Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The dust that had gathered on the arcade cabinets was frankly filthy, and Alan found himself wishing he'd worn something more casual as he paused in the entrance, one hand still clutching at the door with more force than was, strictly speaking, necessary.

Somewhere behind him, a symphony of car horns made it clear that the traffic had reached its patience with what counted as peak hour in the neighbourhood.

Still in the doorway, framed by the falling sun behind him, Alan heard none of it.

If he ignored the dirt, the drop sheets, the still air -

He could still see it. Feel it. The crowds, the laughter, the sheer chaotic energy that tended to emerge whenever Flynn had settled somewhere long enough. The jukebox so loud he had felt each song more than he had heard it, beat pulsing in his chest. For a beautiful, aching, moment, he could see all of it superimposed on the scene in front of him - as if a ghostly Flynn was two seconds away from sneaking up on him, wearing a devil-may-care grin and with coins at the ready…

He breathed out, and let his hand drop from the door.

It's a shame, he thought absently, that come next month, all of this will be gone.

It was Roy who had started it. Well, no, that wasn't completely accurate. What had actually started it was a call from Flynn's mother about six years after Flynn had been officially declared missing.

Alan couldn't - wouldn't, still didn't - believe that Flynn was gone for good - but lawyers tended to be very definite about these things once they had a signed certificate in hand.

Lynda hadn't quite given up on her son either, but Flynn's personality must have skipped a generation as she was the most practical woman Alan had ever met. He'd liked her instantly when they'd been introduced at a function Flynn had dragged him and Lora to - you'll have fun, man, c'mon - and when she'd delightedly realised that they were the ones who had helped rebuild Flynn’s reputation, she’d spent the remainder of the night sharing his embarrassing childhood stories.

They'd kept in touch after… after. Food drops, support, spending time with Sam. When Lora had to return to Washington and the distance of Long Distance had started to sink in again, Lynda had opened the doors and told him to call past at any time, day or night. No need to call first - family, she'd told him sternly, when he'd tried to protest, is always welcome.

So when she’d called a family meeting, what she actually meant was that she wanted Alan to come over and help with something. And when she’d handed him the paperwork to the arcade and asked him to help mothball it, please, well - he couldn’t say no, even if the act of packing it away seemed like giving in, at least a little, to the idea that Flynn would never return. He hadn’t really been to the arcade in years, even before Flynn had disappeared - keeping ENCOM running had been more than a full time job in those days, especially since he’d usually been doing Flynn's work in addition to his own - but knowing it was out there had always been - something. A monument to life before work had taken over his free time.

Roy was the one who had pointed out that mothballing it meant more than just cleaning it up a little and locking the doors forever. Those games are valuable, he'd said, and also delicate. You want to leave them in a building with no climate control and no security? When we find Flynn again, first thing, guaranteed, he's going to ask us about what we did with the place. We don’t want him to come back and discover that the arcade’s broken, I mean - the current state of ENCOM is bad enough news as it is, we don’t want to add more to the mix.

He’d been right, of course. So Alan did what he always did, and started to work on the logistics. Research on storage lockers, contracts with the power company. A potential property manager to keep tabs on the place, make sure it was maintained. Flynn had never bothered, preferring to treat the arcade as an extension of his own home - meaning that though the bills got paid, everything else had fallen by the wayside long before.

So here he was, still stuck in the doorway, half afraid to cross the threshold. Reliving old memories, like the sentimental fool he was, rather than getting on with what he actually needed to do - namely, make a list of what was in here before the movers came to pick it all up.

It would have been faster if he’d had help, but this - this wasn’t something he could delegate. Lora was still in Washington, her next flight back not for a week. Sam was with his grandparents, and though Roy had made noises about potentially swinging past he couldn’t wait for him before he got started. He wasn’t CEO anymore, but he still had precious little free time. He was on his own.

Alan flipped the fuse, and the first strains of music from the jukebox felt like a direct punch to his heart.

His jacket had been neatly folded by his briefcase at the door and his shirtsleeves were rolled up by about the second hour. He hadn’t been wrong about the dust - it clung to him, leaving occasional grey smears on the backs of his hands, and the rest of his clothing was something of a lost cause.

He hadn't bothered searching Flynn's living space for clues as to his whereabouts. The arcade had been the centre of the police investigation once they realised they had a missing persons case - the Ducati had still been parked out front, even if its rider was nowhere to be seen. The office was the first thing to get checked, in case something - a note, anything - had been left behind. As it was, the only thing left upstairs was the furniture… and the memories.

The nostalgia followed him as he added more and more notes to paper, working his way methodically through the building. He'd have to come back to get more accurate measurements and tie up a few loose ends, but he was starting to get a picture of what this place needed. A few more checks, and he could go.

He rubbed the bridge of his nose and, out of the corner of his eye, caught sight of the last cabinet he had to review. It wasn’t that he’d been avoiding it… well, no, he had been avoiding it. Despite Flynn’s copious reassurances, he was still faintly embarrassed by his own face staring out at him from the branding. He still wasn’t sure why he’d caved to Flynn’s request, or why Flynn had been so insistent that no one else could model for Tron.

It hadn’t seemed like too bad an idea at the time - but that was before Flynn had built an empire out of the game and Alan was resigned to a lifetime of jokes both at work and beyond.

“Tron saved us once, Flynn,” he muttered under his breath as he made his way over, placing his clipboard on the ground and standing back up to rest his hands against the controls. “Too bad it’s not that easy this time, huh?”

The screen, as if in response, flickered - the idle animation of the two figures eternally racing wavering and stretching, oddly distorted. Alan banged one hand against the side of the cabinet and it stabilised, briefly, before starting to waver once more.

Roy was going to need to look at this one, potentially make some repairs before they sent it off to storage. Or…

“It could be just the power,” Alan said to himself, looking around at the other machines - all which had otherwise been in good shape. It seemed unlikely that just the one would have issues. “Maybe the plug’s loose?”

He nudged the clipboard out of his way with his foot and braced his shoulder against the cabinet, intent on bringing it forward a few inches so he could check the socket behind it.

He nearly fell over when the cabinet swung forward, faster and smoother than he had anticipated. Almost like it was designed -

His breath caught in his throat as he saw the door. The new to him door, despite believing he knew every inch of this place.

The possibility that Flynn didn’t know about it was nil to none. That he, Alan, didn’t - that the arcade was the last place that anyone had seen -

The cabinet was on a hinge, he noted distantly, as if set up so it could be moved quickly. This was not some storage space that had been blocked off accidentally.

It also hadn’t been in the floor plans.

By nature, Alan was not an anxious man. But his hands shook, briefly, as he pushed the door open to reveal the darkness of the passage behind it.

He stared into the shadows, and thought a lot of things very quickly. He needed to check it out. But it was dark in there, and he hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight. The lights of the arcade only made it comparatively darker - and - he curled his hand around and tentatively felt the wall - there was no light switch. He needed to tell Lora, and Roy. Maybe they knew about this already, but he doubted it. And, just in case, whatever he found down there… he wanted them to know where he was, what he’d found, before he went further. He debated for a second about telling Sam, Lynda, Mac, before disregarding that just as quickly. He’d tell them if he found something of substance, not before. He would not grant them false hope.

He stepped into the space. He couldn’t not. But even as he did, he knew he couldn’t go far - he got the sense that the passageway extended onwards, but it really was too dark to see. He wanted to walk forward anyway, say screw it, explore - but, even as he was considering it, he knew he couldn’t. He was, as ever, careful. Diligent. He had to be.

It took almost everything he had to step out, close the door, and swing the cabinet back in place. It was even harder to pick up his clipboard and walk away, locking up behind him.

It was only the knowledge that he’d be back, and soon, that let him drive away. Still - he couldn’t help a backwards glance or two as the building receded into the distance.

Flynn - what happened?

Where are you?

Chapter Text

Alan had gone home. He’d forced himself to eat something. He’d had a shower, got changed, and left two voicemail messages - one to Lora, and one to Roy.

By the time he returned to the arcade, it was late. The traffic that he’d been caught in before had all but disappeared, and when he flipped on the fuse again, the blast of noise seemed to stand out all the more against the silence. He made sure the security gate was locked and headed back to the passage.

He was armed with a flashlight this time, and a cursory examination of the hallway he ended up in revealed nothing more than a set of stairs leading… somewhere. A click behind him made him whirl about to find that the door had swung closed - heart in his mouth, he gently tested it to make sure he wasn’t trapped. When it moved, easily, he sighed in relief and then snorted at his own skittishness.

But then - he reflected - it wasn’t like he didn’t have a reason. By rights, this could be nothing - but something in his gut said that this was it, that this was somehow linked to everything that had happened all those years ago.

He was getting more nervous as he made his way down the stairs, ending up in front of a set of double doors. And - the keys. The keys in the lock. He knew them, knew the keychain, had had them casually thrown in his direction often enough - usually whenever Kevin had asked him to open up the house, his own hands full with wrestling Sam from the baby seat in the car.

They'd been declared lost long ago.

By this stage he could hear his own heartbeat, a rhythmic pounding in his head. He almost wasn’t breathing as he reached out, grasped the handle, and pulled it open to reveal -

A workspace. A private workspace. Notes, scattered everywhere, a couch still in disarray and with one of Flynn’s handheld games left on the cushions - as if he’d be back to pick it up any second, like it had never been abandoned.

And, just to the side was - wait - hang on - was that -

Alan knew that the SHIVA project was still active, even if the funding had slowed to basically nothing - the board was considering canning it entirely, even if he himself was protesting the move at every step. He’d have heard if the laser had been taken from the lab. But - there it was - a second generation SHV. He’d thought that there had been only one. Surely Flynn wouldn’t have - he wouldn’t have taken it from his own company, surely? Did Lora know about this?

It had been there for a while, too, if he was any judge of the matter. This place didn’t look like it had been disturbed for years, and the laser was well-established, wired up, cables securely fastened to the banks of technology behind it.

Flynn - what were you doing?

This… wasn’t what he had expected to find. Not that he knew, really, what he expected, other than it… wasn’t this.

He flicked his light around the room, noting the photos on the wall, the filing cabinets - the terminal. One of the old touch screens that ENCOM had used in its executive offices, and - as he got closer - one that was… still running?

The screen showed nothing but the uptime, ticking onwards - an incredibly impressive -

Alan sat down in the chair, hard, staring at the number, mentally doing some math. No matter how he cut it - the computer had been running since Flynn’s disappearance. It couldn’t be a coincidence. He wouldn’t believe it. A secret room, a hidden office - well, lab, really - and now a computer that had been active for as long as Flynn had been gone?

He shifted forward and reached out a tentative hand to brush against its surface. The screen came to life, keyboard at the ready, as if it had only been used yesterday.

Alan took a second just to sit, absorbing it all, before leaning forward again and getting to work.

He pulled up the logs, dug through the code, looking for an explanation. An ID check confirmed that - not that he really needed the proof - all this was Flynn's. A check of the history was much more rewarding.

Flynn had accessed the laser controls?

[Aperture clear? Y/N?]

He shot a nervous glance behind him. If this was referring to what he thought it was referring to - he’d been in the laser bay often enough with Lora and Gibbs, and, well, he remembered the precautions they’d taken whenever they were experimenting. Goggles, safety suits, hard hats. Precautions that were conspicuously absent, here, with the laser aimed at the very chair he sat in.

Which was also not likely a coincidence, now that he thought about it.

N, he selected, and sat back, thinking. Behind him, he could hear a faint whine as something seemed to power down.

Here’s what he knew.

Flynn had been gone, for six years. The last known trace of him was here, at the arcade, but they’d found nothing to indicate where he’d disappeared to. He’d found this - a secret lab that none of them had known about. The SHV laser was here. A computer was here that had been running since Flynn’s disappearance.

...Flynn, before he’d vanished, had been acting erratically, even more so than usual. At the time, he’d thought it was just stress - between Jordan, Sam, and ENCOM, it wasn’t like he didn’t have an excuse - but he’d also had a project. One that he wouldn’t tell Alan about, other than his talk of - well, his dream for a ‘digital frontier’. Quantum teleportation, he’d said to Alan. I got in, he’d said to Sam, an idea that Sam had clung to - a story that Alan himself had dismissed as little more than creative fiction.

Alan, with a sinking feeling in his stomach, remembered what he used to tease Lora about while she was working on the laser. Can it send me to Hawaii?

Surely Flynn wouldn’t be so reckless as to…

He would. Alan knew he would, even as the sinking feeling solidified to an angry ball in his gut. This was Lora’s baby, and Flynn had - what? Tinkered with it in his off time? Told no one about it, despite the incredible risks that the laser project had? Hadn’t shared the results of his experiments?

Built or stole one, placed it in his basement, and -

“Why didn’t you tell us,” he growled, staring at the screen in front of him. “We would have backed you up, helped you. We were a team.”

Except, apparently, in this.

He took a few moments just to breathe, trying to calm down. His thoughts stormed, cursing the sheer bloody stupidity of trying to play with digitisation in an uncontrolled environment. He had thought Flynn was a visionary - and he had been. He just hadn’t thought that he’d be so idiotic about it.

But then - that was Flynn’s own particular brand of chaos, wasn’t it? To try to take on the world by himself, until he couldn’t. He always had been too proud to ask for help, even if he might accept it if quietly offered.

It wasn’t like Alan hadn’t had a front row seat to all of that before.

Breathe.

Next steps. That was what he needed to do. Work out the next steps. All he had at the moment were pieces of the puzzle - not the full picture.

He closed his eyes, and reopened them. Maybe, if he wanted to get to the bottom of this, recreate whatever had happened that night… god help him, he had to act like Kevin.

But not before he made some calls.

I’m going to do something stupid, were his first words as he leaned against one of the games out on the floor, cell phone pushed to his ear with its antenna extended.

He’d hit their answering machines again, though considering the hour, that wasn’t unexpected. As quickly as he could, he updated them on what he had found… and just what, exactly, he was planning on doing.

I know the lectures I’m about to get, he’d continued, and believe me, I’m telling myself the same things. But - that laser is the key, I know it. And if there’s even a chance -

He paused, hesitating. He could be signing his own death warrant by doing this - the SHIVA project had never reached the level of human digitisation, even as they had moved on to more and more complex objects. Did he really want to do this?

...Flynn had been telling Sam those Grid stories for years. If he had been using the laser then it hadn’t been just a once-off, and he’d clearly had some way of controlling the process from the inside. It would have to be enough.

And he couldn’t wait. Even as he knew that he should, that Lora knew more about this than he did, that it was a stupid risk with an uncertain outcome...

But if his was where Flynn had been this whole time -

I have to try.

He’d spent six years waiting. And, right now, he could feel every single one of them weighing him down.

[Aperture clear? Y/N?]

Alan looked around once more, and wondered just what, exactly, he was getting himself into.

Y, he selected.

And the world - dissolved.

When Alan came to, he felt as if he’d just finished three back to back rides of Montezooma's Revenge. He kept his eyes closed, fighting back the waves of nausea, before his stomach settled enough that he could tentatively crack open an eyelid.

He saw - the terminal, in front of him, as it had been a second ago. Maybe nothing had happened…?

But even as he patted himself down, made sure that he was alive and in one piece, he could see the differences. The dust on the surface of the screen - wiped. The light streaming from the window was harsher, strange, and as he swung the chair around slowly he could see that the rest of the room had changed as well - the laser was gone, as was all the messy detritus of notes, blankets, and photos. It was clean. Neat. Empty.

It felt, Alan thought, a little too sterile.

But also - he swung back to look at the terminal again, and then at the space where the laser had been - exhilarating. For all that this was a stupid risk, he felt like he’d walked into a science fiction story. He wasn’t sure where he was, if he’d been teleported somewhere or if he’d somehow, impossibly, entered the computer - but what he did know was that he’d been in the arcade, and now, in the space of a moment, he was elsewhere.

“You son of a gun,” he breathed. “You did it.”

And had never told them about it, but at this moment he was too caught up in the awe to be angry.

He reached for his glasses and ineffectively batted at his own face before he realised that, of all things, they didn’t seem to have come along with him. His groan was audible - until he swung back to the computer to check that they hadn’t just fallen off, and realised to his confusion that he was able to see just fine.

He waved his hand in front of his face, close, and then far. Perfect vision.

“Fascinating,” he said, and then chuckled, still somewhat in shock. ‘Beam me up, Scotty!’ indeed. If Flynn had been working on this then maybe a transporter wasn’t so far fetched after all. He still wasn’t convinced he wasn’t dreaming, but… it felt real.

He looked at the workstation in front of him. The screen was dark, but as he touched it, it lit up again - but with a new interface, not something he was familiar with. It was graphical, futuristic, and as his eyes swept across the odd shapes it dawned on him that with the laser gone he had no idea how to get back to the arcade.

He’d half assumed that it would be obvious, somehow, that there’d be some glowing sign he could follow - maybe a gigantic red button that said press x to activate laser. If this was the Grid, and he was in a computer - and he still marvelled at how real this all felt, how mundanely it presented itself - Flynn would have had to include some way of returning.

So why didn’t Flynn come back? He thought, and paused. Flynn wouldn’t have run off on them. Not by choice. Something, somewhere, had gone wrong.

...maybe Alan had been too reckless. As amazing as this was - he didn’t know where he was, or how this worked, or even, really, what he was doing.

Just in case, he pulled out his cell phone and checked it. No signal. Figured. He stashed it back in his pocket and thought for a second before turning to the information on the screen in front of him. Current status of the Grid, it told him. Power use: green. Uptime: green. Welcome, Flynn.

He stretched his fingers out, and started to search for some answers.

They’d been in the middle of a training simulation when Tron had abruptly pulled back, tensing up as if he’d been hit. Beck, who had been nowhere close to catching him, took it for the opportunity it presented itself as - he ducked, low, and was about to release a shot when Tron lifted his hand as if to say /stop/, head tilted as if he was listening to something in the distance. The environment around them suddenly receded, the various faceless mooks dissolving to wireframes as the room they were in reset.

When Tron took off at a dead run, Beck feared the worst.

“Tron?” he questioned, reholstering his disc as he turned to follow. “What’s happening?”

He didn’t get a response. Tron was already out of the room entirely, and as Beck caught up to him, the feed pulled up on the main display at least partially answered his question.

“I left a sensor,” said Tron, not turning around - fingers frantically tapping at various panels, as if trying to confirm what they could already see. “Before - I left one at the portal, one the arcade. Flynn would occasionally get too caught up in his new inventions to announce when he’d arrived, and at least this way, I knew -”

“The portal,” breathed Beck. In all of his runtime, he’d only ever seen it lit once. He'd been compiled just before the end of the User era, but programs still had legends, still shared stories of before. "Isn’t that where - is that where Users join the Grid?"

"The portal is where they get out," Tron said, grimly, still tapping away. "Which means that there's a User on the Grid already. We need to go.”

“What? Why?”

Tron had already turned to leave, not waiting to see if Beck was following. “Because if we know about this, Clu will find out just as quickly. We need to get to them before he does.”

Beck hurried after him again, worry rearing its ugly head. He had a sinking feeling, and a suspicion that he already knew what the answer was going to be, but - “What can we do? Surely you aren’t planning on going after them, I mean, your health -”

“My health means nothing if Clu gets his hands on a User!” Tron snapped at him, pausing and turning to face him briefly as if to make his point clearer. “If he gets his hands on Flynn or anyone else then it’s game over for all of us.”

“But if he gets his hands on you, it isn’t?” Beck parried back, reaching out and grasping Tron’s shoulder. “There’s a reason you trained me. This isn’t like you. If we’re going to do this, we have to plan, at least, we can’t just run out there! You were the one who taught me that.”

Tron looked away, clenching and unclenching his fists, and Beck knew that he’d won the argument. “I get that you want to help them. I do too. But it’s at least a millicycle to get to the centre of the Grid, and then what? What if Clu is there?”

Tron sighed.

“You don’t get it, Beck,” he said, not meeting his eyes. “I can’t not go. It’s in my directive, it’s what I do. Flynn disappeared out of my scan range long ago, but - I can tell that someone’s here. Someone new. They’re... different. And I doubt that they’re prepared for what the Grid’s turned into.”

Beck considered this. “But… they’re a User, right? Surely they wouldn’t be in that much danger.”

The look Tron gave him was a heavy mix of both exhaustion and despair.

“If only that were true, Beck,” he said. “If only that were true.”

Chapter Text

Twenty minutes later, Alan had learnt that he needed to access something called a “codestream portal” to exit this place, and that wherever it was, it wasn’t here. He’d wrestled with the interface, looking for some kind of FAQ - he couldn’t find one, but he’d still managed to discover two key pieces of information. Namely - there was an exit, even if he wasn’t sure where it was. And that the system was managed by something called Clu - the name appeared at least as often as Flynn’s in the otherwise incomprehensible maintenance logs.

It had rung a bell, and Alan remembered the stories that Flynn would tell - the comics, even the toys. Codified Likeness Utility. This must have been where he’d gotten the idea for the character.

But he’d found little else. The workstation clearly wasn’t designed to be a system in its own right - it showed some diagnostics, but nothing of true value. Wherever his answers were, he wasn’t getting them from here. More importantly, it had nothing on Flynn or his whereabouts.

A few taps later and the screen in front of him powered down. He stretched, and hesitated.

Where to from now? If the exit was elsewhere, there had to be an elsewhere - wherever he had ended up, it clearly wasn’t limited to just one room and a desk. He eyed off the double doors before glancing around the lab one last time. Nothing new stood out, nothing that would give him an idea of what to expect.

Seemed like the only way out was through.

Moving forward, he cracked one of the doors open an inch, warily peering through at the space beyond. Too dark to see properly, really, but it seemed peaceful enough. Shrugging, he pushed them both wide and realised with a start that he was in a carbon copy of the arcade he'd just left - placed almost exactly where the Tron cabinet had been.

The incongruity of it all made him laugh a little. Whatever this was, Flynn had definitely been involved.

He took a few tentative steps into the gloom, getting bolder with each one, until a sudden roar of noise and light made him jump back. Something rattled the space, something big, and he cautiously crept up to the windows to get a better view.

The sight stole his breath again. It was a recognizer, something he’d seen a million times on the other side of the screen. This one, though, looked dangerous in a way that all the others hadn’t. Maybe because this time, it was real.

The red of its lights twisted something in his gut. Bad news, he thought, though he wasn’t sure where the feeling had come from. The bleed of the neon made strange reflections against the rest of the street - and if he hadn’t believed he’d been digitised before, the impossible architecture outside would have been all the proof he needed. I’m not in Kansas, anymore, Toto, he thought as he took in the hulking buildings wrapped in white.

The recognizer landed with a tremor he could feel, the centre sliding down and unfolding to reveal -

Alan had already been through about as many surprises as he could handle in one night. So when the recognizer disgorged multiple human figures, dressed in the same ugly red-and-yellow highlights as the ship - all he could manage was a whispered “What.”

Most of them had helmets on. He squinted, trying to get a better view - none of them moved like Flynn, acted like Flynn, shared Flynn’s body shape. They couldn’t have been other digitised people, surely? Flynn was many things, but a kidnapper he was not - and they would have noticed if another ten people had gone missing on the same night in 1989.

He ducked his head below the windows entirely, sneaking forward to try and get closer without being seen. When he raised it again, carefully, he refocused to - and - wait, was that Andrew Kresnky??

He stared at the face of the senior software engineer. He hadn’t seen him in years, but he had definitely seen him after Flynn had gone missing - he was one of the employees that ENCOM had laid off in their first round of budget cuts, the beginning of the end.

But right now, he was apparently dressed in lycra and tapping away at some kind of fancy PDA. He wouldn’t have looked out of place, minus the bodysuit, at any of ENCOM’s general meetings.

Sam, thought Alan, I’m never going to dismiss your bedtime stories ever again.

Programs. The figures had to be programs. It was the only thing that made sense in the contexts that he knew - Flynn's jokes, the way he marketed his games, heck, even how Sam used to play, stretched out of the floor and holding his program action figures. He'd always thought it was just a gimmick.

It sounded insane, but then, he was already at his limit for impossible things. He was in a computer. Nothing about today had gone how he'd expected.

So sure, why not? The programs were people. He was in a computer. The streets looked like someone had watched too much sci-fi and decided that the new ‘it thing’ in architecture was hundreds of glowing lights.

Jordan would have had something to say about that, he was sure.

At this stage all he could do was roll with it.

A shouted “Listen up!” recaught his attention, and he watched as one of the figures addressed the group out front, arranged in what could only be called military rows. “Clu has ordered a sweep of this area! You have your assignments! Two by two! Cohen! Take the arcade! The User is out there and we will find them!”

Alan… knew that they were talking about him. Nothing else made sense. He slunk back down, out of sight.

They didn’t look friendly. They didn’t sound friendly, either, the overall vibe giving him the impression of some sort of hostile military group. The red lights and the recognizer still sat uncomfortably in his gut - video game logic, maybe, but then this was a system built by Flynn - who had tended to be consistent, if simplistic, in his colour coding. If they were bad guys, and they were searching for him, he didn’t want to be caught.

But where could he go? He didn’t know where he was, and the most obvious way out was already blocked.

...But if this was a faithful copy of the arcade then it had a backdoor. Normally it led into an alley with nothing more exciting than a few dumpsters - here, he wasn’t sure where it might lead to, but it had to be better than what was currently outside.

He kept low, shuffling across the floor to where he knew the staff room was located. And - bingo. There it was, almost invisible in the darkness.

He slipped out via the exit just as the arcade door slammed open behind him.

Tron was as tense as Beck had ever seen him. He’d stopped long enough to plan, as per Beck’s suggestion, but that was all - the second that they had something even remotely workable in place, Tron had all but run out of the safehouse.

It was odd. The only other time he’d seen Tron so thrown off-kilter was with Dyson, and that wasn’t something he wanted to re-live.

Seeing someone usually so stoic almost frantic in his haste was not doing wonders for Beck’s own nerves. And as they sped towards Argon, twin lightcycles kicking up the snow of the outlands, he had plenty of time to stew.

“What was Flynn like?” he asked, raising his voice so it could be heard over the bikes. He normally didn’t ask Tron about his runtime before Clu, but he was desperate for a distraction. And at any rate, he justified to himself, he needed to know about Users if he was trying to protect one.

Tron didn’t answer for a long time, long enough that Beck had given up on a response, before he said, “Did I ever tell you that the Grid wasn’t my original system?”

He wondered where this was going. “I mean, I knew, kind of,” he replied. “Kind of like the old 786 lightbikes, and Able’s Bit. You were from the ENCOM mainframe, right?”

“That’s right,” he got in reply, followed by another silence, and then a sigh. “The system I was compiled into had its own Clu. The MCP. Another program that decided that the best way to run a system was to control all the programs within it, derezzing at a whim. A petty tyrant, but he’d had enough power to enforce his will.”

This, Beck hadn’t known. “And? You stopped him?”

“I did.”

With his helmet up, Beck couldn’t read the expression on Tron’s face. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to. “So why’d you come here?”

Another silence, one that Beck waited through. The snow kept swirling around them, and in the distance, the lights of Argon were getting closer.

“When I took down the MCP,” he said, eventually, “I wasn’t alone. It had brought Flynn into the system and we met while trying to stop it. I’d always seen Users as - untouchable. There was no ‘creator of the grid’ in those days, no meeting your User face to face. The only way you could communicate was through an I/O tower, and that was it.”

“An I/O tower?” Beck asked. “I don’t know what that is.”

“You wouldn’t. It was never used much here, not when Flynn could just access the Grid directly. But before meeting him, I thought that Users knew what they were doing. Like they had a plan. That they had it all figured out. Flynn blew all of that out of the water. ‘You just keep doing what it looks like you’re supposed to be doing and hope for the best’, he told me.”

“That’s not bad advice.”

“It’s not. But it wasn’t what I expected. And then he threw himself at the MCP to give me a chance to shut it down.”

Beck wasn’t sure what the appropriate response to that was. While he was trying to figure it out, Tron continued,

“He was just a person, Beck. Users are just people, though with more power than they know. And he was, first and foremost, a good friend. You want to know why I came here? To the Grid?”

“Yeah?”

“Because he asked. That’s all. Because he asked.”

They pulled up, out of sight, before they hit the garage. Tron disappeared while Beck unmasked, stored away the lightcycles, and walked through to Abel’s directly.

“Beck! Beck!” was his only warning before Mara was on him, catching his arm and spinning him around excitedly. “Have you heard the news?!”

“Rumour, Mara,” commented Zed, coming up behind them. “It’s just a rumour. We can’t see it from here, so it’s not like we have proof.”

“We have proof,” she rebutted, still delighted. “Another mechanic in the city sent me a gif. The portal is open. There’s a User on the grid. Isn’t it amazing?”

“Amazing,” said Beck, “Sure.”

Amazing in how fast they had to get to them to make sure that Clu was stopped, at least.

“Don’t be like that, Beck!” said Mara, determined to be positive, still hanging off his arm. “They could solve this, the occupation, all of it! If anyone could take on Clu, it’s a User.”

“It’s not like Flynn was able to stop him!” argued back Zed, clearly re-treading the grooves of a conversation they’d already had. “And if Flynn couldn’t, what chance does this User have? Flynn’s had cycles upon cycles to do something about Clu, and, oh look, he’s still in power.”

“I believe in them,” said Mara, firmly. “This is going to change everything.”

Beck steadied himself.

“Actually, speaking of changing everything,” he said, “Can both of you follow me to Able’s office? I’ve got something I want to tell you.”

Both Mara and Zed looked startled, and then suspicious. Beck winced a little - he’d earned those looks. Once upon a time they would have followed him without question.

“Why?” asked Zed. “Can’t you tell us out here?”

“I really can’t,” said Beck, and started moving. Zed and Mara followed him, lagging behind. “This is more something I have to show you. C'mon."

Able was already inside, feet propped up on his desk, deceptively casual. Tron was only visible with a second glance, and only if you already knew he was there - masked, and with the barest of circuits showing.

Beck could still tell he was getting impatient, though. It was in his stance, one of his few tells. He huffed a laugh under his breath as he waited for Mara and Zed to enter fully and for the door to close.

Mara glanced about as she did, clearly picking up on something about the situation.

“Able?” she asked, reaching for the familiar. “What’s going on?”

Able held up both his hands as if to say not me, keeping his feet on the desk. “Ohhh no. This isn’t my show. This is all Beck’s. I’m just here for moral support.”

“Moral support? What? What is this about?”

“It’s about,” said Beck, turning to face them both, taking a moment to recenter, “Where I’ve been when I haven’t been at work. It’s about something important. And while I can’t regret not telling you, we need your help if you’ll give it.”

He shouldn’t be nervous, he thought. Considering what he usually faced, this was a breeze. And yet. Here he was. Funny, that.

Behind his back, he snapped his two discs together. Made them whole.

“Beck?” asked Zed, eyebrows lifting. “Sounding kinda dramatic there, though you’re not making a lick of sense. You wanna explain?”

“I think it’d be easier if I just showed you,” he said, and connected his disc to its dock.

The white of the armor unfurled. The Renegade stood before them, and Beck straightened his posture, fell into a stance to match.

Mara gasped, her hands raising to cover her mouth.

“What.” said Zed, flatly.

“I’m the Renegade.”

“What.” repeated Zed. Mara was still standing there, staring.

“I said I’m the -”

“Yeah, no, I got that bit,” said Zed, cutting him off. “Thanks. What I actually meant was - why? And how? And more importantly, are you insane?”

“Zed!” cried Mara, shooting him a Look.

“It’s a legitimate question!”

“Thanks, Zed,” said Beck, dryly. “I’d like to think I’m not, at least.”

“But - if you’re the Renegade, and don’t think I don’t have questions about that,” said Mara, frowning as if she was thinking something through, “then Tron -”

“Lives” said Tron, and Mara and Zed just about hit the roof as they startled away from the figure emerging from the shadows. It was a good thing the office was soundproofed, as Zed’s shriek could have broken glass.

“Couldn’t resist an entrance, could you,” muttered Able, and shared a grinning eyeroll with Beck.

“Zed, Mara,” said Beck, still smiling slightly, “Let me introduce you to someone.”

Tron’s helmet unfolded, and he nodded his head to them both. “Beck’s told me all about you. Nice to meet you at last.”

“Tron Lives,” breathed Mara, a blinding smile slowly creeping over her face. “I was right! I knew it! I knew you weren’t dead!”

“Not dead,” said Tron, “Just -”

He paused, as if trying to work out how to word it.

“Injured. Badly,” said Beck, quietly, and raised an eyebrow in response to Tron’s annoyed glance. What? I’m right. And you can’t keep it from them forever.

“Beck may have phrased that inelegantly, but yes,” sighed Tron. “I was damaged in the fight against Clu. Permanently. And I’m limited, now, in what I can do. Which is why I’ve been training Beck and why we need you now. A revolution for the Grid is coming, and we need allies.”

“I’m in,” said Mara immediately. “But then you knew that already, Renegade.”

“I’m not apologising for that,” said Beck, standing firm. “I couldn’t lose you too.”

“That’s why you said no? That wasn’t your choice to make!”

Beck opened his mouth to respond, but Zed was faster.

“Uh, guys,” he said, cutting in. “Clearly I’m missing something here, but - other than Mr Double Life here, we’re just mechanics. Why do you need our help?”

“This has something to do with the User, doesn’t it,” asked Mara, connecting the dots.

“It does,” said Tron. “We need to get to the centre of the Grid, and quickly. The User would have rezzed in at Flynn’s arcade, in the heart of the main city, and we need to get to them before Clu does.”

“They’ll be expecting Tron,” continued Back. “Potentially the Renegade, too, though we’re not sure if they think we're one and the same. Every eye in the city will be looking for the User right now, and Clu will know that we’ll be looking for them too. He’ll probably be expecting us to come in from the Outlands, sneak in that way. The stealth approach.”

“So we do something else,” said Tron. “It’s riskier, which conversely makes it safer. We take the direct route, one of the express trains.”

“They won’t be looking for a group of four friends who just happen to be heading into the city on their off-cycle,” said Beck. “Or at least we hope not. It’s our best shot at short notice.”

“We won’t lie. It’s still dangerous,” said Tron, “But we’re out of options and out of time. We need to leave now if we’re to even stand a chance of catching up with both the User and Clu.”

Zed and Mara had been listening, though they still looked a bit shell shocked at the situation. Beck couldn’t blame them.

“One question, though,” asked Mara, slowly. “You’ve described how we get to the city, but what happens once we’re all there?”

Beck looked at Tron. Tron mostly just looked grim. “We work that out when we get there. We don’t know who this User is. It’ll all hinge on who they are and what they do. They’re the key.”

Zed raised a tentative hand, before saying, “Is anyone else seeing the problem with the idea of four friends just hanging out when one of those friends is Tron? You’re famous, you know. If you turn up with us we’re just going to bring the occupation down on our heads. Not that I’m saying yes to this yet. I’m just saying.”

“That’s where Able comes in,” said Tron, moving aside as Able ambled up next to him. He waved a device at the group, looking pleased with himself.

“Beck once told me about a program that had worked out how to code identity disguises. I took a little inspiration from this, a little banned tech from that, and voilà. I call it the I-Don’t.”

He looked far too pleased with himself at the name.

“It should last for a while, more than enough time to get to the city. And you can re-apply it if need be. There should be enough in there for dozens of disguises, though hopefully only Tron will need it. Oh, and speaking of, Tron -”

He threw the ID device at Tron, who caught it easily, and then moved around to a wall that looked just like the others. He spread his hand on it, tapped out a sequence, and a section dropped away to reveal a hidden shelf.

He took out a cloak, a bag, and a decently sized container of pure energy, then rezzed the wall back up. He passed it all to Tron and said, “This isn’t a long-term solution like your healing chamber, but it should be enough for what you have planned. There’s extra, in case.”

“Thanks, Able,” said Beck, and Tron gave an acknowledging nod. “We appreciate it.”

“Just come back in one piece,” he said, waving it away. “And bring Zed and Mara back safe. It’s been a long time since this Grid had hope.”

“I haven’t said yes yet!” said Zed, “I still have questions! Many, many questions!”

“I’ll promise I’ll answer what I can,” said Beck. “After all of this. Are you with me?”

“C’mon, Zed,” said Mara, linking arms with him. “Haven’t you always wanted to rebel a little?”

“No!”

“Well, I have,” she said, cheerfully. “They won’t know what’s hit them.”

Chapter Text

After Flynn's disappearance, ENCOM had made extortion, kidnapping, and crisis training mandatory for all of its executives. It wasn't a new thing - the financial sector had long offered it to all their general managers, but before that night in 1989, no one in consumer technology had ever really taken the threat seriously.

Flynn probably hadn’t been kidnapped. There had been no signs of a struggle at the arcade, no ransom note left behind. Even so - a missing CEO and no clear cause to pin it to had had a chilling effect on the company’s risk tolerance, and ENCOM had signed a partnership with a security firm in a little under a year later.

Most of the advice provided to the board had boiled down to follow the instructions of your security team and let the professionals handle it. The money is insured and you're worth more to us alive. But there had been a few sessions on what to do if being followed, some practical advice on how to try and control a situation before it escalated to the point of no return.

Alan couldn’t remember every lesson from the seminars, but right now, he was glad he'd attended them.

The backdoor had led to something the equivalent of an alley in the real world - a narrow, dimly lit space that gave the impression of function without fuss. Moving as quietly and as quickly as he could, he picked the direction that led furthest away from the recognizer and started walking.

The first rule given in the training had been keep as calm as possible. Alan thought he was managing that one rather well, given the circumstances.

The second rule had been don't let your adversary know that you're aware of them, but try to make it harder for them to tail you. It was common sense, and maybe it sounded obvious, but they’d elaborated on it a bit further than that.

He didn’t run. Running drew attention, tipped them off. He didn’t glance behind him. He walked carefully, alert for any noises, scanning the scene in front of him - but he could have been out enjoying a stroll around the local park if you had judged him by posture alone.

Rule three had been look for a public space. Crowds served two purposes - if there were other people around, an individual became harder to track. Eyes in the street also meant that you were less likely to be directly confronted, too much of a risk of someone intervening.

The other half of rule three had been call local law enforcement and then your security operations center. Listen to their advice.

Alan only wished that was currently an option.

He must have been doing something right, though, as all was quiet by the time he reached what looked like a main road. He was starting to get the impression that this place was organised like a city, as absurd as it seemed - Flynn’s arcade was one thing, but surely the inside of a computer should have appeared more alien than downtown LA.

His impression was only reinforced as he entered the road proper and saw the skyline. Skyscrapers, dozens of them, reaching dizzying heights. Mid-rise buildings here and there, spacing out the blocks. All of them highlighted with white lines, varying designs that wrapped around their facades like circuits.

It was beautiful. Surreal, but… beautiful.

And so, so, weird. For someone who’d grown up on science fiction, it really was like a story come to life.

He took a moment to just drink it in, before refocusing on his immediate surroundings. There were others here, for all the world acting like normal people - the occasional group talking, some clustered outside of buildings, some just passing through. Though some of them wore spandex bodysuits, jackets and pants were common enough - all in the same cyberpunk style as the rest of the city, glowing patterns seemingly melded with the fabric. None of them were paying any attention to him.

Alan looked down at his own lightless clothes and tried to adjust them surreptitiously, but he knew it was a lost cause. Nothing for it. He hadn’t thought to pack reflective tape for his outing tonight.

He randomly picked a new direction and headed that way with purpose, trying to match the body language of others on the street and keeping his head low. Nothing to see here, he tried to project, and hoped it was enough to hide him until he could get further away.

He’d managed to walk further and further from the recognizer and the red-and-yellow soldiers until he was thoroughly lost somewhere in what, on the outside, he'd have called mid-city.

This place was big, surprisingly so, and he figured he was out of range enough now that he could pause. Catch a breather, try and plan something longer term than just what direction he was pointed in. Actually work out what he was going to do - how he was going to find Flynn and get home, what would come next. He was tempted to just ask someone, but he wasn’t sure how he’d approach it - interrupt a passerby and interrogate them? Have you seen this man?

He didn’t want to think what it would mean if Flynn wasn’t here at all. It wasn’t a possibility he was willing to entertain - everything pointed to this place as Flynn’s last known whereabouts, and someone here had to have known him and where he'd gone.

And then there was the question of the soldiers. Who were they? And why were they so interested in - well, him?

He was leaning into the recess of a building, debating his options, when he heard the yelling. It was frantic, desperate, almost pleading, and more importantly - it was close.

