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Fanworks: Tron: Fics: Disorientation
Summary
Post-Legacy. Specifically, right after that scene with Alan and Roy at the end of the Next Day short.
Inspiration: What if Flynn's friends did know about what happened to him in 1982?
And if so, how could that reconcile with the events of Legacy?
I've put the Explicit rating on this for mentions of Alan/Roy sex and program orgies in the past... but there's no detailed onstage sex here. Sorry.
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-Disorientation (It'll Come Back To You)-
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"Hey. Roy."
"Hmm?" A click, and the CRT screen turned off, static fuzzing audibly over its surface.
Alan Bradley set down the popcorn bowl on the smooth coffee table; leaned back a bit on the couch. "I'm curious."
"About what?" Roy Kleinberg leaned back too, with a smile that looked about as tired as this long, long day would probably warrant.
But then, for a moment, Alan just glanced around, a slow process of collecting his thoughts.
Roy's living room was strange, in a way Alan couldn't quite put his finger on-- maybe something about the sleek curves of it juxtaposed with the antiquity of the technology in here, the old movie they'd just watched on a VCR, in the year 2010 for godsakes... but no, it was something beyond those things that was puzzling Alan now.
"How would you compare the, ah, style of this room?" he asked, finally. "To the one we were in earlier, I mean."
"The style?" And Roy's grin lit up in a way Alan hadn't yet seen today-- a light he really hadn't seen since old old times.
A good enough response to reassure Alan that Roy did remember their old code, after all.
That sure was a relic of a more... cautious time. But justified, considering all that had come to light about the MCP during and after those days.
And maybe it would've been almost as justified, or even more, these past few years under Mackey. If Roy had been there to keep using it. Hell... Alan himself could think of some times he and a few other employees could've benefited from that code.
Or anything like it. A quick and subtle way of communicating just how safe from eavesdroppers a particular room was... Yeah. Would've been handy, more than once.
"That office?" Roy's smile broke into a laugh. "1990's. No way would I have gone with anything less."
1990's? Suddenly Alan felt awfully old for a second, remembering that "1990's" was the most advanced "style," as of the last time he and Roy had used their code.
Meaning, "checked for bugs as recently as this morning, both visually and by electronic means."
Checked just visually was "mid-80's," a vague allusion to Orwell's 1984... which had sounded so cutting-edge back in '81 and '82, hadn't it? And everything less secure just had various whimsical names. ("Edwardian," for instance, meant "Edward Dillinger is definitely listening through a keyhole right now," and if Alan remembered correctly it even sometimes had the added effect of getting the aforementioned Dillinger to come out of hiding, Roger-Rabbit Shave-And-A-Haircut style, to correct you about how the room was obviously mid-century modern.)
Good times. Well, not exactly.
Anyway. "1990's" made sense. That office would have been as safe as Roy could get it-- if he was going to be shredding evidence in there, as he'd been when Alan found him....
Wait. But then, that would mean...
"And this room..." Roy went on, either missing or ignoring Alan's shifts in expression. "Twenty-third century, this one. You haven't seen the likes of it before."
That shook Alan out of his thoughts. His eyes circled once more around the smooth lines of the room-- modern, if not futuristic. "No, I haven't." A chuckle escaped him-- that certainly wasn't part of their code. "Odd thing to call it. What does 'twenty-third century' mean to you?"
"All the conveniences of the 90's, plus steel-reinforced walls. Ceiling, floor, doors too. Faraday-caged. Y'know, so even if there was something, it couldn't transmit out."
"Roy."
Their eyes met for a longer expanse of seconds than they had yet today. Alan found his voice almost failing. "Really? Why... My God you're obsessive, aren't you?"
"I've had to be." Roy's smile was gone for the moment, solemn. "You know."
Silence, for an even longer stretch of time.
"Is there anything," Alan began at last, "that you want to talk about here? Anything the 90's weren't ready for, but the, ah, twenty-third century might be?"
But Roy's smile was suddenly back in place, his curls just shaking playfully. "Nah. I don't know if I ever really needed this much security, to be honest. I was in a bad place when I remodeled this room. Paranoid. Space paranoid, even." His laughter almost sounded young again. "But, hey... you're making me feel safe right now, 'Tron.' No matter what room we're in."
The nickname touched something deep in Alan; stirred feelings he wasn't sure he was ready for, in this century. But also reminded him of why he'd asked the question in the first place.
"So. 'Ram.' If you feel so safe..." His mouth felt dry, all of a sudden, but he forced his train of thought to stay on track this time. "And if that office was safe, 90's style... then, what was going on with what you said just before we left there?"
"What? You mean, the thing about the nicknames?"
"Yeah. 'Why do you think Flynn gave you the cool name?' That's what you said, right? And... that wasn't for the benefit of anyone possibly spying on us?"
Roy blinked. "...No. Why would it have been? What? You think spies would care what name I think is cooler?"
"What? No, I mean--" Alan cut himself off, laughing in spite of his confusion. "Wait, why the hell do you think 'Tron' is cooler than 'Ram,' anyway? It's... objectively not. It's short for 'electronic.' Can you imagine a football team named the Los Angeles Trons?"
"Ha!" Roy's head tossed back in giggles. "Okay. Fair point. But... well, I just do. I think it's context, y'know? The video game. Encom's pride and joy. A whole generation of young gamers think it's cool, even if it started as a security program that no one these days has ever heard of. And yes, even if you named that program after a syllable in 'electronic,' for some reason known only to your ultra-nerdy, abacus-using twenty-something programmer self."
"Hey!" With a blushing laugh, Alan picked up a couch cushion, wielded it threateningly for just long enough to realize that no, he was still too mature to actually hit Roy with a pillow, no matter how this conversation was starting to feel.
So, lowering it, he let his laugh fade and managed to find the words.
"Ram's a program too. That's why I wondered, about you asking. Because... you already know why Flynn gave us both those nicknames. After the programs we wrote. Tron and Ram."
"Is that--" Roy's eyes went wide. "Dammit! Is that why he picked Ram? Seriously? That old actuarial calculation script I wrote for-- Why did-- Hell, I'd written hundreds of others with better names, by the time Flynn started calling me that! The bastard, why would he pick-- how did he even know about that one-- Shit, why do I even remember that one now? Of all the random--"
"Randomly accessed memories?" And then with a final soft laugh, Alan's smile went sad, as the reality sank in.
He should have realized. Back then... well, he'd done enough questioning of his own memories, since that time. No surprise that Roy's line of questioning had reached a different end.
"So... You really don't remember, then."
"Uh." And Roy's face was gathering that wariness around it, now.
Shadows of old fears. Not the paranoid kind that made him style-code his words and cage up a room in metal. A more personal kind of fear.
One Roy could clearly see coming, by the look of it. So he must remember something.
But Alan could tell that memory scared the hell out of him more than anything else he'd been scared of in years, and there was probably no way to soften it, right now.
"You do remember." Alan's voice was so quiet he barely felt himself speaking.
But Roy nodded, a short, almost-frozen motion. "I... Something. Some things. Things I... didn't think anyone else remembered. You...?"
"Believe me, I tried to convince myself I didn't remember all that either." Alan bowed his head. "Tried to blame those wild parties-- the drinking, and the pot, and... and Flynn, the whole effect he had on us all." He sighed. "But, well. I eventually had to admit it to myself. That even Flynn, and all the substances Flynn could dig up, couldn't have taken us on a trip like that, unless it was real."
He fought to stop his eyes from closing for even a second, because now the memories were too eager to push through. Psychedelic rainbow swirl of alien shapes and colors, sounds, sensations, glow and reverb and the crackle of energy, and things perceived through senses that this human world didn't have words for.
Things Alan knew he could never have had the imagination to dream up on his own, drugs or no drugs... if Flynn hadn't wrapped him and Lora, and eventually Roy, into that so-generous group hug and welcomed them all through the laser beam into his world, all those years ago.
