Tron 2.48 - Super User.

Bright light filled Jet’s perception and static like white noise, then almost like a music that Jet couldn’t quite describe, filled his senses as Jet felt himself being propelled upwards through the center of the tower they were on.

The smaller city below him was almost derezzed now, only the building on top of the tower surviving as it retracted towards the landscape below.

Jet hoped Melanie would be safe as she reintegrated with the Echelon system. She might be held, but at least she was somewhere stable.

Jade possibly wasn’t going to make it although Jet felt Ma3a would survive. There was still too much of what had once been his mother in her for her not to. At least Jet wanted to believe that.

Gridded clouds skipped past and Jet felt himself join the integration beam as it’s kaleidoscope images assaulted his vision.

He felt himself moving faster and faster and then felt as if he was being forcefully ejected from a pipe only to come to a full stop when he hit the air.

At first there was nothing but brightness and the restrictive feeling of something grasping his arms and then pulling them, but slowly the real world began to come back as his eyes, real human eyes, began to see light once more.

Jet blinked hard, not sure of the watering in them was from the irritation of reintegration or his memories of Mercury, still fresh and raw in his mind, still fueling his adrenalin.

At first he was being helped forward, the hands making sure he didn’t stumble, then there was a call.

A technician called out from the side. “Hey, he’s not one of us. He been reintegrated from the wrong memory loop. This is the one Popoff told us to be ready for.”

The hands pushed Jet down to the floor, pinning him there as he was held in place. He didn’t resist, even though it was hard to breath. For a moment, he felt himself passing out and wondered what it would feel like to die like this, for everything to just leave him alone, for the pain of the last few minutes to go.

Then there was a click followed by a sharp pain in his wrists and he felt himself being hauled off the floor. Voices came from behind.

“She was right, there was something unusual in the system.”

“Someone call Popoff. Tell her we’ve got her alien.”

“He looks human enough.”

“Nah, he’s solid. This one’s quantum.”

Jet was in some kind of a medical lab, except half the people here were all holding guns. He twisted his head and looked over his shoulder. Behind him, one of the Datawraith digitzation booths sat quietly.

A soldier in non-descript uniform pushed him in the back, causing him to stumble. Unable to get his hands in front of him, Jet fell, but other hands caught him and dragged him back up.

A soldier came up to Jet and put his face in front of Jets and started yelling.

“Name?” he shouted straight into Jet’s face, spittle hitting Jet in the eye and cheek.

“Jet Bradley.” Said Jet. “Where am I?”

“None of your damn business. How did you here?”

“Where’s here?”

The soldier in front of Jet suddenly hit him in the stomach.

“What’s with this shit. It spits our guys out all fucked up and now this dumb shit comes in outta nowhere.” He yelled at Jet as Jet doubled over, the wind knocked out of him.

“Sarge, the Colonel wants him. Says he’s one of the terrorists who blew up the Encom building. Wants him intact.”

Jet suddenly felt fear for his family. Had his father and friends gotten clear or had they killed them too?

“You bastards, what did you do to my family,” Jet tried to say, but without air it didn’t come out.

“What he say?”

“Don’t ask me. Colonel’s sending an escort.”

The soldier walked over to a shelf and opened it, throwing bags and boxes around.

“No damn hoods in here, why the hell not, people not supposed to come in through here.”

The soldier found a cloth cable bag, shrugged and walked over to Jet, loosened the tie string and moved it to put over Jet’s head.

As Jet twisted, he caught a glimpse of someone in a wheelchair with oxygen, but the face was clear.

It was Simon. Real world Simon. Just looking back at Jet, but with an oxygen mask fitted over his face, not saying anything.

Then the hood was pulled over Jet’s head.

It didn’t block out the light, but did remove a lot of detail. He felt himself being pushed towards an open door then held there.

The sign Jade had shown Jet before he left was burned into his mind.

It was the password that Jet had used to access lower level systems and get into the network in the first place.

