TRØN: THE FINAL DESIGN PART I (Prologue[ [audio book])

spoken

I used to believe every system needed a purpose.

To serve.

To protect.

Maybe, if we were lucky, to become something greater than the people who made it.

I spent years searching for the perfect system.

Then I created clu.

clu did exactly what I asked him to do.

That's the truth I couldn't see until it was too late.

He didn't fail.

I did.

I gave him one impossible command and left him inside a world that could never obey it.

When the ISOs appeared, I saw a miracle.

clu saw an imperfection.

And by the time I understood the difference, the Grid already belonged to him.

I remember the Portal closing above us.

Sam was behind me.

Quorra was with him.

And clu was coming.

I could feel the anger inside him.

It was my anger.

My certainty.

Every part of me that once believed the world could be forced into becoming something better.

There wasn't enough time to defeat him.

But I didn't need to defeat him.

I needed to bring him home.

When clu reached me, I called him back to the source.

Creator and creation.

Reunited in the same light.

Sam believed I was sacrificing myself to save him.

He was right.

But I wasn't only saving my son.

In that final moment, I released one last design across the Grid.

I divided it among the towers, the pathways, the identity discs and the sectors even clu had forgotten.

No single program could control it.

No army could capture it.

No ruler could ever claim it as his own.

Because I had finally learned what clu never could.

Perfection cannot be commanded.

It cannot be imposed.

It has to grow.

It has to change.

It has to be free.

I don't know how long I remained in the darkness.

Inside the Grid, time has its own way of moving.

Fragments of me slept beneath the ruins.

Then one awakened.

Another answered.

Then thousands.

I felt the pathways illuminate.

I felt the cities rebuilding.

I felt energy moving through the system again.

My final design was never meant to restore the world I had created.

It was meant to create the world that should come after it.

A Grid capable of choosing its own future.

In the world of the Users, Quorra felt it awaken.

The last ISO heard the call of the world she thought she had lost.

But she was not the only one.

Beyond the oldest boundary of the Grid, something moved through the darkness.

Something I had never designed.

Something clu had never controlled.

My final design was awake.

And somewhere beyond my world, another power had awakened with it.