Preface: (A new ending). This is a Fanfic written in the Tron universe…

Note: This is not how Tron 2.0 ended. This is how, IMHO, it should have ended, and a subsequent story.
This fits in between when Jet and Mercury say goodbye (“I guess this is end-of-line”) and Jet is “knocked” into the data port by the F-Con tri-user “Monster” merge. I consider this the bit “cut” from the game.

“I guess this is end-of-line” said Mercury with an expression of sadness slowly spreading across her delicate features.

Mercury started to step away then suddenly stepped back and wrapped her arms around Jet’s chest. Surprised by the move, Jet let his arm fall around her and she responded further, hugging Jet more tightly and then molding herself into him until his body glowed along one side where they touched, her head held tightly into Jet’s shoulder, yet her face turned away. A single drop of liquid energy started to form in the corner of her eye.

Mercury held Jet surprisingly tight. Jet knew she was combat trained, but could feel that the strength in her lithe frame came from emotion now - something he hadn’t realized ran so deeply in her before. His mind no longer saw her as a compiled set of code lines. His trials inside the machine had hidden the real Mercury from him.

After a brief moment, Jet felt Mercury shift and she began to speak to him for the last time before he had to leave.

“Jet, you need to leave. You can restore me from a backup, but if you derez then even the users can’t bring you back can they?” Mercury’s voice seemed broken even as she formed the words.

“Mercury,” began Jet, finding his words choking in his throat. It wasn’t something he expected. “I don’t want to leave. I need to know you’re safe. I need to know you can get of this carrier before I leave”

Mercury lifted her head from Jet’s shoulder and looked into his eyes, her own eyes now visibly filling with pools of energy.

“Jet, I need to believe in your power as a user,” she began. “I need to put my faith in you.

“But even if you’re a user, you’ve shown me that users can’t change everything. You can’t save this carrier and you need to be gone when it crashes. I won’t be able to face the future here when this system crashes unless I know your safe.”

Jet looked into her eyes. Mercury’s tough façade was suddenly failing. This wasn’t the Mercury he had crossed systems with – it was something deeper. Something he had only now come to realized existed as something more than just in his own mind. This was the real Mercury.

He looked down at Mercury’s face through her tears and realized that the beauty he had begun to fall in love with during his time online was more than superficial. Mercury was more than code and his stomach turned as he realized too late that he had missed out so much in their brief time together.

The data carrier shuddered and several panels began to break down to primatives as he stood with her. The crash had begun. Two datawraiths that were attempting to make it to the beam fell through a panel that blinked out of existence as they moved across it, dropping them into the datasteam below.

“Mercury,” began Jet, but Mercury had put her hand against his chest, filling it with energy as her own drained away.

“Find me, bring me back and then return to me,” she said as her form shifted slightly with the loss of energy. “Find me and if you can’t find me, find an earlier me and tell me what I need to know”.

As she looked up, Jet lowered his mouth on to hers for the last time and kissed her, his energy now flowing into her through their touching lips, restoring some of her glow. The shared glow of their closeness moved through their circuits.

“You have my promise,” said Jet slowly as the kiss broke, ”That nothing will keep me from restoring you”.

Tears of light now flowed freely down Mercury’s face. She looked for a moment directly at Jet then pushed him away, breaking the embrace. She looked away from his eyes for a moment before making contact again.

“What is it that users say when they disconnect from someone when they don’t want to?” she’d asked gently, Jet’s hands only barely on her shoulders now.

“I love you,” said Jet, feeling her slip away.

“I love you,” responded Mercury, then in a single fluid move before Jet could stop her, twisted herself out of Jet’s grip and returned deep into the data carrier.

Jet watched her for a moment and was about to run after her- risk it all, when the F-CON merge hit him hard, knocking him into the transfer port of the reintegration stream at the last moment as a reverberating shock started the carrier breaking apart with finality.

Jet screamed.

Tron 2.1

Chapter 1. Synchronisation.

Timeframe - Twelve months after Jet’s Digital Sojourn …

Pulling the ragged seams of a broken zipper closer together, Jet’s cold fingers attempted to shield himself with what little material they could grasp against the cold wind as he wandered through the alley. The hooded windcheater wasn’t as effective as its name suggested and every gust bit deeper into his body chilling him to the core.

He ducked his head further down into a makeshift hood attached to it more recently for what little protection it offered, fighting off a chill. It made it more difficult to see what was going on, but then he didn’t really need to see where he was going.

Jet had walked through this alley many times in his life, often during times that had held for him more joy. The faded walls alongside the alley painted with mural dating well back a few decades to a period when this area was an electronic meeting place for the younger generation.

