Free Tron by Brian Daley Page B

loyalty, could not now deny to himself an awe of the Users. He himself had never been able to expunge it, and suspected, though he would never have voiced it, that he shared it with the MCP. “Users wrote us. A User even wrote you.”
    “NO ONE USER WROTE ME!” the MCP stormed, and the Carrier quaked. Sark shrank from that anger. “I’m worth millions of their man-years!” It was a warning so plain that Sark dared not pursue that subject any further.
    “But, what if I can’t—” he labored.
    “You’d rather take your chances with me?” Somewhere, the MCP altered the flow of energy. “You want me to slow down your power cycles for you?”
    Sark the Champion felt the influx of power ebb, felt his own energy level plummet alarmingly. The eddy-currents of energy around the podium’s sockets faded as the power fled from him. He slumped weakly, clutching the handgrips for support. Within him a terrible emptiness rose, debilitating and not to be defied, reminder of who was servant, and who master.
    “Wait,” he gasped. “I need that.” Humbled, deprived of the strength Master Control allowed him, he saw that total obedience or total obliteration were his only options. Without Master Control he was not Champion, nor Command Program, nor even Warrior. The MCP misered its power jealously, and would accept the service only of those who obeyed it without question and without hesitation. And for Sark, existence was pointless without the high rank conferred upon him by Master Control. He’d drunk too deeply of power.
    “Then, pull yourself together,” Master Control ordered with nothing but severity in its tone. “Get this clown trained. I want him in the games until he dies playing. Acknowledge.”
    “Yes,” Sark managed, clinging to his podium, chastised. “Acknowledged, Master Control.”
    The MCP watched him for another moment, and the Red Champion could feel its scorn. It was reassured once more that it, and it alone, held sway in the System.
    And soon it would be so in that Other World; the Users would learn! “End of line,” Master Control announced, and its projection disappeared.
    Energy surged; Sark felt it rush through him, revitalizing, filling every part of him with strength and life. And still it came, swelling him until it seemed to radiate from him, lifting and exalting him. Sark threw back his helmeted head and drank it in, glorying in it. If bending knees to the MCP was the price of such indescribable power, he told himself as he rode the exultation, then it was a bargain with which he was content.
    Flynn was being escorted down a long corridor, past door after door. The nearness of the doors to one another suggested very small rooms; he had a stomach-wrenching feeling that he knew what they were.
    The two guards in front of him stopped by one of the doors and it opened to some mechanism or command he couldn’t detect. Flynn hung back, hoping against hope that the cramped space within wasn’t meant for him. One of the guards said, “Video Game Unit #18. In here, program.”
    Flynn’s temper got the better of him. He reached for the guard, snarling, “Who you callin’ ‘program,’ program?” But the guard grabbed Kevin Flynn with overwhelming strength while his fellow brandished a staff threateningly, and hurled Flynn into the cell.
    The universe whirled around him while Flynn fought to recover physical and mental balance. The notion of simply ignoring it all, of trying to wake up or wait things out, wouldn’t do. He’d felt pain when the guards had roughed him up, and time seemed to be passing at a realistic rate; events would continue, he was convinced, whether he wanted them to or not.
    He leaned against the door, looking down at his hands. They glowed and pulsed. He was willing to bet that he was no longer seeing in the 3700-to-7000-angstrom range, and wasn’t particularly eager to think about the rest of his bodily functions. A hardware phrase occurred to him: