Tron Odyssey
Chapter 11:
Tron and Tron Legacy are the property and copyright of Disney.
~O~
There's a red woman in red water in a white bathtub. Her face is pale and empty. I cry and I beg for time to turn back, to undo this, to make this not real.
Please don't leave me oh god please don't leave me alone I'm so sorry
Men in black come, and they ask me to let her go so that they can put me in a cage like the animal that I am. All I see is red and blood and I now I want them to be hurt, to feel even an ounce of my loss.
They fire.
There is a tree.
It has no leaves, and yet it is still alive. It still grows, new branches sprout from the trunk and the branches fork into twigs. It is small, planted in the middle of a gray plain with no grass or even dirt, just bare rock. Life, in defiance of death.
There is an old man in a black cloak, on his knees, praying to the tree. His face is cracked and wrinkled, irrigating a flow of tears.
"Please, please… he is my only son," begged the old man. My heart sings. I know that voice.
"Flynn?" I call him. But he does not hear me. I want to run to him, to touch him, but my legs are air and my hands are mist.
This isn't right.
Flynn stayed behind. Flynn is unrecoverable. Flynn is gone.
Flynn is dead.
"This is a dream…It can't be…"
The tree is on fire, and a hundred eyes in the dark sky open and stare at me.
Yes. It is. But it is not yours.
"Who's there? Who are you?"
You trespass into my soul and demand answers from me? You shall have none!
"I don't understand. "
You are not welcome here, thief! I see you, all of you…and what do I see where your soul should be but a tiny void! You are a doll, starved for the dreams of others, waiting for a child to pick you up and give you a soul!
"That's not true!"
Thief!
"I'm not here to steal from you!"
Liar! You came here seeking dreams! MY dreams! You've found only nightmares!
The flames engulf me, and vanish. The tree and the old man are gone, replaced by a city on fire and in ruins. The sky is red, and the ground is covered in ash.
Ash, streaked with blood.
I see Sam, impaled on a spike, his body quivering as he tries to draw breath in as his blood bleeds out. He is naked, bruised, and cut. Alan is next to him, sharing the same horrible fate. And so many others, some long dead, others still dying.
Sam opens his mouth.
"Run…"
Before I can say anything, a snake springs from the ground, its open maw snapping shut around Sam, leaving only his head dangling on the side of its lips. The snake grew wings, and lowered its head to stare at me. Sam, still living, utters the same words again.
"Run…"
And I do.
My naked feet find only muddy ashes, and every inch I travel stretches into infinity. Hands, more bones than meat, reach out and grab my ankles, and I'm terrified, so terrified that the snake will catch up and devour me. One of the hands seizes my ankle, and I fall into a pit walled with dead faces, staring and accusing with empty voids where their eyes should be. The pit goes on forever, and I sink into darkness.
And all the fear and horror fades away into it.
I feel arms wrap around me, cradling me like a mother, and I hear the soothing hushes of a sultry voice, a comforting lover's…
"Hush, darling. You don't have to run anymore…"
I knew that voice.
"…Ishtar?"
"Yes, t'is I. Now hush, go to sleep. I shall keep the monsters at bay."
"I'm scared… so scared."
"And you have every right to be…but in here, in this darkness, I shall be a torch for you, a flame to burn and repel the horror and the madness, a light to guide your way…
She held me closer, and I could suddenly make out the glow of her skin.
She was naked and blue, freckled with gold. Her hair was pale and wild, her head was crowned with a pair of ram horns and a headdress shaped like a star with eight points... She was so strange, and so very beautiful…
She held me closer still, and kissed me…
And everything became sensation.
~O~
Quorra woke up gasping, her eyes darting left and right, expecting to find herself face to face with a cannon-wielding giant. Instead she found a ceiling of cracked obsidian crisscrossed with several humming energy conduits. She tried looking around, expecting to be surrounded by security force fields. Instead she found a door barricaded by several boxes…and a snoring head of messy, glowing pale pink hair on her left cheek and a weight across her chest.
Who the-? Oh, Julie. Borked her RGB settings. I remember now.
