Tron 2.28 – Biphase

Flynn could feel the van he had been bundled into moving from side to side, but he could see little. He could tell the van was well lit because of the small amount of light that came through the tiny holes in the fiber of the hood that had been placed over his head, but it wasn’t possible to see anyone through it.

Flynn was still worried about Alan after he had been rendered unconscious back in the Encom parking area. He hadn’t heard a sound from him since they had been loaded into the vans and driven away.

Even if he could see what was happening, or what had happened to his friend of so many years, he wouldn’t have been able to check if he was alright, because his arms were cable tied behind his back and he was harnessed to the side of the van.

“Is anyone there?” called Flynn to the van.

“Flynn?” came Alison’s frightened voice. She sounded truly terrified.

“Yeah, who else caught a ride on this bus with us?” Flynn asked.

There was no response, then Alison spoke. “The van left just after I got in,” she said, then another voice surprised them both.

“No Talking,” it warned.

“Flynn?” came Alison’s terrified voice once more, sounding even more terrified than before.

“Better do as he says,” said Flynn, then went quiet, not sure if the guy was about to hit him or do something else.

A slow, keening sound filled the van as Alison began to cry.

It was after Eleven Thirty when Manny started to clean up the arcade. Flynn’s had stayed open this night until midnight for the last twenty years and the patron were used to spending the evening here.

In the long past, the night had been rowdy, even dangerous and certainly not the kind of place for a young boy.

But old arcades were ancient history now and people came for the atmosphere after the late movie, sipped their coffee in the coffee shop next door and then just played the old classics.

It was the possibly even the late night once a week that kept this place profitable, though Flynn had long since made his millions as a director of Encom and would have run this place as a hobby even if the anachronistic community moved on and the rates made it unprofitable.

Manny moved behind the coin counter and checked the PC that now monitored the status of each game – he could add free credits or reboot an old chassis from this one location if he needed to - to see if any of the machines needed last-hour attention.

Blinking in the middle of the screen was a brief coded message that appeared as Manny typed in his login.

Highlighting the message, pulling up a webpage and ROT13’ing the obfuscated text, the message dropped into the decode section of the website he had just googled to find a suitable ROT13 decoder.

If you haven’t heard from us telling you everything is alright, then something’s gone wrong and we might be in serious trouble with the police. Go to the safe, 13l, 42r, 18l and remove the envelope. Put it in your bag. Leave. Don’t lock up. The doors will close themselves at Midnight. Head to the train station, through to the other side of the highway, then get in a taxi. Once in the taxi, open the envelope – it has instructions.Do not follow them until you’re in the taxi. Flynn and Alan.

Manny didn’t follow the instructions at first. The very first thing he did was look in the crontab of Flynn’s linux server that looked after the network and controlled the interfaces in the arcade.

Set against the time on a daily schedule – obviously Flynn had been lazy – was a newly added line.

30 23 * * * root /root/message.sh

Further down was another one.

55 23 * * * root /root/eraseall.sh

Manny checked the scripts. The first displayed the message, piped plain from a file through a ROT13 encoder then piped it to the website for the next refresh. Then it used a secure delete program, although the script was still there.

The second script was a watchdog script – designed to erase everything if Flynn didn’t edit the crontab or otherwise ask Manny to do it.

That worried Manny, so he went to the safe and followed the instructions. There was a large brown, unsealed envelope in the safe and Flynn had left Manny’s backpack near the safe, and a clean, plain T-Shirt and Jacket were next to it, along with a vacuum sealed change of clothes.

Manny took the envelope, put it in his bag, removed his Flynn’s T-shirt and changed. Then he swung the bag over his shoulder, walked through the arcade slowly, looking at the games machines as if interested, then followed a group of older people out of the arcade.

He had just crossed the road with them when he first noticed the sound of sirens and watched as several police came over the hill at the end of the street and drove up at speed before coming to a stop just in front of Flynns.

Several uniformed officers got out of the car and most entered the building, while one waited out the front, asking anyone who left to move to the side and wait for instructions.

