Sam looked up and down into the dark, dark abyss that once housed the portal. The stream of light was gone. Gone. He felt his heart sink down into his stomach. He was stuck in the Grid, but with three hours and fifteen minutes to spare by his own watch, what had made the portal shut down? That was one thing he had never dared to touch, the portal. Messing with it too much could shut off the Grid completely from the real world…or seal him in. But it looked like he would have to, to see who had tracked muddy footprints all over his father's pristine programming. He bit his lip and walked back down the runway….until a low growl made him freeze.
A black cat, the size of his light cycle, slid out onto the walkway with all the grace of a dancer. "Oh Christ, I thought I got rid of you." Sam groaned, backing up slowly as the cat advanced. There were no roads here, no staff to grab from a program. Nowhere to run. The man who had closed the portal, the other User, must have known that he would go to the portal, and thus had made the perfect little rabbit trap for him. He couldn't even get to his light cycle from here. He swore and looked around him. There was nothing except the small ridges on either side of the walkway. The cat knew it had him cornered, there was a different body language this time. Its head was high on its shoulders, and the purr sounded….arrogant.
Sam backed up and felt his heel hit the edge. Beyond that was abyss and the shut down portal. The cat was barely six feet from him before he felt air at his back. He felt a low, loud hum, then the light struck his spine. He didn't question it. He stepped backward and into oblivion.
When he came to, he was standing before the terminal in the arcade. Dusty as ever, it caked his palms. So much different than the glassy world of the Grid. "Jesus." He muttered under his breath, running his fingers through his hair and streaking it with dust and sweat. That hadn't been a mistake. The other User was toying with him. Mocking him. Opening and shutting the portal to remind Sam that he was no idle threat, he was something to be feared.
"Whoever the fuck this guy is…." Sam growled. Anger ran through his veins. Why now? Why? He had gotten the world to be at peace, at last, preparing it to be open to the public and now this? But some little voice in the back of his mind said that if he ever let the Grid go public, then he would have to deal with problems like this. There was always someone smarter than he.
The cat paused at the beam of light, confused. It growled softly when a hand rested on its forehead. "Good. He'll be back in before the night is over." The man standing next to the creature chuckled softly. "Let's go have a visit to Zuse….see what else we can do about Sam Flynn and his little empire of peace." He snapped his fingers and the cat moved with him, turning as one creature down to the end of the platform. "Light cycle….how primitive." The User sneered, running his fingers down the seat of the light cycle.
His hand went back to the cat, running his index finger down its forehead. This time the gesture was more meaningful. The cat howled and dropped with a loud clank to its stomach. It's legs stretched out and the joints shifted noisily, like obsidian grinding on itself. The head stretched out, the neck bulged with reprogrammed muscle, it became more lanky. When the cat rose, it was no longer that. The horse shook its reformed head and shifted awkwardly. The User mounted the horse fluidly, and set off in the direction of the city. Sam Flynn's little creations on the current Grid were quite cute, more replicas of his father's work than anything. But out in the Outlands he was forming his own empire against Sam's. It was a chess game that he would win, now that the other queen was going to be hopping back and forth over a small portal virus.
The horse galloped with an unearthly smoothness. There was no lope to the gait. The man on the creature's back stayed as still as someone on a bike. No jarring movements. Just the flurry of legs underneath the figure, and the mechanical whuffs of the creature. The User barely noticed when the programs in the streets of the Grid stared at him. He was not here for their amusement, he was here for Zuse. The boy would have seen the iso by now, and though Zuse was secretive he was a useful piece of biodigital software. Too useful to let Clu throw away.
He paused at the elevator at the base of the End of the Line club. He would have to leave the Grid soon, but only once he'd found out what Zuse knew about the inner workings of the Grid. Unlike Sam, he knew how to handle the capricious iso. He dismounted the horse and let the software twist itself back into the form of a cat. It hobbled for a moment as it regained its primary functions and rebooted, then slid by the User's side as the man settled into the elevator.
"He'll have that portal moved. But I intend on using my own backdoor…Flynn didn't honestly think that ENCOM didn't copy his every movement, every keystroke? What a fool." The User mused to himself, shaking his head. The cat said nothing, rumbling its purr with every inhale and exhale. The hum of the elevator around them was….soothing. For all the elder Flynn's flaws, he knew how to program beautifully and smoothly. He couldn't say as much for Sam, who had the same grace but was still learning. He ran a finger over the banisters ringing the elevator's walls. There was a slight hitch in the movement. Clumsy. He pressed down firmly on the spot that hitched, dragging his thumb slowly and forcefully down the banister. The spot hissed and crackled under his thumb, the code resisting his attempts to smooth out the bad decimal point someone had left somewhere. But the error was so glaring, he needed to fix it. He bared his teeth and ground his thumb harder on the spot, feeling it give and become as smooth as glass. He slid his hand across. The hitch was gone. Good.
