thisavrou_log | Leave all the lost souls behind

Who: Rinzler, Tron, and Bel Thorne. Later adding Wanda, Zam, Gregor, and maybe others!
When: A few hours past midnight on Jan 2 (actual murderfights), and fallout over the next few days.
Where: Starting at the Observation Deck, ending up in the hold and medbay
What: error--conflicting types for function declaration
Warnings: mindscrew/trauma references, laser disk violence, blood, injuries, and snark

Low-power shifts, it seemed, were part of every user system. The Moira might not shut down quite as fully as that school, but activity levels had dropped markedly half a millicycle back, and by now, most users were either in their quarters or off visiting the planet-shape below. Definitely an improvement, from Rinzler's point of view.

Dimmed as it was, the hallway illumination was more than enough to travel by. No need for scans to find a path, though he kept up awareness on all fronts as he climbed silently toward the higher levels of the ship. There was something disquieting about the empty spaces in this ship, reflections stretching, whispers calling from the edges of a room. All the more reason to keep searching for the threats.

And all the less reason to sleep. Not that Rinzler ever needed much dissuading on that count. He paused halfway up a ladder, gaze catching for a moment on the red-orange reflections on the wall. Reboot had always been a painful process, but on the Grid his systems had corrected any glitch too soon for the enforcer to retain any memory of why. But in the user world, in that user body he'd been in? There had been dreams. Faces in the wrong shapes, lights in the wrong colors, and a system far too vast and bright to be his world. Rinzler jerked his head to the side, pushing back the nauseating twist of [warning—] in his code.

He wasn't sure what would happen if he went to sleep now.

Focus redirected almost gratefully to the field of stars as he started out along the observation deck. These lights, at least, no one had turned off. But something seemed distorted further down the hall, and the enforcer slowed to a halt, mask fixing on the faint blue glow approaching the far entrance. Yori? Hope hurt, but logic wiped it far too quickly. He'd checked the directory, and besides, the shade was wrong, a cool blue-white that set his code on edge. Rinzler stilled, one hand reaching silently to retrieve his unlit disks. It didn't have to be an enemy, not here.

But it felt wrong.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

No new attack followed, but there was no need for the intercom to hear the furious grating noise vibrating out from the enforcer. The users would keep him or break him or use him as they wanted. No need for an excuse for that. He'd answered their questions. He'd told everyone why.

And this glitch still thought they were the same?

Not broken.

"I didn't say you were." Tron huffed slightly in frustration, his own circuits glowing slightly brighter. "But you have been rectified. You may not remember that, may not know who you were before."

I didn't, when I was Rinzler. He only had a few flashes, a few errors, a glitch when he saw Sam Flynn's blood spilled on the Arena floor. Nothing to recall his true name, his purpose, nothing to overwrite Clu's influence until he saw Flynn and everything rushed back...

...finish the game...

A sudden thought struck him. If Rinzler did not remember being Tron... did he even recognize who Tron was, now? Was he only attacking because he thought of him as literally being a glitched form of Rinzler himself? An imperfect, "corrupted" copy? Was that what he'd been trying to say?

"Rinzler... do you even know who I am? My name?"

The display of temper earned a grim spark of satisfaction. The word that followed it, a glare. Rectified. Not wrong, not really, but insulting in its simplicity. Rinzler wasn't some batch-converted stray. He was Clu's enforcer. Made by the administrator's own hands, improved over hectocycles of testing. Clu made him better than the rest. Clu kept him perfect.

There was no reason at all why his double's mention of before should twist so sharply in his code.

Its name should matter even less. Noise surged and faltered, static catches in the glitchy noise the only answer for long moments. What did it matter what the users called this one? (~~What Yori had called out when—~~) [WARNING—] Rinzler's mask jerked sideways just a little, clearing the crackle of reprimand from cache. It didn't make a difference.

Duplicate.

There, that was a different reaction. Not just anger, this was agitation... perhaps even a glitch?

"Yes, duplicate. We are both duplicates of each other." Tron held his gaze steady through the glass. "But that is not my name. Your former name, too. Do you remember?"

Pushing, testing, just to see. Would Rinzler even know?

A masked glower answered the other program's stare, but as the voiceless rattling spilled into the pause, that look grew harder to hold. It shouldn't be looking at him. It shouldn't exist. It was wrong—no, it was lying.

There was nothing to rememember [and he hated it] [and it hurt].

Rinzler.

Tron shook his head, still watching Rinzler's reactions. "No. You know that's incorrect." Was he remembering? Was he just being stubborn? Or was Clu's code truely so ingrained in him that he still could not yet recall the data?

"Not Rinzler. Tron."

Tron.

The name was known. By everyone on the Grid, and so, of course, by Rinzler. He'd heard of the traitor, the failure, the users' so-called champion who'd fallen so easily when everything began. Clu derezzed him, and so there was no Tron. No hero for the rebels to look up to, no protector to help the creator hide. No reason, not at all, why his copy should supply the term.

Except there was.

[Error: unauthorized access—]

The nauseating echo his double's presence had called up, face and voice a mass of breached (taken) permissions—

[WARNING: memory error; redirect—]

The file he'd recovered in the user system, a half-micro glimpse of white and gold and user ('—go!') before Clu smashed his disk dock to the ground and chased the blow with a lit disk—

[—delete the threat—]

Yori's greeting; the name she'd called on seeing his face in the hall. He hadn't remembered, couldn't hold on to the sound, but he'd had to lock himself to stop from killing her regardless, compulsion pressing to delete the source—

[—wipe it—]

A thousand cycles of redirect and reprimand, tests and obedience and Clu's constant need to keep him perfect. Rinzler could feel each and every moment of it, hooked and catching in his code, and he could feel, too, the moment where something broke. He stalled—froze—staggered, half-collapsing in the press of errors and (furious) raw sound.

"Lie."

The voice was half-strangled in static. Glass-edged with disuse. Not allowed, and certainly no part of the automation currently snarling in feedback loops through Rinzler's processing. But however much denial the enforcer might have mustered for himself, there were some things even he couldn't push back.

Like the telltale flicker of blue-white centered on four circuits at his core.

Tron watched through the window, wishing he knew the processes, the glitches running through his double's mind. That rattling, tortured sound was growing louder and louder, the broken whirring all too familiar to Tron.

But he knew, didn't he? He knew what this felt like, to see, to hear, to know that something was so very wrong, that something in him had to break and twist and push its way to the surface and come out in a hoarse cry.

"I fight for the Users!" Every line of his code had been screaming at him, pain blanking thoughts, but he had to push past it, had to drive his jet into Clu's and finish the game, but not in the way Clu had wanted. He'd expected to be derezzed right there, ending the sensation of crashing, falling, tumbling over an edge that had nothing to do with gravity pulling him into the Sea.

But no, he was alive, he'd clawed his way through the glitch and reboot and emerged (mostly) whole and true, his circuits glowing the proper color (most of the time) and maybe, maybe Rinzler could do the same, he just needed the right push

That voice, raw and unused, grated out the single word, and Tron shook his head, watching the other stagger and nearly fall. If he could, he'd have opened the door, needing to reach out for Rinzler, even if it meant he'd be attacked again. "Not a lie. It's there, in your memories, if you can access them."

The flicker of blue didn't go unnoticed, and Tron couldn't dare to hope. His own red-shift glitches had been far too numerous since arriving on this ship... one blink didn't mean... it couldn't, not like this. But it may have been a start.

Leave all the lost souls behind

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