FIC: Help [Gen + smidge of Flynn/Clu]
Title: Help
Author: crows_queen
Fandom: TRON (Betrayal era)
Pairing: Gen + minimal Flynn/Clu
Rating: PG
Warnings: Mild swearing, Clippy
Wordcount: 2368
Disclaimer: The characters? Not mine. It was all a labor of love. I'm just making action figures hump in someone else's sandbox.
Feedback: Very welcome!
Summary: In which Tron meets his match, and Clu does not want help but gets it anyway.
Author's Note: Blame winzler. That is all, apart from complete disregard for when certain programs were created and certain features were added. It was necessary. Sit down, eat your crack, and shut up.
Thanks to grey_sw for the beta.
"Clu?"
Flynn's admin program didn't even glance up from his workstation. Indeed, he spared barely enough attention to give an inarticulate grunt before slipping back into the comfortable rhythm of the task at hand. Zeta Sector was experiencing energy flow problems again -- hadn't he just fixed that? -- and determining why the system kept failing and fixing the root cause was far more important than-
"Sir?"
Clu sighed and clenched his hands against one of the screens for a moment. Sometimes it felt like a miracle that he had accomplished anything at all.
"What is it?"
"There's… something that you should see." The function -- a security program, one of Tron's guards, Clu noted as he caught a flash of blue out of the corner of one eye -- sounded almost confused. "We just found it; Tron thinks it might have come in with that new word processing program. He wants you down there personally."
Clu knew the one. That program's arrival had been a large-scale change that Flynn's own program had overseen personally. He still wasn't sure what to make of the new addition, honestly, the program was efficient enough but some of the things that he did absolutely defied logic. He also had the terrible habit of reformatting Clu's carefully constructed output and then trying to force the changes on all subsequent additions, in complete defiance of his Sysadmin's instructions to the contrary.
"-away." The guard apparently hadn't stopped talking. Clu shook his head to clear out the unnecessary data and realign a few memory sectors, although he still didn't take his gaze away from his work.
"Repeat," he ordered. He could actually hear the other program's circuitry buzzing with nervousness. It was annoying, like the perpetual hum of the fluorescent lights that he knew from Flynn's memories.
"It won't go away," the guard said, again. He tactfully and very wisely ignored the Sysadmin's momentary distraction.
That gave Clu pause. "What do you mean, 'it won't go away'?" he asked, finally deigning to look up from his terminal.
"I mean exactly that, sir. It won't go away. We've tried, Clu, we've tried everything that we can think of. It just won't. Tron even put it in a password protected file, and it still came back."
That was unsettling. Clu existed to create and keep order. He was order, he was control. He did not appreciate elements in his- Flynn's, system that did not belong there. Elements that did not conform to standard operational protocols, that did not follow instructions.
He'd also never met a threat that Tron couldn't handle. The MCP, rogues, gridbugs, Flynn at the End of Line Club after one too many input commands. Tron had bested them all.
"What does it want?"
The program fidgeted so much that Clu wondered if he was glitching.
"Sir, I think it wants to help."
>>><<<
Clu's boots echoed loudly. They had always been heavier than the soft-shod feet of the security programs, but this time it was different. The streets were deserted and eerily silent, programs evacuated and the sector cordoned off until they could figure out what, precisely, the intruder was and what its intentions were.
Tron was standing, rigid and unmoving, near one of the buildings. For someone who wasn't particularly emotive under the best of circumstances, he looked uncommonly relieved to see Clu.
"Clu."
"Tron." Clu stood beside the other program and clasped his hands behind his back. "What's the situation?"
The grim program looked even grimmer, if possible. "It showed up in one of the text archives," he said. "No one saw it arrive or knows where it came from. It simply… appeared, and started harassing people." Tron frowned. "It can't have been an isolated security breach because we just inspected and reinforced the entire net. Besides, this is a closed system. And something this big would have shown up on entry, anyway."
