FIC: Moving Out [Tron (1982/Legacy)]

[omnicat]

Title: Moving Out
Author: Omnicat
Spoilers & Desirable Foreknowledge: Joseph Kosinsky & co’s Tron: Legacy and Steven Lisberger & co’s Tron.
Warnings: Some non-graphic injuries and past character death.
Characters & Relationships: Sam x Yori, mentions of past Tron x Yori
Summary: Dillinger Systems is hot on their tails, and Sam and Yori have run out of options.
Author’s Note: Written for the Tron Fandom Ship Week on tumblr, theme: Betrayal. Enjoy!



Moving Out

Sam saw it coming, which was probably the only reason the crash didn’t kill him.

Sheeting rain cut visibility down to almost nothing, the road was slick as a mirror, he was cold to the bone on top of having lost a lot of blood, his arm was rapidly approaching useless - and every time he thought of the speed limit his first instinct was go faster. Another bright side: his bike’s tenuous grip on the asphalt didn’t give way until he had the arcade in his sights, so he managed to pick himself up and limp the rest of the way. The Dukati was totalled. If this had happened five minutes of reckless speeding earlier, the game would have been over.

The double-handed force required to move the Tron cabinet was agony, and he dripped red-tinted rain water all over the Grid’s touch screen. When Yori asked him if the laser aperture was clear, his hand froze, hovering over the Y.

All this pain and blood and fear, he thought, a little crazed. All these lives and personalities at stake. This time last year I would’ve thrown an ancient hard drive like this in the trash without a second thought.

But there was no pretending he could just go back to that ignorance. That’s what his father had tried to do, in the end, and look where it got them.

The transition was as smooth as a sigh.

The voice that greeted him, not so much.

"You’re hurt!"

Yori was there in an instant, kneeling by his side where he sat, dry but no warmer or steadier than before, behind the digital equivalent to the basement computer. She immediately began unrezzing the sleeve of his gridsuit.

How on Earth did you know? Sam thought. It took him a bewildered moment to remember she had just mapped and converted his entire body from banged-up flesh and bone to code. She’d commented on the food in his stomach once, of course she would notice the giant gash draining all the strength from his arm and replacing it with knifelike pain.

He grabbed her wrist and willed the black data-material back into existence. "No, leave it, exposing it will only make it worse."

Come to think of it - he willed the stuff even tighter than usual.

"What happened to you?" Yori asked, squeezing his hands and searching his features.

Sam’s last thred of composure snapped at the look on her face, and he curled in on himself, the even rhythm of his breath collapsing. He buried his face in the crook of Yori’s neck and wrapped his arm around her head, burying his fingers in her braided hair, crushing her to him to the point of obvious discomfort.

"Sam -"

Don’t leave me, the little boy deep inside of him begged. Everybody always leaves me. Please, not you too.

"You’re in danger. We don’t have a lot of time. We don’t have any time," Sam said after a moment. He shook himself and released her. Then, meeting her eyes, he changed his mind again and clutched her shoulders. "Listen, Lora sent me here to get you. You’re the one they’re after."

Yori’s eyes went wide. "Me! Why? Who?"

"Dillinger Systems," Sam spat. And to think he’d come to trust that little hipster prick. Everything Alan had done for Ed through the years, all the times they’d given him the benefit of the doubt. And now he turned around and did this. "They want the digitization software," Sam said, before he remembered he had already told her that - that he was talking to the digitization software. Yori hated it when he separated her person from her function. But he shook his head; there was no time for that. "And not for friendly visits and making the world a better place, either. They know about Dad’s work and the true nature of programs. They want to control and exploit it, you, and if they find anything in here that thinks for itself too much, they’re going to look for a way to exterminate it."

"Like ISOs?" Yori asked, frowning.

"Like anything. Right down to whatever bits we still have left. Basics are definitely included. They’d turn you all into mindless repurposed drones if they got a close enough look at you."

Yori’s expression locked down. Her voice was so flat it bordered on robotic. "Like Rinzer."

Sam’s heart lurched for more than one reason. But what could he say that hadn’t already been said between them? The shadow of a dead man and all the horrors he had suffered would forever hang over their relationship, and like Yori’s inhuman nature, all Sam could do about that was accept it.

"Yeah," Sam said lamely.

It was actually kind of funny, for a given value of funny. Growing up, he had never paid a lot of attention to Yori’s part in the stories; if, as a child, he’d had to guess which ‘character’ he would fall in love with as an adult if they turned out to be real people, he would have guessed Tron himself.