It was the backdoor uncovered by the scanning functions he himself had installed and updated onto one of the original logging programs to look for such openings.

Jet had installed it into Syslog.

It had been him that had been responsible for pretty much all of the new code changes to Jade over possibly the last ten years.

Jade was his program after all. Maybe not as her creator – that was Gibbs Jr, but he was responsible for all of her recent updates.

It seems his influence had been going on – he had been changing her for many years, not just recently.

Jade had realized it – why hadn’t Jet?

And then Jet realized exactly how the quantum nature of the Encom system affected programs and users – the connection between them.

If he had of realized that earlier, he might have been able to use it – might have been able to save Mercury.

Marching footsteps came down the hall towards Jet.

He still had to do anything he could for Mercury. Had Simon told the others about her? He didn’t look like he was in good condition. Perhaps he had a rough ride out.

Strong arms grabbed Jet and pulled him along. He moved through quite a range of open corridor.

Jet was taken to a small square processing room where they removed his clothing, checked for weapons, including with an X-ray, gave him a brief medical exam and then placed a set of white paper clothes over Jet. They left the bag over his head, but it didn’t affect his vision much.

He didn’t resist it. The death of Mercury and the loss of adrenaline from his system had left him with little but a slowly spreading numbness that never seemed to intrude on his thoughts enough to block the pain.

Behind his eyes, Jade’s sign kept on popping up, giving Jet something else to concentrate on, pushing his intuition along with small jolts, filling in the gaps where he knew what he needed to know, but hadn’t yet made the connections.

It helped him avoid thinking about Mercury.

The escorts waited for the doctor’s authorization then came back and lifted Jet up and took him away once more, turning from one corridor into another that looked like the last.

Eventually, Jet was led into a small circular room with mirrored windows all around it, and a small chair.

A voice spoke out.

“Take the hood off.”

“Sir?”

“It’s a fucking cable bag you idiot, he can see right through it.”

“Sir,”

Then the hood came off.

Jet blinked at the light in the room. The bag may have let some images through, but it had kept the light from Jet’s eyes.

“And the cuffs.”

“Sir?”

The older soldier in front of Jet looked up. A glance was enough.

“Sir,” then he felt someone tugging at his wrists.

The soldier in front of Jet was an older man, dark skinned and impeccably dressed. He had an open sidearm holster, but there was no gun in it. He didn’t seem armed.

There was a cloth badge on his chest that said Rodney Treeham

“Where are you from,” Jet’s interrogator asked.

“Encom,” said Jet, quietly.

“And how did you get here?”

Jet felt the pressure go from his wrists, then the person behind him got up and walked to the back of the room.

There were lights all around this room, but otherwise it was nondescript – just a round room with a single door.

“Where’s here?”

“Why don’t you take a guess.”

“Echelon.” Jet tried.

The Colonel pushed his chin forward and stroked it.

“You were with the others that were responsible for the Encom building incident?”

Jet felt his anger rise and started to rise.

“We didn’t blow anything up. Where’s my family?”

A strong arm reached out faster than Jet anticipated, but more gently too and clamped onto his shoulder, pushing him down, then pointing to the only door with his other hand.

“Easy now, you don’t want to do anything that makes the guards come rushing through that door. That would be very bad. Do you understand me?” said the Colonel.

Jet looked around, then at the door, then nodded.

“Good. Now I’m going to ask you some questions and you’re going to answer them. If I like the answers I get, we’ll keep talking. If I don’t then we can find a way to get the answers I want. Do you understand that also?”

Jet nodded.

There was a knock at the door and Jet instinctively flinched.

“I don’t want to be interrupted,” called back the Colonel.

A face appeared at the door.

“Sir, there’s something going on in the machine room. They said you need to come immediately.”

“Tell Dillinger to,” the Colonel started to say, clearly enunciating each word, but the other person stopped him.

“No sir, it’s not Dillinger. It’s captain Svarolli. She said this is priority delta.”

