Helena closed her eyes as the pale woman in the glowing armor herded her aboard the craft, thinking that this had to be a trick of her sensorium; she was hallucinating. The old synthetic nerve fibers were misfiring again; that had to be it.
Sam had told her there would be A.I. in this thing that his father had created, which he and Quorra had safeguarded up until this point. Sentient A.I. entities, exactly the kind that were banned along with replicants when the Oligarchy had finally put its foot down after the first replicant revolt.
He hadn't told her what form it would take.
Goddamn Recognizers, for Fnord's sake!
In fact, she had known almost nothing, up until this point. They had told her nothing. Helena had always known that there was something; some last product of genius that Kevin Flynn had cooked up before he'd disappeared.
Mom would freak. This was the thing she always hoped to find - the nugget of info that she'd always hoped Sam would let slip one day.
Well, here it was. And now she was here, too. Actually in it.
Thing was, it was all an accident. She wasn't supposed to be in here at all. All Sam had told her to do before the cops dragged him away was to move it, to relocate it to someplace safe. It was someplace safe now, except that she'd taken the laser - a device precisely the same size and shape of an old-style webcam, exactly like the kind she'd grown up with - along with the rest of it.
She hadn't known what it was for when she'd hooked it back up with the rest of Sam's tablet computer, exactly the same way it had been before when she'd found it in room 89 of the Emperor Norton Hotel – a building which Sam and Quorra had owned through the Dumont company before the Tyrell corporation had taken control of it, too.
In fact, the thought that had crossed her mind before she'd answered "Y" to "CLEAR APERTURE, Y/N?" was, 'what is Sam doing with this antiquated POS on his tablet?'
Oops. I guess I should have gone with "Sam, what are you doing with a mothertrucking laser on your goddamn computer?" for three hundred, Alex.
It was obvious that the laser had something to do with what she was experiencing now, like the projected 3D MMORPG LARP that she and her friends enjoyed in their downtime - but how, exactly? All she'd seen was one bright flash before she'd found herself in the broken ruins of a once-mighty metropolis. She wondered exactly how it was inducing this scene into her brain - because no freaking way she was actually physically, bodily here. That kind of thing just didn't happen in real life.
Gaff - as insufferable and inscrutable as he usually was – had been there, too when the police had taken Sam into custody. Helena didn't think he'd seen her. At least, she hoped not. The fact that the Tyrell corporation was finally taking full control of Encom and all its holdings was the reigning scandal of the day. The police had made a huge show of taking Sam into custody on the charges of which the Tyrell corporation had accused him.
For once, Gaff and his flunkies weren't looking for her. But she hated to think about what his presence probably meant for Sam.
"It's okay," he'd told her. "I'll spend the night in jail. I've done it before. Big deal."
Not if they can charge you with harboring illegal sentient A.I. entities on Earth, Sam, Helena thought. And if they can make it stick...oh Fnord. Good thing I have the evidence.
Someone had turned on the wireless radio on the computer, though, before she'd found it. Some disgruntled hotel employee, perhaps; one whose offworld bank account had probably just grown by several thousand dollars – giving the blackhats on the Tyrell corporation's payroll enough time to break in.
But if they had access to the evidence, why would they try to destroy it? Everything they need to put Sam away forever is here. If they manage to get Quorra extradited from the Lunar station...damn, Helena thought, removing her glasses and pinching the bridge of her nose against the crashing feeling of helplessness that suddenly bombarded her. I'm sure I've done stupider things than get myself caught up in a digital hallucination when my friends need help, but right now I can't think of any.
She only hoped that the rest of the Black Rock Irregulars could think of a way get them out of it somehow...
"It's going to be all right," said one of the other folks on the Recognizer; a tall, solidly-build black man in armor similar to her captor's, which glowed from the seams with the same brilliant green phosphorescence. "We'll figure all of this out somehow."
"Does anyone really believe that?" asked another, smaller, man who crouched in a far corner of the deck, his pale face illuminated by the greenish glow of his own pattern. Helena wondered if the lines only went as far as their clothes, or if they emanated from their skin and radiated outward through their garments. She could see her own surgery scars clearly through the black fabric of her tracksuit, limned with a stark white light. Pulling up her sleeve, she could clearly make out the strobing ghost-impression of the nerve implants underneath her skin. Seen together, it looked to her like a broken neon sign - one composed of the messy Zalgo text she'd seen on the meme sites in her teens. She wondered if the implants in her head were visible; they probably would be, if she shaved her head in this place -
"Look around you, Niels!" the crouching man exclaimed, de-railing her train of thought. "Does it really look like anything is going to be okay ever again?" he laughed, a panicked, manic edge to his voice. "Sam and the ISO are gone. They've abandoned us."
"They have not." Helena interjected, shoving her glasses back on. She wondered why the man referred to Quorra as "the ISO."
