Tron (8 page)

They passed down silent stairwells and corridors of ENCOM’s subbasements, hearing only the whisper of the ventilation system. Then they descended a staircase and found themselves face to face with a security guard.

The trio had the presence of mind to keep walking. Lora came to an instant decision that neither of the men with her would be hurt, nor harm anyone else. Alan kissed his career good-bye, and wondered what jail would be like. Flynn congratulated himself for having worn his running shoes.

Lora tried her sunniest smile on the guard; it came out with a tiny quiver.

“Hi,” the guard said casually, not so much to the two men as to that nice young Ms. Baines who worked for Dr. Gibbs. “Working late?” He recognized the fellow in the glasses, and the other guy too, though he hadn’t seen him around in a while.

“Oh—yeah,” Lora replied nervously, and found herself giving the man—she couldn’t quite dredge up his name—a warm look.
She’s got wiles she ain’t used yet,
Flynn marveled, and Alan was greatly impressed.

The guard nodded as he passed them by, ascending the stairs, on his route. All three wilted with relieved sighs as they went on their way. They stopped in a darkened entrance area, close by the lab proper. Lora said, “Okay, Flynn; I’m gonna put you at my terminal in the lab. Alan and I will be in the control room.”

Flynn rubbed his palms together. “Swell. I’ll log us both on, and Alan can get his Tron thing running.”

She cautioned them both, “As long as we stay off the top floor, Dillinger’ll never know we’ve been here.” Until it was too late, at which time it wouldn’t matter if he flipped his peruke.

Alan looked to Flynn. “Good luck, hotshot.” Flynn nodded; he liked Bradley’s composure. Alan set off for the control room.

Flynn followed Lora toward the laser lab. He was feeling somewhere between an espionage agent and a kid playing hide ‘n’ seek. He tried his best covert-entry gait, but it felt a little ludicrous in the well-lit computer rooms, and quickly devolved into a sort of Groucho Marx burlesque of stealth, a mime burglar. He outdistanced Lora. In a typical Flynn decision to make the most of the excitement and defuse the anxiety, he decided to play a little.

Lora brought up the rear, adjusting her glasses, preoccupied with her own thoughts.
Let’s see: there’s illegal entry, trespass, treason, theft of services
—

“Boo!” Flynn remarked, popping up behind her. Lora jumped straight up, and clutched in the region of her heart, in case she should have to pound it to get it started again.
Now I remember why it was interesting to be around him. And why he almost drove me bats.

They went on, Lora stepping carefully over the structural members of the frame, Flynn skipping along them and tightrope-walking the occasional girder. Neither noticed the monitoring cameras following their progress. They reached Lora’s console in the lab, and Flynn threw himself into its chair impatiently.

He rubbed his palms again. “Like the man says, there’s no problems, only solutions.”

Lora laid a hand to his shoulder, speaking emphatically. “This laser’s my life’s work. Don’t spill anything.”

He laughed, but let her know he understood with a nod of agreement. She gave him a half-smile and left to rejoin Alan.

Flynn wriggled into a more comfortable position and interlocked his fingers, cracking his knuckles in anticipation and summoning up his electronic muse. He poised hands over the keyboard, his mind trumpeting:
Flynn at the Mighty Wurlitzer!
He drew a breath and typed a code, then tapped the ‘enter’ key. And was unaware of the realigning of a monitoring camera.

It focused on him from directly above and behind, watching his every move. Flynn typed on.

Access code 6. Password

Series PS 17. Reindeer,

Flotilla

The CRT screen cleared suddenly, and the room was resonant with the voice of the Master Control Program. “You shouldn’t have come back, Flynn.”

He knew a moment’s surprise, at how far applications of voice synthesis had come. “Hey,
hey
; it’s that big, bad Master Control Program everybody’s talking about! Y’don’t look a thing like your pictures!” He typed:

CODE SERIES LSU-123 . . . activate.

CODE SERIES ESS-999 . . . activate.

