Tron
It takes me a moment to understand what I'm seeing.
That's not possible . . .
The ISOs are dead. The ISOs are dead and Rinzler killed the last of them himself. Besides, he's a function of me, how could he possibly manifest on his own? There wasn't enough code there to make a whole program—all I lost were some memory files and the emotional context that went with them. I'm 97-98% whole. He was not that autonomous.
I refuse to believe he was ever that autonomous. He was a corruption, not a program. A shell full of Clu's lies, that's it. He should look like nothing but the code for an orange circuit mask and some enforcement upgrades without me.
But here he is.
-Error-
An ISO.
-Processing-
Complete with an emblem. I don't even understand why I didn't see that before.
As if she can read my thoughts, Radi explains.
"It showed through when you . . . hit his arm again," she says gruffly.
Meanwhile, Greshim and Mav rush in, holding Rinzler in silence while Paige replaces the lightcable with cuffs, pinning his hands behind his back. She landed the chopper nearby at some point in the course of our fight, and the rotors are spinning lazily, blowing dust in our faces and fog around our ankles as we stand here, Radi and I a short distance away from . . . him . . . and his captors.
I stare at his arm. I don't know what my face looks like, but my systems are screaming. I can't process this, largely because I don't want to.
Rinzler follows my gaze, ducking his head towards his left side, looking at the glowing emblem and the injury in the shoulder above it. I still can't see his face (which is fine by me) but I can tell that he is putting together the sequence of events more quickly than I am; head snapping back up in the next instant to stare at me with some unimaginable expression that I'm glad I don't have to look at.
Processing—
It bothers me that he processes with so much more expediency than I do.
Processing—
Come on, Tron. Put it together.
Processing—
How slow are you getting, old program? The emblem showed up after-
Ah.
I see.
I went for his shoulder to keep him down (and maybe, just maybe to hurt him, to see if he was real) and the trauma caused a glitch in the circuit mask he must have been using to hide it.
It.
An ISO emblem.
On Rinzler.
ERROR.
Rinzler
This is not how this was supposed to work.
Let. Me. GO.
I was pulled here, driven here for a reason, and it was not to waste my precious time on this hapless bunch of would be enforcers and their too-stunned-to-function leader.
Stop looking at me like that.
Tron is the only one who understands who he is seeing, and he stares accordingly, glaring. The others stare too, but at the symbol on my arm and the color of my circuits and all the physical attributes which they're putting together bit by minuscule bit. Not at me.
Tron is the only one asking who, not what.
The others see only an object, a myth brought to life to ogle at. To judge by their standards, by the laws they can barely uphold, to sentence as they please or study like a bit of broken data under 100% magnification.
They are still staring. Tron now tries not to look.
You thought you were rid of me, didn't you?
Of course he did. He thinks he's always supposed to win. That the users are with him.
Funny how well that mentality worked out for him the last time I was born.
I feel like gloating. Like looking him in the eye and injuring him with my presence, like hurling words at his feet just to spite him. But I don't. I can speak now, but under their watching fearful-curious-furious eyes, I don't want to. I don't want to say a word.
Besides, Tron has been in my head anyway.
He should know exactly what I'm thinking.
You were wrong.
I'm back…
I'm better.
I'm not going anywhere.
I'm not going anywhere and nei—
I catch my own thought, pin it down and hold it where I can see it, where I can tear a seam down the middle and understand what just came into my mind, came without me asking for it. Five words, like a warning from the sea, like a whisper from Arjia.
. . . And neither are the others.
Yori
Tron took off in such a rush, and took so many of our best with him, that I feel a little as if someone has just pulled the floor out from under me and left me to put it back myself. Tron gets . . . infatuated with things sometimes. Ideas settle in his head and he pursues them at all costs until he either sees them through to completion or is given no choice but to let it go or see someone hurt. This rogue is going to be one of those things. I can feel it.
And that worries me more than I can stand to admit. I have this feeling . . . it's not bad, exactly, but ominous. Like something is coming that we are not prepared for, like nothing is a coincidence anymore, like—
Alert—
A warning siren rings out from above my control panel, which I have been leaning on as I've pondered Tron's latest obsession. When I turn to look, between the red, flashing words on every screen reading ARGON: INFRASTRUCTURE FAILURE, I can see the details of what's happened.
