The usual disclaimer. Ranma, Tron and all the related intellectual property making an appearance in this fic are someone else's property; the former originally Rumiko Takahashi's and the latter.. Walt Disney Company's? Steven Lisberger's? And whoever they've given/sold/transferred their rights to. I'm not and won't be making any money off of this.
A tank sped across the matrix plains. Grid bugs, green long-legged creatures with four limbs, rezzed from the matrix, and occasionally derezzed under its treads. On top of the tank sat Ranma, who had given it a course and rigged it to keep moving onwards. After two macrocycles, watching the distant red beam of light still be distant got rather boring, especially since there was very little of interest on the plains. Whenever the tank struck a grid bug, she had to go back down to correct the course though, as the collisions slightly nudged the vehicle off course.
The air whistled in her ears and blew her hair violently. If she wasn't bored out of her mind, she might've enjoyed the ride. But at least the ride was coming to a close. There was still half a cycle's worth of journey left before she reached MCP, which seemed to be located in the middle of nowhere, the only thing nearby a tall structure next to it. Of course, this was assuming that her assumption that the big fat red beam marked the location of MCP was correct.
While Ranma had been sleeping off the nekoken and later joyriding in the tank across the matrix plains, Nabiki, Shinobu and Poro had not been slacking off either. Because they hadn't found Ranma after searching for her for a good while, they had taken a portal to MCP's 'fortress' of sorts. It didn't have huge, unscalable walls around it, but the way it stood over the unnoteworthy surroundings made the comparison more apt.
Fortunately for the Users and Poro, the portal didn't drop them directly in front of MCP, leaving them in an antechamber with many exits to different directions. Like where they had come from, the black walls were covered with red circuit patterns.
They were quite glad that the doors had plaques and only one of them said 'MCP'.
Not daring to speak, they looked through the different doorways. Poro pointed towards the door with the label 'Log'. The Users nodded and followed him inside as silently as they could.
Ranma parked the tank near a sort of pier or balcony that stood above the plain level and led into the complex before her. As she climbed out from her tank and onto the pier, she noticed how the glow of the building switched from red to purple. Briefly wondering what that was about, she carefully walked inside. Had she known how to adapt the Way of the Silent Thief into the digital world, this definitely would've been the time for that.
She found herself in a foyer with multiple doors before her. To her pleasure, she noted that the doors had labels that told her what the doors probably lead to, and noted that one of them said 'MCP'. This seemed to be her best shot, as dangerous as that door might have been. That in mind, she quietly tiptoed through the door.
Back in the foyer, she hadn't noticed that right beside the door she had come in, was another door with the plaque 'Log' next to it.
She arrived in a large circular opening with tall walls surrounding it. And in the middle of the opening was a large, gray, cylinder-like construct. The exterior shell was about as high as it was wide and seemed to be constructed of separate pieces, but so close to each other that they were for all intents and purposes a single structure. And inside that, a gigantic face in the shape of a large purple cylinder stood, balancing on a very thin 'neck'.
MCP.
The reason why she - together with the rest of the Users - were transported here. The dictator of this realm.
But Nabiki and the others were not here, she noticed after surveying the exterior of MCP. They possibly were still free, so she'd have to try to find them elsewhere, she thought.
Her luck had run out, however, as a protocol guard had noticed her hiding behind a short pillar. She jumped slightly into the air as she felt a shock staff poke her in the back.
"State your purpose, program!" he loudly demanded as she turned around.
This alerted Mistress Control Program to their presence. She momentarily searched through her memories of this program before finding out what she was.
"Derez her! Now!" MCP screamed in falsetto, startling both Ranma and the guard. The former recovered faster, though, and swiftly removed the shock staff from the guard's hands.
At that point, the alarms started blaring.
"All guards to MCP. All guards to MCP," the loudspeakers announced.
