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FIC: Laser Control, chapter 2 [Tron (Legacy), Yori & OCs]
02 - Blackout
With Tron gone, a millicycle of boredom awaited the Shiva crew. Only Zava and Quolli’s attention was needed to monitor the laser’s power supply while they idled, but none of them save Teck, the driver, could leave the station without crashing their whole program and trapping Flynn inside the computer. And even Teck was under strict orders to stay put unless there was an urgent message for her to send. Not that she needed telling. The laser crew’s services were called on so rarely in this system, every time was a relief now. Even if the end result was just another millicycle of sitting around doing nothing for all but two of them.
Yori plucked a datahex from her thigh and her identity disc from her back, slotted one into the other, and opened the holographic display before the crushing weight of uselessness even had a chance to stir. There were no leisure consoles in the station, so the image wasn’t as big as she would have preferred. But she wasn’t the best designer-coordinator on the Grid for nothing. With a few taps to her code she rezzed up a magnifying visor, and set to work.
The first tentative notes of Pum’s experimentation with music rose from another part of the room. Teck and Ni had opened their discs and were trying out different hairstyles and circuit patterns and discussing whether to temporarily dampen their identifiers, cover them up with a second layer of clothing, or take that uneasy last step of changing even that for the sake of their mischief. Sei, predictably, was chagrined by the whole affair. (“You may find it funny, but I’d prefer not to have Flynn’s programs think we’re some kind of soulless, endlessly respawning glitch because they can’t tell us apart and some programs keep confusing them about how many of us created in LoraB’s image there really are.”) Equally predictably, Anemone was cheering them on. (“What’s the big deal? The identifier will still be there under your suit, right? And it’s just one little circuit, anyway. Bostrumite ISOs make all their circuits bright green, on their clothes and their skin, and I hear that in Bismuth a single program’s circuits can have all the colors of the spectrum.”)
Visper plopped down next to Yori. “Whatcha doing?” She peered at the design Yori was working on. “Oh, are you and Tron redecorating?”
“Not us,” Yori said. “We had some ISO friends over for drinks a little while ago, and they were interested in our Old System decor. I’m designing a few templates for them to integrate into their own quarters.”
“Hmph. My ISO friend keeps complaining that if I make the place any more prismatic, her optical sensors will short-circuit.”
Visper reached out to rearrange a bit of code, turning a cluster of energy lines from a pink-purple gradation to orange-blue. Yori gave it a few picos of consideration and promptly changed it back.
“Then again, your optical sensors might be a little out of alignment. But as long as she knows how to push your pleasure nodes, right?” Yori said serenely.
Visper did not grin as widely as she had anticipated. Too late did Yori remember how close Visper’s friend had been to Radia and Jalen. The only exchange likely to have been going on between Visper and Quorra lately was of an alien grief and comfort laced with old, old memory scars.
“True,” Visper said nonetheless. “How Clu must love us and the way we keep luring those pesky ISOs out of their towers and all the way across town for some liquid energy or bumping purple bits.”
“Clu can go interface with a bit,” Yori spat with a venom that surprised even herself. If even half of what Tron suspected about his involvement in the ISO conflicts was true...
“No!” Bit cried, swooping down toward them.
Yori shot it an apologetic look. “Not you, Bit.”
“He’s the Grid’s only bit,” Visper reminded her.
“Yes,” Bit trilled mournfully.
“Sorry, Bit.” Yori reached up to touch it, but Bit moved out of reach. “He can go interface with a bug, that better?”
“Yes.”
Visper finally grinned to her fullest. “Would you look at that. Even a bit knows where Clu can stuff his ISO-hating malware.”
They both laughed.
Microcycles passed. The millicycle crawled on as it always did.
Pum put her music box aside (to unanimous relief) and it was promptly snatched up by Anemone (to unanimous delight). Ni and Teck moved on to playing ‘bop the bit’ with Visper, trying to make it chirp in time with Anemone’s music. When they tired of that, they dug up a datahex from somewhere and started playing Jenga. Sei gave up on getting through the milli without crashing herself in irritation and retreated to her designated idling pod against the wall.
Yori finished her designs and spent some time jokingly extolling the many advantages of Pum turning her already unique, curly orange hair fluorescent. First and foremost on the list being that it would annoy Clu.
Instead they ended up reminiscing on the system they had left behind, where the chromatics had been almost diametrically opposite to this system’s. Back then the orange (‘red’, Flynn insisted) of Pum’s hair had been as grey as Yori’s blond and Tron’s brown, as grey as the pink of their skin and the blue of their eyes – as grey as anything that wasn’t pure energy. Now they, and Clu, the ones shaped in the image of their respective Users, were the only ones with any color in a system that produced only black or white hair, and no colored light unless you manually pigmented it.
“Don’t tell anyone this, but when the ISOs showed up, I felt a little relieved that I wasn’t the strangest thing on the Grid anymore,” Pum confided in Yori. Her thin lips twisted. “But if I’d known Clu would transfer his annoyance from me to them, I would have taken it back in a tick.”
