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the outer gate
"Open up, and let them in."
The Moira is no more.
With the damage done to the ship due to the timeslip, all that remains is a burning wreckage and parts to be taken—if the crew can find anything in the pieces. Recovery and headcounts are the main objective for the first several hours of being planetside, and once things have settled just enough, Captain Ira calls for a meeting and addresses those who are able in person to explain the situation. He draws a rough map of the area and explains where he believes they are - according to the terrain - and where they must go. For anyone who’s listening, he describes things like an “Outer Gate”, an “Inner Gate” and “gate sectors”. Believing this to be the best course of action, all crew are asked to explore and gather what they think they’ll need to make the long journey towards the central point of the Hub. Because the MIDs are no longer working due to the lack of a network, the Captains distribute a newer tech called the TAB. It serves the same functions as the MID but is lighter, slimmer, and has the ability to stick to any surface.
WELCOME TO THE MIDWAY HUB
Now that the smoke from the crash has cleared, and injured crew have been tended to, the Captains get everyone ready for departure by explaining what they know of the Hub. Almost stone-like, the creators built a domed workspace in the largest solid space on the planet they could find. Gates are the only way inside, and anyone who catches a glimpse of the compound will see that parts of the dome are cracked. Yet, everything still appears to be relatively intact. The Midway Hub’s terrain is very rocky and difficult to walk on at times. Below the surface is a honeycomb of intermittently dense and brittle stone that makes travel difficult due to the unpredictable nature of what lies beneath the crew’s feet. Those who can develop the tech from what’s left of the debris might be able to create something to determine which route is the safest. Ships and small crafts can be used to fly, but landing is a problem—rocks jut up in sharp peaks and the clearer spots can't handle their weight. Vegetation is sparse, consisting of twisted dark gray thistles that have sprung up from cracks in the rock and burn when in direct contact with skin, and what could be considered small animals here can be seen scurrying away the closer crew get to them.
☄ WEEK ONE
Crew are asked to hook cryo beds together and to use any appropriate vehicles that can be made or fashioned to fit the terrain to carry injured crew on the journey to the center of the Hub. Supplies are gathered, and the Captains, as well as any crew who want to, give the Moira a proper sendoff, heads bowed as they say goodbye to what’s been their home. Traveling starts out slowly, a line of a hundred-plus crew members making their way slowly forward. Stops are frequent, but camping for rest only occurs at night. Crew are assigned watch shifts, fires are built, injured tended to, and those who are able are asked to explore nearby caves and hunt for food.
Something akin to deer, though striped and only to be found in pairs, can be stumbled across at night. Throngs of dark purple mammels begin to follow the Moirans on their trip as well. They are friendly, curious, and eat the thistle. Meet the intelligent, watchful predators that aren’t easily scared away and follow the crew from a distance as if waiting to pounce. The thistle can be eaten, but only if cooked first, and those who sample the chewy plant raw will experience a burning sensation in their throat that doesn’t go away until the cooked version is consumed. During the first week, water can’t be found.
Anyone who does hunt, gather, or explore should make sure to that their TABS are on and it’s suggested that nobody goes alone.
Nearing the end of the first week, an Ingress can be spotted close by that crew can explore. If anyone dares to go inside, they will find the texture of the ground and surrounding walls to be rather soft. If inspected closely, crew will discover that what they originally thought to be rock is actually a living organism that’s fed off the energy of the Ingress it’s attached itself to. It’s not harmful and squishy to the touch. If pressed hard enough, it secretes a turquoise liquid with the consistency of water that might make a good substitute for that very thing. ☄ WEEK TWO
When crew finally pass through the sector gates, a strange sensation encompasses them, and a depowering of sorts goes into effect. The creators put in security measures meant to put all visitors on equal footing as well as to protect themselves from harm. All crew will essentially have the strength and abilities of the average human. An unforeseen issue, this causes Captain Thán to slip into a coma as he is no longer able to continue to recover at a steady pace, and with the loss of the former Captain’s abilities, crew can no longer be brought back if they die. For the first time, all Moirans are subject to permanent death.