Manny watched for a moment, surrounded by many other onlookers, then walked away to catch the Taxi Flynn had recommended, except now he was completely terrified of what was going on, and of what had happened to his father and sisters.

Jet found a clearing just beyond the gaping hole the packet transport had punched into the side of the terminal. Looking further around the structure, he found an area from which several ramps rose to the upper level, although there were no holes that led into the structure, as Mercury had said.

Briefly, Jet wondered just how Mercury had come to know this, although she had known about the other entrance through the roof in Sector 2, so he guessed she had spent quite some time looking for alternate ways in and out of the terminals without alerting the Kernel to her transit.

Reaching the top, Jet noticed how far he could see into the demolished sector. Although the terminal wasn’t that high, around a hundred feet or so relative to what it would be in his world, it still offered an exceptional view of a large area of Sector 1 and a better idea of the damage that had been done during the fighting.

While other sectors had stunned Jet with their beauty – this one surprised him with its devastation.

Large sections of the sector were simply laid to waste with ruins and rubble from flattened structures while in other places there were areas that were almost completely bare, with whatever had been located there now missing, as if some giant had come along and taken them.

The destruction wasn’t absolute – parts of the sector looked as Jet would have expected them to, but these areas weren’t as common as the sectors that had been devastated.

Jet stood there on top of the terminal for a moment taking it in, holding Ma3a over his shoulders, then turned his attention to the Hub Terminus, which is where he had to take Ma3a to, to get her in the scanner.

Ma3a’s frame weighed heavily on Jet’s shoulders, slowing him down, but for the most of it, the path was relatively easy to walk, laid atop the ridge that covered what appeared to be a wall between the two terminals.

Jet wasn’t sure what passed through this wall, or what it held back, and couldn’t guess it’s function by applying his knowledge of real-world computing, but he expected he might understand it if he knew more about the EN511 architecture.

Jet hadn’t even known there were legacy connections between the first three sectors, but then the actual functionality of them could be virtual or physical in the real world. If virtual, then there might in reality be far more than just three sectors interconnected, but even virtual concepts held power in this world.

Moving towards the Terminus, Jet scaled the occasional ledges and dips without too much difficulty as he made his way, but for the most of it, the path was negotiable.

At times, as he looked down into the areas beneath the wall, Jet could see the ICPs and the shell as the rest of the group moved along. At times they seemed to acknowledge the sighting of him also – at least they looked in his direction once in a while and occasionally held up a hand.

But for the most of it, they had the harder path to follow, their own path being obstructed by debris and shattered pathways that frequently forced them to find another path, so although they were making a faster pace than Jet, their effective progress seemed to take them forward at about the same pace as Jet was making.

Jet spoke at times to Ma3a, although in practicality he was speaking to himself as she never acknowledged anything he said. Her weight also seemed to be increasing as they walked, or perhaps it was just in Jet’s mind as he tired from the effort. It was all, of course, in his mind, however he had noticed now that his body in this world seemed to have its own needs, which seemed just as real in this world as his needs in his own world did.

Jet was around halfway to the Terminus when he realized the wall ahead was damaged – far too much to climb down or get around. As he approached it, there was a section of wall that looked to be missing at the top, leaving a vertical slice missing with a gap of around thirty feet – more than Jet could jump even in this world.

Jet looked down the gap then stepped back. He would have to find another way. Walking back towards the terminal some way, there was a structure that came close to the wall, it’s top surface around ten feet away and five feet lower than the ridge he was on.

It seemed too far.

The gap might be jumpable by himself but with Ma3a, Jet wasn’t certain he could clear it. Unfortunately, Jet wasn’t sure Ma3a would last much longer either – he had no way to know how badly she was damaged, but she wasn’t responding now and he assumed that meant that he didn’t have time to find another way down.

The only choice, the logical choice, was to leave his friend behind, but it simply wasn’t something Jet could think of doing.

He twisted his head to look at Ma3a’s face – it was starting to dim so much now that the features were no longer distinct across the wireframe.

“Do you think we can make it?” Jet asked the unconscious Ma3a.

