Tron Read online

  But Ram made no answer. The cells around them, and the Training Complex, were answer enough. Crom suddenly felt tired, weighted with despair. “If only Tron was still around—”

  Ram made a sudden noise under his breath at the sound of that name, a noise that spoke to Crom of surprise and anger. Ram’s face had gone cold, closing in his emotions.

  But Crom went on, “Did you ever see that guy in action? A hundred-percent independent!” Crom shook his head in admiration. “MCP couldn’t tell him what to—”

  He stopped. Ram had turned to look over his shoulder, at the window to the next cell beyond his. Crom, confused, asked, “What’s wrong? What did I say?”

  There was a slight noise from the cell where Ram was looking, of someone moving around. A figure stood silhouetted by the light, his back to them, his glowing disk affixed to it. Crom strained to see, and as he did, the figure turned to him slowly. The compound interest program saw the features known so well to programs throughout the System: the clear, canny gaze and calm, strong face.

  Crom gasped in disbelief. “Oh, my User—Tron! They’ve got you in here?”

  Tron—a legend come to life. When programs throughout the System spoke among themselves of independence, of loyalty to the Users, of defying the MCP, it was Tron’s name that was most often invoked. Tron championed the User-Believers; Tron had defied all the MCP’s efforts to enslave or convert him. He had never been defeated in battle. No Warrior of the Red Elite had ever been able to withstand him.

  Tron in a cell, captive on the Game Grid.

  Crom slumped; Tron’s imprisonment had hit him like a physical blow, filling him with a sense of utter disaster. But the Champion’s first words lifted that feeling: “Not for long, friend.”

  Crom’s spirits rose all at once. The words had been spoken without bravado, a simple statement offact, with all of Tron’s conviction behind them. For the first time, Crom began to feel hope. Sark and the MCP didn’t control the System yet.

  IN ANOTHER PART of the System, a lone tank slid along, proceeding cautiously through a landscape of huge, planar surfaces, a maze of defiles. High walls bracketed a flat ground floor that wended in a series of obtuse turns. The rectilinear look of the Electronic World prevailed here too; blockish forms bordering the defiles were divided along precise edges by glowing demarcations and bands, and subdivided by areas of shading.

  The tank was unlike any conventional vehicle, a collection of sleek curves with a wide, low silhouette. Its main battery was an enormous cannon, longer than the tank itself, complex and streamlined. It was mounted with its longitudinal axis lying along that of the tank, the gun mated in offset fashion to the turret, which was located on the right side of the hull. Instead of ordinary treads, rows of glowing, V-shaped light-tracks drove the war machine.

  The vehicle’s command and fire-control center was gymbal-mounted in the turret for stability, tilting as the tank moved along, rotating to the operations of its lone crewman. The program’s name was Clu, and he, too, wore armor. Clu worked his controls with great dexterity, peering intently into the casklike guidance-targeting scope. The tank’s interior was bright with the glow of its controls and energy-channels.

  Clu paused for a quick gulp from a container; his circuitry shone a little brighter. He stared into his scope once more, the fire-control center rotating around him. “Think we can merge into this memory okay, Bit?” he murmured, poised over the controls.

  A shape of gleaming light suddenly appeared, many-faceted, zipping around the tank’s interior. In response to Clu’s question, it stopped dead in the air and expanded into a green, shining star, like some unearthly, spiky Christmas ornament. From it, a voice answered with an eager “Yes!”

  As soon as it had spoken, the Bit reverted, shrinking back to its former shape. Clu nodded to himself absently. “Now, ol’ Flynn said for me to look over in here.” He worked the controls with a sure touch. The tank swung into a turn, advancing between lustrous defile walls.

  Clu was annoyed and disappointed in that, after all his and the Bit’s work, the danger and the running fights and constant peril of encountering a Recognizer, they’d come up with nothing for his User, Flynn. Clu persevered nonetheless.

  Now he frowned into his targeting scope. “But I don’t see what he’s looking for. I’d better get over to that Input/Output Tower and let him know.”

