Tron by Brian Daley

“User-friendly.” I bet this joint isn’t, he thought. He looked up from his hands, eyes wide. A tentative conclusion came to him, awful in its implications.
    He forced himself to confront the things he’d heard and seen and felt, without self-deception. If reality was the product of mind—if awareness shaped existence—then, might not other intelligences fashion other worlds? Reality’s a matter of opinion, Flynn’s mind pounded at him. We’re all wave fronts on this bus. He recalled Lora and Gibb’s experiment, and had a feeling he knew what had happened. He thrust those preoccupations aside, freeing his mind to deal with problems at hand.
    Flynn turned and addressed himself to the fiendishly designed cell, and found no relief. It was cramped, allowing no comfort and providing little room, and had a transparent ceiling, undoubtedly for the convenience of guards. He’d never been fond of single-room occupancy.
    Flynn’s attention was drawn by low voices; he spied an opening to an adjoining cell, wherein a figure leaned in conversation with the prisoner in the next cell along. He couldn’t make them out too clearly except to note that they shared his luminescent appearance.
    Ram glancing over his shoulder at Flynn, murmured to Tron, “New guy,” and sized him up.
    Tron shook his head in regret. “Another free program off the line.” How many more, he wondered, would it take to put the entire System under the MCP and stamp out faith in the Users?
    Ram sighed. “You really think the Users are still there?” He had put a note of doubt in it that alarmed Tron; if Ram wavered in his loyalty, who might not?
    Tron was drained by constant rounds of competition in the arena and the confinement, which permitted no real rest. And he had thought, often, of the one he missed most, of she who meant everything to him. Not freedom, not survival, meant more than seeing Yori once more. At times, it seemed, his faith had come near failure. What was the point of it, what did it matter? MCP promised to take over the System without any real opposition but Tron’s. Why hadn’t the Users intervened? But then, Tron knew, they had— he was their instrument. But the cause, to set things right and restore order and purpose and safety to the System, seemed lost. Instead, there would be the dictatorship of Master Control Program and the savage spectacles of the beast Sark.
    But, as always, another thought surfaced. Why would Sark and the MCP be so determined to stamp out loyalty to the Users if that loyalty didn’t threaten them? The Command Program and the MCP were the fanatics, not the User-Believers; their brutal efforts to suppress belief in the Users only served to confirm convictions vital to Tron. As they increased their oppression, so they reinforced his faith.
    “They’d better be,” he answered Ram, “I don’t want to bust out of here and find nothing but a lot of cold circuits waiting for me.” And Yori! his mind resounded, the most elemental of prayers.
    Ram smiled at Tron’s comment; wordlessly, they sealed the agreement that there would be no bowing to Sark and Master Control, and that there would be a future.
    Flynn, at his window, strained to make out his fellow prisoners more clearly. “Hey!” They turned to him in the dimness. He made to reach through the opening. “Who are you guys?”
    As his hand came into the area framed by the opening, it was stopped by something he couldn’t see. Discharges leaped outward from his fingers; a bolt of pain/heat/cold coursed up his arm. He snatched his hand back in shock, jaw dropping. “ Youch! ”
    One of the figures turned, and Flynn could see him more clearly. “You want to watch those force fields,” Ram said. Flynn couldn’t have been more in agreement.
    He came over to Flynn, a figure of radiant colors, gray predominating, limned with the circuitlike lines, resembling some celestial being. He wore armor and helmet, as did Flynn, but not the half-tunic,