Tron

tune, as if waiting for a bus. Anytime, door, his attitude said. Alan and Lora watched in amusement.

Twenty feet thick, the door finally showed an opening. Flynn stood back and ushered Lora through first, then followed behind with Alan; she would be a familiar face in the subcellar, while neither of them would. Flynn was acutely aware that none of them was wearing ENCOM picture-ID security badges, Lora and Alan having turned theirs in upon leaving the building earlier. He invoked a prayer drawn from The Treasure of Sierra Madre: Bodges? We don’ need no steenkin’ bodges!

They passed down silent stairwells and corridors of ENCOM’s subbasements, hearing only the whisper of the ventilation system. Then they descended a staircase and found themselves face to face with a security guard.

The trio had the presence of mind to keep walking. Lora came to an instant decision that neither of the men with her would be hurt, nor harm anyone else. Alan kissed his career good-bye, and wondered what jail would be like. Flynn congratulated himself for having worn his running shoes.

Lora tried her sunniest smile on the guard; it came out with a tiny quiver.

“Hi,” the guard said casually, not so much to the two men as to that nice young Ms. Baines who worked for Dr. Gibbs. “Working late?” He recognized the fellow in the glasses, and the other guy too, though he hadn’t seen him around in a while.

“Oh—yeah,” Lora replied nervously, and found herself giving the man—she couldn’t quite dredge up his name—a warm look. She’s got wiles she ain’t used yet, Flynn marveled, and Alan was greatly impressed.

The guard nodded as he passed them by, ascending the stairs, on his route. All three wilted with relieved sighs as they went on their way. They stopped in a darkened entrance area, close by the lab proper. Lora said, “Okay, Flynn; I’m gonna put you at my terminal in the lab. Alan and I will be in the control room.”

Flynn rubbed his palms together. “Swell. I’ll log us both on, and Alan can get his Tron thing running.”

She cautioned them both, “As long as we stay off the top floor, Dillinger’ll never know we’ve been here.” Until it was too late, at which time it wouldn’t matter if he flipped his peruke.

Alan looked to Flynn. “Good luck, hotshot.” Flynn nodded; he liked Bradley’s composure. Alan set off for the control room.

Flynn followed Lora toward the laser lab. He was feeling somewhere between an espionage agent and a kid playing hide ‘n’ seek. He tried his best covert-entry gait, but it felt a little ludicrous in the well-lit computer rooms, and quickly devolved into a sort of Groucho Marx burlesque of stealth, a mime burglar. He outdistanced Lora. In a typical Flynn decision to make the most of the excitement and defuse the anxiety, he decided to play a little.

Lora brought up the rear, adjusting her glasses, preoccupied with her own thoughts. Let’s see: there’s illegal entry, trespass, treason, theft of services—

“Boo!” Flynn remarked, popping up behind her. Lora jumped straight up, and clutched in the region of her heart, in case she should have to pound it to get it started again. Now I remember why it was interesting to be around him. And why he almost drove me bats.

They went on, Lora stepping carefully over the structural members of the frame, Flynn skipping along them and tightrope-walking the occasional girder. Neither noticed the monitoring cameras following their progress. They reached Lora’s console in the lab, and Flynn threw himself into its chair impatiently.

He rubbed his palms again. “Like the man says, there’s no problems, only solutions.”

Lora laid a hand to his shoulder, speaking emphatically. “This laser’s my life’s work. Don’t spill anything.”

He laughed, but let her know he understood with a nod of agreement. She gave him a half-smile and left to rejoin Alan.

Flynn wriggled into a more comfortable position and interlocked his fingers, cracking his knuckles in anticipation and summoning up his electronic muse. He poised hands over the keyboard, his mind trumpeting: Flynn at the Mighty Wurlitzer! He drew a breath and typed a code, then tapped the ‘enter’ key. And was unaware of the realigning of a monitoring camera.

It focused on him from directly above and behind, watching his every move. Flynn typed on.

Access code 6. Password
Series PS 17. Reindeer,
Flotilla

The CRT screen cleared suddenly, and the room was resonant with the voice of the Master Control Program. “You shouldn’t have come back, Flynn.”

He knew a moment’s surprise, at how far applications of voice synthesis had come. “Hey, hey; it’s that big, bad Master Control Program everybody’s talking about! Y’don’t look a thing like your pictures!” He typed:

CODE SERIES LSU-123 . . . activate.
CODE SERIES ESS-999 . . . activate.
CODE SERIES HHH-888 . . . activate.

The MCP sounded confident, amused, but was secretly intimidated. Despite its tremendous augmentation, it could not quite analyze the random factors, unpredictable impulses, and sudden whims of the organic computer that was Flynn’s brain. But it told him, “That isn’t going to do you any good, Flynn. I’m afraid you—”

There was a lurch in the voice synthesis, then it became a series of high-pitched squeals. Flynn grinned malevolently; try that on for size!

The voice returned to normalcy, but sounded shaken, making Flynn wonder what moved the MCP to prove its mastery of nuances of human communication. It warned, “Stop, Flynn. You realize I can’t allow this.” Hidden from Flynn’s sight and hearing, the laser array began a warmup sequence.

Flynn was in his element now, ignoring everything but the terminal. This was a contest he relished; it was an article of faith with him that no machine or program was a match for a human being who had the necessary skills and information. C’mon out and fight! he thought, and prepared to hand the Master Control Program its address. The screen read:

MCP: Terminate control mode.
Activate Matrix storage.

Flynn tsked, “Now, how d’you expect to run the universe if you let a few unsolvable problems throw you like that? C’mon, big boy; let’s see what you’ve got.”

Silently, without Flynn’s noticing, the entire wall behind him slid upward, revealing the frame, target platforms, and the rest of the laser lab. The laser array swung and targeted on his back, its cross hairs bracketing him precisely. Flynn played on.

“You’re entering a big error, Flynn,” Master Control intoned. It had considered its options with typical thoroughness. Letting this troublesome interloper recover the data was out of the question; that algorithm led inexorably to disaster for the MCP. But alerting security wouldn’t do either; there would be inquiries, possibly the intrusion of the police or other authorities. At the same time, Flynn was the most adroit User the MCP had ever encountered. He stood a good chance of winning the information from the System, given time.

That left the laser.

But not for murder, although that lay well within the MCP’s capacity by this time; it had thrown off all limitations imposed on it by human beings. Flynn’s body, though, would bring a hue and cry; investigation that might spell ruin for ENCOM and Master Control. There was an alternative.

The MCP had carefully monitored all the lab’s experiments. It knew even more about the process of digitization than did Gibbs and Lora, thanks to their experiment. Without a body, without a corpse, there would be no furor or danger of compromise for Master Control. But Flynn couldn’t simply be left suspended in the beam, and the MCP had decided just what to do with him. Flynn’s fate would be practical, amusing, and appropriately vindictive.

“I’m going to have to put you on the Game Grid,” Master Control concluded calmly, as it synchronized the laser array.

Flynn missed the implication entirely, sniggering, “Games, huh?” The cross hairs centered on his back. “I’ll give you—”

Brilliant, coherent light issued from the array; Flynn was rocked in his chair by the spasms of his own outstretched arms and legs. As the orange had done earlier that evening, his body began to break into scan lines.