During this week of travel, broken ingress machines and parts will be found scattered among the rocks, and new crew will come through. Unfortunately, these Ingresses aren’t in good shape, and anyone coming through will be in varying states of distress—some physical and some mental. New individuals will either have suffered an age slip, growing older or younger than their original body, some form of body transformation (perhaps that shiny thing they were wearing is now part of them somehow), or an extreme weakness they had never been subjected to before arriving on the Midway Hub. The new people will be offered to join their group, once found, and seasoned crew will be asked to explain to them where they are going and what they know.
The rest of the week will be a mix of greeting the new arrivals and continuing to travel to the center of the Hub. The closer they get, the less frequently they’ll see animals, and more caves will begin to pop up. ☄ WEEK THREE
Entering the third week of travel, settlements and houses begin to crop up and are prime areas for exploration and general supplies. Those who go inside may find items that have been left behind and evidence showing that those of varying species and cultures lived in the homes. Some appeared to have been scientists while others were explorers, but all living quarters are deserted. Crew who are less lucky in their search might come away with no fresh supplies, and others might walk into traps or safeguards left behind by previous tenants; these come in many forms, from mild paralysis to temporary unconsciousness. As there are more residences, there are also more caves. The entrances vary in size, and light sources will be needed to explore. Once inside, crew can find purple underwater streams, which can be consumed, and glowing surfaces. When crew drink the water, it temporarily restores powers, a few minutes tops, and then, extreme lethargy settles in for a couple of hours.
Further into the cave systems, crew will come across these lovely creatures that are attracted to sound and track through scent. They are highly dangerous and attack simply to feed. Killing them, though, is surprisingly simple as they are just as vulnerable and weak as everyone else. They are vicious in demeanor but only as strong as an average human.
The closer to the Inner Gate crew get, the less homes, wildlife, and more caves there will be. ☄ WEEK FOUR
The Captains, aware that the crew is exhausted, stop and make camp for the first few days. Someone mentions that it’s the holidays where they’re from, and the Captains do their best to throw a party. Set up at the base of a cave, tents are built and fires roar. Soft music is played in the form of guitar, thank you Ira, and Cúrre brings out some legumes that taste like cherries when roasted. There isn’t much in the way of decorations, but crew are encouraged to dig through their pac-discs and contribute to the festivities.
After a brief respite, crew learn that the entrances to Gate A and Gate B are inside one of the caves but any signs or markings have long since worn away or been destroyed. Groups are split, TABS are synced, and crew explore carefully until an entrance is found. Crew discover Gate A first, and all crew are contacted to gather there. The Captains will remain at the cave entrance until all crew are accounted for, and then, they’ll enter through the gate together.
( ooc; For questions, go here. Please comment to activity check to receive new ranks (if applicable)! )
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hohnkai) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thisavrou_log2016-12-02 06:54 pm
no subject
It's not the first time he's run the query.
Satisfactory answers are another matter. The output requested is simple binary, but even the most basic projections can guess that Clu won't take any answer but a negative without proof. (Projection is at least as dangerous with Clu, but the admin took them this far out of bounds, and Rinzler needs every tool in access to keep up.) Safer, then, to answer no. It's not even wrong.
It's not right either. Not completely. Rinzler might not understand Clu's methods, but there's only one reason for an assessment of this depth. Stiffness settles to a rigid, loathsome weight.
Correction.
no subject
There is nothing wrong with that answer.
The data are clean and straightforward and could have been pulled from a bank of responses Clu himself might wish to install there.
How is this crisp, elegant, true dollop of lexical perfection not satisfactory.
...That shouldn't even be possible.
But they are so far beyond should--some key factors are already unrecoverable, and more after that first altercation, and more after the inevitable User betrayal--an expected attack vector from an unexpected source; and who knew what this latest system crash would cost, in the end.
Maybe everything.
Clu considered it, felt the potential loop there, and cut the terms from their bases with a shake of his head.
"I see." Carefully, alert for the least shift in the finality that had settled on Rinzler's shoulders. "But you're..." An ancient gesture, half-buried and almost to himself, a flick of the hand catalogued quantity: relative: so-so "I think I understand your hesitation."
It's not a question; it's a prelude, a head of steam, word strings gathering almost faster than he can spool them, nudged along to inevitability. They leave his tongue hot with something suspiciously aberrant, a too-bright tonal value that less exact creatures would call mania.
