Tron Legacy the Junior Novel

by Alice Alfonsi

  Sam put down his burger and wiped his hands. “Why are you here, Alan?”

  “I promised you if I ever got any information about your dad, I’d tell you first,” Alan said. “I got a page last night.”

  “Still rocking the pager,” Sam said, stifling a laugh. Pagers were so old-school. “good for you,” he added.

  “The page came from the arcade.”

  Sam shrugged. “So.”

  “So, that number has been disconnected for twenty years,” Alan said. “Ever since your father vanished.”

  Sam froze.

  “Two nights before your father disappeared, he came to my house,” Alan went on. “Flynn said he cracked it. He was talking about genetic algorithms, quantum teleportation. Flynn said he was about to change everything. Science. Medicine. religion.” Alan locked eyes with Sam. “He wouldn’t have left that, Sam. And he wouldn’t have left you.”

  Sam shook his head. He had heard this before. It didn’t change anything. It couldn’t change anything. “You and I both know he’s either dead or chillin’ in Costa rica,” Sam said angrily. “Probably both. I’m sorry, man. I’m beat, and I smell like jail. Let’s reconvene in a couple of years—”

  Before Sam could object, Alan tossed him a metal ring. Instinctively, Sam reached out and caught it. “The keys to the arcade,” Alan said. “I haven’t gone over yet. I thought you should be the one—”

  “You’re acting like I’m gonna find dad sitting there working!” Sam cried. “Ah, sorry, kiddo, lost track of time for, like, twenty years…”

  The older man nodded, stared at the flickering lights of the city. “Wouldn’t that be something?” he said wistfully. Sam felt a momentary pang of sympathy. He wasn’t the only one his dad had left behind. Then, before he could say anything, Alan walked out the door.

  Left alone again with his dog, Sam found his gaze straying to the Tron-game action figures lined up on his shelf.

  For the very first time, Sam noticed something. “What the…?” he whispered, looking harder. The plastic face on the Tron figure looked just like the face of Alan Bradley.

  When Sam’s dad had been trapped inside the computer all those years ago, it was Tron who’d helped Kevin defeat the evil Master Program.

  Does the digital world my dad created really mirror our world so closely? Sam wondered. The thought stayed with him, like an itch he couldn’t scratch.

  He stared at the keys in his hand, the keys to the arcade. Suddenly, Sam grabbed his helmet and jacket. Before Marvin had time to swallow the last bite of his double-double, no mayo, Sam was back on the freeway.

  AS HEAT LIGHTNING RIPPLED THROUGH THE PURPLE SKY, Sam arrived in front of his dad’s gaming arcade. It was three a.m., the streets were deserted, and Flynn’s was dark and shuttered, just as it had been for two decades.

  Layers of old posters covered the entryway. There were flyers for concerts, movies, basketball games—twenty years of event history. Sam ripped them all away. Using the keys Alan had given him, he unlocked the front door.

  A beeping sound reminded him to punch in the alarm code. Sam did, surprised his twenty-seven-year-old brain could still access his seven-year-old self’s memory.

  The arcade was dark. Even after Sam turned on the lights, the place felt gloomy. Strange shapes lurked under sheets covered with layers of dust, like the creation on doctor Frankenstein’s lab table.

  But Sam knew the only creations lurking under the dusty covers were the ghosts of forgotten video games from the 1980s. Every one of them was an antique. The multiplatform, Internet gamers of the twenty-first century had no use for them.

  But not everything in this place was useless. As in Frankenstein’s lab, Sam suspected there might be a secret lurking inside the arcade. He just had to find it.

  Before he could begin his search, something caught his attention. One game, covered in a sheet like all the others, was up against the far wall. He walked up to it, blew away the dust, and pulled the sheet off Tron. He dug into his pocket for a quarter. Just one game, he thought. For old time’s sake.

  Suddenly the coin slipped between his fingers and Sam groaned. dropping down to retrieve it, he noticed scuff marks on the floor. It seemed the Tron machine had been moved—and moved a lot.

  Why?

