Between Friends
By Simon Woodington
Previously: Axl chastises Vigor; Ronne's is revealed to be Tron's daughter; Zero and Roll enlighten X as to the nature of their relationship...
Episode Ten
Roll shuddered. The muted thundering of the power grid and sundry howl of reactivated Reaverbots delivered no comfort to her aging frame.
"Rock did this all the time! He wasn't so scared by it..." she said, not sounding very confident. "Was he?"
Tron was so excited that her gait was almost over dramatic, skipping and jumping with truimphantly smiling eyes.
"I haave the traanspoorter!" she chorused, swinging her arms and pointing to the Servebot pair lugging an eight foot long cylinder as if they could burden no more.
"Oh Tron," Roll chuckled, smiling softly at the twenty-two year old woman. "Won't you ever change?"
"Never like you have," she retorted warmly. Roll frowned, glancing over her digger body.
"It's only Rock's armor. I'm not tough enough to Dig without it. Besides the Buster Gun is..."
"A matter of life and death, I know..." she whirled and bent at the middle, hollaring at her faithful companions. "Okay you lazy morons! See that crystal over here?"
"I was going to say 'sentimental'."
"Oh," she muttered, face dimming. "I'm sorry."
Roll's eyes slammed shut, clenched against a flaw in her systems that she could not identify or repair. For its duration, try as she might to respond to Tron's pleas of concern, she could not move. Her voice seemed useless, too.
This time, the Servebots had set up the transporter relay pods, before the system-wide null effect abated. A trace pain at the base of her neck and a point behind each eyebrow remained, however.
Tron looked down, seated beside her previously inert friend.
"Still with us?"
"Yes Tron... forgive me. I couldn't help..."
Tron's brow furrowed irritably.
Useless ferreting around the truth, she thought. "You're dying."
"No, no... after this I'll have a new body and it will go into remission," Roll countered without heart.
"No it won't. Didn't you say it was like code hemorrage? Like mirganes? What does your index report lost this time?"
"Four blocks," she replied sorrowfully.
Tron sought Roll's difficult to catch eyes, and in a moment they latched.
"We've replaced defective parts, even new parts, but there hasn't been a change. I think it was Doctor Light's fault. He didn't know you would live this long."
"His 'fault'? He had nothing but goodwill towards..."
Tron raised her hands.
"I'm your friend, remember? Robotics is an imperfect science, and it always will be."
"You're no help, Tron," she replied, repeating her best friends' name to be sure it had not been lost, also.
"Yes sensei," she quipped, the humour despondent and crestfallen. Tron grasped Roll's hand, pressed it with hers, and then rose to direct the transportation of the crystal to the Flutter-B. "Git back to work! What layabouts! C'mon now! Press the bleedin' button! Crimney!"
Roll just listened to Tron bellowing, a subtle smile touching her unpainted lips and scampering away, unnoticed by the depressed girl.
But I'm not a girl, am I? I've been tricking... deluding myself all these years, believing that.
A forty foot column of silver illuminence consumed the metallic-grey pedestal, accomplied by a four note hum tuned to an A#7th in the key of D, thanks to Tron's electronic's skill.
Electronic Art, she thought, listing psychologically with the notes which carried her into a melody that carried no immediate name.
'I love you Roll. You are as real a child as I have ever known.'
'Yes Doctor,' she could hear herself say, uncharted depths of innocense brilding her world. She had not understood.
Was it love she felt for Tron, presently? She did not empathize with Tron's sexual desire for other humans, so she surmised that it must originate from another source. Since Rock's disappearance, they had clung to each other, sequestered from a world that would haunt and terrorize them, if they knew of their survival.
'Family, Roll, is more than a bond of friendship, or the ties of sexual intimacy. There is a fundamental difference in behavior that suggests to me a greater purpose. Humans are machines of flesh and blood, fitting that definition. Our definition.
"I have witnessed Rock act selflessly time and again striving to keep peace in our society. It is true he is programmed to fight, and even obey, but I did not code his sense of righteousness. He believes unerringly that good is right, so he does what he must, inevitably. He will give up his life in a few days, because of his faith in goodness!'
'Don't you believe in goodness, Doctor Light?' Roll had asked, akin to her brother's sense of purpose.
'How can I? Roll, I am not convinced that good is Ultimate. I don't have faith in humanity, for the few that choose it are not enough. They need an advocate, a mighty guide and protector, now, and in the times to come. "End the threat! Destory all robots!" Destroy our civilization, better said! What of their artifically intelligent appliances? Dependency is the fear, and power, moreso! No toaster oven will ever usurp government!'
'Doctor!'
A tired old man had smiled then, and said:
'Oh Roll, I do love you. I willi make things right, one day. I promise you this.'
The next day, Roll had fled the Lab, joining Blues in a several decade dodge of the authorities.
Where is Blues now? Roll wondered fleetingly. Beyond the dusk of her remeniscence, Tron had the site cleared of the pods, and sent the Servebots back to the Flutter-B. The transporter had captured more than a mere power source. The ancient ruins contained libraries of heavily encrypted data. Whether historical records, daily journals, advanced technical records, all of the above or otherwise, it repsented a potential as yet untold wealth of information!
"Under our very noses the whole time! What did we bother with the Motherlode for?" Tron muttered.
"For family," Roll answered, walking shakily towards her. "Anything is worth sacrificing for family."
The ruin was silent for all but gentle sigh of moving air, caught in the abandoned tunnels like bolts in the hands of Zeus. The ancients, now removed from their technological forge, had succumbed to the adolescent promise of their destiny, and had surrendered their heritage.
