It had started to rain. The electric smell of ozone flickered around him, and he tilted his face into the deluge, eyes closed, letting it wash over him.
The rain was more than just a simulation mimicking User-world weather patterns- it was part of the circulation of energy through the system, a rhythm as old as the Grid itself. Standing still and letting it find its way around his code, leaving faint shivering trails of energy on his armor, he felt as connected to his world as any program could.
The fractured scars that had once marked him were gone now- when Alan-1 had repaired him when he'd first found him, they had faded as the corrupted code was purged from his system. But he could almost still feel them sometimes, especially now, as the energy trickled delicately across his neck. Flynn had referred to such sensation as 'phantom pain'. Rinzler had never felt anything like that, but he was still no stranger to memory ghosts. When the storms drummed down on his helmet, close but never touching, they always had left him with a taste of isolation, the forlorn sensation of being lost. He did not like it and could not place it. Therefore he had learned to hate the rain, with its inaudible whispers of something more.
He had once hated many things for what they made him think he should feel, most of all Kevin Flynn.
Tron's eyes opened and he shook his head, sending the faintly glowing droplets in all directions, and he tried to scatter those old, dark thoughts along with them. He focused again, tuning in to the constant data feed from the Grid. It was just a routine patrol that a simpler security scanner could have done, but he had no other programs to send out at the moment. For the time being, he was the only security function in action on the Grid, so all of the patrols fell to him.
He alone had put order back into the Grid in the past cycle, and ended the warring of different rebel cells and bands of renegades and lone trouble makers. Many of them had wanted to help him, but without the needed programming, he had quickly found that non-security programs were rather useless for filling in as security functions. Many had some form of patched upgrades, however, and these he could use, at least for support.
Zuse had made the best of his talents as a repair and modification program after the coup- paying programs like these, and like Kaps- in upgrades in return for doing his bidding in all its forms. The nature of the programs of this system was different in that way- in lack of a User, they had slowly began to adapt instead of remaining locked in obsoletion.
He was now cruising at a casual scanning pace along the ragged edge of Delta on a Outlands-capable lightcycle he had confiscated from a contraband dealer, on the lookout for bugs, glitches or new damages to catalogue. He was on his own Grid-side for the time being, but, thank the Users, Sam and Alan-1 had been at work from the outside. Whatever he couldn't get rid of or fix, he could just tag as damaged for them to deal with.
He had a feeling he'd be doing a lot of that tagging in this area. Delta had been a new sector under development at the time of the Purge. CLU had allocated the resources used in its development for his own ends, and it had remained in a state of static incompletion. Raw scaffolding code and energy conduits laid exposed, serving as the perfect bait to attract copious amounts of gridbugs to the fringes of the city.
CLU had merely maintained the problem, rather than correct it. He was a perfectionist; but he had always focused all his energy and force into one goal at a time. The coup, the Purge and then the Rectifier initiative had demanded his full attention one after the other, and thus Delta lay imperfect but very low priority and therefore of no concern to Rinzler, or so he'd always been told, and tried to believe. Some nagging instinct had him spending all of his limited spare time there, fending off the swarms more or less behind CLU's back. There was no directive preventing him from doing so, but he still was sure that acting without command was a dangerously mutinous thing.
It was of major concern to Tron right now. The rest of TRON City was well established with good debugging software; this sector was an Achilles' heel, letting swarms form and feed before dispersing into neighboring Gamma and Epsilon.
Gridbugs detected massing around structural conduit seventeen. The notification flashed through his processes with a certain crisp efficiency he seemed to be lacking lately and he sighed, veering from his perimeter scan towards the swarm. He was still sore from evacuating programs from a destabilizing file in Epsilon- he had used his armored body as a shield to protect the unarmored Basics fleeing the collapsing building, and had subsequently been pummeled by the falling chunks of derezzing code. No serious damage, but it still hurt. His self repair protocols leeched his energy reserves as a result, and his circuits were a dull gray-white. He would have to wait to find some energy, though. There was work to be done, and that came first.
He sent out a security-channel binary message to the ragtag force he'd assembled.
