![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
actualjedimasterThis is a novel. Use the cut tag at your own risk.
The Canon
Things start off according to canon. In 1982, Kevin Flynn breaks into Encom after getting fired so that he can find proof that Edward Dillinger was stealing his stuff. He gets zapped into the computer by the MCP, meets Tron and Yori and Ram, and eventually manages to get home with proof that Dillinger did indeed steal his stuff. He then used his business acumen and some really awesome lawyers to depose Dillinger and end up CEO of Encom. (There was also probably some creative stock buying going on, since he had controlling interest in the company and passed that on to Sam later, but I digress.)
After reorganizing the company around the idea of universal access to personal computing and the beginnings of what would later become open-source project development, Flynn started work on a secret supercomputer project he called the Grid. The Grid was meant to be his gift to the world-- a way to bring the world of programmers together with that of their programs, since directly working together might achieve a lot. To create the founder population of the Grid, he called on some programs he already knew and recruited others from the Encom network, asking around for copies of various bits of software for an experimental system. (This later led to allegations that he was embezzling funds since he never did get around to sharing that project with anybody, but again. Digression.)
He also married Jordan Canas somewhere between 1982 and 1983, and in 1983 his son Sam was born. The pregnancy took him away from the Grid a lot, so he installed two things that turned out later to be very important-- a primitive version of voice over internet protocol so that he could get emergency calls from Jordan, and a Codified Likeness Utility who could take on some of the work-load when he was away from the system. Things were pretty awesome, even if he spent a lot of time picking fights with the board of Encom because he was scarily good at figuring out trends in business and tried to take advantage of them before anyone else cottoned to it.
And then things blew up, probably somewhere in 1984-5 given Sam's age in the relevant part of Betrayal. Jordan died suddenly (probably car accident) and left Kevin a single parent who was trying to juggle a top-flight software company and playing part-time god to the Grid. Political factions at Encom took advantage of the mess to try and depose Flynn as CEO (since controlling interest isn't everything) and things were also destabilizing in the Grid between the appearance of the Isomorphic Algorithms and other, longer-standing problems that Kevin kept promising to look into and then never had time to deal with. None of this was helped by his shitty home life and blossoming tendency toward megalomania without someone reliable to slap him upside the head with a rolled-up newspaper.
A lot of people on all sides tried to warn him of the collapse, years before it finally happened. Flynn was so wound up in himself that he didn't pay attention, and sometime in the fall of 1989, things got really fucked up. While on a late vacation with Sam, Kevin went to go check on the Grid, and during that time Clu pulled the trigger on a coup that had been in the works for years. In the ensuing chaos, Flynn's friend and staunchest supporter, Tron, was fatally wounded, Clu stomped on Tron City and most of the surrounding environs with an army and a killer virus, a lot of ISOs were murdered in a Blitz-like assault, and, oh yeah, Kevin got trapped in the Grid because of poor design choices.
Alcohol Helps Everything
An ISO named Gibson, along with a number of like-minded wary people, was at least ahead of the curve. He managed to snag Flynn before he could blunder into Clu's army and smuggled him to Bostrum Colony. Then Flynn did the only thing he could think of at the time-- got hella drunk. It was epic.
The hangover after was even more epic, especially considering it also involved some emergency coding to move as much of the colony as possible out of Clu's way.
When the dust settled and news filtered in that the Bostrum Kernel left behind had been virused and then also bombed to hell, Kevin sat up, wished aspirin existed in the computer, and made some very important vows to himself.
#1: Never ever fucking drink that much again. He was accidentally zapping people for a Grid-week after that.
#2: Stop running away and start dealing with the reality right in front of his nose. No more pretending that the computer-world was all pretendy fun-times that could take care of itself, because clearly it wasn't and he almost died a couple times over during the initial blitz... and if he wanted to live to see Sam again, he was going to have to just stop.
#3: Shut up and pay attention. That was the first rule in those self-help books that his parents shoved on him in regards to getting his life back together, and while the meditation and non-attachment and stuff was all also cool, not shutting up and paying attention was what got him into this mess.
