He doesn’t kid himself—he’s here as a sacrifice. Get in, get out, and if he’s captured and strung up and hanged in the process, then so be it.
His User’s commands ring strong in his head as he moves his tank through the system. His holy mission spreads out before him, pulls him inextricably toward his target. It’s more than his previous quests, as Flynn had promised—the stakes are higher, the cost of failure swims up to his chin, and the system itself is something else entirely. Nothing like scrubbing a parking ticket from some municipal government server. The atmosphere here is oppressive enough to crush him; security swarms, almost virulent, in the places he avoids. He feels the likelihood of his leaving alive diminish by the second.
Dogged and relentless. He wears those words like a charm against the gloom of the ENCOM system. Dogged and relentless. Praise that glows as bright as his circuits. Dogged and relentless. He holds his User’s words in a vice grip in his mind—for as long as he can.
Her body is near empty when she feels his energy flow into it—soothing, almost burning, and certainly beyond anything she’s felt in the system she calls home. And the ways she can pit it against the MCP’s power are myriad and righteous—warmth against the freezing shudders of death; holy light breaking through the depths of despotism. It sweeps through her like something more than life itself, lifts her up like she isn’t just another program among thousands, like Tron’s sudden deresolution was something she deserved to live beyond. She rises up from the chill of oblivion, Flynn’s hand dragging her back to the surface, and she gazes at him with the realization that someone like her had witnessed something so miraculous.
“You brought me back,” she says. “Why did you bring me back?”
Flynn’s answering grin is as unknowable as the rest of him.
He’d never met the guy, but Tron had told him plenty of stories back when he’d visit the garage. It had been funny, hearing what the User who’d made his reality was like among those he considered friends: Flynn’s proclivity for saturating conversation with inscrutable Userisms, replete with something called “Journey”; the full cycle he’d once spent perfecting the physics of a bouncing ball; his seemingly infinite projects, begun and forgotten at a mind-numbing pace; the time he’d tasted the sand along the Sea of Simulation. Amusing things, each and every one. He thinks he’d laughed at the time. His creator had seemed so fallible, so much like the programs who worshiped him.
It’s nice to reminisce on those stories, sometimes. To remember the grin on Tron’s face as he’d recounted them. But thank whoever’s worthy of it—he knows better now.
She glances across the table. The man sitting there, lines around his eyes, was responsible for her birth. She still remembers that moment—stepping out of the Sea, water holding her up like she’d been a gift, ISOs all around her as they walked on land for the first time. Her first happiness, surrounded by the mutual happiness of the Grid.
It’s impossible to forget: he was also responsible for death. So much of it, and so unnecessary, all-encompassing, ever-present. She sees it like it’s right before her eyes—programs derezzed by the thousands, their voxels splitting under orange disks. Fear, ripping out as screams, piercing the air in futility. The loneliness of surviving.
She sees the weight under his eyes. She can’t bring herself to resent him for either.
The relics are not meant for his mind. He gazes upon them—colors arranged in unfamiliar patterns, strange shapes extant for reasons he cannot fathom, objects created for a being higher than himself. He touches them—materials foreign to him running almost uncomfortable on his hands, light reflecting back on him in odd and mesmerizing ways. He even—on slow days, uneventful days, days when he’s willing to risk finding a discovery he can’t comprehend—reads them. Strange articles full of beings he doesn’t know, concepts he can’t possibly understand. Words printed for intelligences more complex than his own. Things the created aren’t intended to know about their creators.
(He never reads the manual. Not yet. In the meantime, he chases the shadows on the cave wall.
(Flynn will reveal what casts them in time.)
“How can you be sure?” Query has to ask.
Sierra hums. At the border of the Sprawl, he’s let his User-esque appearance relax; the voxels that make up his exterior seem to slough off his body in parts, exposing slices of wireframe underneath. He’s kept his face, though. Maybe he thinks Query isn’t quite ready for what lies therein. Query doubts he’s wrong.
“If you’re looking for certainty,” Sierra says, “then I’m sorry to disappoint.”
“Then…,” Query says. Because surely an entire society built on the denial of the very existence of the Users is aware of something other programs aren’t. He just can’t find a way to say it kindly.
Luckily, Sierra doesn’t need to hear it. He shakes his head. “Consider it like this,” he says. “The proof you require for the nonexistence of Users is unavailable to us. By contrast, the proof we require for the existence of Users is unavailable as well. We have stories, and legends, and barely remembered encounters from thousands and thousands of cycles ago—but beyond that, what do we have? No one living has seen Flynn, and it seems less and less likely that someone ever will.” He shakes his head again. “No. We prefer to work with what we know. And what we know is that we’ve been on our own for long enough. A User showing up now, after everything that’s brought us here, after everything that’s expelled my community to the outskirts—it would be an insult to what we’ve suffered and accomplished. If Flynn’s still out there, then he should stay out there.”
Well. Query can’t quite argue with that, even if it sits uncomfortably in his skin. He decides that he doesn’t actually have to like what Sierra’s saying.
“Maybe we’ll see,” he says.
Sierra looks at him, and the slightest grin twitches at the corner of his mouth. “Maybe,” he repeats, like he’s entertaining the idea. “Maybe.”