WARNING:POWER FAILURE—WARNING: POWER FAILURE—WARNING:P—
. . . No coincidences.
ERROR: FAILURE RECTIFIED—ARGON: INFRASTRUCTURE: ALL SYSTEMS ONLINE-
Then, in an instant, as if the users themselves have reached in to fix it, the warning suddenly disappears, and all systems come back online in the fastest turnaround of a failure –let alone the largest power failure—that I have ever seen.
Something is coming. I wish I knew what.
Rinzler
Something happened.
Something has just happened. It came in with the words; a ripple in the system. I can feel the waves washing through me, over me, around me.
For a moment, I swear I can taste the sea . . .
I understand now.
Being born takes time. The first ripples come early, we emerge later. I am suddenly certain that is what I am feeling, here in the ruins we're going to inherit, the city which brought me all the way here just to tell me that it was going to be mine.
And to put Tron and I in the same place . . .
ERROR.
No, I refuse to believe that. Not at this time.
But a city . . . a city is meant to house programs. To be lived in and worked in and felt in and loved in and hated in and died in. And they are coming. That is the message. That was the shudder in the air.
The ISOs are coming, and we will need a home. In this desolate ruin, where there is no one alive left to displace, where no one claims ownership and no one will, we can have one.
This is not my city. It's ours. And we will need it soon.
Very, very slowly, we are coming, and our—our leader- is being born.
This time when I look at Tron, I really do have to laugh.
Tron
I have a few choice words for how I feel about the noise that escapes him the next time that impenetrable helmet tips up, indicating that he's looking at me. None of them are nice.
Is that supposed to be a laugh?
He stands out like a beacon in this place. It's all gray dust, black outland rock, shattered silver ruins, hazy white light that refracts off of everything to give the place a faint bluish hue, ambient light hovering just above the swirling white mist on the ground. He kneels, cuffed, at green-clad Paige's feet; Greshim's faded gray circuits and Mav's white circuit mask framing him while they hold him down, each with their hands clenched around his shoulder. And then there's Rinzler, a bright red gash in the middle of all of it . . . laughing.
Greshim's expression, as usual, is flat to the point of being dull. After so many years of being a sentry, he gives away nothing. Paige looks like she's afraid to touch him, and yet tempted to kick him in the back at the same time. Mav's expression is unreadable, but I can't help but notice that he's being gentler than I would be with the ISO's injured shoulder. He glances at me, a sideways look that only lasts a nano before it's gone, but which is enough to give me the distinct impression that if anyone here besides me understands who we are dealing with, it's him.
Maybe that's why, when Rinzler suddenly throws his shoulder into Greshim's groin, shoving the considerably bulkier (and now very much in pain) program aside as if it's nothing and leaping to his feet, Mav doesn't hesitate. Before Rinzler can even finish the kick he was aiming at him, he pulls his baton and drives it into his side. There is a flash of electricity, and Rinzler crumples to the ground. Radi screams, and bolts to where Rinzler lies.
Mav stands by as if nothing has happened, replacing his baton. Paige is fuming –her usual reaction to feeling disconcerted— and Greshim is doubled over off to the side. When Radi arrives beside them she looks ready to cut Mav clean-through, but that's before she realizes that it was just a shock device, not a light blade. Rinzler is unconscious, not dead.
They have all frozen to look at him.
I jog up to where they are standing, and arrive beside them just in time for Radi to look down and see what everyone else sees.
His helmet collapsed when he went down, exposing his face. There is a moment of tense silence.
Then they all turn to me.
Paige is the first to try and speak, rounding on me with furious intensity in her expression, hair falling farther into her eye as she whips her head around. But Radi cuts her off, her voice so hollow and so scathing it's almost as unsettling to listen to as Rinzler's face is to look at; the words meticulously separated, like verbal stabs.
"What. Did. You. Do."
oo0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0oo
"I had nothing to do with this," I hiss, turning on the woman beside me with a toxic tone that I have rarely heard from myself, and which has never boded well.
Get it together, Tron.
. . . Yeah, right.
Radi scowls back at me, arms crossed over her chest, feet planted shoulder width apart, completely un-phased by my tone. Maybe she doesn't understand what that means . . . that the last time I sounded like that was the last time I was able to speak.
