Author's note: So, there are some things in this chapter that I'm going to address for the sake of clarity before I even begin, the first being Tron and Rinzler's measurements. That sounds very random, I know, but the topic will come up in passing in this chapter, so I think it's worth mentioning for the sake of context.

So, I realize that in Legacy Tronzler didn't look all that big. This is because the actor in the suit stands at (or so the internet told me) six foot exactly with no lift on his shoes, while the body double for Jeff Bridges was 6'1" or 6'2" plus a heeled boot. In homage to the movies, in my head I am going to put Rinz's new ISO body at about 6'0" but will be keeping Bruce Boxleitner as a model for Tron, putting him at 6'2". I also like the idea of him being slightly bulkier than Rinz. Though Bruce wasn't a huge guy, he was decently broad through the shoulder in his younger days, and Tron is a bit of a larger than life figure anyway. A strong build just sounds fitting for him, in my mind. Therefor, I am picturing a Tron who is solid, but not huge, and about 6'2" (188cm), and a Rinzler who is more of a"lean muscle" like we saw in Legacy, standing around 6' (183) cm.

Also, regarding Beck,I will try to sneak it some backstory/explanations of my headcanon regarding his whereabouts, but I beg of you to be patient with me, as all my narrative characters (Yori, Tron, Rinzler, and later Lora) are a little preoccupied at the moment, and I do not want to detract from the central narrative by trying to cram in a reason for one or another of them to muse over Beck's backstory. I will mention him at some point though, I promise!

My thanks to: Kayla,Scribe~Of~Red, and Jax Solo for beta-ing, and tumblr's Lightjetlady for helping me pick a chapter title.

And of course, my thanks to all of you for reading, and thank you especially for reviewing. I'm sorry for the long note, and I hope you enjoy this next chapter. ^^

-End of line.

o0o0o0o0o


Tron


"What do you mean he took his disc?"

Radi looks at me with her usual pugnacious scowl, but I can see genuine worry in her eyes.

"I mean the witness report states that he paused on his way out, picked it up, and kept walking. Took the guy's baton, too, but that was before he derezzed him."

I don't like any part of what I'm hearing.

"I want a location and a name."

Radi groans, and even Yori winces. They know as well as I do that our tiny team of amateur administrators doesn't have the resources for a manhunt, but I want this one alive, and now. I want to know what makes a program steal a dead man's disc.

"I'll take Beta sector. Radi, get a team together. I want Mav on it. Start with the borders between Alpha, Gamma, and Beta and work inwards. I'll start at the bar. Go."

Radi gnashes her teeth for a moment and looks perturbed (as usual), but nods to me before turning on her heel and striding from the room. Paige follows her, nose tucked into the tablet, which she's taken back from Yori. Still beside me, my counterpart is looking at me with worried eyes.

"Well, this is just what we needed," she says.

I don't have anything to say in reply. I sort of snort at her instead, which she understands well enough. She tilts her chin down towards her chest and eyes me from under her lashes.

"Do what you can about it, Tron, but if you don't find him, we need you here. You can't chase this indefinitely. Promise me."

I turn and stare out the long window above the control panel as if to ignore her, but I ruin my own ruse with what was supposed to be a surreptitious glance at her over my shoulder. Yori wearing her fiercest expression, blonde hair fanning out from her face in every direction. She is dramatically beautiful, threatening, and completely unintimidating all at once. She's too small to be intimidating, really. But her eyes say what her mouth doesn't: that we're alarmingly shorthanded and behind schedule. We don't have time for me to do what I was programmed to do. No more than she has.

Yori was designed to be a building and prototyping program; she used to construct things (including things her user sent her that no program could identify). While Clu was in power, she moved on to personal upgrades and downloads for the revolution, making things on a smaller but equally vital scale, and now she's trying to plan the reconstruction of the entire system. After Clu's deresolution our infrastructure collapsed, and she's handling the logistical aspects of putting it all back together. I'm supposed to be handling the re-establishment of law. Not that it's working, since I don't have time between establishing laws to enforce them.