[Swarm massing in Delta in block ten, conduit seventeen. All idle programs report immediately.] There was a ripple of confirmations and acknowledgements from around ten of the thirty odd programs he'd recruited. All obsolete functions who should have been repurposed, they had taken on new directives with the help of illegal upgrades from Zuse, mostly as guards to caches of energy, gang-claimed parts of the city, or contraband stashes. Naturally he wanted to tag them for quarantine along with the remains of the Guard, but he needed them for the time being, and until Alan-1 could unlock and repair them, and write enough new ones to make a decent security force, they would have to do.
The swarm was a decent size, but he cut into the center of it without hesitation, throwing the bugs into disarray. He had a small window before they identified and tagged him as the threat, and hopefully within that window some of his reinforcements would arrive.
If not, it would just be that much harder.
He had thankfully had his helmet restructured by Alan-1, and as the rain drenched him and sheeted over his face he activated it, letting the advanced visual settings and notifications enhance his attacks and make every disk cut count. Dodge, slash, spin, duck, left feint right cut dodge jump- he evaded every mandible and began to thin out the swarm with a vengeance. He worked into the steady rhythm of fighting gridbugs- not an actual pattern of attacks, but a pounding beat of action and reaction.
Attack. Analyze reaction. Defend against next offense, let them get close. Formulate new attack. Execute, repeat.
With a large swarm, the bugs shared information and acted as a collective, and in order to destroy them one had to fight them as the parts of a whole, carefully managing how they would react to stimuli in order to use that against them.
He didn't notice when others joined the fight until he caught a flash of glaring cyan circuits and blond hair between the droves of bugs. It was the surly fighter he'd kicked down in Epsilon when he'd first quarantined the sector- what was his designation again? It didn't matter right now. The swarms had trouble coordinating against multiple adversaries, weakening them but also making them even more unpredictable.
It didn't take long after that, though. There were around ten programs near him fighting now, and they managed to clean up the swarm, responding to orders from Tron to box in and destroy the last few bugs as they tried to scatter. For some, taking orders had been a tough learning curve, but they'd soon remembered just what Tron was capable of, and their respect for him continued to grow the more they worked with him. Rallax had been like that. When Flynn had first rezzed the Guard, the majority of them had been tripping over themselves to follow the existing security programs' lead, but not Rallax. Only after Tron's actions had proven to the new program that he knew what he was doing did he truly begin to listen to his commander.
Once again, he found himself pushing thoughts aside to deal with the current situation. One program had a small bite where a bug had briefly latched on and leeched a little energy, but he was stable and functional, if a little shaken by the encounter. They stood proudly in the inert remains of the swarm at a poor imitation of attention, talking and bragging. The Guard would have been offended that these lawless bandits were being trusted with their job, if they hadn't been trapped under CLU's corrupting code, locked by Tron in the quarantine file complex Flynn had built at the beginning of the Abraxas viral attack in the outlands along with a large number of strays that he had rounded up for the Users to sort through.
He walked down the line, scanning each for damage.
Reko, that's his name!
He recalled the program's name recalled only after scanning the program and having the designation appear on his helmet HUD. Some dropped their gaze nervously when he came close, and he realized that his helmet probably still made them nervous. These were the sort of program that Rinzler had hunted down and derezzed on a regular basis, and fear clung more than any programming.
[Swam neutralized.] He announced simply, letting them know they were free to go. Immediately cycles rezzed, and he turned to leave himself. A voice stopped him, though.
"Hey, man, you look like you're about to fall over! You could use a jumpstart, and I know a place that could help you out." The User terminology caught him by surprise, though it shouldn't have- he'd discovered that the two brief forays of Sam Flynn into the Grid had circulated some new vocabulary through the Grid.
The speaker was an earnest-looking program lacking any form of armor, contraband or otherwise, hanging back with a few of the others. Tron was at first surprised they wanted him tagging along with whatever they had planned, but a long time ago the rowdier members of the Guard had been the same way, entire squads going out, usually to wind up falling-over overcharged, and also to possibly locate some female partners for other downtime activities. It had become their sport to try and drag him along. For a second he stood there, filled with an aching, deep sadness. He rarely let himself mourn all those that he'd lost, as if fearing it would overwhelm him, but that loneliness would still hit him from behind every few cycles.