"I know you've detected it, you must have. This set of stunts with the wristlet, the constant hunt for other allied units, the spectacular arabesques of logic that I pushed on you, somehow, that I pretty much forced you into the clutches of a proxy, and given that you've set yourself to an interim value of not!Alan-1--"
He can't stop. If he stops now, the whole thread forks off into what a rush of warning flags are insisting will be major code spaghetti.
He takes a breath, because the reflex is there, distal, quirked into his code somewhere along with a nightmarish impulse to scrub his hand through his hair.
Clu holds very still for just less than a quarter pico, and then the crescendo harsh with triumph:
"Those things are consequences of systematic conditions in this environment, and endemic, and it was inevitable! All of it! And things cannot continue as they are!"
You're welcome, Program.
no subject
Clu shakes his head. And known values, the value, the single expectation that Rinzler's thousand and two cycles have been based on... starts resetting, line by line.
Hesitation. Logic. I made, I forced, and the frozen stillness breaks, mask stuttering back up in halting segments of pure shock. Clu never took blame, but Clu did, and Clu's still speaking. Interim implies change, implies transition—one that should never have been possible (but it is) (but Clu would never [admit]/[allow]—)
All steadiness has vanished. Any pretense of resignation has been left behind. Rinzler stares, and Clu stills, and sound rises and falls in ragged desperation, filling up the pause, and then—
...
He wants to laugh.
He wants to crumple.
[Error: corruptible content—] [Warning: filter—] [Error: unauth-], a cache and more of useless, beautiful mismatches. Inevitable.
...
What took him so long?
Rinzler breathes. Rinzler lags. Air is every bit as stale and recycled as before, but it feels different, and another intake drags in shakily right after the first. Rinzler nods, a small, stilted motion that costs much more power than it should. He thinks he might be crashing. He's not, he knows, but circuits shiver, bright/dark/dim, with just the slightest flicker of light blue, and there's a raw ache in his throat crawling up and out—
"Don't—"
He stops. Stutters. It's too much, too far, too many ways to fill the line. Too many permissions still withheld. He doesn't want to trespass, doesn't want to lose it, please please please don't let this be a lie. Fingers curl around the text interface instead, and if the words it makes aren't his completely, there's a claim inserted just before the line that Rinzler would never have dared before.
I don't want to go back.
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.
no subject
Clu stops.
Clu. Stops.
Clu stops, and Rinzler is still running. Clu stops, and air cycles, an odd, incomprehensible sound falling from his programmer's mouth amidst the tangled segments of a confirmation string. It's an error (but Clu doesn't make errors). A lie? Placation? More likely (certain), but Clu stops, and speaks, and something raw and jagged nestles in the empty ache of expectation.
Rinzler can't turn it off. He can't stop looping, can't stop cycling the phrase. Never, never, never (and how long is that really?). He should bow, he should kneel, he should surrender his disk in sheer, unfiltered gratitude. But Clu didn't ask for it, and he's—they're not going back. He isn't.
(Please.)
Stillness draws out, stretched and strained, before the inactive flicker of the text display draws his attention. Rinzler twitches—scrambles to type out a line, and stalls again as cognition catches up with what. It's stupid. Reckless, glitched, and if Clu needed more excuse to take back each and every offer, Rinzler knows this would serve. He has never, ever had a right to demand anything from his programmer.
But Clu doesn't need an excuse. The word rezzes up, a small and fragile shield in front of that arrested reach.
Promise.
no subject
...Well.
Well.
If there were ever one hell of a way to flush the cache, that sure is one. Motion seethes up out of the stack, raw kinetic power flooding the queue--
It takes every resource he has instead to lean back, to shrug, to cancel: by choice, by sheer will. There's a heavy, hot pressure welling up from his throat: laughter restored, an ugly jackal staccato and a great whooping sob on the inhale, and it feels like there's more, like maybe it will spool out forever, but he cuts it to a stop between his teeth.
"Did Nihlus promise you?" Velvet, honey, low and slow; it burns his tongue. "Did Alan-1? You." He pulls close, smooth, sudden as a well of mud under footprints. "Want."
He feels hollow, and that must just be hunger, must be the shortage.
"...A very foolish thing."
no subject
Nihlus had reminded and reassured. Alan-one had promised—that he would stop Rinzler, that he would edit him. He'd tried, and faltered, and taken it back once. No way to know if he would finish it this time.