  For Clu, as for many other programs still at large in the System, there was no question as to whether or not he should respond to his User. What point was there to program tyrannizing program, rejecting the Users? And certainly there hadn’t, before the MCP, been the sort of cruelty and hatred that threatened the System now. If Clu had his way, all that would change.

  Now Clu worked the control surfaces, stroking and patting the energy channels, heading the tank for the distant Input/Output Tower, to make his report and seek new instructions. The tank’s command center rotated and tipped. The vehicle left the maze behind, merging with a stream of cometlike data bits moving along a canyon-size passageway, all bound for the Tower. Overhead, the sky was filled with unique colors and shapes, and luminosity—shifting patterns evocative of clouds.

  Clu, bent over his controls, paying close attention to his scope, steadied himself with the thought: Flynn will know what to do.

  His features were the same as Clu’s: animation in the face, irreverence, humor, a nimble turn of mind. Clu was, in fact, a reflection of him.

  Kevin Flynn crouched over the keyboard of the computer terminal as Clu had over the tank’s controls, muttering to himself. He was intent, concerned.

  “C’mon, you scuzzy little data; be in there!”

  He was blond and in his late twenties. He’d already been up and down in life, gone through enough victories and defeats to be convinced that any circumstances could be altered if you wanted badly enough to change things. He had an irresistible confidence in himself and that was fortunate for him, given the number of times he’d gotten himself into scrapes.

  The room was disorderly, clothes scattered everywhere, interspersed with empty Chinese-food cartons and pizza boxes and wax-paper cups. The room contained several large commercial videogames, and an unmade bed that hadn’t been used in some time. Flynn’s white-trimmed black hapi coat hung open; he had several days’ growth of beard. All in all, he felt much as he had back during his most dedicated periods as a computer hacker. But he thought he’d scented victory, and had the feeling he was onto something. At least, the password he’d managed to come up with stood a chance of getting his Clu program into the high-clearance memory that was his objective.

  Flynn tapped the keyboard a few more times, leaned forward to read the cathode-ray tube, and hoped; he projected his determination at the CRT. Its intense colors lit his face.

  Aboard the tank, Clu was studying the Input/Output Tower, thinking about his next contact with Flynn, when a warning light flashed on the control panel. Clu sat bolt upright, thoughts torn from his User, and stared at the alarm. The Bit whizzed down like an angry meteor to circle him in panic.

  “Uh-oh,” Clu said, more to himself than to the little data bit. “We got company. A Recognizer.” The thought filled him with misgiving; his face held the same worry that his User’s did on those all-too-frequent occasions when Flynn’s brash nature brought him into conflict with higher authorities.

  The Bit expanded momentarily to a jutting red star, just long enough to squeak, “No!” The instant it had delivered the word, it contracted into its smoother form once more.

  “You said it,” Clu agreed wholeheartedly. “One of those Recognizers comes after me, I’m gonna hafta jump clear out of the data stream.” If I can, he added to himself; escape was by no means a certainty. He’d tangled with Recognizers before, and knew what the odds would be if he was forced to join combat.

  He leaned to his scope again, setting it for target acquisition. His hands never strayed far from the cannon’s fire controls. Abruptly, the scope was filled with the dreaded
shape of one of the Master Control Program’s Recognizers. It was enormous, many times the size of the tank, a glittering, metallic blue-black. The Reco glided toward him, not yet sure that he was an intruder.

  It flew lightly, quickly, an inverted U of armor-plated battleship, shaped from field-bonded polyhedrons, its turret-head dangerously alight. Clu wondered if its crew, there in that fortress of a cranium, had identified him yet.

  A second Reco floated into sight behind the first, its black component modules outlined in crimson energy. The two swooped toward Clu’s tank, their pairs of gigantic pincers opened wide, the inverted U’s at maximum deployment. Either ship could easily have gathered up a half-dozen tanks in a single clutch.

  “Oh my! The long arm o’ the law!” Clu spat in consternation. But even as he did, he acted, a stranger to indecision. He watched his scope reticle and his hands flew across the controls as rapidly and surely as Flynn’s had across the keyboard of his computer terminal.