Clu’s circuits dimmed a little. "You don't mean that it manifested, do you?" User, the ISOs were causing enough trouble as it was. The last thing that the Grid needed was more of them, not when the damage that they were already causing was taking so many resources just to control.
"No, I don't think so. You probably would have felt that." Clu was so deeply tied to the system that he could feel when it changed. He had intelligence networks, but usually he already knew what they came to tell him. Often he knew it before they did.
"Then it's here legitimately?"
"I didn't say that. I just said that it didn't come in on its own. Our guess is with the new word processor, he's the only one apart from someone like you or me that's really complex enough to conceal something like this. The only one to arrive recently, anyway."
"And if it had been here longer, or functioned as a wholly independent entity, I would have sensed it," Clu finished for him. Tron nodded, and the Sysadmin sighed as he smoothed his hair back. Then he straightened his shoulders and jacket purposefully.
"Very well. I will see what I can do."
The guards had cornered whatever it was against one of the buildings, backed it into the glass and surrounded it with a glowing semicircle of staves. Wise, Clu thought as he approached, thoughtful to put a weapon and distance both between them. Discs were risky in such close confines, unless you knew exactly what you were doing.
Occasionally the prisoner would bounce a little, prompting a sharp jab from one of the Sentries.
The Sysadmin took a bold step into the center of that ring, and his lips curled in distaste at what he could now see clearly. If the reflective, coiled thing with bulging eyes was a program, then its User had to be the single ugliest person that Clu had ever been aware of. He'd seen some of the "hipper" sections of the City, too, full of wildly colored and styled hair that could probably derez an eye; more facial piercings than should have been possible; strange tattoos and circuit modification; and clothing that was in serious danger of violating public decency ordinances, so that was saying something.
Clu looked down at the intruder, and somehow managed to appear even more inflexible and intimidating than usual.
"Greetings, Program."
He had to admit that he was a little disappointed when the function didn't respond in the anticipated fashion. Usually that got applause and roars of approval.
The… program? creature? whatever it was began to tap on the nearby window with what Clu decided was an arm. Hoped was an arm, because the alternative was more horrible than he wanted to compute and it made his pixels crawl.
The sound made everyone except for Clu himself jump. He glared at the thing for a moment, unblinking, put on what Flynn had called his "game face" (and why Flynn should consider any of this to be a game was beyond Clu's comprehension, but it bothered him), and waited for it to explain itself. It just kept tapping until Clu's right eye started to spasm. Then his fingers began to clench and unclench reflexively, and this went on for well over a nanocycle before he finally cracked and shouted in exasperation,
"WHAT?! What? What is it that you want?"
That seemed to be the response the entity was looking for. It blinked at him and then an interface popped open near its… head, Clu supposed. The sudden movement had the circle of Sentries bristling with staves and a disc or two. Clu waved a dismissive hand at them, his attention otherwise fixed on this latest development.
"You will tell me your designation and function, program. Or I will extract them from you by force."
He wasn't sure whether it was the threat that prompted it, but text began to flicker across the interface window. The Sysadmin squinted at it as he read aloud:
// Hi! I'm Clippy, your office assistant. //
Clu's brow furrowed. "I do not require another assistant," he said. "I have sufficient and qualified System Utilities, and- are you even listening to me?"
It didn't seem like it, because "Clippy" continued:
// It looks like you're creating the perfect system. //
Not exactly privileged information. Clu was not impressed. "That is common knowledge," he began. "If you are hoping to convince me of your good intentions, you will have to-"
He was rudely interrupted, again.
// Would you like help? //
Clu stared blankly at the thing. Normally he was unflappable, but this function fell far outside of his realm of experience and knowledge. He looked to Tron, and the other program stepped into the semicircle as well.
"That's apparently what it started doing to the others, too," he said. "It's almost as if it has the ability to get inside an individual's calculations and deduce personal desire. And then it offers to help, no matter what those desires are." The white circuits flickered violently for a moment. "You can imagine the confusion and embarrassment that this has caused."