"We uploaded Ten petabytes," Tron commented idly as they mounted the elevator platform leading to the surface. Roll pressed the button marked by a familiar symbol, one they hesitated to translate.
"That's all?"
Tron shrugged.
"This may be the last site," she suggested. "I could use a break, couldn't you?"
Roll frowned, emotions mired in a regret layered pit. With a thought as to their stillness, Roll unpacked an energy capsule, rigged for just this purpose. Almost subconsciously she connected it to the elevator long enough to exit. Outside, the Flutter-B hovered in wait, its squarish body stilli as the magenta sunset.
Minutes were spent, gazing in admiration at the beauty of the sky, painted as though by an artist's hand and keen eye. Aboard the Flutter-B, and upon entering the pilot's head, cried:
"Blues!"
At least, Roll did. Tron, floundering, consulted with Data, who make monkey noises and flapped about how much fun he was.
"Hi, roll. Not feelin' so hot?" he asked, less the question and experience.
"No. My code is degrading," she admitted, eyes downcast.
"Yeah, mine too. What're we gonna do about it?"
Tron huffed pointedly.
"And just who are you?"
Roll smiled guiltily and made introductions.
"Meet my other brother, Blues. Blues, this is Tron Bonne."
"The Bonnes? I never thought you a rebel, sis," he jibed.
"Ah... uh..."
"Only joking," he added hastily, hands open and raised. "Nice to meet you... hey, you're not a robot?"
Tron looked offended, face souring.
"You... what do you mean by that?"
"Hey, I'm not like that. You know, people are people, robots, world-lusting mad scientists, or whatever. I just haven't met a human not scared senseless by us in years."
Tron sighed.
"She's an engineer, apprenticing in robotics," Roll explained. Blues nodded appreciatively.
"You're her sensei. Cool," he said, impressed. "Nice."
"Yeah."
"All right 'sensei', what's the fix for this bug? I have no plans to die now, so you've got to have an answer."
Roll shook her head.
"It's not a bug. I don't have a 'fix'."
Blues grin receded, pulling away from his lips and cheeks.
"Say again?"
Tron stepped in.
"We've tested, restested, debugged, replaced, repaired, tested again, and found no solution for these errors."
His spasmatic movements subsided in the count of sporatically ascending nanoseconds into seconds, after after eternity, into the dawn of minutes. Blues' shoulders rose and fell unevenly, then became a steady flow like the sleeping breath.
"Roll, how..." Blues started, sarrow in his usually sanguine tenor. "How could he do this do us?"
"I don't believe he meant to," Roll professed. Blue looked up, and she could see the reproach behind his shaded half-mask.
"Always the optimist, taking the Professor's side. Pathetic. He was human, Roll. Ever notice how he wasn't perfect? A human can't create infallible things," Blues growled. "Rock's gone. Who's going to take this one on? No one. Face it-"
"It's over," Roll finished for him. Blues staggered toward a console, leaning upon it and grimacing silently.
"It's happened, Roll. No one's here to save us anymore! Where's Rock when you need him, huh?" Blues voice rambled into an incomprehensible stream of words, a collage of pain, doubt, fear and remorse.
Tron and Roll could only hang their heads in shame. A whining pitch replaced Blues inane babble, and by the time Tron recognized it, his buster had already discharged. Cascading through the delicate systems of the Flutter-B. Explosions began to shift and toss the vessel, tearing though control panels and bulkheads like single ply tissue.
Smoke billowed forth like some obscene fog, filling the lungs and retarding air. Roll, unaffected by the chaos, scooped Data into one arm, and jumped forward to received unconscious Tron in the other.
"The escape hatch!" she cried, but there was no aknowledgement from the automated lock. "Can you open the escape hatch, Data?"
"I can do it Roll!" Data affirmed, leaping from her grasp and fumbling with the heavy catch.
"Blues! Blues!?" she cried, with no reply. Briefly she scanned for him, but found nothing. A ringing metal grind and Data's surprised chirp interupted her search.
"Quickly Roll! I've got the hatch!"
It was Blues! Roll ducked under a mess of sparking wires, and made an end run around a column of plasma fire. In the last instant, the Flutter-B pitched starboard. Automatically Roll's auto-nav unit renegotiated, cause her to leap directly into Blues' arms.
Together they dove from the flaming ship, landing and rolling through a tall patch of wild grass. Over their shoulders, a belch of smoke curled upward from the engine room, the expensive equipment insde reduced to liquid metal.
"We're not safe here. Let's move!" Blues cried, getting to his feet. The Flutter-B lurched, its final descend beginning. Roll willed herself move, but the dark abyss of loss struck her, knees buckling and throwing her to the jade bladed ground.
A subsonic rumble sounded in the hull of the Flutter-B, its rent shell cracking and listing rapidly to the earth.
"Take her!" Roll commanded as the bug shut down her communications grid.
"Damn!" Blues cursed.
In the next instant it happened, Blues looking up, the blistering hull shattering explosion, debris scattering wildly. Blues moved with all the speed of which he was capable and covered Tron's body with his own until the roaring cachophany of the Flutter's crashing descent became a stationary funrel pyre.
Rising from Tron's still form, Blues bolted back to the site where a large hull section had dropped on Roll's position, crushing all but the most critical systems. With the might of his short body, and the fuel of emotional desperation, Blues heaved the armored panel aside, and recovered what he could.