  The tank’s turret swung, its gun ranging. The long cannon elevated and its wide, flat muzzle erupted. The cannon bolt was a white chevron of energy, flashing point-foremost at the Reco. Clu’s mastery of his controls was complete; he’d aimed and fired before either Recognizer crew had had the chance to take the offensive.

  The first Reco was just beginning an evasive maneuver, its crew’s reflexes no match for Clu’s, when the V of energy struck it dead center in its head. Light leaped outward from the hit like an expanding bull’s-eye. There was a flash that made Clu blink, and an eruption of force, a secondary explosion from the Reco’s power banks that shook the canyon walls and even jostled the massive form of the other Reco. Its binding and supportive fields gone, the wounded Reco fell like a dropped safe to the canyon floor, where its components flew apart in a fireworks display of freed energy.

  But the second Reco was still to be dealt with. And Clu didn’t doubt for a moment that more were on the way. He maneuvered frantically. The tank turned, its light-treads blurring, and scuttled into a side way as enemy reinforcements began showing up for the kill.

  Clu plied his controls grimly, evading and dodging through the defile. The machine lurched and bucked, throwing him hard against his safety belt and chair back, even though the command sphere’s gymbals compensated for much of the punishment.

  A second Reco closed in; again the tank’s main gun gushed white annihilation. The Reco fired a return volley, its beam springing from a point between the tips of its colossal pincers.

  Clu sought to avoid the shot—flicking the controls with delicate precision—but there was only one way to do that, and his evasive maneuver slammed the tank against a nearby wall. The collision made the gymbals whine and nearly shook the command sphere from its mountings; Clue reeled, dizzy with the impact. The engines cut out automatically to avert an internal explosion and the tank went silent, its interior dark but for emergency lights. The cannon had bent against the wall, crumpling to uselessness.

  Clu staggered to the turret’s main hatch, seized it, and heaved against it with his shoulder. The hatch fell open and Clu dragged himself out of the turret. A Reco closed in, pincers spread. Clu stepped out onto the turret as the Bit came shooting out of the tank, looped, and hovered near.

  “Get outta here!” Flynn shouted at the glowing being.

  “Yes! Ja! Si!” responded the Bit; it banked and zipped off. Clu dropped to the ground and, with a last look at the approaching Recos, dashed away, running for all he was worth.

  A Recognizer dropped toward the tank, its crew examining the wreckage. Between the two tremendous pincers, an energy field crackled to life. The Reco swept over the tank and the ruined vehicle’s outline began to blur as the MCP’s guardian machine de-rezzed it. The tank grew indistinct, and in moments it had disappeared, the de-resolution complete. In the meantime more tanks crewed by programs loyal to the Master Control Program began to converge on the area. And more Recos appeared on the scene with each passing moment.

  Clu fled along the deep, geometrical ravine, boxed in by its sheer walls, unable to find an exit. He heaved for breath, becoming light-headed from his injuries and fatigue. Some sense made him look over his shoulder as he ran, and terror clutched at him as he saw a Reco descending toward him. Far ahead of the program, the Bit flew for the turret head of the Reco downed by Clu’s cannonade. At the end of his reserves, gulping for breath, Clu saw that there was no shelter for him, no place to hide, no chance of outrunning the enormous robot craft. Pincers gaping for him, the Reco came closer, lower, blocking the sky. Clu could only stand and wait.

  In another World, the words appeared on Flynn’s screen:

  ILLEGAL CODE . . .

  CLU PROGRAM DETACHED

  FROM SYSTEM.

  Flynn, hands raised over the keyboard, read it as his heart sank. He tried clearing the cathode-ray tube, but the words stubbornly refused to yield the CRT.

  “Ah, hell; busted again,” he gritted as he made one more hopeless try to clear the screen. And the Clu program had been one of his best. Flynn slumped in his chair, staring moodily at the screen, and wondered what he could possibly try next. At such times, Kevin Flynn only knew what his next move would not be. It wouldn’t be to give up.

