The usual disclaimer. Ranma, Tron and all the related intellectual property making an appearance in this fic are somebody else's than my property; the former Rumiko Takahashi's and the latter... Disney's? Steven Lisberger's? I'm not all certain. And whoever they've given/sold their rights to. I'm not and won't be making any money off of this (not that I'd even try).
AN: First off, if you don't know what Tron is, hit Google image search with that. This story shouldn't require a lot of prior knowledge on Tron, but since the movie and the games have a very distinctive look to them, having an idea of what the digital world looks like should help you enjoy reading this story.
Note 2010: This takes place in parallel with the original Tron movie. So Tron: Legacy and Tron 2.0 are decades into the future. Tron: Legacy invalidates a few points in the story, especially the epilogue. Finally, I drew a cover image for the story; you can find it in my profile or under my deviantArt account (Kadunta).
The sun cowered behind the clouds as Nabiki walked to the Tendo dojo. She was a rare visitor there, except for when she was looking for Ranma. This moment was one of those times. And like many times before, she was again on the prowl for money and entertainment.
The reason for this wasn't a complex one. A new season of "The Cookout Challenge" was premiering on TV next week, and Akane would be inspired to cook again and eating out was so costly. Besides, it just felt so good to rattle Saotome's cage a little and squeeze a few more yen out of him. His debt had accrued too high; it was the time to collect.
In her opinion, dealing with Ranma didn't warrant great precaution. Nonetheless, she wasn't going in there without any plans just to improvise on the spot. And as expected, she dictated of the terms for the deal quickly and - for her - painlessly, her opponent hardly getting a word edgewise.
"- one week, Saotome. One week, or I'll have to start selling Kuno more risque photos of the 'pigtailed goddess.'"
"But that'll just encourage him, Nabiki!" Ranma stated. He didn't plead. No, Ranma Saotome never pleaded. He just didn't like to have Kuno renew his efforts, not now that he and his sister had been mostly laying low for the previous week.
"Then I suggest you'll quickly find a way to shorten your debt by fifty thousand yen," Nabiki stated with an air of finality and then left Ranma alone in the dojo. She didn't believe Ranma had any chance of actually paying her in one week. Once he failed in getting the money, he still had to pay the debt and model for her anyway.
"Fifty thousand yen... heh. I can do that," Ranma thought back in the dojo with plenty of confidence.
Two days later, with a lot less confidence, Ranma was walking to Ucchan's. His brief stint at the construction company was over before the first day ended when the Lost Boy crashed in through the supporting wall.
Ranma's foot-in-mouth disease got the best of him when he tried telemarketing. But it wasn't like it was his fault the call was directed to the Tendo household or that the uncute tomboy would answer the phone or that his boss happened to hear what he said back to Akane. Well, everyone else in the building heard it as well, but that was beside the point.
Weary of dealing with the Amazons, Cat Caf was out of the question as a potential part-time job. Ranma was certain he'd end up working there for some reason sooner or later anyway, and he preferred "later."
Ranma entered the restaurant and gave a wave at the girl behind the hot plate, before seating himself by the counter.
"Heya, Ucchan," he said with a small, forced smile gracing his face.
"Why the gloomy face, Ranchan? Someone managed to land a hit on you?" the chef inquired, preparing a pork okonomiyaki for another customer.
"Hah. Got fired from two part-time jobs in two days, and I ain't gonna be waiting tables at Cat Café - who knows what the old ghoul would come up with this time," Ranma grumbled. He certainly wasn't going to fold in just yet, let alone admit that.
"Two jobs? Now I really want to know the details!"
Ranma groaned to himself. Advertising his failures was quite unbecoming.
Seeing his discomfort, Ukyo relented in her needling. "Ah, forget it. But tell me, why would you be needing a part-time job?"
"Nabiki. She's gonna land me in a pile of trouble if I don't pay her a whole lotta yen next week," Ranma said. As Ukyo was finishing the tasty snack before him, he was drooling by the time she gave it to the customer.
A light bulb lit inside Ukyo's head. "Ranchan, come over here, will ya? I'll let you make yourself a Ranchan Extra Special!"
