The film's opening timestamp — February 19, 1998 — marks the night Trinity is cornered in a hotel room by police and three Agents, programs with superhuman reflexes who can bend the simulation's rules. Her bullet-time escape across rooftops is the first glimpse that the world Neo inhabits runs on different physics than it appears to — a clue hidden in plain sight before the question 'What is the Matrix?' has even been asked.
