by Brian Daley
“TRON!” The bellow was uttered in a voice that combined many, with Sark’s and the MCP’s foremost among them, as if uncounted prisoner programs now inhabited Sark.
Overcoming his moment’s irresolution, Tron coiled, let fly. The disk left a trail of white luminance in the air, a perfect throw. And yet the huge creature reached forth a hand and deflected it easily with his palm. Tron recalled the disk, circling to one side, despairing, but unwilling to give up.
The Carrier closed on the beam at a tortuous crawl, all but spent. Flynn stood on the edge of the superstructure, looking down at it as Yori watched in complete consternation.
“Flynn, you can’t” she declared. “You’ll be de-rezzed!”
He turned to her, placing a finger on her lips. So much like Lora! “Probably,” he confessed. He took her into an embrace, bent close to her. She stared at him, uncomprehending but trusting. This time, their lips met. The kiss was a new experience for Yori, but she apprehended, right away, what it was. She responded in kind.
Yori’s body became radiant once more, its aura brightening as it had in the apartment. She was filled with feelings she couldn’t sort out or analyze, an affection for Flynn that was unlike her love of Tron, but undeniable, and wonderful. She transformed once more, the circuitry giving way to traceries, and was gossamer-winged in her mantle, hair flowing freely, her eyes closed in rapture.
Flynn pulled back to take in the sight of her, enthralled. A moment later her eyes opened. “Don’t worry,” Flynn whispered. He released her and she watched him, unspeaking, wordless with the thing that had happened to her.
Flynn poised on the edge of the fading Carrier, gathered himself, and jumped off the brink, into the MCP’s Communication Beam. Yori was at the rail in a swirl of mantle, grief and fear changing her face, to peer after him.
Flynn dropped in a slow-motion dive through the almost physical resistance of the beam, maneuvering himself down the fountain of energy into the heart of the Master Control Program. Yori mourned him no less than she had Tron.
“END OF LINE, PROGRAM,” the body of Sark intoned in its multitude of voices, the mockery of Sark and the MCP prominent among them. Tron, heaving for breath, his best attacks ineffective, dodged between the giant’s feet. Nearby, Master Control watched with its placid, idiot-feral gaze.
Flynn, arms upraised, slid feet first down the beam, body aglow with his own power. There was an incandescent flash and a feeling like that in the laser lab, when he’d been digitized, of an alteration in his body structure. Then Flynn was inside the very core of the MCP cylinder, where the MCP had never expected or provided against any other entity’s intrusion.
Sark’s zombie looked up sharply, aware of an unspeakable wrongness. Tron couldn’t help but follow the stare, trick or no. The bloated face of the MCP had been replaced by Flynn’s distorted, convex features on the wall of the cylinder.
Tron had the impression of enormous contention, a battle of titans within the MCP. He turned to the thing that had been Sark, but the creature was still absorbed by events within the cylinder. Perhaps, Tron thought, some indirect attack on it—
Then he saw the blades protecting the MCP’s light cones swing open, exposing the supporting cones to attack. Flynn’s doing! Tron knew.
He readied his disk again and it attracted the corpse’s attention. Tron cast a final time, but not at the hideous thing that fought him. The disk hissed to circle the vertex where the energy cones rested one upon the other, supporting the MCP. The disk maneuvered to Tron’s command; it sliced directly into the vertex.
The citadel resounded to an explosion that nearly rocked Tron of his feet, the heat of it making him throw his arms up protectively, the light of it threatening his vision. The Sark-thing stared at it and the outcry of multitudes came a last time, “NOOOO!” as it realized what Tron had done. As it gazed up at the hurricane of energy liberated from the cones, its eyes were again for a moment those of the real Sark, stunned with the knowledge that he’d lost irrevocably.
Then the giant became a column of mottled light, losing all features, seeming to fold in and melt upon itself, dissipating all that had animated it, in a foam of iridescent explosions. Tron stared at it in dreadful fascination, then returned his gaze to the cylinder.
