Tron Legacy (2 page)

SAM FELT HIMSELF FALLING FAST THROUGH THE AIR
. With a hard jolt, the parachute hidden in his backpack deployed and his body was jerked back up again.

Sam laughed. Everything was working out exactly as planned. He began floating down slowly, his feet dangling over his intended landing zone—the employee parking lot. And then, the gust came.

With a whoosh the night wind caught his chute, twisting and turning it.

Uh-oh…

While sirens began wailing in the distance, Sam felt the wind sweeping him away from the parking lot. He was drifting helplessly now, over the darkened city streets.

Down, down he floated, and then, with another jolt, he stopped. Aw, no! he thought. His parachute had gotten caught on a streetlight!

Sam looked down to the pavement—the very hard pavement. He could slip out of the chute’s harness and let himself fall to the ground. But it was just a little too high a drop.

With a sigh, Sam folded his arms and waited.

Just then, he noticed a cab rolling down the empty street. Timing his move just right, he slipped out of the parachute harness and landed with a thump on the taxi’s roof. Perfect!

“Hey, no free ride!” the driver shouted out his window.

Just then, a pair of police cars flew around the corner. Lights flashing, sirens wailing, two more units appeared on the opposite end of the block.

Wow! Sam thought. When I call the cops, I really call ’em!

The taxi was blocked in. The driver hit the brakes. But Sam wasn’t stopping. He rolled off the roof of the taxi and landed on his feet. Then he leaped on and over the hoods of both police cars and took off full speed down the street. Behind him, more official vehicles screeched to a halt.

Just as he reached his motorcycle back at the original landing site, a blinding beam of light shone down from above. Sam looked up and saw a police helicopter overhead, its blades beating the night air.

Policemen rushed out of the shadows. They had been waiting. Strong hands seized him. One of the officers snapped a pair of handcuffs on his wrists. Another told Sam what he already knew.

“You’re under arrest!”

A FEW HOURS LATER, EVERYTHING WAS CLEARED UP
. While his dad might not be around, his name still pulled a lot of weight. Uncuffed and released, and not much worse for the wear, Sam left the police station and headed home.

Home for Sam wasn’t a nice little ranch house in the suburbs or a huge mansion in a subdivision, which, by the way, he could easily afford. Sam Flynn lived where no one else did, next to a junkyard near the city docks.

During the day, this area was loud and active. Sam didn’t like it much then. But now, just past midnight, the piers were closed, the warehouses were deserted, and the city skyline silently flickered like rows of lit candles in a quiet church.

Sam cut his motorcycle engine and parked beside a stack of boxcar-size shipping containers. Carrying a bag of take-out burgers, he climbed a metal staircase to the container on the very top.

Home sweet home, he thought, pulling out a key.

Thanks to a giant window cut into one side of the metal container, Sam had a great view of the city. But tonight he ignored the scenery.

Walking in the front door, he heard a friendly bark. A furry dog, tail wagging, bounded up to greet him.

“Hey, Marvin,” Sam called, reaching into the bag. He tossed his dog a thick, hot burger. “double-double. No mayo. Just the way you like it.”

Marvin barked a thank you and began nibbling on the juicy meat.

Sam went to the fridge and grabbed a cold drink, then headed for the couch with his own burger.

His place was a total mess. Papers and books were piled everywhere. The shelf was cluttered with rows of action figures, and in the middle of the room, a vintage motorcycle sat up on blocks. This was his father’s old bike. Sam was in the middle of rebuilding the twenty-year-old ducati. One wheel and a lot of engine parts were scattered all over the floor.

Sam stretched out on a couch beside his father’s cycle, unwrapped his burger, and began to eat. That’s when Sam realized he wasn’t alone. A man stepped out of the shadows.

Sam bolted upright in alarm. Then he saw the man’s face. “Alan,” he said with relief, “what are you doing in my apartment?”

Alan Bradley shrugged. “You don’t answer your phone.” He smiled. “How ya been, Sam?”