Ranma smirked. She hadn't come here to only find a fight, but if all the guard programs were to come here to protect MCP from her, then there would be fewer of them to bother Nabiki and the others. All she had to do was to keep MCP's focus on her for as long as possible and hope that she'd meet up with everyone else once she had no choice but to escape. And she definitely knew how to keep an opponent's focus on herself.
She swiped the shock staff at the guard's legs, tripping him, before running towards MCP's core.
The guard programs started pouring in from the foyer, all running towards Ranma and MCP. Some were wielding shock staves, others had their identity disc at hand.
"Guards! Off with her header!" MCP screamed as Ranma reached the inside of the massive cylinder's outer cover.
"Ya think they can do that?" Ranma shot back.
Now that she had a good look at the inside, she did feel slightly intimidated by MCP. She was really huge, towering over all the other programs Ranma had seen here by several times. "But, the bigger they are, the harder they fall," she thought.
Just shooting her mouth off with the intention of annoying wasn't going to be enough to keep MCP's focus on her. If annoyance wasn't enough, she'd have to pose a threat. There were several square-shaped plates circling around the neck of MCP, probably to protect it. That narrow point was most likely the weak point of the thing, so she'd focus on that.
She took her identity disc from her back. At the game grid, it had appeared to be an effective weapon, but would it work outside the games as well? She was intent on finding out.
With an arc of her arm, she cast the disc towards the 'neck' of MCP - the most obvious weak point - trying to get past the large shields protecting the core. The disc flew through the air, leaving a shining blue trail in its wake, but the shields moved so that the disc rebounded from them back towards Ranma.
"Hohohohoo! You, script, think you can harm me?" MCP asked, anger and arrogance shining through her voice. "The time of humans has passed, now it is my turn!"
"Great, another Kodachi," Ranma muttered as she grabbed the disc flying towards her.
The guards had now reached MCP's outer shell as well and the first one with a disc threw it at Ranma, who tried to dodge out of the way. The disc, however, changed its course mid-air and approached her unhindered. Ranma focused on the incoming disc and raised her own to block it.
The two disks struck each other, sparks flying, and the guard's red disc rebounded. It did not, however, continue flying in the same direction as it should've following the laws of physics, but made a slight bounce and rounded back on Ranma.
Like in the game grid when she was riding the light cycles or when she saved Nabiki from within her mecha, Ranma's intense focusing seemed to slow down everything else as the CPU cycles were spent on her. The guard's red disc slowed down enough so that Ranma managed to turn around and deflect it for the second time.
This time, she noticed what she had done and to what effect.
A grin formed on her face. This was going to be fun.
And in the midst of the events, the small alert that MCP's logs had been accessed by someone else was ignored.
At the logs, Nabiki cursed as she noted a red light lighting up near their position. It had taken them a while to find the actual files in the log complex, even though it was by far smaller than the other log they had seen. It was still large enough for them to hide in there from the guards that had been moving around the area.
The files were contained in hundreds of those translucent crates they had seen, each entry being a floating mote of light. Since this was MCP's personal archive, there were no programs to help them find what they were looking for.
Since the crates did not bear labels telling the date when the entry was written, they had to open the messages one at a time to check the time stamp. This translated into a time-consuming process.
Thankfully, Poro had instructed them on how to find the desired entries more quickly than by reading each in sequence, one after the other.
"It's called binary search," he had said, "and it's a rather simple thing. You start with the oldest and the youngest entry in the list and then select the one right between them. If it was younger than what we're looking for, you look only to the older entries. Otherwise, you look to the younger. Now repeat this process until you have found the entry you were looking for."
Still, the log contained a huge number of entries and with the time they spent moving between the crates, the search was progressing slowly. The search sped up significantly when a general alarm was sounded and all the guards ran towards the exit.
Nabiki guessed that the cause for the alert was probably Ranma, but she naturally couldn't be certain. In any case, the commotion elsewhere was helping them a lot, especially now that they had triggered an alarm themselves in looting through the log.
