Illegal Entry, by alorian (PG)

[laughingacademy.livejournal.com]

Fandom: TRON
Pairing: gen
Length: ~7,200 words
Author on LJ: tenshi_no_korin
Author Website: Odessa Castle
Warnings: Spoilers for TRON and Legacy.
Why this must be read:

Roy Kleinberg is a patient man — he had to be, to conduct a twenty-year hunt for Kevin Flynn — but when he suspects that (a) there’s been a breakthrough and (b) longtime ally Alan Bradley and new boss Sam Flynn are keeping him out of the loop, he decides a little B&E is in order.

He was bending down to inspect the power leads to the laser when the roar of a bike engine came from outside. Roy stood up too fast, and his glasses slid off his hair and landed with a clatter by his sneakers. Off-balance and afraid of stepping on his glasses, he reached out wildly to steady himself on the closest solid object.

Something clicked under his fingers. Roy looked up into the irising aperture of the laser lens, and had just enough time to be very, very sorry.

...

The first thing Roy did was to finish falling down. It was a natural, fluid motion, following up the stagger that had started when the laser beam hit him square in the chest. He landed on his backside on something cool and smooth, and spent the first few seconds just being glad he was alive. Then he got a good hard look at his surroundings, and he wondered if that really was the case.

A curious side-effect of Roy's forays into the worlds of subterfuge and conspiracy was that it had left him infected with more than a few ideas that, in polite terms among average citizens, could be considered batshit insane. He was a firm believer in the Government's cover-up of UFO evidence (as anyone would be, if they had seen the same top-secret files Roy had seen), as well as numerous theories about life after death, quantum physics, parallel dimensions, and time travel. He was a scientist through and through, but somehow that background only made things worse, as it had imbued him with a natural acceptance that--theoretically speaking--anything was possible.

Roy Kleinberg was sitting smack dab in the middle of a possibility he had never even considered. Was he alive? Dead? A subconscious clone of his astral persona? It could be any, all, or none of the above. What he did know was it was dark, and it smelled not unlike a server room's cool, electric, halon-tinged atmosphere. It was deathly quiet. He was in a narrow space between buildings, little more than an alley. And yet he knew, immediately and without question, that he was a whole hell of a long way from being in Kansas anymore. Gingerly he got to his feet. The road beneath them was black, but not asphalt. It was as smooth as brushed steel, and thin threads of blue light cut down either side of it, tracing a little circle where he stood. Roy took one step forward and the lights beneath him vanished, leaving him alone in the dark. The mouth of the alley was faintly lit, the thin mist illuminated by distant lights. Roy walked out into it, looked up, and felt as though he was falling into the sky.

The city went on forever. It plunged upward for miles upon miles, sketched out of thin lines of light and broad planes of gleaming darkness. Fireflies of colored light pulsed and crossed in the air above him, flying at an impossible distance. It was wholly unfamiliar--Roy had certainly never been there before--and yet it stirred something in his memories, something he had seen a long time ago. In a flash he recalled the conference room in the old Encom building, a wall full of game concept art, and Kevin Flynn feverishly outlining the epic tale based on the fictionalized adventures of Alan Bradley's Tron program against Dillinger's MCP.

Fictionalized? Roy thought, and clutched the wall of the alley for support. No. It couldn't be. For the love of God, those Loch Ness Monster autopsy photos he'd stumbled on in '96 were more believable than this.

Alorian does a wonderful job of extrapolating from what we learned about Roy in “The Next Day” (the Legacy bonus feature which summarizes the in-universe history of Flynn Lives). He doesn’t have Kevin’s charisma, and he’s more highly strung than Alan, but he’s as clever and determined as either of them, and it’s wonderful to see him finally get some answers — not to mention meet his cheerfully gung ho search program, Ram 6.

“Illegal Entry” on Livejournal, Tumblr, and the author’s website. (There is an equally good five-part prequel, “Location Query,” about Alan’s first trip to the Grid, his introduction to Ram, and their search for Tron and Kevin, but I think this also works as a standalone story.)