Tron


My scanners screaming, yellow alerts cluttering my vision, the rogue diminishing to little more than a blur on the horizon, I don't make it as far as the roof. Two flights up I break through a window and jump, almost hitting the ground before my jet rezzes up. If these things didn't get all manner of debris in their engines and flip themselves over nine times out of ten when they're near the ground, I'd have taken off from where I was standing, but they do.

The escapade of getting into the air has put me behind already.

Mav has committed to flying, but has opted out of the alarmingly short two story drop, putting me two blocks ahead before he's even airborne. Radi hates flying, and has elected to use her cycle. She is tailing the rogue program from the ground, but quickly falls behind.

I abandon them both, soaring ahead, up and over the tops of the buildings, looking down at the city below. The eerie red-orange circuits of the disc-thieving rogue are visible beneath me. He's decided to fly low: weaving in and out of buildings not far above street level, cutting dangerously through narrow alleys, disappearing between buildings.

His flying is… weird.

He banks too hard, and has to roll just to make corners that he takes too sharply, and yet his control is impressive. He understands the jet and it responds to him with disquieting accuracy. It's the flying itself that's hard for him, as if he understands the machine but not the aerodynamics, how to move but not when. Like he knows how to fly . . . but has never tried.

It doesn't make sense.

I don't dive immediately. Instead I watch him from above with a nagging sense of fascination, following him with my eyes more than my jet as he dives between buildings and under archways, around broken street lamps and piles of rubble from half-collapsing buildings. I could descend, could chase him through the streets where my more experienced flying would give me the upper hand, but part of me is curious to see where he goes, what he'll do. There's something strange about him –a creeping familiarity mixed with a complete and utter lack of recognition— that makes him more interesting to me than a criminal should be.

These are disturbing thoughts, thoughts I shouldn't be trusting. My systems respond to them with a series of warnings and alerts, but I ignore the cacophony. I continue to watch, expecting him to appear again just after the next building, to emerge from each alleyway where I can see him, thinking I have the advantage, thinking he cannot have spotted me way up here, that he's mine for the taking. But then he disappears.

He rolls, flying almost sideways into yet another narrow back street, disappearing behind a large, low building without emerging again on the other side. I send my own jet plunging towards the place where he's vanished, discomforted and irritated by the idea of him being out of my sight.

Bit-brain probably crashed, flying like that.

He'll probably be on the ground when I get there, actually. It will be the easiest arrest I've ever made. . .

In the next instant something collides with my jet.

My starboard engine is smoking before I've even finished processing the audio input from shot, the rogue program dropping back before I have the chance to return the favor –to put a hole in his jet— as I would very much like to do. Up close, his circuits are more red than orange, and there is a meanness in his body language, in how he turns his head to look at me and flies with his body so low on his jet that he looks like he's growing out of the machinery. Everything about him is wrong. Cruel.

…Familiar.

ERROR—

How . . . ?

Processing-

. . . Where did he come from?

I know these streets. I know this city. How he got up here without me seeing him . . . it doesn't make any sense. Neither does the speed at which he accelerates again, drawing alongside my jet but keeping just out of arms reach, watching me with an intensity I can feel. I roll away from him, but he follows the movement exactly, flying in a wide arc to follow the drastic twist of my own jet. He moves as if he knows where I'm going to go, what I'm going to do, before I do.

The next thing I know he is flying around me in a concentric spiral, winding his lightribbon around me at a breakneck speed that no one should be able to control, spinning his jet end over end in an ever-narrowing corkscrew, closing the ribbon around me.

There is no way out.

In an instant, I am trapped. Another nano and my jet is derezzing beneath me, and I am falling, narrowly missing the ribbon myself, plunging towards the ground as the rogue shoots away across the sky, a red-orange blur that disappears in the darkness over the outlands.

I have a second baton. I can save myself, but not in time to catch him.

He's gone.


Rinzler


I enjoy watching him fall. I like seeing him plunging towards the ground, like the thought of him falling falling falling and then breaking on the street below.

But he saves himself. Of course.

He always does.

Oh well.

He's not my problem right now.

My problem is where to go from here. I have full power. I have discs. I have a baton. I have the absolute freedom to do whatever I like.

what do I like?

I'm still so new that I have no idea.