A new form was coming into being in the madness of contending powers that threatened the energy cones. It reminded Tron of Dumont as he had been configured in his pod, its face ancient, drawn with age, wizened and emaciated, its pod an earlier and eroded version of a Guardian’s.
High up there, the MCP was losing its fight; it had assumed this appearance, stripped of the power and accumulations of its long rise. It looked down through weakened eyes, old and debilitated. Before it, its gnarled and withered hands played on an old-fashioned, standard typewriter keyboard, an instrument from the days of its earliest origins. As Dumont had predicted: He started out small, and he’ll end up small. The face sank backward and down out of the headpiece, leaving only a dark aperture.
The figure faded from view and the great cylinder of the MCP shone more and more harshly. Tron took a step back, sensing that some final finish was yet to come. Along the wall, the figures of Dumont and the other Guardians were rezzing up, their substance and essence released from the destroying Master Control. Tron took Dumont by the arm, gesturing to the others, urging them from the citadel.
Detonation after detonation blossomed across the surface of the MCP, licking out at the heels of the fleeing programs. They got through the doorway just as the vertical flange panels began to blast free, searing the air and making the floor jolt. The explosions continued, rising around the cylinder, consuming it, eating toward its core.
At last the MCP went up in a sunburst that climbed into the night sky as Yori watched from the drifting Carrier. With that, the surrounding Domains, darkened during the reign of the MCP, began to return to life. The impenetrable sky, blocked off by the influence of Master Control, was once more open to the night; stars and nebulae and comets and moons flashed and winked.
The fireball of the MCP’s last eruption climbed, as more Domains revivified in every direction, a carpet of light rolling out to all sides as a ripple expands across a pool from the dropping of a stone. Yori shielded her eyes from the glare of the nova but watched the returning Domains, ecstatic.
The Carrier was descending, little left to it but the bridge area where she stood, its de-rezzing barely halted in time. Below her she saw Tron waving, running across the mesa to reach the spot where the Carrier would touch down.
He gazed up at it, a ghost ship except for the bridge. He doubted that the System would see the ominous flagship again. Yori came to the edge of the bridge as it settled to the ground and jumped the last few feet, into his arms. She was again attired as a worker.
Tron gathered her in happily, laughing, about to welcome her and tell her how dear she was to him. But before he could, she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him full on the mouth, holding it for a long moment, pressing him to her. Surprised at first, he accepted, then savored it. When she released him, he was a little breathless. “Nice!” he panted.
She giggled. “It’s something the Users do.”
Whatever it was, Tron wasn’t sure he liked the idea of her doing it with anyone else, User or not. But that was beside the point right now. He scanned the bridge behind her. “Where’s Flynn?” He had a feeling he already knew.
Her face went somber. “He’s gone. Into the MCP’s beam. He saved you. He saved us, after all.”
He looked to where the beam had probed down from the sky and wondered if Flynn had made it home. The events since Flynn’s appearance on the scene would take much consideration, Tron thought, much meditation. They had meanings to yield. “So,” he murmured, “he really was a User.”
A small green meteor swept down past him on a close flyby, spikes protruding. “Yes!” assured the Bit, who’d finally caught up with his program’s friends.
Dumont joined them, and
they all watched the System return to life and light, and the sky show the splendor of the stars once more. How wonderful it must be in his World, thought Tron. Thank you, Flynn! Yori sent a silent message upward.
FLYNN’S DISEMBODIED POINT of view watched the circuit landscape of the Electronic World draw away from him, growing small at breathtaking speed—except that he had no breath. Soon it had resolved into a globe of intricate geometric shapes limned in light. Then it shrank into infinite distance.
He only half-remembered now the terrific fight with the MCP, in which he’d been aided by Tron’s timely inspiration in hurling his disk at the vertex of the energy cones. His instinctive use of his special powers had helped him in his effort to set things to rights, and to direct a reversal of his digitization. And in that he had been aided too by programs that had begun running after the destruction of the MCP. He hoped he hadn’t blown it . . .