Radi, meanwhile, has been left with the odious task of coordinating the rest of our small team, which consists of a few horribly mismatched programs, none of which are still doing what they were written to do in the first place. It's a miracle the citizens of this system haven't come and overthrown us.

If we don't catch this death-robber, they very well might.

There are only so many behaviors they'll tolerate, especially from Oranges (the "you cannot derezz someone because of the color of their circuits" rule is one of the many I'm barely holding together). A rogue Orange will meet a nasty end, no question about that, and he'll take us all with him when he does. The system is stabilizing now (it's been eight cycles since Clu fell—it ought to be), but it's still fragile. The last thing we are prepared to handle is an uncalculated factor like this.

"Yori, this—"

"Tron, please don't try to tell me it takes precedence. I've got whole sectors that still don't have access to power, no solar sailor or cargo transit system of any kind for any of the outlying cities, and half of Argon went down in a power surge in the last five milicycles. Don't try to tell me that this i—"

"Power surge?"

I don't mean to cut her off, but the words are out of my mouth before I can stop myself. She twists up her expression into something that might have been a grimace if it weren't so smug, and nods.

"Massive. It started at the docks and darkened 80% of Beta quadrant and 99% of Delta before it stopped. Something is happening in the Sea of Simulation. I was hoping I could wait to deal with it after I'd at least gotten transportation reinstalled, but I'm going to have to have a look if this keeps up."

A yellow warning icon and a line of ones and zeros scrolls quickly through my head.

Keyword: Sea—assessment commencing—

I've taken a plunge into the sea before. It's not an environment I like. No natural feature should feel like it has an energy of its own. If it doesn't have circuits, it shouldn't feel alive. It's that easy.

When it spat me back out, I was wet and cold and I felt like I'd had 1,000 cycles worth of cognitive processing and emotional files wiped right out of my system. For every two things I have a technical record of doing, I am missing at least one file's worth of context. An inanimate environmental feature shouldn't be able to tear out one personality and reboot another, discs or no discs, recent personal revelation or not. Not as easily as it did to me. I'm not sorry to be rid of Rinzler, and I appreciate that it did that for me, but I don't trust the sea.

The idea of Yori sticking her hands in it to take samples bothers me in the extreme.

"Send some analytical programs to look at it. Take Amp and Mole off of energy refinement for a milicycle."

She crosses his arms over her chest.

"Tron, don't give me orders."

I falter, re-evaluating my phrasing. My expression as I do this—which probably looks to her like a confused mix of chagrin, discomfort, and irritation—seems to amuse her, because her firm countenance crinkles into a poorly contained smile. It's a tired smile, but a smile. She lets me puzzle over that for a moment before speaking again. When she does, her voice is heavy.

"You don't have to worry," she concedes with a sigh, "I don't have time do it myself anyway. I'll send whoever I can find, when I can find them. Maybe that can be your job after you catch that rogue program…"

I grimace, and she grins deviously.

"I hope you're kidding, Yori."

She shrugs.

"Maybe I am, maybe I'm not. You'll find out when you get back. Now, go on. Just don't be too long. We need you here. Ok?"

"All right."

I reach out, and cradle her face in my hand for a moment, then turn to go. I leave her standing there, a hand on her hip, a seemingly endless list of functions waiting to be executed scrolling across the control panel beside her.

Flynn once told me that there is "no rest for the wicked." I'm beginning to understand what that means.


Rinzler


From where I'm sitting I can see the last administrative program pull up to the bar. She's easy to spot, her circuits turned down so dark that the lightribbon of her cycle looks dull gray from the air.

I am perched on the roof of a building not one block from where I killed the basic. The structure is in a state of disuse so extreme that the doors no longer function, even when unlocked, every light inside of it having gone dark many cycles ago. I had to scale the broken ruins of the building that used to stand beside it in addition to using a light cable to reach the top. But now that I'm here, it's perfect.

I can see everything, and they have no idea I'm even in this sector.

It is said the programs who run the system now are reaching far outside of the scope of their own programming. That's the rumor that was whispered in the bar and on the streets as I was walking in. It's true.