Roy was shaking now; Alan could feel it in the couch, more than he could see it in Roy's tense limbs. "You mean... It was all r-- Oh, Alan. Alan, are you saying-- this is crazy, I can't..." Roy's eyes went wide. "Tron, and Ram-- what happened to them-- and Yori! Oh shit, does-- does Lora know?"
And Alan's heart hurt-- that was so like Roy, to jump right to worrying about everyone else, while his own world was still getting flipped upside-down. Alan closed his eyes; didn't trust himself to really look at Roy, quite yet.
"Yeah. She remembers it too. She... I think she accepted it was real before I did. I mean, she is the one who knows that laser. There was a time when watching it digitize oranges was just a day's work for her, so I guess she didn't feel like it was much of a jump from that to... you know."
"And the... the, uh, programs?" Roy's hand was clutching at his own head now, tangled in his hair. "I can't-- oh, I can't even-- the programs, though! Tron and Ram and Yori and... Are they..."
With an effort, Alan pushed away another over-vivid wash of memory. The programs. Oh, those faces! Gray, but somehow brighter than his own-- arms reaching and chests swelling as voices cried out to greet him, intricate patterns brightening in joy-- a look of adoration he knew he'd never see on his own face in any mirror in this world--
"They're... they're fine. In some form. Fine doesn't mean the same thing to them that it does to most of us, though, of course. They're..."
He trailed off for a moment before deliberately cutting that line of thought, because trying to conceptualize the in-and-out of how all that happened-- spontaneous life and consciousness, for software nowhere near complex enough to support such processes-- maybe the influence of the MCP's code in the Encom system? Or something more mysterious, spiritual, supernatural? Or some bizarre mixture of things? Even now, after all these years, if Alan didn't stop that train of thought, he'd get stuck in loops that made his head hurt, made him question pretty much everything in reality.
The why didn't matter so much by this point, anyway. No more than it did when thinking about why he himself was alive-- or Lora or Roy or anyone. Alan had had plenty of time to get philosophical about it... and his conclusion was that you didn't waste time questioning why people were in the world.
You just lived with them, loved them, counted yourself lucky.
"....I mean, whatever they are, and however it happens..." A wry smile tugged at the side of Alan's mouth. "Well, it doesn't evolve from the same instincts as human feelings do. It evolves from program instincts. A whole different kind of thinking, and it does take some getting used to, believe me-- even for a programmer."
"I... what. What do you mean by that." And now Roy's voice and face had just gone blank, like shock was setting in at last.
Alan couldn't blame him. The man hadn't yet had even five minutes to reach that philosophical calmness that Alan had found over the years. Poor guy.
"I mean... they're fine," he repeated, voice as gentle as he could manage. "But in different ways. Without the laser to go in and meet with them in person, we've had to get creative, but we've come up with a mutually intelligible language. They still communicate. With me, and with Lora, through me, even though she's... away."
And he knew his face was giving away things about Lora, probably more things than he wanted to talk about with Roy-- especially right now, when poor Roy still had the programs to wrap his head around. Alan pushed through, despite his skin getting warm and pink again. "Anyway. They've got a will to live, of course-- any program is designed to try and keep itself functioning for at least a while. But that means different things, depending."
Roy's blank look had survived the mention of Lora, and it kept on being blank. "Depending on... what..."
"On what they're written to do. They care about life, they seek happiness, like us... but in so many different ways, strange ways sometimes. Some of them are happy to live for only a few days, if all their goals in life will be completed in that time. Some are happy to sit around for a time that's like thousands of years to them, doing nothing but waiting for a single command. Some are happy to be copied, in the hundreds or thousands, and count it as survival if even one copy goes on existing anywhere."
"And what about ours? What are they, uh-- happy with?"