The laser array hummed, issuing a line of coherent light. It flashed at an exact range, precisely decoding the structure of Flynn’s body, a task which would’ve been impossible if the MCP hadn’t devoted so much effort to digitizing him in the first place.
He barely had time to catch his breath, to wonder, to rejoice and raise thanks to the Powers That Be. He barely had time to marvel at the things that had happened to him and think: Good-bye; good luck! to his friends.
Because just then the computer begin printing out hard copy:
file = DSKI:FLYNN .MEM 700.706
.dir (flynn) /hist/ listall
File System Accounting Log
Directory Access History
User name: Kevin O. Flynn
Password: *FLOTILLA*
Subdirectory: game software
Access control:
This User:
encryption protection
(level 5)
Other Users:
access denied
Access History:
File name
Project name
File Created
Last Access
PARA
“Space Paranoids”
21-MAR by FLYNN
30-AUG by DILLINGER
VICE
“Vice Squad”
15-APR by FLYNN
30-AUG by DILLINGER
LITE
“Light Cycles”
10-JUN by FLYNN
30-AUG by DILLINGER
CIRCMAS
“Circuit Masters”
29-MAR by FLYNN
30-AUG by DILLINGER
WARP
“Warp Factor”
12-AUG by FLYNN
30-AUG by DILLINGER
Flynn snatched up the copy with a whoop and a laugh, and dashed off to find Alan and Lora.
In the aerie of the ENCOM tower, early-morning light grayed the windows of Edward Dillinger’s office. He’d spent the night in the sumptuous private suite that adjoined his office, too tired for a limousine or helicopter ride home, only to be awakened in the predawn by an alarm squeal from his desk.
Now he sat before it and watched as one of the desk’s many screens showed him the same information that had been printed out for Flynn. There would be no way to hide it now, he knew, nor any way to refile it under limited access. The Master Control Program was no longer running, as if it had been utterly destroyed—by what means, he had no idea. And Bradley’s Tron program was running.
Dillinger’s superdesk told him that Flynn and the others were already manipulating the ENCOM system. Soon enough, Gibbs and the rest would be down on Dillinger’s neck. His career over, the criminal implications of what he’d done only now coming through to him, he ignored the coming of daylight in the moribund silence of his office.
The black executive helicopter circled down from the blue sky toward the landing pad on the roof of the ENCOM building. Lora and Alan squinted into the blades’ backwash as a ground crewman held the chopper’s door open.
Out jumped Flynn; grinning broadly, he’d just returned from concluding a major multinational agreement much in ENCOM’s favor. He had on a natty double-breasted suit, but had chosen to wear his running shoes.
Y’know, those two don’t look too bad together, he thought, as Alan and Lora ran to meet him. He hoisted his attaché case in triumph. When they’d exchanged greetings, Alan said, “Dillinger wants to talk to you; he says it’s all a mistake.” He had to yell to be heard over turning rotors.
ENCOM’s new Senior Operating Officer smirked. A number of lettered agencies were lined up, indictments in hand, for a crack at Edward Dillinger. Flynn shook his head. “Can’t; bad for the corporate image.” Alan smiled, somewhat like a wolf.
They fell in behind him as Flynn headed for the elevator. “Besides,” he finished, “I’m beat.”
“Hey,” Lora protested, “you’ve got an executive board meeting.”
Flynn turned his smile on them both again; Alan’s arm around her shoulders seemed the most appropriate thing in the world. He slipped them a wink. “This is the executive board meeting!”
High over the System soared the Solar Sailer, cruising above the glittering beauty of the radiant Domains and the phosphorescent tides of the Game Sea.
Tron stood on the bridge with his arm around Yori. The Sailer changed transmission beams and came onto another tack as the Bit shot past them, playing and cutting figure eights, zipping along next to the graceful Sailer, over a System ablaze, a free System.
Table of Contents
CONTENTS
TRON
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
11
11
12
13
14
15
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