CODE SERIES HHH-888 . . . activate.

The MCP sounded confident, amused, but was secretly intimidated. Despite its tremendous augmentation, it could not quite analyze the random factors, unpredictable impulses, and sudden whims of the organic computer that was Flynn’s brain. But it told him, “That isn’t going to do you any good, Flynn. I’m afraid you—”

There was a lurch in the voice synthesis, then it became a series of high-pitched squeals. Flynn grinned malevolently; try
that
on for size!

The voice returned to normalcy, but sounded shaken, making Flynn wonder what moved the MCP to prove its mastery of nuances of human communication. It warned, “Stop, Flynn. You realize I can’t allow this.” Hidden from Flynn’s sight and hearing, the laser array began a warmup sequence.

Flynn was in his element now, ignoring everything but the terminal. This was a contest he relished; it was an article of faith with him that no machine or program was a match for a human being who had the necessary skills and information.
C’mon out and fight!
he thought, and prepared to hand the Master Control Program its address. The screen read:

MCP: Terminate control mode.

Activate Matrix storage.

Flynn
tsk
ed, “Now, how d’you expect to run the universe if you let a few unsolvable problems throw you like that? C’mon, big boy; let’s see what you’ve got.”

Silently, without Flynn’s noticing, the entire wall behind him slid upward, revealing the frame, target platforms, and the rest of the laser lab. The laser array swung and targeted on his back, its cross hairs bracketing him precisely. Flynn played on.

“You’re entering a big error, Flynn,” Master Control intoned. It had considered its options with typical thoroughness. Letting this troublesome interloper recover the data was out of the question; that algorithm led inexorably to disaster for the MCP. But alerting security wouldn’t do either; there would be inquiries, possibly the intrusion of the police or other authorities. At the same time, Flynn was the most adroit User the MCP had ever encountered. He stood a good chance of winning the information from the System, given time.

That left the laser.

But not for murder, although that lay well within the MCP’s capacity by this time; it had thrown off all limitations imposed on it by human beings. Flynn’s body, though, would bring a hue and cry; investigation that might spell ruin for ENCOM and Master Control. There was an alternative.

The MCP had carefully monitored all the lab’s experiments. It knew even more about the process of digitization than did Gibbs and Lora, thanks to their experiment. Without a body, without a
corpse
, there would be no furor or danger of compromise for Master Control. But Flynn couldn’t simply be left suspended in the beam, and the MCP had decided just what to do with him. Flynn’s fate would be practical, amusing, and appropriately vindictive.

“I’m going to have to put you on the Game Grid,” Master Control concluded calmly, as it synchronized the laser array.

Flynn missed the implication entirely, sniggering, “Games, huh?” The cross hairs centered on his back. “I’ll give you—”

Brilliant, coherent light issued from the array; Flynn was rocked in his chair by the spasms of his own outstretched arms and legs. As the orange had done earlier that evening, his body began to break into scan lines. The console, too, was outlined in radiance as the laser and the MCP made proper integration with it. Flynn’s body lost resolution. The whole scene became monochromatic, except for Flynn’s shining body. His form blurred, becoming indistinct, evanescing . . .

It was entirely subjective, perhaps, but it seemed to Flynn that the CRT screen, unbelievably incandescent, rose up to meet him, to swallow him. He was without feeling, nearly without thought. He was, for a time, in complete blackness.

Then came a speck of light, pinpoint of brilliance, to seize on his dazed attention. It grew nearer to him, or he to it. He felt as if he were midway in some eternal high dive. The globe became clearer and clearer, a gridded orb suggesting the ENCOM trademark, crisscrossed with currents of light, hinting at exhaustive detail. Flynn circled it, or it rotated before him.

Closer and closer; somewhere in that part of him not paralyzed, questions formed, but he had no way of asking them, even of himself. The landscape below became one of angular towers; buildings; illuminations; banded energy; hulking, mountainlike features and rivers of brilliance; and blasted, fallow places suggesting wastelands. The whole was defined by a grid pattern resembling nothing so much as a world of circuitry. He fell feet first, arms extended upward.

