Tron: Deliverance

........ONLINE

Lora was trying very very hard not to bite her nails. She hadn't done it in years. Broken the habit cold. But now she wanted to gnaw.

She'd taken to fiddling with the Yori program on her second screen while she watched programs offload and the Grid start to fracture behind them. It was close. Way too close for her liking.

Roy was working furiously on keeping the system stable. Riley at his side. She didn't have his experience but she was holding down leaks in the Titanic like a pro.

Rachel and Rebecca were somewhere in the mess of server stacks.

"Is this the kind of plug you were talking about?" Rachel's voice filtered through the growing dust cloud as they waded through the stacks.

"Yeah, let me plug that in here" there was a popping sound. Rachel let out a soft gasp.

"Well that was painful" Rebecca deadpanned.

"Why do I smell something burning?" Roy snapped, his eyes never leaving his screens.

"Are you girls alright?" Lora asked.

"Don't worry everyone. Got a little zap, apparently some of this isn't grounded quite right. I'll work on it" Rachel stuck her head around a server stack. A faint haze of smoke curling behind her.

"Well get a lid on it. We don't need to all die by electrocution on top of this system catching fire" the man harrumphed. His concern was warranted, the basement had gotten up to a balmy temperature. The air that used to smell of dust now had the distinct smell of hot plastic. The basement had been heating up for awhile, which was a very bad sign on top of all the horrible signs they'd been getting today.

"Please be careful girls" Lora wanted to jump out of her chair but a new line of programs were ready for offload, she had to turn back to her screen and transferred them over to the drive.

Rachel sighed "Well if you're not burned Becca, I'll hop upstairs and get those fans plugged in. Its getting too hot down here" the shortest sister weaved out of the mess to beeline up the stairs.

"Make sure you're steering clear of my breakers! We can't afford to blow anything right now" Rebecca called after her.

Lora offloaded the last program in the batch and queued up the next one. While those were loading she shifted a line on her program. She was nearing the end of her recode on Yori. But if she was being honest she had no idea what would happen if she let her run. She typed in a final line on the completed program and considered rezzing her up.

Then Roy's voice stirred her from her contemplation.

"Hey, what?" He was usually so reserved the edge of panic made her hackles shoot up. She turned her chair around to see him leaning towards his screen, typing furiously.

"What did you do dad?!" Riley hissed, also typing away. Lora hopped up to look over Roy's shoulder. Her blood went cold.

"Where is everyone?" Lora asked in a deadly calm voice. Roy was watching the team on the Grid while Lora managed the offload. The life signs they'd followed for several days now were completely gone. Roy unhooked his headset and let the audio link play through the speakers. It was only static from the people on the inside. Lora leaned down and hit the hotkey.

"Lora to Alan, do you hear me?"......silence. She nudged Roy aside and pinged everyone on the inside. Still no response. They were just gone.

"When did you lose them?" Lora demanded.

"Just now" Roy muttered "they went inside the compound, I heard them talking about it feeling weird in there. Then I got a buzzing sound and everything cut off"