thisavrou_log | You can never say that I didn't try

Entry tags:

You can never say that I didn't try

Who: Rinzler and OPEN
When: April 14th through the 24th
Where: the Hold
What: Rinzler killed some people and copes poorly. Set after this log.
Warnings: references to character death and mindscrew, glowy injuries, unfortunate assumptions. (See also: Rinzler.)

The first place Rinzler woke up in this system was a cell. He'd been locked in after a fight with his duplicate—with Tron. Not that the enforcer had been capable then of even hearing the older version's name. Rinzler had attacked because he had to, because the overrides built in his mind detected conflict and demanded he delete the source. Since then, he's shattered that if/then chain. Chipped away at the filters on his memories, even managed, once or twice, to speak.

But he's back where he started, and he knows better than to expect things to end the same way.

For the most part, visitors will find Rinzler seated on the low bench back against the wall. Circuits burn dimly in the shadows, almost outshone by the dull glint of fractured code that covers a full half of the enforcer's core. He's turned slightly to conceal the injured side, but the spiderwebbing cracks through code and armor are obvious to see, and he doesn't have the power to refresh his shell and cover up the damage.

The low rattle of corrupted code echoes through the cell and down the corridor, though it does nothing to compete with the invectives from the user locked in one door down. Rinzler approaches shutdown just once, curled up against the wall, and if the flickering lights and twitch of limbs is any sign, it's anything but restful. The program won't notice anyone approaching then, but he probably wouldn't mind being woken.

Once or twice, Rinzler rises, pacing, frustration and the need to move boiling up through the despair. There's nowhere to go, though, nothing to do, and even that much risks opening his damage further. Maybe he should. Fracture, break, rip himself apart and leave them voxels on the floor to claim and punish. Rinzler wonders if he ever tried before. If he does, he can't remember. He wonders what they'll make him into. Alan-one had told him what would happen, told him he'd correct the fault if Rinzler fought again. Now two users are dead, and if there's any hope at all, it's that they'll decide he's too worthless to salvage.

[[ooc: ~~the duration during which Rinzler can be visited depends largely on the results of his trial, so there may be some time-wobbling. In particular, if he ends up with solitary confinement...~~ no longer applicable; Rinzler will be visitable for both the trial period and his sentence. ETA 2: As of the 20th, temperature conditions will be improved thanks to Vision + co.

Prose and spam both welcome!]]

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Prometheus turns, and grins, and sneers, and Rinzler's glitching rumble rises in a snarl. That clenched hand shoves, weight shifting as he takes a half-step forward. The program's stance is unsteady and uneven, a forwards lean just waiting for the chance to leap or strike. The spiderwebbing damage brightens fractionally with the strain, competing against Rinzler's own lights for clarity.

But Rinzler doesn't care. Rinzler would gladly accept that pain or damage if it meant he could tear into the malware. If he could wipe that look (those words), or break himself in the attempt. He knows it's his fault, and he hates that more than anything, hates that it was always going to come back to this. It hardly even matters who's outside, and as the program's fists curl with empty, directionless rage, a third option might present itself.

Intentionally or not, the bars are doing a very good job protecting Rinzler from himself.

There's nowhere to go. No way to fight. He can't pare down the way he wants, can't take the easy out of violence and function. And if the want to do so stays locked in every line of the enforcer's frame, eventually, the coiled stance does falter. The glare doesn't, though. In the end, Rinzler reaches for his MID. He doesn't care if the malware can read him; he doesn't care what truths it can discern. He wants his own words.

Why are you here?

Deacon can take a not-a-all-subtle hint. Keeping an eye on Rinzler, he reaches behind him to rap on the door in a stuttered rhythm to tell someone on the other side to let him out.

The door opens and he ducks away quickly, never turning his back to Rinzler.

Rinzler isn't Tron. If he were aware of the comparison, he'd make it unforgettably clear. But even without having that spelled out, there's plenty in the user's words to hate.

The ticking growl picks up towards a snarl almost from the outset—at its assumptions about who he'd kill. At its presumption that its opinion made a difference. Even the generalities are laughable—of course programs need to sleep. Rinzler's inability to shut down here certainly hasn't helped the compounding mass of errors.

