The Long Road, Part 5e/?
Continued from Part 5d
“I should've insisted when we first arrived,” Quorra rambles distractedly. She removes her disc from her back. “But now we have something to do while we wait...”
They're outside again, and she's moving at a fast clip, away from the sealed doors of their makeshift camp. Alan trudges after her. He's wondering why they've left a sleeping Kevin with that half-crazed program of his.
“Shouldn't we be-”
“We're better off out here for now,” she interrupts. “Flynn will be fine.”
Naturally his mind is on Kevin's safety first. But he's also worried about Quorra and Tron.
By now, Quorra is fifteen yards out and counting. Her path is perpendicular to the edges of the highway and dead center of the triangular, arching bridge gate above them. A wide, open field of view extends in the direction away from the urban sprawl and its smog blanket. As far as the distant horizon to Alan's left, the road is a cracked desert landscape, crossable, but fragmented into a crude puzzle of black, glossy pieces-reflective like glass and tougher than concrete. Alan stumbles over the edges as he scans the area with inbred wariness.
They've doubled their distance from the bunker when Quorra halts, gracefully pirouetting to face Alan.
“You trust me, right?”
Her tone is cavalier and supplemented by a grin.
Alan almost steps back. “Yes...”
“Don't move.”
Lightning streaks from her hand. Alan wrenches out the way, but he's a little too late.
Idle only a split second earlier, Quorra's disc is now embedded an inch into the ground, and wisps of smoke waft around the erect edge. It's just shy of where Alan's left foot had been.
He turns red. Also, he has a quiet coronary.
“Slow, but you have instincts,” she says, sounding cheerful.
“Next time you want to test my instincts, throw a punch.”
Not responding right away, Quorra retrieves her own disc. It jerks out of the ground's hold with the wild motion of something requiring a great deal of force, and the screeching, grating squeal reminds Alan of his first hours on the Grid-when those savage, mechanical beasts tore down a man. Left behind after Quorra's extraction is a seared trench of wounded, alien asphalt.
“The most important lesson anyone on the Grid should know, Sam learned in the Arena,” she says. “Your life depends on your disc.”
As if Alan needs reminding! He dryly rehashes his close encounter with Clu's disc.
“True, but he wasn't targeting you. Understanding the threat means defending yourself with force.”
“Maybe you didn't get the memo, but I'm not disc war material. My job at home is behind a desk.”
She nods, tapping her disc pensively. “Your real strength will be as a user. But user privileges won't protect you in a brawl.”
“Well let's try to avoid those,” Alan jokes.
Her lighthearted facade falters fractionally, and she averts her eyes uneasily.
“We should be careful anyway,” she hedges. “Why don't you take out your disc? We can practice.”
A lost cause, in Alan's opinion. But Quorra's nervous under her skin, and if 'practice' will help relax her, maybe he should play along.
He frowns and reaches behind him. Disengaging the item feels awkward, but no more awkward than the disc itself. Alan hasn't touched his disc at all, not before or after Gem's installation, and now with his fingers curled around one edge, the device unexpectedly, unnaturally, is set ablaze with the flame of life. Power awakens. A white-blue glow irradiates outward, illuminating but also casting darker shadows. And behind the energy circulating under the fine patterned ridges of his skin, Alan can sense a mystery. He prods the barrier instinctually, and the separation gives under the inquisitive nature of his mind, revealing-.
“Is something wrong?”
“I-” Alan is sidetracked.
He follows the virtual thread, the clue, with a minute tightening of his grip. His eyes and ears are still open to the outside, to the bridge, to Quorra and her anxious face, but they're receding too. Time slows and stutters into the still images seen through the folding leaves of a camera shutter. Fading in is another vision: the ticking machine, it's tiniest, most intricate parts growing smaller, smaller and accelerating away. Soon the motion is too fast to follow. The whole world is falling past him, and he's shooting out from the arm of a small galaxy.
Alan is horrified. He thrashes, every fiber of his being clawing for purchase. Quorra's image flickers in, and Alan heaves himself on the solid textures and lines like they're a life raft.
Another body, another heartbeat. And then the throb of his own pulse.
Alan drops his disc. They're still on the desert road outside Tron city, and his body is shaking, bleeding perspiration under the normally temperature-regulated suit.
“Easy,” Quorra soothes, steadying him. “Are you okay?”
As if Pan himself had decided to knock Alan's brain loose, Kevin's voice filters back to him.
“Understatement always was Kevin's idea of a joke,” he gasps.
Quorra's brows furrow before comprehension dawns on her face.
“Your user privileges! Flynn used to say the experience might depend on the user. But I've never seen anyone react so badly to their disc. Not even Sam.”
Alan has to stifle the urge to laugh hysterically. Instead, he focuses on the newly rediscovered sensation of his diaphragm contracting and his lungs ballooning. When the rush of flight-or-fight dies down, he toes his disc with his foot. The God-view doesn't threaten to swallow him whole. But the possibility hangs on the edge of perception, waiting. He quakes. How had Kevin known?
