Tron

manifestation of the MCP’s evil. Flynn looked back to the citadel, with its communication beam descending directly to its center, and thought of a plan.

“Yori, steer us over by the beam, right next to it!”

She went to the controls, striving to harness what little propulsion the derelict had left. “How will that help?”

Flynn started for the passageway, making for what remained of the outer hull. Sark’s corpse was stomping toward the MCP. Flynn called back to her, “I’m going to jump.” He sized up the beam, trying to calculate his leap— for life?

She stared at him with her mouth open. Maybe these wild talents of mine will work. If I can enter the MCP, I might be able to do something. Only way to fail’s not to try; only way to find out is the old Geronimo! Flynn thought.

Tron fired off his disk once more as the Master Control Program’s panels spun to spread the impact and energy discharges. Tron prepared for another toss. Just then a heart-stopping, demonic roar brought him around.

Tron stood frozen by the sight. Sark was a colossus, wreathed in power, still bearing the ghastly wound. The horror of it daunted even the User Champion.

“TRON!” The bellow was uttered in a voice that combined many, with Sark’s and the MCP’s foremost among them, as if uncounted prisoner programs now inhabited Sark.

Overcoming his moment’s irresolution, Tron coiled, let fly. The disk left a trail of white luminance in the air, a perfect throw. And yet the huge creature reached forth a hand and deflected it easily with his palm. Tron recalled the disk, circling to one side, despairing, but unwilling to give up.

The Carrier closed on the beam at a tortuous crawl, all but spent. Flynn stood on the edge of the superstructure, looking down at it as Yori watched in complete consternation.

“Flynn, you can’t” she declared. “You’ll be de-rezzed!”

He turned to her, placing a finger on her lips. So much like Lora! “Probably,” he confessed. He took her into an embrace, bent close to her. She stared at him, uncomprehending but trusting. This time, their lips met. The kiss was a new experience for Yori, but she apprehended, right away, what it was. She responded in kind.

Yori’s body became radiant once more, its aura brightening as it had in the apartment. She was filled with feelings she couldn’t sort out or analyze, an affection for Flynn that was unlike her love of Tron, but undeniable, and wonderful. She transformed once more, the circuitry giving way to traceries, and was gossamer-winged in her mantle, hair flowing freely, her eyes closed in rapture.

Flynn pulled back to take in the sight of her, enthralled. A moment later her eyes opened. “Don’t worry,” Flynn whispered. He released her and she watched him, unspeaking, wordless with the thing that had happened to her.

Flynn poised on the edge of the fading Carrier, gathered himself, and jumped off the brink, into the MCP’s Communication Beam. Yori was at the rail in a swirl of mantle, grief and fear changing her face, to peer after him.

Flynn dropped in a slow-motion dive through the almost physical resistance of the beam, maneuvering himself down the fountain of energy into the heart of the Master Control Program. Yori mourned him no less than she had Tron.

“END OF LINE, PROGRAM,” the body of Sark intoned in its multitude of voices, the mockery of Sark and the MCP prominent among them. Tron, heaving for breath, his best attacks ineffective, dodged between the giant’s feet. Nearby, Master Control watched with its placid, idiot-feral gaze.

Flynn, arms upraised, slid feet first down the beam, body aglow with his own power. There was an incandescent flash and a feeling like that in the laser lab, when he’d been digitized, of an alteration in his body structure. Then Flynn was inside the very core of the MCP cylinder, where the MCP had never expected or provided against any other entity’s intrusion.

Sark’s zombie looked up sharply, aware of an unspeakable wrongness. Tron couldn’t help but follow the stare, trick or no. The bloated face of the MCP had been replaced by Flynn’s distorted, convex features on the wall of the cylinder.

Tron had the impression of enormous contention, a battle of titans within the MCP. He turned to the thing that had been Sark, but the creature was still absorbed by events within the cylinder. Perhaps, Tron thought, some indirect attack on it—

Then he saw the blades protecting the MCP’s light cones swing open, exposing the supporting cones to attack. Flynn’s doing! Tron knew.

He readied his disk again and it attracted the corpse’s attention. Tron cast a final time, but not at the hideous thing that fought him. The disk hissed to circle the vertex where the energy cones rested one upon the other, supporting the MCP. The disk maneuvered to Tron’s command; it sliced directly into the vertex.

The citadel resounded to an explosion that nearly rocked Tron of his feet, the heat of it making him throw his arms up protectively, the light of it threatening his vision. The Sark-thing stared at it and the outcry of multitudes came a last time, “NOOOO!” as it realized what Tron had done. As it gazed up at the hurricane of energy liberated from the cones, its eyes were again for a moment those of the real Sark, stunned with the knowledge that he’d lost irrevocably.

Then the giant became a column of mottled light, losing all features, seeming to fold in and melt upon itself, dissipating all that had animated it, in a foam of iridescent explosions. Tron stared at it in dreadful fascination, then returned his gaze to the cylinder.

A new form was coming into being in the madness of contending powers that threatened the energy cones. It reminded Tron of Dumont as he had been configured in his pod, its face ancient, drawn with age, wizened and emaciated, its pod an earlier and eroded version of a Guardian’s.

High up there, the MCP was losing its fight; it had assumed this appearance, stripped of the power and accumulations of its long rise. It looked down through weakened eyes, old and debilitated. Before it, its gnarled and withered hands played on an old-fashioned, standard typewriter keyboard, an instrument from the days of its earliest origins. As Dumont had predicted: He started out small, and he’ll end up small. The face sank backward and down out of the headpiece, leaving only a dark aperture.

The figure faded from view and the great cylinder of the MCP shone more and more harshly. Tron took a step back, sensing that some final finish was yet to come. Along the wall, the figures of Dumont and the other Guardians were rezzing up, their substance and essence released from the destroying Master Control. Tron took Dumont by the arm, gesturing to the others, urging them from the citadel.

Detonation after detonation blossomed across the surface of the MCP, licking out at the heels of the fleeing programs. They got through the doorway just as the vertical flange panels began to blast free, searing the air and making the floor jolt. The explosions continued, rising around the cylinder, consuming it, eating toward its core.

At last the MCP went up in a sunburst that climbed into the night sky as Yori watched from the drifting Carrier. With that, the surrounding Domains, darkened during the reign of the MCP, began to return to life. The impenetrable sky, blocked off by the influence of Master Control, was once more open to the night; stars and nebulae and comets and moons flashed and winked.

The fireball of the MCP’s last eruption climbed, as more Domains revivified in every direction, a carpet of light rolling out to all sides as a ripple expands across a pool from the dropping of a stone. Yori shielded her eyes from the glare of the nova but watched the returning Domains, ecstatic.

The Carrier was descending, little left to it but the bridge area where she stood, its de-rezzing barely halted in time. Below her she saw Tron waving, running across the mesa to reach the spot where the Carrier would touch down.

He gazed up at it, a ghost ship except for the bridge. He doubted that the System would see the ominous flagship again. Yori came to the edge of the bridge as it settled to the ground and jumped the last few feet, into his