It's so small. Small, and light, cheery and forced, the phrase he'd risked everything to gain. It registers only dimly, a string of audio balanced against a haze of fear, against the shift from expectation to paralyzing fact.
Clu's words, against Clu's edits.
The update is live. Disk to dock to frame and function, no lag to review or consolidate the change. There's no other programmer present to watch, and it says a great deal about how far off standards they've been here that this is the first time. But Clu knows what Clu wants, and lines shift under his programmer's touch, deleting and expanding at a thought. Rinzler shifts; Rinzler changes; Rinzler clings to everything he is, breathless and sick with desperation.
He doesn't know what Clu is doing. He never knows, but it's much too late to pull away. He can't (Clu won't permit him to destroy himself), so there's no purpose, absolutely none, to looping now. Over what a sickening, perfect trap this all might prove. Over just how much Clu could do that wouldn't count as going back. Clu keeps his promises, but this one is so very small, and Rinzler's administrator has a thousand cycles' practice in calculating cruelty.
(A thousand cycles, breaking him.)
Rinzler waits, dizzy and helpless, to learn how much that promise costs. When lines close and touch recedes external, it's all he can do not to stagger, braced against something that's not there. Was that it? Clu murmurs a status-check, and diagnostics obediently respond, but he doesn't feel any different. As hard as he'd clung, as much as he'd struggled—
None of it hurts.
He hasn't even thrown an error. Search returns new subsets to directive, each condition he'd agreed to layered in hard-code. No changing his mind (he hadn't planned to). There's something different to the flickering of background processing as well, a subtle shift that doesn't match to expectation. Faster? More space? Maybe, but how...
Noise stutters, search stalled on a new term, and this time, Rinzler does stumble, a fractional, unsteady sway before his mask jerks up. It's minute and specific, conditional and locked to Clu alone, but this has to be the error. (Or the trap.) And if that makes just as little sense as the permission... it can't be right. His admin nearly wiped him once already just tonight for trying.
no subject
Clu's words, against Clu's edits.
The update is live. Disk to dock to frame and function, no lag to review or consolidate the change. There's no other programmer present to watch, and it says a great deal about how far off standards they've been here that this is the first time. But Clu knows what Clu wants, and lines shift under his programmer's touch, deleting and expanding at a thought. Rinzler shifts; Rinzler changes; Rinzler clings to everything he is, breathless and sick with desperation.
He doesn't know what Clu is doing. He never knows, but it's much too late to pull away. He can't (Clu won't permit him to destroy himself), so there's no purpose, absolutely none, to looping now. Over what a sickening, perfect trap this all might prove. Over just how much Clu could do that wouldn't count as going back. Clu keeps his promises, but this one is so very small, and Rinzler's administrator has a thousand cycles' practice in calculating cruelty.
(A thousand cycles, breaking him.)
Rinzler waits, dizzy and helpless, to learn how much that promise costs. When lines close and touch recedes external, it's all he can do not to stagger, braced against something that's not there. Was that it? Clu murmurs a status-check, and diagnostics obediently respond, but he doesn't feel any different. As hard as he'd clung, as much as he'd struggled—
None of it hurts.
He hasn't even thrown an error. Search returns new subsets to directive, each condition he'd agreed to layered in hard-code. No changing his mind (he hadn't planned to). There's something different to the flickering of background processing as well, a subtle shift that doesn't match to expectation. Faster? More space? Maybe, but how...
Noise stutters, search stalled on a new term, and this time, Rinzler does stumble, a fractional, unsteady sway before his mask jerks up. It's minute and specific, conditional and locked to Clu alone, but this has to be the error. (Or the trap.) And if that makes just as little sense as the permission... it can't be right. His admin nearly wiped him once already just tonight for trying.
He knows Clu doesn't want to hear his voice.