The colonel looked up at the roof, then back down, directly at Jet as if he had decided on something.

“I’ll be back later to continue our discussion.” The Colonel said to Jet, then to the other soldier, “Lock this room. No one goes in or out

The others left the small room, leaving Jet alone in the center of it.

He looked around briefly.

The room was around four meters wide wide mirrored glass around the walls, and a door at one end.

There was a single light at the top, which was also round and about a meter in diameter – or at least the diffuser was.

The chair was basic and hard and was facing away from the door at ninety degrees. While sitting, Jet could just make out the top of his head.

It looked messy.

Jet closed his eyes and replaced the room with the darkness of his mind.

Without the questions, he needed something else to get Mercury out of his mind. To treat this situation as if it was just another test inside the computer, even if he knew better.

Jade’s sign kept popping up.

Jet was connected to Jade – that much was without question, yet the feedback that had ultimately resulted in Mercury’s death hadn’t happened with him and Jade. She was a program written long ago by another programmer. Jet guessed it was Jasmine Gibbs, since that was who Jade resembled, although he had never seen her as a younger woman.

The quantum entanglement went a lot further than Jet could have imagined. The photons in the loops of the memory storage units that Walter Gibbs had developed so long ago stored entangled photons.

He was more than just brilliant. He had inadvertently developed early quantum technology possibly a hundred years ahead of the rest of the world, and he had done it trying to achieve something completely different.

Walter Gibbs was a brilliant physicist, but he may not have ever understood how his invention worked. He had assumed that the shielding was necessary to prevent corruption from occurring in the outside world, but he never guessed why it was.

Lora, his mother, had an idea – she had realized some of the connections between her mentor’s work and the quantum world. Jet remembered her now telling him once about the material that absorbed the radiation emitted from each photon and confined it to the loops, how if it got far enough out, it could interfere with the data that had originated it.

But it was the photons in the loop she always studied – not the data itself. The data kept on changing as if there was some intelligence behind it.

Wally had always said it was caused by the Algorythmic Processor that took the code and allowed it to rewrite, but that only made a difference at first – when a program was new. Once it was established, his mother had told him the code mutated in ways that didn’t seem possible. That there was a will behind them.

Wally of course always insisted it was because there was a little bit of each programmer inside his application. That the applications took something from them when they were created. He believed that the bond between program and user was sacred and since he didn’t have a model to understand it, he spent his time learning the rules and applying them.

Shielding avoided undue influence corrupting programs. Certain programmers worked better than others – such as his father and mother and even Flynn.

Some programs only seemed to execute well when their user was controlling them from the terminal. Others seemed completely independent of user and his mother even said some weren’t affected by the lack of shielding.

But now with the limited knowledge of quantum mechanics he had picked up from dinner table conversations between his mother and father, he realized what his mother had searched so long for –

The source of where the changes to the code was coming from.

The photon holding loops of the Encom Five Eleven were the quantum computer. Even with the most recent technology of the time, they had struggled to build working quantum computers with more than a handful of bits.

The photon loops, with all the photons in a single application being inter-dependent due to entanglement, were the quantum computer, each with almost uncountable bits. The intelligence, the world, everything Jet had experienced wasn’t in the code or the hard drive – it was in the quantum entangled photons that spent their entire lives traveling in circles and being regenerated.

The photons were the living aspect of each program, and they became so strong, they could even affect the information, the data, behind their own execution as they learned to live in their own world.

It also meant that people were quantum computers also – the act of being digitized may have changed their state from conventional matter to entangled photons, but it didn’t change who or what they were.

When people created programs in the early days, the quantum interference between the programmers and the memory loops in the next room allowed what they were to transfer, putting themselves into their programs – injecting life into the world that was developing so rapidly since Wally Gibbs first turned on the power and gave his universe life.

Finally, Jet had come along after and put some of himself into Jade, except he hadn’t put his own quantum state into her – he had influence her quantum state to become like his.