He closed his eyes and tried his best to ignore it. He didn’t know this place. He was trying not to draw attention to himself. He probably wouldn't be able to help anyway.

The yelling got louder until it was followed by an odd crack, and then a split second of silence.

The scream that followed was worse.

Alan opened his eyes. Reluctantly, already mentally kicking himself, he started moving, heading to where the shouts were coming from - one of the many side streets that seemed to space the area at regular intervals, like service lanes.

There were other people around, but as he got closer he noticed that they had hunched their shoulders and picked up their pace, hurrying away - as if they knew what was happening and didn’t want to be involved. The road was noticeably more deserted than it had been a few seconds ago and Alan felt the dread start to pool in his stomach.

He was close enough to make out actual words now from the noise - and - was that crying?

“You didn’t have to do that!” he heard, and he rounded the corner to find an oh god dressed in red soldier pointing a staff at someone, clearly threatening them. The ground was littered with oddly textured cubes, a weird detail Alan filed away for later, and she was on her knees amongst them - clutching at them even as they seemed to dissolve away.

“He was found in the possession of contraband” said the soldier, and unlike the woman, he sounded almost robotic.

“He would have come with you! You didn’t have to derez him just for talking back!”

“If you do not comply, you will share the same fate.”

The mutinous expression on her face showed exactly what she thought of that.

Alan had heard enough.

"Excuse me," he said, stepping smoothly between the officer and the woman, coincidentally knocking the staff a few inches out of the way as he did so, "Is there a problem here?"

The guard - there was no other word for it - flinched, almost losing his grip on his weapon and staggering back as if he’d seen a ghost.

Not the reaction he’d expected. He couldn’t flatter himself, he knew he didn’t cut an imposing figure - if the guard had decided to retaliate, he wasn’t quite sure what he could have done. Heck, he didn’t even know what he was doing now, mostly running on some kind of fear-laced adrenaline-filled instinct.

But far be it for him to ignore the advantage. He raised an eyebrow and folded his arms. “Well?”

The soldier seemed to be expecting something, if his cowed posture was anything to go by, overtly looking him up and down as if visually searching him. A beat or two later and it was clear he hadn't found what he was looking for. He stood up straighter, though into something of a less aggressive stance, and queried -

“Identify, program.”

Lie, said Alan’s internal voice.

“Roy,” he said externally, and hoped it wouldn’t come back to bite him in the ass.

“Roy,” said the soldier, sounding weirdly relieved, straightening further. “Roy. Submit your disc for verification.”

“My disc?”

“Your disc. Now.”

This was not good.

Alan raised both hands placatingly, trying to stop this from escalating. “Well, uh, you see, I don’t think I have one of those, whatever they are - but - I’m sure we can talk about this...”

He trailed off when he realised his words were falling on deaf ears.

“A stray" the soldier was saying, almost as if talking to himself, still with the weird tone of relief. “Just a stray. A normal stray. A totally normal stray. We have procedures for this.”

Alan had about a half second to be confused before a hand shot out and grabbed his upper arm.

“Now, look here,” he managed, before he was being turned and something that felt an awful lot like cuffs were snapped over his wrists. Oh, god, he thought - this was exactly what he’d been hoping to avoid, and he’d walked into it of his own volition. Well done, Alan, he thought. What am I going to do now?

The one good thing that had come out of all of this was that the street behind him was empty, the woman clearly fleeing while she’d had the opportunity to do so. He had to count that, at least, as a victory.

“Come with me, program” said the soldier, pushing him in the way that meant start walking. “All strays are to go to the game grid.”

Alan had no idea what that was, but he didn't like the sound of it. He tried standing his ground, managing half a turn to look at the guard and say, “Is this really necessar-”

A jab to the small of his back with the staff cut him off, and he knew that it was the last warning he’d get. He was pushed, again, this time the hand catching his shoulder and holding on.

“Move, program.”

Alan shut up, and moved.

Perched on the roof, up where she’d managed to scramble to after the guard had been distracted, Dana watched them both walk away. Neither of them had noticed the tracker she’d snuck on to the stranger’s jacket, the tiniest of items now hidden in the seams. The corresponding puck in her hands beeped gently.

Cutler was right. There was something weird going on, and she had a feeling that it was linked to this stranger - who wore Tron’s face, but not his circuits, his insignia, or his code-identifier, who didn’t ping /safety/ the same way that Tron once had. The stranger who had nevertheless intervened to save her, even if he wasn’t in time for her partner. Her eyes flicked to the portal on the horizon, and back to the figure in the distance.

Cutler’s order to the network, the ask to distract the guards around the city - take their eyes off the streets - suddenly made sense, and she had a sinking feeling that she’d just monumentally screwed up.

He needs to know about this, she thought, and turned to run.

Able’s device had thankfully worked without issues. Tron now wore the guise of a mechanic, young, someone who could have easily worked at the garage with the rest of them. Between that and his cloak, they really did pass as just a group of friends on an outing. The checkpoint guards hadn’t even looked at them when they’d waved them through.

The only thing that broke the illusion was that even a disguise couldn’t hide Tron’s grumpy expression.

They settled in their seats, Beck and Tron both taking the aisle so they could keep a wary eye on anyone approaching. Mara and Zed, determined and resigned respectively, took the window. The rest of the train was relatively empty, only a few programs scattered about here and there - apparently a derailing had brought down passenger numbers recently. Beck could only hope that this trip wasn’t a repeat of last time.

The only thing left to do now… was wait.

“At least we know that Clu hasn’t found the User yet, right?” asked Zed, after a couple of moments of awkward silence. They hadn’t talked much on the way to the station - something about the speed in which they had left hadn’t lent itself to conversation.

“Yet.” said Tron, and lapsed back into silence.

“I mean, at least it’s something. I can only imagine what he’d do if he -”

“Zed, this probably isn’t the best place to have a private conversation,” hissed Mara under her breath, leaning forward to emphasise the point. In an even quieter whisper, she said, "We don't know who's listening."

“What’s private about it? I was just saying,” Zed hissed back, but he matched his volume to hers.

Beck cast a glance around the carriage, but the other programs were far enough away that it shouldn’t be an issue.

“Just keep your voices low,” he said, demonstrating what he meant. “And don’t mention anything specific. Honestly, it’d probably look weirder if we didn’t talk the whole way to the city. Four friends, remember? Most programs would chat.”

He couldn’t help but cast a look to Tron at that, his eyebrow angled in a tease. Tron gave him an unimpressed look straight back, but with his borrowed face it didn’t have the same impact.

Beck just grinned at him and turned back to the others. “Or at least we would.”

“See?” said Zed to Mara, who just rolled her eyes.

“I’m just trying to make sure we don’t blow it before we even get there," she told him.

“You’ve got good instincts,” Tron said to Mara, bluntly. “I can see why Beck was so impressed with your extracurricular activities.”

Mara beamed at that, and said, “I mean, it was nothing. Not like what you’ve both been up to, anyway.”

“You showed others that they could take a stand. You spread the word. That’s not nothing.”

“Uh,” said Zed, watching Mara get increasingly flustered at the praise. “Can someone fill me in? Mara? What are they talking about?”

“I’ll tell you later,” she said, and then turned back to Tron. “So, speaking of taking a stand… how did you and Beck even meet, anyway? Everyone thinks you’re, y’know…”

“Dead?” asked Beck, “I almost thought the same thing before all this started.”

“Exactly! It’s not like any program can just bump into you in the street. So what happened?”

Beck looked to Tron at that, who merely titled his head as if to say after you. He wasn't sure what else he had expected.

“Honestly,” replied Beck, after thinking for a moment, “I'm not actually sure there's much to say. Looking back, it was mostly just luck that we met.”

Tron actually snorted at that, and said, “Luck had nothing to do with it. I was tracking you the second you hit the Outlands.”

“Then you should have caught me sooner,” said Beck, focusing his attention on Tron. “Do you know how long I had to walk to get to your little graveyard of broken transports?”

“Yes,” said Tron, with a very careful not smile dancing around the corners of his mouth. “I watched you walk it.”

“Thanks,” said Beck, rolling his eyes.

“Outlands?” asked Mara, her voice going even lower. “Why were you in the Outlands?”

“Did you mean why I was in the Outlands? Or why Tro- Tyrone was in the Outlands?” asked Beck. “Either way, both are long stories.”

“It’s not like we’ve got anything but time right now,” said Zed. “Pick one, we don’t care.”

Beck looked at Tron again, who just shrugged a shoulder in response. Beck sighed.

“Well,” said Beck. “I can’t get into detail, so most of this is going to be vague, but it started with Bodhi…”

Inside the train, programs hibernated, chatted, waited for time to pass. Outside the train, far on the horizon, something shined in the distance.

It gleamed red.

Chapter Text

Alan had been marched to something that looked like a cargo train, if a cargo train had been designed by a minimalist, and shoved into something that equally resembled a shipping container. Both the train and the container had been lined with the same red highlights as the guard, and he reflected that at least it was an easy way to tell what belonged to who - items, he thought somewhat hysterically, well beyond surprise at this point, have been color coded for your convenience.

He’d been pushed into it so forcefully that he stumbled and fell, knees hitting the floor as the doors slid shut behind him.

He raised his head to find a half dozen faces staring at him in shock.

Alan looked behind him. Nothing there. He looked back at the astonished expressions, and, struggling to right himself, offered an awkward, “Hello?”

One of the figures came towards him, helping him up. The others stood from where they’d been seated, crowding in, surrounding him. Green, white, and blue highlights, Alan thought. That was a good thing, right?

“Tron? Is that - is it really you?”

“Uh -” he managed, before he was cut off by someone else, who cuffed the speaker over the back of their head.

“Of course it isn’t. Does it look like he has Tron’s circuits? He’s not even broadcasting an identifier. He’s just a lookalike. Besides, do you think Tron would get caught by Clu’s army?”

“If Tron were alive, they wouldn’t send him to the games, that’s for damn sure. He'd go straight to Clu if they found him,” chipped in a voice.

“Moot point, anyway,” said someone from behind him. Alan spun around and tried to get out of the way, but just backed into someone else who gently caught him by the shoulders. “He doesn’t have a disc. He wouldn’t even know who he is right now. He’s just some stray.”

A stray. The soldier had said that before. Did it mean - homeless, or something? What would that even mean, in a computer?

But they didn’t say user, and Alan had seen the viciousness in the way that term had been spat earlier. If being a stray kept him safe, then stray he would be.

They’d also mentioned Tron, and Alan knew beyond a doubt that they were not using it to refer to him. Why would these programs know his nickname?

…how did they even know the name?

“I’m, uh, Roy,” he said, sheepishly. “I hope you don’t mind me asking, but what is this place?”

“So he does know who he is!” cried the one who had helped him up, clapping him on the shoulder. “Welcome to the inaugural meeting of the Music Appreciation Club, program. Our venue for tonight is this here prisoner transport, lovingly donated by Clu, and- umph-”

A hand had clamped around his mouth, pulling him away from Alan. The hand led up to a face that had longsuffering written all over it, the exasperated fondness of a friend.

“Don’t mind him,” said the program. “He tends to use humour as a coping mechanism. At least your memory loss will mean that you won’t have to remember his attempts at comedy. But you seem to remember your own name, so - just in case - I’m Liang. And this fool in my hold is Skala.”

“Barsky,” said Barsky.

“Ida,” said Ida. “And this is Ruena and Lee.”

Lee waved.

“Nice to meet you all,” said Alan, and meant it. “Did you say that we’re in a prisoner transport? Donated by Clu? Why would he imprison people?”

There were benches against the walls. Alan sat down on one of them, rubbing at his knee. He wasn’t as young as he used to be, and the joint still twinged a bit from the fall earlier. Skala pulled out of Liang’s grip and sat down next to him, the others spacing out a bit, opening up some breathing room.

“Damn, you really don’t remember anything, do you,” said Ida, pulling her legs up to her chest and hugging them. “Must be nice not having to worry about the situation we’re in.”

“Situation?”

“Why even bother telling him?” Barsky asked the others. “He’s not going to recall any of this in a moment or two anyway.”

Liang shrugged, and said, “What else have we got to do while waiting? It’s not like contemplating our future in silence was any fun while it lasted. His memory might be addled, but he’s clearly with it enough to have a conversation.”

“Point taken,” said Barsky, and leant back against the wall.

“Anyway, situation,” said Liang. “You might have noticed that our hosts outside are not the friendliest of programs,”

“Understatement,” said Ruena under her breath.

Liang continued as if he hadn’t heard her. “Though they’ll claim to be acting in the Grid’s best interest if you push the point with them enough, and manage to not be deleted in the process. The Grid’s not the same as it was when you were compiled here. You remember Flynn at least, right, your User?”

Alan’s mouth suddenly went dry and his heartbeat pounded so loudly he was surprised it wasn't audible. These people had known Flynn?

“Yes?” he managed to say without his voice shaking. Don’t play your hand too early, Alan, he thought. Stray, remember? “Yes, I know Flynn.”

“Right. Well, Flynn built this place, but Clu figured he could do a better job at running it than he could.”

“And the ISO situation was escalating,” chimed in Ida. “I overheard them once, in the city. They were arguing about it.”

“And look how that turned out,” muttered Lee.

“Anyway,” said Liang, “Far as we can tell, Clu decided to act on that thought. Overthrow him. Flynn disappeared somewhere -”

“In hiding, probably. Some say they saw him in the ISO war, but -”

“-and Clu’s taken over almost every city on the Grid since, in the quest for ‘perfection’,” finished Liang, air quoting, and then folding his arms with a sigh. “Of course, ‘perfection’, seems to look an awful lot like obedience without question, these days.”

Alan’s head was reeling. “And is that why we’re -”

“In a prison cell? Yes,” said Skala, who was giving him something of a contemplative look. “Although you’re in here because you’re a stray, and Clu figures that if you don’t have a purpose, then your best use is as fodder for the games. Bread and circuses, my dear fellow. But they can’t have the circus without the clowns, the role of whom is soon to be filled by us.”

“Once upon a time we would have just given strays a new disc and sent them on their way,” said Ruena. “I miss before.”

“We all do,” said Liang. There was a beat of silence.

“If only Tron were -” started Ida, before Barsky burst in,

“We’ve been through this, Ida! He’s dead. We can’t rely on anyone saving us but ourselves.”

Alan felt as if he were floating, as if he was a step or two removed from here, his heart still running a mile a minute. Flynn was here. Clu had done something. Flynn was here. He was right.

He heard himself asking, as if from a great distance, “Tron?”

“Grid’s protector,” said Liang. “You look a lot like him, which is why we were surprised before. He fought against Clu, tried to protect Flynn. Most programs think he died in the process, but there are still some who think he’s alive.”

“If he were alive, Clu would not be,” growled Barsky.

“He could have been injured,” said Lee. “I mean, he’s Tron, but he’s also just one program. Clu has a whole army. And then there is, of course, the rebellion.”

“The graffiti artists in Argon don’t count,” said Ruena, grinning, with the tone of an injoke.

“I meant the Renegade and you knew it,” Lee shot back easily, shoving at her shoulder.

“We were hoping to join him,” said Liang, in an aside to Alan. “And, well, we were a little too obvious in our intentions.”

He waved an arm to the cell around them.

“So it’s the games for us too. Speaking of which, we’re probably reaching the Coliseum now.”

The mood in the container suddenly sobered, and Alan suddenly understood the implications behind their phrasing. Fodder for the games. Coliseum. Bread and circuses. His floating feeling cleared. He was back to the present and angry.

“So Clu forces people into gladiator games?" he asked, incredulous, "that's absurd! I thought he was supposed to be good! Sam always said -”

He cut himself off, abruptly realising he’d said too much. Stray, he thought, whatever that is. Just a stray, just a stray, definitely not someone who’s already in over his head and obviously some sort of target.

The others all looked at each other, mirroring confusion.

“Gladiator?” asked Ida. “I don’t know what that is.”

Skala, still next to Alan, gave him a side-eye, as if he was working through something. Alan wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.

“Sorry, my dear,” he asked, carefully. “I do have ever such a terrible memory myself, sometimes. What did you say your name was again?”

“Roy,” said Alan, a little too quickly.

Skala opened his mouth as if to respond when a sudden jerk knocked them all off balance. A deep hum that had previously run through the carriage cut off, and Alan only realised how loud it had been once it had stopped.

It was silent for a second or two.

“We’re here,” said Liang finally. “I just want to say - it was nice meeting you, Roy. We could have been friends, under better circumstances.”

Alan looked at everyone around him and said, “I’d like to think we already are. Thank you, everyone. You don’t know how much you’ve helped me, or how much I appreciate it.”

There was a range of smiles at that, though the faces attached to them were still worried.

“I'd normally say that we’re happy to help, anytime,” said Liang. “But. Well. I don’t think we’ll have the opportunity in future. Good luck, program. You’ll need it.”

The door slid open, and the soldiers poured in.

They’d been separated. Alan supposed it shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise, but he still felt the loss - he’d liked them, liked their banter, liked their companionship.

Instead, he’d been ordered to march, winding through what felt like the backstage of some sort of arena. It reminded Alan of the endless corridors of a stadium, like when he’d set out to find the restrooms in Anaheim and had ended up in a service area on the opposite side of the complex. Lora had laughed at him when he’d returned to their seats over an hour later. I wasn’t worried, she’d said. I knew you’d come back to me eventually.

He missed her. She would have been amazed at this - it was everything she had been working towards and more.

Flynn, he thought, You’ve still got a lot to answer for.

They eventually ended up inside some sort of chamber - and as he went to move forward as directed by the guard, his feet caught. Almost tripping, he looked down to see that he’d been trapped - some sort of transparent boot had come up and encased his legs, holding him fast.

“Um,” he said, staring at it. “Is this supposed to happen?”

He didn’t get a reply. He turned as much as possible to only see a smooth wall in the distance, both the entrance and the guard gone in an instant.

“Well, this is just perfect,” he grumbled. Bending down, as much as he could, he tried to tug at the material. Hard as any plastic and with no seams - no indication of how it had unfolded, or how he could get it to refold. He was stuck.

He straightened himself up, only to almost fall over again in surprise as the walls suddenly split open.

Two pods, and two women emerging from within.

Four, he revised, hearing the sound of footsteps behind him and twisting around again.

They moved in an oddly synchronised way, and he was reminded of the soldiers - where Liang and the others had been fluid, all easy movement, the ladies were regimented, walking with military precision. It was an odd sort of contrast, but it was there.

“Evening, ladies,” he tried, anyway. “Nice to meet you. I have to say, I wasn’t expecting this.”

He’d been expecting more soldiers, sure, and they moved like them. But the women were dressed in white, not red, and they weren’t carrying weapons.

Not that they needed to while he was still locked to the floor.

The second they entered the ring of light he was standing in, one stumbled. The others paused to wait for her, and she recovered quickly, but Alan had caught her wide eyes before they started again - a little shakier than before, just a half-beat out of step.

“I get that a lot, it seems,” he said to her. “But I doubt I’m who you’re thinking of.”

They didn’t respond, coming closer, close enough that it was almost uncomfortable - only for him to almost yelp when they ran their hands along his clothes and for them to slough off like nothing.

“Hey - wait, - stop, c’mon now - what are you - that’s my jacket -”

His phone, wallet, keys, and flashlight clattered to the floor and Alan had had enough.

“Ladies. Please. I’m not sure what you’re doing, but there has to be a more civilised way of doing it than this.”

They paused, even if they didn’t respond, watching as the flashlight rolled merrily into the corner of the room before sharing an inscrutable look.

“It was unzipped!” he told them. “You could have just pulled it off! What is this all for, anyway?”

“The games,” one told him. “You will be given armour. For your safety, do not attempt to remove this armour.”

“Surely the armour could have gone over my clothes?” he said, and then almost jumped again as he felt something climb up his back and over his arms.

“How about that,” he said, staring at the material that had appeared.

They turned away from him, coming back with segments that they snapped on in turns. He watched, fascinated, as everything expanded and lit up with the occasional glowing line that seemed to be the default in this place. Fashion? He wondered. Or do the lights have an actual purpose?

From what he’d seen before, no two people shared the same designs. Maybe it worked like some kind of barcode, a unique identifier?