There was no response.

“Yeah? You think we can?” Jet answered for her, bouncing her body slightly on his shoulders as he repositioned her.

“Well, as long as you’re certain,” said Jet, then walked to the far side of the ridge, lined up and then ran.

Leaping from the side, Jet took as much distance as he could, knowing that there was little he could do to make the other side with any height in reserve. Ma3a was heavy and Jet felt himself falling more quickly than he had anticipated as the roof edge came up, but somehow Jet got a toe onto the edge of the structure and bent to deliver Ma3a to the roof, levering himself around that point.

Ma3a rolled like a ragdoll as she hit the roof, coming to a quick stop barely in front of Jet’s foot, but Jet wasn’t so fortunate. As he dropped Ma3a to the roof, he fell backwards, his forward momentum now fully used up delivering his load and he started to fall.

Reaching out for something, some kind of skyhook, Jet flailed, not able to get close enough to the edge to grab it, then felt himself tipping as he started to go over backwards.

Jet watched as his feet slipped and came loose, his fingers just inches from the roof edge as his body dropped and his vision passed by the edge of the roof. Reaching out, vertically, Jet struggled to catch the edge of the ledge, but he was too far away.

As his body dropped further, he twisted to try and catch on to anything when a hand shot out. It was Ma3a’s hand, held out with a will by itself, while the rest of her body remained unconscious. It grabbed Jet’s wrist and held him fast, dangling out over a long drop like a plumb bob.

Jet looked up and down nervously, but the grip didn’t ease up. Swinging his feet to find some leverage against his own momentum, Jet reached out with his other hand and grabbed the ledge, then swung into it as Ma3a suddenly let go, her arm going limp like the rest of her body and dangling over the edge of the drop.

Jet hung there by his fingertips for a moment, catching his breath, then levered himself back up onto the ledge to Ma3a.

“Thanks, Ma3a, I thought I was finished then. I thought you were unconscious but I guess you’re still there,” Jet said.

Ma3a said nothing.

Jet shook his head. “Are you even aware of what you just did?”

Still no response.

Jet grimaced. He knew Ma3a had saved him, but how? She still seemed to be in sleep mode at the moment, yet somehow she had interrupted long enough to save Jet.

“Well, I really do appreciate it,” he said, then looked around, got up, unsprawled Ma3a then scouted the roof while Ma3a lay still at the edge.

The roof of the structure Jet was standing on wasn’t level. There was a drop about the same height as Jet further on, and a ramp leading down from this into rubble and damaged buildings, which looked like it might lead out to a clear area that Jet could reach the Terminus from.

He climbed back to the top of the roof, found Ma3a and dragged her to the ledge to the lower roof, dropped down, then pulled her onto his shoulders in a fireman’s lift, bending his knees and almost falling as her weight hit him.

“Damn, Ma3a, I don’t know where you’re hiding it in that frame but you gotta lose some weight. We’re going to have to review your source code after you’re back to normal.” Jet said, then made his way to the ramp and down into the rubble.

While the ridge had been relatively easy to travel across, the rubble was not. There were some clear sections, but once at the ground level Jet frequently had to find a way over or around obstacles and even resorted to dragging Ma3a under some.

Several times, Jet had to put Ma3a down and find a way forward before returning to get her and then continuing.

Each time Jet stopped, Ma3a seemed to be getting less defined, some parts losing their definition altogether. To Jet, it looked as if her polygon count was decreasing, and with her limited polygon’s to begin with, Jet didn’t think she could afford to lose too many.

“Hold on, Ma3a,” said Jet. “Nearly there,” when an ICP stepped out into the rubble and leveled a blaster at Jet.

Jet held up both hands, although his arms were already around Ma3a, so he couldn’t lift them far.

The ICP lowered the weapon, then blinked once and yelled “I’ve found them,” to the other ICPs.

Three other ICPs quickly found their way to Jet and helped carry Ma3a, each in file and holding Ma3a above their heads.

As worried as Jet was for Ma3a, he was relieved to not be carrying her any more, and led the group back to the Terminus.