Sam narrowed his eyes. Years ago, Alan had been his father’s best friend. After his father had escaped the digital world and focused back on the real world, he’d made Alan a partner at Encom. And when Kevin disappeared, Alan had been the one to help raise the young orphan. Now Alan managed Sam’s majority ownership of the corporation—and he tried to manage Sam, too.

“When I was twelve I might have appreciated the whole surrogate-father thing,” Sam bitterly told Alan. “But come on. I got it under control now.”

Alan gestured to the mess around him. “Clearly.”

“What is it?” Sam lashed back. “do you want to help me with my homework?”

Alan turned his back on Sam and peered at the city skyline. “I heard you did a triple axel off the Tower a few hours ago,” he said. “rough landing, huh?”

Sam rubbed the wrists where he’d been cuffed. “Could have been worse.”

Alan sighed. “I also heard you sent the last batch of dividend checks to some interesting charities.”

“The dog-park thing?” Sam gestured to his canine bud. “That was Marvin’s idea.”

Alan folded his arms.

“Are we gonna do this again?” Sam asked, shaking his head. “do I look like I’m ready to run a Fortune 500 company?”

“No,” Alan said. “And truthfully, the board’s pretty happy with you where you are. That way they can keep doing whatever they want. What I find curious is that annual prank you pull on the company. You have an interesting way of being disinterested.”

Sam put down his burger and wiped his hands. “Why are you here, Alan?”

“I promised you if I ever got any information about your dad, I’d tell you first,” Alan said. “I got a page last night.”

“Still rocking the pager,” Sam said, stifling a laugh. Pagers were so old-school. “good for you,” he added.

“The page came from the arcade.”

Sam shrugged. “So.”

“So, that number has been disconnected for twenty years,” Alan said. “Ever since your father vanished.”

Sam froze.

“Two nights before your father disappeared, he came to my house,” Alan went on. “Flynn said he cracked it. He was talking about genetic algorithms, quantum teleportation. Flynn said he was about to change everything. Science. Medicine. religion.” Alan locked eyes with Sam. “He wouldn’t have left that, Sam. And he wouldn’t have left you.”

Sam shook his head. He had heard this before. It didn’t change anything. It couldn’t change anything. “You and I both know he’s either dead or chillin’ in Costa rica,” Sam said angrily. “Probably both. I’m sorry, man. I’m beat, and I smell like jail. Let’s reconvene in a couple of years—”

Before Sam could object, Alan tossed him a metal ring. Instinctively, Sam reached out and caught it. “The keys to the arcade,” Alan said. “I haven’t gone over yet. I thought you should be the one—”

“You’re acting like I’m gonna find dad sitting there working!” Sam cried. “Ah, sorry, kiddo, lost track of time for, like, twenty years…”

The older man nodded, stared at the flickering lights of the city. “Wouldn’t that be something?” he said wistfully. Sam felt a momentary pang of sympathy. He wasn’t the only one his dad had left behind. Then, before he could say anything, Alan walked out the door.

Left alone again with his dog, Sam found his gaze straying to the Tron-game action figures lined up on his shelf.

For the very first time, Sam noticed something. “What the…?” he whispered, looking harder. The plastic face on the Tron figure looked just like the face of Alan Bradley.

When Sam’s dad had been trapped inside the computer all those years ago, it was Tron who’d helped Kevin defeat the evil Master Program.

Does the digital world my dad created really mirror our world so closely? Sam wondered. The thought stayed with him, like an itch he couldn’t scratch.

He stared at the keys in his hand, the keys to the arcade. Suddenly, Sam grabbed his helmet and jacket. Before Marvin had time to swallow the last bite of his double-double, no mayo, Sam was back on the freeway.

AS HEAT LIGHTNING RIPPLED THROUGH THE PURPLE SKY
, Sam arrived in front of his dad’s gaming arcade. It was three a.m., the streets were deserted, and Flynn’s was dark and shuttered, just as it had been for two decades.

Layers of old posters covered the entryway. There were flyers for concerts, movies, basketball games—twenty years of event history. Sam ripped them all away. Using the keys Alan had given him, he unlocked the front door.

A beeping sound reminded him to punch in the alarm code. Sam did, surprised his twenty-seven-year-old brain could still access his seven-year-old self’s memory.