Flynn and Gibson picked up Anon and tried to launch a last-ditch effort to save as much of Arjia as they could, but between the hangover and Clu's steamroller offensive, Gibson ended up with a case of virus and Anon had to go on alone. (Flynn was able to arrest the virus's progress, meaning in this AU Gibson survived but remained a carrier of the Abraxas virus.) Arjia still got steamrolled, Radia still got killed, and Quorra still got kidnapped. Flynn sent Anon to rescue Quorra and, more importantly, to take out Clu's command ship to give everyone a chance to actually frigging regroup.
Clu's rampage was eventually stopped and Abraxas derezzed as normal. Flynn managed to rerezz Anon from backup after he got himself fragged saving Quorra. Then there was nothing to do but dig in, since Clu still had control of an entire frigging army, and all Flynn had was one system monitor and a handful of crazy civilians.
The Resistance
Kevin had one major problem: Clu. The only guaranteed way to stop Clu would be to reintegrate with him, to basically shred his code and take back the copied bits of Flynn's own psyche that went into making him. Problem was that Clu wasn't really designed to go back in once he came out, and that meant it would likely seriously mess up or kill Kevin if he tried... and getting out to see Sam again was a big item on his agenda. Direct confrontation was out-- Clu was too tied into the Grid to delete cleanly, and Flynn didn't dare risk taking him back.
At first, Kevin tried the direct route. It was a straightforward enough plan. Code a bunch of fighters, make strategic strikes against Clu's forces, grab command and then quarantine the glitchy admin. Three problems with this: One, Clu could and did just reprogram Flynn's forces, replacing or even expanding his own in the process. Two, a new program named Rinzler popped up and cut a swath through anything Flynn could code. Three, Flynn just really sucked at tactics. Video games were one thing, but he missed the RTS boom of the early nineties and anyway real combat just wasn't a game. Flynn was a powerhouse and the only source of new programs in the system... but that megalomania meant he couldn't bring himself to delegate.
Needless to say, the resistance was pretty boned for a while-- Basics naturally flocked to the User for guidance even though it was shitty guidance, and the ISOs alternately hid or joined up with Bostrum. The one best thing that happened during the early cycles was that the resistance was able to set up a pretty solid communications, supply, and transport network under Clu's nose, boosted by Flynn's encryptions and other little hacker tricks.
Thankfully, Flynn had Gibson and then later Shaddox as lieutenants, and kept vow #3 and listened when they cornered him to gravely inform him that he sucked at running things. (Sure, he sulked and maybe came pretty close to breaking vow #1, but he did pay attention this time.)
Flynn retired from actively leading the resistance and created a series of safe houses scattered throughout the Outlands, both to serve as his own workshops/bases of operations and for general Resistance use. Gibson, Shaddox, Anon, and the other leaders of individual cells stepped up and took overall command of what was going on.
It was still a desperate and ugly slog. Anon ended up falling in battle, too badly hashed to recover. Quorra stepped up to take his place, over Flynn's objections (she was the littlest ISO). It quickly dawned on the Resistance exactly who Rinzler was, and it became a bit of a bone of contention between Flynn and the other leaders when he wanted to bring Rinzler in and try to de-rectify him and the others just wanted to delete the guy and be done... assuming that was possible. There were fights. Flynn broke up with the Resistance multiple times, always getting dragged back in when things got too intense for the programs to handle on their own. They were all he had left at that point.
What did Flynn do with his time? Focused on the things that only a User could take care of, mostly thorny technical problems that, if solved, would take care of things.
First was the Grid's instability. Deleting most of the ISOs didn't solve the system's problems, just mitigated the damage a little bit. Since he was stuck inside and actually able to study and witness the faults and crashes, Flynn was finally able to do something about it after a while. (Of course, he also had the incentive of needing to live long enough to get out...) Surveying and tweaking the Grid's base coding and physics was a decent distraction when he was on the outs with the Resistance, so even past solving the instability problems he spent a lot of time optimizing. It was probably a big part of the reason why the system kept running despite twenty years of wear on the hardware. (Clu, naturally, took credit for all of it, but then the system's stability had him cracked in ways that nothing to do with the ways he'd cracked in the first place.)