He sighed, derezzing his helmet.
"I -"
A shiver ran through the system, jolting him to his source code in an unforgettable surge of energy. Instinctively they all turned to watch the Portal flare bright. His words died in his throat, and he was rezzing his cycle within the nano, rocketing away towards the rezzing User's point of materialization, his databases instantly updated to include the new data. It had been adjusted since he'd rezzed back onto the Grid; set back to the arcade in Epsilon, which he'd finally cleaned up enough to take out of lockdown.
[Maybe another time,] he sent apologetically to the programs he'd just left. He'd hoped Alan-1 had come back to the Grid- he wanted to show his User the world he had helped create and had protected, and that now he was helping to heal. He wanted him to see all the things that were finally going right, the shimmering rivers of energy that had been dry for thousands of cycles, the calm, cleansed Sea, the programs laughing and learning to live a life worth existing for all over again. Disappointment pricked at him when the system only registered Quorra.
Perhaps it's just as well. Of all the programs hurt by CLU, and by him, she was one of the ones that had suffered the most.
[I have a few things to take care of.]
Bored.
Not once since he arrived in the User world had he been able to say he'd suffered from boredom.
…Until now.
Forbidden to leave the laser bay, he and Gem were to remain here, waiting on Quorra's return. They had been given a communication device known as a 'cell phone' and the emergency number necessary to use it to contact Alan (who was trapped in long series of ENCOM board meetings along with Sam, whatever those were) if she did not return within the specified amount of time. He had his orders and normally that would have been all he needed, but this was sitting around in a small room with a prickly Siren doing nothing.
Said Siren was currently immersed in a small, flat device identified as a 'Kindle' belonging to Quorra, leaving him to his own devices. The novelty of having been drenched by the summer downpour in the run from the car to the arcade had worn off. He'd committed every detail of every surface in the room to memory. He knew the number of keys in the Grid's keyboard and the order they occurred in, the number of cobwebs in the corners-
"Would you stop that!?" He froze, pinned by Gem's frosty glare. For a moment he looked at her, confused, before realizing he'd been tapping out the rhythm to a song he'd heard on the radio some time during the blur that had been the last two days on the laptop's plastic casing, sped up to somewhere near two hundred percent its original tempo.
He gave her a too-innocent look that said, stop what? But relented nonetheless, deciding it really wasn't worth the trouble to continue to antagonize her.
He really had no idea where Gem's fabricated identity stopped and the ISO underneath started. Not that it matters anymore. The game he'd been forced to play for the past few thousand cycles was over- no longer did he have to run for other programs, scrounging energy in return for rumors and memories that the Basics with power outside of CLU's henchmen could afford to pay for. It was just as well- it wasn't a game one wanted to play.
He tried to imagine what his life would be like now that the system was running as it should. He'd have a steady line of work from the Users, and a guarantee of enough energy to sustain him. No more illicit spying or patch upgrades. Might get a little boring. He'd quickly adapted to function without true purpose- those who didn't hadn't lasted long after the coup- and going back to how things were meant to be would require some adjusting of its own.
Well, a change in pace never hurts.
A sudden fear stabbed at him though- what if he had no place in the future of the Grid? He was an older program, though he'd barely been out of beta testing when Flynn, friend of a friend of the User who wrote him (he'd never actually run for J_Henry74, so it was hard to think of him as his User) had installed him on the Grid. That had been a long time ago, and he was sure there were better programs for his job by now.
Logic stated he'd simply be repurposed; find a new niche in the system. Repurposing had a nasty stigma attached these cycles, though, he thought. A memory of Rinzler, grating purr harsh and sinister, flashed through his mind.
"What are you reading?" He asked suddenly, trying to distract himself from his own thoughts. Gem looked up, face caught between annoyed and surprised. She looked back to the screen she held, obviously considering whether to deign him with an answer.