But Yori was biting her lip, her expression having turned pensive, and she took Sam by surprise when she asked: "How many more of me are out there?"

"What?"

"Where else is my code installed?" she clarified. "How many backups do you have?"

"None. Nowhere. Lora and the research team never took you off the Encom network, and the equipment you were written on is thirty years gone now. Dad kept Lora’s research notes and a back-up of your code on a floppy disc down here in the basement, but they took it all when they caught Quorra. But she managed to destroy your back-up data." Like that was nothing but a triumph. Like Yori wasn’t as much an ‘endangered species’ of program as Quorra herself was. "That’s why they’ve come back - you’re their last chance to get their hands on the technology."

Yori, like Aunt Lora would have, caught on immediately. "You want me to uninstall myself and enter a flash drive you can easily take out of their reach."

"Yes," Sam said, grinning with relief.

The grin fell.

"No. I don’t know. I -" He clutched painfully at his wounded arm, his mind racing. "- I crashed my bike - right outside -"

She gave him an odd look. "You can’t run from them anymore."

"Oh, I can run," Sam said darkly. "Just not far."

"Then I’ll have to be deleted entirely."

His head shot up. "No!"

"Is there any other way to keep me out of their hands?" she asked, like she was talking about - about just some thing, an inanimate object, not her life.

"Yori..."

She kept doing that. And every time, Sam’s head and heart came to a stuttering stop. He tried, he honestly tried, to understand and respect her values and perspective and otherness. But after the heartbreaking way he learned how wrong he and his father, and through his father’s teachings even Quorra, had been about the finality of death not only for humans and ISOs, but Basics too - after the Tron they installed to replace the one that was lost to the Sea turned out to be a different person, an entirely new man without a trace of the hardwired bond Yori had shared with his predecessor...

Don’t leave me.

"They’ll find me if I try to hide in this world, won’t they?" Yori asked. "They know the location of the computer and you don’t have the means to keep them from searching it."

Sam shook his head, not trusting his voice.

"Then there’s no other choice," she said.

"I - no, that wouldn’t even work," Sam said firmly. "Dad turned this into such a Frankenstein’s monster of a computer -" (‘Frankensteins’? Yori mouthed) "- there’s no way I could completely erase your data on time short of taking an electromagnet to the hard drive and killing everyone in the system."

Yori let out a horrified cry. Another one of those funny things. Self-sacrifice came far easier to Basics than the loss of their loved ones.

"Not an option, I know." He smiled wryly. "Also literally impossible. I don’t have an electromagnet on hand."

She shoved his shoulder and stood from her crouch in a huff.

Sam ran his hand through his hair again, balling it into a fist halfway through. "There has to be a better way than to try to outrun them! We’ve been trying to outrun them for days, they just keep finding us."

He tried to think of ways to hide her, but he knew it was no use. Whatever he gave her, did to her or put between her and them, he had nothing they wouldn’t know how to counter-act. Their programs would hunt her down to every corner of the Grid and...

...beyond.

Sam’s eyes widened.

Oh man. Could that...? Oh man oh man oh man.

He stood abruptly (and refused to give in to the momentary vertigo). "Yori, can programs use their own functions on themselves?"

"What kind of question is that?" She looked at him like he’d grown a second head.

"Can you use your functions on yourself?"

Slowly, like the thought was so unnatural it wouldn’t even process properly, Yori’s expression shifted from confused to incredulous. "...undigitize myself?"

"Yes. Can you do it?"

"No," she said almost before he’d said ‘do’.

Sam frowned. "Have you ever tried it?"

"Of course not."

"Simulated it?"

"No!" She backed away from him.

"Then are you sure you can’t do it? Lora made sure nothing stays behind of the things you undigitize, not a trace, not a molecule. It would be perfect!"

"I won’t!" she exclaimed, as if he’d proposed something utterly indecent.

"Why not?" Sam burst out. He knew why not. But for god’s sake, this was her life they were talking about.

"I’m a program, Sam." Like that explained everything.

It did. Of course it did. That was the problem.

"Yeah, I remember, we’ve been over that a thousand times."

"Ninety-four times," she corrected.

Sam threw his hands in the air - "Whatever!" - and immediately regretted it. "Ouch, shit."

"No." She shook her head emphatically. "I don’t belong out there. I love you, Sam, but my place is here."

"Please, just this once, forget about all the worshipful bullshit," he snapped, clutching his wounded arm. "I’m inviting you. It’s allowed."

"That’s not the point," she snapped back. "What would I do out there?"

"Do?"

"We’ve been over this ‘a thousand’ times because you keep refusing to listen! I am a program. I was created to carry out a function. I exist to carry out my function."

"Would you rather die?" Sam asked plainly.

Yori’s mouth worked silently for a moment before she answered. From the look she gave him with it, Sam knew she knew how he would take it. "I wouldn’t have anything to live for."

That, too, hurt less than it could have by the simple virtue that he saw it coming. Sam’s aggravation drained away, and in return he saw the tension in Yori’s shoulders ease.

It was often so hard to remember that she wasn’t inherently human, deep down inside. Sam was Generation Internet, Generation Uncanny Valley. Nebulous entities from halfway across the world whom he knew only as lines of text on a screen had made up the majority of his social circle for far longer than he cared to admit. Meeting Word and Excel face-to-face had been barely any stranger than his first Flynn Lives meet-up. And when he watched a program plug in to its surroundings and perform its function, his brain didn’t tell him inhuman, it said great SFX.

Yeah, it was probably unfair of him to treat her like she was any old human girlfriend - like Jet’s sister, basically - but dammit, there was more to the Basics than the bare functions Users had coded for them, and until they all figured out how to deal with that, death was just not an option.

Sam half-shrugged and opened his arms. This is all I am; this is all I have. "You have me."

Yori grimaced. She looked away, crossing her arms over her chest. "Sam, Sam..." she said miserably.

"And there’s Lora and Alan and Jet," he forged on. "Quorra, Roy... Yori, I’m not forgetting or ignoring what you are. And none of us would want to force you to act like something you’re not. But you’re not -" ‘just’? No, too dismissive. "- not only a program. You’re more than one thing to all of us. You’re a friend, a daughter, a sister... and we’ve got something special, don’t we?"

Refusing to look at him, she shook her head, but he could tell she didn’t mean ‘no’, but rather ‘why are you doing this to me?’.

Because he loved her - because they all loved her. And they wanted her to live.

"We’ll find something for you to do," Sam said. "Lora gave you your directive once before, I’m sure she can do it again."

Yori shrank in on herself, ducking her head and crossing her arms more tightly. "Nothing good has ever come from my kind reaching too far into the realm of the invisible," she whispered, voice ragged with shame.

Sam stepped up to look her in the eye and cup her face in his hands. It had been a long time since he saw her so unhappy. It tore at his heart. Gently, he asked: "You told me once that you considered loving Tron as great a directive as your laser work. Won’t you consider loving me the same way?"

Face twisting in agony, Yori tore away from his touch.

"That is not fair!" she cried, tears forming in her eyes. "LoraB and Alan-1 gave us that love as surely as they gave us our reason for existence. I’ll never be sure of anyone again the way I was of Tron. You have no idea how hard it is sometimes, when I look at you, not to think that all the love I have for you will never be enough to - will never -"

"Yori..." Sam started helplessly.

He reached for her again, and this time she burrowed into his embrace, face pressed to his chest, and wrapped her arms around him tightly.

"This would be forever, Sam," she whispered. "My functions can’t exist in your world, I can feel it. A part of me touches the realm of the invisible every time you use me. The thought of going there, it’s..."

"Scary?"

Yori looked up, and in her eyes Sam saw the reflection of worlds he couldn’t so much as picture, let alone begin to comprehend. "You can’t even imagine."

"If we get through this, Lora might be able to write a new digitization program someday," he offered consolingly. "It doesn’t have to be forever."

Yori shook her head. "I’m seventy-two percent sure I can do it. But I have no idea if I’m... viable for your world."

Sam’s heart soared. "You have Lora’s data stored, right? You could use that."

"Should be compatible..." she murmured, gaze turned inward in concentration.

"So you’ll come?" he asked, trying not to sound too eager.

She gave him a long look. Then one corner of her mouth pulled up in a crooked little smile. "Do I have a choice?"

Sam considered it one last time, taking in the unhappy tension in her features.

"Yes, you do," he said eventually. "I can still try to run."

"But the odds would be better if I were a real girl." She studied his face with an intensity only programs seemed capable of. There must have been something good there, because she nodded. "I’ll do it."

Sam knelt over a woman sprawled out in the middle of the road. The rain had stopped, but not before it plastered her blond hair to her face, obscuring her features, and drenched her clothes. Though heavy tremors wracked her body, she was utterly unresponsive.

Sam didn’t have to feign his horror.

At the shriek of tires across wet asphalt, he jumped up and ran toward it, waving his arms and yelling "Hey! Hey! Help!" Five yards for him and an alarming number for the car later, he recognized the vehicle and came to a skidding halt.

Quorra’s warning had earned him a thirty minute head start; a look at his watch moments before told him it was just over five minutes since he crashed his bike. Any other day, he would have hated being right. Right now, he just hoped what he’d done was worth it.

And that these guys weren’t planning to run him over.

They weren’t. He backed away, but the only thing that hit him was water thrown up by the wheels of the car. Sam backed away further, looking frantically around him for an alley or some other source of darkness and cover and escape. The car spilled two expensively dressed thugs, weapons drawn, and Sam’s gaze swept over the crumpled, trembling woman. Her fingers twitched like she was trying to grab hold of the puddle they rested in. For some reason his eyes snagged on the sight. He stilled, all pretense at wanting to run dropping. Clenching his jaw, he put his hands up in the air and turned to face Dillinger’s goons.

"Please - I need to call an ambulance. I hit her with my bike, I just didn’t see her with all the rain, she needs an ambulance. I’ll give you the keys to the arcade," he said, voice genuinely strained and loathe to form the words. "Just please let me borrow a cell phone."

The goons exchanged glances. The one on the right nodded, and the one on the left marched up to Sam and gave him a one-handed frisk search, the other hand still keeping his gun pointed at Sam’s chest. The arcade keys got yanked from his jacket pocket and tossed over to the right-side goon, who had moved around to the front of the car.

Then Yori started convulsing.

Panic flooded Sam’s skull.

"Oh, Jesus." He from Left-Side Goon’s grasp, unthinking, uncaring, threw himself down beside her and yanked off his jacket and stuffed it under her head to keep her from banging it bloody on the pavement. "No, no, what have I done?!"

"Christ. Stay here and watch him," Right-Side Goon said somewhere above him. "Let him make his call. I won’t be long."

He headed toward the arcade. Sam had to force himself to remember the plan, to keep half an eye on Right while Left thrust a phone at him and took an uncomfortable step away from the seizing, maybe dying woman in Sam’s arms.

Sam dialed 911, put the phone on speaker, and thought furiously. The car was right there, empty, doors open, engine running. The only thing standing in the way was the remaining goon, gun still trained on him. And Sam may be an overconfident adrenaline junky, but he knew better than to try those odds.

"This is nine-one-one, please state the nature of your emergency."

Abruptly, Yori’s spasms stopped. Yori’s everything stopped. She went limp, her head lolled to the side, and after a few long, frozen moments - "This is nine-one-one, please state the nature of your emergency. Are you there?" - Sam realised her chest was too still.

"No. No no no, this can’t -" The phone clattered to the ground. He grabbed her wrist, looked for the vein, failed, shook her. Tears brimmed his eyes from one moment to the next. "No, please -"

"Dammit, just what we needed," the goon growled, though he sounded more nervous than the one with the gun had any right to be. He stepped over Yori and knelt down opposit Sam to press two fingers to the side of her throat. "Hold still, you moron, I can’t get her pulse with you shaking her."

The moment his fingers made contact with Yori’s skin, her eyes shot open. Her eyes were so wide and bright and blue in the slanted glow of the street light, Sam could have sworn they lit up for a moment behind the curtain of wet hair still plastered to her face. She drew in a whistling breath, and then everything happened in a blur.

Her hands shot out. She grabbed the goon by the hair and the back of his neck, sat up and twisted around, and in one fluid movement, she slammed the goon’s head into the asphalt right where Sam, instinctively scrambling out of the way, had been moments before. The force of her throw toppled the goon over in a summersault, and he smacked down onto the road, rainwater splashing up.

He lay on his back and didn’t move again.

Out cold with one blow, Sam thought, stupidly surprised - just as Yori’s luminous eyes shot to him with almost superhuman speed.

Sam scrambled back a little more.

Yori blinked. At once, the eery almost-glow in her eyes was gone, and her face lost its blank, mask-like rigidity. Her breath sped up and she pressed a hand to her head with a grimace. The downed goon caught her eye.

"What happened?" she rasped, wiping her hair out of her face.

"I should be asking you!" Sam exclaimed, still wide-eyed. But he jumped to his feet and helped her up. His Grid-bandaged arm protested the strain, but with all the adrenaline in his veins, only slightly.

