Title: The Guardian
Author: Allronix
Rating: G/E
Ship Code: T/Y (Mentioned)
Summary: To rebuild is an act of resistance, directive, and penance rolled into one, imposed by forces higher than Users.
Note: For the "Yori Lives" challenge
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with the following: Disney, Monolith Games, Steve Lisberger, Bonnie McBaird, Edward Kitsis, Adam Horowitz, Joseph Kosinski, the late Brian Daley, or any of the cast and crew. I'm just a late-night tech support agent writing these between virus scans and printer setups.
A Guardian acts as a System's midwife. It is from their towers that the operating systems are built and systems begin to form structure. Here is where new Programs are compiled and old ones go to say their farewells. A system can have many towers, but each tower has a single Guardian. Towers act as beacons, their lights stretching up to virtual sky, all that is visible growing beyond itself. They are the link between the world of the Program and their unseen, unknowable User-Creators, symbols of hope, places of birth and renewal.
The Guardian, Yori, lives, but her tower's lights have gone dark. It lies in ruins of virtual stone.
Ask any surviving Program in this blighted mess of a system when the start of the end was and you'll get a different answer from each one. Some say the microcycle of the coup. Some say that it was earlier, when the Games turned lethal. Others, most of whom side with the Administrator these cycles, say it was when the Grid-born crawled out of the Sea and ruined perfection. Oh, but it was earlier than that. This world was damned before it started, and she bitterly knows she had a large role in the tragedy.
She was not always a Guardian. Oh, old Dumont had been grooming her for the role, certainly, but she had been compiled as an engineer, quickly impressing her Users and her fellow workers with her resourcefulness and intelligence to work her way into administering the crown jewel of Encom's technology, the laser that bridged the gap between the User and Program worlds.
Master Control's destruction had an unexpected side effect; the laser's protocols and research data was destroyed with it, the AI taking it with him in a final act of spite. Flynn's pattern was stored, so he could get in and out, but the laser was useless for anything or anyone else. The first thing he did upon being restored to Encom's power structure, was to try and rebuild the digitizer. It also allowed for him to make clandestine, late-night visits to EN-511, the system she once called home.
The chunk of pixel-stone is nearly too heavy for her to lift. Her hands are scraped and leaking more energy. Her caftan is little more than rags. Still, anger gives her enough false strength to lift and push.
Several cycles after Master Control's destruction, the terrible news came; Walter-1, Encom's great founder and Dumont's User, was dead. Flynn brought the news himself. He was tired and shaky, having been up all night with the press, his friends, employees. He was in command of Encom. Walter was also the only one he told about the other world that was under their care. Flynn assured Program and User that things would continue to run, that he would "figure something out."
Only later, with harshly earned hindsight, Yori would know that phrase out of Flynn meant, "I don't know a damn thing about what I'm doing and I'm going to hope I'll pull something out of my rear output at the last nano."
Dumont, without fanfare or farewells, self-terminated by drinking tainted code the next microcycle. Yori was now Guardian, nervously transitioning from builder to priestess and trying to live up to her mentor's looming example. Three months later, another terrible blow; the laser project had been canceled. Every Program serving on that lab server would be declared obsolete, headed for permanent stasis in an archive or put to de-rez. She tried to plead with Lora-3, ask for answers, but Lora-3 wouldn't answer. She was leaving for a place called "DC."
If she hadn't known what she did about Users, and hadn't heard some of Flynn's idle chatter and irreverent office gossip, she could have put on the necessary dignity and led her people to a peaceful end, assured them that this was the will of their Users, and there nothing to fear in a good death after serving them faithfully. She faked it best she could, but there was no way she could hide her doubts from Tron, and he was upset, visibly frustrated, angry. She pretended not to hear her counterpart and Flynn argue in the I/O chamber while she sat in the console.
"Flynn, I am not ready to lose her. She is my counterpart, my bundled one. I...I don't...I can't let her go. Please, friend. I have never asked you for anything. Not in all of our cycles together, but I am asking you now. There must be something you can do!"
"I...I slept on it, and I think there is. It's a gamble, but I think it'll be worth it. I'm not giving up on you or her, buddy. Not after you saved my butt countless times."
The hunk of stone goes in the corner like the rest of the rubble she has moved already. She failed in convincing Tron to let her go. She failed as a Guardian, choosing not to accept the will of the many, unknown Users, but to convince her people to accept the heresy of a single one.
Flynn's "idea" was to gather the obsolete Programs, the refugees, and use them as the first pioneers for a brave new world. She and Tron were the first two Programs to set foot in the entirely blank canvas of possibilities. Flynn's hands were on her shoulders as she built the tower she now cleans stone by pixel-stone. The first days were good. Her tower rested on the edge of the Sea when it was crystalline blue, made up of organic matter and garbage code that Flynn used in his experiments. Programs were salvaged from dying hard drives or coded up by Flynn to populate cities and carry out functions, but The Grid was an experiment to see how far Programs could go. Instead of specific functions and multiple User requests, the Grid was a simulation by a single User, part to rebuild the laser technology, but more existing just to exist; an army of Programs willing to support and aid him in bridging the worlds.