Second was resurrecting the primitive VOIP to get a message out. The tie into the phone system was still there, and since the power stayed on it was reasonable to think the phone did as well. The problem was, Flynn had pulled a lot of that once Sam was born, declaring it a drain on the system's resources. However... Tron had a pager plug-in. Encom's Tron had always been able to page Alan in the event of a serious problem, since the hours between going home and getting back into the office at nine AM could be crucial ones. Discerning if Rinzler still had the plug-in and getting him access to the phone lines to summon help was the only serious operation Flynn planned for the Resistance once he retired from running it. It would still take a thousand cycles to pull off.
Part of that was his other major project-- trying to reel in and de-rectify Rinzler. It was a frustrating step-forward-two-back process, since every time Flynn managed to snag Rinzler alone and start to get through to him, Clu would sweep in and pull the leash even tighter. Flynn knew he wasn't as familiar with Tron's coding as he should have been, but he also couldn't leave Rinzler like that and couldn't bring himself to join the others in trying to kill the guy.
Between that, Flynn spent a lot of time working on other smaller projects, mostly bases, equipment, tools, and intelligence gathering. Even though he'd sometimes spend tens of cycles not stirring from one of his safehouses, he was generally well-connected and busy. Since Flynn was the User, he also handled as many re-rezzing and recompiling cases as he could without giving away his location to Clu's forces. Once in a blue moon, he'd go out among the programs incognito, usually when it looked like a new Resistance cell was popping up, but tried to stay out of the actual hierarchy.
On top of that was Flynn's personal project that was all about not being so much of an asshole. He took up meditation and actually reading a lot of those important books he'd imported for the ISOs. He taught a ridiculous number of programs how to play fizbin and other random User games that didn't involve computers. He got toasted and argued philosophy with Bostrumites, tried to be a decent uncle-figure to Quorra, and made an effort not to sink into the same black hole of self-pity and apathy that had contributed so much to getting him into this mess.
Things settled at a fairly stable stalemate-- Clu's own instability meant that slowly the Resistance was able to chip away at his control of the system. Even if Sam hadn't appeared in 2010, it's likely that the Resistance would have managed to put Clu down.
Legacy
Of course, Sam did show up in 2010, and that kicked the hornet's nest.
The Rinzler-page plan finally went through, and Flynn and the Resistance geared up for the last big push. Resistance forces would take on Clu's head-on to serve as a combination distraction/military offensive while Flynn would grab whoever came through, make a last swipe at Rinzler, and GTFO to settle things once and for all with the Unix prompts waiting outside. Quorra was riding along as Flynn's super kill guy partner, since even a thousand cycles later he was.. kinda not that great at fighting. Everyone figured it would be a breeze, since while it was likely Alan would flail a bit, Alan was also pretty unstoppable when riled up.
And then it was Sam, not Alan, who got picked up and appeared on the Game Grid. While Flynn catspazzed and re-drew plans, Q ran to the lightcycle arena to pick Sam up and deliver him to the safehouse closest to Tron City that Flynn was using as a staging area. The whole thing seemed kinda screwy when Clu didn't send anyone to follow, and soon the reason why took shape.
The disappearances that had been both a boon to the Resistance (fewer Clu-allied programs!) and also a bane (more of our guys also disappearing!) were being mass rectified. Clu had finally rebuilt the Regulator and hatched an insane scheme to use the command ship to attack the User world. Rinzler had finally been able to send the page because Clu needed someone to find and activate the laser. The only missing piece was a User access key-- something Flynn figured Alan would have granted himself before coming in, and something that otherwise sat on his own identity disk. Clu had used Sam as bait to bring Flynn out for a shot at the key when it became apparent that Sam hadn't built himself a User profile before zapping in.
Problem was: the plan would never work and probably permanently fry the laser in the process of not working, potentially finally frying the Grid as a whole as well.
