1985
ENCOM Corporate Office
Center City, California
"You have a light schedule today, sir. At ten you have another meeting with the board to discuss our workings in Mumbai, India, and then...."

Flynn wasn't listening. He couldn't care less. Meetings, Press Conferences, Paperwork; The board made him bored. What got him really excited was the Grid. A Digital Frontier. What started out as a new system optimized for games and simulations operated from INSIDE the computer had become so much more. There were big things on the horizon. He just had to bring it to each world easily.

In the Real World, he couldn't just come right out and tell everyone that there was a whole other world inside the computer. He'd be locked up in an asylum somewhere, and that Mackey kid would be running up the rungs of the corporate ladder as fast as he could. Flynn didn't really like Richard Mackey. He didn't quite "get it." But someday, everyone would.

Flynn figured he had to introduce them to the idea of programs being more than just a bundle of ones and zeroes slowly. It was the whole reason he wrote and published the TRON game. Put it out there as a story first, and someday, maybe, people would be more willing to accept the reality because they knew the story. He had tried to put as much of his experience inside the ENCOM 511 computer system as he could into the game, including Tron, what Clu must have seen, the Solar Sailor, the part he heard about later with Dumont even.

That was it. He was Dumont. Dumont was an I/O Tower guardian. He kept the two world from each other until they were ready, and then facilitated the contact. That was what Flynn was doing. He was protecting the two worlds from each other, and was preparing to facilitate the contact when they were ready.

But would they ever be ready? That was the question. This development that happened only a few days ago was mind-boggling.

Isomorphic Algorithms. Isos, for short. Digital beings, like programs, but different. So different. Their code was immensely complex. Flynn couldn't even begin to understand it, and they had no set purpose. A true free agent in the Grid. Written by nothing but the cycles of the System pulling at the code inside the Sea of Simulaiton.

Flynn figured that he was, in a way, their programmer. Sort of. He had put everything in place, without even knowing it, for them to come to be. What were the odds of that, man! He felt that he had been given a gift. A gift that he was to cherish, and share with the world.

He still had to take care of the Basics, though. He was actually looking forward to tonight. Tron had asked him if he could bring over Yori from the 511 system, without a purpose, to live like an Iso. So they could be together. It facinated him that these programs actually had emotions, feelings, attractions to each other.

It had been too long since he had visited the 511 server. He had been spending every spare moment of time building the TRON system. But all that would change tonight.

"...and most of our terminals are down now, and will be until about 11 AM, when the formatting is complete. After that-"
Flynn suddenly sat up straighter in his chair. "Wait, formatting? Which servers? Cmon, man, I don't have all day!"
The secretary was a little surprised. "Y-yes sir. Formatting, to install the Flynn OS. We're formatting 509, 510, and 511 today."

Flynn didn't wait to hear anymore. He could only imagine what formatting looked like on the inside to a program. Everything progressively being wiped clean... He jumped up, knocking his chair to the ground, and rushed toward the door, bumping his leg on his desk as he went. He limp-ran for a little bit at first because of it, but soon he was running at full tilt. He ran through the halls of ENCOM, racing, trying, hoping against hope that he wasn't too late. "NO! NO! STOP THE FORMAT! STOP THE FORMAT!"

It was bad enough that ANYTHING was being formatted. Flynn knew it had to happen, but he tried to be aware of when it did, and copy everything over onto another hard drive the night before. He couldn't bear the thought of all those lives being simply terminated, with no explanation, and no future plans. But this caught him by surprise.

He burst into the server room, where a group of technicians were huddled around one of the servers. The 511. "NOOOOOO!" He raced over and jerked the cord out of the wall. The server went dead. He stood straight, and ran a hand through his hair. "How far was that format?"

Stunned silence met his quiery. He banged the bottom of his fist against the server. "CMON man, how far was the format!?!"

"We were at 98%."

Flynn slumped against the server. 98%. Ninety-eight percent. All those programs, all of that beautiful world, destroyed, with only two percent left. He was too late to save that world. He had to fight tears from welling up in his eyes.

But, maybe... maybe, beyond all hope, in that two percent left...

He brightened up for a moment. He stood back up, and in his haphazard fashion, pulled the hard drive from the server, and began to walk away. The tech tried to stop him. "Mr. Flynn! We need that, we still have to install the new OS!"

"Use a new hard drive. And tell Marsha to cancel the rest of my schedule. I'm taking the rest of the day off."

He jumped on his Ducati and drove off. Ignoring every rule of the road, he was blessed to not get pulled over. The big neon "FLYNN'S" sign hadn't been turned on yet. School wasn't out yet, and the place really got hopping in the evenings, so Kevin figured he'd have plenty of time.

He pulled the TRON machine over, opening the secret door he had built behind it. It closed behind him automatically, just like he had set it up to do.

In just a few moments, he had the hard drive from the 511 hooked up, and was accessing it. Or, well, what was left of it.

He didn't really need much time at all.

There was only one encrypted folder left on the hard drive. Kevin tried every encryption cracking trick he knew, but there was no accessing that folder. It was cut off from any technology available to them. The rest of the hard drive was even corrupted, Flynn couldn't install anythng onto it. He couldn't use the laser system to get onto the other side of the screen, to see what it looked like from the inside.

He slumped in his chair. He couldn't beleive what had just happened. It took a few minutes for it to sink in. When it did, he cried. A whole world, SEVERAL worlds, gone, in an instant. And not just any worlds, worlds that housed his friends. Dumont. Yori. He would never see them ever again.

He sat and just cried in the basement of the Arcade for a while. How would he tell Tron? How would he explain his red eyes to Jordan?
He spent the night in the Arcade, and phoned home to let Jordan know that he was going to be working late.

The Grid was a place of endless, fantastic wonder. A place he was making into the perfect system. But tonight, he would have to bring sorrow.


{{OOC: Don't own that pic. It comes from http://sternwise.deviantart.com/art/YORI-ICON-270853154 .

Also, more is coming. My friend Astraica is helping me with this.}}