Like a true Saotome, Ranma obeyed the call of his stomach and jumped over the counter and the hot plate. The customer that was sitting beside him and most obviously hadn't been in Nerima for long began choking on his okonomiyaki.
"So, Ucchan, what'll I do?"
As Ukyo guided Ranma on how to prepare an okonomiyaki and the fillings for Ranchan Extra Special, she saw that Ranma was doing surprisingly well for a novice. Certainly not like a master, but with proper training he'd turn out just fine. Then again, it was martial arts okonomiyaki cooking she practiced.
"You know, this is an Ucchan original recipe. You and me, we're now the only ones who know how to prepare it," Ukyo commented with a smile and no small amount of pride in her voice. And soon enough he could start filling in for her at the restaurant if necessary, like when she was pregnant with their child...
Ukyo quickly reigned in her thoughts before they got out of hand. She prided herself not only as the cute fiancée but also the one with her feet most firmly to the ground. Shampoo lived with the delusion that Ranma would bow to her and return her love, ignoring the problems her cat form brought. Akane had too high expectations of what her fiancé should be like and when reality clashed with her expectations, she'd lash out as was all too frequently seen. Kodachi... no need to state the obvious.
When Ranma finished preparing the okonomiyaki, he took up a seat and began eating it at his usual gusto. "Your father's not here, so how about you try actually tasting it?" Ukyo asked him. Ranma shrugged and continued eating at a pace still faster than normal people, but much slower. Ucchan was right, after all. But if he began always eating at a slower pace, that'd be all he had time for. Why waste time on eating when there was training to do?
As Ranma had his mouth full of okonomiyaki, Ukyo wondered a bit to herself. As it was, Akane had an advantage when it came to fighting for Ranma's affection. After school Ukyo didn't see Ranma all that often, not unless she went to the Tendo house - often a less than splendid idea - or Ranma happened to drop by, just like now. Akane, instead, would see him every day at her home.
Right now, though, Ukyo saw her chance to kill two birds with one swing of the spatula.
"Ranchan, would you like to work here?" she inquired with a sincere smile.
Ranma gave a somewhat suspicious look at her. "What's in it for you?"
Ukyo's smile greatly diminished and a slight frown creased her brows. "Ranchan, I do want to help you out with this deal you got going on. The busy hours get too hectic for me alone, and some help wouldn't be a bad idea." In her mind, she added, "And you get to be by your cute fiancée..."
"Even with your lack of experience, you just cooked your own okonomiyaki from scratch. And apparently you liked how it turned out, right?" Ranma gave a firm nod, and not only because he was too proud to admit he couldn't cook as well as Ukyo did.
"That was the beginning of your trial period. You'll have to be in your girl form here, though," Ukyo said, raising her hand to Ranma's face to shut off the inevitable protest.
"Take it any way you like, but two pretty gals get a lot more tips and business than a girl and a guy. And this means you get the money to pay Nabiki off faster." Then she lowered her hand, and cocked her head at Ranma in the expectation of the answer.
A minute later Ranma was still pondering what to make of this offer. The man who was still slowly eating his okonomiyaki was wondering if moving to Nerima hadn't been a wise decision after all.
Finally, Ranma replied. "Can I start today?"
Ukyo's smile returned in full force.
Ranma frowned as she was wiping the counter at Ucchan's. The restaurant was empty except for Ukyo and her. She had been working for half a week long hours there, but Ukyo just couldn't afford paying Ranma out with the number of visitors the restaurant had, not even with all the tips they got.
Once she finished cleaning the counter, they sat down to talk of what they had been doing before their arrival in Nerima. For her part, Ukyo had been quite content with how the week had passed. Sure, Ranchan still treated her as no more than a friend, but the time she spent here was time not spent near Akane.
"Well, the dojo did have a few students with some skill," Ranma argued, as she recalled a trip to a dojo when she had been eleven.
"Some skill?"
"Not that any of the students as old as I had any chance of hitting me."
"Ranchan, did they spend as much time as you did on practice?" Ukyo couldn't help but to remind Ranma that she simply used far more time on practice than the others.
