AN: This is something that I've written for a while. Xeno/grey asexual Alan/Tron. We're gone for quite a long very much philosophical ride with it.
I tried to remain faithful to the canons to some degree. If anything doesn't make sense compared with the movies, let me know please. I hope this tale can bring you as much reading entertainment as they were writing.
Warnings: Bad science. Random philosophic ideas. My strange French grammar.
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Sure, Alan was thrilled, felt as intrigued as his first day at Encom and everything. And sure, Tron had always been very dear to him, but very soon, the only thing he saw staring back at him in unblinking devotion became a huge complication to the balance of his sanity.
"Perhaps it would be easier to just consider him your son?"
Alan left his pad to give his spouse a bland look, only getting a stifled chuckle in return.
"Or maybe not a child, but a brother? A twin?"
Alan held her glace for a moment and then sighed, laying the pad down on their blanket. "It's ridiculous, I know it is!" Lora pushed her pillow higher and propelled herself on an elbow to clutch his hand. "But he's—Tron is… Tron! He is not my son, and don't even get me begun about the twin thing. He is a program, no matter whose looks he has, he—he is my program." He sighted. "Don't say anything," he pleaded.
Lora grinned, now feeling like a schoolgirl. "It doesn't seem much different on our network. Whether he comes or you go, biological or not…"
"It's not about—it's just—I..."
"It's only complicated if you make it so. I though you used to enjoy exploring new grounds..."
A strange expression arose on the ex programmer's face. "Like feeling your program up?"
Lora stood speechless, mouth agape for a few seconds before swallowing. "I didn't— It..." Blushing, she shot her husband a dark glare and playfully punched his arm. "I thought I explained that already!" at least I don't speak to her in command lines, she though, which she immediately regretted.
"At least I don't stare at her as is if she is might explode," she countered.
Alan tensed and a silence swept across the bed, sobering her at once.
Lora admitted it might have been a little harsh to make fun of it. He was already taking his relationship with Tron bad enough as it was. Besides, she understood only too well why Alan would be terrified by his proximity to a program he used—never mind that it was Tron, a real sized avatar of his youthful ideals, or that Tron actually shared his face—but Lora had long gotten over her own existential complexes with the portable version of Yori she upgraded on her laptop from Encom's archives. by now and Tron seemed just as happy as Yori to spend time with their Users, so why was Alan taking face to face interactions with the program so badly?
Perhaps the topic was too personal, too narcissist to be threaded on lightly. If Lora was being honest with herself, neither of them was ready to open up about it, long married couple or not. Her eyes dotted on the pad resting between them. For all the oedipal turmoil they had experienced, the program did not seem to care a second about putting a status on their relations with them. Of anything, Alan and her needed to find some common rules or something, before pretty errors were done and awkward regrets ensued.
She looked up at him and felt terribly bad when he avoided her eyes. Lying back down on the bed, she sighted and tentatively reached for his hand.
"Well, I don't stare anymore," she tried to amend, "So I can't hold it against you, and," her voice trailed fainter, "we both know they don't either."
On his system, Flynn had implemented a special chatbot feature to what they called the I/O towers; a crazy and brilliant idea—just like its inventor, Alan thought with a bittersweet taste in the mouth—so now, through they still could not process all of the concepts the English language offered, the "Grid" programs were granted a more "user friendly" mode of output through a simplified somewhat rigid syntax. It was while debugging Tron's code, and exchanging a few words with his program, that he had begun to add credit to Sam's story.
When he realized there was reason behind the trick: nothing in the code of the chatbot protocol justified half the nuances in his program's outputs...
He swore, memories of SF reads and asimovian tales already swirling in his head.
It was not so much the idea of speaking and playing chess with a program that made Alan nervous, but he had yet to get used to the fact that the program was such an accurate copy of his younger body, with his own mannerisms and values. He had been enthusiast to meet him at first, but the initial curiosity quickly left place to a magnetic repulsion, which only began very slowly to dissipate through the week.