He knew the front entrance just as well but the dated neons fixed above the main entrance of the building he was visiting still flickered with anachronistic light and reminded him of the place he still couldn’t forget. Even just the memory of his being there still hurt, more so the realization he hadn’t been able to find a way back.

Arriving at his destination, Jet stopped briefly at the inset door, his knuckles moving to rap on the wooden frame without thought as they had so many times in the past. For a moment Jet thought about the irony that his employer had for so long harboured a secret that he himself had been keeping for nearly twelve months. But if he had known sooner, would it have made a difference? It wasn’t certain either way.

Before he consciously returned his mind to the task at hand, he found his knuckles already rapping on the door surface, the hollow sound deadened slightly by the wind.

No answer.

Jet knocked again, this time louder, but with no more response than the first effort. A fleck of paint fell loose as he did, flickering with dim reflected light as it fell, causing Jet to pause as he remembered the flickering pixels of a derezzing panel.

A sharp gust of chilled wind blew back the hood and revealed hair now black and matted as the colouring and styling he had been so fond of once had grown out. The change reminded Jet where he was and why he was here.

Even in the darkness, Jet’s eye’s glinted slightly with the same reflection of a streetlamp in the distance and sizing the door up, Jet kicked the door solidly once with the toe of his worn sneakers, then again.

This time the door opened abruptly and Jet found two long tubes like geometric primitives attached along an axial moving around under his nose. His eyes followed the tubes to the base of the shotgun that rested in the hand of his former employer so long ago.

“Jet?” came the surprised voice.

“Hello Flynn,” said Jet. “I need to talk.”

The shotgun wavered and for a brief moment, Jet thought Flynn was going to slam the door, but slowly the barrels dropped to the side and Flynn stood back behind the door, allowing a space for Jet to move in.

“It’s been a while,” came the voice apologetically from within. “Sorry about the reception. Some bad gangs around here lately”

Jet moved in past his old mentor into the gloom and slowed as he realized how dark it was inside the room. Flynn closed the door behind him, leaving Jet’s eyes struggling to come to terms with the darkness.

“It’s past midnight,” said Flynn, moving between several bulky shadows to a doorframe inside the building and with a short snapping sound, turned on a light. A sudden flash erupted in the room as the light displaced the shadows, revealing a slightly messy kitchen littered with the debris of several old video games and even a few cabinets. A soldering iron and oscilloscope that was twenty years out of date sat in the middle of the table. Several small components lay next to a board that looked slightly burned. Repairing old video game boards was one of Flynn’s hobbies, as was running this old arcade, although he didn’t really need to work anymore.

Now starting to become accustomed to the light, Jet blinked several times, his dilated pupils shrinking rapidly in the sudden glare.

“I understand it,” said Jet. “I think I finally understand it” he said, taking a seat ahead of his mentor.

Flynn took a seat in the small kitchen. Jet shifted and ran his fingers through his hair as he leaned back.

“You came here in the middle of the night to tell me you’ve finally realized it was all a dream,” said Flynn, rubbing his eyes. “You could have just emailed me.”

“You know I can’t stand email since it happened,” said Jet, taking a seat adjacent to his old employer.

Flynn nodded. “Something about digitizing really fucks with your head doesn’t it,” he said in sympathy, rubbing his eyes. “I spent years in therapy after my bout.”

Jet shook his head. “It wasn’t a dream,” he said slowly. “It was real and now I know it.”

Flynn fixed him with a direct stare. Now in the light Jet could see he hadn’t shaved for a few days and he looked more tired than this late night visit should have normally left him.

“We never managed to repeat the transfer,” said Flynn. “You are the only other person who even saw what I thought I did, but none of it’s real Jet. You know that’s true also.”

Jet nodded slowly. He and Flynn had discussed this several times since he came back. His father hadn’t really been in the other world with him, or at least, didn’t remember anything. That in itself was quite confusing for Jet. The Datawraiths in storage were badly damaged and only some returned. Encom was shut down due to the OHS issues of digitizing live people.

The federal agents came in the next day and closed the place down. Sure, the systems kept on running but the place was closed and maintained by federal employees now. The military still had a use for the research, although even they weren’t likely to start digitizing people in the near future.

Even Alan, Jet’s Father, was only permitted to complete enough work to bring back the triumvirate from F-Con after some serious legal intervention from the F-Con board and then Encom was dissolved. The building still stood, but now the company that had occupied it was gone, it’s employees and genius scattered now throughout dozens of companies.

Everyone who had returned from laser suspension during the incident was suffering from some form of memory loss, except for Jet and Flynn, and most retained dim memories that they said felt like the entire experience was more like immersion in a VR tank. Few had described anything resembling the world Flynn and Jet had recalled, but even then it wasn’t easy to explain. Most described it simply as “Dreamlike”.