Or maybe, her apparent obsession with ISOs considered, she just doesn't care.
"You have no idea who this is." I practically spit the words at her. Her eyes –which are unusual for a program, almost purple in color—narrow in response.
Paige is the next to speak. She throws her hip out and props her hand on it, leaning over Rinzler's unconscious body to look me in the eye from under her dark hair, feisty and fearsome all at once.
"Then why don't you tell us?" She says, glowering. There is something like fear in her brown eyes, though, confusion and alarm clouding her irritation. It's really not surprising that she and Radi are friends . . . they handle things identically.
I'm trying not to look at the limp figure on the ground. I'm waiting . . . hoping that one of them will figure it out, that they'll spare me from having to say that name out loud, from having to admit that what I'm seeing is real.
It can't be….
Seeing his face makes it worse.
Why couldn't you just die?
Paige breaks my reverie.
"Well?"
I look up at her, down at Rinzler, and back to the group. My voice is suddenly gone. I couldn't answer her if I tried.
I couldn't speak if I tried. . .
Panic suddenly rises up in me, clawing its way up my throat, squeezing it shut from the inside. I can't move. I can't speak, I can't even change my expression from the mask of anger I'm sure I'm wearing.
I can't look at anything but him, there on the ground, bent almost backwards because of how tightly Paige cuffed his hands behind his back, one leg bent, the other straightened, expression still and raging all at once.
He's so . . . pale. Well, no,not even pale so much as clean; his complexion brighter than a basic's, still new and untarnished under his helmet. Brand new skin and hair and features and circuits.
There are four lines of circuitry on his face.
One symmetrical pair shoots from just below each temple, slashing across the sides of his face, coming to a stop on the most prominent part of his cheekbones, below his eyes. The next pair sits above the first, starting from the corners of his eyes and running back to the exact center of his temples. The last, a free standing line of orange-touched red light, races from the bridge of his nose up to his hairline, where it disappears beneath a mess of dark, dark hair. Unlike circuits on a gridsuit, circuits on the skin (which some call light lines to differentiate them from what we basics have) seem to glow from underneath, a slightly visible pulse of energy brightening and darkening them in subtle, rhythmic repetitions that are only noticeable from up close.
If there was any doubt about what type of program he is, the circuits dispel that. Only ISOs have light lines, and after so long in an ISO-free grid, the fine lines of light are unsettling and unfamiliar, especially in that pattern. There is nothing smooth, nothing gentle in the pattern. They look like red slashes across his face, and they mirror the jagged, semi-symmetrical lines of circuitry on his body. I'm not sure which is more unnerving, the circuits themselves . . . or the face beneath them.
He looks like me, but he doesn't. His nose is the same, the shape of his eyes and the way his brows rest over them is like mine, but his jaw is harder, his cheeks sharp and prominent, and his face is thinner and his forehead not so high. He has my features, but refined. Cut down and detailed to match his slightly smaller, quicker frame, sharpened and hardened and exaggerated, me but nothing like me all at once.
No wonder the others are staring.
He looks like what he is: He looks like me with every scrap of joy torn out, and every shred of violence balled up in his center. Me as an enforcer. As a weapon. If I'm a staff, he's a lightblade.
I am still frozen, eyes following the angles of his face, the pattern of the circuits on his chest. Around his collar there is a band of circuitry that runs around his neck and then plunges diagonally across his chest, stopping above a single square in the exact center, and then continuing on beyond it at a new angle, like a broken sash. A circular band of red light encircles each of his arms as well, and his emblem stands out in white against one of them. He looks exactly likewhat he is . . .
The others are still waiting for me to explain, Radi still angry, Paige still unnerved, Greshim's expression as flat and dull as ever beneath the halo of his black and blond hair, and I still can't answer them.
But then Mav looks at me, manages to break through my paralysis to make eye contact. He meets my gaze, and nods once.
"I know who this is," he says.
The others look up, myself included, to hear him out. He speaks decisively, and his tone is as strict as a command.
"This is Rinzler."
Author's note: Thank you to Pixaneth and ScribeOfRED for helping me edit this, to all of you for reading, and special thanks to those of you have been reviewing. Your feedback really helps!
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