The arcade was dark. Even after Sam turned on the lights, the place felt gloomy. Strange shapes lurked under sheets covered with layers of dust, like the creation on doctor Frankenstein’s lab table.

But Sam knew the only creations lurking under the dusty covers were the ghosts of forgotten video games from the 1980s. Every one of them was an antique. The multiplatform, Internet gamers of the twenty-first century had no use for them.

But not everything in this place was useless. As in Frankenstein’s lab, Sam suspected there might be a secret lurking inside the arcade. He just had to find it.

Before he could begin his search, something caught his attention. One game, covered in a sheet like all the others, was up against the far wall. He walked up to it, blew away the dust, and pulled the sheet off Tron. He dug into his pocket for a quarter. Just one game, he thought. For old time’s sake.

Suddenly the coin slipped between his fingers and Sam groaned. dropping down to retrieve it, he noticed scuff marks on the floor. It seemed the Tron machine had been moved—and moved a lot.

Why?

Sam tugged on the game, trying to move it himself. For a moment it didn’t budge—and then the whole thing suddenly swung outward. The game was concealing a secret doorway!

As Sam stepped over the threshold, an electronic eye activated the room’s power. Lights came on by themselves, and Sam gasped in surprise.

It must be dad’s secret laboratory, he realized, his heart beginning to pound.

Frozen in time, a twenty-year-old pot of coffee sat on a stove in the corner. The leather jacket his dad had been wearing the night he vanished was still draped over a chair. A layer of dust covered everything. gulping, Sam continued to move around, taking stock.

He saw a map tacked to a cork bulletin board. The map outlined a landmass Sam didn’t recognize. His father had labeled it the grid.

Computer mainframes lined the walls, and a glass and silicon laser array was placed in one corner. The laser was aimed at a chair and table in the center of the room.

Sam sat down in the chair. Suddenly the table in front of him lit up. Sam brushed away two decades of dust and discovered that it was actually a worktable that controlled the computers surrounding him.

Processors began to hum. Then the screen in the center of the table flashed a question:
TRON PROJECT
INITIATE SEQUENCE?
Y/N

Sam pondered the question for two whole seconds before pressing
Y
.

Instantly, a brilliant blue burst of light washed over Sam. “Ahh!” he cried, blinded by the flash.

For a moment, there was nothing but the bright flash and the heavy sound of Sam’s startled breathing. It was as if time had been suspended.

Sam finally opened his eyes. darkness. He blinked and rubbed his eyes, but it didn’t help. All the lights in the room had shorted out.

Reaching out in the pitch dark, Sam felt the surface of the table. There were no running lights on the control panel, no humming or vibrations. It was dead. Sam found a manual reboot switch and activated it.

Nothing. No power at all, not even emergency lighting. Muttering in frustration, Sam felt his way out of the secret lab. He moved through the arcade, which was also pitch dark, and finally stumbled out the front door.

Although it was still dim, at least now he could see. And go home. Enough trips down memory lane.

The night air felt different now, wet, foggy, cooler. Maybe the jump off the Encom building had rattled his brain. Shaking his head, Sam walked over to the streetlight where he’d parked his motorcycle. It was gone.

“What?!”

He glanced around and realized the missing bike wasn’t the only strange occurrence. Lots of things were different now. Clouds, stars, even the moon had disappeared. The sky above him looked as black as outer space. Suddenly a crackling flash of lightning rippled across the firmament.

Heat lightning again? he thought. But the weather seemed too cool for that. And since when was lightning blue?

Sam’s heart was now pumping hard enough to drown out the strange electronic buzzing that was assaulting his ears. He couldn’t wrap his head around it. Nothing was as it should be. Even the buildings looked different—blank walls without any windows or doors.

That’s when a blinding spotlight pinned him. Sam groaned. The police again? “This has to be a new record,” he said out loud.

But this was no helicopter. Looking up, Sam’s eyes nearly popped out of his head, and his jaw dropped. Hovering over him was an upside down U-shaped recognizer—from the Tron game! The digital construct was blue-black in color, with orange piping.

I’m inside, Sam realized in shock. I’m in dad’s digital world!