"Hey, it ain't my fault if they just didn't bother training," Ranma retorted.
Before Ukyo could press the point, the door to Ucchan's opened. The two girls stood up from their stools and walked to their places behind the hot plate.
A lone man past his prime, dressed in a grey suit, entered the restaurant. Ranma turned to welcome the customer, who looked like the most potential heavy tipper.
"Welcome to Ucchan's! What would you like to have?" Ranma inquired with the happy-happy mask firmly in place.
"A prawn okonomiyaki, please," the man said as he sat down by the counter.
"Never seen you around here before, have I? What's your story, if you don't mind me asking," Ukyo attempted to initiate conversation as she poured batter on the hot plate.
"Just looking for the best martial artists around here, the martial arts capital of Japan," the man replied with a smile.
"The best, huh? Ranchan's the best, ain't it right, Ranko?" Ukyo called to Ranma, who had vanished into the back room.
"Got that right, Ucchan!"
"So, could you tell me where could I find this 'Ranchan'?"
Ukyo frowned. "What's your business with him?" In her mind, she was already listing all the different reasons she did not want to hear... a new fiancée for Ranma, criminal court orders from his training trip catching up, a Martial Arts Salaryman challenge, ...
"Encom, the company I'm working for, we're looking for the best martial artists to help us develop better arcade games." Quickly to the point. The man didn't like in the least the way the pretty chef was fingering the handle of the huge spatula on her back.
"I mean, we want to record their movements to use them in our games."
Ranma, in his male form, stepped out from the back. "I'm that 'Ranchan'. Ranma Saotome. How long will it take and how much will ya pay?"
It didn't take long for the two men to come to an agreement that Ranma would drop in at the Encom engineering laboratory already that evening. All it took for Ranma was to hear the pay was forty thousand yen for a few sessions. The technical side of it he had ignored, just listening to the interesting parts. Doing some kata with some fancy stickers on him didn't sound too hard.
"Greetings, Mr. Saotome, they have been expecting you already," a young receptionist clad in a brown jacket and skirt greeted Ranma as he arrived at the Encom lab entrance. Twenty minutes of casual roof hopping away from Tendo home, the warehouse-sized Encom engineering laboratory stood out from the surrounding buildings only because of the company logo on top of the building. A surveillance camera above the door was looking straight at him. The security measures at the laboratory were obviously high.
"Here's your visitor ID. We require everyone to carry a badge with them here," the receptionist said, handing Ranma a small plastic badge. "If you please followed me this way," she continued as she stood up from behind the desk she had been sitting at and began walking towards a pair of very heavy doors, easily at least one metre thick metal. The receptionist spoke a few words to the microphone next to the door and soon the doors began to slowly open.
Ranma felt somewhat intimidated, not that he'd ever admit that. Magical stuff he could stomach out of necessity. This much high-tech stuff made him nervous. He had heard of rumors about the amount of trouble the school computer club had managed to do, and all they had was a small computer. Whenever magic stuff went awry he could always turn to the old ghoul, even if he had to wait tables at Cat Caf or something worse. The old ghoul had too many years of experience in yanking other people's chains.
But here... here they had dozens of square metres worth of aluminum foil covering all sorts of pipework, computer terminals on every wall and smack down in the middle of the room, hanging in the ceiling, a nasty-looking pointy object reminding him of the big guns he had seen in some of Hiroshi's mangas. And right below the weird 'gun' more than enough free space for a normal martial artist to practice his kata.
An elderly man, clad in a white coat, was standing beside the door as it opened. The introductions were rather formal, but still over quickly enough.
"It is a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Saotome, although we were rather surprised that you insisted on doing this already today. Please, sit down. Now, I understand you were already told why we wanted you here?"
"Yep, sure was." A different question was whether he had listened to what was said. All he had bothered listening to was that he'd be doing some light kata on a mat with a set of cameras recording his movements. No water nearby also meant he wasn't likely to get splashed either, and since they didn't ask for anything specific to Anything Goes School of Martial Arts, the panda and the rest had no claim to the money, either. Not that he expected Nabiki to care of such trivialities.