Yori

-A short time later-


This is bad. This is really, horribly, exactly the opposite of what I needed in my life. I have half the system to rebuild, starting with the transportation systems for the materials I'll need to do it and ending with the difficulty of finding programs to help me do the actual building, and I can't lift a finger to start because Tron is using every single control panel in the room.

And do I get an explanation as to why? Of course not. Tron's exact words as he was barreling past me to the systems operation station where I work were "He got away." That's it. Radi is muttering angrily to Mav out in the hallway about how much having a rogue program on the grid irritates her, and I am relying on Paige of all people to paraphrase what Radi told her on her way in.

"Apparently," she tells me, crossing her arms over her chest, "he knocked Tron right out of the sky and then just flew off. We can assume he was probably more concerned with escaping than anything else because he didn't turn around when Tron rezzed up another jet, but it was a fairly vicious attack… according to Radi."

"How do you mean?"

"He had a clear shot, but used his lightribbon instead. I would imagine he was trying to make a point."

For some reason, that comment sends a shiver through my circuits.

"Or he just likes a spectacle."

Paige's eyes narrow, and she cocks her head a little, tossing her hair out of her eye to look at me. I simply shake my head.

"Never mind. I don't know what I'm talking about," I sigh, glancing away from her, "Tron, what are you doing over there anyway?"

"Trying to figure out where he was going," he grumbles. Sure enough, a comprehensive blueprint of the entire system is spread out on the screen in front of him. "There is nothing out there. . ."

A little blinking red dot on the screen indicates the rogue program's trajectory. Tron City (we almost always refer to it as "The City" because the whole thing makes Tron vehemently uncomfortable) is surrounded on all sides but one by other large urban centers, but the rogue is flying in the opposite direction of all of them. The only thing out that way is outlands. Flynn's hideout used to be there, too, but Tron locked it down almost immediately upon returning to his original programming. Long story short, he's right. There is nothing in that direction.

"Except the Arjia ruins," interjects Paige beside me. Lost in my own reverie, I've half-forgotten she's there, and I'm startled by her voice. Tron turns around and stares at her, looking her up and down as if he's re-evaluating her programming. She shrugs, and throws her weight onto her right leg so that her left seems to be on display, her arms still crossed. That pose, which looks forced to me, is actually a favorite of hers that she falls into unconsciously on a fairly regular basis.

"That wouldn't be a bad place to hide, actually," she muses, "with so much rubble on hand a determined program could easily make a shelter, and there are power wells not far from there. It would be unrefined, but . . ."

Unrefined power is strong enough to peel the wireframe right out of a building, but a program can run on it for several milicycles at a time. It was all we had back in the old system, and Tron and I drink it all the time. It wouldn't seem all that impractical to an outlaw on the run.

Judging by the deeply concerned look on Tron's face (he always looks a bit bad-tempered when he's really worried about something), I can tell that he's thinking the exact same thing that I am: Paige is right. He isn't thrilled with the idea of searching the city, and I don't blame him; Arjia was once home to more than 500,000 programs and the ruins are extensive. Clu hated the ISOs too much to go near it long enough to clean it up, and even if he had wanted to, it was infested with gridbugs for several cycles following the Purge. If there is a perfect hiding place in this system, Arjia is it, and searching it is going to take more time and resources than we can possibly spare.


Rinzler


I don't know where I'm going.

There is nothing I can see below me that's worth landing for, but I can't bring myself to turn around. Something out there in the dark is calling me, luring me in. I've given up on trying to come up with any one purpose to apply myself towards, and have been flying aimlessly for almost a quarter milicycle without a thought in my head.

Nothing.

Just endless, scrolling code.

Code and instinct. Not directive, not requirement. Freedom, aimlessness, and the need to see the place which is out there in the darkness calling me. There is no making sense of freedom, of choice. I tried to come up with something I should be doing, something I could do next. I tried to ask myself what I wanted from life.

It didn't work.

Directives were easier.

. . .

This is better.

I just need to give it time. Give me time.

Patience, not code. Not orders. Patience and instinct and desire. That is what will provide me with my purpose.

I will wait.

I will wait and I will follow the compulsions I can't explain. I will fly into the outlands until I reach the end of the system and there is nothing left to see but cold and empty gridscape, so many dull white lines spread out over eternity, if I have to. But there is no turning around.

The system has something to show me.

I am going to look.


Author's note: Many thanks to Cyberbutterfly for editing this chapter! Here's hoping you're all enjoying where this is going, and as always, thank you for reading.

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