"It's about a User girl who falls in love with a type of fictional creature- kind of like a virus- that feeds on the blood of Users." What?
"…that is the most disgusting idea for a story I've ever heard of." Kaps managed after sitting stricken for a couple of minutes. Really, what sort of User would come up with something like that?
"Why would someone fall in love with a- never mind, why are you reading a book about it? Why did Quorra even have a book like that in that thing?" Gem had the familiar you are too bit-brained to be in the same file as me look going and he knew that no matter what she was or wasn't, that face was genuine.
"You wouldn't understand- it's beyond your programmed parameters, I'm sure." She told him smugly. Now it was his turn to glare. The ISO continued to read, unperturbed. Several long minutes passed in silence, and then-
"And she didn't have it on here. All she had was a bunch of boring science fiction novels. I had to figure out how to buy new ones. All the data I needed was already saved into this thing."
" You bought new books with her credit card…real nice, Gem. That's about one step up from being a hacker program." He had only recently figured out the 'credit card' thing himself, having watched Alan buy fuel for the car with it.
"Why are you still talking to me, Kaps?"
"I'm bored!"
"Be bored quietly." I liked you better when you sulked in a corner and just sat there silently giving everyone dagger eyes. Which was how Gem had spent her first day in the User world, more or less. She'd barely registered in his peripherals at the time- he was too busy trying to take in as much of Olympus as he could- but she had a way of radiating sheer I hate you all just sitting there that sort of clung to anyone who came too close and he'd been vaguely aware that Gem wasn't enjoying the incredible, strange world they found themselves in at all.
Quorra had persevered; insisting on talking to her, showing Gem things like chocolate, Boston Terriers and, Quorra's favorite thing of all, the miracle known as the sunrise. She loved the sun; the wild, uncontrollable sky in general. I can see why. There is absolutely nothing like it.
Initially the Siren had given clipped, monosyllabic replies to any verbal cajoling, but Quorra's easy laugh and warm smile demanded a response in kind. To his astonishment, Gem had actually begun to lighten up- more relaxed, less sadistic tendencies- though still he had trouble believing what he saw.
The general feeling regarding her seemed to be 'forgive and forget' among the Users, which he had to try not to resent- despite the strange changes in attitude lately, this was still the same program that had put a disk in his back. He would never try to directly get even with her for that, of course, but he still wished that somebody had said something, a rap-on-the-knuckles sort of thing. Oh, well.
He grinned, remembering something.
"Hey, Gem."
No response.
"Watch out for those toasters."
Now she reddened ever-so-slightly, though she kept her eyes fixed firmly on the screen.
The previous morning, Gem had patiently stared down said appliance, waiting for it to transform the bread Sam had put into it into the apparently preferred 'toast'. Kaps guessed she'd lost focus and drifted off into thought, because when the toaster ejected the toast the Siren had jumped back- actually, violently leapt back, as if bitten, in total surprise, practically landing in Sam's arms, despite his heroic attempt to get out of her way.
Kaps had learned what it was like to get a stitch from laughing.
"Hey, Kaps." He looked over at her, smug. Come on, we both know I didn't do anything that-
"Glass doors are still doors." …stupid. His less advanced, User AV feeds were actually terrible at picking up on transparent objects, and he had run head on into a sliding glass door at Alan's house, after Sam decided one ISO was his flat's max capacity for programs and had convinced Alan to take them for the time being. The door had survived, and so had Kaps, but he was sure the door had won. Is a basic proximity scanning feature too much to ask for?
"Marvin." He said simply in reply. Gem recoiled at the word, eyes narrowed.
"That little monster!"
"Little is right, I've seen bigger Bits!"
"He was sniffing me!"
"You didn't need to kick him!" He asserted contemptuously.
"He looks like a gridbug!"
"Well, that just changes everything, security program. Quorra and Sam were honestly considering tossing you out on the street after that."
"They wouldn't!"
"You kicked Sam's companion accessory-program in its nose! Marv was just being friendly!"
