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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
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.
no subject
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.