There wasn't any debate about staying in the safehouse and doing nothing-- there wasn't anything stopping Clu from trying again for Alan once the Portal closed again. If anything, Alan was more likely to find the Grid with Sam missing as well. Sam went ahead to clue in Zuse and the rest of the Resistance network, as well as requisition flying gear, while Flynn finished shutting down his own stuff, but it turned out that Zuse had finally cracked, convinced that Clu was going to win after all, and betrayed Sam's location.
Flynn and Quorra ran to the rescue, his ID disk was lost, and everyone hitched a ride on the Solar Sailer as per canon. Unlike canon... well, Flynn started his conversation with Sam out by apologizing for not being the kind of father he should have been. No mentions of being willing to burn down the system for another day were made. Quorra took the opportunity to sorta-flirt with Sam. Flynn ended up meditating, because like or not this was also probably going to end with the direct confrontation with Clu that he had been dreading for a kilocycle.
They hit the Rectifier. Quorra made the sacrifice play to lead Rinzler away-- there was no way to grab him now-- and give Sam and Flynn a chance to get one of them out and stop Clu from potentially shorting the whole Grid. Sam went back for Quorra anyway, stealing Flynn's disk back in the process. The dogfight-and-glitch-fest happened, and Flynn traded disks with Quorra before they landed. He couldn't leave, not with Tron potentially drowning in the Sea behind them, and besides, Sam could made the calls and execute the commands as well as he could. (And.. well.. there might not have been enough juice in the laser for all three of them, and like hell was he going to leave Quorra where Clu could grab her.)
It didn't matter. Clu caught up with them, and in the end, Quorra shoved Sam through the Portal. Flynn's confrontation with Clu was a lot less suicide hug it out and a lot more come at me bro/I should have done this a long time ago, but ended pretty much the same. Clu was reintegrated. Flynn had the worst case of existential heartburn ever. It was kinda boomy.
Sam shut it down/backed up the Grid. And then he rode home with Quorra after thoroughly confusing Alan because it was too long since he'd slept for making sense to be a thing.
The Canon
Things start off according to canon. In 1982, Kevin Flynn breaks into Encom after getting fired so that he can find proof that Edward Dillinger was stealing his stuff. He gets zapped into the computer by the MCP, meets Tron and Yori and Ram, and eventually manages to get home with proof that Dillinger did indeed steal his stuff. He then used his business acumen and some really awesome lawyers to depose Dillinger and end up CEO of Encom. (There was also probably some creative stock buying going on, since he had controlling interest in the company and passed that on to Sam later, but I digress.)
After reorganizing the company around the idea of universal access to personal computing and the beginnings of what would later become open-source project development, Flynn started work on a secret supercomputer project he called the Grid. The Grid was meant to be his gift to the world-- a way to bring the world of programmers together with that of their programs, since directly working together might achieve a lot. To create the founder population of the Grid, he called on some programs he already knew and recruited others from the Encom network, asking around for copies of various bits of software for an experimental system. (This later led to allegations that he was embezzling funds since he never did get around to sharing that project with anybody, but again. Digression.)
He also married Jordan Canas somewhere between 1982 and 1983, and in 1983 his son Sam was born. The pregnancy took him away from the Grid a lot, so he installed two things that turned out later to be very important-- a primitive version of voice over internet protocol so that he could get emergency calls from Jordan, and a Codified Likeness Utility who could take on some of the work-load when he was away from the system. Things were pretty awesome, even if he spent a lot of time picking fights with the board of Encom because he was scarily good at figuring out trends in business and tried to take advantage of them before anyone else cottoned to it.
And then things blew up, probably somewhere in 1984-5 given Sam's age in the relevant part of Betrayal. Jordan died suddenly (probably car accident) and left Kevin a single parent who was trying to juggle a top-flight software company and playing part-time god to the Grid. Political factions at Encom took advantage of the mess to try and depose Flynn as CEO (since controlling interest isn't everything) and things were also destabilizing in the Grid between the appearance of the Isomorphic Algorithms and other, longer-standing problems that Kevin kept promising to look into and then never had time to deal with. None of this was helped by his shitty home life and blossoming tendency toward megalomania without someone reliable to slap him upside the head with a rolled-up newspaper.