Yori was just trying to decide whether to comfort Pum with actual comforting words or by ragging on Clu, when Sei chose to exit her pod – and turned right back around at the sound of Visper, Ni and Teck’s cheering and jeering as their Jenga tower derezzed into noisy little voxels. Pum didn’t need any more cheering up after that.
Pum went to join the Jenga contest, leaving Yori to her nostalgic mood. She found herself contemplating the unlikely scenario that Sei – or one of the others, but most likely Sei, even as staunchly old-fashioned and User’s Will-reverent as she was – might grow fed up with the rest of the crew one cycle and decide to leave. Thanks to Flynn’s benign repurposing techniques, Anemone had joined them without much difficulty, but Yori couldn’t help but think the reverse wouldn’t be as easy.
Living in the Encom network quickly taught a program that all Users wrote their programs differently. Code (in)compatibility could be a serious issue, performance and efficienty varied wildly, to say nothing of the great and sometimes hilarious variety in work uniforms. But here on the Grid, Flynn had taken that simple fact of life to extremes. In Encom 511, Yori had known some of the programs he’d written before the MCP rose to power, and they had been perfectly ordinary in their differences. The earliest Grid-native programs, too, the ones who had laid the system’s foundations, were still close to what they might have been in the Old System. But the younger they were, the more outlandish their code and functions got. More and more often as the Grid grew and changed, Yori felt Flynn’s betas were as alien as ISOs.
She would have written it off as time, as the User years passing by and the digital world evolving, while the Shiva sisters and Tron escaped obsolescence only by virtue of regular upgrades and revisions to their code – were it not that Flynn openly admitted the way he wrote his programs was experimental. Just like the entire Grid was an experiment. What exactly he was testing for, he would not – or perhaps could not – say; ‘perfection, world peace, the cure for cancer, easy-peasy stuff like that’ had become his standard dismissal. But apparently not deleting anyone once the experiment was done was part of the experiment. Typical User oxymoron.
One thing Yori did know was that Flynn’s programs were coded to be flexible. When he tried to explain it once, early in the Grid’s runtime, Yori had accused him of trying to make them all interchangeable, and he had only half denied it. Flexibility was low on the list of an Old System program’s priorities, though, and when Flynn tried to force it into their functions anyway... well, Tron was suitably miserable, at least.
But maybe Flynn had a point. This wasn’t the system LoraB and Alan-1 had written them for. This world was barely compatible with the purpose they had been created for. Everything really was backwards here. While Tron had to semi-permanently overclock himself to keep up with the work expected of him, the Shiva crew wasted away in inactivity. Flynn did not believe in the leisure work that had shaped the world Yori had been rezzed into; Flynn’s Grid had an entire class of programs whose formal function was to create residential sectors, exploit system functions, modify video game simulations for private use, and even to design and develop entirely new features of their own. Hobbies and off-time should be about fun and relaxation, the User said, not more productivity.
Maybe that’s how it worked for Users, and maybe, when they sprung from his spirit, Flynn’s programs had inherited a higher tolerance than most for living in a computer that never shut down yet only saw a few hours of User activity a day. But it drove an Old System program like Yori stir crazy. Maybe they would feel better about the duties Flynn expected them to perform and the lives he wanted them to live if they were repurposed a little. Just a little. Flynn’s version of repurposing was nothing like the MCP’s, Anemone said.
Yori grabbed a blank datahex and calculated light jet designs until her code stopped crawling and her body stopped shivering.
“Flynn’s pushing it again,” Ni sighed. Every time another microcycle went by, her circuits flashed. This being the eighth microcycle, she flashed doubly bright in warning.
The light looked even stronger than usual because of the excessive amount of circuits she and Teck, taking inspiration from Sei’s comment about soulless glitches, had decided on. Almost every pixel of their suits was covered in broad, new system-style light lines, branching off fractally into more delicate, Old System-like ones. Their dimmed identifiers were conspicuous dark spots below her throats. They looked ridiculous, but Yori had no doubt they would walk out of the Arcade at the end of the millicycle without a care in the computer.
“The User is testing us,” Quolli quipped.
They all laughed.
“He’s really cutting it close this time,” Ni said another microcycle later, frowning and rubbing the circuits on her arms like their bright flash had stung.
“Are we going to have to send a reminder?” Anemone looked vaguely alarmed. “Again?”
Sei grimaced. “I hate having to bug the User like that.”
Pursing her lips, Yori turned to Teck. “You know what to do.”
“I still get to tell Tron you want Flynn punched in the nodes if he doesn’t hurry up?” Teck asked, taking off her disc and quickly resetting her suit configurations to default.
“Absolutely.”
Teck turned on her heel, grinning like a gridbug.
All eyes were either magnetized to a display panel or turned up toward the faint light of the Portal, flickering down through the water from far, far above.