Looking down, Quorra saw that the weight on her chest was Julie's arm, resting protectively on her body. She gently lifted it away, causing Julie to stir and moan, but otherwise didn't cause her to wake up. Julie's hand was clasped firmly around the triangular weapon Quorra had looted from the crazed hacker. It had changed: while it used to be shaped like a unilateral triangle, it now extended into an isosceles one, and split down the middle. It looked like a ray gun.
Or a Blaster.
Now, what are you doing with that?
Quorra's assumption that they were being imprisoned was promptly shot down: she checked her arms and back for her weapons, and found them still moored to their docks. No one was stupid enough to leave a prisoner armed. Reassured, she got up from what she quickly realized was a makeshift bed made out of bundled clothes. Next to it were a dozen empty vials of energy. Looking around some more, Quorra was quietly horrified to see three silhouettes made out of pixels on the ground, the remains of dead programs, their voxels long dissipated into nothing.
Stranger and stranger. What happened here?
Something else caught her eye: amidst the ashes was some kind of knife like device with a hollowed-out handle. Its glow was flickering, indicating it wouldn't be long before it derezzed. Curious, Quorra picked it up, hoping to use her ISO talents to figure out its function. What she received instead was a rush of data the likes she had never felt before.
In fact, it was a vision:
~O~
This had not been a good millicycle for Spooler. It had not been a good centicycle, all things considered: He and his two friends, Bat and Dir, had endured endless toil as Data Pushers in the New Empire for the past one hundred cycles, and their reward for being too good at their job was to be sent down in the tunnels to find Grid Bug hives. Before they could get the necessary upgrades and modules, the riots had flared up again, and the trio couldn't believe their luck as the Recognizer took a bad disk hit before it could take off, causing its power cycles to interrupt long enough for their restraints. They weren't so lucky to have their disks unlocked from their mounts while running through the chaos, the confusion, the screaming and the derezzing, but they had eventually chanced upon a convoy of vehicles headed straight for Sector Carina, home of the Industrialists, where freedom awaited.
Only it didn't.
The Industrialists, wary of potential infiltration by Castor loyalists hiding amongst the hundred thousand or so refugees, decided to erect firewalls around a portion of their territory and corralled everyone into the "Quarantine Zone", as they liked to call it. Conditions were terrible: there weren't enough sleep mode docks around, so that meant almost everyone was constantly burning away energy. Energy rations were distributed every millicycle, apparently just enough for everyone in the Zone to get by, but some folks were simply greedier than others, and they were usually bigger and armed with combat disks. Processing centers were taking their sweet time with the length process of decompiling and recompiling programs to check for potential daemon sleepers, after which they would allow clean program into Carina proper. At the rate things were going, everyone was going to starve to death, save perhaps for the various gangs that were already forming around the just cause of beating the voxels out of smaller programs to get their dinner.
Bat, as always, took charge, and managed to get his hands on a couple of energy extraction tools (Spooler really didn't want to know how he got those…things) and got the trio into the business of draining unwary programs ("it's them or us," Bat justified). They started with sleeping the sleeping ones, then managed to work their way up taking down a former (if slightly outdated) gladiator. Bat had become more confident and more greedy, and had heard about a pair of female programs shacked up in the basement of a Shell Mod store. One of them had crashed pretty badly, and their apparent guardian, a gladiator program in a debugger suit, had been drafted into a bughunt in exchange for pay. They were vulnerable, ripe for plucking after getting their rations (the sick ones got extra), the few Monitors that patrolled the Zone didn't give two bits about the store, and it was late enough that most bystanders would be too frazzled to do anything (programs were avoiding going into sleep mode for some reason). When they got into the room, only the crashed program was there. It was perfect.
Spooler couldn't believe the amount of energy this program had. They had already extracted nine vials from her body with an energy fluid concentration the likes of which no one had ever seen before, and yet her self-patching subroutines were still repairing her battle damage. Dir and Spooler got nervous: only Champions in the arena were supposed to have that much energy, and they both said so. Bat just smiled and said it was all the more reason to get every single drop so that they didn't have to deal with her later. Spooler was about to protest, but decided he'd much rather live than starve to death: he had seen what it was like, and really didn't want to go through that experience. With the champion dead, they'd have enough energy stocked up to…hell, buy their way through the Processing Center, or at least get bumped up on the waiting list. They'd gone through so much, Spooler couldn't bear the thought of slowly derezzing in a no-good, low-priority place like the Zone simply because he had some issue with draining some voxel-hungry killer. No, Bat was right, they were going to do this, and they would live.