"I've kicked a lot of programs that were 'just being friendly' in far more sensitive places." She told him, completely remorseless.
"You're an unholy menace."
"I'm a political refugee from a genocidal state!"
"So is Quorra, but I don't see her kicking puppies!"
They glared at each other, but there wasn't much real hostility left in either of them after thousands of cycles of fighting to survive in their own ways. Though she seems to have some special reserve of venom for emergencies.
And speaking of Quorra…
"Do you know why she snuck off to the Grid, anyway?" Gem shrugged, feigning a sulky disinterest.
"What do you mean, snuck off?" She finally asked, curiosity winning out.
"She waited 'till Sam and Alan were both busy, and then she dragged both of us here with no notice. What's she doing in there?" This was an interesting line of code, now that he processed it a little, and he wasn't letting it go. Before he could say anything more though, Gem spoke up again.
"We all have things we want closure on. Sometimes the only way to get it is to find it on your own." He gave her a blank stare.
"What's that supposed to mean?" He said, wondering if he was missing something.
"Haven't you ever wanted to be alone, with just you and whatever you really need to do to make everything right?" She asked, her tone shifting towards defensive. Kaps shrugged.
"I'm usually alone, and there's nothing I can do that will make 'everything right'. I do what I can to get by, if that's what you're saying. Is this some ISO thing?"
"…I didn't think so. Perhaps it is." Silence for a moment more, and then he realized-
"Maybe not, though. Maybe that's what Tron was doing." He remembered the driven edge to the way Tron talked and moved, as if he knew he was supposed to be somewhere else. There was some invisible pull dragging him back into the Grid and whatever demons of his lurked there.
"Are you done talking now? Users, I need earplugs." Okay, I guess she exhausted her Civil Conversation quota for the day. He sighed, fingers drumming again, the glowing Grid screen grating at his eyes.
As much as he was loath to admit it, he owed the Siren one, in a way. Without her sending him out to find answers, Tron might have derezzed on the shores of the Sea, damaged and weak as he was. Without Tron, the Users would never have rezzed anywhere near Gamma, in all likelihood.
If she hadn't gotten it into her processor to do whatever she came here to do (he had the feeling he was still on the Grid when her mysterious plot was aborted) he knew nothing of it and he didn't think asking would go over well), he would never have wound up here, seeing and doing things most program's couldn't even imagine.
Well, I would have owed her something if she hadn't canceled it out by stabbing me in the back. Okay, less of a 'stab' and more of a poorly aimed disk throw but still. He couldn't say that he felt betrayed; they'd never really been on the same side, after all, but realizing just how dispensable he was to the program he'd worked for long enough to think of as an 'employer' and not a 'client'… it stung, more than he liked to admit.
Get over yourself, he told himself.
It doesn't matter anymore.
She was uncertain and wary- afraid she had made one of two mistakes, or both.
One, that she had left Kaps and Gem alone in the laser bay. Some lifeline that is. She'd be lucky if they were both unharmed with no collateral damage to the surrounding room when she returned.
And two, she had come here alone, an ISO in a hostile system.
I can take care of myself. Perhaps that was why she had done this- she was afraid, she realized, of being too foolish or weak to look out for others when they needed her. She remembered the sneering, jaded face of a program who'd once stood with the ISOs- she could have cost Sam his life with her misplaced trust.
She cleared her thoughts as Flynn had taught her, stretching her mind through her native form once more, embracing the familiar feel of code and data, the linear patterns and subtle complexities of her world, savoring the feeling of energy surging through her as she reconnected to the system, data relays and feeds calibrating to the Grid once more.
There was a familiar weight back between her shoulder blades, a deadly extension of her identity that she'd missed every day in San Francisco that her disk's User world copy had spent sitting with her cut-up armor in the bottom of a closet. She had her katana back now, and her grappling hooks. A faint smile lifted the corners of her lips. She felt like herself again. This was her true form, and everything else was a modification upon this.
She loved the User world. She would never tire of it, and part of her heart belonged there now, to its wild skies and hot sun and immense cities and wide open spaces.