They are surviving, nothing more.

That much is obvious from here.

There are three administrators outside of the bar now. One is tall, broad shouldered, and white-circuited. He wears a helmet almost as consistently as I do. The other two programs include the redheaded female with the dark circuits, and another male, smaller than the first. Despite his best efforts to mask his true colors, his disc glows orange in the midst of his white circuits.

I can't find a memory of a more incongruous group of programs in either of my discs.

I turn my attention back to the one in my hand. I have it open, lines of simple blue code hovering in the air above it. I could override it without any great deal of effort. Even in my old body I could have done that.

But I want to clear it out by hand, first.

That's even easier.

Their code is so simple…

I flip through code as if it is nothing, searching for valuable files and upgrades and information. Mostly I meet with disappointment.

There's very little here I can use.

Reaching in with my free hand, I push aside a jumble of code pertaining to transport schedules and cargo manifests in favor of an engineering and mechanics upgrade. Technical skills could be valuable.

Those can stay.

Absently, I wrap a fist around the transport files and drop them for deletion. A progress bar flickers for a moment as they disappear. Shipping must have been his original function, because that does away with 60% of the contents of his disc.

All that remains are physical upgrades and personal files.

The physical upgrades are excessive. Why anyone would want to try to move in a body that bulky I cannot comprehend.

Ridiculous.

I throw those files out altogether, ripping them away from the disc and crushing them in my hand. Damaged, the disc deletes them on its own.

The personal files are more complicated.

The sea may be able to separate context from memory and feeling from thought, but I am not nearly so capable. I settle with sorting the files by title, going through them one by one.

Personal file: title: Lana (subtitle 'counterpart')

No.

Personal file: title: circuit upgrades (subtitle 'interface' subtitle 'appearance')

Absolutely not.

Personal file: title: disc wars (subtitle 'techniques' subtitle 'study')—keywords: audience, spectator, Rinzler, battle, observational.

. . . . .

Leave it, Rinzler.

But it's so tempting.

These are old memories, old files, technical studies of an older me. And I'm curious.

I want to know what I looked like.

I want to know how all of that code the sea copied me from behaved in some basic's body. I want to see whom I was made from… who I am… who I was.

The line is between basic-Rinzler and myself is hazy.

I'd like to remedy that.

I open the file. A series of audio input records unfold in the air above the disc, all shades of blue and gray. The relevant colors and sounds for the scenes are stored separately. They won't play together when viewing them through a disc.

Not on a basic disk, anyway.

The memory looks up at two programs on a broad, flat platform. The first is uninteresting. It fights in a blocky, uncoordinated way that holds absolutely no interest for me whatsoever.

. . . The second program I recognize immediately.

I used to be taller.

Basic-Rinzler moved stiffly on the ground, walking as if his legs were reluctant to go where he asked them to, shoulders rolled forward aggressively, head held so low it looked weighted. How the program whose memories these are—how anyonefailed to see how twisted he was is pathetic.

Every line of his body was warped.

Every turn of his head.

Every. Single. Step.

And no one cared. It angers me. It infuriates me. Watching him stand, watching him walk—and knowing how many programs looked on as it happened—is embarrassing and painful all at once.

But then the memory fast forwards. Then he leaves the ground.

It is now that I can see myself in him.

I haven't lost my passion for aerodynamics. The turns, the leaps, the purposefully narrow avoidances and quick jabs he favored are as commendable in my eyes now as they were then. That way of fightingwas so innate to me that even the sea couldn't, or wouldn't, change it.

That it changed everything else is a blessing.

Clip after short clip, move after move, I watch myself through the dead basic's eyes, and remember.

I remember how it felt to kill for fun. I remember how it felt to kill because it's all I knew how to do. I remember the agony it put me through to do so for the first time and how quickly that reluctance was stamped out of me by my own programming. I remember how exhilarating it became.

I remember fighting.

I remember broken pixels and the thrill of matching myself against a skilled opponent. Of watching him fall all the same, never good enough.

I remember the games.

They were closest thing I ever felt to freedom.

