FIC: Laser Control Chronicles, chapter 3 [Tron (Legacy), Yori & OCs]
03 - Coup
Orange light, to be more precise.
Same difference.
"Stay calm. There’s no reason to panic," Yori cautioned as she slowly backed them all away from the double doors of the arcade. Her voice was so low it barely activated her vocal processor, though every line of her code wanted to scream in denial. This couldn’t be happening. Not again. Of all the things, not this. "They can’t hurt us. They can’t get in."
The pair of red-circuited Sentries flanking the exit did not move.
"Hurt us?" Anemone blurted out. "Why would they do that? And why are their circuits like that?"
That shattered the trembling silence of panic barely kept from exploding. Seven pairs of eyes turned to stare at her, and three jaws had dropped in incredulity.
Anemone looked from face to face and guessed, uncertainly, "Are they infected with something?"
After so many cycles together, it was easy to forget that Anemone had never known the MCP.
"Not infected. Defected. Clu turned on the User," Quolli said, her voice growing more unstable with every word. "That’s why Flynn didn’t..."
Staticky sobs took over. Pum pulled her into a hug, though she herself looked dead behind the eyes. Like she had shut down all her emotional processes, was trying to become a vehicle of functions without a spirit - or perhaps more prudently, without memories.
"Not again," another one of Yori’s sisters moaned quietly.
Yori had no processing power to spare to worry about them. Her thoughts were racing at top speed - though they didn’t seem to be getting anywhere particularly useful.
Sentries with circuits of (User-denier?) red. Unlike independent Tron, these were emphatically Clu’s security programs, reporting and answering to him, absolutely loyal - sometimes too loyal. Where there were Sentries, there was Clu’s will. And if this was Clu’s will, then Tron...
Tron would never have allowed that.
It couldn’t possibly be User-denier red.
Visper’s voice cut through her thoughts.
"How can we be sure that’s it?" she all but demanded.
She sounded exactly like Yori felt. A tiny thought flitted through her head - Quorra - and triggered an escalating chain of terrible, terrible realizations. The ISOs. Oh, dear LoraB, if this was what it looked like...
And Teck. They’d sent Teck straight into a death trap.
"Things are different in this system, and even in Encom 511 red didn’t use to equal anti-User sentiment exclusively before the MCP," Visper argued. "Maybe in this system it’s a sign of high alert. LoraB knows Flynn not showing up is reason for high alert!"
"Yeah," Zava chimed in with a thin laugh. "You’ll see, in a nano or so Tron will show up, glowing bright red and cursing up a crash at Flynn for his poor taste."
"Are you two glitching in your eyes?!" Sei shouted. "Just look at them!"
"That’s enough," Yori said, with a calm her body belied, her code wound so tight and stiff she trembled with it. She pushed through her thronging sisters toward the door to addressed the Sentries. "What’s going on here?"
They turned to her as one, and the one on the left wasted no time scanning her. Let him. As long as Yori was on this side of the arcade threshold, she was read-only to Flynn’s - Clu’s - programs. Scanning was all he could do.
When he was satisfied she was authorized to receive the information, he said: "All units assigned to the combined Shiva Laser Control and Digitization Suite SHV-20905 are in violation of the new prime directive of all programs of the Grid. You are to surrender yourself and submit to the punitive process as set out by System Administrator Clu."
His voice was incongruously toneless and static-laden. Unless he was running silent functions Yori had never heard about before, he couldn’t possibly be processing that heavily just standing there.
Intimidation?
she thought. The notion filled her with disdain. My Tron could derezz whole suites of you with his bare hands and experience little enough processing strain to sing like a User all the while.
"What new prime directive?" Yori asked.
"User Flynn is gone. There is no higher authority than System Administrator Clu. The loyalty of all programs is to System Administrator Clu. Independent operations are strictly prohibited. All programs found in violation of this directive will be subject to immediate repurposing or deresolution."
Visper came to stand beside Yori. The circuits on their shoulders brushed; Visper radiated enough rage and fight to drown out the swirling undercurrent of horror below Yori’s own tightly reigned emotions. "Clu can’t repurpose us. He doesn’t have the necessary privileges."
"Then you will be derezzed," the Sentry crackled.
Yori had closed the doors, but the red light still shone through the panels of black glass set into them, so the laser control crew had retreated upstairs. Ni, ever vigilant, had taken up position at the window, keeping an eye out for any signs of life in the deserted streets below, while the rest had deposited themselves around the User-style office as haphazardly as Flynn had everything else in there.
Well, all of them save Anemone, who was pacing. But then she slowed. "Do you think Flynn is... dead?"
The idea felt sacrilegious, but in reality it was much worse.
"Of course not," Yori said firmly. "He’s a User and Tron is with him."
"Maybe Tron is dead," Sei said darkly. "Teck definitely is."
Yori whirled on her, circuits flashing. "How dare you!"
