neutral end
He hasn’t returned to analog for years, and it’s for the best - many years of patch spheres and healing pools have left him more Program than human, and it’s how he prefers it.
Irony of ironies. he’s in a very nicely coded house (really, an extended dock) on the far reaches of an increasingly interconnected Program world. There are always threats to it. Humans discovered it, and everyone from greedy corporations to greedy governments to well-intentioned ideologues are trying to overrun this world, but he cannot pick up a disc and fight them like he did in his youth.
Ma3a long ago calculated that most of humanity would do their best to ignore their accidental deity status. But among those who did not, most would try to use the digital world to gain power. Only a small group of humans would actively put aside power and choose to serve.
He was never meant to be a single human defender; just the first.
He recruited from idealistic college students, employees of computing firms who were in ethical crisis, sometimes the odd hacktivist. He brought them here, and gave them the choice Ma3a gave him. Some chose to stay. In a memorable incident, a destructive piece of malware (a heavily altered military officer who sought his country’s dominance over the digital world) gave them the derisive name “Brothers of Tron” and the name stuck. He is the de facto grandmaster, his own name forgotten to digital history while his brother’s lives on. He doesn’t mind at all.
He’s up to twenty students now, some training apprentices of their own. They are humans who put aside the title of User to become defenders, always watching, forever under siege.