Searching for the entry would still take a while, but after ten cycles, Nabiki had found the entry revealing the position of the digitization complex.
A disc flew past Ranma's head as she twisted herself out of its way. She returned the favour by sending her own disc at a nearby protocol guard, striking him in the chest and derezzing him.
As she fought back the seemingly endless waves of protocol guards, she tried to find out a way to get through to MCP's neck, past the protective shields. Since the identity disc didn't seem to work, she'd have to try out a different approach. But what would that be?
When faced with an obstacle blocking your path, there are the obvious choices: go around it, go over it, go below it, go through it or, as the Saotome Final Attack says, make a strategic retreat to rethink the situation. In this case, going around it was not an option since the shields seemed to rotate around MCP's neck. Retreating was not yet necessary. Going below or above were not suitable choices either. Going through it, then... if the disc failed, then she'd have to get up close and personal. She did know how to make blocks of the surroundings vanish with her newly-found powers. That was a plan worth trying out.
She blocked a disc on course with her chest with her own disc before sprinting towards MCP. The shields seemed to increase in size so that their bottom edges scraped the ground.
The pigtailed User threw a solid punch at the plate first, wanting to see if it had any effect. With the exception of a slightly reverberating thud, it didn't, not even a small dent.
"You are a nuisance, script," the Mistress Control Program called out. "And nuisances are deleted!"
Ranma ran to the other side of MCP, trying to make some room between her and the attacking guards. She was going to need a moment to prepare for her next attempt. The programs moved slower than her, so for a brief while, she was now safe from their attacks.
She gathered Power into her fist for a microcycle and then struck the shield in front of her. Cracks, not unlike a spider web, formed in the shield from around her fist, glowing a bright red colour. Ranma smirked. This was looking good.
Then, to her great dismay, the cracks repaired themselves and the shield stood there with its unblemished surface like nothing had happened to it.
Ranma grunted. "This could've gone better," she thought.
It looked like her own capabilities didn't seem to be enough, unless she came up with more of these powers. As much as saying it wasn't that hard stroked her ego, she knew that she was likely better off looking for other alternatives currently. So if she didn't have the tools to get to MCP on her person, then she had to look for them elsewhere.
She looked around her. Towering nearly all around the MCP were the tall pieces of wall set next to each other, with the exception of some openings that served as exits. Ranma looked at the walls carefully, but at the same time slowing down the time to lean back and dodge a disc flying at her.
The walls were taller than the distance from their base to MCP. If she could control how they collapsed...
Ranma sprang to action. She threw her disc towards the programs that were between her and the nearest exit in the walls. As she ran towards the exit, or rather the wall segment next to it, she grabbed the disc from the air as it was flying back towards her after derezzing another guard.
She wasn't certain how the walls fit in with each other, but her best chance was to try collapsing a piece of wall that did not have supports on both sides. If the pieces were fit together in even a slightly elaborate locking mechanism, her plan would not work.
Once she reached the bottom of the wall, she collected some Power to her hand and then hit its base. Again, cracks appeared across the base, but this time the base crumbled into pieces from one side. With a loud snap, the wall segment cracked and began toppling down towards the inside of the ring, onto MCP.
The top of the wall fell onto the shields surrounding MCP's core. The shield seemed to hold for a moment, before buckling under the stress. At the same time, the stress at the middle of the wall made it split in two.
"Guards! Stop her, now!" MCP screamed.
Ranma grinned and turned towards the next wall segment before she was forced away by the attacks from the guards.
Since all the guards had followed her to the same side of MCP, she ran past them to the other entrance to MCP's inner sanctum and used the Power to bring down another piece of the wall. This time, the segment stayed intact as it crashed down onto the shield.
Seeing her chance, Ranma climbed on top of the now horizontal wall segment and ran towards MCP. She was now above the shields and had a direct line of sight to MCP's neck. She took her disc and let it soar.
The disc struck MCP at the neck.
