Tron: Machina Ex Machina 64-65
This is the point where things start picking up speed, and where it got hard to write not because I couldn't, but because oh, my heart.
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SIXTY FOUR
Struggling to turn around, re-supplying energy on the wing and trying to find a firing angle that didn’t also have them hitting their own people on the ground, the mixed fleet of warships above Om had to take the risk of dropping outside the storm; there was just not enough visibility for all of them to do all that maneuvering all in the same airspace. To further complicate matters, after an all-too-brief lull and perhaps in answer to so much traffic around the Spire, the weather was beginning to grow unpleasant once again.
Though it was further away than any other ship, the Drakkar opened fire first. It was just above the city, the blaze of its guns skimming barely above the tops of its buildings, slamming into the onrushing forces of the virus and lighting the battle lines with its strobing glow. The tanks behind the thin line of defending programs were firing as well, their shooting vectors so low that any one of those fighting who’d dared jump with a hand up would’ve lost it.
But the tidal, viral wave seemed endless. For every simulacra Om’s defenders took down two, five, ten more took its place. They clung to shields, to batons, to arms and legs. In the time it took to get rid of one clinger, two more had attached. Programs were dragged down, away from the line, lost in the tide of yellow. The virus wouldn’t admit how few of them it could infect, but it didn’t have to – they could simply be torn apart and, amidst the inexplicably unresponsive terrain of the Black Plain, their voxels were a gift from the Users.
“We need to get down there,” GAM, staring at the feeds a dozen screens on the Drakkar’s command center were showing, ground out.
He was startled into looking away when a familiar voice seconded and added to his words. “We need to get down there now,” Tron was scowling at the fighting.
“One,” Gungnir, hurrying to another screen, replied tersely, “the Drakkar is meant to dock, not land. Two, warships aren’t fast. Three, I’m working on it.”
“Working how?” Tron demanded. It was a question he came to regret as Pevir’s SysAdmin dragged them all out of the Command Center, through the echoingly empty decks and to one of the main launch catapults of the immense flagship. “No.” The First Monitor sounded both disbelieving and betrayed. Behind him GAM rubbed at his closed faceplate and, while the helm silenced his sigh, it might as well not have done so.
“Yes.” Gungnir beamed at them all. “You want to get there quickly, don’t you?”
“And online,” Tron gritted out. “You can’t – Gungnir, you can’t launch a bomber from a catapult. That’s too much mass and not enough time for the engines to catch up!”
“Is it? Have you ever tried it?”
Tron’s mouth worked soundlessly, whether because he couldn’t refute the questions or he was trying, very hard, not to launch himself at the SysAdmin and strangle him, no one could tell.
“Oh, absolutely delightful!” MAR exclaimed when he understood what Gungnir was planning to do. The launch catapult had been modified, and the Parnassian bomber was sitting on it, straining the launching equations to their breaking point but not quite tearing them apart. Its oilslick gleam was integrated here and there with the vivid Pevirian red of fully charged weapon systems, and the engine bars were not quite screaming, but certainly humming very loudly.
“You can’t be left alone to make plans,” GAM told Gungnir wearily. “You do this when you’re left alone to make plans.” He waved a hand angrily at the bomber.
“It’ll work! You’ll have how many Users with you?” The SysAdmin gestured at the small pack following them.
“I still think -” GAM began.
“I’m still not staying,” Kane shot back before the Sentry could finish the sentence.
“I’m not staying, either,” Sam replied with a little less heat, but with implacable calm. “And Moll has to come, so…”
Every eye turned to Gungnir’s mirror image. “I can stay,” the young man murmured, as quiet and uncertain as his program was brash and determined. Pevir’s SysAdmin said nothing.
Kane and Rob stared at one another; Rob sighed and looked away first, shrugging unhappily. “Yeah, I know, I know, master key and whatever. I wasn’t meant to come in anyway, I can stay behind, just in case.”
The two surviving Omni Monitors helped the Users board, MAR leading the way.
“For the record,” Gungnir pointed out gleefully, “it wasn’t my idea. It was your pilot’s.”
