lights will guide you home

[runsinpacks]

Who: Wulf and YOU
Where: Sector 64
When: anytime
What: The doctor is in.
Warnings: not yet, but program gore is a definite possibility.

Comments

[runsinpacks]

It'd have been surprising if Anon hadn't heard of it -- since programs weren't used to having medical care freely available, the first thing Wulf had done was to advertise it everywhere! "Over here!" the recompiler called, sending his latest patient off with a pat on the back and strict instructions to limit her energy intake to a level that would not prompt her to start dancing on the bar and get thrown out literally on her nose.

Hmmm. A security program, but with blue circuits -- that was a relief. Wulf strode out to meet him, brushing a few stray pixels from the latest repair job off his hands.

[[yay!~ and bwahahaha, that's awesome. stealth helmet!~]]

[voiceless_anon]

Anon looked up at the call, spotting a green-lit male program with a reassuring air about him. Relaxing, he waited patiently until the recompiler was finished with his current patient.

When the other came forward to greet him, Anon held out one of his introductory chips, and with his other hand unclipped the data pad that Flynn had given him. After Flynn had given him the pad, he'd asked the Sirens to make a minor modification to his armor so he could attach it to the front of his left thigh. It'd help if the recompiler had to ask any specific questions. He wasn't entirely sure of the procedure, as the only being who'd ever repaired him had been Flynn.

[runsinpacks]

Wulf took the chip with a querying look, but the introduction answered all of those questions. He'd seen more than one program in here without such subroutines. They were complicated modifications to make for programs who hadn't been designed with such things in mind; if that was what Anon had come for, he'd have to... well. It might not be easy to get permission from his User given the state of the system, but without such permissions, Wulf literally could not intervene.

He held out a hand for the monitor to shake, assuming that -- as had been the case all day -- his own identity was already known from the introductory messages he'd spread over the Grid. "What seems to be the trouble, Anon?"

[voiceless_anon]

Anon did know who Wulf was, thanks to the messages he'd found when mention of the clinic had made him start looking for informtion. He shook Wulf's hand, then turned so that his left shoulder wound was in view. It was more or less stable, although serious exertion did tend to cause the odd pixel to fall away. It was a rough, pixel-lined mark that marred his otherwise clean surface render.

Wulf could relax on the voice issue. Anon knew that Flynn was on the Grid, and had no doubt that his User could figure out a way to provide him with the missing subroutines. But that was a secondary issue as far as Anon was concerned, the Grid coming first.

[runsinpacks]

Now there was an image worth a couple hundred words. "Disc battle, was it?" mused Wulf, looking over for the helmeted program's nod. If there's anything he'd always recognize after all those cycles tending to victims at the Arena, it was the distinctive ragged score of a disc hit.

He peered closely at the mark, examining the way the surface render was layered, and ran a light scan over it to map out any complications.

"This should be pretty straightforward," he decided. "Here, have a seat."

[voiceless_anon]

Anon nodded in agreement when Wulf asked him if it had been a disc battle. He held still at the scan, able to feel it running over his code and making the damaged area tingle. It was strange, being on the receiving end of a scan instead of the one doing the scanning. Then again, these scans seemed different from the ones he could perform.

At Wulf's request, he sat down and looked around with interest. Most of what he could see was unfamiliar equipment, the function of which he couldn't begin to calculate.

[runsinpacks]

Much of the equipment Wulf normally used had lain unused for many cycles -- or had been misused by the rectifiers, so he preferred to keep it out of sight. Some of the rerezzed, unrectified programs still recognized it, and Wulf himself was still uneasy around it. What was left in the open was a series of devices for such purposes as installing necessary add-ons and a full virus research laboratory. So far, Wulf hadn't dared bring a sample of the Sea's virus here. When he studied that, he took his equipment down to the Sea with him, and usually derezzed it afterwards just to be safe.

Surface damage was generally very easy to deal with, unless it involved unusual mods or formatting, and the repair program had already fed Anon's information into a write file and started in on it, isolating the damaged code strings and repairing them with samples duplicated from either side of them. "I'll need your disc in a moment," he said absently.

[voiceless_anon]

Anon hadn't been around for the Rectifier - the last ship of Clu's that he'd encountered had been the Regulator. Keeping uncomfortable sights out of the view of most programs was something he was very famiiar with, however.

There were some interesting mods in Anon's coding, ones that he suspected most programs hadn't been loaded with, but they were all internal and combat-oriented. There shouldn't be any problems at the surface level, as his formatting was fairly standard there.

He reached behind his back and drew his disc smoothly, the ease of the motion betraying the frequency with which he'd used it. For this situation, however, he left it deactivated and simply held it out to Wulf.

[runsinpacks]

Since the disc slice hadn't gone very deep, Wulf had kept his scan light, and didn't come up against anything he didn't recognize. Finishing the recoding, he nodded as he accepted the disc, fully in task mode and only peripherally aware of anything outside the work he was doing.

Splicing the fixed code into Anon's disc only took a couple of nanocycles -- the cut had been clean, the irritation around the edges only due to neglect (and that pretty much confined to the armor layer anyway). Since it had been such a slight change, he didn't say anything about sitting down as he offered the disc back, reasoning that a security monitor had probably done this often enough to know when a resync would require rebooting.

[voiceless_anon]

Were Anon like most monitor programs, that would be true. As it was, he'd managed through remote repair and complete reboots from file. Even when Flynn had put him back together, he'd been offline. This would be the first time he'd actually had a minor repair done by another program.

Anon clipped his disc to his back and stilled as he felt the odd sensation of his shoulder knitting itself back together. Had Wulf been able to see his eyes, he'd have noticed them flickering blue as Anon's code updated. Blue light marched around the center ring of his disc, and he didn't move until the process was complete. It was a relief when the discomfort vanished and the odd healing-feeling went away. He nodded gratefully to Wulf, a slow incline of the head that broadcast his thanks to the recompiler.

[runsinpacks]

"There. Good as new." Wulf smiled, patting the healed shoulder. "If you don't mind my asking, why did you wait so long to get this looked at? I couldn't help noticing the timestamp -- it must've been bothering you for a while."

[voiceless_anon]

Anon still had the data pad in hand, and now he held it up so that Wulf could see it. I used to be able to heal from anything short of derezzing, back before I rerezzed here, he explained. All I needed was some energy. This time, though, it didn't work. It's the first injury I've had since I returned, so I don't know what went wrong this time. He hesitated, then added, I don't know if it has anything to do with it, but before I derezzed, Flynn upgraded me to white. When I rerezzed, I was blue again, but I still have all my memories.

[runsinpacks]

Wulf's brows rose at the explanation, and he nodded. "Hm, if you've got some truncated subroutines from upgrades that didn't reincorporate when you came back, that would account for it. Mind if I take a look?"

[voiceless_anon]

Anon gestured open-handed in a way that said, Go ahead. He didn't know if Wulf wanted to look while Anon still had his disc connected to him, or whether he wanted Anon to remove his disc, but he figured that Wulf would tell him if he wanted him to do something.

He settled back in the chair, relaxed but hoping that Wulf could find the problem. He'd suspected for a while now that Flynn's upgrade using the virus disc shards hadn't meshed properly. To be honest, he was rather relieved it hadn't.

[runsinpacks]

"Right, then. This'll be a medium-level scan, so you might feel it a little, but try to stay relaxed

[voiceless_anon]

Anon felt the odd shiver of the mid-level scan as it passed through his code, but held still. Instead, he studied the concentration on Wulf's face as the recompiler paid attention to the information he was gathering.

At Wulf's question, Anon nodded. Yes, he could ask Flynn to help. He was reasonably certain that his User wouldn't mind repairing him, given how helpful he'd been in giving Anon a means to communicate. He hadn't expected that Wulf would be able to go deep enough to change something so fundamental, and was simply glad that he'd found the problem.

Standing, Anon nodded once more in thanks.