Then the door opened, and the other girl screamed.
"What are you doing?"
"Frag!" Bat swore. "Dir, I told you to watch the door!"
The girl, some comfort program with pink circuitry (like the ones they have in Bootes), reached for something on her back. Spooler was frightened, expecting a disk, but was relieved when he saw a triangle instead. The triangle, much to everyone's surprise (especially the girl's), got longer and split into a two-pronged fork. The girl held it in front of her with both hands, and it was evident to the three drainers that she obviously didn't have any combat subroutines installed: That wasn't how one held a Disk or a Rod, and Bat just laughed as she shouted demands to let the Champion go.
"Guys, take care of this, would you?"
Spooler got up and did his best to get the girl's full attention, While Dir approached her from her right. It worked, and Dir tried to wrestle the object away from her.
Then Dir started screaming as his hands started to dissolve, exposing his power conduits to the open air, before they burned away as well. Spooler lunged at the girl with his extractor, but she brought her tool up and squeezed the handle, and a small part of his chest blew away in a flash. And another. And then another.
He fell on his back, dropping the extractor, feeling nothing. He could faintly hear Bat shouting "Shareware bitch!" before rushing at her. Bat was not a very big program, but he was quick, and before long the two were grappling with each other.
Spooler closed his eyes, and reopened them as he felt the sudden crushing weight on top of him and saw a mess of glowing pink hair settling right in front of his face.
Then Spooler became Julie and Julie was straddling Bat and stabbing at his chest, crying all the while. With every stab of the blade, energy fluid gushed out of the handle, its full cartridge having popped off.
With every thrust, Julie became Bat and Bat was being straddled and stabbed by Julie and all he felt was the horror he had inflicted onto others as he drained their very life from their bodies while they slept.
~O~
"What the fuck?" Quorra thought to herself, dropping the blade. "What was that?"
That, child, was a memory.
How? That thing doesn't have a memory buffer!
Death leaves its mark on EVERYTHING, child. The feelings called forth when you surrender to it, or fight it, are some of the most powerful there are. They taint the will, and the worlds, this one more than any other, is SHAPED by will.
This world is shaped by Code! Data! Commands! You can't just decide to have an experience written onto a tool! It doesn't work that way!
And yet, there you were, living the painful last moments of two separate programs, and the glorious moment when your companion overcame her fear and conquered those craven dogs!
Glorious? She was scared out of her mind!
Don't worry, she found her comfort, eventually…In any case, why the surprise? You could always glean knowledge from devices. I merely increased your sensitivity.
You're the one doing this? You're messing with my head? And the dream, was that you, as well?
Ishtar said nothing.
What are you?
Your companion wakes. Won't you comfort her?
Truly enough, Julie began to stir.
This isn't over.
~O~
Julie's eyes opened, gladly letting the light inside them, burning away an unpleasant, half-remembered dream. And yet, she still felt like going back to sleep: she was never a morning person, and nothing short of a cup of coffee could make the drowsiness go away.
She suddenly realized that Quorra wasn't where she should be, and fear caused adrenaline to surge through her body. She shot up, eyes wide, looking around frantically. She didn't have to look long, as Quorra was kneeling beside her with a worried look on her face. Julie sighed with relief, and embraced Quorra.
"Oh, Q! I thought…I though you might've gotten kidnapped! Men, horrible men with…syringes! They tried to drain you dry!"
"I know…And I'm so sorry you had to do what you had to do."
At this, Julie let go and pulled away.
"You know? How?"
Quorra produced one of the blades the men used on her.
"I found this, and I saw their remains. I put two and two together."
At this, Julie brought her knees to her chin, ready to cry.
"I didn't want to kill them…I never wanted to hurt anyone…"
"I know," said Quorra, as she put a hand on Julie's shoulder, and discarded the blade.