Indeed Clu could. It made him particularly glad that Clippy had chosen his desire of purpose to focus on, rather than some of the others in his memory files. Somehow he didn't think that he would be able to live down, // It looks like you want to fuck your Creator. Would you like help? //
"And nothing at all has been able to stop it?"
"That is correct." Tron shook his head. "Every time one person disables its interface or deflects it, it just pops up somewhere else. It doesn't feel like a virus or even a piece of malicious code. It doesn't appear to be self-replicating, either, it merely relocates itself. It doesn't even seem dangerous so much as intrusive, and-"
Clu's disc suddenly cut through the bizarre function, and he was already sliding it back into its port before the last of the pixels had even hit the glossy sidewalk. It was mercy, he reasoned, not murder. It was not as if he had destroyed something that Flynn had created. Whatever it was had clearly compiled incorrectly, and from the look of things debugging would be next to impossible. He'd simply put the thing out of its misery and excised an out-of-place element from the system in one stroke. That was good. That was efficient.
Tron and the guards were all staring at him in disbelief. (And possibly relief. Clu wasn't sure.)
"Simple problems often have simple solutions." He inclined his head, pushed his way out of the cluster of Sentries, and started back toward Central Tower. "A very good day to you, gentlemen."
He felt a flicker of pride at having come to master such a peculiar turn of phrase.
>>><<<
The cycles passed, by the tens and by the hundreds. The tensions with the ISOs, with Flynn and Tron and the others, had only grown. Clu grimaced as he leaned back in his chair, his yellow-trimmed coat draping over and around him like an imperial robe, and looked out over his city. Yes, his city, now, completely and irrevocably. Not Flynn's, not anymore. But that wasn't the end of the matter, he knew that all too well. Flynn was gone but his legacy of chaos and disorder remained seemingly everywhere, in the crumbling infrastructure and the rebel factions that were already beginning to form. It needed to be purged and patched, and quickly, before things crumbled down around Clu's ears.
Clu was so lost in his own calculations about how to accomplish that goal most efficiently that he completely missed the tiny *blip!* that came from in front of his desk.
He did not miss the tapping that followed. The program spun around, blue eyes wide and wild, so quickly that his chair overbalanced and toppled him down with it. Perch and program both landed in a disorganized heap.
"What the hell-? I derezzed you!" Clu shouted as he disengaged himself from the furniture and got hurriedly to his feet. A quick review of his code revealed that nothing had been damaged save for his pride. His expression was caught somewhere between anger and disbelief, and there was even a tiny bit of grudging admiration for Clippy's tenacity. "What the hell are you doing here? How did you get past the Sentries? How are you still alive?!"
The little fucker was tapping its- arm, Clu reminded himself, it was an arm and nothing but an arm, against the glassy surface of the Sysadmin's desk. Then it stopped and blinked those hideous eyes at him. Clu shuddered. It felt like they were staring into his soul.
"Go away," he growled, low and threatening. But like the last time, Clippy didn't seem to be intimidated. In fact, it looked insultingly cheerful as the interface window popped up.
// It looks like you're creating the perfect system. //
The Master Program gave a furious roar and slammed his hands down on the surface of his desk, all but lunging across it. He knew his purpose, that he had hardly fulfilled it yet, and he didn't need to be reminded of that by this null unit of all things. Clu shouted so loudly that his voice distorted and broke into static.
"GO. AWAY!"
Clippy did not go away. It simply hovered where it was, and a new set of prompts appeared on its interface:
// Would you like help?
• Kill all the ISOs
• Just create the perfect system without help
☐ Don't show me this tip again //
Clu couldn't help himself.
He punched the damn thing right in Option 1.
>>><<<
When asked, more than one thousand cycles later and after Flynn had recompiled him, what had finally driven him over the edge, Clu talked at length about his User. He talked about about the man's absence, and also about the denial of attention and love (which was difficult to bring across believably when Kevin was so busy kissing his neck).
He talked about Flynn's conflicting orders and eventual disregard for everything that Clu was and stood for, and his blatant favoritism of the ISOs over the Basics that were his own creations, his children.
