I realize there is an inconsistency between chapters 3 and 4 and I intend to go back and correct that in chapter 3 so that the rest of this story from hence forth makes sense. Tis what I get for writing these chapters in the middle of the night at Denny's.

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End of Line

Chapter Five

Captured!

The Outlands

He was too old for intensive action these days. Although he really did not feel his age thanks to the physics of the Grid, in his heart he certainly felt his age. But, Kevin Flynn, did not give up. He had not given up over twenty years ago when Dillinger had stolen his creations and he was not about to give up now because a Recognizer had appeared over him and deployed sentries after him. He stole one glance over his shoulder to see where exactly those sentries were and wished he had not. They were not far behind him and appeared to be traversing the terrain a lot easier than he.

Flynn slide down a slope, disrupting pebbles and dirt as he made his way deeper into the canyon. He really needed to get out of this waiting death trap before the pilot of the Recognizer got the idea to block his escape route off. His feet landed solidly on the ground far too quickly than he would have liked and over-balanced as he sent his hands forward to stop the fall, turning it into a haphazard tumble instead.

Rock shattered where he had been a second ago and he caught the glimpse of a orange highlighted disk boomeranging back to it's owner before he sprang back to his feet and started running again. A second disk flew and bounced off the canyon wall next to him, sending shards of rock raining down on him. He ducked instinctively and wished there was more cover.

"Man, where is a cave network when you need one!" he cursed at his luck.

He heard the digitized voices of the sentries as they coordinated in cutting him off. He caught a glimpse of two climbing up the canyon wall for higher ground and Flynn knew that he was quickly losing this chase. His hopes sank even further as he heard the roar of the Recognizer as it quickly moved ahead toward a narrowed gap in the canyon. It settled down just past the bottle neck and activated a force field, essentially blocking Flynn's only means of escape that way.

The Creator skidded to a halt at the sight and blinked in amazement at the worse luck he's ever had since Clu had betrayed him all those cycles ago. "You have got to be kidding me, man!" he cried in half annoyance, half incredulity at the blockade. The hum of an approaching disk turned his attention away and he ducked just in time to avoid being hit in the chest by one of the sentries disks.

"I thought you wanted me alive!" he reached back for his own disk. Well it really wasn't his disk. It had belonged to the repurposed program he had used to impersonate him and destroy Clu. He had, of course, erased it and imprinted his own identity on it since then. So, technically, it was now his disk.

With his disk activating with a steady hum, he tossed it haphazardly at one of the approaching sentries. The guard dived out of the way and returned the favor with his own in which Kevin Flynn barely managed to get out of its path before it had the chance to slice into him. Although the disk could not instantly derezz him, it could cause injuries that would eventually lead to his deresolution.

To death.

Something he wanted to avoid immensely right now.

His disk returned to him and he backed away further, quickly trying to devise a plan on how he was going to get out of this situation. Tron where are you? I need you, buddy! But Tron was gone. Clu had derezzed him, not once, but twice; and as far as Flynn knew the security program was at the bottom of the Sea of Simulation, gone forever.

As another disk came his way, no plan had come to him quickly enough and that left him with the only option of fighting back until he couldn't fight no more. "Well, you always wanted to go out in a blaze of glory, Flynn," he said out loud and tossed his disk again, this time purposely missing the sentry he was aiming for and watched for a second as it ricocheted off the canyon wall and came curving back. It's return trip caught the sentry by surprise and it cried out as it's stability came undone and it derezzed.

But before he could catch his returning disk, his world exploded in pain and a bright white light. The Creator cried out as he felt his knees buckle underneath him and dropped to the uneven ground. He keeled forward onto his hands and tried to catch the breath that had been zapped out of him. He briefly registered that something had hit him in the back and it had hurt like the dickens. Crap, the two that took the high road double backed behind me, he realized a little too late.

The sentry behind him raised his staff again and brought it's electrified tip down upon the Creator once more, sending another agonizing jolt of electricity through him. Kevin Flynn collapsed to the ground, holding his own chest as his body spasmed a couple times. When he did not attempt to get back up, the program merely held the tip in his direction as if it was enough to keep the User from considering about escape.

Once the others caught up, they grabbed him by his arms and hauled him to his feet. Binders were placed on his wrists behind his back and Flynn found himself being roughly escorted to the Recognizer. Man, maybe switching places with a double wasn't such a good idea after all.

He worried what Clu was going to do to him once he was finally brought to the rogue program. He also worried if he would have an opportunity to escape. The last several times he had managed to escape any tyrannical program and it's minions he had help. He had Tron, Ram, Quorra or Sam at his side. This time, he was alone and he seriously doubted that he was going to get any help from any of the programs serving Clu.

You're a User, improvise.

Central Control, Tron City

"They have him, sir," informed an assistant program from behind Clu. The System Admin stopped in what he was doing to face the program with a look that pretty much told the assistant that he had just given his superior the best news on the Grid ever.

"Where is he now?" Clu inquired impatiently.

"He is being brought here now, sir." The program consulted a databyte in his hands before continuing forward with the answer to the next obvious question he was likely to be asked by Clu. "Estimated arrival is in two microcycles."

"Excellent! Have him brought to me the moment they arrive with him." Clu turned away from the program again and faced the control screens he had been working on before the interruption. He had managed to slow the inevitable shutdown of the Grid and buy himself more time to come up with a solution, but he knew he could not do that by himself. He did not have the administration rights to do it. Those rights were something only a User had. He only had one problem in achieving that goal.

He knew Flynn was not going to cooperate.

So he was going to need an incentive to make him cooperate somehow. What can I say or do that would convince the User to do as I command? The only cards he once had were now gone, having escaped through the portal back to the User world. As he thought about it, he wondered if Flynn knew that they had succeeded in escaping before the derezzing of everything in the area. Hell, even he wasn't sure if they had managed to escape. He was only assuming based on the facts he knew of.

If they hadn't, then they were most likely derezzed with my previous version. Clu typed in a command to deal with a blinking indicator across one of the sectors in the city. The directive he created to monitor power losses on the Grid was keeping him ahead of the shutdown and letting him delay it as long as possible, but he knew that the next sector to go was going to be much, much closer to the center of the city. If he did not come up with a way to convince Kevin Flynn to help...

He did not want to think of failure. He was Clu. He did not fail and he was not about to let the Users to defeat him so easily. He had not come up with the End of Line subroutine to reboot his coding into a repurposed program just so he could be deactivated from the outside.

"Damn you Flynns!" he growled as the next sector began to shut down one building and program at a time.