Red-circuited fingers curl around the shelf as it goes on, flat loathing glaring out behind the mask. He doesn't answer to this Flynn. He doesn't care about its judgements. None of this ever had to do with Clu, and if the blame is nothing new, it's nothing he needs telling, either. And the question, the challenge, the test? That does more than just offend.

Need might be the wrong word. But in the space of a few lines, this user's certainly made Rinzler want to cause its death. The enforcer offers no answer to the binary, only jerks his helmet in a challenge.

Take one step closer and find out.

At first, Sans presumes Rinzler will leave it at attacked. It's in keeping with his usual frustrating vagueness. Not much he could do about that, not when he's guilty of the same 95 percent of the time.

But Rinzler didn't leave it there. Sans grin stretches to something unnaturally broad. It's the closest thing to a grimace his anatomy allows.

"I just wanted to talk to you, man. But if you keep going on the way you are, welp... It's not gonna be a very pleasant experience for you."

Talking, Rinzler's already determined, is just about all this monster does. It's irritating. Pointless. The threat is at least more interesting, even if he doubts it has the strength to follow through.

The enforcer's helmet only angles, noise skipping out to fill the silence. He doesn't care about its judgement. And if Rinzler knows better than to think he'll be allowed to stay himself, that doesn't mean he has to submit early. Especially not to this.

"Some people would say we're all coded, in the end. If not in the ones and zeros you prefer, in genes or stories or thoughts."

Which has precisely nothing to do with much right now, but Loki does quite like giving people things to think about and has a bad habit of occasionally thinking out loud, which can be confusing when he has about five trains of thought all running crossways.

It's also probably almost as irritating for anything based on logic as being stonewalled is for Loki, frankly. The answer isn't giving him anything to work with, and he pulls a moderately frustrated face.

"You should know I'm almost impossible to get to leave without my curiosity satisfied, by the way. So- from the beginning, then. You're a program, given solid form. What are you programmed for?"

"I tried to tell ya, buddy."

What happens next is fast. In the space of a moment, the emptiness of Sans' left-most socket fills with sickening, strobing blue-yellow light. In the next, his hand is raised, flung towards the hold ceiling. Then down again. Then up again.

Sweat beads at Sans' forehead, before hurling Rinzler back to the floor. No bones. This isn't that kind of discussion.

Edited 2016-04-24 18:03 (UTC)

There's a faint rise in the ticking rumble. Rinzler's heard that excuse before, and it definitely irritates. Users bleed. They grow and change with no input at all. They aren't designed to serve a function. And what purpose they choose can't—shouldn't—be recoded.

They're nothing alike.

The warning, Rinzler accepts with resignation. Still, the question it starts with is simple enough, and discounting the heat-lag, there's no delay in response.

Threat deletion.

She spots that shrug and doesn't say anything for a few moments. She tries to decide if he even wants her bothering him, but can't get much of a read off of him. Of course, it's so hot here that she imagines he's not doing too well given the amount of time he's been in his cell. There's the cooling unit, but that only can do so much.

"Since I'm here, I should be honest. I don't give a shit about how comfortable you are. But if you're in pain and I can help somehow, you should speak up and let me know."

She's never been anything but direct, and clearly doesn't intend on changing that just because she's talking to a prisoner that needs help. Bluntness works for her, since it keeps conversations short and to the point. She's really not sure how to help him, since working with coding isn't something she's ever done.

Under normal circumstances, Rinzler would have seen it coming. Under normal circumstances, he might be able to react. Here and now, with heat glitching half his functions and damage limiting the rest?

There's a flash of light. And pain.

It's his intact side that slams into the ceiling. That much saves him from derezzing, but the blow still sends sharp sparks of agony through half his core, unhealed fractures grinding glass-edged against one another. Processing is still locked on what and where when the momentum reverses, and he's not nearly so lucky this time.

Visuals white out, one arm going limp entirely as the cracked and aching hole cut through his side crashes into the surface of the bench. Circuits flicker and go dark in patches, warning: critical threshold— looped and seizing through through processing in a way that's much too recently familiar. There's a skittering sound as red-orange voxels scatter across the cell, and when the hook of force in his core jerks back up, automation shoves all conscious thought aside.

