alan_1 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alan_1) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thisavrou_log2016-04-28 07:43 pm
alan_1) wrote in thisavrou_log2016-04-28 07:43 pm
[closed] come as you are, as you were, as i want you to be
Who: Alan, Rinzler, Peter, Wanda, Fiora, Alice, Frisk, and possibly others
When: April 29th
Where: Ship corridors and Moro 004
What: Rinzler is captured and dragged to Alan for recoding. Literally everyone has a bad time. Plot summary can be found here.
Warnings: Violence, injuries, attempted brain-tampering against an unwilling subject, just not a good day for anyone really.
When: April 29th
Where: Ship corridors and Moro 004
What: Rinzler is captured and dragged to Alan for recoding. Literally everyone has a bad time. Plot summary can be found here.
Warnings: Violence, injuries, attempted brain-tampering against an unwilling subject, just not a good day for anyone really.
no subject
Even at a touch, Alan will feel the potential. This code is alive, compressed and closed but malleable. Like the baton, but so much more behind it, and all reactive to intent. To his intent, perhaps, more than anything.
It's just a glimpse. Barely the opening prompt. Still, certainly it offers more to focus on than the ragged, voiceless stutters from behind. With his back turned, Alan can't see Rinzler's head jerk sideways, again and again. He can't see the desperate twitch as the program tries to crawl forward, or the freeze that interrupts it as the light spins up from the display. Rinzler can't look at his own code.
Neither can Alan. Not yet. The open menu is accessible, but the moment he tries to work his way in deeper, he'll find something barring his way. Permissions request, spelled out in geometric twists of light, something felt as much as seen. The disk is waiting for someone's ID. Their signature. It shouldn't be hard to guess whose.]
no subject
He senses the resistance before he sees it, the tension building against his fingertips like static. His own signature feels wrong before he even attempts to enter it, a sense of intrusion/wrong/unauthorized access casting over him. He flinches internally and the display pulls back to the starting menu. He takes a steadying breath. Alright. It seems he’ll have to find another way in. No matter how heavily Rinzler’s code has been altered, it’s still based on Tron’s and Tron’s code had more than one access point for someone with the correct permissions.
He only has to think it for the code to react again, clusters of light shifting to illuminate an alternate pathway in. Alan blinks in surprise. The same code that had just denied him access now seems to be actively working to help him. It’s a stark reminder of the dual nature of Rinzler’s code, a product of two clashing creators. He doesn’t let the revelation slow him for long. Following the pathways leads, predictably, to more attempts to keep him out, but for every roadblock thrown in his way, another channel presents itself with enough work and will. It’s like watching the code fight itself, part of it twisting in on itself to allow him in while another tries desperately to block his way. It’s a slow, labyrinthine descent deeper in, but he is making progress. He can feel the walls in his way begin to weaken, the feeling of intruder/wrong gradually waning as he breaks further through its defenses.
It should only take a little more effort to reach the code protected within...]
no subject
Once he has, the rightness of the connection will only settle further into place, an unspoken tug of programmer joining the sense of user-creator. Once he has, he'll feel the branch of possibility as the motes of light tracing the helmet finally dissolve. Memory in one direction, data sequenced and stored for review. His, if he chooses it. In the other, structure and design. Code. It plays out in the same strange shapes and symmetries, but once Alan's view adjusts, the first view might be something like the sort of program he's used to.
Even at this level, though, things are different. Simpler. Vast swaths of what Alan remembers will be absent completely, others greyed out and past use. His program's been pared down, functions looped to a single use, an ID sequence that should be familiar by now. Serve Clu. That's Rinzler's function. Looking at the over-layer, it's all one might expect him to be capable of. But just like before, there's that itch of possibility. Alan-one, programmer-creator, can certainly look deeper.
