AUTHOR'S NOTE:
This isn't exactly a fragment so much as a SUPER-CONDENSED actual chapter, but one that should have come a lot later. But I didn't feel like writing all of the in between stuff, but I did feel like writing. So I made this. Because I love and miss the Tron fandom and because I wanted to know what would happen if I mixed beer and Tron. (On that note, this has not been thoroughly edited. You have been warned.)
SO, NECESSARY INFO:
Yori gets fed. Up. With Tron's BS. right as the sea starts to churn again. The decision to poison it is overruled when nothing immediately emerges, but chaos breaks out in sea-approximate communities lead primarily by a faction that's posing as anti-admin but is in reality more akin to a criminal organization, terrorizing civilians and extracting various assets from them in exchange for "protection" from whatever it is apparently brewing t sea under the pretense that the admins can't possibly help them. The admins can't hope to deal with this logic or this organization, and tension breaks out admits their ranks. Finally, someone admits that they need more manpower, and that Tron cannot possibly cover security by himself, nor can he constantly rely on their entire admin team as backup when they need to be covering so much ground in order to combat these widely spread factions (referred to loosely as Simulation Gangs).
Yori gets after Tron for trying to do everything himself, and in the end he more or less storms off while she shouts after him that she doesn't know who he thinks he has to be, by which she means she doesn't know who this brooding torturer lone wolf egomaniac is anymore. While he's off brooding at great cost to the grid's criminal elements, she has an idea, which she then springs on the admins in an impromptu meeting with no warning WHATSOEVER.
Yori
I'm not certain what I'm expecting when the thought comes out of my mouth: it's mixed up in memories of two men in two lifetimes and a certain ruthless realism that desperation has been teaching me in intervals over the last several cycles. Since Rinzler returned.
"Then let Rinzler out," I declare.
There is a seemingly endless moment of silence long enough to prompt an evaluation protocol that obscures most everything in my left eye. Scanning—
Then Radi cackles.
Tron turns a helmeted head in my direction. He does not take it off. Of course.
"Yori . . .Ma'am," Greshim begins. I shake my head, lifting a hand to stop him.
"It makes sense. He's an admin, isn't he? Let him be an admin. If he gets away . . ." If? If? I swallow, "Derez him."
Users know that Tron wouldn't mind that.
"How do you expect us to keep him under control?" Radi retorts. Tron is still staring at me, helmet drawn over his eyes. His circuits are flaring.
Somehow, I don't care. still mad enough to reheat a cold circuit. It's liberating. This is my system, too.
"Downloads. Give him one of my batons. Only one of mine. The search and retrieval functions I built in for combat will sync to his disc and you'll be able to track him by it from the moment he touches the baton."
"So we can hunt him down again when he runs?"
"So he has no reason to." No hope of escape.
Radi, Mav, and Greshim look at one another, and then to Tron. He stands stock still without responding, absorbed in the blackness of his helmet and the darkness of his thoughts. For a moment I want to smack it away from his face and force him to look at us, and I wish I had the strength to shatter the helmet that I designed. If Rinzler can't hide behind his, why should Tron?
Because Rinzler is dangerous, I remind myself, ignoring whispers of because Tron is afraid and retorts of so am I. We lost power in Argon again today. I can feel the implications, unknown and uncertain, fizzling in my code and in my circuits. I feel like I'm alternating between hot and cold, deprived of measurements I can trust to make sense of the readings that keep interrupting everything I'm seeing. Alert—
Warning—
Updating . . .
We have to do something. And the blackouts begin in the sea, and so did he. Rinzler is the one unifying element we have, however impossible, however loathed, however burdensome he is. However innocent.
No, not innocent.
This version of him may have killed mor egridbugs than programs and tortured no one, but his body count is, for example, higher than mine. But he's an ISO, and he's from the sea. When I tell the rest of them that, Radi scowls, and Mav looks at his feet. Tron stares at me through his protective shield, looking more Rinzler than Rinzler does. "We can use him," I insist.
A moment drags on, wasting energy and cycles, offering me enough time to check my readings of beta sector while I wait. Finally, Tron nods.
"The nanocycle he steps out of line," he growls.
"I know."
I don't mean to snap at him the way I do; my voice sounds cold and high and pitchy all at once, certainly removed from the gentleness I once prided myself on. Gentle, but direct. Like Lora's code. But that was a millennia ago, before Tron forgot what justice was, before this system existed, and before anyone was desperate enough to look for me for leadership. And, I suppose, when I was soft enough—if no less subversive—that they had good reason not to. Now isn't then, my voice is as tired as I am, and Tron, at least, seems to understand that. His helmet derezzes at last.
He looks only at me, with what might be desperation in his eyes. His face looks so soft after Rinzler's. the same, but sweeter, more innocent to look at, though I don't know how true that assessment is anymore. I get an error warning just for thinking it.
"All right," he says. "I'll get him."
"No." I'm halfway to shouting, and for a moment I wish that I had a helmet to hide under that didn't look out of place. "I will."
Rinzler
It takes time to realize it, but my face is a weapon.
Against Tron, it's a torture device.
He looks at me and he sees himself. He looks at me and he sees failure. His own unwillingness to die.
Against Yori, it's a tool of extraction. Of sympathy. Of offerings of energy and consolation and the touch of her hand. Careful. Limited. But contact.
She doesn't touch me when she comes to release me. She hands me a baton in silence. I glare up at her.
"Your freedom is conditional on being tracked," she says, forcing stern words from soft, readily quivering lips. She's such a tender, frigid creature overall. Beautiful program.
A small part of me wants to gut her for leaving me here for as long as she has. Wasting. Corroding. Bathing in my own broken pixels, drinking from her hand to stay alive.
The rest of me wants to grab her. Pull her. Put her on the floor, shatter her kneecaps to bring her close to my face and make her see my answer in my eyes.
Assuming she'd see the right one.
Anything to get out of here is not what I want to convey. Nor is never. There's an itch. And instinct. A heat in my circuits I shouldn't be able to sustain in this state that says get out get out get out, they're coming. And I can't greet them from in here.
And another itch. Echoes of defend the system and oversee and kill that taste better than undiluted energy on the tip of my tongue. Tangy and hot and metallic. Like the dust of imploding programs. Like violence and fulfillment. I want to do my job.
In the end, that's what I tell her.
"Do you accept?" she asks.
"That is my job."
She scowls. Swallows. She passes me a baton.