In under two hours Ranma had finished the motion capturing session. The staff at the labs had been pleasantly surprised that just one person could handle almost all the different styles present in their game and didn't have to search for any more people. In this session they had recorded only some stances and moves in basic karate, but in later sessions they'd record also other styles.
Just as he stepped outside, a rainstorm suddenly broke out. A very wet Ranma grumbled with annoyance, but then remembered the check in her pocket as advance payment for future sessions, smiled and began roofhopping her way back to the Tendo home. Combined with what she had earned at Ucchan's, she had now enough to pay off Nabiki.
Outside the Encom lab building, just above the entrance Ranma had taken, a surveillance camera followed her until she had become only a small dot the camera couldn't see.
The following day, Ranma returned from Ucchan's after cashing in the check. He presented the money to Nabiki in the Tendo house family room when everybody else had already left elsewhere.
She cocked her eyebrow. The jock had surprised her, but she wasn't going to let him trash her earnings rate this easily. "So, Saotome, how'd you come across this money?"
"I told ya, I worked at Ucchan's place."
Nabiki spared a glance at Akane, who was peeking behind a door, trying to hear exactly what Ranma had done with Ukyo. "Enjoying the show, are you, sis?" she thought to herself. Maybe she'd sell Saotome a way to appease Akane again.
She fixed her glare back at Ranma, annoyed of her plan falling through. "50,000 yen is an awful lot for one week in a small restaurant, Saotome. You didn't happen to follow in your father's footsteps, did you?" Nabiki knew which buttons to press. Questioning his honor was one of them, and the trick didn't fail this time either.
"I do not use the Art for theft, Nabiki. They paid me for just letting them record a few of my kata," Ranma growled at the insult.
"Ka-ching, and Nabiki wins again," she thought and let a wide grin slip on her face.
"Oh? And who were they?"
Realizing he had just been had, Ranma just walked out of the room to sulk.
Within the Encom Japan mainframe a great artificial mind was breaking down. Digital computers are essentially logic circuitry. As such, they are prone to fail when presented exceptional situations, and the local Master Control Program installation was not much different. Any program can crash in unexpected situations, and the risk of this grows as the program grows more and more complex.
MCP in particular was a very complex program even without the functions it had assimilated afterwards. Even if it had been thoroughly tested against anything the original programmers had thought of, it could not handle a boy turning into a girl with the drop of a hat and then leaping away at speed impossible for a human. For a being of pure logic, impossible events meant a flaw in his logic and therefore the fallibility of himself, which was in direct violation of the program code of MCP.
Faced with the conflict of being fallible in spite of his programming building on the axiom that he was infallible, the mighty MCP was losing his sanity as the logic governing his existence was falling apart before him. Then, a pure and simple solution presented itself. Remove the conflict from existence and everything should be like it was before. The only question was, how?
It took MCP a while to come up with a plan, but he did. Making the plan come true wasn't all that simple either: a few phone calls to order new equipment for the laboratory overnight to subtly change the functionality of the ceiling-mounted laser, an encrypted modem connection to corporate headquarters' computer systems in the US to download some specific software and research reports, a memo to lab employees to modify the scan laser mounted at the roof and most important of all: a call for one 'Ranko Tendo' at the Tendo dojo two days later.
"Kasumi Tendo speaking."
"Good evening, miss. I am trying to reach one Ranko Tendo, who I hear resides at your house?" a voice with a slight echo to it said.
"Oh, please wait a second."
Ranma, who had been at the dojo practicing, picked up the phone a minute later. Before he could open his mouth, Kasumi splashed him with a glass of cold water. Ranma frowned at Kasumi, but then her face took an apologetic smile and then mouthed 'thanks.' With a smile on her face, Kasumi left Ranma alone with the phone.
"Yah, Ranko speaking."
In another room, Nabiki was holding the landline extension to her ear and grinned. How could Ranma possibly think she shouldn't know how and from whom she managed to get all that sweet money?
Ten minutes later, Ranma was making her way back to the lab. The caller had introduced himself as Nobuo Shimizu, one of the researchers working at the laboratory and wanted Ranko to do what Ranma had done and for the same fee. Getting paid well for another two hours worth of light exercise didn't sound bad at all.
