There's always a story.
For some, it started with gods and goddesses, beings of ancient energy and wisdom. For others the truth laid in atoms, no less eternal when they clashed and collided and expanded existence. For many, it began with light. Everything else coagulated around the warmth and the brightness, manifested like a flame—
Creation began with a spark.
Destruction is said to be messier.
The end has inspired as many stories as the beginning. Maybe more. Fire and brimstone and judgment; great plagues and scourges to clear the land of life; the simple flash-bang snuffing of existence in its entirety. The method varies depending on who you ask, as does the impetus for it. The deities are angry or the atoms collapse or the darkness becomes too much for the light to bear.
And it ends.
Ceases.
A linear progression from start to finish.
As neat and orderly as anything in the world can hope to be.
Idle fingers skim the surface of dark water, the facet-like crests of jagged waves reflecting a soft cyan glow in a dozen directions. [Picking up anything?] the program to whom the fingers belong pings his companion. To break the silence of the void with anything verbal feels vaguely blasphemous. The Sea might as well be a graveyard, now, the final resting place of Users know how many ISOs, not to mention CLU and the Creator himself and—
"No," said companion replies. Ram's features dip into a slight frown, an expression seen only by the water. Paige is quick and smart and sharp as anything, but there are times when her approach lacks nuance. She sees things in a binary – you are with her or against her, her friend or her foe. By necessity, she has little time or care for the grey and nebulous areas in between. Ram can respect that, can see hints of another program he remembers fondly when she gets that look of grim determination on her face, but there are times when matters are not so straightforward.
Her reverence for Flynn wore out long ago, and Tron is little more to her than a martyr for a cause that was only ever lost. That this vast, dark, unforgiving place might have swallowed them in its relentless ebb and flow likely means nothing to her. But the ISOs, surely she feels something for them, after everything.
Or maybe she's just trying not to think about it.
"And you asking every few nanos won't make it go any faster," she reminds him pointedly. If there's a sting to her words, he knows it isn't meant to truly wound. There would be no mistaking it, were that the case.
Ram stretches and sits upright, away from the pull of the tide. A few microcycles ago, they hadn't even been certain if the Sea of Simulation was still a toxic danger or not. He'd been standing at the shore with Yori when various programs had finished their analysis of the obsidian water. "It should be safe," one of them said after a long and uncertain pause. "Should be," Ram had huffed under his breath. "Safe for a gridbug to take a bath in, maybe, but you can't tell me that—" The objection hadn't left his mouth before Yori was wading into the water, stopping only to turn around when it lapped harmlessly at her knees.
A full millicycle passed before he was willing to speak to her again, after that stunt.
He's nearly lost count of the time they've spent trawling the Sea ever since… Something locks in his processors; a line of faulty logic. He doesn't know what to identify that moment as. It should have been the end. There was turmoil and panic, a level of sound and vibration that made the Grid quake. The distinct sensation that everything in existence was being simultaneously pulled towards and pushed away from a tangible epicenter. And he knew, just as Yori knew when she reached blindly for his hand as the rooftop they were standing on began to crumble, that Flynn and CLU were at the blinding heart of it all.
But ends are finite. Or they're meant to be, at least. Nothing comes after a conclusion, after the final breath or the final word. You say your goodbyes (or maybe you don't – maybe all you get to do is laugh weakly and hope that the friends you're leaving behind are better at protecting each other than you ever were) and then it all just… stops. So if that – if Reintegration – was truly the end, none of this should be happening right now.
If it wasn't an ending, it must have been a beginning, only those aren't meant to come in the middle. But there was a spark. There was light. There was a stumbling newness to everything that came after it, like tentative first steps all over again. Yori's wide eyes surveyed him when the ground below their feet steadied, the pair of them awash in an eerie silence. Every subvocal network on the system had been knocked out at once, and words felt foreign in his processors.
"Ram?"
The call rouses him from his thoughts, effectively booting him out of the uncomfortable logic loop he'd been tangled in. Perhaps none of this needs a classifying definition, not really. He makes his way to where Paige is standing towards the bow of their craft, and decides that maybe this is both things melded into one. A beginning and an ending coexisting within each other.
Paige doesn't look at him even when he touches her elbow, nudging her circuits with the sensation of support and reassurance. Every program left on the Grid is teetering on the edge of exhaustion, these microcycles. He does what he can.
At first he thinks she's looking down at her datapad, and he smirks. "Another dud reading?" he asks, aiming for lighthearted but falling short into thinly-veiled disappointment instead. But when the medic doesn't nod or shake her head or offer anything more than a stuttering inhale of air, he finally follows her line of sight out towards the infinite horizon.
"Oh… my User."
They're moving in the same instant, Paige darting for the craft's controls while Ram scrambles to adjust the angle of the searchlight mounted to the front of it. "Tell Yori," the medic calls over the hum of the engine, but Ram is already steps ahead of her, a frantic series of likely incoherent pings leaving his processors well before the request has been made.
They haven't even made the confirmation yet, but it doesn't matter. Ram knows – he knows, beyond any shadow of a doubt – that the search is finally over.
There's a program out there, clinging limply to a bit of rock-like scrap code that only just manages to protrude above the surface of the water. How the Sea hasn't claimed the drifter as its victim yet must be nothing short of a miracle. It's with that thought that fate takes a turn, because as Ram watches and the craft approaches, the figure begins to slip into the fathomless depths.
"Frag," Ram hisses, reaching a hand over his shoulder to make a grab for his disc. He's at Paige's side in a few quick strides, breaking her focus in favor of pressing the slim ring into her hands.