“Computer programs don’t speak in English,” began Flynn. “And a data bit has just one numerically different outcome. It doesn’ t have a personality. Programs are just lines of code. No more no less. Machines are hardwired memory.”

Flynn pointed across the table at Jet.

“You’re a programmer,” he continued. “You know this. A hard drive doesn’t look like a digital city. It looks like a bunch of ones and zeroes, and even if you render it, it still looks like a bunch of ones and zeroes, or maybe like some crap static. It certainly doesn’t create neon panels of energy.”

Jet nodded once, but his gaze was fixed.

“I remember all of that Flynn, and I remember therapy. I cried for a week when I finally admitted it was a dream. Do you know what it’s like to find the love of your life and lose them? And then to finally accept that they never existed?”

Flynn nodded in sympathy, remembering that he once also had feelings for a simple “program” as Jet now did, although he had never mentioned to Jet or especially Alan about the incident. He got up and pulled a can of coffee from the fridge and poured it into a two stained mugs which he retrieved from a cupboard nearby, knocking aside some loose papers on the cupboard. He put the mugs into a microwave oven, knocking more papers to the floor. He didn’t retrieve them.

Jet flinched as Flynn set the timer on the over, each of the beeping sounds leaving him with flashbacks. Memories uncovers coming to him of a place that seemed so far away at the moment.

Flynn’s back was still to Alan as he started speaking, watching the mugs go around inside the oven, a little crackle of static appearing on a thin metallic strip of paint on the mug. “So what makes you think it was real now?” he asked Jet.

Jet looked up at the single incandescent bulb that lit the room, breathing in deeply through his nose, then slowly letting it out, then breathing in through his open mouth before answering.

“Because I now realized what happened,” he said, his eyes flicking back to Flynn.

“I now know what happened and why it happened. I know how to explain it and how to understand it.”

Flynn looked back over his shoulder at Jet then again to the oven as it completed heating the coffee.

“Then you’ll have to explain it to me,” said Flynn, returning to the messy and parts-ridden table with the cups, spilling one slightly as he set it down before Jet. “But in the morning would have been fine.”

“It’s Quantum mechanics Flynn. I understand now how a user can exist in the online world and why it exists the way it does.” Jet said. The intensity of his words came through Flynn’s tiredness like the caffeine he had just heated up.

“Of course it’s quantum mechanics, Jet, it always was. The correction algorithms were critical to eliminate the uncertainty generated simply by reading the data when we scanned objects. But let’s say you’re right and there really is a world on the other side of the screen. Let’s assume it’s made of bits and bytes like we’re atoms and it’s possible for a user to exist there. Why is this suddenly so important that it had to come here in the middle of the night.”

Flynn’s question was straight to the point. He had been a good CEO at Encom and even an insightful boss when Jet had worked at Flynn’s and later Encom. He knew how to drill to the point when he needed to.

Jet fixed his former mentor now with a direct stare. His gaze locked, he didn’t look away or flinch as Flynn equally returned the intensity.

“I’m going back Flynn - I’m going to find her and I’m going to stay there.” Jet responded coolly, not blinking and not breaking the gaze. For a second, Jet thought Flynn had simply missed the comment, but then his pupils widened slightly behind the steam rising from his own cup.

Flynn put the cup down, then returned Jet’s unblinking gaze once again. “You’re serious aren’t you?”

Jet didn’t initially respond. On the way here he had played this out in his mind several times. Flynn gets angry, Flynn laughs. Flynn kicks him out. Flynn lets slip with some secret. He hadn’t actually considered Flynn taking him seriously.

Flynn knew about Mercury – about Jet’s search through the data of the crashed hard drive for her code. In retrospect, he should have realized just how serious Flynn realized Jet was about Mercury when he returned. Of his father, the shrinks and his friends, only Flynn seemed to understand how seriously Jet’s heart had been wounded by his ethereal lover’s disappearance.

The silence maintained for a moment longer then the spell was broken by the single silent nod of his head, never once though did Jet look away from Flynn’s eyes as he spoke.

“I love her, Flynn, and I made her a promise. It’s time I kept that promise.”

The silence returned, and with it a strange stillness as Flynn took in the seriousness of his young protégé. Jet had always been able to achieve his stated goals in the past, but never had he ever aimed so high. Flynn wasn’t even sure Jet could even have figured it out. Right now, he wasn’t even certain of his own trip into the computer.

Flynn slowly picked up his coffee, all the while maintaining eye contact with Jet. He brought the steaming sweet liquid to his lips and sipped gently.

It was going to be a long night.

Next: Chapter 2.11 – Preamble.