"Well, Tron, he was written to work for me, and he's, ah, very devoted." The smile came back, impossible to resist when thinking about the simple, pure, hyperfocused love of that program. "I've kept upgrading him. Sometimes completely refactored him from scratch-- whatever it took to make sure he'd have a function in every generation of Encom computing, no matter how they overhaul the system. As long as I'm the one who makes the upgrades, he accepts them. He doesn't like being copied-- wants his older self deleted before the new one comes online, every time. He considers himself the same person through all versions, and he acts like it... as much as any of us act the same through all the changes in our lives, I suppose."
"And... and Yori?"
"Lora did the same for her, more or less." Alan lowered his eyes. "When the laser project was shut down, Yori became an all-purpose driver for other digitization hardware-- cameras, scanners and so on. She's more okay with being copied, and she's willing to work with other users now that Lora's gone. So there are lots of Yoris in our system. I'm not so clear on how they think of themselves, but they act the same and they share memories. Tron seems happy with whichever one is around."
"And..."
Oh, Roy. "Yeah. Ram's there too. In the benefits department, and wherever else probability calculations are needed. Always a joy to have around. Always helpful. He gets, ah, copied, like Yori-- but he's also a survivor. Even when one of him gets deleted he's almost always recoverable, like that first time. And he works with whoever needs him-- you know him, always ready to help anyone."
Alan's eyes were threatening to tear up, and dammit, the look on Roy's face, finally starting to change expression, wasn't helping. "He, um, he knows you wrote him for commercial distribution. He knows he's not designed to keep reporting to you. But he... still thinks about you, Roy. Fondly."
"Oh... oh, Alan..." Roy's voice cracked, and he leaned over, but not to bury his face in his hands as Alan had expected. Instead it was a sideways slump against Alan's side, and arms wrapped tight in a sudden, awkward hug, and-- Alan's brain just shorted out for a few seconds.
He almost-- almost-- lost twenty-some years of memories in that moment. Almost reset all the way back to one of those hot and desperate memories that felt to him like videogame save-points, crucial nodes of his past, populated by their two younger selves, moving fast and frantic against each other in the warmth and shadow of an 80's room as close to 90's style safety as they could get it back then.
He almost turned too far into that hug. Almost brought his lips too close to--
Their eyes met, and Roy looked as if something similar was processing in him, for a few tortured seconds. He pulled away a little, though not breaking all contact.
"And... Flynn?"
That was deeper, a pain that Alan himself wasn't done processing. And he was able to shut down some of his response to that hug, in the task of figuring out what the hell to say about Flynn.
"I mean, we knew some of it, right from the start. We knew he'd taken the laser and hid it in his arcade-- I think Lora knew that before anyone else even knew it was missing. You could not take her life's work out of that Encom building without her noticing it, somehow."
"His arcade? You-- Flynn had the laser, in the arcade? Connected to, what?"
"To something. We suspected-- for a long time. That it had happened again-- him getting stuck, same laser, new computer, without him finding a way out this time. But we couldn't prove it. We even..."
Something almost stopped Alan from continuing; it was a bigger secret than that other break-in, longer ago--
--but this was Roy, and this room was in the twenty-third century.
"...Lora and I, we... broke into the arcade, years and years ago, just a little while after he disappeared. We found it there. The laser, the computer. But we-- we still couldn't be sure."
"Oh my lord. Oh--"
"Lora wanted to activate it. To have it send us inside and look for him. I... it was too dangerous, of course. Obviously. I mean... I couldn't, you know? Sam was little, and... I was all he had, back then! If I'd gotten killed in that thing..."
Roy nodded, wooden. "I'm assuming you tried from, like, outside?"
"Of course. The monitor was there, all the code on the screen..." Alan felt the memory of that frustration welling up, reanimated into a too-real feeling again. "I should have been able to find him, extract him! But this was a whole new system. Whole languages that Flynn had made up just for programming whatever this was. No damn way of knowing which lines of code in there might be... him."
He took a few deep, heavy breaths, head falling against Roy's shoulder, because his hands were still somewhere on Roy's back and he didn't want to pull away. "And no damn way of knowing what command would do what. A few minutes in that room, and I realized trying to tamper with that computer or that laser from outside was as dangerous as from inside. We... Lora realized it too, and we... we left. Gave up. Went home."