A lot of people on all sides tried to warn him of the collapse, years before it finally happened. Flynn was so wound up in himself that he didn't pay attention, and sometime in the fall of 1989, things got really fucked up. While on a late vacation with Sam, Kevin went to go check on the Grid, and during that time Clu pulled the trigger on a coup that had been in the works for years. In the ensuing chaos, Flynn's friend and staunchest supporter, Tron, was fatally wounded, Clu stomped on Tron City and most of the surrounding environs with an army and a killer virus, a lot of ISOs were murdered in a Blitz-like assault, and, oh yeah, Kevin got trapped in the Grid because of poor design choices.
Alcohol Helps Everything
An ISO named Gibson, along with a number of like-minded wary people, was at least ahead of the curve. He managed to snag Flynn before he could blunder into Clu's army and smuggled him to Bostrum Colony. Then Flynn did the only thing he could think of at the time-- got hella drunk. It was epic.
The hangover after was even more epic, especially considering it also involved some emergency coding to move as much of the colony as possible out of Clu's way.
When the dust settled and news filtered in that the Bostrum Kernel left behind had been virused and then also bombed to hell, Kevin sat up, wished aspirin existed in the computer, and made some very important vows to himself.
#1: Never ever fucking drink that much again. He was accidentally zapping people for a Grid-week after that.
#2: Stop running away and start dealing with the reality right in front of his nose. No more pretending that the computer-world was all pretendy fun-times that could take care of itself, because clearly it wasn't and he almost died a couple times over during the initial blitz... and if he wanted to live to see Sam again, he was going to have to just stop.
#3: Shut up and pay attention. That was the first rule in those self-help books that his parents shoved on him in regards to getting his life back together, and while the meditation and non-attachment and stuff was all also cool, not shutting up and paying attention was what got him into this mess.
Flynn and Gibson picked up Anon and tried to launch a last-ditch effort to save as much of Arjia as they could, but between the hangover and Clu's steamroller offensive, Gibson ended up with a case of virus and Anon had to go on alone. (Flynn was able to arrest the virus's progress, meaning in this AU Gibson survived but remained a carrier of the Abraxas virus.) Arjia still got steamrolled, Radia still got killed, and Quorra still got kidnapped. Flynn sent Anon to rescue Quorra and, more importantly, to take out Clu's command ship to give everyone a chance to actually frigging regroup.
Clu's rampage was eventually stopped and Abraxas derezzed as normal. Flynn managed to rerezz Anon from backup after he got himself fragged saving Quorra. Then there was nothing to do but dig in, since Clu still had control of an entire frigging army, and all Flynn had was one system monitor and a handful of crazy civilians.
The Resistance
Kevin had one major problem: Clu. The only guaranteed way to stop Clu would be to reintegrate with him, to basically shred his code and take back the copied bits of Flynn's own psyche that went into making him. Problem was that Clu wasn't really designed to go back in once he came out, and that meant it would likely seriously mess up or kill Kevin if he tried... and getting out to see Sam again was a big item on his agenda. Direct confrontation was out-- Clu was too tied into the Grid to delete cleanly, and Flynn didn't dare risk taking him back.
At first, Kevin tried the direct route. It was a straightforward enough plan. Code a bunch of fighters, make strategic strikes against Clu's forces, grab command and then quarantine the glitchy admin. Three problems with this: One, Clu could and did just reprogram Flynn's forces, replacing or even expanding his own in the process. Two, a new program named Rinzler popped up and cut a swath through anything Flynn could code. Three, Flynn just really sucked at tactics. Video games were one thing, but he missed the RTS boom of the early nineties and anyway real combat just wasn't a game. Flynn was a powerhouse and the only source of new programs in the system... but that megalomania meant he couldn't bring himself to delegate.