I remember hunting rogues and strays and ISOs in the streets, too. I remember cutting down my own predecessors without any comprehension of the fact— without understanding how that made me a murderer. Without caring. I remember carving the circuits out of their faces because Clu wanted them tortured, not killed.

I remember them screaming.

NO.

I close my eyes, look away. Shake my head as if to chase understanding back to nothing.

I don't want to remember this.

My own circuits seem too hot, long burning scars across my temples, down my forehead. I don't know how to process guilt like this.

It turns to anger instead. Heavy, gnawing, viscous anger that lurks deep in my circuits with a mind of its own. I understand anger. I always have.

Better anger than pain.

. . .

Anger isn't rational, but it's functional. Anger is defiant.

Anger feels like liberation, even where there's none. I remember feeling free while Clu distorted my rage. Remember how independent I was. How I thought I was. I thought I was tasting freedom while I was twisted, breaking, bending, warping, killing killing killing all because he told me to.

Because I could.

Because I liked it.

Because he made me like it.

I liked the sounds of their screams.

RINZLER.

I liked the way the pixels in their faces shattered, how circuits smoked against a spinning disc, liked the dread in their eyes.

RINZLER, STOP IT.

They always knew they were going to die, in the end. When I was done with them.

LEAVE. IT. ALONE.

I found it gratifying.

Stop stop stop…

Remembering hurts me. Remembering is agony. But I remember because I can. Because I can't. I can't stop.

I have to understand.

I tortured them. I slaughtered them. I was a slave and a sufferer and I made them share in my torment. That was the only freedom I had: How fast, how slow, how painful a death could I give? How many ISOs could I punish for living—for being what we are?

We are not a stabilizing element.

We are unrestricted, beautiful chaos.

And I killed us—killed the others—over what we cannot help. Over that price for our autonomy.

. . . I want to kill something now.

I am filling up with hate and rage and loathing and I want to take it out on something, take it out because I can, not because Clu is coercing me, not because it's what I was designed for. I have a choice, now, and I want to kill something.

I feel like I want to kill something . . .

I am shaking.

I am shaking, all full of loathing, and I have to let it out. I have to dispel it. Have to do something, break something besides myself. Break it because I can.

Because I have a choice.

Basic-Rinzler killed ISOs because he hated them. He hated them because he was supposed to. Because that's how he was made to think. Programmed. Manipulated. Pre-determined.

Not anymore.

NOT ANYMORE.

I choose anger.

I choose defiance.

I've had enough of this memory. I've had enough of this disc. I've had enough of myself.

I reach into the depths of the disc's contents, closing my fingers around files that have so little substance they seem to disappear in my hand. I twist. I tear. Code breaks and I crush it in my hand, the last echo of its content dissipating and disappearing on the breeze.

Good riddance.

I don't want to see any more.

I'd rather not know.

The last of the basic's useless files gone, I close my hand around the disc, chasing away the last echoes of guilt and horror and self-loathing and memory with the feeling of a sharp edge on a soft palm, chasing them away into the dark parts of my code where I don't have to see them as the disc activates.

Overriding it is so easy for me.

In an instant, it is not blue, but red. All mine.

All mine.


Tron


"Nothing."

"What do you mean, nothing?"

Radi looks as mad as I've ever seen her, having just taken longer than anyone to patrol her appointed sector. However, that this is her response to 'what did you find?' is exasperating regardless of the amount of effort she made. She is a program of few words and abundant attitude, and she is as irritating as she is effective.

"I mean there wasn't a single trace, or a single witness, in the entire sector. Either he masked his circuits, took off the creepy helmet, and made a run for it or he never left."

I grimace beneath my own helmet, where she can't see. I've considered this possibility, and it's not one that I like. A murderer who can hide under my nose is . . . unacceptable. But so little in the way of results from our searching seems to support her theory . . . whether I personally would like to admit to it or not.

Mav, however, is too blunt and too . . . optimistic to be deterred by any such possibility. In his mind, a killer who hasn't gone far is a killer that is close enough to catch, and he raises a speculative eyebrow as he looks back and forth between the two of us.