“Who -” Tron began to demand.
“No,” GAM, who’d been watching the Users board, whipped around at that and all but charged Gungnir. “Absolutely not!”
“She’s not mine to command, GAM!” Gungnir protested, arms up.
“She is what the virus wants!” the Monitor all but shouted back.
“Alright!” Gungnir pointed at the bomber. “Go ahead. Tell her she can’t go.”
GAM was so close to him that the Pevirian could see himself reflected in flawless detail on the Monitor’s black faceplate. He was trying not to look smug and he was almost succeeding. Almost. It wasn’t mean or petty; Gungnir just generally found it hilarious that the WallSec never tired of trying to make the Grid be… organized. And the Grid never tired of being anything but.
GAM whirled around and charged up the bomber’s ramp. “VIDI!”
“Did you do that on purpose?” Tron asked quietly.
“I wish I had,” Gungnir replied in the same tone. “Come on, you old bit of code, let’s go before they leave without us.”
“You’re coming?” Tron followed Gungnir, not bothering to hide his surprise.
“That thing owes me a rematch -”
“Wait!”
They both turned. Gungnir’s User hurried to them. “You’re going?”
Tron gave Gungnir an unreadable look, and headed up the ramp. The SysAdmin turned back to face his User. “Yes.”
“You can’t go,” Ethan blurted out. “I mean, you could, the math is sound, it’d be better if there were less people, I mean, programs, because less weight and more acceleration and you can’t go, I haven’t backed you up, I didn’t get a chance, I was gonna before this all started but then there was the laser and the power surge and I hope all the machines at the hospital are OK, but I didn’t back you up! I didn’t back you -!”
Gungnir let the torrent wash over him. Some part of him, he realized, was listening to every word, hearing them and at the same time hearing a dozen different messages bound into them like encrypted information, layers upon layers of communication. For a moment he wondered how Users decrypted such multi-layered messages, and then a terrible realization struck him.
They didn’t.
In his world, his User was constantly screaming into a void that couldn’t understand him.
But he was his User’s program. He had been created to hear him. To understand him. No one else, in either of their worlds, might ever hear and see and understand Ethan as Gungnir did. He reached out and clasped his User’s shoulders. “Ethan.”
Ethan felt as light and fragile as a light-sculpture under Gungnir’s touch. A tremendous, unseen surge of… something passed between them, and the User knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he’d been heard. Gungnir’s touch didn’t even grate against his senses. It felt simply like a part of him had come home. His program had heard him, was listening to all the things he couldn’t say for all that his voice had been rising to just shy of a shout.
Unfortunately that understanding didn’t change the decision Pevir’s SysAdmin had come to.
“I didn’t make you to be brave,” Ethan whispered. “I’m not brave, I couldn’t code that, I couldn’t have coded what I don’t know. I haven’t backed you up.”
Gungnir grinned at him. With one hand he reached back; on the other he took one of Ethan’s. In it he placed his disk. “If I know anything about courage,” he told his User evenly, and his implacable faith spilled from every word, “it came from you.”
He turned and trotted up the ramp, triggering its closure and throwing the two Users left behind a thumbs-up before it shut.
The inside of the bomber had been lined with launch sarcophagii, the bare-bones structures that kept Programs from getting tossed around while being carried through enemy fire. One of them had been laid flat, and Moll secured to it, the medical program latched onto a safety strap with one hand while keeping the other on the young User, directly monitoring her feed. There weren’t otherwise many of them; even Fortis’ Ancilia were down below, one last line of defense between the unthinkable and the Weather Station Tower where so many SysAdmins were helping organize the ground defenses. All that had been left on board the Drakkar were its gunnery crews and Gungnir’s personal guard.
“You’ll all be glad to know,” he declared as he rushed to the cockpit, “that my User says the math for launching the bomber is sound.” He peeked into the cockpit, saw Vidi sitting at the pilot’s station, MAR sitting on the navigator’s side. “Oh, look,” he said pointedly, leaning back to stare at GAM’s faceplate. “She’s still here.”
