Find Tron.
Like it was such a simple command. Sam had been in what could be loosely termed his home for hours, listening to his boston terrier noisily chew up a philly cheese steak sandwhich. Alan was right, he really should start feeding him dog food. He paced noisily on the floor of the stacked shipping crates, mulling over his options. He could lock down the Grid and prevent any more logins, but Clu had also attempted to do the same thing and the programs might react poorly. He'd promised them he'd rule them fairly, not with an iron fist as Clu had. He could raise up an army of his own, but doing so might provoke attack itself, and in turn make the programs nervous that he was turning into Clu. He could find this stranger somewhere in the Grid, somewhere beyond far away and impossible like Zuse had told him, but would that mean his own death? He'd played enough online games to know that while some Users might be content to chat with him and work out terms, others would rather put a spike through his skull and rule the Grid themselves.
They could, now that they might have a working replica of the Portal somewhere. "Fuck!" Sam groaned, sinking down into his leather couch and watching his dog stumble over to give his calf an affectionate lick. "What the hell am I going to do?" he moaned through his fingers, hiding his face from the world. He felt like he could not go forward nor go back. He could not keep ignoring his company while battling this other User.
He looked down at the terrier, who was snorting through a brachiocephalic nose and wiggling his little stump of a tail. He couldn't keep ignoring his girlfriend or neglect his home. He let a hand down to rub between the terrier's ears. "Hey." He said softly. "I'm so sorry Marv…I don't even remember the last time I took you for a walk."
"I've been taking him for walks. It helps me to know the city."
He looked behind him to see Quorra walk in, smiling gently. "What did Alan say?" she asked, setting down a bag. Sam knew where she'd been. Quorra spent endless hours in the libraries around the city, absorbing as much information as possible. In his father's home in the Grid, there had been dozens of books. When he had shown her the public library, with its thousand upon thousand of tomes…and learning there were more of these wondrous buildings had taken her breath away. She'd taken it upon herself personally to learn, and who was he to deny her?
Sam ran his hand over his hair. "He said I had to find Tron." He said quietly. Quorra looked at him, puzzled, and walked over to stand in front of him.
"Tron is dead." She said quietly. "He derezzed falling into the Sea of Simulation."
Sam nodded. "I know…Alan knew…but why would he say that? He's angry with me, he claims I'm on my own with the Grid problems." He said softly. Quorra knelt in front of him and took his hands in hers, her large eyes looking into his own. He unconsciously rubbed his thumb across her cold, digital hands.
"You're not on your own." She told him, sternly. "You have me."
Sam squeezed her hands. "Zuse told me to find the other User. Out in the Outlands, beyond the city. If I go…will you come with me?" he asked. Quorra's answer was her lips softly pressed against his, and her hands squeezing in response.
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Zuse had felt wetness, but something was hard under his chest, something solid. He slowly groaned and opened his eyes…he'd felt like he'd slammed his chest against a wall, all the breath was taken out of his body. He lifted himself up on his arms, seeing seawater coating his hands. He had fallen into the sea, he remembered. Icy cold, digital sea where nothing was matter, and it flowed all around him but for an instant after the cat pushed him. Then he had been falling through open air, then hit the ground. He shook his head, water flecking off into the small tidal pools around him. It was a place devoid of life, made of jagged black rock. He shifted his hands and felt sand under his fingers.
No, not sand. He lifted a handful of the stuff and had to choke down a small gasp when he saw code flowing through his fingertips. Blocky, glassy code that might have been one of his patrons, or a piece of the lover Dillinger had so cruelly derezzed. The place was paved with the dead. He scrambled to his feet and looked around him in the soft, white, biodigital glow. Everywhere he looked glass littered the floor, the remnants of programs disintegrating as the system removed bad code. Dillinger had plucked him from a place like this.