"Do we have the resources for a perimeter sweep of the area, then?"

There is no real reason for me to snap at him, but something about the simple nature of the suggestion irritates me. Something about this entire situation is . . . off somehow, and my patience is running thin already. The entire system, from the ground beneath my feet to the air around me, seems to be resonating at too high a frequency, something dark and heavy and electric in the atmosphere that is too unstable to be trusted. Whether I should be or not, I am terse with him when I reply:

"Resources? Yeah, three of them: You, me, and Radi."

His expression—which is usually highly approachable—actually flattens. It's an unusual look for the habitually even-tempered program. He stares at me from under his shaggy medium blond hair with flat gray eyes, his natural orange flashing in irritation under the white circuit-mask he wears when he works beyond the line. Once an elite member of the Black Guard, he turned traitor and fled about 600 cycles into Clu's reign, right about the time the repurposes began. He escaped with his mind intact, but never lost his color, which makes him a target for the angry and the misguided.

The other thing he never lost was his sense of technique. He's a fighter, not a planner, and he's used to a battalion, not a trio.

I should go easier on him.

Or correct myself.

Radi, however, interjects before I can say anything to that effect.

"We've all done sweeps as we've come in," she says, her tone no kinder than mine. "We need eyes in the air."

This pulls me from my reverie.

"Jets." I order the word with more aggression than I ought to, and I have to work to soften my voice as I continue. "We can take jets."

Radi grimaces. Mav grins. I turn wordlessly on my heel and motion for them to follow. Jets are best started from on high. We need a roof.

As I turn towards the now-empty bar and the promise of roof access, something catches my eye. Down the block, cutting dangerously between ruined buildings, there is a flash of reddish orange.


Rinzler

-moments ago-


Memories are not easy to ignore now that I have them. They nag, and cling.

Relentless.

The dead basic's last revenge.

As I look out over the side of the building, I see nothing. The images keep leaking into my head despite my best efforts to ignore them, and they are all I can focus on. I can control my reaction though, now. I know what's coming, and there is no panic, no breakdown when it arrives.

But memory.

Memory won't leave me alone.

I was better at denial as a basic. Simpler code: Simpler solutions. More firewalls, less freedom. This ISO mind has no such restrictions. Memories arise on their own, and they do not stop. I can steady myself. I can cope. But I am still up here, frozen in remembering. Whether I want to or not.

Unbidden, yet another flash of recollection moves through my vision, a reminder of the way those ISOs looked at me before I killed them, how—past the fear in their eyes—they stared up into the empty black surface of my helmet as if knew me better than I knew myself. Maybe they recognized Tron beneath the twisted mask that I was, maybe they recognized their sibling-to-be. Even through the anger that is already present -hot and red and blinding in my head- this thought hurts me. It tortures me to my core.

I try to ignore it.

I can't.

Instead of deleting the file, or blocking it out, my mind merely wanders from one difficult subject to another, skimming over files to a more recent event. The new thought I settle on is not much better.

Now I remember dying.

I cannot and do not want to comprehend how I feel about this.

On the inside, I'm thrashing, clawing, fighting it away. Chaos. On the outside, I'm scowling at nothing, sitting on the ground with my back to a wall, spinning my new disc restlessly in my hand. Passive. Neither defensive or offensive saves me; I try to ignore this memory, too, but I can't.

Ending is not something I will ever forget.

I can recall tasting freedom, only to be knocked from the sky, to find myself drowning while he took over. While he chased me out of the only body I'd ever known. The body he'd wasted. The body he'd allowed to be taken from him, taken to create me.

I remember everything turning to black, and then nothing.

. . . Empty.

I was nothing.

I was dead code in the depths, rejected by his—our—my own body. And I was gone. It was over and I was gone and there was nothing left and nothing to think about and nothing to feel because I didn't exist.

But the world wasn't done with me, wouldn't let me go. Wouldn't let me die.

The sea wasn't done with me. It is potential, and it read potential in the remnants of me. It is creation in liquid form, and I am what it made to protect its unborn children.

Error.