It's the arena, but too fast, reactions lagged and with his enemy locked out of reach. It's the arena, but he's already half-shattered. The enforcer doesn't have the power to stand, much less fight back, but he curls inward as gravity inverts, shoulder rolling with the force as he turns off the ceiling, re-orienting to take the next fall on the only part of his shell he can still feel.

It's still too hard, too much. More cracks spiral out from the widening gap as he hits the floor in a heap, and if the program's limbs are still twitching inwards, trying to brace for the next blow, Rinzler's in no shape to defend himself.

It made sense, from what he's seen so far - hostile planets and hostile crew members. But his heart aches at the thought of it. He did the right thing in the end, he knows he did. So why did it hurt? Was the surface world that Frisk lead the other monsters to just as hostile as the one he'd seen with his own eyes years ago? He suffered just as much as the rest of them, so shouldn't he at least get some kind of relief?

None of those thoughts show though, as Asriel's face remains unchanging.

"That's... what I was afraid of."

Asriel's smile stays in place, but it doesn't really seem all that genuine.

"I'll come visit you the next few days, okay? Do you want me to bring you anything?"

Hand tucked neatly back into his pocket, Sans looks on with vague displeasure on his face. He really doesn't like doing this, nor does he relish thinking what Papyrus would say if he could see Rinzler now. Murderer or not, he had a soul.

It's Papyrus, not Rinzler, that prompts him to conjure a femur. It glows green, illuminating Sans' skull with a sickly cast.

"I'm not saying you need to be reprogrammed, I'm saying you need to get your command line in order. Peter shouldn't have done what he did, but this little web goes back longer than that and we both know it. You've gotta learn to keep yourself in line, kid. It's in your best interest."

He tosses the bone towards Rinzler, following it up with a few more. He's not much of a healer, but magic is magic. It works as well on robotic creatures as it does on organic ones. A soul is a soul.

And as quickly as the cruel twist to his perpetual grin came, it smooths away once more. Sans looks nothing if not benign, as if he just gave Rinzler some folksy advice instead of a beatdown.

"Hope you're feeling better. Think on what we talked about, okay? I don't really have the guts for this kinda thing, hehe."

With one last tap on the bars, Sans winks: "Seeya around, Rinzy. I've always got an eye socket out, don't forget."

If Rinzler looks up, he'll find the space Sans occupied moments before suddenly very, very empty.

Edited 2016-04-24 19:48 (UTC)

"If you have a choice, I would like to know why you would choose to kill."

She can understand self-defence, even if she would struggle with using deadly force even under such circumstances, but could Rinzler not have incapacitated his opponents without killing them?

If not, she wants to hear that from him.

"Oh. Hm"

Really, had they expected different? The dead man instigated, the dead man attacked, and now it's Rinzler left facing the punishment. Would the former have faced any consequences at all, had he survived? Chara looks down the row of cells, then pictures the sterile whiteness of the medbay.

Speaking of...

"Why hasn't anyone fixed that, yet?" Chara leaves their spotlight now, stepping forward.

When Rinzler pushes to his feet, Prometheus doesn't even move. He knows about the extent of the damage the program had incurred and this heat was clearly messing up his processes. In this situation, Prometheus held the upper hand even without Model W or Pandora's assistance. And even if they had started a fight? No doubt that someone would have shown up to interrupt them now that they were all on high alert. Not nearly as fun or worthwhile for either of them (wouldn't get them the result they wanted either).

He watches the program with amusement and... Satisfaction? All the intensity was gone, and if it weren't for Rinzler's response, it's hard to say that the last few seconds weren't just some glitch or another. And since Rinzler was the only person aboard to have seen Prometheus' meltdown over Pandora, he was likewise the only one that could say for sure that the previous exchange wasn't entirely an error.

"Glad to see you've still got some fight in your at least."

Prometheus stops to read the MID message before chuckling softly.

"I told you already. I know your processors are being overworked right now, Rinzler, but your memory banks can't be that terrible. Though I guess I should be fair, a lot of people seem to like asking me 'why'. Do I really need a reason?" Sounding almost amicable, it was like they were stuck being humans back in that school, instead of being a Reploid and a damaged program separated by prison bars. At the very least, it seems like he's done antagonizing Rinzler for the moment.