The doors opened and noise blasted his eardrums. Zuse was quite obviously celebrating his return in style. But oddly, was not present. The User sighed and looked down at the cat. The panther looked toward the plexiglass office of the partygoers' patron. It was clouded with soft blue light, compared to the seizure-inducing, throbbing cobalt of the rest of the club. The User smirked and made toward it, his hand on the panther. He could sense the programming Zuse was shifting around. All so innocent, what the iso was doing. Nothing that could ever harm anything, but it made his own life more convenient.
The User lifted his palm and the door melted away at his will. The panther wisely guarded the door as the glass resolutioned back in behind him, chinking itself back together pixel by glassy pixel.
The User marched through the office, past the C-shaped white couches and the luxurious bar, following his ears. He was hearing soft, mewling cries of pleasure. Another plexiglass door crumbled under his fingers, and he saw the white form of Zuse sprawled out on the bed, the heaving back of a program between his legs, a woman by his side. "Hedonist." The User growled, barely giving the programs time to react. He seized the man by the back of the neck and the program shrieked, shattering in the User's fist. The girl fled, stumbling out of the door with as much grace as she could manage. The User could sense her panic.
Zuse sighed and threw one of the diaphanous black sheets over his thighs. "Edward Dillinger. Always a lovely surprise." He rolled his eyes, voice dripping with sarcasm. "Tell me, why is it only Flynn seems to know how a door operates, hm?"
"Did you do as I asked you?"
Zuse glared irritably at the black and red-orange figure at the foot of his bed. He sat up and rearranged his hair into some form of normality, tying one of the sheets around his waist and standing up. "Yes. He'll have a manhunt on before the cycle's out." He said. He uncorked a glass bottle from a nightstand and poured himself a flute of the mysterious, blue liquid his club served. "Now why did you come all the way up here to confirm what you already knew, spoiling my fun? I had fun programming him." He said, picking up a glass shard of his lover. The piece fell away into dust in his palm.
"Because I have another task for you."
"Please." Zuse rested his back against the nightstand and sipped the alcohol. "What more could you want? You've already got programs of your own manufacturing those little horrors out in the Outlands."
"I need you to find the remains of the other isos in the system. Flynn brought them here, Clu killed them. But, like you, I could repair them." Dillinger said, clasping his hands quietly in front of him.
"My dear boy, you fished me out of a recycle bin, among thousands of lines of tangled code." Zuse said incredulously. "What makes you think you can reach down there and resurrect biodigital code? It's not been done, even by Flynn. The bio part renders that a bit difficult, I think. Their code is so degraded I think you'd be bringing back a bunch of slack-jawed idiots."
"Precisely." Edward said. Zuse could hear the sneer.
"I'm up for a bunch of idiots as much as anyone else, but usually only when they're buying my liquor and fucking on my couches." Zuse said.
"Locate where Clu put them. You have nothing else to do than reprogram subroutines to give you blowjobs, I think you could find time for a little soul searching. Unless you want me to put you back where I found you." Edward growled threateningly.
Zuse glared. But he knew Dillinger was right. Flynn had been a calm beneficiary, his son Sam seemed pretty content to ignore Zuse's philandering as long as he didn't bother any programs that were seriously needed by the system. Dillinger was under the impression Zuse was his personal slave.
"If you think you can get me to go down there and start sorting through the garbage just because you've got your finger on the delete key….that's where you're right." Zuse said, giving Dillinger a thin-lipped smile. "If you'll excuse me….I've got quite the tension headache going on from your little mess and I need some program out there with some forceful code lines to put me back in shape."
Dillinger nodded. "Keep it under control. And Zuse?" he said as he turned to leave. The iso was quite obviously trying to restrain a temper. "Sam's going to come back here. When he does, I want you to get close to him. Seduce him. Then…use this on him." He tossed a tiny object toward Zuse. The iso caught it without effort, not bothering to look at what his palm had captured.
"Toodle pip then." Zuse said icily, watching his door crumble at Dillinger's passing, then resolution itself back in place. He sighed and sat down on his bed, opening his palm to look at what Dillinger had passed him. A small, triangular black object with a point sharper than any blade that had crossed Zuse's chin. He turned it over in his fingers, and swore slightly when he felt it graze nastily against his flesh. He watched milky white blood pool at his fingertip, and sucked on the wound. The blade hummed slightly in his hands, and Zuse felt something course through his veins from the wound. His programming was enough to take care of it, but he still felt sinking in the pit of his stomach. "Poison." He whispered softly.