He returned from his thoughts to find the women staring at him, and Alan could see their eyes flicking between his chest and his face. Only a handful of the circuit-like lines had appeared as his armour had built up, mostly discreet dots here and there rather than the broad lines he’d seen on the others. The most distinct of them all were the three squares on his chest, small, shaped like a pyramid but missing the middle square.

“What?” he asked them, looking down at the armour, before - oh.

He was abruptly thrown to a memory of Flynn trying to convince him to model for Tron again, the marketing department sending someone to take reference photos. They’d dressed him up a bit, and he’d spent an uncomfortable hour or two in the limelight - a feeling he was reliving as he felt the eyes on him and he realised what the symbol reminded him of. It wasn’t exact, but it was closer than what he’d seen on anyone else.

“He looks like you, Alan, there’s no one else that will do!” echoed in his ears as he refocused on his surroundings.

He was starting to get an idea of where his nickname had come from, and he really, really hoped that he was wrong.

Eventually, the women started moving again, one of them giving him an appraising glance as she waited for the other to come back with some sort of frisbee in hand. He shrugged at her, and she looked away.

This is an identity disc, said a voice from nowhere. Anything you do, or learn, will be imprinted on this disc.

The second it made contact with his back it was like when he’d tried on glasses for the first time.

The world got sharper, detailed, like his awareness of the space around him had opened up tenfold. The vague familiarity he’d been feeling, the gut feelings without knowing their source - they solidified into knowledge, like he’d been plugged into some kind of datafeed, connected to whatever ran this place.

He looked at the ladies again and thought sirens.

He waited a second to see if anything else would follow, but apparently, that was it. Still, the feeling was almost exhilarating - the vague fog of exhaustion he’d been starting to sink into earlier had lifted, and he was wired, ready to go.

“Synchronised and complete,” one of the sirens said to him, and they rotated around to their original positions, put their hands down. “You may now proceed.”

“Proceed where?” he asked. “It’s not like I can move right now.”

Predictably, his question fell on deaf ears. They started walking backwards, clearly aiming to return to where they’d started from, and he sighed, gave up.

“Now what,” he said to himself, and looked up to find that one of them - the same one that had stumbled before - had hesitated, watching him.

“I’m not sure,” she told him, one hand holding her pod open. “But I know it’s going to be interesting.”

“Thanks,” he told her. “That’s very useful.”

“Just stay alive out there,” she said, and smiled. “The Grid needs hope.”

Alan was still puzzling that comment out when she stepped back again and sank into the wall.

He’d scooped his items up and found an appropriate pocket-like-gap in his armour to shove them into, though he’d had to abandon the flashlight due to lack of space. Then again, it wasn’t like he needed it, here - he was his own lightsource now.

The locks on his legs had disengaged the second the last siren had disappeared, and he’d been left free to roam the room. No door had opened and no guard had come to collect him, so for lack of anything else to do he’d started to explore, feeling along the walls for any divots that might have indicated a way out.

Maybe this was part of a test? The games, as Skala had said?

He doubted it, though. From what he’d cribbed together the games were supposed to be a spectacle, something with an audience - and he doubted that anyone would have found this entertaining.

Regardless, it wasn’t like he had anything better to do.

He was on to his second wall when his fingers ran across it into nothing, and he suddenly sensed the shift in his perception - as if looking hard enough had tripped some kind of trigger, and he felt more than saw the code under his fingers.

It was the same feeling he’d had with those Magic Eye books, like he’d been staring at a nonsense picture and suddenly saw the pattern in the noise, the object suddenly there, rising from the page. He could sense it, sense the parameters of the code, how it’d been structured and what it was made of, could almost reach out and tweak -

He snapped back in shock, and saw nothing but a normal wall in front of him - solid, and seemingly impassable.

What, he thought, the hell.

It was like he’d been granted access to the source code, like he could feel the programming that made up this place. It was the weirdest sensation he’d ever experienced - and also very, very promising.

Could I - what happens if I just - delete this? Could I do that?

He had no idea. But he didn’t want to be trapped here, and some part of him had already assessed the situation and whispered potential exit. He leant forward, trying to concentrate -

And this time he did fall backwards as the wall next to him blew inwards, scattered cubes hitting the ground.

Alan looked at his hands, and then back to the wall - and then to the gap in the wall, where someone was striding through, holding a glowing disc at the ready.

Plan abruptly abandoned, he squinted, and blurted out -

“Jackson?”

He knew even as he said it that it couldn’t have been correct, that Jackson had left the company when ENCOM had moved away from defense contracts. It was confirmed when the figure in front of him looked over and chuckled, holstering his disc and reaching a hand out to Alan, helping him up.

“No,” he said to Alan. “I’m Cutler. Jackson was the name of my User, though, which means I’m in the right place. And just in time, it seems.”

“Your User?” Alan asked, and then connected all the dots he’d been handed. Programmer. Got it. “Actually, better question - what on earth is going on? Who are you?”

“I’m breaking you out,” said Cutler. “You might want to follow me.”

He turned to go, speech apparently done, but Alan stopped him - grabbing his shoulder before he went too far.

“Wait - before you - I didn’t come here alone,” he said to Cutler. “I was sent here with others - six of them, we were in the same intake. If you’re breaking me out, you’re breaking them out too. I’m not leaving here without them.”

Cutler looked at him and smiled, just barely. “I had a feeling you might say something like that. You’ve already built a reputation as someone who stands up for what’s right.”

Alan didn’t know what to say to that.

“They’re safe,” Cutler told him. “Or at least, my people are helping them now. If we had to break into the Coliseum, we weren’t going to stop with just you. They’ll be fine.”

“Oh,” said Alan. “Good.”

Cutler grinned at him, and inclined his head.

“But we should move, now, if we want to escape. Let’s go. They’re not paying attention to us at the moment, but that will change if we stay.”

He turned to leave again, and this time Alan let him, trailing behind. He didn’t know him, didn’t know if he could trust him - but his highlights were white and blue, and he had the same fluidness that Liang and the others had. It had to be enough.

Besides, it was Jackson. Or at least, Jackson’s program. Alan doubted that that would ever get less weird - some part of him was still waiting to wake up, like all of this was nothing but a weirdly realistic dream.

The second they crossed the threshold, back into the endless corridors, he could hear the alarms.

“I’m guessing this was not a sneak attack,” he said to Cutler, keeping an eye out for anyone approaching.

“It started that way,” said Cutler grimly. “Can you fight?”

“What?”

“Can you fight?”

“I mean - no?”

“Then stay behind me.”

Alan did.

They crept back through the maze, sticking to the shadows where possible. It was quiet, surprisingly so, and Alan could feel himself getting tenser by the minute. It couldn’t be this easy, surely. With the number of guards he’d seen crawling all over the place before, it seemed unlikely that they'd have a clear run now.

“Not to complain,” he said after a while, “But where is everyone? Can’t they hear the alarms?”

“The alarms aren’t for you,” said Cutler, throwing out an arm to stop Alan from rounding the corner before peering beyond it himself. “And all the programs breaking out of the arena are keeping Clu's drones busy. Who would care about one program left alone in the armoury when hundreds more are running free elsewhere?”

“You did,” said Alan. “You cared - actually, about that. Why did you?”

“Because I don’t like how the Grid is being run under Clu. And you are our best chance at doing something about it.”

“Me?”

“You,” said Cutler, waving his hand for Alan to stop and shut up. He reached for his disc and activated it, silently, before pivoting and abruptly throwing it down the length of the passage behind them.

There was a choked noise of something and then a sound like coins scattering. The disc returned to Cutler’s hand like a boomerang, and he docked it to his back before turning and waving for Alan to follow.

Alan had turned to watch the disc. He wished he hadn’t.

“You killed them?” he asked, aghast.

“Would you rather it were you?” asked Cutler, not looking at him.

“I would rather it wasn’t anybody!” he said, and this time Cutler turned to face him fully.

“Once, I wanted the same thing,” he told him. “I still want the same thing. But the programs back there were nothing more than shells, just a couple of processes left behind. Clu has already rectified all of the guards in this place, and believe me when I say that derezzing is the only way to get them to stop.”

“Can’t you just - knock them out, or something? Doesn’t that disc of yours have a stun function?”

“No,” said Cutler. “And we don’t have time for this. If we stick around here we’ll end up just like them.”

Alan looked back at the cubes. They were deceptively neat, bloodless, nothing like the two soldiers that had been there mere seconds before.

He looked back at Cutler, who held his gaze steadily.

Jackson had always been a good person, if ruthlessly pragmatic. It was the one thing that Alan remembered clearly about him.

He’d always wished they’d kept in touch.

“I’m not killing anyone,” said Alan, firmly, and Cutler inclined his head in acknowledgement.

“I’m not asking you to. Now - let’s go. There’s someone I need to introduce you to.”

Chapter Text

They had, eventually, run out of stories to tell. Express train or not, Argon was still on the edge of the Grid and had a travel time to match. Zed had ended up dozing against the window, face smushed up against the glass, while Mara was staring outside, watching the landscape flash past.

Even Beck was starting to flag, slipping lower into his seat and tipping his head back.

Tron, as always, had stayed posture-perfect. He sat, motionless, but Beck could feel the gentle ping on their shared channel as every so often he scanned the carriage. The others didn’t react, couldn’t feel it, but Beck had kept a running tally in his head before giving up and stating outright -

“You’re going to wear yourself out if you keep doing that.”

Tron stopped and looked almost guilty. Beck squinted at him and wondered if the disguise he was wearing was somehow more expressive - he doubted Tron’s actual face would have reacted under normal circumstances. It was hard enough to believe the look now.

Something to ask Able about later.

It was peaceful for another second or two.

Ping.

Beck rolled his eyes, but it wasn’t like he could blame him. This was probably the longest Tron had gone in public without his mask, and disguise or not, it had to be weird. They were all agitated enough as it was without throwing that into the mix too.

Besides, usually by now something went wrong with their plans.

He stood, abruptly, and said, “I’m going for a walk around the train, if anyone wants to join me. I need to stretch my legs.”

Mara roused from her thoughts and looked over. “Huh? Oh. No, I’m good - I’ll keep an eye on Zed here. You go, though.”

Tron gave Beck a look that was somehow a combination between I know what you’re doing, y’know and thank you.

He rose, too, and said, “Someone needs to keep you out of trouble.”

“Sure,” said Beck. “If you want to call it that.”

They ended up between carriages, where the roar of the engine drowned out the silence and the wind whipped at both their hair and Tron’s cloak. Tron smoothed it down as he leant up against one of the exterior doors, Beck settling opposite him - ensuring they wouldn’t be interrupted from either direction without warning.

“Mara has been taking this well,” Beck said, raising his head to watch the sky. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. She was always willing to fight. I’m glad she brought Zed around, though.”

“It wasn’t just her,” said Tron, and Beck could tell he was more relaxed out here, that some of the tension had loosened from his frame. “You won him over, too.”

“I dunno,” said Beck, and laughed a little. “Something about having Tron in front of him might have helped with that.”

He tapered off, sobered up. Tron looked frustrated, and he had a feeling why.

“You okay?” he asked, seriously. “I know we’re not there yet, but at least we’re getting closer.”

Tron’s jaw clenched at the question, his lips thinning, before he said, “There’s too many unknowns. Clu probably has his forces out en masse in the city, and yet, if I get too involved -”

He cut himself off and just pointed at the bag he’d slung around his shoulders, the one that carried the energy from Able. The some, but not enough energy, the energy that could act as a stop-gap but was not a replacement for his healing chamber.

Beck didn’t want to think about it too hard.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

Tron hesitated and said “...but thanks. For asking.”

Beck was about to respond when overhead something red streaked past, a low hum starting to fill the area.

Both of them snapped to attention, heads immediately scanning around them. They didn’t draw their discs, but they did stand back to back, looking for the disturbance.

Something red flashed overhead again, and then something else.

They shared a glance and started climbing.

When they poked their heads above the roof of the train, just enough to see, the only thing that Beck thought was there’s the thing that just went wrong.

“There’s a barricade,” he said quietly, dropping back into his seat next to Mara. Tron was a couple of steps behind him, all precise movement again, sitting down and clenching his hands into fists.

Mara startled a little, and then processed what he said.

“A what?” she said, kicking Zed at the same time to wake him up. His hands slipped from where they’d been supporting his face, and he dropped, barely blinking awake in time to catch himself from hitting his knees.

“What? Wait, what,” said Zed, muzzily. “‘S going on?”

“A barricade,” said Beck, even quieter this time. “It doesn’t look like they’re stopping the trains from entering, but they’ve certainly surrounded enough of the city to make it hard to get out. Looks like they’ve brought reinforcements from across the Grid.”

“If Flynn tries to get to the User, he won’t be able to get in. And if the User tries to get out, they’ll run face first into Clu’s army,” said Tron, grimly. “They’re not searching the city. They’re letting the User come to them.”

“How can they be so sure that they will try to get out?” asked Mara, mirroring his expression. “They might just lay low for a while, wait until the barricade is gone?”

“They can’t,” said Tron. “Not if they want to get back to the User world. That portal has a time limit - it’s why Flynn is still somewhere on the Grid now, and not back home. He never made it out before it closed. And Clu knows it.”

“Time limit?” asked Beck, zeroing in on the detail. “Wait - this is the first I’ve heard of this. Explain, please? Can’t it just - I don’t know, be turned on again, if it shuts off? We are mechanics.”

“It can’t,” said Tron, “not from the inside, according to Flynn. It’s open eight millicycles max, but that’s all. And now, with the barricade, we have even less time to deal with this. Our goal has to be to get in, find the User, and get them out of here before it’s too late.”

“But I thought they could help with -” started Mara, but Tron was shaking his head.

“They can,” he told her. “But from the outside. They have more power there, and there’s less risk of them getting killed.”

“So why haven’t they done it already?” asked Zed, eyebrows raised. “If it’s that simple for them, shouldn’t Clu be nothing but voxels now?”

“I don’t know,” said Tron, frustrated. “There’s never been another User on the Grid before, it was only ever Flynn. I don’t know who they are or what they know. Clu was originally created to help the Grid, maybe Users can’t tell what he’s been doing. Flynn always said he tested his inventions in the Grid for a reason, that it was easier to see what was happening from within the system somehow.”

Zed looked skeptical at that. Beck jumped in before he could say anything else.

“It changes nothing about our original plan,” he said quietly. “We get in, we get to the User, and then we work it out from there. We can’t let Clu get his hands on their disc. If we think he’s bad now, just imagine what’ll happen if he gets ultimate control over the Grid.”

Mara shuddered.

“So how do we find them?” asked Zed, now mollified. “If Clu can’t, what chance do we have?”

“We can split up,” said Mara, gesturing as she thought it through. “I’ve got friends in the city. Zed, you and I can go with them, maybe go dancing, try and find out if anyone’s seen anything out of the ordinary. Keep an ear to the ground, speak to other programs, see if we can get some intel.”

“That’s not a bad plan,” said Beck. “Tr- Tyrone and I will stay together and hit the guards, see if we can find out what Clu already knows.”

“And if either of us do find anything?” asked Zed. “How exactly are we supposed to find each other again?”

“We’ll have regular check-ins at a designated point,” said Tron. “It’s the best we can do without resources.”

Beck looked out of the window. The closer they got to the city, the more obvious the various light jets and recognizers flanking them became, flying in from every corner.

They weren’t far off now.

“We can do this,” he said. “We have to do this. For the good of the Grid.”

“And for the Users,” said Tron, lips pressing into a thin line. “I’m not letting Clu get his hands on anyone else, ever again.”

They didn’t encounter anyone else.

Alan was glad. He was getting the sense that this place was more dangerous than he’d initially realised, but even so, he didn’t want anyone else killed in the course of their escape - bad guy or otherwise.

They’d emerged from something a bit like a fire door into the open air. It was deceptively peaceful, white lights glittering along the horizon, and when he turned to the left he could see crowds of people streaming out of what had to be the main building of the Coliseum. It reminded Alan of nothing more than a summer night after a game, and for a moment he almost forgot where he was.

“C’mon,” said Cutler. “We’re not clear yet. Most of the guards will be chasing after the rest of my team, but there might still be a sentry or two left behind.”

“Why didn’t we join them?” asked Alan, following as Cutler dropped down and kept low. “Wouldn’t there be safety in numbers? You’ve come an awful long way just to get me out specifically. There has to be a reason.”

Alan paused for a second and amended, “It’s not like I’m not grateful - I am, believe me. But it’s a lot of effort for one stranger.”

Cutler looked at him sidelong, as if considering something. After a bit he said, “What’s your name?”

“Oh! Oh, I forgot to introduce myself, didn’t I,” said Alan. “I’m so sorry. I’m Roy.”

“No,” said Cutler patiently. “What’s your actual name?”

Alan froze.

Cutler merely smiled a little when he saw.

“You can trust me,” he said. “I’m asking for a reason.”

“Alan,” said Alan, reluctantly. He wasn’t sure why he was so reluctant other than he had the gut feeling that it might have meant something here, which was reinforced when Cutler nodded.

“Alan-One, right?”

“I - that’s my username, sure, but how did you -”

At the confirmation, Cutler grinned, all teeth. “That’s why I broke you out.”

“Because of my username?”

“Because you’re a User,” said Cutler. “Someone who has the power to create and modify the Grid. And, more importantly - you’re the User who created Tron. You created the greatest hero this Grid has ever seen.”

Skala and the others had said something similar, but Alan was still struggling to wrap his head around it. He was proud of what he’d created with Tron - he’d spent years fine-tuning the coding, and he still thought that Tron was the best program he’d ever written. He was sure that his work would hold up even today, even in the markedly different computing environment that the world operated in.

But it was one thing to hear people talk about a program, and another to think of the program he wrote as a person. Someone he’d created.

“You are talking about the security software I wrote, right?” he asked, faintly.

“I’m talking about the program,” said Cutler. “And if anyone knows what to do next, it’ll be him. We need to get you out of here and on a train to Argon before Clu realises who you are and where you’ve gone.”

“Argon?” asked Alan. They were very nearly at the perimeter now, and Cutler stopped, Alan bumping up behind him.

“It’s another city,” he told him. “On the edge of the Grid. Tron’s running a resistance there. I’m just here to get recruits. And you,” he said, teeth flashing, “are the best recruit yet. Now. Take this.”

He handed Alan some kind of baton. Alan examined it, trying to work it out, before Cutler reached over and adjusted his hands, corrected his stance.

“Open and twist, like this,” he said, and demonstrated. Alan followed, and watched in awe as the wireframe built up around him.

Lightcycles, he thought. I have a model of one of these on my shelf at home. Despite everything… this really is incredible.

Cutler was barely visible now, the lightcycle concealing his face. “Are you ready?”

“No!” said Alan, trying to adjust his posture, work out the controls.

“You’ll learn quick enough,” said Cutler, already starting to move. “This way.”

Alan fumbled what he hoped was the gas, and followed.

Chapter Text

They’d stopped off at Cutler’s safehouse first.

Well, he said it was a safehouse. To Alan it looked like a somewhat decent apartment complex, quiet, nestled amongst other low-rise buildings. He wasn’t sure what any of this would have translated to, on the other side of the screen - memory blocks, maybe?

He couldn’t dwell on it too deeply. It wasn’t like talking programs were evident via a command prompt either. But from everything he’d seen so far - they lived. They had cities, trains, freeways. They laughed and fought and had opinions and Flynn had told him about none of this.

Would he have believed it?

Probably not, he admitted to himself. Not without proof. But Flynn had had proof, with the laser.

He’d told him he’d taken Tron off the ENCOM system and never shown him why.

The nudge of an elbow broke him out of his thoughts, and Alan looked up to find that the elevator had arrived on their floor - the whole building was theirs, according to Cutler, but this was where he kept the supplies.

“We need to get you something to cover those circuits,” said Cutler, moving past him. The next second something hit Alan in the face, and he pulled it down enough to see a cloak.

“Why?” he asked, though he had a feeling he knew what the answer would be.

“Because between your face and that emblem? You’re going to attract a lot of attention. Attention we don’t need. Programs can tell you’re not Tron, but you’re close enough that you’ll still draw eyes.”

Alan had had enough encounters over the last two and a half hours to see the logic in what Cutler said. Pulling the cloak on, he asked, “And to hide my face?”

Cutler grimaced and Alan knew it wasn’t good.

“I’ll just pull the hood down as low as possible, then,” he said, trying to make light of it.