Needless to say, the resistance was pretty boned for a while-- Basics naturally flocked to the User for guidance even though it was shitty guidance, and the ISOs alternately hid or joined up with Bostrum. The one best thing that happened during the early cycles was that the resistance was able to set up a pretty solid communications, supply, and transport network under Clu's nose, boosted by Flynn's encryptions and other little hacker tricks.
Thankfully, Flynn had Gibson and then later Shaddox as lieutenants, and kept vow #3 and listened when they cornered him to gravely inform him that he sucked at running things. (Sure, he sulked and maybe came pretty close to breaking vow #1, but he did pay attention this time.)
Flynn retired from actively leading the resistance and created a series of safe houses scattered throughout the Outlands, both to serve as his own workshops/bases of operations and for general Resistance use. Gibson, Shaddox, Anon, and the other leaders of individual cells stepped up and took overall command of what was going on.
It was still a desperate and ugly slog. Anon ended up falling in battle, too badly hashed to recover. Quorra stepped up to take his place, over Flynn's objections (she was the littlest ISO). It quickly dawned on the Resistance exactly who Rinzler was, and it became a bit of a bone of contention between Flynn and the other leaders when he wanted to bring Rinzler in and try to de-rectify him and the others just wanted to delete the guy and be done... assuming that was possible. There were fights. Flynn broke up with the Resistance multiple times, always getting dragged back in when things got too intense for the programs to handle on their own. They were all he had left at that point.
What did Flynn do with his time? Focused on the things that only a User could take care of, mostly thorny technical problems that, if solved, would take care of things.
First was the Grid's instability. Deleting most of the ISOs didn't solve the system's problems, just mitigated the damage a little bit. Since he was stuck inside and actually able to study and witness the faults and crashes, Flynn was finally able to do something about it after a while. (Of course, he also had the incentive of needing to live long enough to get out...) Surveying and tweaking the Grid's base coding and physics was a decent distraction when he was on the outs with the Resistance, so even past solving the instability problems he spent a lot of time optimizing. It was probably a big part of the reason why the system kept running despite twenty years of wear on the hardware. (Clu, naturally, took credit for all of it, but then the system's stability had him cracked in ways that nothing to do with the ways he'd cracked in the first place.)
Second was resurrecting the primitive VOIP to get a message out. The tie into the phone system was still there, and since the power stayed on it was reasonable to think the phone did as well. The problem was, Flynn had pulled a lot of that once Sam was born, declaring it a drain on the system's resources. However... Tron had a pager plug-in. Encom's Tron had always been able to page Alan in the event of a serious problem, since the hours between going home and getting back into the office at nine AM could be crucial ones. Discerning if Rinzler still had the plug-in and getting him access to the phone lines to summon help was the only serious operation Flynn planned for the Resistance once he retired from running it. It would still take a thousand cycles to pull off.
Part of that was his other major project-- trying to reel in and de-rectify Rinzler. It was a frustrating step-forward-two-back process, since every time Flynn managed to snag Rinzler alone and start to get through to him, Clu would sweep in and pull the leash even tighter. Flynn knew he wasn't as familiar with Tron's coding as he should have been, but he also couldn't leave Rinzler like that and couldn't bring himself to join the others in trying to kill the guy.
Between that, Flynn spent a lot of time working on other smaller projects, mostly bases, equipment, tools, and intelligence gathering. Even though he'd sometimes spend tens of cycles not stirring from one of his safehouses, he was generally well-connected and busy. Since Flynn was the User, he also handled as many re-rezzing and recompiling cases as he could without giving away his location to Clu's forces. Once in a blue moon, he'd go out among the programs incognito, usually when it looked like a new Resistance cell was popping up, but tried to stay out of the actual hierarchy.
On top of that was Flynn's personal project that was all about not being so much of an asshole. He took up meditation and actually reading a lot of those important books he'd imported for the ISOs. He taught a ridiculous number of programs how to play fizbin and other random User games that didn't involve computers. He got toasted and argued philosophy with Bostrumites, tried to be a decent uncle-figure to Quorra, and made an effort not to sink into the same black hole of self-pity and apathy that had contributed so much to getting him into this mess.