"Clu has an army, Yori!"
"So did the MCP, and look at all the good it did him," Yori said, sharply and with a warning note of finality. She took up pacing where Anemone, arms wrapped tightly around herself, had left off. "No. If Clu had managed to derezz Flynn, they would be comming it down every street, but that Sentry only said Flynn is gone. Clu may have taken control of the city, but Flynn is still out there somewhere, and Tron won’t abandon him. Or let Teck be hurt. As if she’d be stupid enough to get in harm’s way in the first place. No. Teck is fine - hiding, but fine - and it’s only a matter of time before Flynn and Tron shut Clu down."
Nobody argued that logic. But nobody chimed in to agree either. Her sisters shared glances or avoided each other’s eyes, but all in the same, tense silence. Yori paced and tried to think and not think at the same time.
"So what do we do now?" Quolli wondered aloud.
"What can we do?" Ni said without turning away from the window. "As long as those reds are waiting for us down there, we’re trapped."
"At least they can’t get in," Yori said. "They can bark all they want, but none of them have the clearance to come here and bite us."
"Clu will try to force or forge his way in," Pum said. Her eyes were still unfocussed, flat enough to flag alerts in Yori’s mind, but she took it as a good sign that she was speaking at all. "Like Sark did with the I/O towers."
"He won’t succeed," Visper assured her.
Coming from anyone else, it would have been an empty platitude. But there was so much grim fire in Visper’s voice it made Pum look up. Yori remembered a time when every word Pum spoke, no matter how innocent or trivial, had held a note of the same savageness. A souvenir from one too many matches on the MCP’s Game Grid.
"And I doubt he’ll try very hard," Zava added more gently. "Clu needs us. All of us, Teck included. We’re the only ones who can operate the laser. He can’t repurpose us to serve him against our will, nor repurpose other programs to replace us after we’ve been derezzed. He has admin privileges to every aspect of system operations except ours... and Tron."
"Exactly," Sei said. "I bet all the sentimental nonsense about ‘respecting our Users too much’ to make any of their programs ‘subservient’ to his was just a ruse, and situations like this are the real reason us Encom 511 programs run independently of the rest of the Grid."
Yori jerked to a halt. Sei wasn’t looking her way, but she caught Visper’s eye. Flynn thinking so far ahead? Admittedly, a tempting thought. It would mean he had been prepared for something like this, better odds that he was okay and would beat Clu down soundly.
But as blasphemous as it was to think so, Yori had never heard anything more ridiculously unlike Flynn.
"That’s assuming he wants to keep the laser operative. Why would he, when he has already succeeded in trapping Flynn here?" Anemone said.
Sei turned to look at Yori now; Yori knew what she was going to say before she said it. "Master Control found plenty of use for us."
Yori’s skin crawled. "He did, but his ambitions were entirely different. The MCP saw the Encom system as only the first step toward controlling all systems, including that of the Users themselves. Clu has never expressed interest in anything but this system -"
"- yet," Sei mumbled.
Yori raked a hand through her hair. "Okay, you have a point. For our own safety, though, we should assume Clu’s forces will kill us on sight. Excepting Tron -" She swallowed through a lump in her throat. "- we are the first programs he would want derezzed, to keep Flynn from trying to reopen the Portal somehow and delete Clu from the outside. And to stop other Users from activating the laser from their end to let him out, or maybe even enter the system themselves and finding out what’s going on."
Anemone looked around at her Old System sisters in awe. "LoraB?" she whispered.
Now the memory was first in the cue; Anemone had not suffered the MCP, but she had never known the User whose name was now etched into her soul either. Never felt her light warm her down to the core, felt her voice resonate in every character of her code.
A conflicted sense of loss and longing made Yori ache. Flynn’s presence in their midst was a never-abating miracle, but it wasn’t the same. In here, Users were little better than any other program. From out there... they were gods. Giants, calling with all the unfathomable warmth and depth and power of their souls to the tiny little spark of themselves that lived in their programs.
From out there, they didn’t seem so fickle and fallible.
And fragile.
But she pushed those thoughts aside. Need breaks want.
"LoraB," Yori confirmed. "And Alan-1."
"But they entrusted us to Flynn," Quolli said, confused.
"Because they’re his friends. If Flynn doesn’t return to them, they’ll notice something’s wrong. And once they do, they’ll come look for him," Yori explained. "Flynn is always in a hurry to return to his responsibilities in the other world, so now that he’s missed his transport back home, it shouldn’t take more than a User day - two at most - for them to start missing him. Three decicycles, give or take, before they start looking into the places he’s most likely to be, and let’s say four until they reach the laser." She spread her arms. "That’s it. Whatever is going on and whatever happens, it’ll be at most four decicycles before LoraB or Alan-1, or both, arrive. And then everything will be alright."
"Yori’s right," Visper said, standing and brushing shoulders with her again. There was a hint of a smile on her face, and the heat of her circuits felt encouraging. Yori found her own back straightening a little further in response to Visper’s confident stance; feet apart, hands on hips, chin up. "We need to stay put, stay alert, protect our station, and await LoraB’s arrival."
To Yori’s surprise, it was Sei who asked, in a small, frightened voice: "Are you sure she’ll come?"
"Yes," Yori and Visper chorused.
Visper smiled, looking from Sei to Yori. "As sure as I am that Teck and Tron are still alive and will find their way back to us eventually."
Half a microcycle later:
"We can’t just sit here and do nothing but wait for four decicycles." Zava lifted her head from her hands. "What are we going to do?"
Yori looked up from the glitchingly cluttered desk drawer she was pouring through, but before she could say ‘Working on it!’, Sei pinched the bridge of her nose and snapped: "For the umpteenth time, there’s nothing we can do, because the reds have blocked the exit."
"There’s only two of them," Visper said with a dismissive wave of the hand.
Ni chewed her bottom lip. "Am I the only one who thinks that’s suspicious? Nine of us -"
"Eight," Quolli whispered, though she looked as if it tore the voxels from her throat to do it.
Ni just shook her head. "Nine of us - one of whom Tron’s mate, two others trained disc warriors and the rest as capable with a disc as any other program - against two of them? And with the domain barrier between us? They don’t stand a chance. We could kill them without setting a foot out of the door!"
"They’re a trap," Pum murmured. She gnawed on her thumbnail a moment longer before setting her hands on her knees and nodding to herself. "Decoys. Clu knows damn well that this is the only safe place left on the Grid. It’s not us coming out that he’d be worried about, it’s Flynn getting in. He’s letting us think we could smash our way out at any moment because us doing that would make it easier for him, but you’ll see, he has this whole sector cordoned off just out of our line of sight. Sentries and Black Guard at every corner and intersection, Recos above and tanks in every street, all the buildings occupied..."
"There’s always the emergency hatch back at the station," Anemone offered. "No way for him to guard that."
"Because it opens into a seething mass of pure virus," Sei said tersely. "Which I realize nobody wants to talk about or has ever actually considered a danger to us before, but will still disintegrate our escape pods and kill us horribly long before we break the surface."
"Funny you should mention that," Yori piped up, finally withdrawing the datahex she’d been looking for. What it had been doing in a folder labeled ‘Traffic’, she had not the patience to contemplate beyond a few choice expletives. "I have my proposed fortifications for the escape pods right here. All we’d have to do is implement them."
"What, us?" Zava looked around at her sisters in alarm. "We’re simulation designers, not update and repair. We can’t just go and rewrite our own code."
"Sure we can, in this system," Visper said, eyes gleaming. "And since End User Flynn couldn’t be bothered to make the time to do it himself, we’ll have to. Come on, it’s only a minor revision."
"Hack our own station," Quolli mumbled around the hand she’d clamped over her mouth. She and Zava exchanged glances. "I can feel myself go red just thinking about it."
"Unless we want to be stuck here until someone else comes to break us out, we don’t have a choice," Yori pointed out.
"Okay." Sei threw up her hands. "We violate the will of our User and Creator and that of End User Flynn, we somehow manage to get our jets into the air with nothing to jump off of. And then what? Fly into the city and be derezzed on sight?"
"Sneak into the city and find out what’s going on," Yori said. "We have a duty to keep ourselves safe so we can open the portal when LoraB calls on us, but not knowing anything could be as dangerous as going outside."
"And everyone we care about is out there," Visper added. "Our friends, our mates, Teck."
Ni looked perturbed. "We’re not combat programs, Visper, and a few rounds of Disc Wars every so often doesn’t make you one either. We can’t stop what’s going on out there."
Yori hadn’t given that option any serious thought so far, but put like that, it just rubbed her the wrong way. "It took only two programs to bring down the MCP."
"It took Tron and a User to bring down the MCP," Ni corrected miserably. "And you, we get it. But the laser is too important, we can’t go running off like a bunch of dime a dozen data pushers!"
"I’m not suggesting we storm out of here and fight off hordes of reds all by ourselves, just that we don’t know anything," Yori said. "What’s going on out there? How stable is Clu’s new authority? Did he take Tron City only, or every settlement on the Grid? Those Sentries by the entrance could be the only reds in the city, for all we know!"
Anemone frowned. "They said -"
"Maybe they lied! We don’t know, that’s the whole point."
"I’ll go take a look," Pum said, standing suddenly. Her circuits were faint and there were tense lines around her mouth, but her voice was steady and hard. She looked her sisters in the eye one by one, then held Yori’s gaze. "My combat subroutines are the most developed. I’ll have the best odds. It’s been many cycles since the Gaming Grid, but I remember everything. Like it was yesterday."
Yori’s energy cycling stalled painfully. "Pum, you don’t have to do this."
"But I can." With visible effort, she produced a smile. "I’ll find out what happened and bring back Teck. And if I can, I’ll finally repay Tron for putting a stop to Master Control’s Games."
It took the better part of three millicycles to work around their lack of User permission to access the code of the station, and two more to modify the escape pods. All of that after they had spent a centicycle and a half writing another set of modifications to allow Pum to return the way she came, once she had reached the surface.
Every new step of the process made something in the back of Yori’s mind itch more fiercely, and she had to stop herself countless times from double-checking and second-guessing her work, the risk of altering the wrong line of code and leaving them all derezzed or glitching horribly or non-functional ever at the top of her priority list. But with the help of her sisters and Visper’s constant presence at her side, her right hand and second through this crisis as she had been in every other, they succeeded eventually.
"If I’m not back after two centicycles, assume the worst," Pum said, her hands clasped in Yori’s. Her voice was level, but Yori could feel her shaking. She tried to pull Pum into an embrace; Pum kept her at arm’s length and shook her head. "Don’t make this any worse," she pleaded, quiet enough that only Yori could hear.
Light jet baton in hand, Pum climbed into a pod. The front panels closed around her. Its energy lines lit up, and then a beam of light shot up from the top, and the pod zipped through the force field in the ceiling faster than the unprepared eye could process.
For a moment, Yori squeezed her eyes shut and allowed herself to fear, and hope, and want him. Then she took a deep breath and immediately put her crew to work.
The laser control station and the arcade made up an autonomous domain unto themselves, which no program of Flynn’s, Clu included, could access. Nor any of the ISOs, alive or dead. Not after that deeply unsettling millicycle Radia decided to invite herself in, filled with questions and entitlement and bizarre, alien ideas about going through the Portal to walk among the Users. But as the saying goes: given enough time, a bit can learn to recite poetry - in binary. Clu would keep trying to force his way in until he succeeded. It was best if they started thwarting his efforts right now.
They kept themselves busy designing and implementing shields and security measures, and rewiring the energy transfer conduits inside so thoroughly there was no possible way Clu could cut off their power supply completely. Bit they kept locked in the station for fear that if they took it with them into the arcade, it might fly out the doors and meet who knew what horrible fate. Sleeping was done in shifts, and they made sure one of them was keeping an eye on the Sea around the station and one on the streets around the arcade at all times.
It was challenging enough work to keep emotional turmoil to a relative minimum, and make Ni scream like she was being derezzed when, without warning, a beam of light connected to the empty pod slot sixteen millicycles after Pum had left.
"Wake the others," Yori yelled to Ni, who sprinted for the transporter while Yori drew her disc. Anemone and Visper drew their discs too and, as they had practiced, they surrounded the pod’s slot, weapons raised.
In times like these, there was no such thing as ‘too careful’.
Visper, Zava, Quolli and Sei had joined them by the time the escape pod lowered through the ceiling and hissed back into place.
All this time, Yori had allowed herself to hope. For a smile saying it wasn’t as bad as they’d feared, for a hug and a laugh and the revelation that it had all been a misunderstanding, or at least a raised eyebrow at their over-the-top cautiousness. A tiny, shameful thread of a process had even dared to wish that it wouldn’t be her missing sisters stepping out of that pod, but Tron.
One look at Pum’s face when the panels slid away made Yori wonder where that naivety had come from. Pum’s grimace as she took in her sister’s hopeful faces shattered whatever optimism they’d held onto into a million tiny pixels.
Pum caught Yori’s eyes and shook her head.
Yori went numb after that.
Flynn was said to be alive and the speculation mill was working overtime, but he had not been reliably sighted since the millicycle the Portal closed. Clu controlled all of Tron City and claimed the same of every other part of the Grid. Every known ISO settlement and hub in the computer had been bombed to code-dust, and survivors were being hunted down and massacred in the streets, along with anyone suspected of being an ISO-sympathizer. There was no trace of Visper’s ISO... friend, mate, pleasure-partner, whatever they had been. Given the close and very public ties Quorra had had to Radia and Jalen, though, derezzed was the most likely possibility.
The rest of Pum’s report was delayed a while in the face of Visper’s destructive reaction to this news.
Clu’s rejection of the User was met with ubiquitous chaos and confusion and something Pum had heard called ‘civil war’; non-combat programs fighting and derezzing other non-combat programs, strangers and friends alike, heedless of task or function, with only their opinions to blame. It was unlike anything she’d seen even under the MCP. Every security and combat program on the Grid was either loyal to Clu, fighting a losing battle against overwhelming numbers of their former brothers, sisters and suite-mates, or in hiding.
Pum had found log nor rumor of Teck’s fate.
Tron was dead.
The actual pain didn’t register until long after the tears had started.
Laser Control (WORK IN PROGRESS)
01 - Digitized
02 - Blackout
03 - Coup
Digitization: one part magic, three parts hard work by Yori and the rest of the laser control crew. Resistance: the only thinkable course of action when red once again swarms the system and takes Tron away from her.
Orange light, to be more precise.
Same difference.
"Stay calm. There’s no reason to panic," Yori cautioned as she slowly backed them all away from the double doors of the arcade. Her voice was so low it barely activated her vocal processor, though every line of her code wanted to scream in denial. This couldn’t be happening. Not again. Of all the things, not this. "They can’t hurt us. They can’t get in."
The pair of red-circuited Sentries flanking the exit did not move.
"Hurt us?" Anemone blurted out. "Why would they do that? And why are their circuits like that?"
That shattered the trembling silence of panic barely kept from exploding. Seven pairs of eyes turned to stare at her, and three jaws had dropped in incredulity.
Anemone looked from face to face and guessed, uncertainly, "Are they infected with something?"
After so many cycles together, it was easy to forget that Anemone had never known the MCP.
"Not infected. Defected. Clu turned on the User," Quolli said, her voice growing more unstable with every word. "That’s why Flynn didn’t..."
Staticky sobs took over. Pum pulled her into a hug, though she herself looked dead behind the eyes. Like she had shut down all her emotional processes, was trying to become a vehicle of functions without a spirit - or perhaps more prudently, without memories.
"Not again," another one of Yori’s sisters moaned quietly.
Yori had no processing power to spare to worry about them. Her thoughts were racing at top speed - though they didn’t seem to be getting anywhere particularly useful.
Sentries with circuits of (User-denier?) red. Unlike independent Tron, these were emphatically Clu’s security programs, reporting and answering to him, absolutely loyal - sometimes too loyal. Where there were Sentries, there was Clu’s will. And if this was Clu’s will, then Tron...
Tron would never have allowed that.
It couldn’t possibly be User-denier red.
Visper’s voice cut through her thoughts.
"How can we be sure that’s it?" she all but demanded.
She sounded exactly like Yori felt. A tiny thought flitted through her head - Quorra - and triggered an escalating chain of terrible, terrible realizations. The ISOs. Oh, dear LoraB, if this was what it looked like...
And Teck. They’d sent Teck straight into a death trap.
"Things are different in this system, and even in Encom 511 red didn’t use to equal anti-User sentiment exclusively before the MCP," Visper argued. "Maybe in this system it’s a sign of high alert. LoraB knows Flynn not showing up is reason for high alert!"
"Yeah," Zava chimed in with a thin laugh. "You’ll see, in a nano or so Tron will show up, glowing bright red and cursing up a crash at Flynn for his poor taste."
"Are you two glitching in your eyes?!" Sei shouted. "Just look at them!"
"That’s enough," Yori said, with a calm her body belied, her code wound so tight and stiff she trembled with it. She pushed through her thronging sisters toward the door to addressed the Sentries. "What’s going on here?"
They turned to her as one, and the one on the left wasted no time scanning her. Let him. As long as Yori was on this side of the arcade threshold, she was read-only to Flynn’s - Clu’s - programs. Scanning was all he could do.
When he was satisfied she was authorized to receive the information, he said: "All units assigned to the combined Shiva Laser Control and Digitization Suite SHV-20905 are in violation of the new prime directive of all programs of the Grid. You are to surrender yourself and submit to the punitive process as set out by System Administrator Clu."
His voice was incongruously toneless and static-laden. Unless he was running silent functions Yori had never heard about before, he couldn’t possibly be processing that heavily just standing there.
Intimidation?
she thought. The notion filled her with disdain. My Tron could derezz whole suites of you with his bare hands and experience little enough processing strain to sing like a User all the while.
"What new prime directive?" Yori asked.
"User Flynn is gone. There is no higher authority than System Administrator Clu. The loyalty of all programs is to System Administrator Clu. Independent operations are strictly prohibited. All programs found in violation of this directive will be subject to immediate repurposing or deresolution."
Visper came to stand beside Yori. The circuits on their shoulders brushed; Visper radiated enough rage and fight to drown out the swirling undercurrent of horror below Yori’s own tightly reigned emotions. "Clu can’t repurpose us. He doesn’t have the necessary privileges."
"Then you will be derezzed," the Sentry crackled.
Yori had closed the doors, but the red light still shone through the panels of black glass set into them, so the laser control crew had retreated upstairs. Ni, ever vigilant, had taken up position at the window, keeping an eye out for any signs of life in the deserted streets below, while the rest had deposited themselves around the User-style office as haphazardly as Flynn had everything else in there.
Well, all of them save Anemone, who was pacing. But then she slowed. "Do you think Flynn is... dead?"
The idea felt sacrilegious, but in reality it was much worse.
"Of course not," Yori said firmly. "He’s a User and Tron is with him."
"Maybe Tron is dead," Sei said darkly. "Teck definitely is."
Yori whirled on her, circuits flashing. "How dare you!"
"Clu has an army, Yori!"