... It's still hard to say whether this sudden shift was meant to disarm or to further unsettle.

...now that? Was unexpected. Rinzler's mask stills briefly, only a quiet catch of the ticking rumble to mark his appreciation. Honesty isn't something many of these users have bothered with, and certainly not so directly. It certainly beats feigning concern when he could hear the conversations down the hall. This user isn't on his side. But he hadn't expected it to admit as much.

The act doesn't change the enforcer's answer. Still, the user had taken effort to be clear with him, and Rinzler's willing to return the value. He reaches for his MID, typing out the reply this time and projecting it in a holographic display.

Can't help.

The new question might be less personal, but only by virtue of sheer stupidity. Rinzler stares, noise ticking out into the silence. Is she glitched? Finally, he reaches for his MID.

Removes threat.

The words are typed into text, displayed in a holographic line projected from the tool.

"There are other ways."

You don't have to kill someone to incapacitate them.

"You didn't answer my question. Can you choose to go against your programming?"

"Why?" Her tone isn't harsh, but it is firm, insisting that she gets an answer. She feels she's in over her head with this, but doesn't want to be told that she can't help.

Even if she can't repair him, she can at least figure out a way to increase his comfort. It looks like Vision's already handled the cooling element, but she's sure there is more than can be done. And if not, then at least he's only in here a handful of days and then he can go to his own space to recover properly.

"I can't fix what's wrong with you, but you've got to have something that will make you feel alright." There's a pause, and she arches both eyebrows. "Do you feel things the same as people do?"

Edited 2016-04-25 09:43 (UTC)

Tension shifts through the enforcer's frame, a brief coil of wariness that's forced back almost before it can be spotted. Still, if Chara does take notice, they might be quick enough to observe something else: it wasn't a reaction to their movements.

No acceptable repair options.

The smile might be a misplaced value, but it's one the enforcer's used to. It brings to mind the beta's expression as he'd left the jury hall, and triggers the same quiet flicker of regret. But Rinzler hadn't lied, and if the world isn't what Asriel expected, that's a disappointment that bears getting used to. Fast.

The helmet inclines fractionally, acknowledging, before Rinzler outputs a short shake of his head. There's nothing Asriel could bring, though he appreciates the offer.

No way to repair damage.

That much is prompt. Immediate. But the user keeps talking, and Rinzler's hands twitch, curling faintly on and through the holographic keyboard. 'The same as people'?

Well. That accounted for a lot. And really, it wasn't much surprise, was it? This one is that user's friend, and it had made Rinzler's position clear well before any of these kills. 'Why are you even allowed out here? Around people?' 'The ship doesn't need anything rabid, running around causing problems for the good people of this crew.'

Rinzler isn't allowed out now. By the time his user finishes with him, he knows he won't be capable of making any problems whatsoever. The user wasn't wrong. This user isn't either. That doesn't make the reminder any less bitter, and the constant rumble of corrupted code grows harsher as his shoulder twitches inward in another shrug.

Inefficient.

The retort's immediate. The next question? Only earns a long, flat stare. This user had expressed intent to rectify him by its own standards, and he's not going to spell out for it that the only way to do that is through code.

Even if the fact that the user needs to ask is glitched enough. He's a program. What does it think he's bound by?

He's getting used to the way the ticking changes when he ventures to close to something irritating, and he smiles slightly. Well, he supposes it probably doesn't look that way from where Rinzler's standing, but- Loki isn't human. Isn't even strictly speaking real, not completely. He's a creation of story and myth, he doesn't and can't change like humans do, and he recoded himself, once.

Mostly by dying, but he supposes that's not a terribly fun option if it can be avoided.

He leans against the wall, settling in for what seems like a long game, possibly with very little reward. He is getting answers, though.

"Threats to who, exactly? And how do you codify 'threat'?"

System threats.

To the Grid. Or to Clu, of course, but that went without saying. The admin was the center of the system, the one who made it what it was.

(Who made Rinzler what he was.)

Assigned threats: malware, imperfections. ISOs. System disruptions. Sources of instability.

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You can never say that I didn't try

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