Mercury was waiting for them when they arrived and Alchemist had already established her scanning machine and was waiting for them.

“Take her over to the scanner,” said Jet, pointing to Alchemists machine. Mercury stepped up behind Jet to watch as they laid her friend down on the stretcher.

“You didn’t say she was this badly hurt,” Mercury said.

“I didn’t want you to worry,” Jet said, then noticed the look Mercury was giving him, but cut off anything she was going to say. “Anyway, I need to find out what’s wrong with her.”

The ICPs placed Ma3a on the slab that sat next to the torus of Alchemist’s machine. As they did, some of the light ran out into the machine, leaving Ma3a diminished.

“That can’t be good,” Jet said.

“No, it isn’t” Mercury said. “What exactly do you need to do?”

Jet looked to Alchemist but she appeared to be waiting for him as well.

“Doesn’t this machine operate autonomously?” Jet asked.

“The machine operates autonomously on users,” said Alchemist. “On programs, it will do little more than stabilize their flux. Any core changes or repairs will need either an algorithm change or a plugin.”

Jet looked around. “Then how are we going to help her?”

“Jet,” said Alchemist, with a tone that suggested his question seemed stupid to her. “You will need to operate the interface directly, as Ma3a did during the processing of user::Melanie.”

Jet looked at her.

“How do I do that?” he asked.

Alchemist was still in her sitting position that she undertook to be a part of the machine, but her arms were free, so she pointed.

“Through the application binary interface,” she said, pointing to a chair that formed with the machine, where Ma3a had assisted in the work on Melanie.

Jet sat down on the chair, then placed his palm against the panel on the machine. Instantly this time, he fell into a visual code impression of a blank page.

Pulling his hand back in shock, he returned to the digital world around him.

“There’s nothing in there!,” Jet exclaimed.

“Ma3a isn’t stabilized and scanned yet,” said Alchemist.

Jet nodded, then turned to Mercury.

“Merc, this could take some time. Can you regroup the ICPs and keep a watch out for Datawraiths? We know they are in this sector for certain and the one that got away would have had to alert the others.”

Mercury nodded.

“Acknowledged, I’ll speak to the Section leader right away,” then she led the three ICPs that had helped Jet with Ma3a to the other side of the Terminus.

Jet looked around briefly – the first time he had done so since arriving at the Terminus.

The building itself was huge, looking like it might have been designed to hold airships, although the craft Jet knew existed here weren’t far off.

The beam termination was far larger than the one he had arrived in to see in Sector 3, although there was no beam emanating from this one. The roof held several open sections where craft would be assembled before transit with packets and there was a huge control room suspended above where the beam would terminate.

Jet tore his attention away from the surroundings to concentrate again on working out what to do with Ma3a. Alchemist touched a panel and the slab that Ma3a was laying on moved slowly forward through the torus while lights seemed to dance and move around the inside, as if following circuits through the translucent outer layer.

Moving his hand over the control panel again, Jet felt himself dive into the world in that had before seemed blank, but now held a fully detailed version of Ma3a in monochrome and color.

A circle of light split the two sections and Jet realized it represented the progress of the scanner that Alchemist was running.

“Scanning process fifty percent complete,” came Alchemist’s disembodied voice into Jet’s mind.

“Can you hear me Alchemist?” Jet called out.

“Communications quality five of five,” responded Alchemist.

“Ping,” called out Jet.

“ICMP protocols blocked in virtual system. Access denied,” came the response.

Jet was surprised. “I’ll take that as a yes, you can hear me.” He said.

Jet walked over to the scanning Ma3a. She had scanned from her head first and the circle that appeared to be connected to Ma3a through a thin changing matrix of lines was at her knees.

“Ma3a?” called out Jet.

There was no response from her.

“Ma3a program scanning function at eighty percent,” came Alchemist’s voice.

Jet stepped nearer the circle. As he did so, he could feel the status updates, letting him know how far along the progress of the scan was.

The numbers moved up slowly to 99.9 percent, then held there for a short period before flicking over to 100 percent.