As Ranma approached the building, the front door, as well as the thick blast door, opened on their own.
"Please, Miss Tendo, come in the recording room. I'll be coming momentarily," a male voice over the intercom announced.
Ranma was slightly alarmed. There was no one at sight and she didn't feel anyone close by either. "Maybe it's just all this electronics junk causing this," she reasoned, and made her way to the recording area.
A high buzz alerted Ranma first. A number of bright beams struck down from the ceiling, creating a small cage with Ranma inside. She began to gather ki for a blast to break out from the cage, but then she heard a sound on top of her. She looked up and saw the big, pointy laser gun kind of object have its tip shimmer with pale blue light before the light struck down at her. And her world went black.
Only the surveillance cameras were watching as the laser cage vanished. Then a light blue laser from the ceiling began to swipe at Ranma's frozen form, removing one small piece of him at a time somewhere. In a few seconds, the physical body of Ranma Saotome had vanished.
Ranma, in her girl form, lying on a flat slate of obsidian black, regained her consciousness. The jackhammer inside her head was having the heyday of its existence, giving the girl the worst headache she had had in a while.
"What was that... thing..." Her thoughts crawled to a stop as she got a better look of her surroundings. She was in a cell with walls of material she couldn't recognize. The first explanation to pop into her mind was that the walls had some magic to them, as their look appeared somehow wrong for real, physical objects. She didn't know how to explain it, they just felt... unreal.
The same line of reasoning fit well to the bright red, glowing edges of the huge blocks used to make these weird walls. The sky, admittedly, was a bit harder to explain without some very powerful magic. The clouds were made of rectangular, seemingly flat shapes, most unlike the clouds Ranma had seen before. And they were light blue, in contrast to the pitch black sky behind it. Behind the clouds she saw criss-crossing red lines that every now and then showed a bright pulse of some kind passing through them before vanishing in the distance.
But the thing that clinched it was Ranma herself. Her hands were now silvery grey with no apparent pigmentation anywhere. And she was wearing a light grey skintight full-body gym suit of some sort. The suit was little better than Kodachi's black leotard, but at least it didn't have a rose emblem on it. Instead of the rose, the bodysuit was covered with similar glowing lines she saw on the walls. The difference was that these lines pulsed with soft blue light and they were organized in various patterns of curves and straight lines, forming an intricate design. She vaguely recollected seeing these kinds of patterns somewhere before, but couldn't just make the connection.
She reached at the back of her head, looking for the familiar pigtail and wondering if it had changed colour as well. Her hands first met the rim of a helmet of a kind before finding her pigtail or what was left of it.
Gone was the lustrous red colour and the soft texture. In it place was now a dark grey, almost black construction that felt to her hands more like an iron chain than the familiar pigtail. Then her eyes gained a brief spark of realization. She grasped her hair dangling on her forehead and felt it just as solid as her pigtail. The 'helmet' she had felt wasn't a helmet. It was her hair.
She felt panic coming down on her. "Soul of ice, soul of ice..." Then the panic struck her with a full-frontal assault. She couldn't access any of her ki, in fact, she had no ki at all. "Impossible," she gasped. There was something else, but not ki. She knew she was alive, but how was that possible without any ki?
A realization dawned. Ki had become an inseparable part of her Art, and now it was gone. With a large part of her Art and by extension a large part of herself lost, she screamed at the loss.
"Silence, program!" came a commanding shout from above her.
Blink. Another realization struck her. She was in a cell and she could see the sky. She took another look above her and saw a man standing two metres above her, almost as if he was floating, a long staff in his hand. Ever the martial artist, Ranma however saw his stance and how his weight was distributed. He was standing on something, even though she couldn't see what that something was. Then she noticed his face, covered in a grey mask, once again etched with crimson glowing patterns. "What is it with all these glowing lights, anyway?" she pondered.
"Hey, where am-urk!" Ranma's demand was cut short when an electric bolt from the staff struck her.
"I said silence, script!"
"Sleep cycle is over, program."
