One of the greatest aspects of Agent Smith in The Matrix is the ability to present itself as pure evil. But Agent Smith’s evil (played masterfully by Hugo Weaving) was rooted in logic. A program designed to protect the Matrix from the threat posed to machines by Zion, the last refuge of free will.
Evil is based on perspective when weighed against the equally arbitrary -- good. Agent Smith was totally devoid of any emotional connection to his purpose. It runs in firm contrast to, as most things do in The Matrix, its angelic hero, Neo. The chosen one destined to purge humanity of its robotic nemesis, led by the digital devil himself, Agent Smith. Without any emotion, Agent Smith has no ability to empathize with people. Without the hope of empathy, good must fight evil because it can’t be reasoned with. But it can evolve. With that in mind, let's look at how the Agents of the Matrix franchise took on new forms.
When The Matrix Reloaded spun onto screens after the original dropped a creative red pill on Hollywood, Agent Smith’s adaptive-evil found a way to return to the Matrix. Now, unshackled from the Matrix, the leftovers of Agent Smith's coding was free to operate and be a menace to both sides in this multi-layered dystopian-society. And he brought a next generation of friends to help. At the beginning of Reloaded, when Neo has his first battle with the Agents, he quips about them being noticeable upgrades. However, the adaptations imply something evolutionary, just look at their name-tags.
In Matrix Reloaded, the audience is introduced to new Agents’ Johnson, Anderson and Jackson. All happen to be three of the most common surnames in America. This reinforces the generic undertone of a mass identity between them. Now that "son" is in the end they become almost like children to Agent Smith. It was almost like Agent Smith had his own army of arch-angels, cast out from the Matrix to digital purgatory to flounder on their own and terrorize.
At the same time, Neo, too, appears to have equally grown and changed, keeping the balance. He has also evolved into the presence of a messiah-type figure amongst the believers in Zion. But before he was Neo, he was Thomas Anderson, which speaks to the evolution of Agent Smith. "Thomas" in ancient Aramaic means “twin & leader.' ‘Anderson’ loosely translates into “son-of-man” in ancient Greek. But if Mister Anderson is to be a "twin" who represents humanity, then Agent Smith would seem to be paired as his industrial equal. The duality of The Matrix can be expressed in the helix-type paths of Neo and Agent Smith. They needed each other-a perfect symbiotic balance, a relationship between good and evil. So how does this dynamic evolve?
After 2003’s final installment, Matrix Revolutions, the storyline officially was carried forward into an MMO, The Matrix Online. But this online world didn’t strike a chord with audiences. Back in 2004, Monolith studios created an online world that was supposed to draw hardcore Matrix fans and gamers alike. But clunky gameplay and repetitive story modes couldn’t keep up with competitors like World of Warcraft when it was mercifully unplugged in 2009 (after jumping hands to Sony OE). However, MXO did show a hint of what the continually advancing Agents could do. They’d become essentially a viral infection of sorts, with almost limitless potential to infect and control. A natural progression for Agents, but the evil was still bound by the limits of computer code written in 1s and 0s.
But Neo and the Agents can’t evolve without each other. If not for Agent Smith and his ilk hunting the survivors in Zion, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) wouldn’t have had to seek Neo. While Agent Smith, if, as some believe, was actually "The One," he could not have achieved his goal of destroying the Matrix (and fulfilling the Oracle's prophecy) had he not had his own nemesis in Neo to help it achieve its goal. With that said, good and evil never remain constant, meaning it has to go beyond.
If Neo and the Agents are to transcend the limits of their worlds, it seems the next natural progression is to morph into the field of quantum computing in The Matrix 4. Where data can exist as both a 1 and a 0 at the same time, rather than just separately. Which could imply that Neo and Agent Smith are one and the same and bound by quantum entanglement. They would become an inseparable pair, like good and evil.