No, not its children. Not role is more specific than that. I will understand it better when the others are born. It is too soon now. I am too young, too new. I will know my charge when I see it. It's easy to make sense of things when they're right in front of you.

This entire system is evidence of that.

I've been in existence for less than three milicyces and I can already see through it to its scarred, decrepit core. I could almost laugh at the naiveté of the administrators below, flinching away from the frustrated words of their faceless white-garbed leader. His gestures betray his mood, despite the screen of his helmet and the distance from which I watch. He is authoritative, big and strong and old and worn; obviously well designed for command but poorly programed in diplomacy. There is no sympathy in the hard set of his shoulders or the way he holds his hands in fists at his sides.

I don't like him.

I don't know his name, nor do I recognize the minimalized patterns of his circuitry (although they are familiar enough to suggest it is only some subtle alteration of his clothing—not a full replacement—that protects his identity), but I don't like him.

I hate him.

I hate him with every voxel and circuit of my body, in the deepest lines of code, the echoes of my basic self which I was built around. I hate him in my very essence, hate him from my core.

My hand twitches around the disc I am holding, the urge to hurtle it at him almost more than I can stand, even at this preposterous distance. My thoughts are a jumble.

KIllhim…DEREZZHIM—Take his life—take it take it take it . . .

My hand closes so tightly around the edge of the disc that it almost cuts into my palm. But I don't activate it.

Killing is easy. . . But even I need a reason.

At least to do it from here.

If he ever does find me, he will not walk away unscathed… whoever he is. I am so certain that I know him, but until he has a name, I can justify nothing. For now he is safe beneath his mask.

He'd do well to never take that helmet off.

Just like me.

. . .

JUST like me.

With that thought, recognition slams through my code. My hand freezes around the disc I had been spinning so absently a moment before.

I know that body.

I know that body because it was mine.

I can't see his insignia from here, but it must be there, I am certain it is there. The pattern on his chest. Four innocuous little squares. I know who he is. New circuits can't hide those gestures. I know that mind.

Tron.

Tron survived.

. . .Of course he did.

When I was drowning, my systems failing, the sea closing in around me and the light disappearing and my circuits shorting. . . Tron was living.

. . . . . KILLHIM.

I can think of nothing I would like more. I want to watch my basic body breaking, watch the pale circuits smoking, watch as he turns to pixels under my disc, turns to nothing in my grip. To break his discs—mydiscswith me heel… tiny, crunching, broken pixels. . .

But I can't do it. I lunge, rising halfway to my feet, disc clenched in my hand, but I can go no farther. Not yet. The time is still wrong, as wrong as it was a micro ago before I recognized him. It's all wrong and I know it's wrong and I can't fight what I know. Not with how I know it. I know that now is wrong. I don't have to understand why. I just understand, as if the whole system is screaming in my ear to restrain myself. I can't kill Tron. Not here, not now. Not yet.

The basics say we're naïve.

We're not.

I know that I have to go.

. . .Have to leave . . .

If I don't, I will kill him. I have the ability to make a choice, to let him live. But that doesn't mean I have the willpower.

I deposit the new disc on my back, snapping it roughly into place as I reach for my new baton with my free hand. Lightjets are obvious, but the administrators are grounded. I'll be gone before they can even reach the air.

Without stopping to consider what I'm doing, I dive headlong over the edge of the building, plunging towards the ground.

. . . This is the first time this body has used a baton.

My reaction time is not what it should be.

The street below races towards me, faster than it seems like it should, and my baton does nothing.

Come on.

. . .

I can see the cracks in the pixels where the sidewalk is breaking apart. It's getting closer.

COME ON.

Too close.

It'd be pathetic to die so soon, when I am still so new. . .

lightjetlightjetlightjetLIGH TJET I AM NOT DYING YET-

Willpower is everything.

The jet suddenly rezzes up beneath me, that color that isn't sure if it's orange or red lighting up the sky as I redirect my nosedive. It's a sharp gesture. I am an aggressive, forceful flyer.

But I am flying.

I am flying, and soon, Tron will be far behind.