“Scan complete,” came Alchemist’s voice.

Jet stepped in front of the scanned Ma3a – she looked like a statue in here.

“Program stabilized, initializing virtual machine,” came Alchemist’s voice.

Ma3a’s eyes flickered open.

“Ma3a?” asked Jet.

Ma3a’s turned to look at him.

“Jet, what are you doing in here?” she asked.

“You said Alchemist could stabilize your flux,” Jet responded, then watched as Ma3a’s face turned to one of pain.

“Jet, disconnect, you must disconnect before,” she began, then seemed to come apart at the seams.

“Warning, Ma3a core going multithreaded, multiple images tracking independently,” came Alchemist’s voice.

Ma3a’s wireframe face expanded until it engulfed Jet, moving out and becoming solid, blinding him with bright light. Color filled in the gaps between the wires, giving substance to the image.

When it stopped, the inside of the wireframe was looking at Jet, appearing as if she was now tubular, surrounding Jet. Her face covered the tube as an inverse image.

The eyes fixed directly onto Jet, her pupils narrowing into distorted crosses.

“User Jet, you should not have entered into this space,” came a strangely distorted voice, barely recognizable as Ma3a.

Jet shielded his eyes, attempting to make out his surroundings. He could make out the tubular shape Ma3a had assumed, which he was now inside, but little else.

Ma3a’s face rotated around Jet, seeming to look at him from all directions, then her eyes flicked to the side, over his shoulder.

Jet instinctively ducked and a blue disc shot over his head at high speed, curving away. As his eyesight gradually improved, picking up more detail, he removed his own disc from his arm just in time to bat the disc away as it came back at him, underestimating the force with which it hit, and falling backwards.

A blue program stepped forward and retrieved the disc that had knocked Jet over as it continued on it’s path and curved back around to him. It was a simple disc compared to Jet’s – marked with concentric circles.

Jet twisted his head to bring the blue program into view, but the detail was still hazy as his eyes struggled to adjust to the now normal light levels after the blinding flash he had seen when Ma3a had seemed to come apart.

Although the detail was hazy, there was no mistaking the intent of the blue program that was about to attack him and there was little Jet could do to block the attack from this position. He felt fear swelling up inside his mind as he considered the possibility that he might actually be derezzed and never return to his world or Mercury.

He felt his last thought forming as why didn’t I listen to Ma3a, when another blue program knelt next to his prone body, placing itself between Jet and his assailant, holding its arms out to the side.

“Tron, wait, I know this program – he’s a friend, a user,” came a voice he knew far too well.

“A friend?” came the response back that also sounded far to familiar.

“Mum, Dad?” Jet managed, holding his hand up to his face to shield his recovering eyes from the glare that still shone down from above, while he slowly brought the darkness into focus.

“He seems disoriented,” came the soft feminine voice.

“What is he doing here?” said the voice that sounded like his father.

“I don’t know, he shouldn’t be able to reach this place if he isn’t part of Ma3a, but he is a user and I think he’s come to help us.” Came the feminine voice, before the blue program threatening him stepped forward and hauled the other program out of the way.

“Move away from him Yori, he could be dangerous. If he is a user, there’s no telling what his allegiances are and users are very powerful. Trust me on that.” said Tron.

Jet found his vision almost back to normal now and could see the faces of the programs, one still ready to derez him, were recognizable now. They appeared as a younger version of Jet’s own parents’ faces.

Jet levered himself to sitting position, taking care to slow his movements down as he put his disc back on his elbow, warned by the change in stance Tron made that he would react if he took anything that Jet did to be threatening.

“Relax,” said Jet slowly. “I’m not a threat – I’m here to help Ma3a - she is a friend of mine.” Jet said.

“You have yet to prove that,” pointed out Tron, now standing ahead of Yori and holding her back with one arm, although she had one hand on Tron’s chest and looked worried as if she was about to do whatever she needed to, to stop Tron’s attack.

“Tron, this is the user that brought the legacy code to Ma3a, who brought us back together so many cycles ago,” came a now more authoritative sounding female voice from Yori, “I think he has proven himself by default.”

