A/N: Kevin Flynn gets a surprise visit after the events of the 1982 film "Tron".


It's Complicated

"Thank you for coming down to the station, Mr. Flynn." The officer at the desk shook the hand of the man who had just identified himself as Kevin Flynn, CEO of the electronic data firm ENCOM. It took a little doing - a CEO usually didn't dress is blue jeans and a tweed corduroy jacket. "It might just be a wild goose chase since I don't understand a lot of what he's saying, but at least when he mentioned ENCOM we thought it best to give your people a call."

"It was a good idea; I've got a lot of nuts working for me at ENCOM, myself included. I think I might have an idea who he is, which explains what's going on. Has he caused any problems?"

"Nothing serious. Like I said, even though he speaks English he says things I don't understand. Is he one of yours? Is he...okay?"

"He's not crazy, but you might think of him something like...an exchange student intern. He's not from around here."

"Well, no one's actually filed a criminal complaint and we can't hold him for just being weird - he doesn't seem to be a threat to himself or others. We were probably just going to release him anyway, but I'd feel better if it was into someone's custody that could...you know...watch out for him."

"Thank you, Sergeant..." Flynn said as he looked at the badge "...Gaynor. I expect he'll be going back home soon after his work here is done."

"I'm glad to hear it. Give me a few minutes here while I arrange to have him brought out." Sergeant Gaynor picked up a phone and spoke briefly before hanging up. "He'll be brought up here in a bit. Have a seat, Mr. Flynn. I'll let you know when he's here."

"Thank you; I'll just take a nap or something." Flynn took a seat and contemplated his next move. Frankly, he didn't know what was going on. He had gotten word that something came through the dematerializer/rematerializer in the basement of ENCOM, where Dr. Walter Gibbs and Dr. Lora Baines worked with lasers to refine the process of digitizing real world objects and placing them into virtual reality. Flynn had learned of the process firsthand, when he was digitized and transferred from the real world to the digital realm of the ENCOM 511 mainframe computer system while trying to find information on his intellectual property rights stolen by ENCOM employee Ed Dillinger. He found that most users had a digital equivalent in that world; a world that was being taken over by a near-sentient program called the MCP that had designs on taking over control of the real world.

Flynn had joined forces with Tron, a digital avatar of fellow programmer Alan Bradley; Dr. Baines' avatar Yori, and Dr. Gibbs' avatar Dumont to break the control of the MCP and its number one representative, Sark - a digital copy of Dillinger. With the defeat of the MCP, Flynn had rematerialized with the threat of the computer gone and the information condemning Dillinger intact. The release of the truth had restored Flynn to ENCOM, and he was made the CEO.

Five months later, everything had been running well when the news of someone coming through had reached him. He had reviewed security footage, and saw the event from a distance as a figure emerged out of thin air and then ran off into the dark after taking stock of his surroundings. Flynn wasn't sure, but he thought he recognized the figure before it disappeared out of camera range.

A voice cleared its throat and Flynn brought his attention to the desk. "Mr. Flynn, I want you to take a look through that window to your right. Is that the man you think it is?" Sergeant Gaynor asked. Flynn got up and walked to the window to see two figures standing in the room beyond; one was a police officer, while the other was a man wearing jeans and an orange t-shirt. "He didn't have a shirt when we took him into custody."

"Yeah, that's the man," Flynn answered. "His name is Tron."

"First or last?"

"Only. They, ah, don't have two names where he came from."

"You mean like Cher or Liberace?"

"Something like that."

"Okay then, he's all yours." Gaynor walked over to an intercom and spoke through it. The figures in the other room approached the connecting door and Tron walked out. He looked around and looked at Flynn for a moment before recognizing him.

"Flynn!" he yelled as he ran over and embraced the man.

"Hey, Tron. I'm gonna take you back to ENCOM, okay?"

"Sure. Have I got a lot to tell YOU about! Wait - excuse me guard, can I have my disk back?" Tron asked the sergeant.

The sergeant ignored being addressed as a guard - he wasn't surprised by this Tron character now. "Disk? Oh yeah, I got it down here somewhere...here it is." Gaynor pulled out a plastic disk with alternating concentric rings on its surface and handed it to Tron. "Here ya go."

