pills. Morpheus is a hacker who built that code himself.
    • – Ernie Jul 17 '17 at 15:37
  • I honestly don't think that a null reference would possibly cause the entire system to crash. Even in 1998, we had operating systems with enough process separation to ensure that only that process would be affected by such a bug. Since this is far in the future when AI rules the world, and today we virtualise entire operating systems, I can't see why this would be remotely a possibility.
    • – Ernie Jul 17 '17 at 15:40