Actually meeting Tron could have felt like meeting a twin of sort, except it was anything but a twin, despite everything Flynn had theorized about the Grid in his books. Meeting his program has been a familiar and alien sensation at the same time, as many other things. However, most of all, for all of his rationality and scientific mind, it still felt terribly uncanny.
Not only was it a younger copy of himself—with the strength, the agility, and the fresh hopeful views he lost...—but Tron has been—was—a fragment of himself: a segment of his life in which he had put the best of his knowledge, thinking and feelings.
The result was simply fascinating. And yet...Alan did not know if imprinting his own ideals into what looked like a full-fledged, nearly sentient being didn't make him some sort of dictator in the end, but it was surely a bit narcissist, wasn't it?
On the digital world, it had not really made a difference, since directives were the only thing allowing programs to…run. Their feelings only born and grew off their main purpose. Directives gave them purpose and they were happy with it.
Sadly, neither Quorra, Sam, nor any of Flynn's books could explain what made a program over another more curious of its surroundings and own needs. What could make Tron say "my diagnostic returns an inadequacy", "my diagnostic returns a great purpose", while meaning "I am worried" or "I am happy"?
It was surrealist.
The first time he arrived on the analog plane, without the I/O chatbot translations, Tron has only been able to communicate using a keyboard at first. Alan could not stifle a laugh when he saw his program answer the most complexes questions in typed Assembly.
He laughed much less, through, when he tried to decipher the low-level language himself; then with a decompiler; to grasp half of what Tron's loops meant.
It was even more frustrating that there were many questions Alan had for Tron, half of which the program was probably unable to answer, sure, but still!
He would have to wait for Sam to stabilize Flynn's system enough and get rezzed in himself to be able to communicate better.
Fortunately, Tron has showed extraordinary memory abilities; enough to memorize and process audio inputs as soon as he heard them. At that rate, Alan and Lora had little to do before he managed to express himself effectively enough in his User's native language in a very fair delay.
It took a little longer to get Tron to actually leave keyboards alone and voice the words himself. The program also had to get over the miss of the telepathic like senses that his permanent connection to the System usually granted him.
Presented with all of the English verbs, Tron still insisted to use computer terms to express himself and refer to other programs. Lora put it on the sake of some religious code or self-depreciation. Eventually, Sam stopped Tron in the middle of a statement.
"You think, man. Just say you think, that's the world for it. Processing doesn't make sense least you are some kind of..."
"Program," Tron finished. "I see no purpose in referring to myself with User terms, Samflynn."
The young man sighed. "It's just Sam."
"Fact that I feel and live as you would say, Justsam," Tron amended, "does not stop me from being an anti-malware...software. I am not currently active on a System but my memory and behavior are configured according to the last Grid I was rezzed on."
"Still," Alan intervened as Lora softly chuckled, "For most of us, the idea we associate to the terms you use suggest acts devoid of any will or consciousness."
"Then, if you think it is a problem, the logical thing to change would be the Users' idea of these terms," he said bluntly, "not what the programs are and call themselves."
Alan still had their last conversation fresh on his mind. Despite being familiar with the program's mind, his vocabulary would often slip and Tron would be forced to ask for a definition. Among those words stood Freedom, and the horror that befallen the security program at its explanation.
Thinking about these things the next morning as he waited for Lora to leave him the shower, Alan could admit that absolute freedom was an impossible concept, severance of all bonds being a hell of itself even for the human mind.
Therefore, once he was alone with Tron again, he described the sensations that freedom was supposed to cause instead. "These feelings come with purpose," the program had commented then, "When I follow a direction most compatible with my directives, then I feel free."
After some thought and to Alan's amusement, Tron added, "I think it also applies for every programs running on Flynn's Grid...and on Encom old mainframe."
It sounded only logical. Moreover, it eased many of the programmer's worries. Nevertheless, logic and facts soon proved insufficient to quell Alan's complexes.