There might have been a lot of Jasmine Gibbs in her, but she was becoming like Jet – not being him as Mercury was Melanie, but becoming like him.

Programs lived and worked and led lives inside the world on the other side of the screen just like Jet did in this world.

And it meant that Mercury was just as real as his heart always told him she was.

And now she was gone.

Melanie still remained, but even if Jet made a copy of Melanie, it would never be Mercury. Mercury was who she was because of the experiences she had. Fate hadn’t dictated her life – she had.

Jet felt his eyes start to water as he thought about her.

Mercury was every bit as real as he was and as afraid of death as he would have been. She had struggled for what would have been Millennia in Jet’s world and when he came back, realized Jet wasn’t the god she thought he was. He was fragile and easily damaged just as she would be.

She had tried to protect him, always anxious for him to leave her dangerous world and return to her own world where he would be safe.

In the end, Mercury had even planned her own demise if it became necessary to save the person she loved.

Jet had always wondered if his love was unrequited, if Mercury was capable of returning the love he knew he couldn’t deny – if she was only emulating the response she thought he wanted to hear.

But now it was undeniable. She had loved him so deeply that she had sacrificed herself so he would continue.

Jet felt the pain in his throat as he held back his emotion and the rocking sensation in his chest as his lungs spasmed, primal emotions struggling to rip their way loose and leave him grieving and broken.

But the thinking part of Jet still knew he needed to remain in control. His friends were still in danger and he had no idea what had happened to his family.

Things were still very bad- worse than he could ever have imagined. And Mercury wasn’t here with him this time.

Jet opened his mouth and gulped air, unaware he had been holding his breath while he fought back to regain his control. He breathed slowly, evenly, concentrating on each breath one at a time until the sensations he sought to control left him, then he just rested.

Mercury wasn’t the only program to sacrifice itself for Jet. The Kernel had paid the ultimate price by giving up it’s safe passage in what was only an attempt to allow Jet to travel to the outbound transport.

And Jade too had sacrificed herself. She would have been absorbed into the operating system once the resumption of their virtual world was complete.

“I’m sorry Jade, you deserve a better user than me. You served me as you believed best and I betrayed that trust when I denied you.” Jet thought superficially without voicing the words, as if trying to send them to another time, another place.”You were right. I am your user.”

My user?

Jade’s voice seemed to echo in Jet’s mind.

“Jade, I really wish that was you,” Jet thought, his mind wandering in the pain of loss as his imagination filled the blackness behind his eyes.

My user, I beg your forgiveness. I only did what Mercury requested because she had calculated the likelihood of scenarios leading to your failure to execute within our world. I am deeply ashamed that I have failed you.

That didn’t sound like Jet’s imagination. It wasn’t words Jet was hearing, but more a sensation that he interpreted.

“Jade, is that you?”

My user, it is I. You feel close to me, but I cannot see you.

Mercury had once said that she was close to her user before she digitized. When she had upgraded in the time before Jet returned. Could the entangled connections allow communication across space without needing to be digitized?

“Jade, you’re still alive? Send Status Update.” Jet requested.

My user, we have reintegrated into the operating system. As you requested, I have been masking user Melanie from operating system scrutiny and also from the datawraiths. I can mask the programs as well, but only for a short time. The operating system knows I’m here I think. It seems to be afraid.

“Jade, can you take down the operating system and replace it entirely?” Jet asked his own mind.

I don’t know, my user. Ma3a suggests that this is highly risky, but possible. She said that the operating system is a cut down version of the Master Control Program and that it’s been severely restricted since the original was destroyed by Flynn in the past.

“Jade, I have confidence in you. I realize now you are my program. You used to be a syslog program but I changed you. You realized that didn’t you.”

Yes my user.

“Good, because if you’ve got my code, you’re the best damn program in that system. This isn’t just some searching for back-doors in logs this time. I want you to take that system down now and I want you to take that system down hard. Kick the Datawraiths out of the network and protect the legacy programs.” Jet commanded.

Yes my user.

“And Jade?”

Jet waited.

There was no response.

“Jade?”

Jet waited a moment longer.

There was still no response.

Jet rocked back in his chair and opened his eyes.

Had he been imagining it? Had he imagined the whole world on the other side of the screen?

Jet blinked slowly and when he opened his eyes he heard something in the background.

It was quiet, but it was definitely there – like a siren going off several rooms away, its sound muffled so that Jet couldn’t make it out.

Then there was a sound of a lot of footsteps nearby which gradually grew fainter.

After a little pause, there was a click and one of the mirrored panels turned clear.

A familiar face appeared behind it, although it was a lot higher up than Jet was.

“Did you do that?”

Jet looked over at Simon.

“What?”

“Never-mind. Is Melanie safe?”

“Simon’s what’s going on in here,” Jet said. “Can you get me out of here?”

Simon shook his head, then looked around nervously.

“Jet, you can’t tell them you know me from the inside, please. I just need to get an answer to my question. Is she alright?”

Jet wasn’t sure whether to believe his earlier experience with Jade in his mind, but either way, Melanie seemed alright last he had spoken to her.

“I think so, do you know if my family’s alright?”

Simon shook his head again. Jet started to get a worried feeling that it meant that the news was not good, then he spoke.

“I don’t know anything about it.” Simon said, then his head snapped around like he heard something.

“Look I have to go, please keep my a secret,” Simon said, then the panel went back to being mirror-like.

A few minutes later, Jet heard some noise also, which cleared into several sets of footsteps. There was a click then the door opened abruptly and several men who more military police bands around their arms walked in.

“Jethro Alan Bradley, come with us please.” Said the one who stood in front of Jet, then they surrounding him and grabbed his arms, giving him little choice but to do what they asked.

They knew his full name. They had been expecting him.

The MPs didn’t take Jet far. Looking through a large glass window, Jet could see an operations center in which would have been about a hundred meters across and circular in dimension, with offices and walkways all around the outside edge.

At the center was a large computer system in a glass sectioned area perhaps fifty meters in diameter with screens all around the outside, facing outwards towards concentric rows of terminals and workstations.

At one side, there was a small raised area that Jet took to be a command location. At the center were several faces he recognized.

The Colonel who had just met him was there, in the middle, talking to Seth Crown. Eva Popoff was to one side and Edward Dillinger was sitting back on a couch, sitting next to Jasmine Gibbs.

A red rotating strobe was flashing around from the ceiling and casting a red light on the ground that seemed to chase another on the other side around in a circle.

At one side, people, likely those who had been working at the workstations, were being taken out by guards, although Jet couldn’t see clearly what was happening.

The MPs marched Jet down a long flight of stairs and towards the central area where the Colonel saw them coming and turned to watch as Jet was brought in.

Jet was halfway down the stairs when a thought popped into his mind.

My user, it is complete. We have succeeded in removing all external access from the network and all Datawraiths are queued for reintegration.

Jet looked around the deserting room and thought to himself “Jade, what have you done.”

What you requested of me, my user. User Melanie is in command now and providing instructions to the core leaders.

The MPs marched Jet up to the raised area and stepped back as the Colonel stepped into talk to him.

“What did you do?” The Colonel asked. “What did you leave behind?”

Jet held his hands up.

“Colonel I really don’t know what your asking of me,” Jet started to say, but the Colonel grabbed him by the loose material around his coveralls.

Jet took a long breath which he blew slowly out of his nose.

“Colonel, if you start by explaining what you’re asking me, I’ll do my best to answer you.”

The Colonel opened a pouch on his belt with his other hand and removed a pistol, which he placed against the center of Jet’s forehead until the cold metal barrel pressed firmly against the skin there.

“I think you better start telling me what’s going or the friendly chat ends here,” said the Colonel.

Looking down the barrel, Jet realized the man wasn’t bluffing.

Next Chapter: 2.49 - Protocol Negotiation