He talked about all of that, because the truth was just too embarrassing to admit.
Author: crows_queen
Fandom: TRON (Betrayal era)
Pairing: Gen + minimal Flynn/Clu
Rating: PG
Warnings: Mild swearing, Clippy
Wordcount: 2368
Disclaimer: The characters? Not mine. It was all a labor of love. I'm just making action figures hump in someone else's sandbox.
Feedback: Very welcome!
Summary: In which Tron meets his match, and Clu does not want help but gets it anyway.
Author's Note: Blame winzler. That is all, apart from complete disregard for when certain programs were created and certain features were added. It was necessary. Sit down, eat your crack, and shut up.
Thanks to grey_sw for the beta.
"Clu?"
Flynn's admin program didn't even glance up from his workstation. Indeed, he spared barely enough attention to give an inarticulate grunt before slipping back into the comfortable rhythm of the task at hand. Zeta Sector was experiencing energy flow problems again -- hadn't he just fixed that? -- and determining why the system kept failing and fixing the root cause was far more important than-
"Sir?"
Clu sighed and clenched his hands against one of the screens for a moment. Sometimes it felt like a miracle that he had accomplished anything at all.
"What is it?"
"There's… something that you should see." The function -- a security program, one of Tron's guards, Clu noted as he caught a flash of blue out of the corner of one eye -- sounded almost confused. "We just found it; Tron thinks it might have come in with that new word processing program. He wants you down there personally."
Clu knew the one. That program's arrival had been a large-scale change that Flynn's own program had overseen personally. He still wasn't sure what to make of the new addition, honestly, the program was efficient enough but some of the things that he did absolutely defied logic. He also had the terrible habit of reformatting Clu's carefully constructed output and then trying to force the changes on all subsequent additions, in complete defiance of his Sysadmin's instructions to the contrary.
"-away." The guard apparently hadn't stopped talking. Clu shook his head to clear out the unnecessary data and realign a few memory sectors, although he still didn't take his gaze away from his work.
"Repeat," he ordered. He could actually hear the other program's circuitry buzzing with nervousness. It was annoying, like the perpetual hum of the fluorescent lights that he knew from Flynn's memories.
"It won't go away," the guard said, again. He tactfully and very wisely ignored the Sysadmin's momentary distraction.
That gave Clu pause. "What do you mean, 'it won't go away'?" he asked, finally deigning to look up from his terminal.
"I mean exactly that, sir. It won't go away. We've tried, Clu, we've tried everything that we can think of. It just won't. Tron even put it in a password protected file, and it still came back."
That was unsettling. Clu existed to create and keep order. He was order, he was control. He did not appreciate elements in his- Flynn's, system that did not belong there. Elements that did not conform to standard operational protocols, that did not follow instructions.
He'd also never met a threat that Tron couldn't handle. The MCP, rogues, gridbugs, Flynn at the End of Line Club after one too many input commands. Tron had bested them all.
"What does it want?"
The program fidgeted so much that Clu wondered if he was glitching.
"Sir, I think it wants to help."
>>><<<
Clu's boots echoed loudly. They had always been heavier than the soft-shod feet of the security programs, but this time it was different. The streets were deserted and eerily silent, programs evacuated and the sector cordoned off until they could figure out what, precisely, the intruder was and what its intentions were.
Tron was standing, rigid and unmoving, near one of the buildings. For someone who wasn't particularly emotive under the best of circumstances, he looked uncommonly relieved to see Clu.
"Clu."
"Tron." Clu stood beside the other program and clasped his hands behind his back. "What's the situation?"
The grim program looked even grimmer, if possible. "It showed up in one of the text archives," he said. "No one saw it arrive or knows where it came from. It simply… appeared, and started harassing people." Tron frowned. "It can't have been an isolated security breach because we just inspected and reinforced the entire net. Besides, this is a closed system. And something this big would have shown up on entry, anyway."
Clu’s circuits dimmed a little. "You don't mean that it manifested, do you?" User, the ISOs were causing enough trouble as it was. The last thing that the Grid needed was more of them, not when the damage that they were already causing was taking so many resources just to control.