"Thanks - I wouldn't want to go back home without it."

"What, you some part of a league or something?" the sergeant asked, but the two were already making their way out of the room. "Why don't they play baseball like normal people?"

Inside Flynn's car, Tron sat in the passenger seat but held out his hands against the dashboard and firmly gripped the handle of the door. Flynn noticed. "What are you doing?"

"I don't want to get hurt if you make a sudden direction change."

"Here, use this," Flynn said as he reached over and grabbed the seatbelt, pulling it across Tron's chest and lap and clicking it in the receiver. "This will keep you in place."

"Thanks. The backseat of those tanks the guards transported me in didn't have these straps."

"Tanks? Or those aren't tanks, they're police cars."

"Pole lease cars? They never fired their lasers on top."

"Yeah, they...ah...well, those aren't lasers, they're just lights. The police use them to patrol and...well...I guess they're like tanks, sorta - it's complicated. What are you doing here?" Flynn asked as he started the car and drove off toward the ENCOM building. "I left you chilling in digital toon town."

"What?"

"In your world."

"My user ALAN1 said he was going to be away on something called a vacation for a time interval. Everything was going smoothly back in my world, so I thought I would go to vacation and see for myself."

"But how?"

"I thought about it for some time; I don't know how you came to visit us, but you left through the MCP so it must know how to do it. I asked Dumont if I could travel the I/O stream and he said he didn't know, so I had Yori set me up with her stream and I stepped into it and came out in this world."

"Just like that."

"Well, the instructions are probably stored in my disk," Tron said as he patted the device. "I'm not a user, so I don't know how it's done."

"You'll have to ask Lora or Walter that one."

"Other users?"

"Yes. In this world, Lora is Yori's user and Walter is Dumont's user. Their project is the one that can put objects from here into your world, and it looks like it goes the other way too. Thank goodness," Flynn said, patting his chest.

Tron looked out the window at all the traffic moving along the streets, and the pedestrians walking or standing beside the pavement. "All of these people are users?"

"Nah, most of them aren't - they haven't got a clue how programs work. Here, a user is someone who operates a computer - sometimes we tell the computer what to do, other times it tells us what to do. Most people don't use them yet, but I think one day most of them will."

"Who operates them?"

"Nobody. Every person you see is autonomous."

Tron turned to look at Flynn, astonished. "Everyone?"

"That's right. We're taught a few things when we're young and then we're on our own to make our own mistakes. Hopefully not too many. It's complicated."

Tron shook his head. "Amazing. I had no idea. I thought you were kidding when you told us that."

"It may not seem like we're imperfect" As they drove past an accident, Flynn pointed it out to Tron. "Our logic circuits make mistakes too."

"There's no order. You don't have a grid that everything sits on."

"No grid. The streets are kind of a grid. And our buildings are kinda square. But we're free to go wherever we want unless there's a wall there, or it's private property, or restricted, or it's off hours, or...well, it's complicated. We have external rules we have to obey too."

"What's private property?"

"It's something you own, that's all yours and yours alone. Like, ah..." Flynn stumbled to explain. There really wasn't any private property for the digital people he had met. "It's like your data disk - it's just yours, right?"

"Right."

"Well, we have a lot more than that, but we can have things that are only ours. Unless we decide to share."

"Like the moped."

"What moped?"

"I was watching a user...a person...riding what they called a moped. It looked kind of fun, not as fast as a lightcycle but it was open and I asked to try it. I wanted to see how well it worked so I tried a right turn and crashed when I fell down. The bike didn't turn with me like I thought it would. I messed up my covering, and it partially came off." Tron pulled his t-shirt for emphasis. I guess you cover yourselves with multiple layers of something for protection when you bump into things or fall."

"Everyone wears them - they're called clothes. And they protect you from the weather too, so you don't get too hot or cold."

"Is weather what comes from the sky? Liquid fell from the sky for a short time and the atmosphere moved past me quickly."

"Sorta. That was probably a rain shower and wind." There was no weather in the digital world; they had a layer of something that might be considered rectangular clouds, but that was it. "Weather is really complicated - even experts here can't predict it very well. As for your accident, the transportation doesn't work that way here. Vehicles and bikes have momentum like people do; it's called inertia."

