TRON: ASCENSION

CHAPTER 12 - FORTUNE FAVORS THE BRAVE

THE GRID - FIRST TRONCYCLE

ANONYMOUS DARK CELL

White Blood Cells hovered around Sam's naked eyes as he adjusted his vision to the blurry and dizzy realization of their captivity. By the time he stopped seeing the cells for real, Quorra remained unconscious, tied behind his back. Although both of them are divided by these spiked balls on either side, they are bound by the chain link of the very same balls. The only visible thing in the dingy, dark room is the neon-lined ribbons emanating from their physical forms, and even that is of no use as no valuable detail or object of use is exposed in the vicinity. Increasing the vicinity though is a challenge altogether, as even one man cannot drag the combined mass of the balls and Quorra all by themselves. At present, he has only two options: - Wake up Quorra and break the chains or leave their future uncertain in the hands of a madman.

It is an obvious choice to whom Sam entrusts his future and attempted his best at waking her up. After wasting his physical energy waking her up, an unusual memory strikes him uninvited. He then ejects Quorra's Disc and opens the code segment. Tweaking a few syntaxes and modules inside the program, being the hacker he is, Sam woke up Quorra in no time and cursed himself for being such a naïve and ignorant douche at handling such a situation. Nevertheless, he took no time in bringing her back to her senses and emphasized to her the need for teamwork and improvisation in this dire situation, although the latter is more of a matter of training Machine Learning Models using a custom database, only this time those ML Models are ISOs. Quorra, being the battle angel she is, could sweep the rug under her enemies with a simple Light Sword, but is still a stranger to long-range combat; the culprit being her protective nature: whether it be her close ones or her very own Identity Disc. Sam could only guide her so much, but ultimately it is in her hands to turn it into her strength and not a fatal weakness.

Hearing the strange footsteps arriving towards them from a long distance, Sam instructs Quorra to be alert and follow the plan accordingly. Lighting up the room, their mysterious captor arrives in the same shabby and deformed face during the capture, much to their shock and horror. Sam is still a newbie, but Quorra being the more experienced one, had never seen such a monster ever in the Grid. Both of them owed the reason for this to the changing Grid Structure as they had discussed several times, but they chose to know the truth and stayed silent. This hunter had no distinctive facial features and started shouting gibberish upon seeing them alive, like a lunatic. Although he couldn't talk like a normal being, he compensated for that with his sharp and cunning nature, carving a niche for himself in the city of double-crossing pawnbrokers, violent street thugs, and tyrannical authoritative classes. He then fell down to the floor and crawled vividly toward the captive duo, like a rabid dog chasing people out of nowhere in the streets. His disordered fingers, although covered up in the same black cloth as his outer dressing, started touching their faces inappropriately, as if he was registering the sensual touch of a healthy, young Programs or whatever identity he didn't care of, delighting himself of how tasty these beings would be for real. Sam could tolerate himself being subject to such weird gestures to some extent, but seeing Quorra face the same tested his limits of patience up to eleven. But he chose not to express it and wait for the right time to strike gold. He instead, shifted his focus to his captured cell, which housed all types of tools and sharp objects, professional and hand-made ones. They seemed more like stolen objects rather than owned assets, implying this lunatic is more of a scavenger rather than a civilized Basic, even in the most basic sense.

Just when he was about to bring his face closer to theirs, he gets thrown back with a strong base voice vibrating his shirt pockets, possibly from the authoritative class personnel. As the device falls down in the mid-action, the lunatic searches frantically for the audio-visual gadget amid the agitated voice emanating from the person behind. Finally, when the madman picks up the device after a few shenanigans, he nods in agreement with a grumbled smile, as if he's acknowledged what the other person said. Seeing his smile, pat comes the reply: "I asked you to show their faces, not your awful smile, you dick". When the maniac turns the audio-visual feed toward the captives, the anonymous host seems to be in shock seeing their faces and especially their body ribbons, saying: "These Programs are not blue, they're white! ISOs? But they're a myth, it's not true! Only the sentries can make any sense of this". He then commands the maniac to show his face and commands him: "Listen, nutcase! Once I have them alive at Purgos, you'll spend the rest of your life devouring each and every delicious voxel of Programs. Till then, don't you even dare to lick my guests for fun, you hideous fuck!", shutting the call. As the call ends, the maniac roams in an excited frenzy around the room, jumping into mad laughter at his luck.