"She's right, Baud. I can't imagine that they'd just leave things like this," the burly program - Niels? - said.
"Then where are they? Do you know something we don't?" the man - Baud? retorted.
"They need help," Helena said, staring at the ruins below. Could she break herself out of this fantasy by throwing herself from the craft? Was it as simple as finding the boundaries of this projection, and passing through it somehow? She took a step closer to the railing, and resolved to find out.
"WOAH! You do NOT want to do that, program!" Niels shouted, grabbing her and wrenching her to safety. "It's going to be all right, I swear."
"What's going on over there?" the voice of the woman who'd brought Helena aboard sounded from the craft's helm.
"Listen, I've got to get back somehow! Sam needs help, and I'm not supposed to be here!" Helena exclaimed, after a futile attempt to break out of Niels's grasp.
"What do you mean, "get back?" Baud hissed, drawing back from her as if he expected to catch fire.
"Nobody else in the city has a circuitry pattern like yours, Hel. Where did you come from? What's going on with Sam and Quorra?" Niels asked.
"Are you a User?" Baud snapped, the question sounding to Helena's ears like an accusation.
"Am I a User of what?" Helena asked, bewildered.
"Where are Sam and Quorra? Why didn't they help us? Where is Tron? He's supposed to be protecting us! Why don't they come?" Baud shouted, nearly bowling Niels over as he grabbed her by the front of her jacket.
Tron? Helena wondered.
"Sam's currently being held by our enemies," she answered. "He tried to put a bold face on it, but...well. They're probably the ones who did this to your simulation. Mothertrucking script kiddies in the Tyrell Corporation's employ. Whoever put Sam's tablet online left the gate wide open to their attack."
"So it was an attack," Niels stated, as if this confirmed what he'd already suspected. "You getting all this, Arachne?"
"In bits," the woman at the helm confirmed, her face tight with concentration as she steered the Recognizer around a tower that had fallen and lay diagonally braced against another.
"Who is Tron?" Helena asked.
"Tron, the warrior. The sentinel. Tron the protector," Niels said reverently.
""You mean...Tron, as in the video game Tron? Tron is real? Wow. If I told you this was a lot to take in, it would be an understatement," Helena said.
"How'd you get in here," Niels asked her. "Who or what is the Tyrell Corporation? I at least want to know what we're up against."
"The Tyrell Corporation is making a move against Encom. They're bastards. Sam told me to recover the device this simulation is being stored on. And uh, well..."
"Let me guess. You took a wrong turn somewhere, right?"
"Uh, yeah. That's about the size of it."
"Why are we just standing here talking about all of this? You're a User, so do something. Fix this," Baud pleaded.
Helena's eyes scanned the horizon, taking in the destruction that surrounded them.
"I can try...I'm a programmer, but all of this is so over my head, I wouldn't even know where to begin," she said. "Best case scenario, we find Sam and get him back here so he can clean up the mess those jerks left."
"What about Quorra?" Arachne asked from her place at the helm.
"She's offworld. She left when this mess all started. She didn't want to...Fnord, I'd have liked to have seen what she would've have done to the Gaffstapo when they took Sam away, if she'd been there. But Sam told her that the future was in her hands, or something, and she went. Sam's last act before being arrested was to send her away."
"He was protecting the ISO while we were being attacked?" Baud exclaimed, incredulous.
"He was protecting the mother of his child. Quorra's pregnant," Helena said. She darted a look between them. "No one else is supposed to know that, by the way. Why do you keep calling her 'the ISO?'"
"What is the Gaffstapo?" Niels asked.
"Blade Runners. Cops who specialize in hunting down replicants and sentient programs who go rogue."
"Why didn't they tell us about any of this?" Arachne demanded, turning to face Helena from the Recognizer's controls. "Why did they never mention that they had such powerful enemies amongst the Users? Is what we are...is our whole world forbidden? And if Quorra left, why didn't she just take us with her?"
"It's likely that the tablet would have been seized when she went through customs. They'd have been tipped off. It's precisely the kind of thing they'd have been looking for," Helena explained. "This vendetta between Sam and the Tyrell Corporation goes way back," Helena said. "It would take hours to explain it all."
"And because we're Programs, you don't think we'll understand it?" Baud interjected angrily.
"No, man...it's just that there are so many threads, so many pieces on the board. How do I get back so I can help Sam?"
"We need to get you to the portal," Niels answered. "It's in the Outlands beyond the Sea of Simulation."
"That doesn't sound close," Helena said.
"Not really," Niels agreed. "It closes after a set period of time. And if the rest of the Grid is doing as badly as we are..."
"Then we'd better get a move on," Arachne said, finishing his thought. "I'll check in with Kelso. He may be able to advise us further in this."
"What about Tron? Nobody's heard from him for millicycles. What if they've derezzed Tron?" Baud asked.
"I can't imagine Tron would just let this slide - but even he can't be everywhere at once," Niels sagely remarked.