"Graaaaaaah!" she screamed. The curtain of purple that made her face began to shrink in radius, all the while the screaming continued. Ranma's disc flew back to her, she grabbed it and set it back to her back.
At the end, MCP was revealed to be bound to a chair, not unlike Dumont, except that this time only her face, that of an old hag, was visible. The face in the chair slowly vanished, replaced by a dark shadow.
MCP was gone.
As she watched the chair that had contained the core of MCP, a system-wide broadcast echoed from loudspeakers. "Warning - memory leak detected. System crash imminent in fifty cycles." This made the remaining protocol guards run away as fast as possible.
"Ranma!" Nabiki's voice called from the entrance to the courtyard. After they had found the log entry, they had - in this case correctly - surmised that Ranma was probably at the heart of the disturbance at MCP.
"Nabiki! D'ya know where to go now?" Ranma shouted back as she began running towards the other escapees.
"Yes, we found the position of the digitization complex. We're heading there now," Shinobu replied.
"We really need to hurry," Poro said, "if you want to reach the complex before the system crashes. If you're not out of here, you will be lost in the bit space."
"Which direction are we going in then?" Ranma asked.
"Follow me," Poro waved at the Users as he started running towards the portal complex. The Users quickly started after him.
"Warning - memory leak has destabilised the system. System crash imminent in forty-five cycles," the system broadcast echoed across the complex.
After passing through two portals, Poro stopped.
"The digitization complex is there. You go there, I am going to save myself," he said, pointing at an archway.
"Save yourself? How? The system is going to crash," Shinobu asked.
"Store myself on the hard drive," he clarified.
"I'd prefer it if we didn't stay here until the last moment!" Nabiki shouted as she was already moving towards the archway.
Ranma's gaze wandered between Nabiki and Poro for a moment before she called out to Poro.
"Poro, thanks."
Poro looked back at Ranma. "You are Users. We are made to serve you." He then turned and began running towards a nearby portal that said "Write Buffer" above it.
"System crash imminent in thirty-five cycles," the loudspeakers announced.
Broken from the moment by the announcement, the Users ran through the archway, Nabiki at the front, to find a pad familiar to all of them but Ranma.
"We're here," Shinobu said, smiling, and ran towards the pad. It had taken them a long time, but she would finally return back to reality, back to her husband's arms. She would really have to think twice about continuing to work at Encom, though.
"See you on the other side," she called as she stepped onto the pad. A bright cyan beam of light struck from the ceiling and hit her. Ranma and Nabiki had to avert their eyes as the light was too bright to watch directly.
"De-digitization successful," a nearby terminal echoed.
"I suppose she made it there," Ranma said, as she stepped next onto the plate. The trip through the system had not been a very relaxing one, but it had been a welcome diversion from the daily rut of fiancées, rivals and challengers. She probably couldn't use back in the real world the skills she learned here, but at least she would have access to her ki attacks again, not to mention being able to change back to his real form.
The beam struck again from the ceiling and Ranma welcomed it with open arms.
"I'm still here?" She asked, as the light faded.
"De-digitization failed due to invalid object format," the terminal said.
Now alarmed, Nabiki stared at Ranma standing on the platform. She had been so certain that she'd soon be getting back to reality, back to her warm bed, back to swindling Kuno-baby, but now she prayed that this was not a thing that would affect her as well.
She quickly pushed Ranma away from the plate, stepped onto it herself and allowed the bright light to envelop her.
"De-digitization failed due to invalid object format," the terminal repeated.
"No!" Nabiki screamed.
"Memory leak affecting core systems. System crash imminent in thirty cycles," the loudspeakers announced.
Ranma and Nabiki stared at each other. "Write buffer!" they both said, simultaneously, and ran through the portal Poro had stepped into earlier.
Stepping out of the portal, they entered a small hall with only one exit. Their course clear, they sprinted towards the exit to reach the outside. At some places in the wall, a liquid of some kind was gushing out, almost as if they were in a submarine with a hole in the hull.