They aren't here either, though. Clu is, and Rinzler is, and Rinzler wants, and that has always been too much.
He doesn't look up. He doesn't want to see, he doesn't want to freeze or falter (and he will, he knows). Sound rattles out in a fractured, too-quick beat, the aural tremor of something desperate and trapped. Still, he holds position. He types. Because Clu hasn't stopped him yet.
Not users.
no subject
Clu does not and has never needed an excuse. The heel of his hand settles heavily in the crease of Rinzler’s shoulder, close enough to the long lean slope of his neck to telegraph pressure all the way through his spine, like Clu can still his enforcer's frantic rattling by hand.
They both know better. But that's not new.
“No,” slowly, drawn out just enough to suffice as a true answer; a pause exactly long enough for both of them to parse it as the answer he'd rather give.
Clu does lie, and well enough--but he has never, ever rescinded his word, not even once.
He has to find an escape vector. There must be one.
“No, we're not. Think about what you're asking for, because I promise you, they most certainly will.”
no subject
No. Clu doesn't want to. Clu won't give the option up. Clu lies, and Clu tests, and Clu has torn apart far more and better than Rinzler to keep the route to perfection clear. Still, the reach doesn't finish, the path doesn't close. And the order that comes next isn't one Rinzler is used to.
(Things cannot continue.)
Rinzler thinks. Rinzler remembers. Rinzler has never stopped thinking, never lost a single term's awareness of exactly what awaited him back home. Exactly what he'd expected from Clu here, when betrayal forced his own surrender. Command and correction; purge and reset; filters on filters, layered much too deeply for any concept of how empty they left him. Automation. Silence, suffocating and complete, and the constant cycling of punishment and loss as every query came back wrong.
He doesn't want it. He doesn't, he doesn't, he never did, and the tension coiled underneath Clu's hand draws to the edge of a collapse. Fingers jerk across the keys, a single I before they stall, stuttering and desperate. I, I, I. It's important. It's too much. Processing is fracturing to loops, a thousand strings snarled just at the edge of possibility, and Rinzler scrolls up with a jerky gesture to call the phrase again.
I don't want to go back.
No matter what. Not ever.
no subject
To stall like this is unfit. And Rinzler is sure.
(That alone is marvelous, adj. 2., inviting a thrill of something that would run cold in the circuits of lesser units and instead urges him to calculation.)
"I will not permit you to destroy yourself." It's the first one off the stack, quick and casual, tone almost glib. That sheen melts away as his grip tightens, and the words keep coming.
"I will not stand by while you decompile; I will not fail to intervene in circumstances where you might, as I judge fit. If I hear a whisper, then, if I get a lean of the shake of the head, there won't be any talking about it. You'll be formatted off the nearest backup--I won't wipe you, not to base code, but you'll never fit back together in quite the same way."
He leans down further, teeth to ear, vows murmured hot on glass.
"And I will not, I will not permit, you're not to let either of them alter the trait stacks in any way...Be damned if I let either of those guys interfere with the new you."
"If that doesn't suit you," warm, arch, easy steam that halos banded red and gold on that sleek, dark plane, "then I can't promise you anything."
no subject
The cadence, though. The quick rhythm, the crushing dig of claim, claim, claim that parallels the beat before the else. It's a prelude, it's a start, it's conditions, concessions (his to Clu, which implies return—)
He isn't permitted to destroy himself. He isn't permitted to derezz. No argument, no protest (but nearest backup and no wipes, a glimmer through the cracks of something much, much bigger past the lines). The minute distance cuts away, and Clu is running hot and he can feel it, a fog of power and unfiltered certainties breathed against the shell that locks him in.
The names go unspoken, but there's no question in the least who that stipulation is intended to lock out. Nihlus had access to his disk. Alan-one opened it on more than one occasion. Both had been Rinzler's allies; both stood in opposition to Clu. And in both cases, Rinzler does not want to be recoded.
Rinzler writes the stack to memory, commits them to his code: parameters, new to bump the rest of the array that much closer to outdated. His helmet jerks down in a nod, comes up straight and steady and without the slightest lag. Agreed.
no subject
It is happening; Clu’s enforcer will get his wish.
At the right time and under the correct circumstances.
“You’re serious about this.” Empty tag statement, informal words for a formal confirmation, leaden and rhetorical.
They're not playing. Not with this.
“One more thing.” Fingers settle, electrum gold, delicate as spider legs, hovering gentle and precise above direct dock inputs--so close, the microns of air between them fairly crackles with the potential. “One last thing, one little thing and it's yours, buddy.”
Promises and bargaining are both essential modes of grief.
no subject
He wants, so maybe it is.
Maybe.
One point. Two. Pressure maps itself in a careful cluster of potential, circuits prickling as a savage ache of expectation settles in his dock. He doesn't move. He doesn't, he won't (and really, would it matter if he tried?). Power surge or shutdown, edit or hook or hollowing erasure, Clu's purpose is a thought alone from execution. It's more deadly than a leveled disk. It's much, much more terrifying.
One last thing. Sound clatters out a raw, broken grind, despair and panic looped too tightly to execute. His chin tilts up, a fractional lift, but Rinzler does. Not. Flinch.
Say it.
no subject
...He's trembling, or they both are, weighed down with impending favor.
“Stay,” is the form it takes, strangely ragged for the size, and not loud. “As long as you're yourself, you're mine.”
He shuts his eyes, not requiring or trusting them, not any more than his voice.
“Promise or don't,” soft, bitter as intent crystallizes under his nails, “but don't lie.”
He must just be tired.
no subject
It's simple. It's basic. The order chains itself through process and priority, finds a dozen inbuilt iterations, and quite nearly cancels on the spot. Staying is a fact already, corollary to obey and serve. It's what it means to belong to someone. To be a belonging.
Rinzler has never, ever, been anything more.
Tron was. Tron was, but Tron is dead, cut and split and pared away to voiceless fury, a corrupted, constant scrape of sound. Rinzler is not Tron, and Rinzler has no idea when core definitions faltered, when an order that should never have needed to be voiced became a tremulous insistence. It's not a question. Not as such, not here and now.
But it's the promise that going forward, it could be.
This is more than just not back. This is forward, down a vector Rinzler could never have looked for. An option that he still can't allow himself to name. It flags a choice well past accounting, a future value that Rinzler has no way to predict. Stay, stay, stay and he can feel the weight, as grounding and suffocating as the grip still pinning him in place.
The faceless shell dips and rises: hesitant, heavy. As sure as he can be.
He promises.
no subject
He’d just insisted on confirmation of a constant--a measure, perhaps, of how far they've already come. He's felt it much too keenly, here, in this ridiculous open User system that looms incalculably large: he can repurpose programs or he can destroy them.
And Rinzler is so certain he wants both. Close enough--as sure as he can be, and that's sufficient.
It has to be.
“Yes,” small and hot against the backs of his teeth. Permission granted is liberty taken, a neat doubled track of fingers, clean to waiting terminal ends that brighten for the pressure. “Of course, yes; I promise...Told you I would.”
Grinning, glib and cheerful and so, so careful with the variables. It's a restatement, not a reward, and Rinzler mistrusts that brand of pleasure, anyway.
Clu wonders, idly, if the complete absence of pain is proving equally unnerving.
“There,” sighed above a neat greek key of fresh conditions, signed and sealed. Gold threads already reddening in acceptance as Rinzler quite literally absorbs the situation. “See how that fits, huh?”
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.
no subject
No room for second guesses; it has to be perfect.
And hesitating now would go so badly for the program kicking up jagged tag clouds of misgiving under the steady tracks of his touch. Clu learned in the early days. He knew better than anybody what fear did to miracles.
No time for that now. This is revisions, restoration--gently paring stacks to their bases, sealing off forks that were spooling nowhere, adding a true where false had pushed a bad check and started an endless hunt for reconfirmation, here or there.
No one over his shoulder has to tell him to be careful. He knows just what would suit, and now, now he's free to give it to Rinzler himself.
It doesn't hurt because there's no reason it should, kinetic throughput precise and scalpel clean.
"I've told you before," soft, hazy and secondary to the transfer, to pure will underlying it. There, that'll be beautiful when it's done, when it flowers to its conclusions in Rinzler's code--when he becomes what, just maybe, Clu should have allowed from the start.
"I know it's in there, somewhere...?"
And now it makes sense, the stark terror caught between his best inference and Rinzler's best guess: speaking at all, holding his tongue versus losing his head, and he can hardly consider things like tone, like valence and word choice, off a memory he flatly no longer has.