"Did my self-defense subroutines kick in?" Yori asked, dazed.

"You have those?"

She gave him a look that wasn’t dazed at all. Really? it said. Me? Do I have self-defense training?

"Right," he said. He looked around for the phone he’d dropped. He didn’t see it, but he’d dropped it approximately where the goon now lay, so the guy had probably landed on top of it. Good. That would have muffled anything incriminating they may have just said. But 911 would triangulate their position and dispatch a car regardless. Sam didn’t want to get caught up in the mess that would cause, not with a freshly analogue-ized program in tow, but with any luck one or both of Dillinger’s men would be taken in by the police or the hospital or both.

He led Yori to the goons’ car. "Come on, we gotta get out of here."

"You already crashed your cycle, are you sure you’re good to drive?" she asked.

"You certainly aren’t. You just had a seizure." He urged her into the passenger’s seat and buckled the seat belt for her, shooting nervous glances at the arcade doors all the while.

"I’m fine, I just got a little laggy from the processing strain. I feel better already."

"Good enough to handle the additional strain of driving?"

She considered that when Sam moved around to the driver’s side, and by the time he closed the door behind him, she was grimacing and rubbing her temples. "No."

When Sam drove off, Yori contorted in the restraints of her seat to keep the arcade in her sights for as long as possible.

The User world was an overwhelming blur of textures and patterns and foreign input channels, to say nothing of the barrage of error messages in her head, at once impossibly vague and distractingly penetrating. Trying to process too much of it just yet caused her vision to darken and her ears to stopper. She let the whole flow over her and away, filtering her focus to a handful of details.

Like looking back to Flynn’s Arcade. Her home was in there. Her entire world was in there. She’d spent more than half her runtime there, and now it remained to be seen whether she would ever set foot there again.

User buildings blocked her view eventually, and the stimulus quickly made her dizzy, so she pressed her back to the seat - no disc dock to slot into, no disc at all - and looked at Sam.

So this is the real you, she thought.

He was different here, though she lacked the processing power to contrast and compare properly while her updates were in progress. She’d have plenty of time, though. This world was her future now. Sam was her future now. Whether this venture worked out for better or worse... in good times or in bad, sickness or health, no matter how long it would take.

Wait, she had a User-vocabulary entry with that tag.

"Did we just get married?" she asked muzzily.

Sam didn’t take his eyes off the road, but his expression was priceless. In retrospect.

It was a while before they had the time and peace of mind to clear that one up. It was a while before they had the time and peace for much of anything. The whole affair had taken them almost as far away from Sam’s residence as Yori was from her home world, and left them stranded in the middle of nowhere (which was very green and windy) with only a stranger’s motorcycle and the clothes on their back.

Yori felt much better, but Sam was running on fumes (she’d seen actual fumes by now and understood the nebulous User expression that much better) and looked like he could shut down any moment.

"This time I’m driving," Yori decided, strapped on her helmet, and straddled the cycle.

"Sure," Sam answered dully, installing his own helmet. A moment later, he stopped and said, "Wait. Do you even know how to drive one of these?"

Yori raised an eyebrow. Surely he wasn’t so low on energy he’d forgotten the way she’d saved his hide the first twenty times?

"In this world, I mean," he clarified. "The controls are totally different, for one."

"Just get on," Yori said with a smirk.

He did, wrapping his arms around her waist and pressing his broad chest to her back, warm and solid and enticing in strange but not unpleasant new ways.

"Do you know what programs do in their spare time, User?"

He hmm-ed, a warm, deep rumble, and the realisation that sound could be felt in this world was a wonderful one. "Play disco frisby? Mix radioactive drinks? Dance terribly?"

Yori smiled. "That too. But when we get really, really bored? We poke through all your stuff."

Sam laughed. "Well that’s not creepy at all."

"I’ve seen the specs for these machines. I could take one apart and reassemble it in my sleep cycle," Yori said, making the engine roar to illustrate her point. "And to answer your question, yes, I do know how to drive within the parameters of this world. Conversion, extrapolation and improvisation are a big part of my programming."

"Great, because I’m not gonna be of any use." The plane of his helmet came down on her shoulder with a thunk. "Let’s head home then."

Yori stilled.

Sam seemed to have guessed why, because he lifted his head, rubbed her stomach through the material of her jacket, and said, "You know what, I take that back. Let’s head for Alan and Lora’s. One step at a time."

Yori took a deep breath and smiled. "Right."

And that’s where she took them.