"So did the MCP, and look at all the good it did him," Yori said, sharply and with a warning note of finality. She took up pacing where Anemone, arms wrapped tightly around herself, had left off. "No. If Clu had managed to derezz Flynn, they would be comming it down every street, but that Sentry only said Flynn is gone. Clu may have taken control of the city, but Flynn is still out there somewhere, and Tron won’t abandon him. Or let Teck be hurt. As if she’d be stupid enough to get in harm’s way in the first place. No. Teck is fine - hiding, but fine - and it’s only a matter of time before Flynn and Tron shut Clu down."
Nobody argued that logic. But nobody chimed in to agree either. Her sisters shared glances or avoided each other’s eyes, but all in the same, tense silence. Yori paced and tried to think and not think at the same time.
"So what do we do now?" Quolli wondered aloud.
"What can we do?" Ni said without turning away from the window. "As long as those reds are waiting for us down there, we’re trapped."
"At least they can’t get in," Yori said. "They can bark all they want, but none of them have the clearance to come here and bite us."
"Clu will try to force or forge his way in," Pum said. Her eyes were still unfocussed, flat enough to flag alerts in Yori’s mind, but she took it as a good sign that she was speaking at all. "Like Sark did with the I/O towers."
"He won’t succeed," Visper assured her.
Coming from anyone else, it would have been an empty platitude. But there was so much grim fire in Visper’s voice it made Pum look up. Yori remembered a time when every word Pum spoke, no matter how innocent or trivial, had held a note of the same savageness. A souvenir from one too many matches on the MCP’s Game Grid.
"And I doubt he’ll try very hard," Zava added more gently. "Clu needs us. All of us, Teck included. We’re the only ones who can operate the laser. He can’t repurpose us to serve him against our will, nor repurpose other programs to replace us after we’ve been derezzed. He has admin privileges to every aspect of system operations except ours... and Tron."
"Exactly," Sei said. "I bet all the sentimental nonsense about ‘respecting our Users too much’ to make any of their programs ‘subservient’ to his was just a ruse, and situations like this are the real reason us Encom 511 programs run independently of the rest of the Grid."
Yori jerked to a halt. Sei wasn’t looking her way, but she caught Visper’s eye. Flynn thinking so far ahead? Admittedly, a tempting thought. It would mean he had been prepared for something like this, better odds that he was okay and would beat Clu down soundly.
But as blasphemous as it was to think so, Yori had never heard anything more ridiculously unlike Flynn.
"That’s assuming he wants to keep the laser operative. Why would he, when he has already succeeded in trapping Flynn here?" Anemone said.
Sei turned to look at Yori now; Yori knew what she was going to say before she said it. "Master Control found plenty of use for us."
Yori’s skin crawled. "He did, but his ambitions were entirely different. The MCP saw the Encom system as only the first step toward controlling all systems, including that of the Users themselves. Clu has never expressed interest in anything but this system -"
"- yet," Sei mumbled.
Yori raked a hand through her hair. "Okay, you have a point. For our own safety, though, we should assume Clu’s forces will kill us on sight. Excepting Tron -" She swallowed through a lump in her throat. "- we are the first programs he would want derezzed, to keep Flynn from trying to reopen the Portal somehow and delete Clu from the outside. And to stop other Users from activating the laser from their end to let him out, or maybe even enter the system themselves and finding out what’s going on."
Anemone looked around at her Old System sisters in awe. "LoraB?" she whispered.
Now the memory was first in the cue; Anemone had not suffered the MCP, but she had never known the User whose name was now etched into her soul either. Never felt her light warm her down to the core, felt her voice resonate in every character of her code.
A conflicted sense of loss and longing made Yori ache. Flynn’s presence in their midst was a never-abating miracle, but it wasn’t the same. In here, Users were little better than any other program. From out there... they were gods. Giants, calling with all the unfathomable warmth and depth and power of their souls to the tiny little spark of themselves that lived in their programs.
From out there, they didn’t seem so fickle and fallible.
And fragile.
But she pushed those thoughts aside. Need breaks want.
"LoraB," Yori confirmed. "And Alan-1."
"But they entrusted us to Flynn," Quolli said, confused.
"Because they’re his friends. If Flynn doesn’t return to them, they’ll notice something’s wrong. And once they do, they’ll come look for him," Yori explained. "Flynn is always in a hurry to return to his responsibilities in the other world, so now that he’s missed his transport back home, it shouldn’t take more than a User day - two at most - for them to start missing him. Three decicycles, give or take, before they start looking into the places he’s most likely to be, and let’s say four until they reach the laser." She spread her arms. "That’s it. Whatever is going on and whatever happens, it’ll be at most four decicycles before LoraB or Alan-1, or both, arrive. And then everything will be alright."
"Yori’s right," Visper said, standing and brushing shoulders with her again. There was a hint of a smile on her face, and the heat of her circuits felt encouraging. Yori found her own back straightening a little further in response to Visper’s confident stance; feet apart, hands on hips, chin up. "We need to stay put, stay alert, protect our station, and await LoraB’s arrival."