Tron looked back at Yori, as he considered the firmness in her resolve in what she said, and placed the disc behind his back. Tron clearly trusted her judgement.

“Then I owe you an apology for the reception that I have show you,” said Tron, who then walked over to Jet and helped him up.

Jet took the offered hand and wondered what was going on here. Was Ma3a a complete world like the one outside of this?

“Alchemist?” called out Jet.

“Acknowledge user::Jet,” came back Alchemists’ words.

“Who are these programs?”

“Scan indicates no programs,” said Alchemist.

Jet thought hard. “Alchemist, what am I interacting with through the interface?”

There was a brief pause while Jet waited for an answer. He looked at Tron who looked back with a strange smile.

“Reference response shows thee separate threads active at present. Thread four is presently paged.” Came the response.

Jet looked at the programs he had talked to and realized what they were. They were fragments of other programs, each absorbed into Ma3a and converted into the base software she carried. One was possibly the original – Yori, jet guessed, while the other two were added later, but somehow became aspects of Ma3a.

Although they weren’t complete programs that operated independently, within Ma3a, they represented sub programs that were created by equally powerful minds in the real world, amalgamated into one entity. In the digital world, they became Ma3a.

Jet thought about the history of Ma3a.

The original Maths Application 1 Audio was a rebuild of one of Jet’s mother’s old high level control application. The original application had been designed to simulate the quantum transfer process by accessing modules and providing a user-interface to much lower application levels, so Jet understood why his mother – not originally a programmer, had designed Ma1a.

Later, Ma1a improved and became Ma2a, which would have been around the time his mother started to have some success with the digitization process. Jet barely recalled an argument between his parents now about how the original EN511 control application – the Master Control Program, had made the process possible due to its intelligence.

Flynn had described the appearance of the MCP to Jet in some detail when he told him the tales of his time in the digital world when he was young. He now realized what the face on the wall of the silo represented.

As a drastic step, Jet’s mother - Lora - must have included some of the original MCP codebase in an attempt to graft the original MCP processes into her own application to improve its quantum correction algorithms.

Finally, Jet himself had taken the source code for Tron Legacy and had that compiled into Ma3a later. He himself had added something of this to her and somehow her application had absorbed his father’s old security program’s personality as well.

Now that he was accessing this virtual world, which existed solely around running Ma3a, Jet guessed he had entered a recursive environment – this world of Ma3a existing similarly to the world of programs he had just come from, with the three programs Ma3a was developed from each existing individually within her, contributing to the whole of her program.

The idea itself was almost too incredible to believe, except that the idea of Jet even being in here was already too incredible to believe.

Yori took Jet’s lack of response and Tron’s waiting for input as a locked state and tried to get them talking once more. She turned to Tron.

“He is the child process of your own user, Tron”

“Really?” said Tron to Jet. “So you’re Alan 2? Then I really must apologise for attacking you, although I was quite impressed with how long you lasted. What brings you here?”

Tron’s face had now lost its hostile expression and become far more amiable looking.

Jet looked at Tron, then Yori, trying to get his mind around the idea that his parent’s might have programs inside the computer and that they might actually know each other. It seemed too fantastic a concept to believe, but it was presenting itself before his very eyes.

“So how does a user create a child process? You seem far too well formed for a bit.” Tron asked.

Jet was surprised at the question and from Yori’s face, she obviously hadn’t expected it either.

“My mother, Lora,” Jet started, when the comment elicited a gasp from Yori.

He continued when she didn’t say anything.

“And my father, Alan, or Alan 1 as you seem to know him as,”

Then Jet found himself searching for an explanation.

“Merged their codebase and I’m the result of a combination of both programs.” Jet finished.

Tron looked back at Yori and smiled, as something passed between them without words.

“So if you don’t mind telling me, why have the user’s returned?” Tron asked.

Jet looked around the strange area he was in as he answered. It felt like he was in a silo with a wireframe face painted on the inside, standing here talking to these two programs. It was wide – around fifty feet, but there wasn’t a lot else that Jet could see here.