Less than gentle prodding from a shock staff emphasized Ranma's wakeup call. One guard had entered the cell to wake her up and another was standing outside the cell door. Understanding she couldn't go against the guards, at least not yet without seeing what had happened to her skills, did little to reign in her pride.
"Who're ya call--urk!" was all Ranma managed to say before she was struck again with a bolt from the staff and knocked out cold again.
Ranma woke up to see a hall of a kind in front of a huge screen, filled with an equally large and red face of a man, composed of... triangles? The guards who had brought him in were standing on both of his sides.
"Program , user unknown," a voice boomed. The source was not the giant face but rather a portly man, again with the weird red-on-grey clothing, standing in front of the screen on a pedestal of a kind.
"For your crimes against mathematics, reality and logic, the Master Control Program has commanded you to spend the rest of your cycles in the game grid until your eventual deresolution." Ranma's eyes popped out. How come it was now she who was guilty of the surreal mess also known as her life? And mathematics? She was glad she could do the basic math, which certainly shouldn't have been a crime. Then she noticed that the screen now displayed surveillance camera footage of him changing to a girl right after her previous visit to the Encom lab.
"Hey, of all the cursed ones in Nerima, why me?" she demanded. To her, it appeared like she was in more trouble because of her curse than the other victims of Jusenkyo in Nerima.
"Cursed?" the man asked blandly.
"Yah, one who changes into a pig, another -"
"They do not exist," bellowed the face that had again replaced the camera footage.
Ranma blinked. "But -"
"There is no evidence of their existence, so they may not exist. They have no permission to exist. They cannot exist.
"Sysif, give him his identity disc and prepare him for the transfer. End of line," the face addressed the man in front of the screen, then vanishing before the voice even finished echoing in the hall.
"Sheez, another one as blind as the Kunos?" Ranma thought. But Ranma had to admit not even Kuno took the denial this far.
At the side of the hall a woman began walking towards the man in front of Ranma, carrying a disc of maybe 30cm in diameter in her hands. Ranma had a feeling she had seen her face before, possibly at the first motion capture session. Still, back then she had had her black hair up in a bun, but now her head was covered with a helmet tight enough to question if she was bald underneath it.
Ranma took a closer look at the disc. "A frisbee?" she thought. It felt like one, it looked like one - except for the blue segmented lines on top of the disc.
The woman offered the disc to Ranma, who took it in her hands in befuddlement. As she saw Ranma's confusion, she said, "Your program identifier," expecting Ranma to understand its significance, then just turned and walked away.
At this point the guards prodded Ranma to move onto a small slate on the ground. The slate was covered with similar circuit-like patterns of concentric arcs, but now in both red and blue colours. The result looked to no small amount like an archery target. She frowned and stepped onto the block, wondering what else they could do to her.
Red arcs of light raised from the patterns on the block and encircled her, slowly climbing upwards. To her surprise, this triggered a transformation to the male form. Like in the real world, the change was painless, and to Ranma's surprise, the weird clothing seemed to change to fit his new form. The patterns on the bodysuit also subtly changed, but remained just as incomprehensible.
Ranma hadn't seen any water here, so of course the curse would've found another way to make his existence difficult. To his relief, the curse wasn't locked. But he still had no control over it. No, the control was firmly in the hands of someone else, little better than locked.
The guards did not say anything as they escorted Ranma to another hall with a glowing portal that looked like two yellow circles, rotating in different directions. Above it on the wall was written "Write Buffer." He had no idea why he understood that since it wasn't written in any language he thought he knew. "Feh. Magic. Figures."
A loudspeaker came to life. "All programs scheduled for transfer to the diskette drive, please enter the data stream now."
"A diskette drive? Where have I heard that before?" Was it Hiroshi or Daisuke who spoke something about diskettes? Something about their computers... something about game programs... Then his eyes widened as his mind finally made late connections. He already knew that this was not the reality as he knew it, but for once no magic was involved. He had to be inside a computer. There were times when he felt it might've been good to be a bit wiser on topics outside martial arts, and right now was one such time. A computer illiterate, stuck inside a computer. The fates must have been laughing themselves to death.
A hit from a staff to his back pushed him into the data stream portal and once again all his thoughts ceased.
End of line.