“You can wear a mask until we get to the station,” said Cutler. “They just won’t let you on the train with one. But we might have a chance to speak to the guards. You don’t broadcast an identifier, and your circuits are different. You’re not Tron. They should let you on. We just need to make sure that no program sees you from a distance and calls you in.”

“That’s an awful lot of ‘mights’ and ‘shoulds’,” said Alan. “Is the train the only option?”

“It’s the only feasible option,” said Cutler. “And it’s the best we can do for now. Unless you have any other ideas?”

It should have been combative, but Alan could hear the tone, knew it for the genuine question it was. He thought, but -

“I don’t know this place well enough yet,” he said, conceding the point. “I’m happy for you to lead the way. Before we go, though - do you know if the others made it out alright? Are they safe too?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Cutler, mouth pulling into an unhappy line. “The plan is to meet here later, but they’ll have to take the long route to make sure they don’t bring the occupation with them.”

“Ah,” said Alan. “I’d hoped to say goodbye, thank them. They helped in the rescue too.”

“You might get a chance yet,” said Cutler. “Come on. We can walk.”

The rest of the trip had been uneventful, for all that Tron’s tension had taken over the mood of the group. By the time they’d pulled into the station they were all on edge.

The incoming passengers were subject to regular security checks. The outgoing passengers, though -

“I’ve never seen so many sentries in one place before,” said Beck under his breath.

“This is the city,” said Tron, glaring at them. “Clu’s stronghold. He’s got access to more resources here. We’ll have to be careful.”

“When are we ever not?” asked Beck, and Tron just raised an eyebrow at him silently.

“That’s our cue,” said Mara. “We should get moving - if we want information we’ll have to start now. I should be able to catch my friend as she wraps up her shift - Zed, are you with me?”

“Always am,” he sighed, and then looked over at Beck and Tron. Awkwardly, he said - “You two stay safe, alright? I’ve already had enough surprises today, I don’t need either of you injured on top of it all.”

“Thanks, Zed,” said Beck. “Same goes for both of you. If either of you feel like you’re in danger, cut and run. We can manage ourselves out here but neither of you are trained for this.”

“We don’t need to be trained to get intel,” said Mara determinedly. “And we’re not about to leave you behind. Where do we next meet? And when?”

“Front of the station, two and a half millicycles,” said Tron. “It’s a public location and enough programs meet there that it shouldn’t look suspicious. If you can’t make it, at least try to leave some kind of sign that you’re okay.”

“Good enough for me,” said Mara, and then tugged on Zed’s arm. “Let’s go dancing.”

Beck and Tron watched them leave until they’d both merged into the crowd and disappeared.

“Now what,” said Beck, looking to Tron. With Zed and Mara gone, he’d rezzed up his mask - Able’s disguise had been holding, but it’d be wearing off soon.

“Now we go with your plan,” said Tron, head still pointed towards the crowd. “We get out of here, we get to an outpost, and we see if we can find our own intel. They clearly haven’t found the User yet, but they likely still know something.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Beck, and started heading for the exit.

He was about five steps in when he saw a face out of the corner of his eye and he stopped, spun about cautiously.

Cutler?

He was off to the side, speaking to someone wearing a cloak. Beck couldn’t make out any details until they both turned towards him, as if sensing the stare.

Beck froze, keeping only enough presence of mind to grab Tron’s shoulder and stop him from walking forward.

He looked to Tron’s mask, to Tron’s face staring at him from across the station, to Tron’s mask.

“Um,” said Beck.

Tron was a statue beside him.

“Alan-One,” he breathed, so lightly that Beck wasn’t even sure he'd heard him correctly.

"You know this guy? And why does he look like you?"

Tron still didn’t move. It was, Beck thought, the most disarmed he’d ever seen him.

"He doesn't look like me,” he said, distantly. “I look like him.”

“...You’re joking.”

Tron’s mask turned toward him in an approximation of a side-glance. “Do I ever joke?”

“Point taken. So - he’s -”

“My User. Yes.”

Well, thought Beck, this just got more interesting.

“There’s someone staring at us,” said Alan under his breath. They’d stopped inside the station for a few minutes - Cutler had muttered something about there being too many guards and disc verifications, which had apparently surprised him. They’d been trying to work out what to do next when Alan had sensed the stare and noticed the two figures, standing stock still as the crowd flowed around them.

Cutler looked over, and the second he caught sight of them he straightened his posture and grinned, all teeth again.

“Seems like I won’t have to take you to Argon after all,” he said, quietly victorious. “I know that program. He’s on our side. And if I had to take a guess at who’s with him...”

He trailed off, watching as the two came closer.

“Beck!” claimed Cutler, moving forward as soon as they were close enough and clapping him on the shoulder. “It’s good to see you, my friend.”

“And you,” said Beck, returning the gesture. He looked at Alan meaningfully and said to Cutler, “It seems like you’ve been busy.”

“I have indeed,” said Cutler. “He got himself caught while stepping in to save one of my people from the guards. We got him out just before he hit the games.”

Alan watched curiously as the masked program drifted around Cutler and Beck both, head tilted in his direction as if studying him.

Alan kept one eye on him and leaned forward to extend a hand to Beck.

“Nice to meet you, Beck,” he said. “Any friend of Cutler’s is a friend of mine.”

Beck looked at the hand quizzically until the masked program said to him, “You shake it.”

“Sorry,” said Alan, a bit awkwardly. “I didn’t realise you didn’t -”

“It’s fine,” said Beck, and extended his hand too. Alan grasped it and shook, released, and turned to the masked program.

“You too,” he said, keeping his hand out. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I caught your name?”

“You mean you don’t know?” asked Cutler.

A shout from across the station swung all of their heads around, breaking up the greeting. The three programs tensed in an instant.

The only word Alan heard was “There!” before the masked program and Cutler both grabbed one of Alan’s arms each and started bolting for the exit.

“Go!” said Cutler. “We lingered too long, I knew we should have stopped somewhere more private.”

“If you’d done that, we wouldn’t have seen you,” said Beck, running with them. The crowd had scattered around them, people everywhere, and they spilled out onto the street. “Where to now?”

“My safehouse,” said Cutler, pulling Alan, and the masked program by proxy, into a new direction. “But we’ll need to lose them first. This way.”

Behind them, footsteps thundered. Alan, still supported by Cutler and the other program, risked a glance behind them and saw only a sea of red. It was as if every guard in the station had followed them out.

Cutler yanked them down turn after turn, leading them into something that looked a little like a plaza. It was quiet, bordered on all four sides by buildings. Dead end, thought Alan.

There was a noise in the distance, coming closer.

“They’re too fast,” Cutler said. “And there’s too many of them. We’ll have to take them down if we want to get away. Go - climb the buildings, take to the rooftops. I’ll meet up with you later.”

“No,” said the masked program, dropping Alan’s arm. “You know the way to the safehouse. Take Alan-One and Beck and go. I’ll deal with the sentries.”

Cutler just nodded and turned to pull Alan along, but Beck stayed, and Alan resisted the tug.

“You can’t be serious!” he said to the masked program, who was removing the cloak he was wearing and passing a bag to Beck. “There’s dozens of them! I’m not letting you get killed on my behalf! There has to be another way - surely there's somewhere we can hide?”

Beck looked between Alan and the other program and said, “Your injuries -”

“Go.” said the program, reaching for his disc and ignoring them both.

“But -”

With the cloak removed, Alan noticed his suit - lit up by only a handful of dots and dashes, similar to his own. Almost deliberately blank. He looked at the mask again.

Cutler pulled on his arm. “We need to go now,” he said, before letting go. He moved towards a building, grabbing on to seemingly nothing and starting to climb.

The noise in the distance solidified into the sound of running. Beck threw an exasperated glance at the masked program and then turned to Alan and asked -

“How’s your climbing?”

Alan looked at where Cutler was already halfway up the wall and said, “Not as good as that, believe me.”

“Then I’ll carry you,” he said. “Climb onto my back, and quickly.”

It was undignified. Alan didn’t care. He held on for dear life as Beck jumped up the wall and followed the same path that Cutler had taken.

They reached the top just as the soldiers reached them.

And Alan watched, open mouthed, as the masked program went to town.

It was almost beautiful, in an incredibly twisted way. He didn’t derez the guards, as Cutler had, but instead almost danced with them, taking them down like he was swatting flies.

If they tried to get close to him, they fell. If they tried to touch him, they not only fell but took down two others with them.

By the time he was done there were bodies strewn across the plaza.

None of them had landed a hit on the figure, who was standing, stock still, in the middle of the carnage.

But Beck, next to Alan, was already vaulting back down to the street to try and get to him before he collapsed a bare instant later, as if his legs had been cut out from under him.

“I knew, I knew that this was going to happen-” he was saying, as Cutler helped Alan to the ground.

“Is he okay?” asked Alan cautiously, as they came up behind. He cast an eye about their surroundings, but there was no one left to be worried about. Every soldier was down, and staying down.

“I’ll be fine,” the masked program tried to say, but Beck was louder.

“No. He’s not okay. He was injured in the coup against Flynn, and the wounds flare up if he uses too much energy. Which he knew would happen, before he did this.”

It was impossible to read the masked program’s expression at that. He stayed silent.

Cutler looked around them and said, “The safehouse isn’t far. You can heal, there. Can you walk?”

Beck had already slung an arm around the program’s shoulders and had helped him to unsteady feet. Alan came over and took the program’s other side, bracing him further.

“He can now,” said Alan. “We’ve got him. Lead the way.”

It was simultaneously a short walk and the longest that Alan had ever taken. He’d masked himself, too - Cutler had shown him how to on the way to the station, which already felt like forever ago - and between him and Beck they carried the program’s weight. Cutler was ahead of them, scouting, making sure they didn't run into more guards, when Alan heard the faintest whisper beside him.

He looked over, and saw that Beck had clearly heard it too.

“Sorry?” asked Alan. “I didn’t quite catch that?”

The masked program squirmed, head tilting away from Alan, and said, barely louder,

“I never wanted to meet you like this.”

“Like what?” asked Alan, confused.

“Like this,” he said, and tried to stand under his own power, collapsing back down on Beck and Alan a second later.

That didn’t make anything clearer.

“Why?” asked Alan. “You saved our lives back there, in what was frankly the most terrifying fight I’ve ever witnessed. In any case, injuries are nothing to be ashamed of - heck, things happen. Life happens. The only people who’ve never been injured at some stage or another are people who have never lived.”

The mask swung towards him and Alan got the sense of being examined again.

“What?” he asked, feeling foolish.

Beck started to laugh and shot his own glance to the masked program.

“I have to say,” he said, smiling, “his pep talks are much better than yours.”

The mask swung back to Beck, and Beck just laughed harder.

“Y’know, I never did catch your name,” said Alan, as Cutler appeared from around the corner and signalled them through. “Though I have a hunch, by now. Should we do formal introductions? Or do you want to wait until later?”

“...We can introduce ourselves,” said the program.

“Good,” said Alan. “Alan Bradley, at your service. Just call me Alan. I only wish I’d known about this place sooner, and that I could have met you both under better circumstances.”

“Hello, Alan-One,” said Tron. “I’m Tron.”

Chapter Text

The safehouse was busier, this time. Cutler invited them in and led them back to the elevator, but before the doors closed on their little party Alan caught a glimpse of a program in one of the other rooms. Ida, thought Alan, relieved. They made it.

Tron was clearly getting worse, though. After their introduction he’d stayed silent, and Alan got the feeling that he was trying not to grunt in pain - he’d slowly rested more and more of his weight on Alan and Beck both, and every so often he’d tense, as if something had caught in his chest.

The floor they exited out onto was quiet, lights dim. Cutler led them to a room and then turned and said,

“We have some energy to spare. I’ll go see what I can find with regards to supplies. For now, you can stay in here.”

Alan nodded, and Beck followed with a, “Thanks, Cutler. If you can make sure no one disturbs us, we’d appreciate it.”

Cutler’s eyes flicked to Tron and he nodded, once, before turning around and heading back the way they’d come.

The room was empty, no convenient chairs to use. Beck and Alan gently propped Tron up against the wall, sliding him down to the floor so his back was supported while they sat down themselves.

Beck reached into the bag he was holding and pulled out a container of what looked like pure light. He proffered it to Tron.

Tron’s mask unfolded.

Alan sucked in air between his teeth.

After all the reactions he’d received, seeing a mirror of his own - slightly younger - face was not the surprise it would have been originally.

Seeing his own face with a scar extended far enough to blank out an eye was more of a shock.

Tron’s eyes flicked to him, and he winced.

“No,” said Alan. “Don’t you dare feel ashamed of this. Did someone do this to you?”

Beck looked at him and nodded, slightly, as Tron's jaw clenched. Clearly a story there - Alan wasn’t going to press.

“They’re the ones who should feel ashamed,” he said, fiercely. “I only know about half of what’s happened in this place, and all of it too late, but from what I do know, Clu and his army are monsters. This should never have happened to any of you. If only I’d known -”

He cut himself off. No point in speculating - he could only deal with the situation as it stood currently.

“Can you - do something?” asked Beck, hesitantly, as if treading on unknown ground. “To heal him? Permanently? I mean, you are his User, and -”

Tron was giving a flat glare to Beck.

“Oh, knock it off, Tron,” said Alan. “It’s okay to ask for help. Beck - I don’t know how I could, but if I can, I’d be glad to. I'm no doctor, but I'm guessing that healing means something very different for programs.”

“Medical programs usually heal using discs,” said Beck. “I don’t know what they do, or how they do it - but - it could be worth a try?”

“I don’t know either,” said Alan, “But let's give it a go.”

Tron looked between them both, seemingly debating something internally before giving in.

“You won’t recognise the interface they use,” he said to Alan, and yeah, he was definitely spending some effort to say the words levelly - pain roughened the edges of every syllable. “It took Flynn a while to create the ones that regular programs are familiar with. Use this instead.”

He lent forward, enough that he could undock his disc from his back, holding it a second before activating it. Alan leant in, fascinated, as a hologram lit up and a little figure spun in place.

Tron manipulated bits of the image until it compacted itself down, changing from the figure into -

Oh, Alan thought. There it was - Tron’s raw code. Code he’d metaphorically bled over, reviewing it again and again to make sure it was as good as it could be.

Currently being proffered to him by someone who wore his face. Someone who, in a very real way, was this code. His creation.

He took the disc carefully, as if it were the most fragile thing in the world, and met Tron's gaze across it.

As soon as the disc was in his hands, Tron slumped back against the wall. Alan leant next to him, shoulder to shoulder.

“Um,” said Alan, not entirely sure what he was supposed to do. “Is there a keyboard to go along with this?”

Beck repeated 'keyboard?' under his breath at the same time that Tron said, "No. Flynn always manipulated discs directly."

“Right,” said Alan. “Okay.”

He stared at the code in front of him. He took a deep breath in, and then out, and tried to ignore Beck watching him with interest.

The thing was - it had been years since he’d seen the source code for Tron. If pushed, he could remember a few of the tricks he’d used, and he’d always been diligent about leaving comments, documentation - but he couldn’t remember the lines from heart the way he had when he’d been just another ENCOM desk jockey. And even if he could - Tron was complex, and he had no idea what the scar that ravaged its way down his face even translated to.

He kept staring at the code, and the image in front of him wavered slightly.

Magic Eye, he thought, suddenly. The wall at the stadium.

He placed the disk down gently on his legs, keeping it stable, and reached both hands out, touching the hologram. It lit up brighter under his attention, and he tried to shift the way he thought.

None of this place made sense. He’d been rolling with it out of necessity, but he needed to remember that this was not the world he knew, and it didn’t operate by the same rules.

He lightly prodded the interface, found it reacting like a touch screen.

Let’s hope this works, he thought to himself, and focused harder, narrowing in on the code and only the code, blocking everything else out.

His vision shifted, and under it, he knew the code in front of him, as if it had been full of impossible metadata just another layer down.

And, as he started scrolling through, he could feel the corruption, too - like he was running fingers over a smooth surface and finding jagged holes and unexpected ridges throughout.

Instinctively, he found one of the gaps - a small one, experimental - and tried pinching it closed. It resisted at first, until he forced - and the edges snapped together, healing over.

Tron, next to him, shivered.

Bingo, Alan thought, and got to work.

It was quiet, and Beck was at something of a loss.

He didn’t know what he’d expected from another User - though they’d been racing to help one, he’d never really thought about who they might have been. The only real User he’d ever known was Flynn, and even then, it was only through second-hand stories.

Never in his wildest imaginings, though, could he have pictured this - Tron leaning into his duplicate, eyes closed, while the User who shared his face frowned, every so often editing something on Tron’s disc.

Beck had tried to make sense of the changes, but he’d never seen a disc display line after line of text like that before. What he could see, though, was the scar that had overtaken Tron’s face was fading. It’d likely require a complete sync to fix everything, but it was working.

And as it was a User doing it, Beck knew it wouldn't come back.

He had questions - lots of them - and in the back of his head the timer for the Portal ticked onward, but it could wait. For this, anything could wait.

… that didn't mean that after a little while, it didn't get boring.

He'd tried to stay still, not wanting to disturb whatever the User - Alan - was doing, but by about twenty microcycles in he'd rolled to his feet to stare out the only window the room had, absently tapping his fingers against the sill.

"Y'know," said Alan, and Beck turned to face him. "This might take a while. You're more than welcome to stay with us, but don't feel like you have to - if you want to go speak to Cutler or your other friends downstairs, you can."

Beck huffed a laugh. "I only know Cutler," he admitted. "Not anyone else here. And to be honest, I had no idea that Cutler had managed all this since I saw him last, either."

"Well," said Alan, "then it sounds like now’s the perfect opportunity to go and find out what’s changed. Go on - I'll be working through this for a while yet, and there's no point in you being bored up here in the meantime. We'll be fine."

Tron had cracked open an eye somewhere during this exchange, and when Beck met his gaze, he nodded as if to back Alan up.

Beck looked between them both and got the distinct feeling he was getting mentored.

"Right," he said. "Right. I'll just -"

He waved vaguely to the door, and followed it up by walking through.

The second it was closed, he shook his head, trying to clear the experience of being on the receiving end of two identical expressions on two identical faces. Weird, he thought. Good, but weird.

Alan wasn’t entirely what he would have expected from Tron’s User. He was less grumpy, for one.

But he could see it.

Yeah, he could see it.

He’d followed the sound of conversation downstairs, not quite sure where he was supposed to go.

Cutler found him in the hallway, hovering outside one of the rooms. He could hear programs talking through the door, and he’d been debating if he should join them - Cutler had said this was a safehouse, but Beck was still wary.

“How is he?” he asked, quietly, leaning against the wall of the corridor and settling in. Beck matched him, glad for the company.

“Getting better,” he said. “Alan-One is healing him now, but he said they might be a while.”

“Good,” said Cutler. “That’s good. And now - how are you, my friend? What’s news? It’s been too long. I was starting to think I should take a trip down to Argon myself, just to check in.”

“You’d be more than welcome,” said Beck, “Though who knows what’ll happen now. This whole User situation kind of came out of nowhere, and I’m guessing it wasn’t just for us.”

“Clu must be quaking in his boots,” grinned Cutler. “Especially since we found him before he did.”

“For now, at least,” said Beck. “Actually, about that - you’ve seen the barricade around the city, yeah?”

Cutler’s expression darkened.

“I just got told,” he said. “It’s smart. Bad for us, but smart.”

“Very smart,” said Beck. “Since we’ve got about four and a half milicycles left to get the User past it and to the portal. We’re going to need a plan.”

Cutler stilled a little at that and said, “He’s not staying?”

“Not an option,” said Beck. “According to Tron, once the portal closes it can’t be opened again from the Grid. If Alan doesn’t get out in time he’ll be trapped here. Besides, Tron said he’ll be able to help us better from the User world, wherever that is.”

Cutler seemed to mull it over. “I have to admit, I was hoping for more of a tangible action plan. This is the best opportunity we’ve had in a while to take Clu down.”

“I get it,” said Beck. “Believe me, I do. But think of this - what’ll happen if the User does get stuck here, and Clu gets his disc? He’d be twice as bad as he is currently, and that’s saying something.”

“Point taken,” said Cutler. “Plus, if Tron thinks it’s best… well, if we can’t trust him, who can we?”

He stood fully, clapped Beck on the shoulder.

“Come and meet the new recruits,” he said, grinning. “And let’s get to work.”

