Disclaimer: I do not own TRON. I do not own an ENCOM Panel Van. I do not own any ENCOM stock. I do not even own the movies.
I do however own the intellectual project this story will become.
Solid rubber cleats dug into the tarmac with a gentle hiss as the electric brake assist brought a large truck to a stop outside one of the tallest buildings in New York. ENCOM Deus, the second ENCOM tower in the world, the other being in California. Inside, Samantha Kevin Bradley peeked over the dashboard of her mobile home, a custom modified, but otherwise visually stock ENCOM Panel Van, which cleverly concealed the immense computer system and RV built into it. The entire thing was a hacker's cave on wheels, but it passed easily for just another ENCOM delivery vehicle.
The guards didn't even look her way, and she slipped out, leaving the vehicle between two identical ones. The massive main door, a holdover from the original in California, eased open silently at the entry of a password, one borrowed from her great grandfather, Kevin Flynn. The stairs were identical; of course, the tower was identical to the California building. She started up the stairs and fired off a laser pointer at the camera, temporarily blinding it. She waited a few seconds, and then repeated it. The security guard would come to investigate, and be away from his computer terminal for a minute. She rushed up the stairs and slipped around the upper corner, sprinting silently up the unsecured stairs, and past the upper level security office.
The guards in here didn't even see her worm through the bars that were supposed to keep people out, and she was able to slip into the top server room. Immediately, she contacted her cousin, Kevin Alan Flynn, over in the California building. The time zones were different, but they had to be perfectly timed to do this, this time. It was the main reason that there were two buildings in different time zones. Kevin responded with a countdown ping and they both activated the trader program simultaneously. Moments later, they unhooked from the system and slipped out of their respective buildings.
Samantha scrambled up the stairs, noting that she had probably been spotted, and she ran for the roof access door. The guard arrived just as she got up on the window washer's crane. She knew that her cousin was probably doing the same exact thing she was, and she backed up, walking out to the edge of the crane, just as the guard shouted, "Hey, you can't be up here! This is a restricted area!"
"I know. It's basically private property, right? And do you know who owns it?"
The guard stared for a moment, "Two kids, Sam Bradley and Kevin Flynn?" She raised her hands, and indicated, as the guard finished, "But they only control like two thirds of the stock total."
She grinned and slid a weighted business card down to him. It was made of flash-paper, treated with several light sensitive chemicals that would make it burn up as soon as he took it out to show the boss, but it had her name on it. She saluted his incredulous expression and stepped off the crane. The guard panicked, but she just pulled a ripcord on her parachute, and carefully coasted to a gentle landing on the parking lot. She grabbed her van and drove calmly out the gate, the guard letting her out. It was five minutes before the release of the program, and the guard up on the roof was still puzzling over her card, so she had no current reason to be held. She was out on the highway before the release, and she had it running on her dashboard computer. She laughed as it switched on a video of her cousin's beagle, Shoeshine. He thought it was a terrible joke, but they laughed at it anyway. Both had gotten away free, though it was clear that ENCOM CEO John Dillinger the Fourth was very angry at them. Both of them.
Around four thirty the next morning, she reached her cousin's place, a small apartment in California, built on top of the ancient Flynn Arcade, which the two had half-inherited from their grandfather, Samuel Flynn. Now it was considered to be one of the best, if not the best part of the city for college age students to hang out and party, much like it had been in Kevin Flynn the Elder's day. She parked in the back and strode up into the apartment they shared, throwing the borrowed phone down on the counter before she fell face-first onto the couch and fell asleep.
She was woken later that morning by her cousin shaking her awake, "Hey, Cuz, I need the couch for a few hours. The guys are comin' over, and they wanna watch the game."
She glared at the pillow and threw up a series of hand signs that basically spelled out a computer routine, declaring that Kevin Flynn the Younger could go erase himself from reality. He responded with a shout of, "DOGPILE!"
The beagle got to be on top of the pile of four guys sitting on the couch like she wasn't even there, though it should have been obvious she was. She eventually struggled out and scowled at them before storming out and taking the stairs down past the arcade, then past the first basement, where there was a massive collection of ancient gaming consoles, and new consoles, a collection started by Samuel Flynn, to maintain his heritage he said. The second basement was locked by a fancy biometric lock that only let those with Flynn DNA in. The system on the other side was three stories down, buried in a maze of coolant lines that kept it cold enough that if the air wasn't kept at zero percent humidity, there would be a crust of ice on everything. The GRID Server Farm, Generation R Intelligent DOS. It was one of the last things her father had built before he had gone to the big arcade in the sky.
It was also rumored to be related to the Grid system her grandfathers had toyed with, though she was certain that couldn't be true. She had however, been unburying bits of the old Grid, unboxing the old touch-screen desk and the gargantuan consoles. Those were already copied, in full, onto the new, highly advanced silicon chips of the server farm. She shivered as she lifted the laser, the digitizing device her grandfathers had both been pulled in by unintentionally. She made certain to set it up pointed somewhere safe, at a spot on the floor labeled with a painted red bullseye.
The wiring was easy, but copying the program over had left small issues. She wasn't sure if it was due to age, or what, but some of the variables barely made sense, height and weight she understood, but DNA structure, a complex folder labeled , puzzled her. She knew it was supposed to call on the exact atomic structure and replicate that into the system, but she didn't know how. Another folder, labeled caught her eye though, because it was tagged with an active icon. She opened it and watched a program, clearly a rough app, before Java became common, open. It showed a 3D image of an orange, turning slowly in mid-air. She looked at the menu bar, and clicked the button labeled 'Materialize'. The laser powered up and the system asked if the aperture was clear. She checked quickly, making sure it was not smudged or anything, and pushed the Y button.
The laser whirred and hissed, before a 3D pile of voxels appeared in the air in front of the laser. The pile began forming into the shape of an orange, getting more and more detailed as voxels dissipated into thin air before the orange gained color and fell on the chilled floor with a 'Splut'. She picked it up off the target and began peeling the skin back before checking the file on the computer. It showed that the folder was now empty, so she deleted it and started eating the orange, delighted at the way it tasted perfectly normal. She began scrolling through the access system, and located several other types of food, inactive form. She tried opening and rendering a can of beans, but it told her she was not authorized to activate that file.
She scowled and opened the folder, spotting several smaller folders inside, , , and . She went to see if she could read them, but again it denied her the privilege, declaring that these files were actively locked and only the ENCOM Superuser could use them. Another scowl and she created a new folder in the , and named it after her, , before opening it with the rendering program. She hit the scan button and stepped into the laser's path.