"No, you don't know! I wanted to run! I wanted to save my own skin! But something made me stay and fight, and I don't know what it was!" Tears began to stream down on her face.
"Julie…"
"All I know is that it didn't come from me, okay? I'm not a soldier!" She waved her Blaster, for emphasis. "I never shot anyone in my life!" she yelled, throwing the weapon away.
"I don't want to have to kill anyone anymore…I want to go home…"
Julie felt herself pulled into an embrace, and could feel Quorra's heartbeat against her cheek. She wept.
"Hush, it's okay. I'm going to get you home, I promise. You'll be solving my server problems in no time, and we'll find new ways to ruin your brother's day, alright?
Julie was surprised at the warmth that seemed to emanate from Quorra: it pulsed with each beat of her heart, and with each pulse she could feel her sorrow drain away. It felt so nice; Julie wanted nothing more than to stay like this forever.
"Oh god," she said suddenly.
"What is it?" asked Quorra.
"We've been sleeping next to corpses."
Quorra couldn't help but grin. "Yeah, we were."
"That's so gross." Julie sniffled. "I really should've cleaned that up."
"I'll take care of it. You just rest up, okay?"
"Okay," Julie sais as she pulled away. "Quorra?"
"Hm?"
"I have so many questions."
"You and me both. The last 11 hours or so that I can recall are a jumbled, disconnected mess. I could use some answers."
Julie watched as Quorra put her fingers on the ground, tracing each and every outline of the piles of ash. The outlines glowed, and some kind hexagonal keypad appeared on the ground. Quorra typed some commands, causing icons to appear, disappear or morph, until three progress bars appeared and started their course from left to right. As they did, each pile coalesced into a tiny cube.
Once the cubes were done forming, Quorra picked them up and looked for a place to put them away. Finding none, she went to a corner of the room, and traced a square on the ground. The section of ground rose, and became a table. Quorra set the cubes on it.
"What did you just do?" asked Julie.
"I archived the data. Compressed it."
"Like a zip file?"
"Pretty much."
"Oh. Ok."
Julie still stared.
"Quorra?"
"Yeah?"
"Where are we?"
Quorra laughed. "I suppose the ball's in my court on that one. You remember the TRON cartoons?"
"Yeah…but this can't be-"
"-It is. Well, sort of."
"You mean to tell me that Kevin Flynn really was shot by a power-hungry AI with a disintegrator ray and had his molecules recombined inside the computer, only instead of being trapped inside hard disk he was transported in a digital universe where programs are people and they throw disks at each other for fun?"
"Yep."
"And then Kevin took Sam there, and then Sam took you later on...?"
"No, that's not quite it. You remember when I told you when Sam rescued me for a bad place?"
"I remember. I thought you came from Eastern Europe or something."
"Well, welcome to my hometown."
"Oh, don't be silly, that would make you…"
Quorra smiled, and nodded.
"A program? You're a talking program like…like Tron?"
"Not quite like Tron. He was a very advanced Basic. I'm different. An ISO."
"…You're the archive file of an optical disc?"
"err-" Quorra wasn't quite ready for that one. And Julie perked up instantly, seeming to have cast away her all her worries.
"-What of? A video game? You're totally a video game, aren't you?"
"Julie," Quorra insisted, stifling a laugh. "I'm not a video game! I'm an isomorphic algorithm!"
"Oh!...wait, what's an isomorphic algorithm?"
"Hoo boy." Quorra sat down, cross-legged, on the makeshift bed. "I'm going to have to start from the beginning."
"I got time!"
"Yeah, I'll try to abridge as much as possible anyways. You see, after Kevin defeated the MCP…"
And Quorra told Julie everything. About the beginnings of the Grid. About the miraculous emergence of the ISOs. About Tron. About CLU. About the Purge. About the thousand cycles spent as a guerrilla fighter, about the futile war against a relentless enemy made in the image of the Creator himself. And finally, about Sam, and her escape into the realm of the users.
Quorra didn't abridge anything. It had felt too good to talk about it: Sam had expressly forbidden her to talk about her where she came from or her experiences with anyone but him and Alan, and while she saw the wisdom in that, it meant being dishonest to everyone else she met.
