Alan walked in first, Lora on his heels, and Flynn bringing up the rear. Despite the bruises and the scabbed over cuts, Gibbs looked like the suit was more uncomfortable. Everyone who knew the old man knew that he didn't wear one if he didn't have to, preferring a lab coat and workman's shirts.

"The three of you, do sit down," Gibbs said, gesturing to the loveseat and hard-back chair. Alan and Lora took the couch, of course. Flynn contemplated sitting on the floor, but he had enough good sense to opt for the chair.

"Is Ra..." Flynn quickly corrected himself. "I mean, is Kleinburg going to be all right? Did you get any word from the hospital?"

"Roy's going to be just fine, thank you for asking. Dillinger's thugs broke his collarbone and arm, and he did have a nasty concussion, but the doctors assure me he'll be back to work in a few weeks." Pouring three paper cups of coffee, he put them into their hands before filling his own mug. "But, this incident is grave – very grave. I was so excited about the possibilities of my work, and its potential that I lost sight of the business. Thanks to you, I'm still alive after last night! It's going to be brutal around here. At the very least, the police and the FBI will be involved, and I'll be spending more time than I want to in an office trying to salvage what's left of Encom. What I do know is that there is a very short list of people I know I can trust with this company's future. You three and Roy are on it."

"Walter..." Alan looked into his coffee, clutching the paper and no doubt burning his fingers. "I thought you were calling us in to fire us."

"Fire you? Oh, God no! After you prove how willing you are to risk your careers and your lives for what is right? Alan, think better of me. That may be how Dillinger ran things, but I am certainly not him." He rummaged in his desk, pulling out paperwork and pens.

"What do you want from us?" Flynn asked. "Technically, I'm still persona non grata at the Encom campus."

"Well, that gets corrected. You made us an insane amount of money, Flynn. Not even the board is going to argue that. You'll be reinstated, and I'll see about back pay, seeing as you were fired improperly. Lora, since I can't be in the lab until this is settled, would you consider taking on some more responsibility there? Your pay and title would reflect it, of course."

She looked over. "Alan?"

Alan squeezed his fiancée's hand. Funny, Flynn thought. Two days ago, and he would have felt jealous. Not anymore. "I'll be all right with it."

"All right. Then, yes."

"Now, gentlemen, as to the two of you. Alan, you are the straightest shooter and most honest man I've ever met, which makes that security software all the more incredible for flying under Dillinger's nose as long as it did. Honesty and loyalty like yours isn't often rewarded, and I intend to buck that trend. However, there is a catch."

He peered at Gibbs over his glasses. "What is the catch?"

"I'll get to that in a bit. Mr. Flynn, you are reckless and cocky, flamboyance more suited to holding court at your arcade than a Fortune 500 board room...but you're probably everything we need to reinvent the company. The catch, gentlemen, is that I'd like to put the pair of you working together. Despite your many differences, I think you have much to teach one another."

You could hear a pin drop in the room. Lora looked very uneasy and tried to cover it up by sipping the coffee and studying the carpet.

Alan was staring at him for longer than Flynn felt comfortable with. Again, it was very hard not to look at the man and not see the Program.

All things considered, it was well within Alan's rights to tell him to get lost or refuse the offer. Flynn was bracing for the rejection. It would make sense. They hadn't gotten along to begin with. He dismissed Alan as being a humorless stuffed shirt who was happy to toe the company line and not make any trouble - and couldn't have been more wrong. One crazy night could be forgiven, but Flynn understood that it didn't make them friends. Kicker of it was that Flynn wanted to be friends with Alan, not just for Lora's sake or Tron's, but because if they vouched for him, he owed Alan the chance.

Before Flynn could speak, Alan put out his hand. "I'm willing if you are."

"Man, I owe you my life. Deal." They shook on it.

"Good!" Gibbs said. "The paperwork will have to go through HR and there's going to be a lot of chaos on the production floor. I daresay no one will be getting much done today. The detectives will be here in a couple hours and looking to take statements. Just tell them...most of the truth and everything ought to work out. Again, I thank you. This company...Encom is my life, and it is a great relief to know that she'll be safe, even when I can no longer be here."

Alan and Lora nodded to each other, got off the couch, and left. As Flynn was reaching for the door handle, however, Gibbs changed his mind.

"Um...Flynn, could you stay behind and close that door? There's something I'd like to ask you privately."

