Steps drew nearer, and the sensation built. Wrong, wrong... familiar. Like a chain of errors spilling out of cache. He could feel his own sound jarring louder, and for more than a moment, Rinzler wondered if that was the source after all. A mistake of light, a glitch in systems copied and replaced too many times to hold together. How long has it been since Clu repaired his code? Even in the user school, repair and recoding had been delayed. Perhaps too far.

But glitches didn't show up on scans. Errors didn't have a face he could map even at this range, nauseatingly uncovered (not allowed). And the voice that called out across the gap? Was enough to stall, or crash, or rip apart. Another double. But worse, somehow, than the blood-soaked copy he'd chased before. He didn't want to hear it talk. He didn't want to see it. Noise jarred out in a snarl, code locked and grinding with something far worse than breached permissions. It was him. It was broken.

It had to die.

Lights flared a furious red-orange as paired disks split and launched. First one, then the other. The rest of Clu's weapon followed after.