"Let me guess - it's complicated."

"I'm not an expert, but it can be."

"I know that...now." Tron gripped his safety belt a little tighter. He groaned a little.

"What's the matter?"

"I don't know. I'm not operating at my normal efficiency. Is there a power source nearby?"

"Power source? We don't have that here. When was the last time you ate?"

"What is ate?"

"Ate. Eat. Consume. Drink."

"I have not ate. The guards offered me something at the detention center but I didn't know what to do with it. I have been going nonstop since I came here, so I did not ate."

"You probably haven't slept either."

"What is slept?"

"It's what we do when we're tired, when we're...not operating efficiently. We have to have periods of rest, when we close our eyes and our body restores itself; particularly after a big meal or too many beers. Or a dull movie. Or listening to a boring person like a politician. It's complicated."

"Is that why my eyes have attempted to close involuntarily?"

"I wouldn't be surprised. Here we are," Flynn said as they swung into an underground parking garage. Flynn drove to his private spot and parked before getting out. He came around to the other side of the car and Tron looked at him through the window as he tried pulling on the seat belt. Flynn ended up going back to the driver side and pushing the release button, allowing Tron to open the door and get out. "I've got a fridge in my office; I'll get you something to eat." He led Tron to the elevator and punched in the code to enter and be taken to the executive suite that was his office. Exiting the elevator, the lights automatically came on in the office when they entered.

Flynn walked over to a small kitchen area and rummaged through a refrigerator. He took a whiff of a sandwich and threw it away, tried another and gave half to Tron. "Here, take this."

"This is ate?"

"This is food. Our bodies use it for energy. Like this..." he said as he took his half and took a bite, deliberately chewing it before swallowing. "Take a small bite and chew it before swallowing." Tron did as he was told, and was surprised with the experience.

"Food tastes good," he professed.

"You need something to wash it down," Flynn observed, and went back to the fridge. He checked the door for drinks. "Better skip the beer," he muttered as he bypassed a few bottles. He found an apple juice and took it for Tron, handing it to him. "Drink it like that energy source, but slowly."

Tron tried some of the juice. "This is good food, too."

"Yeah, it's not bad for beginners, and it won't give you a hangover. So, sit down and tell me what else you discovered about our world. Your world was strange to me, so I bet ours must be really weird to you."

Tron sat in a chair. "I don't know where to begin. When I first got here there was a lot of darkness, but later on everything got really bright."

"We have natural light cycles."

"Lightcycles?"

"No...I mean, natural periods of light and dark. Most people rest when it is dark."

"That's probably a good idea. People don't glow here like they do in my world. It would be easy to collide with others."

"It's not so bad if you collide with the right person." When Tron looked him questionably he added "It's complicated. What else?"

"There's something else that's kind of hard to describe. I don't know how to say it right, but in my world...oh..." Tron said, growing frustrated. "It's just...in my world, we move like this..." he said as he moved his hand in jerky motion. "Not that bad, but I exaggerate. Now in this world, you move like this..." he said, repeating the process but moving his hand smoothly. "Why is that?"

"It's how you see things. In our world, we call it frame-rate. When you move, you move from one position to the next like it's on a tiny, invisible grid; that jerky motion you see is moving from one position to the next. In our world, our grid is so tiny that it looks like there is no jumping. It's still there, but just too small for your eye to see."

"Do people derez here?" Tron asked suddenly.

"Not like you think. Why do you ask?"

"I was observing some people playing disk in an area where some green material covered the ground. One of the people failed to catch the disk thrown at him and it hit him in the head. He didn't derez, but just laughed and picked it up before throwing it back."

"I think what you saw was a game called Frisbee. They just throw and catch the disk for fun in places called parks. The green material is a living thing to walk on called grass; it's softer than the other surfaces."

"It would have been good to be on this grass when I fell, then. I experienced input that was disorienting when I fell, and my elbow continued to have random sensory signals for a while after that." Tron held up his arm and Flynn could see where the elbow was scraped up a little.