He fixed his hair, which had gone from swept back and beautiful to stringy bits of white hair that hung over his eyes. He irritably pushed it back from his thin face and began to walk down the tunnel. He looked up curiously when he saw a drop separate from the tidal pools along the way and slowly travel upward to the ceiling in empty space. When he looked up, he saw a swirling, roiling mass of water that could have been the underside of a boiling sea. He knew he was looking at errors in the Grid, programs were never meant to look upon this area, thus when he saw the ceiling out of the corner of his vision when he turned a corner, it was calm as still water. But when he looked up again, it bubbled and roiled trying to make sense of his presence. He shuddered and moved to put his hands in his pockets, but his fingertips touched the black, bladed triangle and he jerked his hand away like he'd been burned by it.
He bit his lip. There was the matter of poisoning Sam Flynn. Would he even be able to pull the boy into his web? Sam had refused his advances before, but it had been a sort of game they played together. It was meant in no sort of malice. He rubbed his neck and continued. The drops flowing upward from the floor grew more frequent, until he was actively stepping around them. The code was piling up as he went deeper, gleaming piles of glassy code. When he first espied a dead program, half derezzed, his arms twisted up above his head as if clawing for the sky, he'd had to clap his hand to his mouth to shut down bile rising in his throat. Zuse was an entertainer, he was no man for plunging into the land of the dead.
The programs had become more and more numerous, in varying states of decay. Their eyes were wide, unblinking. Frozen in time. Zuse despaired of ever finding an iso, one with milk-pale skin like his own and the coveted biodigital code that Dillinger had sent him hunting for. The piles of the dead grew so deep soon he was heaving aside fistfuls of the glass shards, fighting down disgust as line over line of code flung away and shattered into pieces, mere numbers now. He sat down on the stones, disgusted. How did he expect to find such code? He had no idea what he was looking for! He'd never seen a piece of his own code before, it was somewhere between the soft flesh the Users boasted and the blocky, glasslike code the programs had. Something that met between. He took out the poisoned spike and turned it over in his fingers again, avoiding the razor edges. But, like the first time, his finger slit on the edge and he looked at the milky white blood welling in the cut. He sighed and flicked the blood away.
He didn't know when or where the drop had hit the ground, but when he looked back there was a white patch growing from the spot, growing ever wider. It grew stronger and stronger, until he had to scramble to his feet to get out of the way of it. The white reached milky, spidery fingers out and touched the piles of code, and a sharp ringing sound came from deep within the mounds. Zuse stared, fear touching his heart. What had he done?
He backed up, and felt his spine hit something, and a deep growl. He whipped around to see a figure staring down at him. The figure was clothed in black, with white bars of electricity striping up on either side of his chest, up the high collar on his neck, to the visor on a helm as black as the sea. There were no words, only the rumbling growl that seemed like some great steel cat was hidden in his chest.
"You're dead." Zuse whispered, and black gauntlets closed around his throat.
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Dillinger ran his hands down the cat's spine. The panther had returned timely, just as he'd asked. The program hadn't failed him yet, and he was quite proud of its programming. He smirked and settled back in the chair. The room around him was white, the furniture was silvery and in the manner of an old French mansion. The floor glowed softly, providing illumination. "The Elder Flynn certainly had good taste if nothing else." Dillinger smirked, putting his feet up on the glass dining table that hadn't borne so much as a smudge since its purveyor had died. The door had been set unlocked, the books gone. But the house still served a good purpose. Dillinger had taken over the house since Sam seemed too preoccupied to pay it any attention, and it was here the man was to await the boy.
Sam had spread the word that he wanted to meet the other User peacefully, and Dillinger had agreed. He still had every intention of killing Sam, but the programs also faithfully obeyed their new leader, and changing the mantle of leadership would not be a simple matter. But it went beyond the Grid. With Sam dead, Dillinger stood to sway the council to his way, and become CEO. From there, the Grid was the biggest gold mine anyone could ever own…and he planned on carving out a large piece of that million dollar pie. He grinned and looked down at the panther. "The father of my thousands." He purred gently, looking up when the door slid open.