Tron

All things considered, allowing the program to turn on his own has been a success. We capture the ringleader—a woman named Aila—relatively easy, and without her, and with Das' release, the rest of her network crumbles; though I'm not certain yet if the rumors Das takes with him are worth the cost. Rinzler doesn't seem to care. That's the most disturbing part. Though he masks his emblem, surrendering to some semblance of good sense he must have somewhere in his spiteful, dogged, impossible form, he doesn't seem to care that people look at him when he's out with us.

People don't see him for who he is.

But they do sense enough of him to know to stay away. They look at him sideways, sizing up his strange circuits with their diagonals and bands, the bands on his helmet bright against its opaque surface. They're used to seeing that helmet on me, now. To see it on someone else, someone orange, is more unnerving. They know when they look at him that it's wrong.

Nevertheless, he has his utility. Radi is the only one who readily volunteers to work with him, and I rarely send him anywhere where I won't be close behind, but that alien, deadly quality he has serves its purpose in enforcement. When he takes down a program, they believe he may kill them. It's in the tone of the few words he ever says. I'm waiting for the day that he actually follows through: I'm going to take his head off and be done with him when he does.

Until then, I tolerate him at a distance. A very great distance. It's sometimes through Yori that I speak with him at all . . .

Her relationship with him is strange. They speak minimally, and stare constantly, when the other is in the room. She has memories of him, I know, that are mixed up in memories of us, and of the two of them separately. I can't quite reach the memory—he took it with him—of the times she woke him from his mechanical reverie, but I can see them moving uninhibited behind his eyes, and it heats my circuits well past what they were meant to tolerate.

Yori never says his name.

He never says hers.

But he looks at her, and sees something I can't know. Or, if I do, it's something I'd rather not see.

Yori

The day they take down the warehouse, finally resolving the issue of illegal weapons downloads in the Alpha sector if not in Beta, Rinzler walks in with a baton strapped to each thigh. Neither are the one I gave him to replace his last one.

"Where is your baton?" I ask him as he and Radi move through the room, their mission reports in hand.

"Broken."

"He's not gentle with his materials," Radi says, her vocal terrain as flat as the arena's floor, "it's a good thing the warehouse was stalked or he'd have been walking home."

"This is not home," he snaps. She shrugs.

"'Is for me."

His words are few and clipped when he speaks, but it never fails to stun me how articulate he is. It's so unmistakably him. I heard him speak so rarely and the sound was so broken when I did, but there's a signature to his vocal output that I don't think I could ever erase from my memory. It rings through me sometimes when I'm in standby, mixing with Tron's, mirroring my waking battle between the two. Tron is distant so long as Rinzler is present. Rinzler is cautious so long as Tron is. The fact that neither of them ever allows me to be in between them is exactly what makes me feel like I am. The only thing that spares me is really how unreal Rinzler still is—one can't reconcile what one doesn't recognize. So it's deeply unnerving to have exchanges with him that might qualify as normal.

"If that's a warehouse baton, I need to see it."

"Because you want to track me."

"That was our agreement, wasn't it?"

He simply stares. Radi interjects, plugging in her mission report to my terminal.

"Are you going to make us some upgrades while you're at it?"

"I'll take whatever she was making and do you one better, you know that." I let myself smile a little, a touch of confidence and flare, and I can feel Rinzler's strange sea-eyes on me. I try not to return the stare.

"Good. I need a new bike."

Rinzler is slipping away behind her, slinking off while she has my attention.

"I didn't say you could keep that other baton," I call after him. He stops and pivots to look at me over his shoulder, something sharp in his eyes that doesn't match his unbothered tone.

"I didn't ask you."

"That wasn't the deal."

"The deal was that you need me. And I need a baton."

"I'll get you another one of mine."

". . . No, I think I like this one."

He turns to walk away, stopping only when Radi speaks, though it's not to him.

"He's not exactly hard to spot if he runs off," she says, shrugging. "Besides, Rinz needs something with a jet. No one deserves to have to share the road with how he drives."

Rinzler stops dead in his tracks and whips around.

"What did you call me?" he snaps. His eyes are wary, bewildered.

"A shortcut designation," Radi declares, deadpan and shrugging again. "Life in this system is short and two syllables is long after a shift like today, so you'd better get used to the sound of it, partner."

Rinzler's eyes narrow, but he says nothing.

"Parner?" I interject.

"Yeah."

"Is there something I should know?"

Radi's eyes narrow. She crosses her arms and leans into one hip to stare me down.

"Yeah, actually: if you and Tron could get it through your geriatric code that he's been nothing but useful to us, that'd be great. I waste half my time on missions keeping tabs on him to keep Tron happy when we could both just be doing our jobs, and it's a bit-brained waste of resources. He's good out there."

"He's good at a lot of things, not all of them beneficial," I remind her. He's still there, behind her, watching the exchange from his careful distance with sparks in his eyes and a strategically languid posture that belies the prepared-to-bolt tension in his legs, and his eyes snap to mine as I speak. A warning pops into my vision as my cycling ramps up.

"Good thing I don't exist to benefit you, then," he says. It's not a snarl. It's sharper than that, cleaner. It turns my processing sour, not just because of the bite in the words or the almost-guilt they strike through me, but because of an unsaid something that hangs off the end of the sentence. I don't exist to benefit you, then, Yori. Something pointed. Something he's calling me that's just outside of hearing but is written all over his face. His sharp, fresh face, so full of determination and defiance but with something very soft at their centers. It's moments when he looks like this that it strikes me that he's so young.

And it's in the moments he does, strangely, that he—this impossible ISO born of a butcherer's memory—can remind me most of Tron.