"No, I don't think so. You probably would have felt that." Clu was so deeply tied to the system that he could feel when it changed. He had intelligence networks, but usually he already knew what they came to tell him. Often he knew it before they did.
"Then it's here legitimately?"
"I didn't say that. I just said that it didn't come in on its own. Our guess is with the new word processor, he's the only one apart from someone like you or me that's really complex enough to conceal something like this. The only one to arrive recently, anyway."
"And if it had been here longer, or functioned as a wholly independent entity, I would have sensed it," Clu finished for him. Tron nodded, and the Sysadmin sighed as he smoothed his hair back. Then he straightened his shoulders and jacket purposefully.
"Very well. I will see what I can do."
The guards had cornered whatever it was against one of the buildings, backed it into the glass and surrounded it with a glowing semicircle of staves. Wise, Clu thought as he approached, thoughtful to put a weapon and distance both between them. Discs were risky in such close confines, unless you knew exactly what you were doing.
Occasionally the prisoner would bounce a little, prompting a sharp jab from one of the Sentries.
The Sysadmin took a bold step into the center of that ring, and his lips curled in distaste at what he could now see clearly. If the reflective, coiled thing with bulging eyes was a program, then its User had to be the single ugliest person that Clu had ever been aware of. He'd seen some of the "hipper" sections of the City, too, full of wildly colored and styled hair that could probably derez an eye; more facial piercings than should have been possible; strange tattoos and circuit modification; and clothing that was in serious danger of violating public decency ordinances, so that was saying something.
Clu looked down at the intruder, and somehow managed to appear even more inflexible and intimidating than usual.
"Greetings, Program."
He had to admit that he was a little disappointed when the function didn't respond in the anticipated fashion. Usually that got applause and roars of approval.
The… program? creature? whatever it was began to tap on the nearby window with what Clu decided was an arm. Hoped was an arm, because the alternative was more horrible than he wanted to compute and it made his pixels crawl.
The sound made everyone except for Clu himself jump. He glared at the thing for a moment, unblinking, put on what Flynn had called his "game face" (and why Flynn should consider any of this to be a game was beyond Clu's comprehension, but it bothered him), and waited for it to explain itself. It just kept tapping until Clu's right eye started to spasm. Then his fingers began to clench and unclench reflexively, and this went on for well over a nanocycle before he finally cracked and shouted in exasperation,
"WHAT?! What? What is it that you want?"
That seemed to be the response the entity was looking for. It blinked at him and then an interface popped open near its… head, Clu supposed. The sudden movement had the circle of Sentries bristling with staves and a disc or two. Clu waved a dismissive hand at them, his attention otherwise fixed on this latest development.
"You will tell me your designation and function, program. Or I will extract them from you by force."
He wasn't sure whether it was the threat that prompted it, but text began to flicker across the interface window. The Sysadmin squinted at it as he read aloud:
// Hi! I'm Clippy, your office assistant. //
Clu's brow furrowed. "I do not require another assistant," he said. "I have sufficient and qualified System Utilities, and- are you even listening to me?"
It didn't seem like it, because "Clippy" continued:
// It looks like you're creating the perfect system. //
Not exactly privileged information. Clu was not impressed. "That is common knowledge," he began. "If you are hoping to convince me of your good intentions, you will have to-"
He was rudely interrupted, again.
// Would you like help? //
Clu stared blankly at the thing. Normally he was unflappable, but this function fell far outside of his realm of experience and knowledge. He looked to Tron, and the other program stepped into the semicircle as well.
"That's apparently what it started doing to the others, too," he said. "It's almost as if it has the ability to get inside an individual's calculations and deduce personal desire. And then it offers to help, no matter what those desires are." The white circuits flickered violently for a moment. "You can imagine the confusion and embarrassment that this has caused."
Indeed Clu could. It made him particularly glad that Clippy had chosen his desire of purpose to focus on, rather than some of the others in his memory files. Somehow he didn't think that he would be able to live down, // It looks like you want to fuck your Creator. Would you like help? //
"And nothing at all has been able to stop it?"
