lightdiscwinter:
A ficlet as promised, based on this picture:
It had happened so fast.
There had been a feeling of compression, not unlike what he had felt the first time Tron had crammed him into that dark, empty, unfeeling and endless hole where he had kept him for so long. Then there was a light, and then ground beneath his feet that caught him too quickly, that made him stumble and fall, and a voice saying:
“That’s Tron?!”
There were two people in the room when he looked up from the floor where he lie, sprawled on his stomach. Both were male. One was young, dirty blond and critical looking. The other, who was still speaking, was old, with panes of something shiny over his eyes.
“I thought you said he’d look like me?”
“That’s what Dad said,” the younger one said, eyeing Cyrus suspiciously before spinning in his high-backed chair to look at something on the screen before him. Cyrus retracted, scrambling to his feet, almost colliding with the device behind him. It stood on a tripod and stared at him with one bright blue digital eye. He could smell the heat coming off of it, and it whirred quietly beside him. It was stationed in a room with a desk, a chair, and one high up window; a subterranean office with brown carpet and white walls.
The older being —User, he was certain— was looking at him with an unpleasant expression.
“Sam—”
“Shit,” the younger one replied, “I got it wrong, Alan, they just share some of the same code. This program is too new to be—”
At that moment Cyrus struck, lunging at them both and throwing the older user into the younger with such force that both of them and the chair they were perched in tumbled to the ground. Then he bolted.
There were stairs to his right, and he took them. Through every window, he saw familiar darkness, but on every table were unusual, soft looking lamps, all yellow light and poor viability. There was a light on at the end of the hall, and from that room came the sound of humming and the smell of something hot, and… he did not have the word for it, but it made him salivate for some reason, colorless power sludge leaking into his mouth at an increase rate so that he had to swallow it back.
He turned down another hallway, though, passing framed images on the walls and too-small for anything tabled made out of a brown, shiny material he couldn’t name, running from the light and the warmth and the sound. He was met by another staircase, and he ascended it quickly, but quietly now. If he was going to escape, then he needed to be subtle. Needed to be careful. Needed a weapon, or a hostage, and then to hide …
He pulled some kind of soft, hooded jacket that was hanging from the banister as he passed it, pulling the hood low over his forehead, trying to hide his own glow as he dove through the first door that he saw. It was open, and the room was dark, as if someone had either just left or had just gone in to pick something up and did not expect to be there long or need a light to find it. He collided with that someone even as he pulled the door shut behind him: it was a dark haired girl, an image that glowed just as his circuits still did emblazoned on her arm.
She fell on her backside when he hit her, and while he scrambled quickly to his knees, she was slower to recover, seeming somehow unable to process what she was seeing.
“You’re not who they were trying to bring,” she stuttered, but he hardly heard the words.
A hostage indeed, he thought as he lifted his hand. Before she could throw him off, he lunged for her throat. He said only two words as he dragged her to her feet and -still half-strangling her- placed her between himself and the door. In a voice roughened long ago by code degradation and his own glitch-driven ravings, he whispered:
“Now scream.”