Evil has spawned in Cyberspace. An overlord by the title of the Master Control Program, the MCP, unforgiving and 
malevolent, governs a world deep beyond transistors, processors and diodes. The entities that dwell under his rule are programs. Those unlucky enough to be singled out are forced into duals where to win means further imprisonment, and to lose: de-resolution. Like gladiators in the arenas of the Roman Empire, kill or be killed in the name of entertainment. The administration is brutal and powerful. Nothing, it seems, can threaten its command or lift the despair. Belief in the “Users” of the Real World and any help they might bring is not tolerated. Users are Gods, the operators who created the programs themselves. How would a User fare inside his own artificial construct? One is about to find out.
In the early 80’s Disney Studios, masters of the craft of animated films, embarked on a new project that would forever transform film-making. Tron tells the story of Flynn, a programmer, who becomes sucked into a surreal universe inside a computer. The world is populated by “programs”: personifications of computer code. Tron is one such program that Flynn forms an alliance with, in their quest to overthrow the rule of the MCP.
The transformation of Flynn from Real to Virtual world takes place in an R&D lab, in ENCOM’s premises. Flynn is looking for evidence of wrong-doing that may be stored in the computer’s data base, and believes he can hack into the system and retrieve it. It seems the ENCOM Corporation have not carried out a Risk Assessment for this particular workstation. Otherwise it would surely have highlighted the dangers of having a chair in the direct line of fire of a laser beam, wired to a megalomaniac computer with ambitions to conquer the world. Flynn is transported into a virtual domain and is forced into engaging in lethal combat through the medium of video games, some of which are his own design. He must have been grateful that he wasn’t involved in the making of Donkey Kong, as instead of buzzing around in space-age motorcycles trailing a blade of light, or commanding cool neon tanks, he’d be scrambling up ladders and avoiding barrels slung by an irate gorilla.
ENCOM’s system is governed by the MCP, a particularly brutal dictator. The MCP was originally created as an AI program, but its intelligence has increased two thousand fold since, and seeks to expand its power further into the real world by means of extortion. When not overseeing the merciless death of contestants in the games arenas, it is illegally integrating many smaller programs, which we see as a torturous process whereby the MCP cannibalises their essence.
To a modern audience, the special effects may seem laughably basic, but Tron pioneered the ground-breaking technology that made them possible. Computer animation was painfully slow, along with other labour-intensive video processes, but the futuristic look of the film was widely praised. Remarkably, Tron was excluded from an Oscar nomination for visual effects, because the use of computers was deemed to be underhand. This seems ludicrous by modern standards when the success of CGI is gauged by how indiscernible digital imagery is merged with the real environment.
The notion of an all domineering Artificial Intelligence was the stuff of sci-fi in the early 80’s, when my ZX Spectrum was running Horace Goes Skiing, but has crept uncomfortably closer nearly forty years on. Tron is probably the first film that shaped my young impressionable mind that bad robots might become a reality (and kill us all). Can Tron provide anything by way of an antidote? When AI becomes sentient and decides to take over, we will need to have in waiting a disc-flinging, light-cycle riding, good-guy superhero, Fifth-column renegade. I’ll need to brush up a bit on BASIC before I attempt to write that. Also at the ready: an arcade champion programmer genius that can infiltrate the system and is prepared to hurl his virtual embodiment into the massive head of a killer power-crazed lunatic. That sounds dangerous. The world of Tron might already be a reality, thriving at a quantum level within the processor of my teenager’s Xbox; all the more reason to turn it off and get on with his homework. And should Microsoft upgrade their motion sensing Kinect device to include a high powered laser, I think we’ll stick with the one we’ve got.
– Anthony Brum.
Please check out my space adventure for middle-grade/ 9-12 year olds- “Imbrium City: Rise of the New Defenders,” available on all e-book readers and Amazon paperback large print.
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