To Yori’s surprise, it was Sei who asked, in a small, frightened voice: "Are you sure she’ll come?"
"Yes," Yori and Visper chorused.
Visper smiled, looking from Sei to Yori. "As sure as I am that Teck and Tron are still alive and will find their way back to us eventually."
Half a microcycle later:
"We can’t just sit here and do nothing but wait for four decicycles." Zava lifted her head from her hands. "What are we going to do?"
Yori looked up from the glitchingly cluttered desk drawer she was pouring through, but before she could say ‘Working on it!’, Sei pinched the bridge of her nose and snapped: "For the umpteenth time, there’s nothing we can do, because the reds have blocked the exit."
"There’s only two of them," Visper said with a dismissive wave of the hand.
Ni chewed her bottom lip. "Am I the only one who thinks that’s suspicious? Nine of us -"
"Eight," Quolli whispered, though she looked as if it tore the voxels from her throat to do it.
Ni just shook her head. "Nine of us - one of whom Tron’s mate, two others trained disc warriors and the rest as capable with a disc as any other program - against two of them? And with the domain barrier between us? They don’t stand a chance. We could kill them without setting a foot out of the door!"
"They’re a trap," Pum murmured. She gnawed on her thumbnail a moment longer before setting her hands on her knees and nodding to herself. "Decoys. Clu knows damn well that this is the only safe place left on the Grid. It’s not us coming out that he’d be worried about, it’s Flynn getting in. He’s letting us think we could smash our way out at any moment because us doing that would make it easier for him, but you’ll see, he has this whole sector cordoned off just out of our line of sight. Sentries and Black Guard at every corner and intersection, Recos above and tanks in every street, all the buildings occupied..."
"There’s always the emergency hatch back at the station," Anemone offered. "No way for him to guard that."
"Because it opens into a seething mass of pure virus," Sei said tersely. "Which I realize nobody wants to talk about or has ever actually considered a danger to us before, but will still disintegrate our escape pods and kill us horribly long before we break the surface."
"Funny you should mention that," Yori piped up, finally withdrawing the datahex she’d been looking for. What it had been doing in a folder labeled ‘Traffic’, she had not the patience to contemplate beyond a few choice expletives. "I have my proposed fortifications for the escape pods right here. All we’d have to do is implement them."
"What, us?" Zava looked around at her sisters in alarm. "We’re simulation designers, not update and repair. We can’t just go and rewrite our own code."
"Sure we can, in this system," Visper said, eyes gleaming. "And since End User Flynn couldn’t be bothered to make the time to do it himself, we’ll have to. Come on, it’s only a minor revision."
"Hack our own station," Quolli mumbled around the hand she’d clamped over her mouth. She and Zava exchanged glances. "I can feel myself go red just thinking about it."
"Unless we want to be stuck here until someone else comes to break us out, we don’t have a choice," Yori pointed out.
"Okay." Sei threw up her hands. "We violate the will of our User and Creator and that of End User Flynn, we somehow manage to get our jets into the air with nothing to jump off of. And then what? Fly into the city and be derezzed on sight?"
"Sneak into the city and find out what’s going on," Yori said. "We have a duty to keep ourselves safe so we can open the portal when LoraB calls on us, but not knowing anything could be as dangerous as going outside."
"And everyone we care about is out there," Visper added. "Our friends, our mates, Teck."
Ni looked perturbed. "We’re not combat programs, Visper, and a few rounds of Disc Wars every so often doesn’t make you one either. We can’t stop what’s going on out there."
Yori hadn’t given that option any serious thought so far, but put like that, it just rubbed her the wrong way. "It took only two programs to bring down the MCP."
"It took Tron and a User to bring down the MCP," Ni corrected miserably. "And you, we get it. But the laser is too important, we can’t go running off like a bunch of dime a dozen data pushers!"
"I’m not suggesting we storm out of here and fight off hordes of reds all by ourselves, just that we don’t know anything," Yori said. "What’s going on out there? How stable is Clu’s new authority? Did he take Tron City only, or every settlement on the Grid? Those Sentries by the entrance could be the only reds in the city, for all we know!"
Anemone frowned. "They said -"
"Maybe they lied! We don’t know, that’s the whole point."
"I’ll go take a look," Pum said, standing suddenly. Her circuits were faint and there were tense lines around her mouth, but her voice was steady and hard. She looked her sisters in the eye one by one, then held Yori’s gaze. "My combat subroutines are the most developed. I’ll have the best odds. It’s been many cycles since the Gaming Grid, but I remember everything. Like it was yesterday."
Yori’s energy cycling stalled painfully. "Pum, you don’t have to do this."
"But I can." With visible effort, she produced a smile. "I’ll find out what happened and bring back Teck. And if I can, I’ll finally repay Tron for putting a stop to Master Control’s Games."
