Culver City, California, Flynn’s Arcade
The rain fell in sheets against the cracked pavement outside of Flynn’s, an abandoned arcade that had sat on the street corner for who knows how many years. Jason Williams, ten year old, was supposed to stay the night there for initiation into an elite club. They called themselves the Blue Hawks, and they were the terror of the fifth grade. Jason was one of those kids that didn’t have much going for him in the way of popularity. He didn’t have very much friends, he wasn’t very athletic, but he could dance around numbers like nobody’s business. He loved numbers, in fact, he had shown such promise in math, that he had been put in some gifted classed for smart kids like him.
It was stuff like being really smart that put him on the Hawks hit list. When they had realized that he was so much smarter than them, the bullying started. Deciding to make the smart choice, he purposely flunked all his classes, and then asked if he could join their elite club. Even though his parents hadn’t been very happy with him at the end of the first trimester, he was glad that the bullying had all but stopped when they said he could join.
But first things first they said. You have to prove that you have the right stuff to prove you can hang with us, they said. That initiation had been what had brought Jason to the abandoned arcade, a couple years after Sam Flynn had ridden off into the sunrise with his new girlfriend that had come from nowhere. Jason had actually met Sam Flynn when he was younger, and he idolized him.
Jason had never been afraid of the old arcade, even with all of the stories saying it was haunted, that people could see blue and red light shining out of the basement windows, or that you could see dead people when the moon was full. They were just stories, and Jason didn’t believe a word of any of them.
He slipped around to the side of the building, almost slipping on the slick road. Locating the side door in the dark, Jason turned the knob and walked inside. Turning on his flashlight, he walked past some trash bags slumped against the faded cracked walls. The beam cut through the thick dust like a lightsaber, and clearly illuminated the ancient arcade machines lined up in the main room.
Setting down his rolled up sleeping bag, Jason cleared a small area on the floor to sleep for the night. After unrolling the bag, he sat down and took out his game boy that he had brought with him. He played Mario, Pokemon, and Legend of Zelda until the green light turned red. With a sigh, Jason turned it off and went over to one of the front windows.
Using the sleeve of his hoodie, he wiped some of the condensation off the foggy windows so he could look outside. The rain had long stopped, but the streetlamp still reflected off the puddles on the road. Shooting a glance at his watch and noting that it was almost midnight, he turned around and started looking at all of the arcade games that hadn’t been used for a good long time.
With his flashlight beam cutting through the dust like a razor, it was easy to look at each console, and while he recognized some, others he had never heard of. Pac-man, Space Defenders, Joust, Frogger, Donkey Kong, and many others lined the arcade, forgotten by time and hidden here with no one to remember them. Walking toward the back, Jason saw one arcade game that stood out, one that he definitely remembered. Tron. He had found an online version of this game on his laptop, and had loved it ever since.
Walking up to the console, Jason noticed that the dust was thinner than it was on some of the other consoles, like someone had used this game recently. Intrigued, he walked up to the console and wiped the dust off its screen and controls. Even though the building didn’t have power, Jason wished with all his heart that he could someday play the game on the original console.
Walking around to the side of it, he noticed a strange anomaly in the dust on the floor. It looked like the dust had been pushed backwards away from the arcade game, in an arc that matched the width of the game’s casing. Looking closer, Jason noticed a series of hinges connecting the game to the wall.
“Weird,” Jason said, his first spoken word inside the arcade echoing throughout the large room. Grabbing the ancient machine by the sides, he heaved it sideways. With a groan that sounded like a drawn-out gunshot in the silence, the arcade game swung outward about two inches. Looking into the small opening, Jason was greeted with a blast of stale air.
Taking out his flashlight, He shined it down into the small crack and could barely make out a hallway that hung a left off in the distance. Feeling elated that he had found something, he started pushing the Tron game with renewed determination. After a few grunts of exertion, he finally opened up a wide enough space to slip through.
He was startled by the game as it automatically swung back into place and locked with an audible ‘click.’ Pushing and shoving on the back of the machine to no avail to escape, Jason had to give up.
Grabbing his flashlight up off the floor, Jason shined it in front of him and started walking. Unbeknownst to him, his foot sliced through a laser that had been set up directly across the hall behind the arcade machine. As the beam was disrupted, it sent out a silent signal to the residence of Sam Flynn. A tiny black security camera whirred to life and located the small child turning around the corner.
Walking down a set of stairs and turning around another corner, Jason was met with a giant steel wall with a door in the middle of it. After exhaling in wonder, he walked forward and tugged at the handle. When it didn’t budge, he looked around for a key or something he could use to open it.
He found a set of rusty keys hidden inside of a hollow brick that had fallen out of the wall and onto the ground. After turning the keys inside the lock and pushing the door open, Jason was greeted by a near empty room, with the only noticeable things a desk and some kind of telescope machine thing pointed toward the ceiling. Jason felt disappointed; he had expected to have found something awesome after all the trouble it took to get in here.
Walking over to the machine in the middle of the room, he didn’t notice the security camera watching his every movement. As he reached the machine, he felt mildly impressed by the technological wonder whose secrets he probably would never know. Jason walked over to the desk to see if there was anything interesting over there.
He wiped some of the dust off the desk and was surprised to see that it was actually a computer screen. Strings of random numbers and words sped across the screen, and they started flashing on and off. The laser powered on with a whirr and aimed itself at Jason’s back. Warnings started popping up, and the computer and laser started sparking and smoking.
Starting to get freaked out, Jason edged sideways, trying to get out of the way that the laser that was pointed at him. He started panicking as it only followed him, and he started backing away to the door. He turned his head away as the smoking computer exploded, and while he was distracted, the laser fired.
Instead of turning him into data and sending him to the grid, it blasted clean through him, only managing to convert some of his torso into data that shattered upon impact when he hit the wall. Gasping, Jason slumped to the floor and clutched at the gaping hole in his stomach, as blood and small blue cubes leaked out.
The laser lowered on its own accord, and fired again, blasting him and effectively derezzed his head, as it exploded into those small blue cubes that scattered across the dusty floor. With its last bit of energy, the laser exploded, throwing the dead body of Jason across the room and into another wall. Jason’s body dissolved into pixalized cubes of matter upon impact, and then the only evidence of him was a small pile of bloody blue bits.
Sea of Simulation, The Grid
The tranquil waters of the sea of simulation meant death to all of the unlucky programs who fell into its deep and unrelenting depths. But they once had given birth to the Isos, who were unique in being not created by Flynn, but by the grid itself. They were living data, capable of thought and reason, and actually having a unique genetic code. They had all been murdered, but the grid wasn’t done yet.
The water rippled, and a humanoid form rose up from the deep, water falling off it in a wave. It took a shaky step, but fell onto the sandy beach. It looked at it’s hand, and gasped when it and the rest of it’s body lit up, suddenly covered in glowing white lines that were arranged in a strange geometric pattern. A brighter symbol glowed on it’s arm, and when the light faded, there was a glowing hexagon with a stubby letter ‘T’ to it’s side.
It spoke, knowing it’s one and only memory, a name. “My name… Jason.”
That had happened thirty years ago.