Is that all? There ought to be so much more to tell, I would think.
Be Quiet, you! She doesn't need to know everything.
Julie, for her part, listened to everything attentively, and was left speechless, until:
"Wow. That is amazing!"
"Yeah, yeah it is. Scary, too, as you've experienced."
Julie's face grew just a bit somber, then. "I've got a couple more questions, though."
"Shoot."
"What makes an ISO special? I mean, miraculous birth aside, what can you do?"
"Besides potentially answer the questions of Life, the Universe and Everything? I can pretty much pick up anything and learn how to use it in an instant. Everything from an abacus to a fighter jet."
"Really?"
"That and make slight modifications to my code to take on functions. I could be anything from a data pusher to a system monitor if I wanted to. That's pretty much it."
"And the flaming frisbee and the resistance to tank rounds?"
"Ah. Those." Quorra got up, feeling the stirring in her heart. "I'm honestly not sure. I vaguely remember someone trying to force something in my mouth…"
"Oh god!"
"It's not what you think… more like some kind of upgrade they give to arena fighters to boost their performance. "
"Why would anyone do that?The last thing I'd want to do is give my prisoners superpowers."
"Probably for entertainment's sake: better performance, more impressive fights. And if anyone gets uppity, there were always the collars. My upgrade was apparently bugged beyond belief and I wasn't supposed to survive getting implanted with it. At best, I was supposed to go completely nuts. At worst, de-rezz. And I doubt they expected to deal with a User with any sort of hacking ability: the security on these things was a joke."
"Programs couldn't break free? At all?"
"Not unless they were malware with the specific functions necessary to disable the security. Basics are very capable when they want to be, but when it comes to adapting…they're helpless."
"Oh…" Julie seemed despondent, now.
"Speaking of the arena," Quorra said. "What happened after I was blown up?"
"Well, after I dropped that glass cage onto the pilot…"
"You dropped a Disk Wars court on him?"
"…and Ed shot him in the head…"
"Ed? Really?"
"Can I finish?"
"Oh, sorry."
"Well, after Ed won, I managed to lower my…court? My court into the lower arena. The surviving programs were patting Ed on the back. Even the whole crows was cheering for him, can you believe it? Anyways, I ran up to them, and one of them saw my bleeding head wound and he started screaming and pointing. He kept shouting 'User!' and then all the other players started kneeling before me. It was weird."
"Well, Users are considered gods here. And let's face it, they kind of are."
"I figured as much. Then the guards came to take us back to our cells. When they saw we didn't have our collars on, they got really, REALLY mad and violent. Ed fought back, managed to kill one of them, but he was overpowered soon enough. When one of the guards struck me, the other players…well…
"Go on..."
"They came to my defense. Every single one. They threw themselves at the guard screaming 'for the users!' while their collars kept spitting out sparks…it looked like it was painful, Q, but they just kept on fighting until…"
"Until the collars finally exploded."
"…Yes. Ed finished off the remaining guards, and by then the crowd had been riled up to the point where they rioted. I don't know why, I guess they didn't like anyone manhandling their new champ, or, or something. I don't know."
Quorra recalled Spooler's recent memories. There had indeed been a riot, and she got the feeling unrest had been brewing for a while. The guards interfering with a match while everyone had been euphoric with choice violence must have been the tipping point. Julie continued with her tale.
"Ed and I took advantage of the confusion. I had to force him to carry you on his back, and he complained, but he did it anyways. We managed to find our way out: with the guards leaving the doors open behind them, it wasn't too hard. Fighting off hooligans and Guards trying to keep order, that was the tough part. I had to use my…disk? My triangle more than a few times, but Ed was…He was getting angrier and angrier, and kept pulling off one headshot after the next. Each time a guard fell and dropped his weapons, some rioter picked them up and before you knew it the riot had even more momentum!"
"And then you managed to find transportation?"
"It found us, actually. Some disgruntled workers decided to start a motley convoy of ground vehicles, and picked up everyone they could before the guards completely pacify the place, because they always did, apparently. They were taking their chance for freedom in this place called Carina, and when they saw we were armed they thought their chances to break through any blockade would be a lot better if they picked us up."