Roy's voice was still small, soft. "So the arcade just..."
"Sat there." Alan's nod almost hurt. "All those years. With the computer still on, of course-- of course we found a way to keep paying the electric bill, we couldn't just let him-- But we knew there wasn't much hope. Computer from the 1980's, running nonstop twenty-something years, never turned off, gathering dust-- we knew the chances weren't good. Of course I hoped. I had the pager, the possibility that maybe someday he'd use it to contact me from in there, give me some more direction... Yeah. I hoped. But what else could we even have done? Who could we have told?"
"You could've told me." And the hurt in that voice was undisguised.
Alan felt it, a clench around his own heart. He let it clench, accepted the accusation, absorbed the pain. "You had your own life. Things that made a difference, things you could actually do something about. You didn't deserve to have that thrown at you."
"And Sam did?"
A bitter laugh rasped in Alan's throat. "Rumor gets around, huh."
Roy shrugged, stiff but still leaning against Alan. "Sam does talk."
"I bet he does. Bet he talks just like his old man, all weird and cryptic so you can't even tell if he's describing a dream or reality or a story he made up. You know what he said when I first asked him what happened? He just said, 'You were right. About everything.' What the hell was that even supposed to mean?"
"But I gather you did get something out of him afterwards. Something about... well, something he learned, about his dad and what happened to him." Roy paused, not long enough for a reply. "Yeah, he doesn't talk all that clear, but I got that much."
"Yeah." And now Alan's voice got cold, hard. "Yes. I got some of the story from him. And, well, it looks like Flynn built a whole new computer world in there for himself, new programs and all. Seems he even took a copy of Tron to put in there--"
...and if Flynn is still alive in there somehow, I am going to make sure he answers to my Tron, who is not going to be happy with him about that, goddamn it-- but Alan shoved down that surge of anger because... no. No point in raging about things that would never happen.
"...And then, everything went wrong. Seems the system turned against him, and finally he sort of... merged with some program in there, some enemy he had to fight."
"What?" Roy blinked a couple times, still looking half-dazed. "Like... like a jumping-into-the-MCP sorta thing?"
"Ha, you remember him talking about that too, huh. Yeah, I think it was a similar deal. And he... well, he succeeded. But less lucky this time. At least... if either of them survived, they're not in any form Sam or I can recognize. Sam has some good insights on that system; we've been examining it as best we can, trying to figure out what we can do with it now, but... far as we can tell, Flynn himself is gone, for real."
"Oh." And now Roy's hand crept up Alan's back, cautious, slow. "I'm sorry."
"I'd mourned him already, mostly." Alan's voice tried to soften; he restrained it. "Wish I could've been there with him, at the end. But Sam... Well. In answer to your question-- yes, Sam deserved that. Deserved to be the one to get that closure. Lord knows he needed it."
He closed his eyes. The touch of Roy's hand was unexpectedly nice. "I'm glad he came out okay, though. I'm... not proud of it, sending him into danger like that. But I'd made peace with it long before I got paged. Sam was going to keep sending himself into danger, whether I liked it or not. And if something didn't happen to fix whatever was going on inside him-- then it would've killed him sooner or later. Parachute off the wrong building. Piss off the wrong cop. He wasn't going to live long, the way he was going. But he was still better equipped for the sort of danger he might find inside that computer, than... than I was ever gonna be. If anyone could've gone in there, all heroic, and brought Kevin out, it would've been him. He deserved to get the chance."
"Did he know any of it, going in?" There was no more judgment in Roy's voice now, just a quiet curiosity.
Slowly, Alan shook his head. "I would've told him, if I'd thought he could have accepted it from me. I... I'd tried to tell him some of it, a few years earlier. But he ran off shouting at me-- wouldn't talk to me for weeks. Angriest I'd seen him since he was a child."
"About you trying to tell the truth?"
