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tron_genficTitle: “Up and Apart”
Rating: PG (language)
Author: Allronix
Characters: S. Flynn and J. Bradley
Summary: Even the closest of brothers grow up...and sometimes grow apart.
Disclaimer: Monolith Games and Buena Vista Interactive came up with Jet, Disney proper owns the rest.
Note: This is an attempt to do a canon mash-up between 2.0 and Legacy, so I've had to fudge some details in regards to the fate of Lora Baines-Bradley. This also postulates that 2.0 and Legacy both happened in 2010.
September, 2009
When they work together, it's the closest someone can get to being a single mind in two bodies.
“Security guard on seven,” Jet whispers through his microphone. “It's going to switch over to camera three-delta for about five seconds. That's all the time you'll get.”
Strangers mistake them for brothers. Vicious rumors speculate they actually are. They're six months apart in age with near-identical sets of cobalt-blue eyes, a connection with computers that freaks out seasoned code jocks, and a knack for trouble that's landed them both in the LA County lockup a few times.
And tonight is theirs; The Great FlynnShow, Version 2.0, coming once a year to Encom HQ with surprise guest Jethro Bradley...
“Got it,” comes the thin whisper.
Time to give Thorne something else to worry about. Routing the signal through an anonymous filter application and remote-accessing the terminal of one of the guys in Facilities who forgot to log off. No matter how good the security systems you can put in a computer, the end user is still the weakest link in the chain, especially the type of end user who considers computer illiteracy to be a source of entirely misplaced pride. Just remote in, use the administrator password they never bothered to change, and...
“I'll give them a distraction. Running an unexpected test on the fire alarm system.”
He can hear Sam's sniff through the Bluetooth. “How cliche.”
“Hey, if it works.”
They grew up together and discovered all the usual ways a pair of boys could find trouble. From daring each other into sneaking into an abandoned factory at age eight (which ended with a broken arm for Sam), creating fake IDs to get backstage at a Zeromancer concert, egging each other on in a street race between his BMW and Sam's Ducati (which landed them in the LA County lockup, but Jet is still a little proud of the fact he won that race). After Sam's grandfather died and his grandmother's health declined, he and Jet lived in the same home from age fourteen to college. Sam went Caltech (and dropped out Junior year), while Jet graduated UCLA. During the summers and breaks, they were back to being a pair of kids looking to see how far they could push themselves and each other – always in sync, always a team.
Six months prior, Jet apparently traded in his hell-raising days for a steady paycheck and adult responsibilities. He hadn't wanted to work in the same company as his father, but with the economy being in the skids, he swallowed his pride and got a job coding levels and drawing concept art for Encom's game division. He focuses on his job and has even come to really enjoy it.
It's the rest of the company that makes him grit his teeth. He's slow to anger. That part he gets from his parents. Dad puts up with too much bullshit up in the boardroom, where the executives trot him out like some old mascot and call him obsolete behind his back. Jet wants nothing to do with the power-jockeying and backstabbing. Dad just can't get that. After Mom's accident and permanent relocation to DC, it just kept getting worse between them. They can be in the same room sometimes and feel like they're on different planets.
A distant part of Jet knows what he's doing would really upset his dad, but he pushes that down for the moment.
“Sam, where are you?”
“Maintenance Stairwell.” Sam's breath is quicker now, and there's the sound of tennis shoes on concrete. For as many times as he's done this, Sam hasn't figured out how to sneak around properly. Good thing that old stairwell is made of concrete and doesn't have cameras. Facilities keeps talking about installing them, but then everyone forgets.
“Watch the noise,” Jet warns. “They'll hear you even through the wall. What floor?”
“Eight.”
Jet does the mental calculations. Why was this so much easier last year?
“Deepak is burning the midnight oil, so you might get caught. Try floor nine. No one's working there, and if you use that key you stole on five, then the closet just left of the stairwell has a janitor's cart. All the better if you want to look like you belong there.”
“Did you memorize this building or what?”
“You want that answer, Sam?”
Silence. Guess Sam didn't want the answer.
After he started working there, Jet went looking for all the places where he could take a laptop or sketchpad and not get interrupted. The downside was that the office gossips took advantage of the same places. They'd forget he was there, and Jet would learn things in lowered voices and snide words; mergers and acquisitions, a build that was going out to the customer with critical bugs just to get it out by deadline, people who were shopping their resumes under the boss's nose, who was sleeping with who...
When the rumors went back to the people he loved, that hurt. Every laughing dismissal of Alan Bradley as a clueless old fossil, every mention of Roy Kleinburg as a pathetic loser spinning wild conspiracy theories, every time some old-school programmer or developer sighed and said Old Man Gibbs would be spinning in his grave, and especially when those rumors about his mother, father, and Uncle Kevin come up...
That's why he was here. After all, Sam's annual stunt was never overtly malicious, just a little prank on the people in Encom who had traded innovation and imagination for what was profitable and cheap. Those who understood approved, those who didn't were the intended target. Not much different than slipping a picture of Bugs Bunny in a dull professor's tedious slide show.
Still, there was that part of him that knew this was a bad idea. No matter how much fun the annual prank was, it didn't change anything. If Sam really wanted to change things, he could just waltz in with his fifty-five percent share and start laying down the law.
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MOD:
Date: 2011-06-25 12:17 am (UTC)Re: MOD:
Date: 2011-06-25 08:54 pm (UTC)Re: MOD:
Date: 2011-06-25 11:30 pm (UTC)