Finality is a fixed endpoint to a mutable state. It's arguably smaller than promise and certainly shorter than forever. Final is just a term, is concrete shoes for an abstraction--small, choking certainties to describe and quantify the unimaginable.
He can do anything he can quantify. That is the oldest necessity.
His stripes ache, just at the fingertips, with how easy it would be. To act, to react, to clean the slate. A standard outcome of standard behavior: a blast of static to smother confusion, precise alignments dulled with pure noise, and under it practiced edits prickling numb in sharp, surgical gold.
But it would be--oh, it would be what they've always had, and that can't persist here. He just finished cataloging the proof.
The gap between wanting and getting is the same space described by the shape of an old friend.
Rinzler cycles harshly, air in hard double gouts behind ragged grinding intervals. A little shake of the head, tiny finite motion that would be a shiver, might be a shudder--Clu's seen that once, twice, endlessly in the arena, the broken-off ends of wanting to laugh.
Hysteria?
Improbable. He hadn't nudged that hard.
Rinzler trembles, live-wire, a burst of allegiances ghosting through his skin--and yes, he can speak and he uses that feature out loud, but never voluntarily, never with Clu--
Data did not lie: Clu himself had never asked for it. It was therefore categorically impossible for Rinzler to idiom: hand it over.
Except, apparently, at great cost.
And for an instant, for sixteenths of a second less than would stop a human heart, that word means not now, Clu; means can we deal with this later; means gotta go and murderous, mutinous, he reaches up--
Stops cold.
The truth throbs red in the air between them and he can't move.
He can't move. The action is unavailable. This is his default now, overextended, ridiculous, and he can't move.
...Hard stall. Some value of actual fault, internal systems cheerfully cataloguing the largest error he's thrown in a megacycle.
"I." Waste of air, up and down: hollow noises where exultant laughter should go. "I know, I understand that. That's, yes, the point I was making."
This is absurd. Stick to the facts.
"You're not going anywhere, and you're never going back to factory settings."
no subject
He can do anything he can quantify. That is the oldest necessity.
His stripes ache, just at the fingertips, with how easy it would be. To act, to react, to clean the slate. A standard outcome of standard behavior: a blast of static to smother confusion, precise alignments dulled with pure noise, and under it practiced edits prickling numb in sharp, surgical gold.
But it would be--oh, it would be what they've always had, and that can't persist here. He just finished cataloging the proof.
The gap between wanting and getting is the same space described by the shape of an old friend.
Rinzler cycles harshly, air in hard double gouts behind ragged grinding intervals. A little shake of the head, tiny finite motion that would be a shiver, might be a shudder--Clu's seen that once, twice, endlessly in the arena, the broken-off ends of wanting to laugh.
Hysteria?
Improbable. He hadn't nudged that hard.
Rinzler trembles, live-wire, a burst of allegiances ghosting through his skin--and yes, he can speak and he uses that feature out loud, but never voluntarily, never with Clu--
Data did not lie: Clu himself had never asked for it. It was therefore categorically impossible for Rinzler to idiom: hand it over.
Except, apparently, at great cost.
And for an instant, for sixteenths of a second less than would stop a human heart, that word means not now, Clu; means can we deal with this later; means gotta go and murderous, mutinous, he reaches up--
Stops cold.
The truth throbs red in the air between them and he can't move.
He can't move. The action is unavailable. This is his default now, overextended, ridiculous, and he can't move.
...Hard stall. Some value of actual fault, internal systems cheerfully cataloguing the largest error he's thrown in a megacycle.
"I." Waste of air, up and down: hollow noises where exultant laughter should go. "I know, I understand that. That's, yes, the point I was making."
This is absurd. Stick to the facts.
"You're not going anywhere, and you're never going back to factory settings."
So there.