But this… this is where I came from. This is where I grew up. I'm a part of the Grid, and it is a part of me. I'm glad I can love both.
Suddenly a chill snaked up her spine, and she whirled to face the door of the lonely, disused arcade basement, suddenly aware that she wasn't alone. Ice filled her as she saw the program silhouetted in the doorway. Rinzler.
No.
"Tron," she whispered lamely, somewhat stricken by his silent appearance. How long has he been standing there?
He looked back at her, expression unreadable, guarded, but his eyes flickered to the floor before meeting his. The Tron she remembered had never been uncertain.
"I…" His voice was rougher than it had been once, but maintained that same gentle strength she remembered. He broke off, looking away.
"The system is far safer for ISOs than it has been in over a thousand cycles," he said, tone carefully neutral.
"But I ask that you let a security program remain with you. There are sectors that could still harbor CLU's remaining loyalists and those who are simply afraid still, and a large swell in gridbug numbers as well." She stepped back, surprised. A security detail was the last thing she wanted. No. The last thing you want is to be stranded or hurt in need of rescue. She wanted to remind him that she had avoided detection for over a thousand cycles just fine, but she had Flynn's help then.
"Fine," she told him, forcing herself to sound relaxed.
"What security programs are left, anyways?" She asked. CLU had systematically cut down the system's security, rectifying and derezzing all, from Tron down to the most basic Sentries.
She knew what happened to the monitors who resisted, regardless of how strong or smart they were. It was surprising that Tron had found any survivors at all. Currently, said program gave a tired sigh, shrugging. It struck her then how drained he looked, leaning back against the door frame as if about to fall into recharge.
"Well, technically it's just me. I've managed to get a few volunteers with the right modifications to help with gridbugs, but mostly I've been on my own."
"Alan's left you to do take care of the Grid without any security backup?" That didn't sound like the User at all. Tron seemed to bristle slightly at the implied accusation.
"Of course not. He's restoring the surviving Guard and using them as templates to write new programs to fill out the ranks. Only a few survived until now after Reintegration. This is just temporary." She nodded.
"I won't be too long." She told him, heading towards the door where he stood and then brushing past him.
"I don't suppose you have a light runner, do you?" He followed up the stairs after her, shaking his head.
"I have an off-Grid cycle, but…" Of course, a light cycle technically could take two riders, but Quorra really didn't want to spend any more time than necessary near Tron, let alone ride with him, and she assumed the feeling was mutual.
"Runners are hard to come by. They were illegalized shortly after the Purge, and most of them were destroyed," he continued.
"I can walk." She said, striding out the doors into the light of the Grid. She hadn't seen Epsilon since before the Purge, and it was never so… quiet. She tensed instinctually; this kind of still was usually a brief prologue to a Recognizer sweep. Tron joined her, looking out over the streets.
"Epsilon was the hotspot of rebellion. Flynn's arcade was a symbol of something more, that there were Users, and that they could not be destroyed. CLU would have destroyed it himself, but he learned that if he gave rebels a symbol to cling to, they would make themselves easier to identify by associating with it." He said, looking over the empty streets.
"I remember more programs." She tilted her head at him, questioning.
"Most of the programs here were either strays, rebels or both. And there was no shortage of contraband dealers, some of whom dealt in banned vehicles as well as weapons and upgrades. Ihad to take care of them. There wasn't much left after that."
"What did you do with all of them? You didn't derezz"-
"No!" He interjected sharply, and she flinched. Of course Tron would never derezz unless he had to. The Tron I knew, at least.
"No," he said again, voice soft now.
"Do you remember the quarantine folders Flynn built in the Outlands, when Abraxas first emerged?" She shook her head- the coup and the outbreak had swept her up in a terrifying whirlwind of betrayal, evasion and the eventual deresolution of almost everyone she'd ever known. Whatever Flynn had been doing as she'd struggled to survive in the wake of the first viral attacks wasn't something she'd had time to look into.