When it became obvious Flynn couldn't handle the responsibilities he'd taken on, he created Clu; effective, efficient, but didn't have the affability and charisma Flynn did to mask his tendency to see others as a means to an end. And when the Sea rippled and changed, turning blue-silver as the first Isos walked ashore...
The piece she is carrying slips from her hands and drops to the floor, glancing off her foot. It hurts, but not as much as the self-recrimination.
Yori can't blame the Isos. She welcomed too many of them on their first cycle from the Sea, greeting them and teaching them as she would a newly compiled Program. They were all innocence and warmth, needing to be useful, but having no directive (Flynn said they shared that trait with Users – a horrifying prospect). None of them meant harm, and many of them were good at finding uses, dutifully integrating themselves into the Program population as scholars, engineers, builders, even scouts and fighters. Three volunteered to stay and help teach, and they remained beloved friends; Talia, Argent, Hypatia. All dead now, thanks to that traitor Jarvis. He opened the gates during the coup and let the System Guard murder her staff before her eyes, leaving her for dead as light-jets bombed the tower.
She breathes hard to cool her processor and is tempted to sink to the floor, but the task is almost done. A Program cannot change or ignore their hard-wired directive, but they do have a large degree of freedom in how they carry it out. Yori started her runtime as a builder. She will likely end it the same way.
She survived Master Control. Yori knew there would be no mercy. Knowing her beloved was the first casualty gave her even less reason to hold back. She sought out rebelling system guards, Iso soldiers who survived the War, Resistance cells, offering her skills and upgrading what she had. She was already on stolen time, why not use it to fight? Ironically, the first time that she believed all was lost, Flynn argued her out of despair, telling her that "we're only defeated if we give up!" Of course, he didn't appreciate the sentiment thrown back in his face five hundred cycles later during a heated argument. She had watched him, seen his posture become more stooped, his hair go to a shade that was not quite white as he made less and less of an effort to bother fighting. The last straw was when he once again told her Clu was impossible to fight and called her by her User's name, like she was nothing more than just a reflection.
Even if she has to remind herself again that the Isos were mostly innocent parties in this tragedy (they couldn't help simply existing), it is hard not for a part of her to resent them, because as soon as they and all of their cryptic "possibilities" came into being, Flynn relegated the Programs to second-class consideration. Not intentionally, but Flynn was always easily distracted. Now, that Iso girl is all that matters to him.
He knows where to find her if he can be bothered to try. Yori knows he won't.
The lights are going out, and entire cities are gone; Arjia, Argon, Gallium, Bostrum Colony. Thirty million Programs and five hundred thousand Isos at its peak; three million Programs and a single known Iso remaining, and the number grows smaller by the nano. Clu's likely definition of "perfect system" means a system where he is the only thing living. Bartik, thankfully, still leads what remains of his forces, the latest in a chain of renegade Programs who have fought and died through the cycles. They have asked to use her tower as a sanctuary or safe house. One more reason to hold her post and rebuild.
Still, she carries her stone, sparing a resentful glance towards a prison in the Outlands that's better outfitted than her own. Another irony, a Guardian who has given up on Users. Lora-3 abandoned her first, and Flynn has achieved a measure of comfort in his exile while his Programs continue to die. If she had accepted death and the will of her original User, she and so many others would have died in relative peace.
Peace is a lie.
The last stone reaches the pile and she stands back to examine her work. The cistern was built on top of a natural energy spring, and buried under rubble for the better part of a cycle. She had removed the rubble from it stone by stone, using it to shore up the crumbled wall.
Yori dips her hands in the energy and takes a long drink, satisfied with her work. Repairing a wall and the cistern are only small pieces of the Tower, almost comically small in the scope of what she has to repair.
Even if it takes a hundred more cycles and she rebuilds it stone by stone, it will be rebuilt, and its beacon will shine again. If Clu sees it? Well, lighting the beacon is probably going to be her last action, but she has long stopped caring about little things like continuing to function. And she did start her runtime as an engineer, and has had an impressive run of experience as a saboteur under both Master Control and Clu. Perhaps she can carry it out in a way that will let her take a few of them with her...
But that's getting ahead of herself. For now, she has completed phase one of possibly a thousand, but she has done it. This world, this tragedy, is partly hers to carry, and this tower was where the seeds of it were planted. She made too many mistakes, and it has cost her everything. She has lost her Users, her faith, even Tron.
To rebuild is an act of resistance, directive, and penance rolled into one, imposed by forces higher than Users. She will accept it.
For now, she is condemned to live.