The Sentry radiated silent irritation at him.
“You know there’s no one in the turrets,” MAR called out after the SysAdmin.
“The point is not to draw attention to the lady,” Gungnir replied. “Vidi, you can fly her back to the Drakkar alone?”
“As long as no one’s shooting at me,” the Gridborn assured him. “That’s what makes it hard.”
“Gungnir, where’s your disk?” Tron asked sharply from his sarcophagus.
“Safest place in the Grid I could find, obviously. This thing infects by disk as well as touch.” Pevir’s SysAdmin stepped into a free sarcophagus next to Tron.
“I’d rather not see you turn into a Stray, you know,” Tron pointed out.
“Then I guess we better hurry,” Gungnir replied cheerfully. “SysAdmin to Catapult Control.”
“Catapult Control here, SysAdmin.”
Gungnir grinned wildly. “Fire.”
SIXTY FIVE
The bomber exploded from the launching bay. The Users grunted in surprise at the sudden acceleration. Gungnir whooped wildly.
For a moment the immense vehicle glided downwards, bleeding off speed, but then the engine bars caught hold of the atmosphere and the bomber leveled off with a howl.
“Best pilot in the Grid, huh?” Sam gritted out as they accelerated toward the Black Plains.
“Amps, would you have done that?” Gungnir asked of the program next to him. “Any of you?”
“No, sir,” the leader of the Valravn declared quite evenly, even though he and his people were matching their SysAdmin’s wild grin to various degrees. “We’re good, not crazy.”
The bomber roared over Om, quickly leaving the Drakkar behind. In a moment it was downslope, over the wall and the pitched battle below.
“Eyes wide open, Vidi,” MAR said tightly.
“I know,” she replied just as nervously, her hair haloed all around her face. There was no way to be terribly precise at it, but she’d been told to get as low and as close to the virus as she could. “This is so weird.”
“You’ve seen the virus before.”
“Not the virus, the terrain.” Vidi was perceiving what the virus had already noticed, that the terrain around Om was… blank. Empty. Everywhere else there had been data streams. Parnassus had been packed full of them; Ilo’s terrain had shown dead and dormant rivers alongside the few still active trickles.
Om had nothing. No data lines, no energy streams, no connections. It was as if it stood outside the Grid, unplugged from it, utterly isolated. Against that darkness, the virus and its forces were a stain of ugly, overly bright yellow, broken and twisted against the universally smooth lines of the Gridborn’s world. No matter how chaotic or illogical the Grid might seem to others, to Vidi it always made sense. It always followed its own order. The virus might have been completely black, and still she would’ve seen it.
She could also see the deep, lambent glow of the Breach’s energies, swelling far beneath the terrain. It looked very much like the Spire had, that third time at Halcyon, building up and up, as if it were bracing itself for a momentous effort. Only this time she was all but on top of it.
“Vidi.” MAR’s voice dragged her back to the present, and to their mission.
“I’m looking, I’m looking. It all looks like the virus from up here. I’m going around again.”
The bomber banked in a smooth loop. Below, the combined firepower of the warships and the tanks tore into the ranks of the simulacra; step by step, the tide of yellow had pressed Om’s defenders to the first row of buildings, which were being desperately defended. A few of them collapsing into tides of simulacra had been enough to demonstrate why the virus and its forces could not be allowed even a single step further.
GAM, trapped as all of them inside his sarcophagus, tried to settle into a plan he knew was terrible, against odds that no one liked, risking everything that they couldn’t allow the virus to take by… bringing it to the virus. None of it made sense, but then none of them had even known Reintegration was possible. Even Sam Flynn, whom the other Users treated as a the most experienced of them all, claimed to have only seen once. Sort of.
Sort of.
GAM stared at the displayed data inside the blackness of of his faceplate. The hope had been that the virus had been at the back of its forces, directing them. The turn he could feel from the bomber carrying them all told him that had been a tactical misconception. He had only fought the forces of the virus en masse once, when it had tried to board the Drakkar, but he was beginning to suspect that it had kept its distance then out of necessity, not out of care.
