TRON: ASCENSION

CHAPTER 5 - BACK TO BEGINNING

USER WORLD (EARTH)

NEXT DAWN

Shining Laguna Pearl Fisker, whose routine is to rev up daily for ENCOM Tower in a whiff, drop Sam at the main entrance and settle in its suite, now waits for the Garage shutter to rail up. Navy Blue Kiton, competing with its cousins Boglioli and Caruso to suit up the youngest and most handsome CEO, lay hanging on the sleek shelves of the milky-white cupboard inside the Clothing Room. Gunmetal Breguet, which made looking at time sexier than ever, is now wasting its shine inside a transparent Watch Box inside a random drawer. The only being happier to reunite with its old pal is the Ducati Biposto, which never imagined that it would be washed and unleashed on the roads for another ride. One month is 30 days for humans, but 300 days for such beasts that race for glory on the streets.

Reeling back to his madcap days of nitro speeds and near-bust escapades, Sam ignites the Ducati to top gear and revs up into the city. Initially, he thought of just minding his work and no distractions, but his partner-in-crime never fails to round up the usual nook and corner of the streets for another crazy adventure. A strong sense of nostalgia made Biposto and Sam wish badly to remain in Sam's adventurous phase forever. Pushing those sudden rush of feelings aside with a heavy heart, Sam finally rode to Flynn's Arcade. Strolling through all the video game parlors and Kevin's lounge, Sam smiled to himself and thought he was a pet peeve to his dad and the Arcade that they called him back. Memories of his dad and the Arcade influenced him yet again that he silently resolved to make the Arcade the gaming rage it was; after he deals with the matter at hand.

Slipping the coin inside the TRON ARCADE Machine, Sam walks inside the trail of steps the machine opens to. At the end of the metallic sounds of the spiraling staircase is a rusty old metal door with no lock of sorts but opening with a heavy monstrous sound. Sam wondered what a relic the bunker has become within a month. Entering inside, he turned on the computer to the blinking underscore it was before. Before entering into the Grid Program, he made sure to turn off the holographic projector to avoid his previous episode, as he could only fix the problem from the outside rather than the inside. Logging into the program, the system requested a backup device to proceed with the source code. After ransacking the room for a few minutes and trying alternate authentication methods, the gateway key around Sam's neck remembered its purpose and he inserted the USB-sized key into the computer's secret port, making him wonder about the level of hindsight his dad had in the 80s. As the system loads into the Grid Program slowly, a genius but seemingly impossible idea strikes him.

"Kevin got derezzed into the Grid along with C.L.U, even though he's a User. Users leak blood even inside the Grid, the same as I did back in Disc Wars and the same applies to him. I just need to find his blood trails inside the code to find him. The creator may bleed but not die so easily. I lost him twice, let's not make it a hattrick." Putting his plan into action, Sam looks at the loaded code of the Grid and says: "Where are you, old man?"

THE GRID-THREE TRONCYCLES LATER

FLYNN'S HIDEOUT

Although the Sea gave Flynn a second life, it forgot to give him the superpowers of eliminating hunger and thirst. Three TronCycles of walking barefoot in the Outlands costs only time for an ordinary ISO or a Basic, but it sure drains the life out of Users. All his powers and invulnerability got eliminated along with his other half, the Sea could give him only life source to survive in the Grid, removing the digital code of Flynn and making him an ordinary User. Blood oozed from his legs as digital shrapnel pierced his feet and hilly terrains pushed him back harder for each attempt. It was then that only the willpower and survival instinct of User Body pushed him forward as all his Zen-like abilities left him. For the first time in his Grid Life, Flynn felt how weak humans are inside the Digital Code without dedicated programming. Although tiny sources of Digital Liquid Bodies could be found like flowers in the Outlands, they were incompatible with the User's inner biology and increased his thirst threefold. Hunger is non-existent in these servers, which made the Creator weak as hell.

After a never-ending, rocky, and arduous journey throughout the Outlands, Kevin finally crawled to the large bouldering entrance of his safe house. From the outside, the milky-white interiors and the glass covering of the house remain safe and sound, exactly the way Kevin left it before. After climbing to the biometric access of the gate as if trekking Mount Everest, his frail body managed to access the door after 2-3 attempts, the obstacle being that his hand changed into a skeleton-like structure due to the near-death journey.

Dragging his frail carcass of a body along the LED-lit white elevation, Flynn slept on the Square Block as it rose to the topmost level without any physical mechanism, resembling Aladdin's Magical Carpet. The lavishly-spaced lounge gets half-lit as Kevin limps out from the elevation into the room. One-half of the room is lit with milky white-colored furniture, shelves, cupboards, and a yoga mat whilst the other half is a rumble of ashes that used to complete the room. The purging of C.L.U was expected to demolish this hideout once and for all, but thanks to the power backup sources and architectural genius of Kevin, the structure managed to survive the apocalypse. Gobbling up all the fruits and drinking water from the remaining half table, Flynn slowly regained his human strength and sat on the chair. He then scoured through the whole structure and luckily the secret key and door remained untouched, designed to block any damage.

Descending into the darkest of the shallow depths, only lit with neonlights as Kevin descends each level, his body still shaking from the after-effectsof the long journey, the elevator stops at a level which when lit, unveils the largestsecret lair ever known in the Grid. As Flynn's steps fall into the lair one byone, his body regains bone strength step by step. Passing through the ThirdGeneration ENCOM Light Cycle, Light Tank, neon-blue Snow Carrier, FourthGeneration Light Runner with a surprise vehicle wrapped in greyish white cloth,Flynn reaches into his favorite Glass-studded Cubicle and turns on the computer.He then logs into the master code of his Grid Prototype. Scavenging through theGrid for signs of surviving programs and standing city structures, anotherauthentication request pops up in the top-right corner of the holographic display.The popup opens up, revealing the source of the request being from the UserWorld, the IP server address hosted by his '89 Macintosh. Mixed feelings of happiness,anxiety, doubt, and hope gush through his face as Kevin settles down, stoppingtears mid-way and whispering to himself: "Come on, kiddo. One last ride."