"That's pain. It's a feedback that our bodies give us when they have been damaged. We try not to do that too often, but sometimes it happens. You don't do our equivalent to derez until you have too much pain, although sometimes you derez when you sleep. It's complicated."

"I do not think I like this place called vacation," Tron surmised. "I have experienced pain, I am required to rest for regular intervals, and I have to ate to keep my body energized. When I was outside there was something called weather that made me uncomfortable, and there are so many colors of body coverings that nobody looks the same. People do random things and everything is autonomous. You never know when you will be derez'd. I enjoyed the food things, but I do not see much that I think I would enjoy." Tron yawned and then wondered what his body had just done.

"Flynn, did you get the..." a voice spoke as a woman walked into the room before stopping when she saw the visitor.

Tron turned and jumped up when he saw her. "Yori?" he asked.

"Alan, I thought you were on vacation."

"Lora, this is Tron. He's the one that came through the rematerializer portal. He's Alan's avatar in the digital world. Tron, Lora is Yori's user."

Lora took off her glasses and looked at Tron. To his credit, Tron didn't immediately go crazy. Here was a visage of the program he really liked, but while the face was familiar her surface was covered with the clothing things and her head was topped with a great amount of hair and no helmet. Even when she put the small windows back in front of her eyes she looked beautiful, and although the clothing hid her form somewhat the effect was even more...stirring.

"Hello Tron. I've never met a program before," she said, a little wary.

"Neither have I. I...I...mean, yes I'm a program. We're all programs. Back home I mean, not here. You're people but not everyone is a user and everybody is autonomous but that's usually okay as long as they ate and slept at regular intervals and wear clothes in the weather and..." Tron said before cutting himself off, realizing he was starting to babble.

"You'll have to excuse him, he's a little overwhelmed being in our world. It's a lot different than what he's used to," Flynn explained.

"I can imagine," Lora said.

"He's going to have some other trouble too if we don't get him back to his world soon. He hasn't slept, and at some point that food is going to work its way through him and I'm sure he has no idea...what's...coming..." Flynn said, laughing. "Think you can run him through the dematerializer?"

"Sure. Come on Tron, let's send you back home."

"Thank you, Lora. I would like that."

"I'll tag along," Flynn said as he stood up to join them in the laser room. "It'll be your last chance for any questions, Tron."

Together, the three walked and rode the elevator down to the basement level where the laser matrix was built. "...so, every program in my world has a user in this world," Tron said to paraphrase his understanding of how things were "but not every person in your world is a user."

"That's right," Flynn agreed. "Sometimes a single user can write several programs. I'm just guessing, but some of the programs you meet must have the same user."

"It could be; I am meeting new programs all the time. But I have never met a program as short as those people in the grass playing disk," Tron said as he sat in the chair awaiting the laser to warm up.

Lora punched a few buttons and watched a graph on a monitor. "Short people?"

"He probably means kids," Flynn guessed. "He saw some kids playing Frisbee."

"What are kids? Short people?" Tron asked.

"They're young people. Oh, I forgot, there were no kids in your world. Here, when people start out new, they are kids and they grow into adult people."

"How do kids start?" he asked, looking at Flynn and Lora. When he looked at Lora he got a funny feeling he never felt before. He had to will himself from staring at her.

"That, my friend, is the most complicated processes of all. Maybe Alan can explain it to you - but I doubt it!" Flynn laughed. Lora nodded and he added "Tell Yori 'Hi' for me."

"I will do that, Flynn. Goodbye, Lora."

Lora pushed 'ENTER' and Tron was immediately locked and scanned by the laser before he was dematerialized, leaving an empty chair behind.

...

Back in the digital world, Yori waited by the I/O base until she saw a figure descending through the data stream and alight on the pedestal. She ran to the figure. "Tron!"

He stepped off the platform and swept her into his arms. "It's good to be back home."

"What was it like?"

"Let me energize and I'll tell you all about it. But trust me, never go to vacation. Ever."

The End


A/N: Of course when this movie came out, relatively few people had computers and only somewhat more worked with them on a regular basis. On rewatching, it might be a little dated but the concept itself is still interesting. Of course the word 'avatar' or 'doppelganger' was not used in the film, but at the time it really did look amazing.