Chapter Text
Sam, and... Quorra had told him everything.
...
Without Lora, with Roy and all of his friends busy or too far away, Alan didn't know who to turn to for advice. Somehow, he ended up having a drink in Gibbs chalet.
He didn't expect the professor to be so receptive to his sudden attachment to programs and his project of making most of them portable.
He needed support. He went asking for help with a...mysterious driver project, hoped to get general advice. What he got, through, was much more than all that he had imagined.
The hope of seeing Tron. Kevin and perhaps other programs, once again.
The hope that Sam would get a father back was too huge to be shared. He didn't want to set the young man up disappointment. Yet he had trouble with believing it.
Faith was not a concept that he was accustomed to acknowledge. It has always been there, somehow. The need to hope, the pleasure of dreaming, the desire of company, of something else, both familiar and new had animated his will to code ever since he had learnt how.
But Tron?
As a concept, he was something that Alan couldn't fully grasp. As a program, he was a wonder whose results Alan didn't feel right to appropriate to his own merits. As a... as an ISO, in his current life, Tron was almost hope incarnate.
Perhaps someone that could fill the void that his wife had left. Perhaps someone who could become a son. He did not know.
The only thing he was sure of was that he would look for him until he had no hope left of finding him. A part of him wanted to update, compile and install another copy, but no matter how much he wanted to meet the program, he couldn't bring himself to do it. Even if he didn't find him, if the Grid someday ended up corrupted, it felt like he ought to at least mourn the version who had been hacked twice first. But that, too, felt impossible.
Something in him couldn't stop hoping with a surprising fierceness.
He had read everything Kevin has written about Sparks and ISOs, but when he fully understood what they were, what had been occurring spontaneously on that Grid, built for the laser, what this miracle had done for programs and users both, it was too much; to wonderful, to precious.
Alan locked the doors and cried.
When the world seemed stable again under his feet and his sight was clear enough to type, the first thing he did was to look for the virus in hope of stopping it. By any mean.
It took days to trace it but they didn't find it active. It had been terminated brusquely, and traces of a basic program were found in its remains.
Unfortunately, they didn't know how the Grid operated in the Sea, and so, they had no idea yet of how to try to revert the damage that it had done.
He could only wait and hope... and Alan held onto his hope with a death's grip, because when he had seen the scrambled code leftovers of the program who had terminated while fighting the virus, he felt his heart skip a beat.
The implications of the process that had occurred in the Sea became more solid in his mind, he took decisions, put up a plan and set up his own designs.
First, he went to retrieve a backup and bring over old logs from Encom, hoping that they would work as he imagined them to.
Against all logical hope, Alan searched for him in all of the system for months, and along the walk, had learnt many useful tricks and learnt many more skills than he thought possible at his age. (Grids were truly wonderful worlds.)
But he didn't allow himself to think of it. The ability to travel to them, their physical rules, the programs' sentience, and the laser was too much. He only had energy for one task well done and he had chosen long ago.
As secondary administrator, he asked for permission only formally, and seized an indexer, an isomorph program, in enthralling. The manual use of a program from Gird level allowed for much faster communication and time worked against him. Directly inside the indexer's memory, Alan quickly found the hexadecimal address he needed.
After a broadcast of gratefulness and a refill of energy for the indexer, Alan beamed himself away, to the coresponding sector.
As soon as he arrived, Alan felt an otherworldly pull, and a new sensation of pain.
It was a desert sector of the Grid.
Instead of aiming for the nearest settlement, using the system's natural compass, weirly, the silhouette walked toward the Portal managed by Lora's laser...
He stopped a few yards away from it, wrote and sent a hand-made search command, and, once the system's standard center had routed it and pinged him back, Alan prompted his glasses to zoom in. A program that was found on the deser shore. Isomorph. As he had thought.
From his stance, his movements, the one he sought looked completely exhausted.
Wounds and traces of fighting were all over this program's lean body, and he walked as if without aim. When he lifted his gaze to watch Alan from afar, he almost stumbled on his steps, and touched one of his tights, as if holding a wound.
Alan gasped as a dash of ghost pain reached him. The program stopped and turned right toward him. Alan could tell that he was wounded somehow.
Despite of the distance that separated them, he felt his heart go still in his chest...
Working on his breath, he beamed himself a couple of dozen meters away before taking a slow step forth. The pull he felt on his mind strengthened, press him onward.
The program stopped walking at first, when Alan appeared before him. His body of dimmed white patterns shook, and the Isomorph took some more steps, more frantic.
Alan forced himself to stop, leaving a few meters to the program's discretion.
From the other side, in his analogic world, through system logs and dumps, the Grid's archived data; ...he had relieved thousands of cycles of Tron's memories, even when his program had gone by another name, stuck in his fighting functions.
There was no need not to start the suffering program.
Now, if his understanding of Kevin's Grid was not completely off, the program before him was a whole new compiled version that had no memories of anything, and was probably ready to panic because he might as well have woken up alone, without a user, after having fought a virus strong enough to bug the Sea itself.
(Alan tried not to think about how his reasons to maim CLU seemed to pill up.)
"Hello," he cast with as much peace and love as he had gathered for this precise moment.
"[Hel-lo]?" the program repeated tentatively.
And as if on impulse, he took another step forth.
"[Why do I feel a pull coming from you]?"
Before the program could ask him about his identity, Alan slowly gestured to his tight.
"Are you in pain?"
The wound was nothing he couldn't solve with a quick energizing and restoration routing, but Alan didn't want to spill too much information on the program while he was obviously confused and vulnerable; he seemed to have fought while he was too freshly compiled to make complete sense of the system, of reflection, or even of his database. (Alan felt infinitely grateful for his timing; to have found him first. )
"[I...feel like there is a dysfunction with my tight]," the program stated as if surprised by his own ability to communicate.
*
The program corked his head with intrigue. "[Is that [p]a]i]n]?"
The other being's smile grew with a fondness almost all encompassing.
That being, before whom he was, was not like him. The program was supposed to know what that being was...every part of his code felt something familiar in him...; and yet, he couldn't quite put a precise name on it because contradictory information came up to him about the situation.
Because Users were of the invisible, they waited at IO Towers —Users walked among them, they wanted to be seen and to help.
"Well... When it's extremely uncomfortable, yes." A silence filled up around of them. "Do you want help with it?"
Stuck with aw, he could only murmur "[How]?"
"I can mend you quickly," the other offered.
"[How]?"
The other, the maybe-user chuckled: "With tools and knowledge."
He might have wondered if the other was a medic in other circustances, but there was not much room for doubt in his processes when he asked if the being was a user.
Still, silence passed over him, the Sea churning foam, and roaring, deafening in the distance.
"I am. I...have been waiting for you for three cycles, now," the other answered, and Ah.
Yes. He knew about Users! His logs told him that he had one himself.
It was a knowledge both imprinted in the oldest parts of his code and it immediately echoed in his Spark... What's a Spark? Does he still have a User?
"[Who am I]?" He asked with growing distress, not completely understanding what the user meant by that.
The user hesitated, drew a breath, and held his pointers. "That is for you to decide." He extended out a hand.
Soothing energy radiated from the user—no, his mind supplied, correcting him: this one was a User; a Creator. He could feel it in his pointers.
He felt exhausted, his main process overloaded with empty questions.
Carefully, he rose his hand.