The platform is caught somewhere between a heat so intense it is freezing, and cold so deep that it burns. I can feel it in my feet.

As I take my place upon the platform, its reaction is immediate . . . and inescapable.

The incandescent auroras which rise from the ground undulate through the air around me, swimming through the fog and spiraling upwards around me into a column with no visible end. I am contained by a latticework of energy, a solid white glow.

Below me, the platform illuminates.

Blinding cyan blue and white blur together, glowing so brightly I can't see past the rising light to my own feet, and the platform begins to burn beneath me. Its twisting patterns seem intent on scalding themselves into my feet, heedless of my boots.

In my hand, my disc comes to life. I can feel its energy, so much like my own, but laid across some other foundation and riddled by the scars of Clu and his coding. It thrums against my palms as I raise my arms.

My systems are screaming.

Release it.

I linger there for a moment, a black shade encased by weaving strands of light and seeping energy, with arms extended as far above my head as I can manage. I am standing straighter than I can remember having ever stood, and looking up at the weapon, the key, in my hands. It tugs against my fingers as if it's being summoned . . . its energy bonded with something elsewhere, other, that I don't understand.

I let it go, and fall to the ground.

Sinking on one bent knee, face turned upwards to meet the endless tunnel of light above me, I am flooded with release. The entire contents of my being, of my servitude and dedications, are hovering above me, an inexplicable physical link between myself and the unknowable . . . an expedient of grace.

. . . Grace . . .

For a moment, that is all there is. And then there is a faltering, a fissure in the connection. The incongruence makes itself known with a ringing in my ears, a sinking in my chest. My disc falters in the air above me.

No . . .

And then it breaks in two. One disc remains in place, whirring quietly, as the other climbs. As it ascends, it flickers, the orange around its blade steadily fading and flickering until somehow, suddenly, it has changed colors completely . . . to white.

It is pure, blinding. In looking at it I can feel something rising up inside of me that I haven't felt, under any identity, since I came to this system.

This system . . .

The white disc climbs away, making its way another few delicate feet closer to the heavens. The stands of light and shimmering auroras around me begin to pulse in iridescent time with the spinning of its blade.

I am drowning in light.

I am overwhelmed by the whispering of the moving air.

I am being torn out of myself, clarity burning itself into my systems, simultaneous torture and reprieve.

I can see myself laid out in the pattern of the lights, the story of my existence painted into the sky above where help supposedly lies in wait for my discs and my actions.

Images begin to flicker before my eyes. Hollow snippets, too fleeting to retain, come to me as fragments of a broken whole.

The light around me grows.

The disc spins faster.

The sensation of remembering, of knowing, climbs up through my systems like some ever building pressure, pushing its way into my chest, filling up the hollow spaces there. For the first time in so many hundreds of cycles, I am silent. The sound is gone.

This is right.

We'll be saved.

I am filled with the writhing certainty of it, the gnashing anticipation of intervention, of everything dependent on this disc… this communication.

I should have done this before . . .

A hot surge runs up and down my circuits, crawling up the back of my neck. I can feel my hair trying to stand on end beneath my helmet as my thought is shattered by the jolt of connection. It knocks the air from my chest.

The disc has stopped rising.

TRANSMITTING.

The message sounds to me like a voice in my head, reverberating off the walls of my skull. It is low and roughened, but warm. Strong. Assured. Otherworldly.

. . . Familiar.

Alan-1.

ERROR ERROR ERR-

. . . Shut up.

My circuits ignite.

My own glow is temporarily blinding. I suck sharply at the air, but can't feel the breath. Elation, anticipation, the ecstasy of faith and grace, defiance and release, they rage inside of me. They press their way up my throat, clawing to escape in some kind of speech, but I have no words. I have nothing to say worth being forgotten.

SEEKING DEVICE- ADDRESS: 8162156658 (TYPE: "PAGER")

Above me, the disc is a solid white glow, a perfect blinding circle. Its lighted blade throbs.

Processing-

DEVICE CONTACT ESTABLISHED.

Again, the input has a voice of its own.

For a long moment I am left with nothing but my own heaving chest and the shimmering column of light around me. And then there is the voice once again, and a shock through my body forces my head back, and my arms fall open to either side of me. The four squared emblem of circuitry on my chest , facing skyward, is scorching me from the inside out.

I gasp. The sound crackles out of me, races towards the sky. I can't catch my breath . . . I don't want to.

Torso thrown back, kneeling on a scalding surface, blinded from all sides, and exposed before a force I can neither see nor name, I surrender. Completely, utterly surrender. The voice comes as my reward.

It says only two words.

MESSAGE SENT.