“Returned?” asked Jet.

“In the time of the MCP, the user Flynn came down to us and granted Yori a second cycle while defeating the MCP. He was the first, and you are the second coming of the users.” Tron said.

Jet was surprised. “Flynn,” said Jet, getting his mind on things. “That would have been quite some time ago.”

Tron looked at Jet with a mixture of surprise and skepticism. “You do not know of Flynn?”

“Flynn? I know Flynn. Flynn helped me get myself into this current situation.” Jet said.

“So the great user Flynn is still watching over us?” asked Tron.

“Flynn watching over? It’s not quite like that, anyway I thought Ma3a was damaged. From what I can see, you seem fine,” Jet said.

Tron nodded. “Yes, we’ve noticed that our cycles were stopped for some time. The primary cycle of Ma3a interrupted out actions for a period due to instability of the application so as to stop us crashing. If one of us crashes, then we all risk crashing and then deresolution.”

Jet understood now. The accident must have caused code damage to Ma3a also. If that code reached the execution point, then there was no telling what would happen. The EN511 was written in an era when bugs were far less tolerated – you can’t just go rebooting a mainframe. An execution that went astray would fail to update its watchdog circuit and the core processor would simply kill the application.

In this virtual world, the change would still be fatal to the application, but the application could be restarted, examined and adjusted. Jet could keep coming back to locate the fault and Ma3a wouldn’t be damaged – frozen in application as she presently was in Alchemist’s machine.

That was why Ma3a had suggested this course of action.

Except of course for the time Jet had available, which was very little as the system outside was under threat.

Alchemist had mentioned a fourth thread that had been paged out. Jet assumed that this meant that Ma3a had isolated the damaged code segment, which possibly represented much of her core code and personality.

“Can you take me to the damaged thread?” Jet asked.

Yori looked at Tron with a worried look, but Tron nodded to her and spoke softly.

“It’s alright Yori – if what you say is true, then we can trust Jet,” he said.

Yori smiled nervously, leaving Jet wondering what she was so worried about.

Tron looked to the face on the silo wall then called out to it.

“Open access to paged memory,” he called to it.

The face on the wall focused it’s huge eyes on Tron for a time, looking directly at him, then looked away as if it had accepted what he had asked of it.

“Access granted, end of line.” it said and the solid walls fractured into hundreds of primitives, leaving only the wireframe which floated above them like an oversize, inside view of the face of Ma3a.

The primitives span off, then moved around, as if being blown by a tornado, then re-merged into a shape that Jet knew at once.

“A Shell,” said Jet, looking at it. It was smaller and less defined than Melanie’s shell, but nonetheless, it was intact and had a small panel with changing shapes on it. There were two components to it, which Jet assumed represented the paging function.

“Ma3a is presently in hibernation – only her critical functions and legacy functions which don’t support sleep mode are operational.” Said Yori.

“I guess we’re just too old,” said Tron, smiling.

Jet walked over to the panel. A section of the shell rippled as if a pebble had struck it and it was made from water as Jet touched it.

“This is where the core fault lies,” said Yori. “Ma3a asked that you be given access once you had safely locked the routines down inside the scanner.”

Jet looked over to Yori as she spoke, then back to the surface of the shell, as the section in front of Yori darkened in color then changed texture and rippled.

As soon as the ripple subsided to smoothness once more, Yori stepped suddenly forward and into one of the shells, the shell closing around her as she did, merging her to its inside.

Then as Jet watched, the surface of the other shell rippled and wavered, then a figure started to emerge, two legs and then two arms appeared, followed by a face that appeared much older than Jet expected, although when he looked into it, he recognized it instantly.

“Hello, Jethro,” said the program standing before Jet, then it stepped forward before the surprised had worn from Jet’s face and threw its arms around Jet, holding him tightly into a hug. “It’s been so very, very long.”

“Ma3a?” asked Jet.

“Mum,” came back the answer.

Next: Chapter 2.29 – Non-Return to Zero.