“I see into things like they're ticking clocks,” Alan confesses. “The world as a machine.”
Quorra's gaze skewers him, and her mouth hangs agape.
“I've only ever heard Flynn and Radia describe programming in those terms,” she says, hushed and mortified.
“Programming?!”
“Well, not at a console. The link...”
At Alan's look of utter bafflement, she offers him a shaky smile.
“Did you think we typed code in line-by-line all the time? We connect to the Grid.”
*
For a man in the business of the technology, he's been remarkably unmotivated to discover the technological underpinnings of the Grid. He blames the desire for ignorance on Kevin. Genius is only genius until innovation deprives you of the life you'd dreamed of; until you're crammed into a meat locker while your entire family melts outside. When you breach the boundaries of what a man can tolerate, genius is a codeword for ice-nine and the seed crystal for armageddon. So it's only natural Alan would recoil from the tools and trade of war which took Kevin Flynn from him. In part, they almost killed Alan too.
However, an understanding of the mechanism seems unavoidable. His life and his future are attached to a vast, virtual world he knows almost nothing about-and that's got to change.
“So I'm not just plugged in,” Alan deadpans. “I'm plugged in.”
“The link is deeper than a simulation,” Quorra confirms. “Deeper than stimulating the digital nerves in your digital skin. The mind is connected on an intuitive level. We use knowledge and abilities on the Grid we couldn't in your world. When we do, we're accessing the Grid.”
Their feet have fallen into a path of circumambulation around the bunker. The bridge is behind them, the ghoulish corpse of the city to their left, the shadow of their chosen stupa to their right. He and Quorra bear their discs like torches in the dark. Alan's finally determined the secret to carrying his: if he rejects the connection under his skin, he can pretend the device is like any other object. As soon as he acknowledges the link, the world tries to eat him.
“Flynn would call using our link 'surfing the codestream.' Some surf better than others. People like Flynn and Radia could surf so well, they raised whole new environments: buildings, transportation, food. Of course, Radia was limited by her privileges. But that's why Flynn wanted to make her a co-systems administrator.”
“And Radia is-”
“She was the de facto leader of the ISOs. Many considered her to be a spiritual guide.”
Alan's simple curiosity about Radia ushers in a lengthy tale worthy of Crusoe (or Gulliver). Quorra speaks of the ISOs emerging from the Sea; the individuals Ophelia, Giles, and Gibson; Ophelia's assumption of a new identity as Radia; the formation of city-states and their respective governments. The gist of the history lesson is that Radia was Kevin Flynn's ISO zen counterpart. Empowering her was the tipping point for full scale war between Flynn and Clu.
A spiritual guide in a programmed world: an angel or a demon?
Maybe Flynn's angel and Clu's demon.
Alan sighs. “I had no idea what I was stepping into, did I?”
“We should've explained.” She falters. “Being out of the Grid was a dream. I was was so happy to breathe and see the sun...”
“Don't worry. We'll get out again.”
“I know. But I risked your life by bringing you here, and I didn't-”
Alan braces her elbow to stopper the outpour. “You did fine,” he says gently. “Tell me about your life on the Grid. How did you meet Kevin?”
By Quorra's own account, she was first a student of Radia the prophet, and second a disciple of the Creator. These zen masters preached to her from literature. They set her on the path of Jules Verne and Dostoevsky, both of whom became the authors of her Biblical canon. The teachings there instilled in her a desire to see a universe beyond Newton and his nihilistic mechanical prison; to see a world of imagination and freedom.
Alan listens with a skeptical ear. In her mind, Alan's world, Kevin's world, is this miraculous land of destiny. It's the land Deus set Jeanne d'Arc to reclaim. It's not a land where people compete to earn money; it's not a land of divorce or homosexual prejudice; it's not a land of cancer and AIDS. It's not a land where dictators murder, like Clu murdered Quorra's friends. Alan can't decide: is Quorra's naivete funny, endearing, or horrifying? Jules Verne could write about submarines and people at crushing depths because he didn't know about water pressure; Jeanne's power was her belief. Jeanne was also tied to a stake in the Vieux-Marche and burned alive. Alan doubts Quorra will ever face anything so terrible (again). But he shrinks from the inevitable confrontation between Quorra's fantasy and the unforgiving erosion of time.
They're just looping around the other side of the compound, the farthest point from the bridge, when Alan plants his boot in syrupy, adhesive gum.
“Great,” he says, extricating himself. “More of that guck Tron had all over him.”
Alan and Quorra unearth a river of smelly, oily tears; the stuff dots an increasingly crag-like lava field of broken, gray hexagon cobblestones. They peer down the trail, which disappears into the haze on their left.
“You don't suppose-”
“Tron,” she says.
Like two prying, meddlesome adventurers, Alan and Quorra set out to see Tron's kill.
Continued in Part 5f