Which left their original plan in shreds. Reintegration, Sam Flynn claimed, required line-of-sight. They had to bring the nearly-derezzed User close enough to the virus to see it. They had to then hope that she’d know what to do, or that she’d be sensible enough to follow Sam Flynn’s instructions on how to proceed.
It had been a slim hope at best when they’d thought the virus would be in the back, with an army to fend off on only one side. If it was on the frontlines, surrounded by fighting in every direction but down…
He closed his eyes. Stop it, he told himself sternly, falling back onto the truth of his being to try and settle his runaway thoughts.
I am a Sentry.
I am the Wall.
I am Halcyon. I am the Grid.
I am GAM.
“I am GAM,” he murmured inside his helm, quiet enough that the microphone didn’t pick it up. A thought brought up the data packet Emil had given him, and he sorted through it. It was surprisingly small; the larger part of it seemed to be the documentation. GAM opened that first for caution’s sake.
He found himself face to face with his User.
“Hey, GAM.”
It was a video feed, the stunned Sentry realized. His face stared back at him, the same solid lines, bright eyes the same color as Emil’s. There were dark circles under them, and the curling black hair was longer, threaded with violet and white. GAM had thought his own hair to be a side-effect of his bond to Halcyon; it had never occurred to him that it was a reflection of his User’s. The space around the User was dark; he could make out a small room, but furnishings and décor were nothing but shadows against the walls.
“So, I’m Liam,” his User told him. Like those of the other Users, it lacked a certain richness, as if half its wavelength were nonexistent. “Um, I’d hoped. Well, I guess I hoped someday I’d be able to talk to you directly, but uh. They’re probably gonna come for me any minute now. I just wanted you to know: out here, at the source? You did your job, GAM. I just… didn’t do mine.” Liam hung his head wearily. “I gave you the data, but not the means to act on it. I… didn’t trust you. Dumb, right? I created you, I should’ve. But I didn’t -”
Shouting, just close enough for the recording to catch it, whipped Liam around, all traces of wariness gone and every sense on the alert, and GAM felt his whole body tensing up with the need, the driving instinct to protect his User, to help him, even though his rational mind knew Liam was long beyond anything his program could do for him.
“Um.” Liam focused on the screen again. “I’m not gonna get to finish the update. I’ve tied it up where I could, it’s half-assed at best, but it’s not harmful and, honestly, I’ll take whatever I can get. It’s not gonna do the version of you out here any good. But it might help you. You’ve… You’ve made a life for yourself in the Grid, GAM, and it’s… God.” Liam laughed. “It’s so much more than I ever hoped for for you. You’ve got the life I always wanted for myself. Helping others. Keeping them safe. Every time I look at you, I’m happy.” Liam smiled faintly. “Every time, I’m proud.”
GAM felt like howling at the unfairness of it all.
Liam looked away at another, closer bout of shouting. “But, you know. Here I am, stuck on this side. You can’t help me with what’s coming, but I can help you. I’d been meaning to add a bit of, uh, let’s call it perspective to your code. I got the foundation from a friend of a friend, and just… started building up on it, but you know, tempus fugit and all that.Most of the bulk is so Grid security lets it through, it’s not finished, you’re probably gonna find a buncha holes, but that’s fine, it shouldn’t hurt your baseline. I’m sending it to dad so it doesn’t get lost if they seize my gear. It’s optional – you’re your own person, GAM. I don’t get to force anything on you, no one should. But uh, if you accept, you get to find out how the other half lives. I think that might help you, someday.”
Liam reached out to turn off the video, and GAM only barely heard someone pounding on a door before the inside of his faceplate went dark again.
For a brief while he couldn’t move. He felt as if his code had frozen, as if his voxels had locked in place, caught in a glacier that dulled all his perceptions of the rest of the Grid, until only him and the sudden, bottomless chasm of his loss remained. He’d known his User was gone.
He hadn’t expected to bear witness to his last moments.
He forced himself to examine the data packet. There it was, a single file named, simply, ‘Perspective’.
Thank you, Liam. He activated the update. For my gift. And for the choice.