It took the better part of three millicycles to work around their lack of User permission to access the code of the station, and two more to modify the escape pods. All of that after they had spent a centicycle and a half writing another set of modifications to allow Pum to return the way she came, once she had reached the surface.
Every new step of the process made something in the back of Yori’s mind itch more fiercely, and she had to stop herself countless times from double-checking and second-guessing her work, the risk of altering the wrong line of code and leaving them all derezzed or glitching horribly or non-functional ever at the top of her priority list. But with the help of her sisters and Visper’s constant presence at her side, her right hand and second through this crisis as she had been in every other, they succeeded eventually.
"If I’m not back after two centicycles, assume the worst," Pum said, her hands clasped in Yori’s. Her voice was level, but Yori could feel her shaking. She tried to pull Pum into an embrace; Pum kept her at arm’s length and shook her head. "Don’t make this any worse," she pleaded, quiet enough that only Yori could hear.
Light jet baton in hand, Pum climbed into a pod. The front panels closed around her. Its energy lines lit up, and then a beam of light shot up from the top, and the pod zipped through the force field in the ceiling faster than the unprepared eye could process.
For a moment, Yori squeezed her eyes shut and allowed herself to fear, and hope, and want him. Then she took a deep breath and immediately put her crew to work.
The laser control station and the arcade made up an autonomous domain unto themselves, which no program of Flynn’s, Clu included, could access. Nor any of the ISOs, alive or dead. Not after that deeply unsettling millicycle Radia decided to invite herself in, filled with questions and entitlement and bizarre, alien ideas about going through the Portal to walk among the Users. But as the saying goes: given enough time, a bit can learn to recite poetry - in binary. Clu would keep trying to force his way in until he succeeded. It was best if they started thwarting his efforts right now.
They kept themselves busy designing and implementing shields and security measures, and rewiring the energy transfer conduits inside so thoroughly there was no possible way Clu could cut off their power supply completely. Bit they kept locked in the station for fear that if they took it with them into the arcade, it might fly out the doors and meet who knew what horrible fate. Sleeping was done in shifts, and they made sure one of them was keeping an eye on the Sea around the station and one on the streets around the arcade at all times.
It was challenging enough work to keep emotional turmoil to a relative minimum, and make Ni scream like she was being derezzed when, without warning, a beam of light connected to the empty pod slot sixteen millicycles after Pum had left.
"Wake the others," Yori yelled to Ni, who sprinted for the transporter while Yori drew her disc. Anemone and Visper drew their discs too and, as they had practiced, they surrounded the pod’s slot, weapons raised.
In times like these, there was no such thing as ‘too careful’.
Visper, Zava, Quolli and Sei had joined them by the time the escape pod lowered through the ceiling and hissed back into place.
All this time, Yori had allowed herself to hope. For a smile saying it wasn’t as bad as they’d feared, for a hug and a laugh and the revelation that it had all been a misunderstanding, or at least a raised eyebrow at their over-the-top cautiousness. A tiny, shameful thread of a process had even dared to wish that it wouldn’t be her missing sisters stepping out of that pod, but Tron.
One look at Pum’s face when the panels slid away made Yori wonder where that naivety had come from. Pum’s grimace as she took in her sister’s hopeful faces shattered whatever optimism they’d held onto into a million tiny pixels.
Pum caught Yori’s eyes and shook her head.
Yori went numb after that.
Flynn was said to be alive and the speculation mill was working overtime, but he had not been reliably sighted since the millicycle the Portal closed. Clu controlled all of Tron City and claimed the same of every other part of the Grid. Every known ISO settlement and hub in the computer had been bombed to code-dust, and survivors were being hunted down and massacred in the streets, along with anyone suspected of being an ISO-sympathizer. There was no trace of Visper’s ISO... friend, mate, pleasure-partner, whatever they had been. Given the close and very public ties Quorra had had to Radia and Jalen, though, derezzed was the most likely possibility.
The rest of Pum’s report was delayed a while in the face of Visper’s destructive reaction to this news.
Clu’s rejection of the User was met with ubiquitous chaos and confusion and something Pum had heard called ‘civil war’; non-combat programs fighting and derezzing other non-combat programs, strangers and friends alike, heedless of task or function, with only their opinions to blame. It was unlike anything she’d seen even under the MCP. Every security and combat program on the Grid was either loyal to Clu, fighting a losing battle against overwhelming numbers of their former brothers, sisters and suite-mates, or in hiding.
Pum had found log nor rumor of Teck’s fate.
Tron was dead.
The actual pain didn’t register until long after the tears had started.
Laser Control (WORK IN PROGRESS)
01 - Digitized
02 - Blackout
03 - Coup
Digitization: one part magic, three parts hard work by Yori and the rest of the laser control crew. Resistance: the only thinkable course of action when red once again swarms the system and takes Tron away from her.