  Sam tugged on the game, trying to move it himself. For a moment it didn’t budge—and then the whole thing suddenly swung outward. The game was concealing a secret doorway!

  As Sam stepped over the threshold, an electronic eye activated the room’s power. Lights came on by themselves, and Sam gasped in surprise.

  It must be dad’s secret laboratory, he realized, his heart beginning to pound.

  Frozen in time, a twenty-year-old pot of coffee sat on a stove in the corner. The leather jacket his dad had been wearing the night he vanished was still draped over a chair. A layer of dust covered everything. gulping, Sam continued to move around, taking stock.

  He saw a map tacked to a cork bulletin board. The map outlined a landmass Sam didn’t recognize. His father had labeled it the grid.

  Computer mainframes lined the walls, and a glass and silicon laser array was placed in one corner. The laser was aimed at a chair and table in the center of the room.

  Sam sat down in the chair. Suddenly the table in front of him lit up. Sam brushed away two decades of dust and discovered that it was actually a worktable that controlled the computers surrounding him.

  Processors began to hum. Then the screen in the center of the table flashed a question: TRON PROJECTINITIATE SEQUENCE? Y/N

  Sam pondered the question for two whole seconds before pressing Y.

  Instantly, a brilliant blue burst of light washed over Sam. “Ahh!” he cried, blinded by the flash.

  For a moment, there was nothing but the bright flash and the heavy sound of Sam’s startled breathing. It was as if time had been suspended.

  Sam finally opened his eyes. darkness. He blinked and rubbed his eyes, but it didn’t help. All the lights in the room had shorted out.

  Reaching out in the pitch dark, Sam felt the surface of the table. There were no running lights on the control panel, no humming or vibrations. It was dead. Sam found a manual reboot switch and activated it.

  Nothing. No power at all, not even emergency lighting. Muttering in frustration, Sam felt his way out of the secret lab. He moved through the arcade, which was also pitch dark, and finally stumbled out the front door.

  Although it was still dim, at least now he could see. And go home. Enough trips down memory lane.

  The night air felt different now, wet, foggy, cooler. Maybe the jump off the Encom building had rattled his brain. Shaking his head, Sam walked over to the streetlight where he’d parked his motorcycle. It was gone.

  “What?!”

  He glanced around and realized the missing bike wasn’t the only strange occurrence. Lots of things were different now. Clouds, stars, even the moon had disappeared. The sky above him looked as black as outer space. Suddenly a crackling flash of lightning rippled across the firmament.

  Heat lightning again? he thought. But the weather seemed too cool for that. And since when was lightning blue?

  Sam’s heart was now pumping hard enough to drown out the strange electronic buzzing that was assaulting his ears. He couldn’t wrap his head around it. Nothing was as it should be. Even the buildings looked different—blank walls without any windows or doors.

  That’s when a blinding spotlight pinned him. Sam groaned. The police again? “This has to be a new record,” he said out loud.

  But this was no helicopter. Looking up, Sam’s eyes nearly popped out of his head, and his jaw dropped. Hovering over him was an upside down U-shaped recognizer—from the Tron game! The digital construct was blue-black in color, with orange piping.

  I’m inside, Sam realized in shock. I’m in dad’s digital world!

  The recognizer hovered overhead, its light probing Sam as if he were a specimen under a microscope.

  “Identify
yourself, program,” a booming, metallic voice commanded.

  There was no way he was staying around to answer that question. He had to get back into the arcade. Sam tried to run, but the ground under his feet rumbled. Then the streets sank, transforming into deep canyons that surrounded Sam. In seconds, he found himself trapped on a concrete plateau with nowhere to go.

  The recognizer circled its prey then settled on the lone piece of raised concrete. The machine’s two legs straddled Sam. Hatches opened, and four guards—or Sentries as Sam remembered them being called—in blue-black armor and smooth, blank helmets walked out of a hangar and surrounded him.

  One of them pointed to Sam. “This program has no disc. Another stray.”

  The voice was electronic, but not without emotion. Sam sensed disdain, maybe even hatred, in the Sentry’s tone. A second Sentry seized his arm.

  “Wait!” Sam cried.