Cutler had opened the door into a common area, and the first thing that struck Beck as they walked in together was the laughter.

It’d been a long time since he’d walked into a room this joyous. Since the occupation, since Tron, since desperately trying to lead an uprising between only the two of them.

Some tiny part of him that he hadn’t previously noticed relaxed, just a little, at the noise.

“And then Mayer was like - zam -”

The sound effect was coupled with a broad gesture that, presumably, demonstrated whatever zam was.

“It was amazing,” said the speaker, sitting back in their chair. “I can’t believe we all got out of there in one piece.”

“Even better than that,” said Cutler, cutting in, and the eyes of every program in the place swung to him. “We had a victory, tonight. Well done. All of you.”

“Eyyyy!” said a program in response, raising a glass of energy. A few other programs raised theirs too, and Cutler waited for the cheer to die down before continuing,

“And we had another fortuitous win, too. But before I share, I want to introduce you to someone - someone I owe my very life to. Everyone - meet Beck.”

The cheer that went around was louder this time, and Beck got the impression that everyone here had loosened up in celebration.

It was nice.

“Hi,” he said, one hand raised in a half wave. “Nice to meet you all. Sorry, but - what is all this?”

“La révolution!” cried someone in the group, to scattered laughter.

“Recruits,” said Cutler, to Beck. “I met Tron, after the Games. He broke me out, got me to safety - and I know you told him to find me. He said the way I could thank him was by recruiting, so I thought - where else to start, but Tron City?”

“Right,” said Beck, staring at the crowd. “I remember I said that now.”

Cutler shot him a look. Beck missed it entirely.

“Are they - you managed to recruit this many? In the heart of Clu’s occupation?”

“Sure did,” said Cutler. “Some of them only joined tonight, but all of them are willing to fight.”

“This many,” repeated Beck, still staring.

“The thing that Clu doesn’t get,” Cutler told him, wearing a vicious smile, “Is that the more he clamps down, the more desperate programs get. And the more desperate the program, the more that program becomes willing to take a risk on something. Yes. This many.”

The crowd had gone back to chatting amongst themselves while Beck and Cutler were talking, and Beck just let the sound of splintered conversations wash over him for a second or two.

“Of course,” said Cutler, quieter, “We haven’t been able to accomplish much, until tonight. We’ve built a network, but that’s all we’ve built. Tonight was our first real win. But now, with you, with Tron -”

“Tron?” asked someone from the crowd, as if they’d singled out the name from the noise.

Cutler raised an eyebrow, and waited. The conversation around them died, quickly, as faces turned back around to him.

“Programs,” he started, once it was quiet enough. “I mentioned earlier that we had two victories tonight. The Games was one. As for the other?”

The crowd was silent, waiting.

“Tron Lives,” said Cutler. “And even better, Tron is here.”

The room erupted. Beck winced, casting an eye to the windows - they were blacked out, but this amount of noise would be likely to attract some attention unless everything was soundproofed.

What was he thinking? It was Cutler. Of course it’d be soundproofed.

The chatter eventually dropped by degrees, until a voice called out -

“Well? Where is he, then?”

“He was injured,” said Cutler, raising his voice to be heard. “The User - his User - is healing him now. He’ll join us shortly. For now, we have some planning to do.”

“Planning?”

Cutler gestured for Beck to take centre stage, clearly happy for him to take the lead in this.

Here goes, thought Beck. With this many faces in the crowd, he’d started to have an idea about how they could handle the barricade - the only thing for it was to now float the strategy, see if they’d agree.

“There’s a new User on the Grid right now,” said Beck, looking out at everyone. “Tron’s User. But he can’t stay here if he wants to help us. We need to get him to the portal before it shuts for good, and as of now, we only have a few milicycles left. The barricade will make it tricky. But I’ve got a few ideas, and it’ll only work if you all work with us. Are you on board?”

Beck knew that the cheer that went up at that was at least partly driven by the already exuberant mood in the room. Even so, it was a nice change of pace from what he was used to.

“Good,” said Beck, determinedly. “They want Tron - so let’s give them Tron.”

Chapter Text

Alan had lost track of time long ago. The only thing he was focused on was the code in front of him, and the horrifyingly large number of changes he’d had to make to correct it.

It was one thing seeing a scar. It was another reading broken line after broken line and wondering how Tron was even still whole after suffering through this amount of damage, like someone had taken a scalpel to his most critical functions.

But - and he flicked through the code, up and down, feeling it glide smoothly under his fingertips - he was done, at last. No snags, no unexpected pits, nothing that shouted wrong at him the way almost all of it had earlier.

He went over it once more, just in case.

Clean.

He closed his eyes, and rubbed at the bridge of his nose for a second or two. The lack of glasses kept surprising him, but he couldn’t say he missed them.

Tron shifted next to him, and Alan reached out, gently picked up the disc from his lap, and turned to him. The scar looked better - much better, practically nonexistent but for a few spidering lines here and there.

“I don’t know how to turn off the interface,” he said. “But I think I’m done. Um. I don’t know what comes next?”

He held the disc out. Tron took the other side, but before Alan let go, he said -

“Alan-One -”

“Alan. Just Alan,” jumped in Alan quickly.

“Alan, then. I - I mean - thank you.”

“Anytime,” said Alan, quietly. “Anytime at all.”

Tron selected a few things on the disc, and it flicked back to the image of the figure before the hologram powered down. He reached behind him, docked it to his back, and -

The scar completely disappeared. It was like a cascade, a waterfall of changes that flowed out from his disc and down. Lines grew, white on black, and across his chest blazened -

“The symbol,” said Alan, huffing a laugh. “It really was a T after all.”

Tron looked down, and then up at Alan. “Yes,” he said. “A little too distinctive, sometimes. That’s why I was hiding, before.”

“I know the feeling,” said Alan, and tugged his cloak aside enough to show the inverted squares that had appeared on his own chest.

Tron looked to the emblem, then to Alan’s face, and smiled. “It suits you,” he said.

He stood, and seemed to test himself - stretching, arms pulled back. Alan sat forward and watched.

“All okay?” he asked. “I can only hope I got everything -”

“You did,” said Tron. “I… haven’t felt like this in a long time.”

“Six years with those injuries?” said Alan. “Yeah. I could imagine.”

Tron didn’t meet his gaze, and Alan sat up a little straighter. “Tron?”

“I - time… works differently, on the Grid,” he said, eventually. “Different from the ENCOM system, and from what Flynn told me, differently from the User world as well.”

“Tron,” asked Alan quietly. “How long has it been?”

“Enough,” he said. “Long enough.”

Alan sat with that for a while and said, “I’m sorry.”

Tron’s gaze met his so quickly it could have given him whiplash. “What for?”

“I just wish I -” he blew out a sigh, leant back against the wall again. “I never knew. About any of this. That Flynn was in here, that you were here, that Clu was - I mean - I knew Flynn was up to something, but - I should have pressed him harder. Made him own up to this. He should have let us know, goddamnit. None of this should have happened.”

Tron was holding his eye contact now, fiercely.

“Alan-One,” he said, deliberately. “You have nothing to apologise for. You created me to stand in where you couldn’t, to protect the Grid and beyond. And I -”

He broke off, his head dropping down.

“I failed,” he said, softly, as if it were pulled out of him. “I failed. I couldn’t get Flynn out in time. I couldn’t stop Clu. Couldn’t protect the ISOs. I’m the one who should be sorry. Not you.”

Alan considered this for a second.

He stood up. He walked over to Tron. Tron looked up at him, guiltily.

Alan pulled him into a hug.

Tron stiffened in his grip, and then slowly, slowly relaxed, resting his forehead against Alan’s shoulder. His hands hovered like they weren’t sure where they should go, eventually stilling against Alan’s back.

“We’re a right pair, aren’t we,” said Alan, holding on, staring out at the city through the window. “I couldn’t protect Flynn either. I didn’t write you to be perfect, Tron. And to be honest, if I knew that I was making a person, I - well, I don’t know what I would have done. But you didn’t fail. You survived, Tron. And you tried. You’re still trying. That’s enough. That was always enough.”

Tron’s arm’s squeezed a little tighter at that, and Alan’s heart did weird things in his chest.

“I’m proud of you,” he said, and squeezed back.

Alan’s eyes were red by the time they separated, though he’d tried his best not to cry. Can’t cry, he thought, nonsensically. Don’t have tissues.

He doubted he’d find any on the Grid, either.

He took a deep breath in, and a deep breath out. Tron didn’t breathe, but he was facing away from Alan, clearly recomposing himself too.

“Right,” said Alan, once he’d calmed down enough. “Right. Okay. Now what.”

“Now,” said Tron, looking back over to him, “We get you out of here, is what. We have less than four milicycles to get you to the portal before it closes, and with the barricade in place -”

Alan’s blood ran cold.

“But -”

Tron stopped, waited for him to continue.

“I - I came in here to find Flynn,” he said, as if through molasses. “I can’t leave without him. Not again. Not when I’m so close.”

Tron slumped, and he placed a tentative hand on Alan’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know he’s alive. And I know he’s on the Grid, somewhere. But that’s all I know. He’s hidden himself from me, from everyone. And we don’t have the time to go looking. Not now. I’m not letting the portal close on you, too, not while I’m still standing.”

“What happens when the portal closes?”

“You’re stuck,” said Tron, grimly. “Trapped here. For good.”

“Can’t we just - re-open it again?” he asked, already knowing what the answer would be.

“No. Not from the Grid. It can only be activated from the outside.”

“Right,” said Alan, to himself, burying his head in his hands. The last six years of his life had just been explained in full, pieced together in a horrible tableau. “Flynn. You monumental idiot.”

He felt Tron move at that, and Alan dropped his hands away to ask - “What?”

“I… advised Flynn, many times, on the risks involved with the portal,” said Tron, slowly, as if he was about to say something sacrilegious. “Such as they were. He always said I worried too much.”

Tron was now wearing the barest nudge of a smile. “I’m glad to see my concerns were not unshared.”

“You can say that again,” said Alan. “I love that man like a brother, but when all this is over, he is in for a reckoning.”

“Can’t you do - something? In the User world? To get him back?” asked Tron, now settling himself back against the wall at a slant. “Or find him?”

“I don’t know,” said Alan, honestly. “If I’d stayed outside, though, I doubt that I would have found out about any of this. This place just doesn’t seem to translate to what I saw before I used the laser.”

They were both silent for a moment.

“If I - If I got out,” Alan started. “And then reused the laser again. Would that reset the clock?”

“Yes,” said Tron. “But Clu’s likely now posted someone to the arcade, where you rezzed in. He’d grab you the second you arrived.”

Alan mulled that over. He had the inkling of something, the barest sketches of a plan, but -

“And if I didn’t rez in? What would happen if I sent in an - I don’t know, an orange or something instead?”

“Then it would rez in,” said Tron, slowly, as if he was realising where Alan was going with this. “And the portal would be open for another eight milicycles.”

“That would let Flynn get out, right?” asked Alan. “As long as it’s open, he can get out.”

“Yes,” said Tron. “Yes. We’d have to find him - but yes.”

Alan grinned, slowly.

“So - I get out. And I stay out, for as long as Clu controls the Grid. But - I keep the portal open, as much as I can.”

“And we find Flynn,” said Tron. “Get him to the portal. Get him out. I couldn’t before, not with my scars - but now -”

He looked almost hopeful, trailing off into nothing.

“Sounds like a plan to me,” said Alan. “Or at least, the best plan we're going to get. Okay. Alright. Let’s work out how I’m getting home.”

They were halfway to the elevator when they ran into Beck.

“Oh,” he said. “Hi. Um - I came up here to get Able’s device, but - you’re up? Are you okay now?”

Tron actually grinned at that.

“Yes,” he said. “Better than ever.”

Beck looked between him and Alan as if he couldn’t believe it, bouncing back on his heels, his own grin starting to bloom across his face.

“Thank you,” he said to Alan, who waved it away.

“No thanks needed, believe me,” he said. “I should ask, actually - you don’t have any of your own injuries that need healing, do you?”

“No,” said Beck, just a second too late. Alan squinted at him, but Beck was already moving on. “This is - great timing, actually. We have a plan. Or at least most of one. But Cutler’s recruits are getting impatient, they want to meet you both.”

“Why?” asked Alan, honestly baffled.

“Because you’re a User? Tron’s User? And because Cutler said you’d be down shortly, and it’s been a while.”

“What’s the plan?” asked Tron, all business.

Beck radiated smugness.

“We have our revolution,” he said. “Programs. Lots of them, willing to fight. And so I thought - if we try to breach one choke point in the barricade, they’ll catch us. And even if they don’t, they’ll know which way we were headed. They could follow us easily. But, say, if Tron attacked every major exit from the city, all at once… well, who’s to say which one is the real Tron? Or where he’s going?”

“Able’s device,” said Tron, as if realising something.

“Exactly. We can sneak through while someone else, disguised as you, leads the bulk of the forces away. In the meantime, Clu won’t know what front to focus on, or where to send his reinforcements. There’s just two snags, currently.”

“And they are?”

“One, we need more copies of your suit. No-one’s going to believe it’s you if we don’t sell the image. And two, I… don’t actually know which is the best way to get to the portal,” he said, sheepishly rubbing at the back of his head.

Tron hummed at that, as if thinking it through. Alan was impressed.

“You came up with that? Beck, that’s an excellent strategy. Well done.”

Beck somehow looked even more sheepish at that, though he was clearly pleased with the praise.

“I did workshop it, a little,” he said. “I can’t take all the credit. And we still have to overcome those two flaws I mentioned first.”

“I can plot the course to the portal,” said Tron. “We’ll have to take an indirect route - maybe a solar sailer for the bulk of the trip, and close the gap with a lightjet. It’ll hopefully be under less scrutiny than some of the other options. As for the suit -”

He turned to Alan and said, “You’ll have the ability to make copies. I worked with Flynn long enough to know how he managed to do some things - I can show you, even if I can’t do it myself.”

“Great!” said Beck. “So - it’s sorted? We go with my plan? No other suggestions? Comments? Criticisms?”

“Alan is right,” said Tron, reaching out to clasp Beck’s shoulder. “Well done.”

They moved forward, continuing to the elevator, leaving Beck behind them.

“You know, I like this new you!” he cried out, watching them. “Alan’s a good influence!”

Tron shot him a Look over his shoulder and Beck just smiled innocently right back at him.

Tron’s eyes narrowed.

“C’mon, kids,” said Alan, ignoring the byplay and punching the elevator call button. “Let’s go make an entrance.”

Chapter Text

As Alan walked into the common area, side by side with Tron, the room went silent in an instant. It was like someone had hit a mute button - programs stopped what they were doing mid-chatter, heads swinging about to face them as if on pivots.

Some part of him withered at the attention - he’d always preferred to be out of the spotlight, where possible - but it wasn’t as if he hadn’t had experience with this kind of thing before.

CEO Bradley is needed here, he thought. Not programmer Bradley.

He straightened his posture, taking a breath in, and noticed Tron standing to attention beside him too.

“Hi,” he said to the crowd with a smile, adopting his best talking-to-the-media voice. “Lovely to meet you all.”

“Likewise,” said Tron. “And we - thank you, all of you, for your hospitality.”

The crowd’s eyes seemed to flick between them both before the room dissolved into whispers, just as loud as the silence had been mere moments before. Alan couldn’t make out much from the noise, but he could pick up the occasional word - a scattered ‘Tron’ or ‘User’ that resolved themselves clearly.

He kept his posture steady, confident, scanning the room and looking for Cutler. He spotted him talking to a cluster of programs and they locked eyes. Cutler nodded at him, then turned to say something brief to the person next to him before starting to make his way over.

Alan relaxed a little internally. It wasn’t as if he didn't have experience as a facilitator - he could manage a crowd, and did, on a regular basis - but - well, this was a very different environment to the business meetings he typically had to wrangle. Best to leave this to the expert.

The whispers had continued, some breaking out into actual conversation, before -

“Roy!?” called someone from the crowd, incredulous. “It is you, isn’t it? Tell us we’re not imagining things.”

Alan’s own head swung about, focusing on where the question had come from - and -

“Liang?” he asked, delighted, “I had hoped - I mean, I saw Ida before, but - I’m so glad you all made it.”

Alan caught the edges of a muttered I told you so as Ida elbowed Barsky in the ribs, and the group of programs started to push their way through the throng towards them.

“Roy?” Tron asked him, under his breath.

“I panicked,” said Alan, under his breath too. “Fake name. Friend of mine, actually, Roy Kleinberg.”

Tron seemed to be about to say something in response to that, before he hesitated and stopped.

“I knew it,” Skala was saying as they approached. “I knew something was up with you. You didn’t act like a stray, and your clothes were - different.”

“You almost had me,” said Alan, smiling. “If it weren’t for - anyway. And it’s Alan. Not Roy. Sorry.”

“We’ll let it slide,” said Skala, smirking. "User."

Ida and Ruena were both staring at Tron, something like awe on their faces. Tron nodded his head to the group and said, “You’re with Cutler?”

“Met him tonight,” said Liang. “We were originally hoping to join you in Argon - but - it seems like that’s no longer necessary.”

“Not for now, at least,” said Tron. “I’m assuming Beck has briefed you all on the plan?”

“Yes,” said Lee. “And can I just say - it’s an honour, Tron. We’ll do your name proud.”

“I’m sure you all will,” said Cutler, coming up behind them. Barsky shuffled aside to make room. “But we don’t have the time to chat about it. Alan, Tron - Beck said he’d update you on our strategy?”

“He did,” said Alan. “He also said something about copying a suit. Tron’s said it’s possible - he’s going to show me how.”

“We’ll need Beck, first,” said Tron, turning to look back at the corridor behind them. “He’s got the disc that you’ll need to duplicate. He should be with us any moment.”

True enough, Beck walked through the door a beat later. He froze as every eye in the group focused on him at once.

“Um,” he said, and looked questioningly at Alan and Tron.

“Don’t worry,” said Alan. “Just discussing logistics.”

“Ah,” said Beck, relaxing, and waved Able’s device as he joined them. “Right - got it. Got this, too.”

“Good work,” said Cutler. “That's the last of it. Time to get this show on the road.”

“Just one question, before we start,” asked Beck, as they began to move, Cutler already starting to direct the crowd, assigning working groups - “who’s collecting Zed and Mara?”

The crowd had slowly thinned as programs were coded with the disguise, given a copy of the disc - just the appearance of the suit, Tron had said, not the permissions that come with it - and were sent to go and take position across the city.

It was like a production line. Alan, who had somewhat already gotten over the weirdness of sharing his face with Tron, tripped straight back into the Uncanny Valley as he watched program after program take on his image.

Judging by Tron’s increasingly stiffening back, he wasn’t alone in that, either.

They were down to the last few groups when the door opened again and two new programs walked through, followed by the person who’d been sent to fetch them.

They stumbled at the threshold, staring at the crowd.

A whole batch of Trons stared back.

“Um,” asked one of the newcomers. “...What did we miss?”

“Because this is just freaky,” said the other.

The actual Tron, across the room, glanced over at that and lifted a wry eyebrow before turning back to the recruits. He stayed silent, but nudged Beck, who looked over at the interruption and perked up.

“Mara, Zed!” he said, moving to join them, pleased. “At last! Come and meet everyone.”

“Every Tron, more like,” one of them muttered, barely loud enough to be heard, and Alan found himself cracking a smile.

They came closer, Beck shepherding them towards where the main operation had arranged itself. Scattered supplies - discards and surplus - marked where they’d been working, and Alan was in the midst of it all, surrounded by duplicate discs.

They don’t shake hands, he reminded himself, settling for inclining his head with a, “Hello. Zed and Mara, is it? Beck mentioned you both earlier. Nice to meet you. I’m Alan.”

The newcomers looked between him and the Trons, and then back to Beck, who just smiled at them.

The one he assumed to be Mara frowned at him slightly, even as she said “...Hi! It’s - nice to meet you too? I’m sorry - I really don’t mean to be rude here, but - should we know you?”

“Not really, no,” said Alan. “Let’s just say I’m new in town. I only met Beck and the others tonight too.”

Mara squinted at him at that, tilting her head between him and the rest of the crowd as if trying to work something out. Alan took it with good grace.

