Rinzler
The city unfolds before me, a monument to our failings. A sea to mirror the one I've just left, this one made of directionless energy and cold rubble. Dirty silver turned to dusty gray.
This is Arjia.
I have fragments of memory from this place. Most of them involve ISOs dying at the end of my arm, running into my disc. Crumbling under the tires of my cycle. Screaming.
That's what happened to the strays.
What happened to the city itself, however, was Clu's doing; Clu and the gridbugs. Even they've run out of sustenance by now, but I can see the marks, the gashes, the deep punctures in the broken infrastructure from their jaws. Hungry, ugly creatures. They feed on entropy, on uncertainty.
On everything we build.
Clu let them come. He saw them as a clean-up crew. Let them swallow the ISO disease. Swallow the shining city. Make it so no one will come back.
I'VE come back.
Basic-Rinzler's greatest failure among many was letting Clu live, for not defying him outright. I almost wish he were here now, so that I could see his expression as I set foot on this old ground in this new body in this city that refuses to die. So I could see his face before I removed his head from his body… or could stretch him out tight and saw off his limbs and watch him crumble. Listen to him scream.
But he's gone.
He's gone, and I am here, looking at what he left behind.
The ground here is cold, rolling mist up to my knees. I can't see the street beneath my boots, moving as if alive in a place that is utterly dead. I like Arjia, in a hardened, heavy way. A fallen city. Dismissed and destroyed but defiant, the glimmer of its leftovers not entirely ruined by the dust. Desolate, lonely, safe in its abandonment. Tron may have his city.
This one is mine.
It is now, anyway. The last time I was here, I was a prisoner.
Not anymore.
My helmet falls away. The air is cold against my skin. Biting, stinging pinpricks of cold and too bright light. Long, drifting, shifting and aimless, white energy sifts through the mist and through the air, leaking away at random into the stillness in a dull white glow. It illuminates the ruins. The brokenness of everything, the severed lines of code impaling the belly of the darkened sky, the last fragments of skyscrapers.
This was a beautiful city. Now it is a wasteland.
Our wasteland.
A hot, blinding surge runs through my circuits. I can picture them here. The others. They will come and we will claim this, I will claim this, and it will never fall again. I can picture it so clearly for a moment, and then it's gone, and I am alone.
. . .
Or at least, I should be.
Something is coming. I can't see them, but I can sense them. They are coming, creeping in on the horizon from the outlands, tempted by my presence, a hundred thundering feet against the ground, some fifty beating wings tearing up the air.
Tron
An alarm sounds, and Yori rushes to my side, sweeping her hands over the control to open the system alert which is flashing in the corner of every screen.
Threat identified, it reads, type 225-GRDB-02 location: Arjia—
I'm getting old and slow. Yori recognizes the code before I do, and her expression shrinks, her mouth turning to a white-lipped 'O' that makes her eyes look enormous by comparison.
"That's impossible," she says, hands flitting frantically over the controls, fingers typing furiously, code flashing erratically across the screen. I have to take both her wrists in my hands and hold them away from the screen just to give myself time to read what's in front of me.
Threat type 225-GDRB-02 identification: processing—
Processing—
Threat identified—
Yori says it at the same time that I do:
"Gridbugs."
Yori
That's it.
Something is wrong.
The blackouts were troubling, the rogue is an unwanted anomaly, but this? This is it. This more than anything doesn't make sense. Gridbugs? We haven't seen a gridbug in that part of the system once in the last eight cycles, and now, out of nowhere, what looks to be a swarm of about twenty is charging the ruins of Arjia from… wherever it is that bugs come from, out in the undefined borders of the system. They've already eaten EVERYTHING there of value, and there is no reason they should come back. Not to Arjia. Not now. But they're coming, and coming fast; as if something has landed there that they want.
But what could be out there that they'd want so badly? That could be that appetizing? The only new feature out there that the admin systems can account for is a rogue program, and one program shouldn't change anything... rogue or not. But that's the only thing I can think of, the only thing that makes sense based on the data that we have.
. . . But why would gridbugs be attracted to a program?
The only programs whose presence they ever responded to specifically were the IS—
NO.
But, the blackouts along the coast. . .
NO. WAY.
I force the thought away, bury it where it can't be found. It's preposterous, and impossible, and far more than I am willing to deal with on top of everything else. The ISOs are dead. Just like Clu and Flynn and Rinzler, they're gone, they are never coming back, and I refuse to believe otherwise.
. . . But if they could come back, wouldn't that mean—
STOP IT, Yori. You're being ridiculous.
A little orange light flashes in my head, nagging at me like a memory that I refuse to open.
YORI.
I look back at my control panel, and force it away.