"That is correct." Tron shook his head. "Every time one person disables its interface or deflects it, it just pops up somewhere else. It doesn't feel like a virus or even a piece of malicious code. It doesn't appear to be self-replicating, either, it merely relocates itself. It doesn't even seem dangerous so much as intrusive, and-"
Clu's disc suddenly cut through the bizarre function, and he was already sliding it back into its port before the last of the pixels had even hit the glossy sidewalk. It was mercy, he reasoned, not murder. It was not as if he had destroyed something that Flynn had created. Whatever it was had clearly compiled incorrectly, and from the look of things debugging would be next to impossible. He'd simply put the thing out of its misery and excised an out-of-place element from the system in one stroke. That was good. That was efficient.
Tron and the guards were all staring at him in disbelief. (And possibly relief. Clu wasn't sure.)
"Simple problems often have simple solutions." He inclined his head, pushed his way out of the cluster of Sentries, and started back toward Central Tower. "A very good day to you, gentlemen."
He felt a flicker of pride at having come to master such a peculiar turn of phrase.
>>><<<
The cycles passed, by the tens and by the hundreds. The tensions with the ISOs, with Flynn and Tron and the others, had only grown. Clu grimaced as he leaned back in his chair, his yellow-trimmed coat draping over and around him like an imperial robe, and looked out over his city. Yes, his city, now, completely and irrevocably. Not Flynn's, not anymore. But that wasn't the end of the matter, he knew that all too well. Flynn was gone but his legacy of chaos and disorder remained seemingly everywhere, in the crumbling infrastructure and the rebel factions that were already beginning to form. It needed to be purged and patched, and quickly, before things crumbled down around Clu's ears.
Clu was so lost in his own calculations about how to accomplish that goal most efficiently that he completely missed the tiny *blip!* that came from in front of his desk.
He did not miss the tapping that followed. The program spun around, blue eyes wide and wild, so quickly that his chair overbalanced and toppled him down with it. Perch and program both landed in a disorganized heap.
"What the hell-? I derezzed you!" Clu shouted as he disengaged himself from the furniture and got hurriedly to his feet. A quick review of his code revealed that nothing had been damaged save for his pride. His expression was caught somewhere between anger and disbelief, and there was even a tiny bit of grudging admiration for Clippy's tenacity. "What the hell are you doing here? How did you get past the Sentries? How are you still alive?!"
The little fucker was tapping its- arm, Clu reminded himself, it was an arm and nothing but an arm, against the glassy surface of the Sysadmin's desk. Then it stopped and blinked those hideous eyes at him. Clu shuddered. It felt like they were staring into his soul.
"Go away," he growled, low and threatening. But like the last time, Clippy didn't seem to be intimidated. In fact, it looked insultingly cheerful as the interface window popped up.
// It looks like you're creating the perfect system. //
The Master Program gave a furious roar and slammed his hands down on the surface of his desk, all but lunging across it. He knew his purpose, that he had hardly fulfilled it yet, and he didn't need to be reminded of that by this null unit of all things. Clu shouted so loudly that his voice distorted and broke into static.
"GO. AWAY!"
Clippy did not go away. It simply hovered where it was, and a new set of prompts appeared on its interface:
// Would you like help?
• Kill all the ISOs
• Just create the perfect system without help
☐ Don't show me this tip again //
Clu couldn't help himself.
He punched the damn thing right in Option 1.
>>><<<
When asked, more than one thousand cycles later and after Flynn had recompiled him, what had finally driven him over the edge, Clu talked at length about his User. He talked about about the man's absence, and also about the denial of attention and love (which was difficult to bring across believably when Kevin was so busy kissing his neck).
He talked about Flynn's conflicting orders and eventual disregard for everything that Clu was and stood for, and his blatant favoritism of the ISOs over the Basics that were his own creations, his children.
He talked about all of that, because the truth was just too embarrassing to admit.