“You - look like Tron, like everyone else here,” she said, slowly, after a second or two of consideration. Beck stayed silent, half a grin on his face, clearly happy to watch her draw her own conclusions. “But not quite. Not exactly. Why have one program look slightly different, when everyone else looks identical? Unless…”

“Unless?” asked Zed, who was now watching the activity in the room more broadly, attention off Alan entirely.

“Unless he’s not a program,” she breathed, and looked at Beck again. Beck’s grin grew wider.

“No,” said Beck, “He’s not.”

“You found him? So quickly? I can’t believe it!! This is amazing!!”

She faced Alan again, all enthusiasm this time, and said, “It is so nice to meet you too. I still can’t believe that you’re here.”

Alan gave her a rueful chuckle in return. “To be honest, neither can I," he told her. "This wasn’t how I originally expected my Friday night to go.”

Zed had turned back at Mara's realisation, and he looked Alan over with wide eyes, darting an occasional glance to Beck as if trying to work out if he was joking. When Beck nodded at him, still grinning, he settled back on his heels and rolled his eyes.

“Figures you’d found him already - all we uncovered was just gossip about the Coliseum escapees,” he grumped, though his tone had an undercurrent of relief. “And it wasn’t even useful gossip. So if he’s not part of - whatever is going on in here - why does he still look like Tron?”

“Because he’s Tron’s User,” said Cutler from behind him. Zed startled, spinning about, shoulders shooting up to his ears as he tensed in an instant.

Cutler looked at him.

Alan managed to stifle his smile.

Beck just laughed at him outright, and Zed shot him a spectacularly unimpressed look in return.

"Would you all stop doing that," he said forcefully to the room at large, slowly relaxing again, stepping back to make space for Cutler and crossing his arms with a pout.

Mara giggled at him. Cutler paused, briefly, before continuing on like nothing had happened.

“Mara. ...Zed. As Alan said, it’s nice to meet you both. I’m Cutler. You have a key role to play in all this, so we better bring you up to speed, and quickly.”

“We do?” asked Mara, straightening up a little.

“You do,” said Cutler. “We have a message to spread, and you are the best programs for it.”

Mara’s dawning look of delight at that only served to highlight Zed’s confusion.

Beck took them both by the shoulders and said, “C’mon, you two. We've got a lot to do, and not much time left in which to do it.”

“Do what?” asked Zed, as he was gently tugged along, Mara almost bouncing in anticipation. “Beck? What are you all talking about? Not much time left for us to do what?”

Eventually, everything was in place. The countdown for the portal in the back of Beck’s head had been joined by another, steadily ticking down.

Across the city, programs had settled in, waiting for a sign. Beck could almost feel the anticipation in the air, the stillness before the storm.

Pressed up against the side of an alley, close to where the solar sailer was docked, they were almost invisible - circuits hidden to the point where they blended with the shadows. Tron was keeping an eye on their surroundings, but the remainder of their group stared out at the city, silent, waiting.

Three, thought Beck.

Two.

One.

There was a tense moment where nothing happened - and then -

The horizon started flickering. Skyscrapers dimmed, guttering out before brightening again, glitching chaotically. Letters spread across their facades as if from nowhere, starting small but growing, turning, connecting - line after line, a bold riot of colour, gleefully spreading wild - all with the message -

Tron Lives.

And across the city, programs made their move.

“Now,” said Tron, and Cutler shifted, the white of the suit already overtaking his circuits. Mask stored away, Tron’s face in place, he turned and said -

“Good luck. Until next time.”

“Stay safe,” said Alan, echoed by Beck, and Cutler left their position at a dead run.

The shouting started about ten nanocycles later.

Tron, hearing it, nodded. They turned to go.

Cutler would draw the guards to one side of the depot. They were breaking into the other. And as it was ‘Tron’ acting as bait - well, Beck knew they wouldn't have to worry about any programs remaining at their posts. None of Clu's army would want to explain why Tron had appeared and they’d stayed behind.

So their route was relatively straightforward as they snuck past container after container, stacked up in neat rows for easy access by the gantry crane. It reminded Beck of the docks back in Argon, and it was, thankfully, just as quiet. As they'd hoped, the guards that had been here now had bigger problems to deal with.

The muffled yelling in the distance seemed to suggest that it was going well.

When a mere instant later Tron flung out an arm to stop them from progressing, Beck thought - aaannnddd there it is. I shouldn't have tempted fate.

“They’ve installed a scanner,” Tron said lowly, dropping his arm once they'd all halted. “For all the cargo, and for all the ramps to the deck. If we try to go through it, we’ll trip an alarm. Clu wasn’t taking chances.”

Beck peered past him to see - a wavering film that hovered between the loading bay and the solar sailer. It was supported by pillars at regular intervals, clearly erected in a haste - unlike the neat precision of the rest of the docks, it was awkward, meandering, working around existing structures rather than with them.

“Easy,” he said, relieved that that’s all there was. “I’ve got my wrench. If we aim for one of the pillars, I can turn it off - no problem. We'll be through in no time.”

“Turning it off is not the problem,” said Tron, sourly. “What we need to be concerned with is turning it back on again from the other side. If we leave it deactivated, it’ll be a sure sign to Clu that this was the route we took. We have to leave this place in the same condition we found it.”

"Great," said Beck, flatly. Of course it couldn't be that simple.

Alan hummed, contemplative, and Beck turned to look at him. He’d heard that noise from Tron before.

“Alan?” he asked.

Alan’s head turned to him. “I might have an idea,” he said, tentatively. “I’ve never done it before, but - I think I know how to get it to turn off temporarily, reboot once we’re past.”

“How?”

“Magic Eye,” said Alan, incomprehensibly. Even Tron turned to him at that, head tilted in a clear question. “I - nevermind. But I think I might be able to access the code for the scanner, switch it off long enough for us to sneak through. If there are logs - well, I might be able to edit those too. I just need someone to keep watch while I make the changes.”

“You’ve got two someones,” said Beck. “We’re with you.”

“You'll need to be quick,” warned Tron, before sighing. "And we'll be more exposed than I wanted us to be. But I can't see another way around this, and we don't have time to plot another route."

He paused for a moment, then nodded at Alan. "Alright. You're up. Let's go."

He gestured for Alan to follow him, Beck keeping to the rear. They slunk into the open, cautiously.

When they reached the closest pillar Alan dropped to one knee. Tron spun, watching his back, while Beck stayed facing forward, alert for any movement on the other side of the barrier.

Both of them undocked their discs, held them ready.

Alan placed a hand against the structure, and underneath it, an interface appeared. He tapped quickly at some of the squares, and in the distance, the wavering light wall sparked.

Alan’s head turned to see where the fault had been, seemingly estimating something before turning back to the interface and decisively selecting one of images. A section of the barrier covering the catwalk flickered, once, before dropping away entirely.

“Got it, I think,” said Alan, distantly, still focused on the code under his fingertips. “Give me one more second -”

Beck saw Tron’s head snap around.

He followed the direction it was pointed to. It seemed silent enough, but a ping from Tron shared what he had heard - noise, as if from combat.

Headed this way.

“We might not have a second,” said Tron, tense.

“Right,” said Alan, tapping hurriedly. He made another change before a dismissive motion wiped the interface altogether, and he stood, turned. “Done. We’ve got abou-”

He was cut off by Tron scooping him up into a fireman’s carry, already starting to sprint towards the catwalk. Beck followed close behind, keeping pace.

The noises were coming closer now, and impossibly, Tron ran faster.

They vaulted onto the Solar Sailer and settled down between the gaps in the cargo just as the barrier reignited and the fight spilled into the space they'd been.

Beck could only catch glimpses from their position, but he could see enough to know that Cutler was holding his own - at least three sentries went down before Cutler had apparently seen enough of the area to know they'd made it through.

Seen enough to know it was time for phase two.

He reached for a baton at his thigh. A second later and a lightcycle tore out of the fight, scattering the guards, headed away. Back to the city, drawing the forces with him.

Not that they'd catch him. Zed had modified the bike. By the time the guards reached the perimeter, Cutler would be long gone.

It went quiet again.

And Beck - wound down a little, unfolding his mask. They’d done it. They’d done it. They were on their way.

Tron had carefully put Alan down in the meantime, the two exchanging a murmur of words that Beck couldn’t make out. Their masks had unfolded, too, and Alan eventually sat down, bracing himself against one of the containers.

“We made it,” said Alan, propping one arm across his knee. “We made it. Oh boy. I’m getting too old for this kind of thing.”

Beck could feel the steady rhythm of Tron’s scans across the sailer, until he was apparently satisfied that the barrier was the only trap that had been left behind. He leant against a container at a slant, next to Alan, settling in.

Beck sat down opposite both of them.

“I guess all we have to do now is wait,” he said, propping his head back. “Again. Does anyone know when the sailer will leave?”

“Soon,” said Tron. “It looks like they’ve finished loading it already. Give it a microcycle or two, and it’ll start moving."

There were no further guards, no indication that they’d been found out.

Still, Beck couldn’t fully relax until the sailer spun into life around them, pulling away, gaining speed - until the red lights of the barricade had shrunk to nothing more than points on the horizon, slowly blinking out one by one - until they'd faded from view entirely, until nothing but the dark remained.

Chapter Text

Beck was the one to break the silence, once they'd cleared the city proper and were well on their way - once it was clear that they'd escaped unseen, that there was no chase, no flare of red behind them.

Alan could only hope that held true for everyone else, too. He’d been saved tonight - not only by Beck and Tron but by strangers, people who had volunteered to put themselves in harm’s way to help him.

He wasn’t about to let their effort go to waste. Not if he could help it.

He owed them that much and more.

“Sooo,” Beck started, and Alan roused from his thoughts, met his eyes. “Now that we’re here - and we’ve got nothing else to do - um. Can I ask some questions? To you, I mean. In general.”

Alan tucked away a smile at the affected casualness of the query, at the very real vein of curiosity he could sense running beneath it. He’d heard that tone from Sam before, on occasion.

“Sure, Beck,” he said. “You can ask me questions. I can’t guarantee I’ll have any answers, but - shoot.”

Beck hesitated for a second more, and then said, almost cautiously,

“Once we get you to the portal - where does it lead to, exactly? Where do you go? Is it - similar to the Grid? What’s the User world like?”

Alan... halted. Processed the enormity of that. Tried to marshal his thoughts together as they skittered away, as he considered how, even now, this place was still blindsiding him, reminding him that he really was - that this really was - somewhere else.

“Starting with the big questions, huh,” he said eventually, with a somewhat crooked grin. “I have to admit, I’ve never been asked to describe the whole world before. Well... to address your first point, the portal should lead back to Flynn’s office - it’s where I found all this. As for the world it’s a part of, well -”

He stopped, contemplative.

“It’s - bright,” he started again. “Messy, this place has no comparison there. The amount of litter in LA - but - I digress. Hmmm. It’s - filled with life. Plants, animals - people. Like you, or me. Cities. Buildings, like the ones here. Heck, we even have our own version of lightcycles - we just call them motorcycles.”

He broke off again, and then sighed, gave up.

“I don’t know, Beck,” he said. “I don’t know how to describe it in any way that would make sense to you. The Grid is so similar, and yet so different to - well, I was about to call it ‘real life’, but…”

He trailed off, searching for the right term.

“Flynn used to call it the ‘Real World’, if that’s the phrase you’re looking for,” Tron said, breaking his silence with a look down. He sighed, too, and then unfolded from his position, actually joining them, sitting next to Alan and resting his head against a container. “Clu used to call it Olympus.”

His clenched jaw betrayed exactly what he thought of that.

“Olympus,” said Alan, pinching the bridge of his nose. “How did he even - honestly - for goodness sake. Well, if there’s one thing that I need to make clear - we’re not gods. Users, I mean. Programmers. And this -”

He swung an arm out, narrowly missing Tron’s face, attempting to encompass everything around them.

“- this is just as real as anything else in the ‘real’ world.”

“No,” said Tron quietly, in response. “We know you’re not gods. But you do have power here, more power than any program. You can alter the Grid in ways we can’t.”

“Mmm,” said Alan, conceding. “Maybe I just have the right permissions - Gibbs always did use to joke about setting me up with a profile for the laser. But - what I want to know - what I really want to know - is why this place doesn’t seem to show up on the other side of the screen. I checked the system before I entered it! It looked - acted, even - like any other - but -”

He broke off, shook his head.

“You’re people,” he said. “People. A civilisation, trapped in a basement. It feels - wrong.”

Beck quirked an eyebrow. “What’s the alternative?” he asked. “It’s not like we know any different. I don’t even know what you’re talking about now.”

“I don’t know,” said Alan. “I don’t have a solution, not yet. Short of hooking this place up to the internet, at least, which has its own problems - but - I don't think the terminal even has the right hardware for that, yet. I doubt this place has any native way of connecting to the outside world.”

There was silence for a second or two, at that. Until Tron said, “Well -”

Alan turned to him, lifted an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me,” he said.

“Alright,” said Tron.

There was more silence.

Alan rolled his eyes. “I have an apology or two to make to Lora,” he muttered under his breath, before saying louder, “Tron -”

Tron’s lips twitched into a smile. Beck’s eyes had gone wide, staring at Tron in disbelief. Tron raised an eyebrow at him, still half smiling, and Beck’s face quickly shifted back into careful neutrality, though he kept darting glances between Alan and Tron like he couldn’t believe it.

Alan… wasn’t going to ask. He turned back to Tron again. Tron’s smile faded a little, settling back into seriousness.

“I... don’t know the specifics,” he warned. “I only ever saw it happen once. But Flynn - there was something. It was - early, when Clu was - there was a ringing, and Flynn started talking about a baby. Said he had to go.”

“Ringing,” said Alan, drumming his fingers against his knee. “Ringing. And it was definitely outside communication? He left shortly after?”

“Yes,” said Tron. “And yes. Clu - wasn’t pleased, at the interruption.”

Alan could feel his blood pressure rising.

“So you’re telling me - that Flynn had a phone line - this whole time. This whole time he could have -”

He stopped, collected himself. Took a deep breath in, and a deep breath out. Beck was quiet, looking somewhat lost, and Tron seemed to have taken the position that silence was the better part of valour.

“That’s what the pager was for,” Alan said, eventually, when he was sure his voice would be even. “I’m sure of it. Something must have stopped him from using it. Flynn could disappear for days at a time, but he wouldn’t have left us hanging this long if he could help it. I have to believe he tried, at the very least. Heck, maybe he forgot the number, or maybe he didn’t have the... right… wait.”

Idea dawning, he reached for his makeshift pocket, pulled out his cell phone. Beck lent in, trying to examine it even as Alan turned it over in his hands.

“What is that?” he asked, curious. “Is that - a User device?”

“Kind of,” said Alan. “Well, actually, yes, I guess it is. It’s a cell phone - a - communications device. It allows people to connect from a distance, talk, send messages. And - maybe if I - I mean, it’s code right now too. Maybe I can re-write it, get it to connect. It’d be a start. A trial-run, maybe.”

“A trial-run for what?” asked Tron.

“To opening this place up,” said Alan. “Though that might have to be a long term project. For now, let’s just try this.”

“Can I take a look at it first?” asked Beck, still eyeing it curiously, and Alan shrugged in easy compliance.

“Knock yourself out,” he said, and passed it over. Beck accepted it with interest.

Tron, meanwhile, had stilled, as if hesitating. Alan glanced over.

“Tron?” he asked.

Tron looked away, and then back, before he said, almost unwillingly, “We - can’t.”

“Can’t what?” asked Alan, confused.

“We can’t open the Grid up,” said Tron. “The phone - potentially, but we can’t connect the Grid to a broader network. Not before Clu is dealt with. As it is, he’s limited to one system, but given the opportunity -”

“He’d be worse than the MCP,” finished Alan, mouth twisting. “Is worse, from the sounds of it. I - forgot, for a moment there.”

Tron’s face seemed to mirror his own displeasure. Even Beck looked up as the mood soured.

There was a beat of silence. Then two.

“Can you -” Alan started, then hesitated, and started again. “Can you tell me what happened here? I mean, I’ve worked out some things, and I know some of the stories that Flynn used to tell Sam, but - I still don’t know enough. Not if I’m going to help you solve this.”

“Solve Clu?” asked Beck, leaning in. He put the phone down, gently nudged it back over to Alan.

“If I can,” replied Alan, picking it up again. “I’m not sure what, exactly, I can do, but I have to try, at least.”

Tron seemed to mull the request over.

“What do you want to know?” he asked, eventually. “I’ll tell you what I can, but - I’m no storyteller.”

Alan grinned a little ruefully at that.

“Neither am I,” he said. “Don’t worry. Just - start from the beginning. Or Clu’s beginning, perhaps.”

Tron looked between Alan and Beck both, and deflated a little.

“Well,” he sighed, “Flynn always called the Grid a digital frontier -”

“So let me get this straight,” said Alan, head spinning after the explanation. Tron had covered the Grid’s history, and what had happened, but something had stood out to him in the story, something on which everything else hinged. “Clu. You said that Flynn told him to create the perfect system?”

“Yes,” said Tron. His voice had lost its edge of anger about halfway through and had mostly settled into resigned.

“And… did Flynn ever clarify on what he meant, by perfection?”

“No,” said Tron. “Though he was… excited, about the ISOs. He tried to - encourage - that enthusiasm in Clu, but Clu never listened.”

“Of course he never listened. Flynn set him up to fail from the get-go,” Alan muttered, running a hand down his face. “The first rule in programming is defining the problem. What are you setting out to do? Asking to make something ‘perfect’ isn’t a thing - seems like Clu interpreted that request as making things controllable, instead. ‘Obedience’, just like Liang said. Throw that in with this place - and - well, I guess it’s obvious that Flynn never read any Asimov.”

Tron remained silent at that, but Beck, who had been listening along quietly until now, jumped in, heated.

“Setting him up to fail or not, he’s still taken over the Grid,” he spat with surprising venom, his hands clenching to fists. “He’s still killed thousands of innocent programs, not to mention what he’s done to the ISOs. To Tron. To all of us. So excuse me if I don’t give him any sympathy after what he’s done.”

“Oh, no,” said Alan, blinking at him, taken aback. “That’s not what I meant at all. What’s happened here is horrific, and your anger is more than justified. I’m just thinking about what happens next. From the sounds of it - Clu isn’t going to stop until the Grid’s entirely under his control. But at the same time, before him, things were falling apart. I don’t want to take him offline only to find out that he’s too embedded in the system, and that you will all be hurt by that. He might be tied to too many dependencies - like - a house of cards. Knock him out, and everything else might crash with it.”

Beck subsided, though his mouth remained pressed in an angry line. Tron huffed the smallest of laughs. “I faced the same dilemma,” he said to Alan. “I had hoped that Flynn -”

He broke off.

“Yeah,” said Alan, his voice catching. “Yeah. Flynn tried to juggle too many things at once with too few hands to manage it. After what happened with Jordan…”

He trailed off as well, and then continued, skipping over it, “But it doesn’t excuse his actions. I think… after we get him out, I might get him the name of the therapist that Sam’s been seeing. Things need to change. They will change.”

“And about Clu?” asked Beck.

“I... may have an idea or two,” said Alan. “Or three. They’re a bit underhanded, and I’m not quite sure where they sit on the ethical continuum, but then - it will stop the murder of countless more, so in this instance, I’m willing to give myself a pass.”

“A pass on what?” asked Tron, raising an eyebrow.

“Creating the perfect system,” said Alan, air quoting to go with it. “What would happen if we changed that?”

“You mean changing his directive?” asked Tron, sitting up and leaning forward.

“Rectifying,” breathed Beck.

“It’s what he’s been doing to others, from the sounds of it,” said Alan. “And programs do get changed, all the time, where I’m from. Here, it’s - well, I don’t like the idea of doing it to a person. That’s why I’m not sure. But I can’t delete him, and he’s likely to keep continuing as he has been, otherwise.”

“I’m not sure it’ll be that easy,” warned Tron. He was wearing a contemplative look, as if torn on his response.

“I’m not either,” said Alan. “But it’s the best I’ve got on short notice. It’ll likely just be a patch job, something to hopefully tide us over until Flynn can work out what to do with him. You said the Grid and my world doesn’t operate on the same timescale, right?”

“Correct,” said Tron.

“Do you know what the difference is?”

“Not... exactly,” said Tron. “Though I know the Grid runs - faster.”

“Did Flynn ever give - examples?” asked Alan. “Anything with a comparison? I need to know how much time to factor in to our plans.”