  The Sentries ignored Sam’s pleas. They dragged him into the recognizer’s hangar. The hatch closed, and Sam felt the craft lurch under his feet. He was trapped.

  ONCE THE MACHINE WAS AIRBORNE, the Sentries finally released Sam. But before he could take even a step, crackles of light energy slammed Sam against a bulkhead. More bands of power restrained his hands and feet.

  Sam ceased to struggle when the hangar floor became transparent. What he saw was unbelievable. It was the stuff of his father’s stories—but in living color.

  The recognizer was flying over a city that appeared to stretch for a hundred miles in every direction. The craft was dwarfed by impossibly high skyscrapers capped by towering spires that rose against the ebony horizon.

  The entire metropolis was laid out in a grid pattern. Sam tracked crackling bolts of energy as they raced between the buildings. Blue plasma traveled beside the streets through canals that flowed along every avenue and boulevard, like a river meandering through the forest.

  Those same energy beams roiled in the black sky. In one blazing blue flash of lightning a glassy onyx mountain range in the far distance was revealed.

  Dragging his attention back inside, Sam noticed other people in the hangar with him. They appeared dazed and frightened. Some watched the view through the floor, but most seemed disinterested.

  “Hey,” Sam called out. “does the name Kevin Flynn mean anything to you?”

  “Keep quiet if you want to live,” a teenager warned, causing Sam to raise an eyebrow. He’d just been asking a question. giving him a closer look, Sam saw that the kid wore a weird black bodysuitlike piece of clothing that glowed with lines of rippling energy.

  Sam looked back at the rest of the people. “Not the games, not the games, not the games,” one person chanted. Curled in a ball on the transparent floor, his eyes were hidden behind trembling hands.

  “What’s his problem?” Sam asked.

  “Shhhh,” another hissed.

  Sam faced the man and gasped. Half his face had been violently torn away, leaving empty space bound loosely together…with wavering pixels!

  These aren’t human beings, Sam realized with a jolt. The Sentry had said it earlier, he just hadn’t been paying attention! These are programs! Living bio-digital entities. And the Sentries think I’m one of them!

  Suddenly, the invisible restraints holding Sam released him. He tumbled to the floor. The recognizer banked, moving into a landing pattern. Finally the airship docked on a platform high over the city streets.

  Sentries dragged Sam outside with the other programs. They were greeted by an intelligence officer in translucent armor. A Judge Sentry, identified with a special symbol glowing on his chest plate, stood next to him.

  Without wasting any time, the Judge Sentry began pronouncing sentence on every captured program: “I sentence you to the games…I sentence you to the games…I sentence you…” He went from one to the other without hesitation.

  Most programs accepted their fate meekly, as if they were already doomed. But some were not as quiet.

  “Not the games!” shouted one frightened program. He broke away from the Sentries and ran screaming to the rail. Sam watched in horror as the program hurled himself off the platform to the ground far below.

  A moment later, the judge approached Sam.

  This was his chance. He had to explain the situation and get out of here. He didn’t belong here.

  “Look,” Sam began to tell the judge, “I know you probably get this a lot. But there’s been a mistake. I need to talk to somebody—”

  But the judge cut Sam off with a simple pronouncement: “I sentence you…to the games.”

  THE JUDGE HAD SPOKEN. Sam was taken away and tossed into a room with four life-size statues of women. He blinked in astonishment when the beautiful “statues” came to life. They were Sirens from his dad’s game! Their white unitards glowed alluringly, and they looked as though they had been carved from pure marble.

  “Uh,” Sam said, “can somebody tell me what—”

  The one Sam assumed was the leader—lifted her finger. The tip glowed with a stark white light. The Siren touched his lips, and Sam fell silent. Then she ran the finger along his chest, and the light cut his clothes away, as if it were a surgeon’s scalpel.

  “Whoa!” Sam protested.

  The Siren ignored him as two others returned bearing formfitting armor. They touched the plates to Sam’s legs, torso, and arms. The armor clung to his flesh as if magnetized.

  Then the Siren raised her glowing finger again.