"About me telling what he thought was a bunch of lies. Kevin told him that stuff when he was a little boy, as a tall-tale bedtime story. When Kevin disappeared, so did all that childhood magic. By the time Sam grew up, I guess it felt like I was trying to convince him Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny wanted to meet him. He said it was insulting. He acted like it hurt."
"I... I can see why you didn't wanna risk that again, then. When there was actually hope, when the pager finally..." Roy raked a hand through his own hair again, head down, grimacing. "I mean... Sam mentioned that part too, how you kept the pager with you. All those years. You're... very strong, to be able to keep believing like that."
"Hah. No." A rueful laugh. "I'm weak. Always going to be weak for Flynn, as much of a bastard as he was. If I got a hint he was alive in there somehow, even now, I'd... well, I'd do things I definitely shouldn't."
"Not alone, anyway." Roy's head tipped upward. "But you wouldn't be alone, not now. Sam would be with you. I'd be with you."
The way Roy was looking at him... God. Alan's breath went away all at once.
"I suppose you would," he managed. "Lora would, too, I guess."
And then Roy's eyes dropped down; his arms went stiff. "Yeah."
It wasn't hard to read that message. What could be going through Roy's head now, and what the mention of Lora might be doing to it.
Summoning from some inner reserve of strength, Alan brought his own arms back to life... tightened his grip.
"Roy, look at me."
Their eyes met again, unsure. "Roy. Lora and I... you remember how it was with us, back then?"
"Yeah." Roy's smile reappeared, slowly... shy, lopsided... achingly hopeful. "I mean-- I remember she was a real free spirit. And, um... real chill about us. I remember some of the times when it was us three, too. And-- and sometimes us four." He trailed off in a gasp. "And-- and more-- if those memories about the programs are really-- oh wow..."
Alan nodded, heart quickening, those half-repressed memories trying hard to push into his own reality.
Tangle of so many User and Program bodies, hot with reverent ecstasy... hands on hands, on faces-- on sensitive, pulsing circuits-- dreamlike waves of pleasure and otherworldly energy, arching and moaning and crying out in a world of rainbow glow, and oh, Alan had not been letting himself remember how much he'd missed all that--
"Yeah." He caught a breath, remembered-- oh god we have the laser now-- lost his breath and barely caught it again-- "Y-yeah. Good times."
"And..." Roy's throat moved, a swallow, a breath. "And now?"
"Things change, but things stay the same. We're... well, Lora and I aren't as young and wild as we were, but we're the same people. ...As much as people can be the same, anyway, through all the changes in life."
"But you're still..."
"What we have is still there, but, you know... long-distance. Had to be. Didn't want to be, at first. But life worked out that way, and it's been that way for years, so we've... had to make allowances. Had to keep some of that tendency toward being, well... like you said. Chill. Free spirits."
"So, she would be fine with-- I mean, if..."
Alan managed to keep breathing, though his heart was doing things it hadn't done in decades. "Oh yes. You can take Lora out of the 1960's and 70's, but you can't take the Free Love out of Lora. The twenty-first century is treating her pretty well. I think she'd pull us all the way into that twenty-third century, if she could."
The grin that spread across Roy's face was glorious; the hands tightening on Alan's back were conduits of joy.
"Oh, we gotta get that laser back to her. She's been waiting so long to change the world."
"Hah." Alan tried for a laugh, managed only a small gasp. "You know... Maybe the miracle for humanity was the friends we had with us all along."
Energy bubbled up in his chest like a spring, and Roy's smile seemed to spread a glow to the whole rest of both their bodies... and then Alan realized, suddenly and too late, that it took more than one mature and responsible individual to stop a pillow fight.
The cushion slammed into his face and upper body with a force that knocked him onto his back on the couch... and when his weight recalibrated to the new position it found another weight holding him down... and when his eyes recovered from the impact, they looked up into Roy's.
And time reset to twenty-odd years ago, and then fast-forwarded a few centuries...
...and when their lips parted Alan wasn't sure who said "oh, that's nice!" and who replied "let's do that some more!"
...but by that point, it really didn't matter.
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Fanworks: Tron: Fics: Disorientation
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