The grids and the globe itself expanded before him as he plunged toward them. Interlaced luminance, soaring spires and modular structures reminiscent of cities, became better defined. A megalopolis among these rose up to meet him, set by a trackless stretch of geometric cliffs and gorges. Around him, Flynn seemed to feel a tunnel made up of the increments of his journey, as if he were dropping through an infinite series of hoops of energy.

He fell and fell, completely disoriented, amazed nearly to the point of thoughtlessness, absorbing all that he saw.

And at last the tunnel ended. He shot from its mouth; the ground flew up at him.

H
E CAME TO
on an open, stagelike surface atop an enormous. building, surrounded by a cylinder of light that stretched up into infinity.

When Flynn looked at himself, checking for damage, what remained of his composure nearly fled. He was costumed in strange armor that weighted his shoulders and forearms. Over it, he wore a wraparound half-tunic. He held up his hands for a better look. He was aglow, a being of light.

Wasn’t I always?
he gibbered to himself. Incandescent lines, resembling circuitry, ran over his torso and limbs, reminding him of the meridian lines he’d seen on acupuncture charts. He shook his head to try to clear it—not a very helpful gesture—and felt the weight of headgear. The touch of his fingers told him he wore a close-fitting helmet.

He looked around, dazed. Beyond the cylinder of brightness were a number of . . . men? Manlike beings, anyway; big, husky-looking uglies in uniforms that accentuated their breadth and bulk. They were cowled, faces hidden but for odd devices that reminded Flynn of gas masks.

They had the air of authority, or at least of power. They carried tall staffs that shone with what Flynn regarded as a threatening inner glow, handling them with gestures evocative of menace. Beyond them, Flynn could see the walls, balconies, stages, and towers of an incredible complex, ablaze with colors, brilliant, unmatched by anything he knew. Flynn couldn’t say much for the looks of the goons, but the buildings, though bizarre and unsettling, were arresting, even gorgeous.

There stirred in him a memory of his encounter with the MCP, and the recollection, too, of a computer maxim: “It’s all a problem of software; in hardware, there are no more problems.”
As far as software problems go,
his mind reeled,
I think I just came across a doozy!

He gaped, staring around himself, muttering, “Oh man! This isn’t happening. It only
thinks
it’s happening!” The Flynnism only partially helped him regain control. Then one of the brawny staff-wielders moved up to face him through the light cylinder, while the rest fanned out around him. The one before him raised his staff and the shimmering column that had surrounded Flynn winked out of existence.

His memory was fragmented; this was far too much to absorb right now. His surroundings cried out for closer inspection, and he was in a dilemma that looked unpleasantly lethal. Several possible explanations for this impossible situation crowded one another for his attention: dream, coma, or hallucination? Something somebody had slipped into a drink? Except, he couldn’t recall having had one recently. The last thing he could remember was being at ENCOM . . .

Dream or no dream, Flynn didn’t like the looks of those staffs. He shifted his weight, readied his hands, and watched them warily. The darkness of the cowls made it difficult not to be intimidated. One of those apes, unarmed, would be a pretty tough project, he judged; three or four of them with those neon quarterstaffs—bad news.

Flynn cocked his fists, despite a determination to employ all diplomacy.
Nothing left but grace under fire,
he sighed to himself.

One of the gorillas stepped forward without warning and bashed the disoriented Flynn in the arm with his staff. There was a dazzle of light, and agonizing pain rocketed from Flynn’s fingertips to his shoulder. He fell back with a yelp, and knew that he was defenseless against such a weapon.

Those jokers were plainly not present for choir practice.

“Hey! Take it easy!” grated Flynn as they closed in around him. Maybe he really
was
lying in intensive care someplace with a concussion, but he didn’t feel like dreaming about having his head handed to him.
Best keep it light,
he philosophized.