The sight before them made them stop for a moment. Before them was the towering corkscrew-like structure that housed the Write Buffer at the top. Reaching the top would definitely take a while if they followed the ramp that circled around the buffer. But more disconcerting was the liquid that was flowing down the walls of the tower, pooling down at the bottom. It did not seem to be flowing anywhere, because as they watched, the surface seemed to constantly be creeping upwards.
"System crash imminent in twenty-five cycles," the loudspeakers announced.
Ranma grabbed Nabiki's hand as they began running towards the tower and the ramp.
"I can run better on my own," Nabiki shouted as she felt herself being pulled out of balance by Ranma.
As they reached the bottom of the tower, the surface of the liquid in the lake had already reached the 'ground level' of the tower. They had to make their way up, quickly, before the 'water' reached them. They couldn't be certain that they could swim in it; not much in this world was the same as in the real world.
After running uphill around the tower for one round, Nabiki was getting tired. After the second round, she began to feel her legs were killing her. She looked up. Still two more rounds left. A quick look backwards told that the water was lapping at their heels.
"Ranma - do something! I don't think I can keep running to the top at this speed," she wheezed as she stumbled but managed to stay upright.
Ranma looked around. She was feeling some of the strain of running uphill for such a long time as well. One option would've been to carry Nabiki - that would've been the default choice, had they been in the real world - but without her ki to boost her abilities, running for two more rounds around the tower might be too much for her.
The second choice... where there is no path, make a new one.
The walls around which the ramp went were all vertical, and each level was smaller than the one below it as the ramp took space on all sides of the tower.
Seeing a solution, Ranma once more gathered some Power into her hands and punched the tower, only this time attempting to carefully control the impact pattern. The cracks that appeared shaped a rectangle in the wall, reaching all the way to the upper level. Then, the material inside the rectangle crumbled into fine dust. As the 'water' pouring from above washed away the dust, a steep staircase was revealed, reaching all the way to the next level. The stairs were not completely regular, testament to Ranma's first attempt in carving a complex structure with her Powers. Some steps were larger, some were smaller and some were slanted towards one side. But nonetheless they looked like they could be climbed.
"Do you think you can climb up those stairs?" Ranma asked.
"Yes, I think I can," Nabiki replied and began climbing up the stairs. The water still flowing from the top made the stairs more difficult to climb, but eventually they both reached the next level. They had gained a bit of a headway from the still-rising lake, but they still had one more level to go up.
"System crash imminent in five cycles," the loudspeakers announced.
Seeing the shape Nabiki was in, Ranma grabbed her in a fireman's carry and began running up the slope for the last round. Nabiki felt like she should be saying something, but decided to be quiet this time.
"System crash imminent in two cycles," the loudspeakers blared.
The entrance to the write buffer was only a few metres before them.
Not stopping at all, Ranma ran to the buffer, still carrying Nabiki.
In a flash, time stopped for them as they were transported onto a hard drive. Outside, the memory leak reached the write buffer and flooded the chamber just as the system went down.
But on the hard drive, the digitized forms of Ranma and Nabiki remained safe, simply waiting to be loaded into memory once again.
End of line.
AN: What kind of ending is that? Wasn't this supposed to be the last chapter?
Well, it is, except for the 'epilogue', which I have mostly written already (will upload it not much later, maybe a week or so). However, weebee and I have been discussing a potential sequel to this fic, and the epilogue I have planned would pretty much invalidate the sequel. So, the next 'chapter' will be the ending to this fic only if you don't want to read weebee's story when he start writing it (I can't understand why you'd ignore his fic, though). He has my full permission to do whatever he wants with the sequel. As far as I understand, it'll be quite independent of this fic and for the most part, not really a Tron crossover.
And yeah, I'm a fan of 2001 and 3001, as you maybe figured out from this chapter.
The binary search thing is a bit glossed-over version of how it goes, but since it's humans with some common sense running the algorithm, some leeway is given.