"Just as well- they were never actually put to use, but the original idea was to be able to hold corrupted programs captive and figure out how to restore them and destroy the source of the viral code. I put remains of the Guard, a few badly damaged programs, and the scores of obsolete dissenters there for Alan-1 to deal with from the outside. It's also where I've been keeping everything I've appropriated from those programs, three of whom were vehicle dealers. I can get you a runner, but first we would have to get there."
There was a moment of silence, and she realized by the unfocused look to his eyes that he was using a restricted binary channel.
He turned back to her after a moment, blinking back into focus.
"One of my volunteers has a cycle she'll let you borrow. She's on her way." Within a few microcycles, a program with short black hair spiked up in front arrived astride a poorly retrofitted bike with two back wheels, almost as if a runner and a lightcycle had been clumsily fused.
She nimbly jumped off it and derezzed it back into its baton, handing it smartly over to Tron.
"It's a sorry piece of code, but it runs over just about any terrain. I could've sworn you had a better one already, though"- she broke off, eyes lighting on Quorra. She froze; bracing for whatever reaction the Basic would have to seeing an ISO, but then remembered that her code masks were still in place and her sleeve still concealed the hated circuit tattoo that branded her kind.
A knowing grin stole over the angular face of the volunteer program.
"Oh, I get it! The Outlands, how romantic!"That extreme misinterpretation was better than having the bright-eyed Basic understand Quorra's true nature, but she would've preferred another cover story.
"Thank you, Nyk." Said Tron, sending her off with a dismissive wave of his hand. She tittered and rezzed a sleek city bike, racing off undoubtedly to circulate the new gossip.
Tron tossed her the baton and rezzed his own, a stripped-down bike with a single exposed tread that circulated over both tires.
"It's a long ride," he warned her, revving its engine before taking off.
[Well, it would have been longer on foot,] she returned, struggling to wrestle her bike into the sharp turns of inner city navigation as they made their way towards the Outlands, and the quarantine facility apparently hidden out in its uncharted vastness.
Finally they were racing out in a straight line through the Outlands, throwing up dusty plumes of tiny inert data shards in their wakes. She realized that though they had talked, she and Tron had avoided saying anything that actually mattered. I came here to get closure. That includes closure on him, too.
She knew she couldn't live with unspoken apologies and unanswered questions. But she was still deeply, instinctually afraid of him, the way a mouse fears a cat. Some instinctual, primal part of her was afraid that if she said the wrong thing, she would wake Rinzler and he would claw his way back into reality.
They rode in silence, save for the roaring of the wind and the shuddering of her bike for what felt like cycles. They rode single file, with Tron in the lead. They were near the maximum speed capacity of her bike; she couldn't have pulled ahead even if she wanted to.
Finally a shape took form on the horizon, growing larger and more defined. The quarantine file was a spare, militant compound hunkered low to the ground, though when she derezzed her bike and stood at the entrance as Tron unlocked it, it managed to loom imposingly above her, all a solid matte black, as if carved out of the Outland rock.
When Tron disengaged the locks, its surfaces flared to life, illuminated with clean white lines and searing red quarantine warnings. As the door slid up, she stepped with him into a sterile, too-bright interior that reminded her distinctly of a User hospital, which she'd thankfully only seen on television. The doors opened immediately into a small chamber, and Quorra felt an automated scan pass over her.
"No threat detected," A computerized voice announced, and with a faint hiss two doors in front of her slid apart to reveal a long, sterile white hallway punctuated at regular intervals by tinted glass windows set at eye level. She hesitantly followed Tron back into the complex, resisting the urge to investigate further. She shuddered at the sight of the orange lit Guards contained in the cells behind each windows.
There were others, though, Basics who glared sullenly at her and Tron, and some that looked at her pleadingly, as if to ask her for help. A pale program with darting eyes sadly watched her walk by, and she flinched back when she saw the fractured wound climbing up the back of his neck.
"Quorra, over here." Tron called to her- she'd fallen behind, lost in thought. He accessed a locker at the end of one of the halls, opening it to reveal a modest pile of batons.
"These are all the know runners left on the Grid." She took one, and then decided she would have to tell Tron what she wanted out in the wilderness sooner or later.