  “This can’t be good,” Sam said.

  She ran her finger along Sam’s armored joints, sealing them and trapping him inside. Arcs of plasma surged through the plating. Sam’s newly electrolyzed flesh tingled.

  Finally, another beautiful Siren approached Sam. She carried a circular metal disc the size of a dinner plate. Silently, she inserted the disc into a groove on the back of Sam’s armor.

  Sam’s head felt like it was going to explode. And rightfully so. Unbeknownst to him, a powerful processor inside that disc had begun downloading the contents of his mind.

  “Mirroring complete,” the disc Siren droned. “disc activated and synchronized. Proceed to the games.” She stepped back into the shadows and froze, statuelike once more. The two others joined her, and all three became motionless again.

  Sam faced the head Siren. “What do I do?” he asked.

  For a moment, it looked as though she might be sympathetic, as though she might actually help Sam get out of this waking nightmare. But then she spoke. Her answer was one word: “Survive.”

  A door opened and the floor moved, carrying Sam forward and then straight up a dark chute. He rose and when he could see again, he was in the middle of a vast arena.

  Looking around, Sam realized he was standing on a raised platform—one of eight. The platforms were huge circles. Each was separated by a deep abyss. Sam looked down into the black pit beside him. He couldn’t see the bottom.

  Thunderous applause greeted Sam’s arrival. Scanning the arena, he saw thousands of programs sitting in the stands. They weren’t just clapping for him. They were clapping for all the contestants—and there were sixteen of them.

  The competing programs eyed one another. Some seemed used to their surroundings, and Sam guessed they were vet-erans of the games. His suspicions were confirmed when those programs dropped into a crouch, waiting for play to begin. The frightened newcomers, on the other hand, shifted nervously. Sam quickly mimicked the seasoned players and dropped into a crouch, too.

  Just then, a robotic voice boomed: “The Leader has signaled the start of the games.”

  Leader? What leader? Sam thought.

  Cheers erupted from the audience, and Sam focused. Across the court, his opponent pulled the disc from the back of his armor. A helmet immediately formed over the program’s head, and then a visor covered his face, making him battle-ready.

  “Yo!” Sam called, realizing the opponent looked familiar in his gear. “I have a three-inch version of you on my action-figure shelf!” Maybe fightin
g him would be as easy as playing with toys.

  Maybe not.

  The disc in the progam’s hand began to glow. Then the program hurled the disc so fast it singed Sam’s hair. Without missing a beat, the disc returned to the thrower’s gloved hand like a high-tech boomerang.

  The game was officially on. And Sam needed to stay focused.

  Just then, a big, bearded opponent threw a disc. But this one wasn’t aimed at Sam. This disc was heading for the terrified program on the platform at Sam’s right.

  The glowing disc hit the quivering program square in the chest. It exploded into thousands of tiny squares that bounced across the court like shattered glass.

  “Program three derezzed,” the robotic announcer calmly declared.

  Sam swallowed hard. He was freaking out now, but he refused to show it. I can play this, he told himself. Plus, I can’t derezz…I don’t think.

  Taking a moment to get his bearings, it occurred to Sam that he had an advantage. He had played a game just like this before—Tron! First level. Single-elimination round.

  I can beat this level. I’ve done it already.

  Sam reached behind him for his disc, but it stuck in its sheath. Uh-oh. His opponent threw again. Sam ducked just in time and finally freed his own weapon.

  “All right, here we go,” Sam said, as the visor instantly closed over his face. Now he was battle-ready! He fired his disc.

  His opponent dodged Sam’s throw and tossed again. This time the disc hit the platform, shattering it under Sam’s feet.

  Sam yelped as he fell. With one hand he managed to grab the crumbling edge. He caught his returning disc with the other.

  “So that’s how it is,” Sam muttered, pulling himself back up.

  His opponent made a huge leap, jumping right onto Sam’s broken platform. Standing over him, the program raised his glowing disc like an ax.

  “I don’t think so!” Sam slammed down his own disc, striking the platform at his opponent’s feet. The platform shattered, and Sam’s opponent fell into the black abyss.