Tron hummed and titled his head to the side, eyes distant, as if searching his memory.

“Ten minutes,” he said, eventually. “Flynn once mentioned that the length of time the portal was open equated to about ten minutes, on the other side.”

Alan… checked his watch at that, felt his stomach drop.

“The portal we’re heading to,” he said, just confirming. “The portal that’s been open for - what - hours, now.”

“Open eight milicycles total, yes,” said Tron grimly.

“Ten minutes,” repeated Alan, horrified. “To hours in here. Well - hell. That’s just made our lives exponentially harder.”

“Why?” asked Beck.

“Because if I want to act on Clu, every minute out there seems to work out to over an hour here. And it’s going to take me a while to comprehend how this system works from the outside. I can work quickly - but from the sounds of it, you’ll both be left waiting days for anything to happen.”

“What other choice do we have?” said Beck. “If we’re going with this plan, at least. We don’t have the ability to change Clu’s directive, or the permissions needed to edit his disc.”

Alan sat up, fully.

“That,” he said to Beck, smiling, an idea coming to mind. “Can change.”

Chapter Text

Alan wasn’t sure what the signal was, but eventually, Tron stood, reaching a hand down to Alan to help him to his own feet.

“It’s time,” said Tron. “This is the closest the solar sailer will get to the portal.”

Standing, Alan’s head cleared the containers, and he turned, slowly, just absorbing the view - the clouds scudding past them as if chased, lit from below in a muted glow, and in the distance -

“Is that our target?” he asked, staring at what looked like daybreak on the horizon.

“Yes,” said Tron, following his gaze. “That’s the portal. It’s only accessible by air - hence the lightjets. Flynn made it - difficult, to approach. Deliberately so.”

Beck jumped up and stretched, already reaching for a baton that appeared on the side of his thigh. Tron saw the motion and turned to him, shook his head.

“We’ll go together,” he said. “I doubt they have, but just in case - if they’ve placed reinforcements around the portal, it’ll be easier to sneak past as one unit. Keep under the radar.”

“You sure?” asked Beck seriously. “If anything, if there’s reinforcements - surely it’d be better to have someone to serve as a distraction? It’s worked for us so far.”

Tron hesitated.

“I can keep at a distance, scout it out,” pressed Beck. “You go with Alan - I’ll watch your backs while you get him out. And if there are forces there, I’ll draw them away.”

“You’d be okay with that?” asked Alan, equally unsure. “We’d be leaving you behind.”

“And it’s a harder flight than it looks,” warned Tron. “But… I trust your ability.”

“Wouldn’t have suggested it if I wasn’t,” Beck told Alan seriously, and then cracked a smile. “I’ll be fine. You two go.”

Tron nodded and said, “Fine. We’ll do it your way. Divide and conquer.”

“Guess that means it’s time for goodbyes, huh,” said Alan, the reality of it all setting in. “If we’re splitting up.”

“Guess so,” Beck said, awkwardly rubbing the back of his head. He sighed, dropped his arm, faced Alan fully.

“It was nice to meet you,” he said, seriously. “Thanks. For everything, I mean. You weren’t what I expected.”

“Again, no thanks needed,” said Alan, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. He opened his arms wide, and said, “C’mere.”

Beck took a hesitant step forward and Alan closed the gap, pulled him into an embrace.

“This is a see you later,” said Alan. “Not a goodbye forever. And besides… both of you have my cell phone number, now. I’m not sure if the changes will work - but - test it, alright? I’ll try and stay in contact, if I can.”

“Sure,” said Beck.

The moment held, and then broke. Beck pulled back, turned to face Tron.

“I’ll keep flying until I see you leave the portal,” he said. “If something happens - I’ll meet you at Cutler’s safehouse.”

Tron nodded at him and said only, “Good luck.”

Beck threw him a mock salute and one last grin to Alan, before running up the sailer’s steps until he was level with the top of the cargo. He took the baton from his thigh, waited for a moment, and then jumped.

Alan held his breath until a lightjet rose above them, a figure just barely visible at the controls. It twirled around them, once, and then took off into the sky, getting lost in the clouds.

“Our turn,” said Tron. “Let’s go.”

Alan sat shotgun, and with Tron keeping them level he had nothing more to do than admire the scenery outside. It was strangely organic - between the sea and the clouds, he felt a little like he was on a redeye flight, watching the world turn past the windows.

The floating shards of rock interspersed with beams of light punctured that feeling, but still. It really was beautiful, in its own way. All his life he’d read, watched, media about other worlds - and Flynn had found one.

He really hadn’t been joking when he said he’d been about to change everything.

Had already changed everything. For Alan, at least.

A glimpse of highlights in the distance briefly broke him out of his thoughts. Just a dot on the horizon, a flash of pale white. Beck, likely, though on an odd angle - further out than he should have been, out east from their position rather than behind them.

The dot disappeared, lost amongst the idle movement of the monuments around them.

The portal itself, too, was providing enough light to start to white out the area surrounding it - incandescent, like flying into an artificial sunrise.

Not that the programs living here would understand the comparison, Alan thought ruefully.

Maybe next time he came back he’d bring photos of the outside world. An encyclopedia set, maybe. Music. Some sort of cultural exchange.

Would chocolate scan into the system? An orange did, once upon a time, and if the laser could digitise something as complex as a person...

The highlights twinkled again, there and then gone. His attention flicked to them, and then flickered away.

Food would probably translate - maybe it’d turn into some kind of energy, like the liquid that this place seemed to run on. He’d certainly seen enough of Cutler’s safehouse to know that programs appeared to have alcohol equivalents, but then again, it would be like Flynn to favour coding that in over other forms of sustenance…

Oh well. He could experiment. Or Flynn could tell him directly, once Tron found him, got him out.

Flash, glinted the white lights - this time brighter, outlined a little more distinctly. Definitely another lightjet.

Alan frowned.

The craft was still at a decent distance - distant enough he couldn’t make out any details, but - it also seemed to be aiming towards the portal, coming closer, making good time.

Didn’t Beck say he’d be hanging back?

Flash.

Tron followed his gaze - and the second the other craft was in his sightline he tensed all at once, his easy grip on the controls tightening to fists.

“Hold on,” he growled.

“To what?” questioned Alan, and then scrambled for purchase on anything as Tron pulled them steeply up, spiralling as he did so, as if scanning the area around them.

Alan held on for dear life. He was about to ask what was happening when -

Marigold dot in the distance, he noted, very carefully Not Panicking. They had a plan for this. And it didn’t look like it was tailing them, necessarily - it was approaching from the same angle as the other lightjet, following in its wake. Maybe it was fine.

“Clu,” breathed Tron, and the tone of his voice was vicious.

“Fuck,” swore Alan, and then said, “Sorry. Forget I said that. But - how did he know we were here? I thought our plan worked!”

Tron drew the lightjet level, started to edge closer to the shattered structures, hiding behind them as much as possible. A couple of taps later on Alan’s behalf and the jet’s lights guttered to nothing. Blackout.

“I don’t think he’s here for us,” said Tron, grimly. “He’s running ragged, and I can think of only one reason why he’d be here without waiting for the rest of his army to catch up. He’s here for Flynn.”

“The other lightjet,” whispered Alan, everything slotting into place.

“Most likely,” said Tron. “Our plan hasn’t changed. I’ll get you to the portal first, and then I’ll deal with Flynn and Clu.”

Alan’s mind was racing.

“This - this might be the chance we were waiting for, though,” he said.

“Chance?” asked Tron, sparing him a glance.

Alan tore his eyes away from the scene outside.

“Think about it,” he said, quickly. “If I go, if Flynn - we’d be leaving you and Beck to deal with Clu alone. Here, without backup. I’m not about to let him hurt you again. Either of you.”

“And I’m not letting him get his hands on you,” said Tron. “End of. I’m not arguing this with you.”

“I don’t want that either,” said Alan. “And that’s not what I’m asking. Quite the opposite, actually. I’m just saying - we have the lead, here, from the looks of it. We’ll get to the portal before them, and we don’t even know if they saw us. We can take advantage of that.”

Tron’s lips thinned, but he said nothing, waiting for Alan to continue.

Alan grinned.

“Here’s what I’m thinking -”

Chapter Text

They’d landed hastily, and Alan had done what he’d had to do. Tron still didn’t like it - he’d only gone along with the plan on the condition that Alan remained a few lengths from the beam of the portal, ready to run.

“If I say go, you go,” he’d said, in a tone that brooked no disagreement. “Get in the beam, hold your disc up, and get out. I will take waiting to deal with Clu if it means that you’ll be safe.”

He was hidden, now, lying in wait. Alan was on the bridge, nerves rising.

Especially because it didn’t have any railings.

“Flynn,” he muttered under his breath. “This is a criminal lack of OSHA compliance. Though I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, after how you treated the laser.”

He knelt down and started poking at the code. It was as good of a distraction as any.

The guardrails rezzed in just as he heard footsteps and talking, at a distance. A girl and - and -

He stood up, quickly, and the head that had risen above the stairs faltered as it tracked his movement.

“Flynn,” he said, and stopped, numb.

“Alan?” came the reply, wavering. “Bradley? Is that - is it really you?”

“Yeah,” said Alan, trying to keep his cool. “Yeah. It is. I - Kevin.”

“I - thought I’d never see you again, man. How are you here?”

Flynn climbed the last few steps as if he was walking in slow motion, a watery grin on his face. A young woman was trailing him, though her focus was on whatever was behind them - fear written across her face in capital letters.

“Flynn,” she said nervously, “Clu’s almost here. We need to go.”

Flynn followed her gaze, and then he straightened, hooking his arm around her shoulder and marching up to Alan.

“C’mon,” he said to Alan, grasping his arm too, starting to move towards the beam of the portal. “We can have our reunion later. Right now, we need to leave before Clu catches up to us.”

Alan resisted, gently pulling Flynn’s hand loose.

“Both of you go,” he said with a smile. “I’m staying, for now.”

“What?” asked Flynn, incredulously. “Alan, my man, Clu is bad news. You do not want to be here when he arrives.”

“I do, actually,” said Alan. “Don’t worry. I’m under strict orders to cut and run if it gets too dangerous.”

“Orders from who?” asked Flynn, suspiciously, before his eyes widened and he pushed the girl behind him.

“What a pleasant surprise,” came a voice.

It was Flynn’s voice, but with none of Flynn’s warmth. The tone suggested that by pleasant, he meant anything but.

Alan turned around and saw - Flynn. Again. But not the Flynn he knew, not the Flynn at his back - instead there was something cruel about the expression, a hardness he’d never seen in the Flynn he was familiar with.

“Clu,” said Flynn, voice flat.

He was at the end of the bridge, just a few feet off stepping on it himself. He seemed confident, for some reason, an easy swagger in his posture and in the space he inhabited.

Do all programs look like their creators? Alan wondered, briefly, before shaking himself back to reality. Now was not the time for speculation.

“Can’t say the same, speaking for myself,” Alan said cheerfully in reply. Few more steps, he thought. Just take a few more steps. Come on. “This is really neither a surprise, nor pleasant.”

Clu’s face twisted at that, as if tasting something sour. He took one more step forward.

Come on, thought Alan. Almost there. He kept his gaze on Clu’s face, trying not to give the game away early.

“Alan-One,” he half-said, half-spat. “Am I right? I had thought as much. Picked up as a stray. Of course, they never thought to tell me about the new conscripts until after you’d broken free. I should - congratulate you, on making it this far.”

“That’s me,” said Alan, just as cheerfully as before. “Hello. I’d say it’s nice to meet you, but - well, I’d be lying. I’m not sure I like what you’ve done with the place, to be honest.”

“Alan, what are you doing,” hissed Flynn, tugging at his arm again. “We can go! Now! Come on!”

Alan didn’t look at him, eyes intent on Clu.

“Trust me,” he said, under his breath. “This has a purpose.”

Clu moved forward again. He was saying something, but Alan didn’t hear any of it, too busy watching his gait.

The second he hit the threshold his arm slashed down -

Now!

Tron emerged from nowhere and slammed his hand down against the platform. The trap they’d set before sprung to life, and Clu was encased in a box that quickly shrunk to fit him - narrow, transparent, and as hard as anything.

He couldn’t move. Couldn’t turn around, even.

So when Tron reached a hand through the barrier to take his disc, well… there wasn’t much he could do.

The barrier was coded to users-only. Well, user-level permissions, anyway.

Clu didn’t have them. Tron, now, did.

“Alan,” cried Tron, throwing the disc in his direction. “Catch!”

Flynn made a strangled noise behind him. Alan ignored him, intent on - tracking -

- the disc flew in a neat arc and - Alan caught it -

- activating it a moment later -

- and -

-

It was like time had stopped.

Everything faded away. He focused, hard, on the code - and it was just like before, except it wasn’t.

Tron’s code had felt familiar. As if it had recognised him, let him in, helped where it could. This -

He could feel the echoes of Flynn in the way it had been structured, but it went beyond that. It was big. Messy. Alien. Still beautiful, in the way that everything on the Grid was beautiful - but a harsh-edged, cutting beauty, not the steady calm that had been Tron.

The code shifted, as if fighting him, and he plunged in, looking for the lynchpin - the impossibility of perfect, the seed that had sprouted into such destruction.

“I’m sorry,” he said, under his breath, as he worked. “I’m sorry. I know. I’m sorry.”

The code trembled under his fingertips, and he couldn’t tell if the maelstrom around him was from the portal or this - it all blurred into one.

He delved, deeper -

deeper -

deeper -

And -

There.

A few words. Just an idea. Good intentions, and yet…

Alan tugged, until it loosened, glinting, in his mind’s eye - before he let it go, dissolving it to nothing.

No directive left behind.

Alan breathed. On some level, the code around him reacted to the absence, pulling itself together. It held steady, and Alan knew it’d be fine, that there was no risk of it falling apart. It could operate without a purpose written into its core, that it was robust enough to live without one.

On another level, it still pushed at him. Scratched.

“Sorry,” Alan told it. “I - know. This is only a bandaid. And this doesn’t fix everything. But - what else would you have us do? You’d have killed us all, given the chance.”

He didn’t get a reply.

Alan made a few other edits - it helped to think of them as virtual handcuffs, more than anything else - before he powered down the disc, coming back to reality.

He didn’t feel victorious.

He just felt sad. Hollowed out.

But also… he also couldn’t bring himself to care too much. Tron’s scars still danced in his memory, and he’d never said that he couldn’t be vindictive, sometimes.

Just a little.

“What. Is. Happening. Here.” said Flynn, behind him, apparently stunned into inaction.

“I’ll explain later,” said Alan. “You’ve got a lot of work to do to clean up this mess too.”

Flynn spluttered a protest at that, but Alan ignored him.

He walked up to Clu, still trapped in the box, his face torn somewhere between apoplectic and scared.

“I’m sorry,” said Alan, again. “Mostly. I know what it’s like to have a purpose ripped away from you. But this - this really wasn’t sustainable.”

He couldn’t hear the response, through the barrier. He didn’t want to.

He shuffled around the box and passed the disc to Tron, who turned, reached out, and - affixed it, to Clu’s back.

Clu’s circuits flickered, but he stayed standing. One hand clenched into a fist, and he slumped a little, but he otherwise seemed fine.

Alan watched, mouth twisted into a complicated line. He turned back to Tron.

“So,” said Alan.

“So,” said Tron, with a half grin.

“He can’t hurt you now,” said Alan. “He can’t hurt anyone. I’ve coded in some failsafes. No killing, maiming, whatever, and no ordering others to do it on his behalf, either. It's just a stopgap - we'll have to work out a long term plan, but -”

“Alan,” said Tron, cutting him off, his grin growing. “Thank you.”

He stepped forward, and before he knew it, Alan was pulled into an embrace.

He dropped his chin to Tron’s shoulder, and just… took it all in.

“Anytime,” he whispered. “Anytime at all.”

It wasn't a long hug, but it didn't need to be. Tron disentangled himself and then gently took Alan's shoulders, turning him about and pushing him towards the direction of the portal.

"You don't have much time," he said. "I'll deal with Clu from here."

"You sure?" asked Alan, turning back around to face him, still worried despite himself. "I mean -"

"Alan," said Tron, cutting him off again. "I'm sure. I have your number. If anything happens before you come back, I will let you know. Now. Leave. Please."

There wasn't really anything Alan could say to that. He dropped one hand to Tron's shoulder, squeezed briefly, let go, and then turned around -

To come nose to nose with Flynn, who had apparently decided to come investigate what was going on.

Flynn's eyes weren't on Alan, though, though they had flicked to him when he'd turned. Instead, he was still in a way that he almost never was - staring at -

"You're dead," he told Tron, in disbelief. "You're dead. Clu killed you. How are you here?"

Tron was watching Flynn right back - his eyes had crinkled into a smile, even if his mouth hadn't.

"Funny," he said to Flynn, almost teasing. "I don't feel dead."

"I - you - that's - funny, of course that's not funny, I - Tron," he said, almost desperate. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. How are you here? Did Alan bring you back?"

"In a way," said Tron, and then took Alan and Flynn's shoulders both, turning them around again and pushing until they started walking, shepherding them past the box that held Clu and further onto the bridge.

Flynn was still trying to twist and turn to stare at him, even as Tron's grip held them steady.

"We'll talk later, Flynn," Tron was saying as he walked them down, "Right now, both of you, get out. I will march you into the beam myself if I have to."

"We're going," Alan told him, and Tron released them, stopping and crossing his arms as if guarding the return path.

"You better," he said. "I'll see you later. When you can. Get some rest. You've done more than enough for one cycle."

Flynn looked to Alan at that and asked, "You had an adventure, Bradley?"

"Of a lifetime," Alan said. "Then again, it sounds like you did too."

Flynn snorted and said, "Yeah. Yeah. Guess we both have stories to tell, huh. Speaking of -"

He turned back to Tron and said, "Tron -"

"Go," said Tron in response - firmly, but not unkindly. Flynn flinched for some reason and slumped, turning back around again with a nod, dropping it.

The woman was still at the end of the bridge, hanging back. Her eyes tracked over to Tron before jumping to Alan, as if trying to work something out, but she stayed quiet.

When they reached her, Flynn placed a hand on her shoulder.

“Quorra’s coming with us,” Flynn said to Alan. “To our world. She's an ISO - I'll explain later, but for now - she's not safe here.”

“I - I’m not sure that’s how the laser works,” tried Alan, but one look at Flynn’s expression and he knew that this was something he wouldn’t budge on. And they didn't have time to argue.

“Fine,” he said, after a second. “Fine. Almost none of tonight has made logical sense anyway, so I guess I’m not the expert in how the laser works after all. We’ll discuss this later.”

Flynn grinned at that, and said, “You have changed these past years after all! I thought for sure you’d yell at me.”

“Oh, that’s coming, believe me,” Alan told him seriously, and Flynn’s face dropped.

"Flynn?" asked Quorra, and Flynn turned to her, perking up again. "Now what happens?"

"Now," said Flynn with a grin, walking backwards into the beam, gesturing for them to follow, "something radical happens, Q."

And Alan's automatic eyeroll at the phrasing felt, just a little, like coming home.

Alan was lagging behind both Flynn and Quorra as they made their way out into the arcade proper, the Tron cabinet swinging back in place behind them.

It really had been just ten minutes. The clock in the office confirmed it, even as his own watch was telling him it was now Saturday morning - long past his bedtime and beyond.

Alan agreed with his watch. He felt like he could sleep for a week, even as he knew he couldn’t - Flynn was back. Quorra was here, made real by the laser, and Alan’s head was reeling with the possibilities of it all - he tried his best to park his thoughts for later, but some part of him was yelling about everything that it meant, what it would change.

The larger part of him was just exhausted.

Flynn had reviewed the terminal when he’d arrived, before he’d turned to them both and declared it a 'tomorrow problem'. Alan had seen the look in his eye and agreed easily enough - Tron had it in hand. Right now it was time to go speak to his other family.

They’d trooped out together, Alan already pulling out his car keys - thankfully rezzed along with the rest of him, though the flashlight had disappeared - when he’d felt the vibration of his phone. He pulled it out, slowing down as he checked it.

Missed calls, from Lora and Roy both.

And one new message, from an unknown number.

It was unsigned. It didn’t need to be. Alan opened it up, and smiled at the contents.

Hello world, it read, and Alan replied easily with,

Hello, Tron.