-One year earlier-

The upgrade was almost done. Alan felt immensely proud of himself as he looked over the code he had finally compiled together. This was going to help Tron immensely, especially with how the structure of the system was starting to change. Digitation technology was getting more and more consistent, and although Alan had first been skeptical of Flynn's story, he found himself thanking his friend for the advent of human digitation, an ENCOM exclusive. Still in its experimental stages, not likely to be publicly available until the late 2020's, Flynn had predicted. If Flynn's story was anything to go by, ENCOM needed that time to be sure everything was safe before a non-company member was allowed into the computer (more literally than he would ever dream, Alan thought with a wry smile.)

Had he ever been digitized before? No, not yet. The laser was still being tweaked; only so many people could go in at a time, and with the destruction of the MCP, the primary brain of the laser, back in 1982, reconstruction had been difficult, even perilous (Alan took a moment to reflect about Lora with a wistful sigh).

Nonetheless, those who were going to be digitized required a protector. Tron had been inactive for a while, and somehow, Alan knew that his program was getting antsy. If he could modify Tron so that he would be accustomed to the presence of Users in the System and fight any threats to them . . . that would be a huge asset to the project.

Tron_Legacy. That was what the upgrade was called.

Alan brought up his program and loaded the upgrade. There we go. Everything seemed to be running smoothly . . .

. . . until a series of errors flooded his screen.

WARNING: PROGRAM MALFUNCTION IMMINENT

AUTHORIZED SHIFT OF PROGRAM FUNCTION: Y/N

PREVIOUS FUNCTION: SECURITY OF SYSTEM, ELIMINATE ALL UNAUTHORIZED PROGRAMS

CURRENT FUNCTION: SECURITY OF SYSTEM, ELIMINATE ALL PROGRAMS OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN

Alan panicked. He desperately tried to undo the changes but could not figure out how to do so.

Oh, God . . .

PROGRAM MALFUNCTION IMMINENT

FUNCTION: DESTRUCTION OF ALL PROGRAMS OF UNKNOWN/OUTSIDE ORIGIN

There must have been a bug in the code or something, something that Alan must have overlooked or typed in incorrectly. This wasn't good. He couldn't submit this . . .

UPGRADE LOADING

LOADING

LOADING

UPGRADE COMPLETE

TRON 2.0

SYSTEM SECURITY

AUTOMATIC SEARCH-AND-DESTROY CAPABILITIES

TO INPUT COMMAND, PRESS...

The messages were gone. Alan's screen was black.

The next day, many of the technicians were gathered in the laser lab, and Alan, fearing the worst, went to see what was wrong as well.

As Alan had dreaded, a lone scientist, surrounded by people attempting to comfort him, quivered wide-eyed, muttering under his breath.

"Abandon the project . . . abandon the project!" he exclaimed.

"What's wrong, Jeffries? And where's Mayle?" one of the bystanders asked.

"Went inside . . . maintenance . . . suddenly . . . this thing . . . beast . . . monster . . . comes out . . . must've been . . . ten feet . . . I escaped . . . barely, but . . . Mayle . . . Ohhhhh . . ."

Jeffries froze for a brief moment, as if he saw the beast again, before he fainted. While some of the technicians were calling emergency care, Alan thought about what this meant for the project. Jeffries didn't need to say anything else. Dr. Mayle was dead, or at least trapped in the system. Unless there was a way to keep future occurrences like this from happening, there was only one thing to do.

I started this. Now, I'm going to end it.