"I'll bet."
"Oh you have no idea!"
-ooo-
"I HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS! YOU WANT TO ME TO PLAY? I'LL PLAY! AND YOU'RE GOING TO LOSE!"
Ed fired another overcharged shot at the flying arch. It apparently hit something vital, and the arch spun out of control, crashing into a building.
"AND WHEN I FIND A WAY OUT, I WILL HAVE ALL YOUR JOBS, AND THEN I'LL HAVE YOUR HEADS SERVED UP ON A SILVER PLATTER! WITH APPLES! IN YOUR MOUTHS!"
~O~
"I didn't know Ed had it in him. I'm impressed!"
"Oh, that's not all."
~O~
The flying arch crashed, then fell on one of the tanks that had been chasing them down the street, right at the front of the formation. And then the wreckages exploded in a shower of cubes and glowing fluid.
"YOU SEE THAT? YOU SEE THAT? THIS IS WHAT YOU GET WHEN YOU FUCK WITH DILLINGER!"
~O~
Quorra couldn't help but laugh that one. She had seen Ed scowl. She had even seen him angry. But downright furious and bloodthirsty?
"Just…wow. I'm sorry I missed it."
"He was pretty much holding them off by himself, and I was getting worried he'd run out of ammo before running out of targets. We were lucky: I heard other refugees transports were overwhelmed. I was so relieved when we made it to our destination: I thought we were safe, that would get looked after…but…"
"But then they put us in a ghetto."
"Yeah, pretty much. How did you know?"
"If a whole bunch of refugees came in uninvited in your turf, you'd be careful too.
"I guess so. Well, you've got an idea of what happened next: We got meal tickets, as far as a vial of glow in the dark drinks can be called a meal, and permission to squat pretty much every where we liked. I lucked out with this place: Plenty of room of the three of us, relatively private, and the door closes…although it doesn't look like it can lock."
"Where did Ed go?"
"Some men in armor similar to his came by the building, asking for volunteers for a 'debugging' job, with the promise of pay and drink. Since Ed's the better programmer between the two of us, and the medics said you needed energy real bad to power your self-patching subroutines, I volunteered him. They took him on almost immediately."
"That couldn't have made him happy."
"Well, he wasn't, but then he figured that working as a 'pretend code monkey' would give him some semblance of normalcy in all this craz-"
There was a knock on the door. Quorra shot up, readying her combat disk while eyeing the barricaded door warily. She looked at Julie: she was aiming at the door, her hands shaking.
Another knock. Quorra wished she could see through walls.
Would really have helped out in…oh, a million other situations back in the bad old days. I need to remember to write some new code and integrate it in my processes…
No need.
Wait, what are y-
Before she could finish her thought, her eyes began to burn, if only slightly. Then the wall and door darkened, and became transparent like dark glass. Several blue glowing figures appeared, some were sitting, others were pacing, but one was waiting intently in front of the door, fully armored with the helmet on, holding a disk in hand.
"I think it might be Ed," murmured Quorra. "But I can't be sure, he's armed with a disk, not a gun. You said there were others with armor like his?"
"Yeah, but hold on."
Julie approached the door, and said "Thunder" out loud.
"Flash," the figure behind the door answered. "It's me, open the door."
"Alright, give us a minute!"
The two young women removed all the boxes blocking the way, and opened the door. What they saw then made them gasp: Ed was standing in the doorway; his armor was scratched, warped and dented, and he was covered head to toe with dried goo.
"We have two problems," he said. "First: this isn't a video game."
"Oh good," said Quorra. "You're up to speed! Because-"
Ed then turned on the holo-emitter on his disk, and a stream of code emerged. Quorra couldn't quite make out the data: it was a mess.
"Second: The Beast is here."
~O~
Author's notes: Whoo, that one took months to do. Work was interfering, and the words didn't quite flow out of the keyboard as well as before.
Another concern of mine is the tone of this chapter. I don't know how well I maintained it, since I've been at this chapter on and off again for the past couple of months. Hopefully this hasn't felt to disjointed.