Long since, with an armful of welling shattered cyan pixels Clu would never, could never, forget--he had done his best to spare Rinzler any recollection of what dying actually felt like. And of why it had almost happened.
"You are my best effort, and of all I've made you are my favorite." All his conviction, warm and sure, input rich and constant as rain. "You are, or you will be, the instrument of everything I've ever worked for."
He doesn't want to let go. But there's no reason not to, or none strong enough to be--correct--and here in this new system there are so many concerned for his program's welfare. He's not the only one with access to the logs.
He could do anything he wanted. Anything at all. His fingertips ache with the urge to try, numb to the hilt with potential.
And Alan-1 would know all about it. Just for a start.
"Trust me, just a little, knowing that you're too valuable to risk."
no subject
Nothing, at least, but listen.
He's always been Clu's favorite. (Favorite weapon.) (Favorite tool.) Clu's enforcer, (Clu's pet,) Clu's very favorite project: to test, to task, to whittle down. He can run for longer on less power than any function on the Grid, maintain defaults regardless of damage or pain. He can kill anything his admin wants, with fluid grace or agonizing slowness.
Rinzler can. Rinzler could. But he's refused Clu's orders, struggled back, shattered defaults so thoroughly as to half-discard the set. Rinzler is so, so far from the perfect weapon that Clu made, and he...
...he hadn't thought Clu wanted him.
He's still not sure. You will be, though, and Rinzler doesn't move, but the stutter of his sound catches, a shiver of recycled breath behind the shell. Clu promised not to set him back. Clu promised, so that has to mean something different. A future value (forward), one he can't predict, but... maybe not so far away.
Maybe.
Trust is as impossible a command as always. But stacks pair and forks seal, values shift and realign, and Rinzler lowers his head, noise quieting as he waits for Clu to finish.
no subject
Clu's already asked so much of him, and then pushed for more. He's nudged allowances wide, standards splayed across their matrices until he can feel the strain, stretching old arrays for new values. And from the dock like this, with no delay between interface and input--there's no sense in being so careful, in being this thorough, in feeding Rinzler promises just to work him raw.
It's accurate. That doesn't make it quite right--and there's more to do. There's always more to do, but undue force will corrupt the pull request.
And he's done enough already.
The last digit aligns, whole and complete, and Clu releases his grip at last.
"I know you." With his fingers free, it's bare fact. No hint of signal loss. "I know you'll be careful with this--because you remember what it cost."
He can feel his lips quirk, snarl or smile. "I look forward to hearing from you."
no subject
And that singular exception is still hovering in queue.
Not an error. Not an error, and Rinzler wants it. He wants more. The impulse flickers through cognition, reckless and half-strangled by the weight of possibility. He wants his voice. He wants all of it, wants the function to be his. He wants his face back. He wants to see himself, see what Clu did to every line that makes him. Rinzler wants so much, so badly, when just a handful of microcycles back he'd been suffocating in the certainty that he would never be able to want anything again.
This is enough. Enough for now, and he will have a later, and that makes this everything. Even the power drain only dampens the electric brightness of his lights a little, a steady hum of awareness that borders on sheer awe. It's not a guarantee. Nothing is, least of all out here, and Rinzler knows that, knows that everything can end badly, and in how many ways.
But he's never before considered the chance that what he's become could turn out well.
He'll be careful. He'll remember. Facts, not orders, and even the line that follows holds only a latent pause of expectation. Enough to prompt obedience for any other form of output, but this is new (is different)—but Rinzler wants to, and he can. Clu's enforcer doesn't move from his position, but there's a slight tip of the helmet. Not down, but up.
"You won't regret it."
The words are clear. The voice, familiar. The noise that rumbles out beneath is quiet, and no interruption. Fact, not thanks. And with that certainty, another promise, challenging and sharp.
I won't fail.
I'll prove it.
I'm better this way.
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Familiar voice, familiar phrasing, clear and familiar pride. Even on their knees under the sword, knights are still knights.
He considers that, blinking, and I do already, but it does not pass Clu's lips and does not escape the queue.
"I have every confidence in you," he says instead, sure and warm as praise, and it is no less true.
After all, look where they are.
Look what they made.