  Clu was pushed into the chamber, a soaring, circular space. He couldn’t suppress a certain awe that nearly made him forget the brutal, staff-bearing Memory Guards who surrounded him, gazing down out of their black-shadowed cowls, chosen protectors of the MCP. Clu had been brought to the citadel of the Master Control Program, wellspring of the power that had brought the entire System under a single intelligence, abode of that intelligence.

  He gazed up at the concave walls and the infinity of lights that interplayed and swarmed there. He looked, too, upon the MCP. Clu was aghast; he was a capable program, but no match for the tyrant of the System. He wished he’d gotten to talk to Flynn one last time.

  A guard stepped before the MCP with a gesture to Clu. He spoke with deference, and not a little fear, to his Master. “Got a pirate program here. Says his name’s Clu.”

  The Master Control Program’s voice resounded from the walls, hurting the listener’s ears, intimidating by its volume, amazing in its power and self-assuredness. “What did he do?”

  The guard answered, “Came into the System with a stolen password. And we caught him trying to raid high-clearance memory.”

  “No,” Clu objected, a forefinger raised, with much of Flynn’s aptness of thought and acting ability. “I must’ve gotten in there by mistake. I—”

  “Who programmed you?” The words beat against him like surf. Clu could make no answer, even if he’d been so inclined.

  He was seized by invisible forces and whisked back through the air to slam hard against the curved wall behind him. There he was held fast, arms spread.

  “You’re in trouble, program,” the MCP intoned. Clu knew fear; the MCP had extinguished any number of programs, and one more would mean nothing to it. “Make it easy on yourself, program. Who’s your User?”

  Pinned to the wall, Clu strained to make his reply, a reflection of Flynn. “Forget it, Mr. High ‘n’ Mighty Master Control! You’re not making me talk!”

  Clu exerted all his strength, more because that was the sort of program he was than from any real belief that he could overcome the power of the MCP. His arm came a little way out from the wall, but was slammed back against it an instant later. Pain shot through it.

  The MCP’s voice was scornful: “Suit yourself.”

  A corona of spitting, crackling energy sprang into being around the program, and a scream was torn from Clu as the fabric of his existence was pulled apart and dissipated. Head flung back in torment, Clu de-resolved like the broken pattern of a fading television picture. It was over in moments and Clu was gone forever without a trace.

  The MCP’s voice echoed in the vastness of its citadel: “Get me Dillinger.”

  A gridded landscape, alight with electricity, reached its rectangles and spires into the sky, aglow
.

  Dillinger watched the suburban sprawl as the ENCOM executive helicopter sped through the air, the thrup of its blades reaching him only softly.

  The latticework of light and activity below him, unlike that of the System, was composed of rivers and automobile headlights and street lamps, illuminated signs and lighted windows. But circuitry it was, of a sort. Ahead, in the heart of the city, rose the monolithic ENCOM building, its highest floors lit by the last rays of the sun, its lower windows already defining new constellations where work was still in progress. The pilot turned to ask, “Will you be inside for a while, Mr. Dillinger, or will you be right back out?”

  Dillinger flicked a bit of lint from the sleeve of his expensive suit. His long, severe face worked into something that was not quite a smile, but sufficed for dealing with subordinates. The words, when he formed them, were spoken with a cultured accent that underscored his English upbringing. “Oh, I’ll be round for a few days. Got some things to take care of.”

  He went back to his gazing, luxuriating in the copter ride. The machine, glossy in its jet-black, reflective finish and bearing the ENCOM logo, was one of his favorites among the prerequisites his position provided. He enjoyed the helicopter much as Sark gloried in his Carrier; the components of Dillinger’s personality, and the aspect of his face, were little different from Sark’s.

  The helicopter made its approach on the building and the huge, resplendent ENCOM logo on the skyscraper held his eye. Dillinger’s heart, seldom spurred by any emotion, came closest to passion when he saw that name. He’d come to regard anything bearing it as his own, and with good reason.

  Several ground crewmen dashed to secure the helicopter and hold the door open as Dillinger emerged. He treated them with the condescension of royalty—a studied attitude on his part. The opportunity to demonstrate his own importance never failed to please him.