Things settled at a fairly stable stalemate-- Clu's own instability meant that slowly the Resistance was able to chip away at his control of the system. Even if Sam hadn't appeared in 2010, it's likely that the Resistance would have managed to put Clu down.
Legacy
Of course, Sam did show up in 2010, and that kicked the hornet's nest.
The Rinzler-page plan finally went through, and Flynn and the Resistance geared up for the last big push. Resistance forces would take on Clu's head-on to serve as a combination distraction/military offensive while Flynn would grab whoever came through, make a last swipe at Rinzler, and GTFO to settle things once and for all with the Unix prompts waiting outside. Quorra was riding along as Flynn's super kill guy partner, since even a thousand cycles later he was.. kinda not that great at fighting. Everyone figured it would be a breeze, since while it was likely Alan would flail a bit, Alan was also pretty unstoppable when riled up.
And then it was Sam, not Alan, who got picked up and appeared on the Game Grid. While Flynn catspazzed and re-drew plans, Q ran to the lightcycle arena to pick Sam up and deliver him to the safehouse closest to Tron City that Flynn was using as a staging area. The whole thing seemed kinda screwy when Clu didn't send anyone to follow, and soon the reason why took shape.
The disappearances that had been both a boon to the Resistance (fewer Clu-allied programs!) and also a bane (more of our guys also disappearing!) were being mass rectified. Clu had finally rebuilt the Regulator and hatched an insane scheme to use the command ship to attack the User world. Rinzler had finally been able to send the page because Clu needed someone to find and activate the laser. The only missing piece was a User access key-- something Flynn figured Alan would have granted himself before coming in, and something that otherwise sat on his own identity disk. Clu had used Sam as bait to bring Flynn out for a shot at the key when it became apparent that Sam hadn't built himself a User profile before zapping in.
Problem was: the plan would never work and probably permanently fry the laser in the process of not working, potentially finally frying the Grid as a whole as well.
There wasn't any debate about staying in the safehouse and doing nothing-- there wasn't anything stopping Clu from trying again for Alan once the Portal closed again. If anything, Alan was more likely to find the Grid with Sam missing as well. Sam went ahead to clue in Zuse and the rest of the Resistance network, as well as requisition flying gear, while Flynn finished shutting down his own stuff, but it turned out that Zuse had finally cracked, convinced that Clu was going to win after all, and betrayed Sam's location.
Flynn and Quorra ran to the rescue, his ID disk was lost, and everyone hitched a ride on the Solar Sailer as per canon. Unlike canon... well, Flynn started his conversation with Sam out by apologizing for not being the kind of father he should have been. No mentions of being willing to burn down the system for another day were made. Quorra took the opportunity to sorta-flirt with Sam. Flynn ended up meditating, because like or not this was also probably going to end with the direct confrontation with Clu that he had been dreading for a kilocycle.
They hit the Rectifier. Quorra made the sacrifice play to lead Rinzler away-- there was no way to grab him now-- and give Sam and Flynn a chance to get one of them out and stop Clu from potentially shorting the whole Grid. Sam went back for Quorra anyway, stealing Flynn's disk back in the process. The dogfight-and-glitch-fest happened, and Flynn traded disks with Quorra before they landed. He couldn't leave, not with Tron potentially drowning in the Sea behind them, and besides, Sam could made the calls and execute the commands as well as he could. (And.. well.. there might not have been enough juice in the laser for all three of them, and like hell was he going to leave Quorra where Clu could grab her.)
It didn't matter. Clu caught up with them, and in the end, Quorra shoved Sam through the Portal. Flynn's confrontation with Clu was a lot less suicide hug it out and a lot more come at me bro/I should have done this a long time ago, but ended pretty much the same. Clu was reintegrated. Flynn had the worst case of existential heartburn ever. It was kinda boomy.
Sam shut it down/backed up the Grid. And then he rode home with Quorra after thoroughly confusing Alan because it was too long since he'd slept for making sense to be a thing.
Tags: