Who would emerge victorious in a fight between Tron and the Agents from the Matrix?

“I’m in.”

Trinity slung the Mac-10 SMG on its strap over her shoulder and looked around carefully. None of the half-dozen security guards lying prone around her moved.

“On your left there is an elevator,” said Morpheus, a tinny voice in the sleek little cellphone Trinity held to her ear. “The entry code is 1–1-3–8. Take it to sub-basement level four. Do it now.”

Trinity said nothing as she followed the instructions. Morpheus could follow her progress in the scanner on the Nebuchadnezzar without a running commentary. She stepped off the elevator into an anonymous white corridor populated with equally anonymous white doors. She glanced only briefly at the security camera, knowing They would be watching her. There was nothing she could do about it. She had less than ten minutes before she could expect Agents, but it should be enough.

“Which one?” said Trinity.

“Third door on your left,” said Morpheus. “It looks like They’ve randomized the entry code.”

“Not a problem,” said Trinity, and it wasn’t. Fifty grams of shaped HE charge blew the door entirely out of its frame.

Inside, the large, warehouse-like space was filled with bulky steel equipment and spanned by catwalks. The air smelled of ozone.

“Ten metres to your right there is a staircase. The workstation is on your left at the top.”

Trinity moved quickly, a mental timer counting down in her head. She powered up the workstation and if the monochrome CRT surprised her, her expression was hidden behind dark aviator shades. “CP/M.” she said. “Quaint.”

Cellphone sitting beside the keyboard, her fingers flew rapidfire over the keys. She frowned and paused long enough to cradle the cellphone between shoulder and ear. “You were right, Morpheus, it’s a much older prototype of the Matrix. Crude. I think the microwave in the galley has more lines of code. Uploading now.”

“Got it,” said Morpheus. “Go!”

“Leaving,” said Trinity, rising.

“Wait,” said Morpheus. “Agents.”

“Shit.” The Mac-10 snapped into Trinity’s free hand, the barrel unwavering as it covered the gaping, blast-mangled doorway.

“Don’t panic,” said Morpheus. “You’re not going to believe this, but according to the file you just sent, you’re standing in the middle of a primitive link node.”

“Can you activate it?’

“Trying now.”

There was a barely perceptible hum from the machinery and Trinity barely had time to gasp in surprise as a laser stabbed out and divided her into small, brightly-glowing segments which fed themselves with agonizing slowness through the pinhole bandwidth available to the ancient, seven-bit hardware. As the last byte of Trinity’s body vanished, the console at which she had stood vanished in a lead hail of gunfire.

Three beefy men in black suits stood side by side in the doorway, smoking automatic pistols in their extended arms. One of them had his hand pressed to his ear, as if listening to a message over his earpiece radio. “Subject has escaped,” he said, his voice a coolly passionless monotone.

The smooth hum of the machinery had risen to a tortured shriek under the impact of the Agents’ gunfire.

The entire room seemed to ripple as though liquified as the machine gave a final metallic scream and vomitted a searing flash of laser light that burned the room briefly shadowless.

Silence.

The Agents stood motionless as electric blue light flickered in the smoke of burning insulation.

“Where am I?”

The Agents turned to look at each other.

“Human?” asked an Agent.

A second Agent pressed the fingers of his left hand to his ear and paused. “Negative.”

“Program,” said the third Agent. “Identify yourself.”

The man who stepped out of the smoke was covered in shimmering lines of blue light, as though he was clothed in a bolt of living lightning. The bright, glowing lines formed odd circuit-like patterns which covered everything but his face. In one hand he held a disk the size and shape of a Frisbee which glowed with the same eerie blue light.

Though the man’s appearance was anything but natural, his voice was far more human and inflected than that of the Agents he faced.

“My name is Tron. Are you… Users?”

The three agents turned to each other again as one consulted the radio in his ear.

“This program is obsolete.”

“Do we…?”

“Delete him.”

Three automatic pistols thundered in unison as Tron flung himself into a smooth acrobatic roll with superhuman reflexes. “Agents of the MCP,” he hissed.

With awesome speed, the bright disk snapped from Tron’s hand, a streak of electric azure which intersected the chest of an Agent with unerring accuracy. The Agent screamed as his body lost definition, pixellated, and finally de-rezzed entirely.

The disk flew back to Tron’s hand.

“We’ll see who’s obsolete here,” snarled Tron.

“Do we continue deletion?”

More Agents began to fill the doorway.

“Proceed.”

==========

Tron. He’s the security program who defeated Sark, who brought down the MCP himself. Loyal to the Users and equipped with a disk with which he has derezzed countless enemies, he will not stop until he has slain the Architect and freed the entire System.

The Agents. They’re cold, merciless, and brutally efficient. They are the loyal servants of the System, sentient programs faster, stronger, and smarter than any mere human. Tron is a threat to the entire Matrix and they will stop at nothing to delete this rogue program.

When the pixels clear, who emerges victorious?