Flynn had been in trouble enough times, and in it so many times the previous night, that his inner alarms instantly went off. "What is it, Gibbs? Something wrong?"

"Not wrong, but probably not for the eavesdroppers or rumormongers. You mentioned you were in the lab all night, correct?"

"Yeah?"

"After all the first responders and other nosy types left, I had a look through the system logs. There was a recorded discharge of the Shiva laser."

Busted. He knew he had to come up with a really good explanation to fly this one past Gibbs. "Um...you know how Master Control tried to kill Alan and Lora? It...it...tried to finish me off, too."

"I don't doubt it. But there is more to the story." Gibbs leaned in, voice dropping conspiratorially. "Because I also looked through all the input and output calculations. For a period of two hours and ten minutes, there was a mass of exactly eighty-four point one five kilos uploaded and some extremely bizarre output readings in the logs. Then, Master Control crashed, and everything just spat back out. Something I cannot explain was happening inside our mainframe."

His arm ached again. Flynn quickly pulled on his long sleeves. "Gibbs, I'm not sure I should...Man, you'd think I'm crazy."

Gibbs folded his arms and tilted his head, all too ready to be challenged. "Mr. Flynn, this company would not exist if I were not capable of believing six impossible things prior to my first cup of coffee."

"You're totally going to haul me to the funny farm. I'm not even sure where to begin."

Gibbs gestured to the hardback chair, his face still lit by a smile. "Begin at the beginning. Stop at the end."

Flynn looked around, picked up the chair and sat it directly across from Gibbs, leaning in close enough to put his elbows on the desk of the company president. "All right. What if I told you that there's a whole other world, one we can't see, but we interact with and build every time we turn on a computer...?" Just to emphasize the point, he pulled down his sleeve and showed Gibbs the faint traces of vestigial circuitry. The old man's eyebrows raised over his horn rims.

"I'd say you're on your way to rewriting the book on almost every field of science." Gibbs rubbed his hands together in anticipation. "Which means I want to hear every detail."

"Oh, that's not the wildest part. You know you say that our spirit remains in every program we create? Well, start by taking that literally…"

The story was fantastic, too bizarre to be true, but Gibbs gave no indication that he thought Flynn was lying or making it up as he went along. He nodded, asked few questions, thought hard about the implications.

"Yes, it makes sense. The principles that underlie how the Shiva Laser works...Mathematically, parallel worlds and dimensions are a certainty. It's just a matter of bridging the gaps from one to the other and back. I just hadn't thought..." Gibbs shook his head. "And those people, those Programs. We created them? They think of us as their deities?"

"Yeah. I was kinda hoping you didn't register that part."

"Flynn…you realize that this cannot leave the room."

"Wait, what? Gibbs, this is going to change the world! We've got those transmission dishes out in New Mexico searching for proof we're not alone in the universe. I just brought back proof we're not. Every time we fire up a computer, we're talking to them!"

"What you describe could destabilize world religions, topple governments. The ethical ramifications are also drastic; even if the Programs are content with their lot, the issue that humanity has created a servant race by accident. I know you have a good heart, Flynn. But I've met far too many who would crave power, twisting that world and its people to unspeakable ends."

Flynn shuddered. "Alan and Lora…Roy, too? They…"

"And what if they let down their guard? Or if this information is forced out of them? I'm not making this request lightly. It will take years before we know what we are dealing with, years where that world and ours will become increasingly tangled together."

"'The world is not ready?' That's what you're breaking out? World's never gonna be ready for this one, Doctor Gibbs."

"The world wasn't ready for the Manhattan Project, either," Gibbs said darkly. "Back in the War, I was designing computers for breaking codes and calculating missiles, telling bombers where to drop their payloads. I'd like to tell myself that times were desperate, and we didn't have much of a choice." Gibbs looked up. "But I still had a hand in it all, and that hand's got plenty of blood on it, despite what I tell myself. Could you live with it, Flynn? Live with someone like Edward Dillinger finding that world and your friends inside there?"

Flynn bowed his head.

"And that's assuming we aren't hauled off in straitjackets. I believe you, which is why I'm very afraid for those Programs."

Flynn said, "We need to make the world ready. If we don't someone else will."

"Lifetime project, that," Gibbs said. "But might be our only option. How do you propose going about it?"

"We start by telling the truth but tell it in a way people won't know it's the truth. Not right away." Flynn said. He thought for a moment. "A game. That's what it has to be. I'll make a game. I hope Alan won't mind if I name it after his Program."