Strange New World
By Moonhawk64
A/N: As promised, the sequel to Tron: Reprogrammed. I do know where I'm going with this, I'm just not sure how to get there, so this one may be slower going than the last one. Please be patient.
Also, I tried to include a little information both for Ironman/Marvel fans who don't know that much about Tron, and for Tron fans who don't know much about Ironman/Marvel, but if I'm not clear, please let me know & I'll try to do something about it.
Disclaimer: I own books and DVD's but not the rights to anything on them.
Spoiler: Everything Tron except the computer games, and both Ironman movies. I don't know much about the Ironman comics, so I'll pretty much be sticking to what's in the movies. (Since the Ironman movies are part of a whole Marvel movie series including other characters, I may reference some of them, too.)
Pepper Potts, the beautiful but extremely competent CEO of weapons and technology manufacturer Stark Industries, was not having a good day.
First, she had slept through her alarm (for which she blamed the owner of Stark Industries and until recently it's [completely irresponsible] CEO, Tony Stark, who had gotten arrested for "drunk and disorderly" and called her to be bailed out at two o'clock in the morning), then her coffee maker hadn't turned on (for which she blamed Tony Stark, because it had been acting up lately, and last night Tony "fixed" it for her; he probably would have done a much better job had he been sober at the time), then she'd been late getting to work (for which she blamed Tony Stark, who'd passed out on her sofa last night because she hadn't trusted him to stay home had she taken him there, and who she had to drag out of her apartment and into a cab, except he'd stopped the cab twice to upchuck out the door, and then rerouted it to a coffee shop twenty-three miles out of their way.)
She hadn't gotten in to her office until ten o'clock, and had, as a result, missed an important (although admittedly boring and dreaded) budget meeting.
And now, her computer was acting up.
After rebooting it twice, jiggling all the cables and connections, and, then, finally, out of sheer frustration hitting it on the side a couple of times, she'd called IT. Unfortunately, IT had problems of their own.
"It's a computer virus." The harried-sounding young man on the other end of the line told her. "The whole building's affected."
"Well, give it a shot of penicillin or something!" Pepper told him, exasperated. She blamed Tony Stark. God only knows what he'd been doing to the thing. He'd probably given it an STD.
"I'm sorry, ma'am." The poor young man told her. "We've been trying to fix it all morning, but whatever this is, it's nasty and nothing we've tried has worked."
"Well, who did we get the system from?" Pepper asked. "Can the manufacturer do something?"
"We got the system from Encom Industries." He replied. "And yeah, we were just about to call them in."
"Then do it!" Pepper snapped, but it was only her frustration talking, so she did not actually slam the phone down.
When Stark Industries' Head of IT, Milton Bradley (yes, he'd been teased about it all his life, and no, he was no relation to Alan Bradley, CEO of Encom) had called Encom in desperation, the call, from one of Encom's most important clients, had been routed to Roy Kleinberg, who, while a member the Board of Directors, was also one of Encom's best and most experienced programmers. Roy had calmed the man down, grabbed his suitcase of tools (both software and hardware), and taken a company car to Stark Industries.
Roy had been one of Encom's lead programmers before being fired shortly after the disappearance in 1989 of Kevin Flynn, the company's CEO and biggest shareholder, but he certainly had not been idle since then. Besides various consulting jobs in the industry, Roy had also been a computer hacker attempting to put together evidence of Kevin's whereabouts. It had not been his fault he hadn't succeeded. After all, how was he supposed to know Kevin had built a secret office under the arcade he owned, built a then-top-of-the-line military-grade server, then zapped himself into it with a digitizing laser, where he had been trapped for twenty years when the sysadmin program he'd created to help him built the software became corrupt and staged a coup?
Thank god Kevin's now-grown son, Sam, had found the office, gotten himself zapped into the system, and helped solve the problem.
'Hmm,' Roy thought as he pulled into Stark Industries' parking garage, 'maybe Alan and I should have rewritten Tron and Ram to modern standards. Given the sophistication and maliciousness of some of the virus's - or would that be viraii? - nowadays, that might not be a bad idea.'
"Note to self." Roy said aloud as he exited his car, "Talk to Alan about modernizing Tron and Ram."
"What?" Said the young man sent to meet Roy to take him directly to the server farm. Jason Decker assessed the Encom programmer. He'd been told only that Roy Kleinberg was one of the world's best and most experienced programmers. He certainly looked like a geek, with messy, curly blond hair and glasses, but he was clearly over forty - probably over fifty - and Information Technology was very much a young man's game. This guy probably thought "phat" meant the File Allocation Table.
For his part, Roy looked at the young man approaching him, saw the doubt in his eyes, and prepared to take the kid to school.
"Sorry, nothing." Roy said, smiling reassuringly. "Just...lead the way."