Rinzler can't. The moment the barriers to access melt away, his helmet bows, forced inexorably down. He can't look. He needs to. He can't can't can't, and the glitching stutter scrapes out harsh and loud as he shudders against the compulsion. The struggle lasts for a full minute before the program's bent neck ducks further, kneeling frame curling in on himself in a bout of helpless nausea.]
no subject
The image of the helmet, closed-off and inscrutable, disintegrates before him, the motes of light resolving into two new pathways: memory and code. Alan’s eyes linger on the former, but only for a moment -- intriguing as the option may be, that isn’t why he’s here. He raises his hand to the latter instead and the clusters of light respond in kind, scattering and reforming into what is unmistakably pure programming.
He’s spent countless hours with Tron’s code over the years, writing and rewriting, patching and upgrading as the system itself evolved. Long enough that the omissions and alterations are immediately obvious to him. Cold unease settles in his chest as he processes what he’s seeing: Clu’s handiwork, laid out before him in all its bleak efficiency. Alan traces every line, and each one leads to the same outcome: silent, unquestioning obedience.
Alan turns his gaze away from the code, quiet horror at seeing exactly how much has been stripped away from his program clear in his expression. Eyes settle, finally, on Rinzler. Alan can’t look for long. The sight of the program’s broken kneel is all the more distressing seeing exactly what’s been done to him.
He can feel the pull of possibility as he looks back at the code, the faint sense of something buried beneath the surface drawing him back in. He takes a deep breath, suppressing dread that has nothing to do with resistance from the code itself. The motes of light shudder, unsure of his intent, and then steady as Alan refocuses his will.
Show me.]
no subject
The display sections. The code Alan has written spirals apart. Not breaking, not damaged, but going deeper, finding the language of intent and purpose underneath each typed-out line. It's the same layering he'd observed in Rinzler's baton, wings and engines and the sleek contours of a jet nested in a simple transport function.
Rinzler is more than a lightjet. What Alan-one discovers as his view expands isn't even on the same level. Algorithms branch out into webs of light, the smooth geometry of simple functions revealing networks of dizzying complexity. The disk itself might not be alive, but it sets the guidelines for what is. Mind and body, goals and skills and personality. All of it here. All of it code, structured and comprehensible, built around a function and its maker's will.
Here, the cohesive glow is filtered to a maze of color. Core lines of clear blue-white sketch out framework and key functions. Additions in bright gold can be found throughout, bypassing some sections and linking others in fixed if-thens. The red-orange color Alan knows is the intersection of the two, ebbing and shifting where they join.
The code shifts and scrolls with the slightest thought, answering its programmer's intent, and it won't take much exploration to encounter a fourth shade. Or rather, an absence. A vast hole is wrecked through one swath of the code, whole sections of capability blackened out and dead. Physical structure seems all but inextricable from function, and one glance at the half-shattered program on the ground should tell Alan exactly what he's looking at. Just as on Rinzler's frame, a multitude of cracks spread out from the gap, marking out the damage trying to tear apart the program's whole.]
no subject
At first, he’s merely exploring, adjusting to the language and intricate patterns from which the code is constructed. The superstructure sketched out in pale blue is especially familiar -- not entirely unaltered, but still more than recognizable as derivative of the code Alan himself had written. The red-orange sections have been more heavily spliced, fragments of Alan’s code edited almost -- but not quite -- past recognition. It’s the segments in gold that draw Alan’s eye the most: in those lines, there can be no question of the author. As incredible as the display is, those lines still fill him with visceral aversion.
And yet, if the glowing strands of gold are unnerving, they still aren’t damage. Awe and fadcination gradually give way to resolve, and the code begins to scroll faster as Alan focuses on his true purpose: repair what’s been broken, eliminate the error. Show me. The code becomes a blur of color and light as it hones in on his intent, and then darkens as it stills back into focus. There’s a moment of confusion, but it doesn’t take long for the cause of the darkness to become starkly, painfully clear. Huge blocks of code sit blackened and lifeless, completely severed from their function. The code of the damaged lines is mangled, some lines aborted before completion and others twisted or fused in inoperative snarls. It takes less than a moment to realize what he’s looking at: damage, yes, but the physical damage Rinzler has sustained in his fights. Movement draws Alan’s eyes at the edge of the blackened area – lines of code around the main lesion are flickering, caught in a loop of degradation and reversion as if at war with itself. The damage is spreading, Alan realizes, though the code seems to be fighting back in an effort to hold itself together.
A new urgency seizes him and he reaches instinctively for the instability. The instant Alan’s hand comes in contact with the code, the damaged line comes into focus. Repair is surprisingly intuitive: he only has to picture what changes he wants to make for the code to respond in kind. Characters shift, vanish, or appear with a thought, the line completing and stabilizing in a handful of seconds. Alan moves onto the next line without even thinking.
It’s nothing like programming on a computer. The code actually seems to learn as he repairs it, responding more and more quickly, sometimes before Alan himself has completed a thought. Slowly but surely, the shattered segments of code begin to knit and regenerate, the stretch of darkness gradually replaced by functional, glowing code, one line at a time. And yet even as he restores the dead code to its former function, Alan can’t help but feel a building unease. The code that relights behind his fingers does not take on the blue-white that he’s come to associate with his own coding, but rather the red-orange and occasionally the gold that marks Clu’s interference. All he’s doing is returning the code to its defaults. Clu’s defaults. He wonders how many times Clu had done this himself, tracing one hand along the damage and watching the code respond to his will. Did Rinzler run from him as well?
Alan dismisses the thought with a small shake of his head. He isn’t like Clu – he isn’t doing this to control Rinzler. He’s doing it to save him. To save everyone.
It’s a while longer before he reaches the end of damaged code, the last line shifting and then lighting back into function. He finally pulls back his hand and surveys his work. It looks stable, the once blackened-out swaths now glowing steadily with the rest of the code. He takes a look back at Rinzler, eyes seeking out the wounds at his side. It’s tempting to stop here, to sync the disk and heal his injuries before anything else. But there’s still one last thing Alan needs to do.
He looks back at the code, taking a deep breath and focusing on a new query. Once again, he asks after damage. But this time, he’s limits the search to mental functions. The code is far too complex to anticipate what he might find – all he can hope is that it will be something he can fix.]
no subject
It's over.
The code responds to Alan's thoughts more readily with practice, view expanding to the wider whole of Rinzler's codebase before focusing again. Still, mental functions is too unspecific of a search query to narrow things appreciably, especially where a programmed mind is concerned. Function defines intent and capability in equal part, and Alan will find himself in part reviewing structures he's already pored through. What Rinzler's for. How Rinzler can do it.
Other constructs, though? Are new. Alan might find himself sorting through code-chains of heuristics, the requirements of function branching to a web of networked possibilities. His own sparse, elegant coding style lays out the profile, with thinner chains of gold linking and correcting, merged across the junctions of decision. The user might come across stored files, layered subtly behind the lines of function and further partitioned to a streamlined point of access. It's only on closer examination that their nature will be obvious: memories, not laid out for display, but compressed in packets of raw data. A ghost of laughter on wide plateau, outrage snarled by the inky blackness spreading through a Sea. Gold lights and the hum of disks in the arena, a thousand cycles of command and less than one without it.
All of it's there. Thought and memory, intent and interest, the simple value of the program's name. Rinzler's whole is written in these disks, all of it open for repair or editing. Certainly, it seems to need it. There's no aching void, no wound smashed to the verge of derezz. But damage? Is everywhere.
Lines hashed apart. Chains of priority disrupted, functions shifted to self-loop until they terminate unfilled. The memory partitions have almost tangible holes punched through them, and the complex sequences that control access are frayed and shifted and, at one point, ripped to scattered characters. Error correction is barely online at all, the central feedback loop meant to interrupt a faulty process dulled to silvery grey, with only a few sparking flickers of red/gold still active. And that line alone feeds back to a thousand branching paths of calculation. As ruined as it is—as strained and corrupted as so much the enforcer's programming has become—there's no way Rinzler's carrying out his function.
Not the way he was written to.]