[Tron]
The voice tugs at him from the edges of the bright warm cocoon enveloping him, and Tron wants nothing to do with it. He doesn't want to leave here just yet. It's safe in here, and nothing hurts. Besides, the recompile sequence isn't finished yet. Whoever it is will just have to wait.
[Wake up, Tron]
The voice won't quit, though. Rough and burred—a voice he knows, quite intimately, he thinks, though he can't match it to a tag just yet—and utterly insistent.
[WAKE UP]
He opens his eyes.
His processes are lagged and sluggish and it takes him several microcycles to understand what he's seeing, but one fact becomes clear almost instantly: he is no longer in his healing chamber, or even in his base. Someone has moved him, has brought him out of his safe haven, and the sharp bolt of fear and anger that burns through him at the thought also serves to galvanize his senses.
This place, too, is a place he knows.
He can see his own reflection, dimly, in the dark surface of the mirror that's been set into the black rock floor of the ravine, but the bulk of his visual attention are drawn to the words that have been scrawled across it in red: "WE ALL KNOW HOW THIS ENDS".
[Do you see, Tron?]
A flicker of movement behind him in the mirror, and Tron's disc is in his hand in less than a nanosecond as he whirls to face his abductor. But there's no one there. No rock walls, either, anymore; no ice, no soft blue glow from the projected illusion of the energy-pool above. Instead a vast labyrinth stretches before and around him, the walls glowing a lurid magenta threaded through with thin gold circuit lines. More mirrors are set into the walls at irregular intervals. Tron reaches toward the nearest and feels the buzzing, faintly repellent tingle of the multiple redundancies and failsafes coded within. Quarantine .zips, like the one he'd set up at the bottom of the hollow where he'd been forced to intern—
"Where am I?" he shouts, the echoes snapping back at him off the walls of the maze, bringing with them another sound: a strange, rattling hum that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. "How did you bring me here?"
[I've brought you nowhere. You've been here all along. Do you see?]
"I don't see anything," Tron snarls, hand tightening around his disc. "Now tell me who you are, and what you've d—"
"Catch!"
This voice is new, and comes from an identifiable direction: behind him. He turns just in time to catch the small spherical object—a Jai Alai ball—that's been lobbed in his direction and follow its trajectory back to its source.
The figure standing there is tall, strikingly so, with brilliant white circuitry against a silver suit of Disc Wars armor. The circuit patterning follows the generic template of all regulation Games attire, but Tron recognizes the other program's large grey eyes and slightly nervous half-smile anyway.
"Jalen?"
Jalen's smile widens a fraction, though his eyes are dark and troubled. "I'd say welcome, friend…but not here. Not like this."
"I don't understand," Tron replies after a long moment. This doesn't make any sense. Surely this can't really be Jalen. Jalen is dead, has been dead for cycles, now. Worse than dead. "How are you…"
Jalen shakes his head. "That's the wrong question. How I'm here doesn't matter, because I'll never be able to leave. How you got here, though, that matters. Because you might still be able to get out. Do you see?"
Tron's frustration level is edging dangerously into the red. "Dammit, I don't see at all! What in Flynn's hell is going on here?"
Jalen's eyes (if indeed it is Jalen; Tron doesn't trust this place for a second) darken further, and Tron realizes a terrible thing: cracks are beginning to spread out from their corners, widening into patches of corruption that eat away at his face like acid. His circuits, too, are twisting and changing, clear white burning away into sickly yellow-green
"Of course you don't see," Abraxas hisses, stalking toward Tron, voice and posture crackling with menace. "Always blind when it mattered the most, letting your attention be deflected elsewhere while your System fell to ruin behind your back. You haven't changed!"
Tron drops into a defensive stance, feeling a stab of pain and guilt at the virus's words that clashes uneasily with the clear call of his directives—eliminate the threat, protect the System. "I failed you," he acknowledges slowly, calculating vectors of attack and escape, energy levels and the best angles for throw and melee. "I know I did, and I am so sorry. But I won't fail the System. Not while I'm still alive, not while it still needs me."
"You've already failed," Abraxas replies with a distorted chuckle. "You've failed, just as I did, and we are the same."
Directive wins. Tron leaps forward, meaning to drive his disc through the abomination's core, anti-viral protocols activated, to eliminate this threat once and for all. But before the blow can land, the thing's surface render changes again. The legs shorten slightly, the dead-white skin darkens, the burning yellow cracks split and straighten into an intricate network of fine circuit lines in white and blue and green.
"I saved your life," Cyrus accuses, blocking Tron's strike with a fluid, effortless mirroring of Tron's own movements. "I saved your life because I believed in you. But I was wrong. You showed me just how little there is to believe in after all."
"Cyrus I didn't…I never meant…" But the blows keep coming, the thing that was once his friend matching him perfectly move for move, and words are meaningless. And that sound, that grinding, grating rumble in the walls is growing louder, threatening to drive him mad.
"We both know how this ends, Tron. Do you see?"
"Cyrus's" features are beginning to pixelate and blur again. It'll be Beck, next, Tron thinks. It'll be Beck next, and I can't let it fool me. I have to fight it. I have to beat it, or I'll never find my way out of this place.
But it isn't Beck at all.
[Do you see, Tron?]
Tron backs away, disc falling from fingers that have suddenly gone numb and strengthless. It clatters to the floor and rolls, and his opponent leans down to pick it up, the movement as smooth and unconscious as an afterthought.
"I don't understand," Tron whispers again tonelessly.
[No. You don't. But you will.]
The dark-suited figure stares back at Tron expressionlessly, arms at its sides, discs in each hand held slightly forward, as if in presentation.
The face is his own.