"Flynn had one hidden in the Outlands. Where I'm going. I only need this to get there." Tron shook his head, looking away.
"It's gone, Quorra." She looked up, filled with a new fear. What did that mean? Had the safe house been destroyed? Ransacked? Could they have traced the lightcycle Sam took to its source? He couldn't have known how to mask its signature, she realized. How could I have been so stupid!?
"We found the safehouse. You were gone by then. We took the runner, but CLU deemed everything else useless and we left the rest." She nodded numbly. The thought of CLU invading the one place she had felt safe in made her feel sick.
Tron turned, opening another locker. He produced another baton from it, this one a gleaming white that was starkly brilliant against his black gloves. A pang went through her- it was unmistakably Flynn's first-gen lightcycle, the one she had sent Sam to the city on.
"I found it on one of the Guard. I… thought you should have it. She took it reverently; suddenly almost unable to speak, overcome by how much she missed Flynn. Tears filled her eyes, and she ducked her head, hastily smearing them away.
"…thank you," she managed, fighting to regain her composure.
Tron
Flynn's whoop from ahead helped him hone in on the User's position within the lightcycle grid, and he swooped in from behind before flipping the panel he was on and riding inverted directly below Flynn.
"Not cool, man! That has gotta be cheating!"
"Flynn, you called this a 'free-for-all'."
"Well in that case," Flynn started, and Tron could almost see the big, mischievous grin on the User's face,
"WE DANCE!"
What is that supposed to- he was thrown first by that seemingly senseless exclamation, and then more literally by Flynn flipping the panels constantly, so that the system spun dizzyingly around him even as he maintained the same speed.
There was definitely some User power going into getting the Lightcycle Grid to do this, and Tron regretted using the term free-for-all anywhere near Kevin Flynn.
Warning: Equilibrium failure in five… Tron was beginning to lose awareness of up and down. Well, Flynn, this has been fun… Tron slammed the brakes on his bike, flaring the spoilers out and screeching back to a near-halt, sending Flynn spinning away on his own, Tron in hot pursuit.
Barely five nanos later he managed to set himself up to use a speed strip to launch up next to Flynn and tag him then.
He executed his launch perfectly, sailing above Flynn and just as he landed next to him, hand outstretched to tag the User-
"WHOA, NO TRACTION!" Suddenly error messages flashed across his HUD as the cycle lost all of its traction, the grid rendered totally smooth, tires spinning uselessly as he skidded out of control.
"FLYNN!" The untouchable white bike shot off across the grid, rider howling with laughter.
Tron stared for a moment longer at the baton cradled in the hands of an ISO, and nodded stiffly at her thanks, pretending he didn't see the tears gleaming in her eyes. He had turned it over and over in his hand in disbelief when he'd found it, sitting back and letting the memories of hundreds of adventures, stupid User stunts and thousands of games of lightcycle-tag, the idiotic but fun game Flynn had introduced to the Grid, wash over him.
It was only right that Quorra should have that same link to a happier past that he had. She looked at it, eyes glittering with unshed tears still, and then she clipped it to her empty baton holster and turned sharply and strode out the door, leaving him standing alone.
She's hurt, more than she wants me to see. There has to be something I can do to help.
AN: I live! I am so, so sorry this has been such a long time coming. I was clobbered with a huge writers block for a few weeks, and then some switch flipped and I've gotten eighteen pages down- in fact, I cut this chapter short because I felt like at some point chapter 19 had ended and I just hadn't got the memo and had kept on writing.
So, I hope this is a somewhat coherent chapter despite that. A little more world building, working towards the resolution of the story arc, with some fun. I know I didn't focus very much on their misadventures in the User world, as that's not really the focus of this story, but I wouldn't be opposed to writing something like that separately.
Many thanks to all of you who've valiantly stuck with me and keep coming back for more and to Cyberbutterfly, Elz Durzen, AvidReader403, Sonta IX, STRiPESandShades and Mata Nui and several awesome Guests for reviewing. Hopefully the next update will be much sooner, as I already have a decent start into it.