Her look is bewildered when she finally realizes the plan being formulated. "Ram, no, we still have to—"
"No time," he insists, already turning and sprinting back towards his previous position. Paige is pinging after him, urging him to wait because they have the right equipment and it's dangerous without knowing what they're about to be pulling onto the boat and they really need to think before—
[If it was Beck out there, you wouldn't wait.] He's calculating the right angle of trajectory, trying to gauge the perfect place to plant his foot on the railing wrapped around the deck while he's still moving towards it. The momentum's important. [You'd know if it was him. You'd feel it.]
Ram turns off his subvocal link.
And he jumps.
The Sea isn't cold, nor is it warm. It really isn't water, either, not as a User might understand it. It's scrolling lines of code, a writhing mass of discarded ideas given shape. Given life. Flynn, in his bouts of philosophy, often wondered if any part of the world he created was truly alive. There was a difference, he thought, between intelligent awareness and life. Between things that were static and things that evolved. Things that lived had a spark to them, a warmth that could never be fabricated.
Then he remembered Yori pulling him eagerly towards a simulation bay to show off the Grid's first Solar Sailer, Tron rocking slightly on his heels when speaking with pride about the members of his security team, and he knew that he already had his answer.
When Ram resurfaces, it's with an added burden. The program in his awkward grip is unconscious, the light-lines etched into dark armor pulsing faintly with low energy. The current neither helps nor hinders his progress, making the Sea little more than a passive observer for once in its existence. Paige is there to help him, lips pressed into a thin and disapproving line even as Ram's coughing water onto the deck.
Turning his subvocal link back on subjects him to an immediate flurry of backlogged pings – Paige telling him he's a bit-brain and that she'll leave him to drown if it comes down to it; Beck trying to make sense of the confusion and Yori's frantic and apparently inexplicable behavior; Yori pleading with him for more information. There's an ache building behind his eyes from the deluge, so he sends one mass response to all the members of their small and ever-dwindling faction before limiting his communication channels.
[We found him.]
"Are you alright?" Paige asks, hesitantly touching his shoulder. The ire is gone from her voice, replaced with genuine concern. She must have noticed the way Ram is swaying where he kneels. He nods, weakly. It's something about the Sea, the vast magnetic tug of it, like it wants to drain everything it touches...
He blinks and shakes his head, and the hypnotic moment is gone.
"Help me move him," Ram says at last, resituating his grip on the half-drowned program's shoulders so that he can be lifted. Paige takes her new patient by the ankles and together they maneuver him away from the lull of the Sea, towards the small stash of medical equipment stowed onboard. It reminds Ram of Argon, embers licking at his boots as he half carried, half dragged the Renegade through the smoldering streets with the help of a medic-turned-soldier-turned-medic.
That feels like a runtime ago, now.
"Still doubting my decision making?" he asks when he sees Paige's gaze land on the distinctive emblem burning on the program's chest. She all but rolls her eyes at him.
"You could have derezzed out there," she reminds him coolly. "You still might. We don't know the long-term effects of the Sea, if there's any kind of delayed response to exposure."
"He survived."
"And he might never reboot. Even if he does, for all we know, his processors are wrecked beyond—"
"Don't say that." Ram's voice wavers and he has to look away from Paige, his eyes falling to focus instead on the sleek black helmet that's staring up at him. His reflection is distorted in the curved glass.
[I'm sorry.] He can feel the quiet remorse in the space between them, heavy and uncomfortable, so he sighs and sniffles and nods.
When they set the program down, Paige wastes no time in getting to work, using the tools she brought to check him over for damage. "Yori and Beck are on their way," Ram says, suddenly feeling completely and utterly helpless while he watches the medic perform her primary function. With little else to do he sits cross-legged alongside the patient and takes one of his hands in his own. Paige makes no comment on the gesture, entirely intent on the task before her.
It takes all of Ram's energy not to interrupt her for the sake of his questions.
Sometime later an engine hums in the distance, the buzzing purr escalating to a low thrum as it approaches. The rescued program's circuits glow steadily, if a little dimmer than they ought to, and so Paige pushes off the floor to stretch her limbs and greet the newcomers. Ram doesn't listen to what she says, but she must say something that holds Beck back, because the first and only program that comes to the patient's other side is Yori. Wordlessly, she takes the prone figure's unclaimed hand.
They sit that way for what feels like an eternity, the only sound and movement around them belonging to the Sea, before another noise breaks the silence. At first, Ram assumes the engine of one craft or another is being started up. But it's too close, too broken a noise to belong to one of the boats. It's then that he feels a slight twitch, a tremor in the hand he's been clinging to.
Everything in his core seizes up in that moment, and he only barely manages to be aware of Yori gasping and stirring beside him because there's a helmet starting to fold away as circuits flare a brilliant shade of—
Somewhere, the sun is rising. Someone is watching the way the colors play along the horizon, her hexagonal pupils shifting in response to the gradual influx of luminescence. It doesn't matter if this is the first or the hundredth day she has woken before the sun, for the sight is as beautiful and breathtaking each morning as it was the last. She is learning things about this world, things that are both very different and very alike what she once knew. Back home, such a scene would herald the arrival of a User, not of another day. But both things would spark within her the same sense of giddy anticipation, the eagerness for something exciting and new. It's a cycle, still. Just a different sort of cycle.
Either way, it begins with light.
There's always a story.
It starts with the lightning-strike spark of a program being written. It starts with the starburst ignition of an I/O tower and a landscape being born. It starts with a sunrise.
It starts with circuits flaring a brilliant shade of white-blue.
Somewhere, the sun is rising.
The uprising ends with light.
Another story goes on.