The recognizer hovered overhead, its light probing Sam as if he were a specimen under a microscope.

“Identify yourself, program,” a booming, metallic voice commanded.

There was no way he was staying around to answer that question. He had to get back into the arcade. Sam tried to run, but the ground under his feet rumbled. Then the streets sank, transforming into deep canyons that surrounded Sam. In seconds, he found himself trapped on a concrete plateau with nowhere to go.

The recognizer circled its prey then settled on the lone piece of raised concrete. The machine’s two legs straddled Sam. Hatches opened, and four guards—or Sentries as Sam remembered them being called—in blue-black armor and smooth, blank helmets walked out of a hangar and surrounded him.

One of them pointed to Sam. “This program has no disc. Another stray.”

The voice was electronic, but not without emotion. Sam sensed disdain, maybe even hatred, in the Sentry’s tone. A second Sentry seized his arm.

“Wait!” Sam cried.

The Sentries ignored Sam’s pleas. They dragged him into the recognizer’s hangar. The hatch closed, and Sam felt the craft lurch under his feet. He was trapped.

ONCE THE MACHINE WAS AIRBORNE
, the Sentries finally released Sam. But before he could take even a step, crackles of light energy slammed Sam against a bulkhead. More bands of power restrained his hands and feet.

Sam ceased to struggle when the hangar floor became transparent. What he saw was unbelievable. It was the stuff of his father’s stories—but in living color.

The recognizer was flying over a city that appeared to stretch for a hundred miles in every direction. The craft was dwarfed by impossibly high skyscrapers capped by towering spires that rose against the ebony horizon.

The entire metropolis was laid out in a grid pattern. Sam tracked crackling bolts of energy as they raced between the buildings. Blue plasma traveled beside the streets through canals that flowed along every avenue and boulevard, like a river meandering through the forest.

Those same energy beams roiled in the black sky. In one blazing blue flash of lightning a glassy onyx mountain range in the far distance was revealed.

Dragging his attention back inside, Sam noticed other people in the hangar with him. They appeared dazed and frightened. Some watched the view through the floor, but most seemed disinterested.

“Hey,” Sam called out. “does the name Kevin Flynn mean anything to you?”

“Keep quiet if you want to live,” a teenager warned, causing Sam to raise an eyebrow. He’d just been asking a question. giving him a closer look, Sam saw that the kid wore a weird black bodysuitlike piece of clothing that glowed with lines of rippling energy.

Sam looked back at the rest of the people. “Not the games, not the games, not the games,” one person chanted. Curled in a ball on the transparent floor, his eyes were hidden behind trembling hands.

“What’s his problem?” Sam asked.

“Shhhh,” another hissed.

Sam faced the man and gasped. Half his face had been violently torn away, leaving empty space bound loosely together…with wavering pixels!

These aren’t human beings, Sam realized with a jolt. The Sentry had said it earlier, he just hadn’t been paying attention! These are programs! Living bio-digital entities. And the Sentries think I’m one of them!

Suddenly, the invisible restraints holding Sam released him. He tumbled to the floor. The recognizer banked, moving into a landing pattern. Finally the airship docked on a platform high over the city streets.

Sentries dragged Sam outside with the other programs. They were greeted by an intelligence officer in translucent armor. A Judge Sentry, identified with a special symbol glowing on his chest plate, stood next to him.

Without wasting any time, the Judge Sentry began pronouncing sentence on every captured program: “I sentence you to the games…I sentence you to the games…I sentence you…” He went from one to the other without hesitation.

Most programs accepted their fate meekly, as if they were already doomed. But some were not as quiet.

“Not the games!” shouted one frightened program. He broke away from the Sentries and ran screaming to the rail. Sam watched in horror as the program hurled himself off the platform to the ground far below.

A moment later, the judge approached Sam.

This was his chance. He had to explain the situation and get out of here. He didn’t belong here.

“Look,” Sam began to tell the judge, “I know you probably get this a lot. But there’s been a mistake. I need to talk to somebody—”

But the judge cut Sam off with a simple pronouncement: “I sentence you…to the games.”