Anemone tucked the same lock of hair behind her ear for the twenty-seventh time, stark white against her dark skin and grey suit. “Teck should have been back by now.”
Half a microcycle left.
“Something’s not right.” They all knew it, but Yori couldn’t help it. She forced herself to breathe slow and deep, to keep her energy cycling down and her circuits cool. “Flynn should’ve given the undigitization command by now. Is anybody even on the platform?”
“No,” Sei said. “No reports of transports coming this way either.”
“If Flynn intended to stay, he would’ve come here to tell us... right?” Zava asked. There was a tremor in her voice that had nothing to do with processing strain.
“Maybe there’s been an emergency?” Quolli offered uncertainly.
There had to be, Yori thought with frightful certainty. Flynn, Tron, Teck, what’s going on?
She spun around and made for her pod.
“To your stations, programs. Initiate emergency power retrieval and reduce our energy usage to a minimum. We keep the Portal open for as long as possible. If Flynn has been delayed, every nano could mean the difference.”
This must be what a ‘nightmare’ was like.
Yori’s mind was loud and close with frantic calculations and rapid typing and shrill reports and commands and rush and energy strain and panic radiating even through such a distant connection, or maybe that was just her own mind magnified and echoing amidst operational sequences.
And then –
– the Portal winked out.
Pressure eased from their minds like a bubble popping.
Silence fell.
No-one looked up.
“It closed,” someone said. Voice small, disbelieving.
Sei reared up and snapped, “Really? How do you calculate that, bitbrain?!”
“Stop that,” Yori snapped back automatically. Her head felt numb and dizzy from the abrupt disconnect from the station and her sisters. This was a new sensation. She opened her pod and climbed out, holding the edge tight against the momentary spinning of the room.
“And start doing what?” Sei asked shrilly. “What do we do?” She clapped her hands over her mouth, fisted them in her hair, waved them about as hysteria threatened to overtake her. “What do we do?!”
Everyone started talking and panicking at once.
“We start by –” Yori rasped as she straightened up. Then she squared her shoulders and raised her voice, catching her sister’s eyes wherever she could. “Calm down, programs! We have to find out why Flynn hasn’t shown up. This might be all according to plan!”
But her gut feeling told her it wasn’t.
Her gut was right. When they teleported into the arcade, there was red light waiting for them.
Laser Control (WORK IN PROGRESS)
01 - Digitized
02 - Blackout
03 - Coup
Digitization: one part magic, three parts hard work by Yori and the rest of the laser control crew. Resistance: the only thinkable course of action when red once again swarms the system and takes Tron away from her.
With Tron gone, a millicycle of boredom awaited the Shiva crew. Only Zava and Quolli’s attention was needed to monitor the laser’s power supply while they idled, but none of them save Teck, the driver, could leave the station without crashing their whole program and trapping Flynn inside the computer. And even Teck was under strict orders to stay put unless there was an urgent message for her to send. Not that she needed telling. The laser crew’s services were called on so rarely in this system, every time was a relief now. Even if the end result was just another millicycle of sitting around doing nothing for all but two of them.
Yori plucked a datahex from her thigh and her identity disc from her back, slotted one into the other, and opened the holographic display before the crushing weight of uselessness even had a chance to stir. There were no leisure consoles in the station, so the image wasn’t as big as she would have preferred. But she wasn’t the best designer-coordinator on the Grid for nothing. With a few taps to her code she rezzed up a magnifying visor, and set to work.
The first tentative notes of Pum’s experimentation with music rose from another part of the room. Teck and Ni had opened their discs and were trying out different hairstyles and circuit patterns and discussing whether to temporarily dampen their identifiers, cover them up with a second layer of clothing, or take that uneasy last step of changing even that for the sake of their mischief. Sei, predictably, was chagrined by the whole affair. (“You may find it funny, but I’d prefer not to have Flynn’s programs think we’re some kind of soulless, endlessly respawning glitch because they can’t tell us apart and some programs keep confusing them about how many of us created in LoraB’s image there really are.”) Equally predictably, Anemone was cheering them on. (“What’s the big deal? The identifier will still be there under your suit, right? And it’s just one little circuit, anyway. Bostrumite ISOs make all their circuits bright green, on their clothes and their skin, and I hear that in Bismuth a single program’s circuits can have all the colors of the spectrum.”)
Visper plopped down next to Yori. “Whatcha doing?” She peered at the design Yori was working on. “Oh, are you and Tron redecorating?”
“Not us,” Yori said. “We had some ISO friends over for drinks a little while ago, and they were interested in our Old System decor. I’m designing a few templates for them to integrate into their own quarters.”
“Hmph. My ISO friend keeps complaining that if I make the place any more prismatic, her optical sensors will short-circuit.”
Visper reached out to rearrange a bit of code, turning a cluster of energy lines from a pink-purple gradation to orange-blue. Yori gave it a few picos of consideration and promptly changed it back.
“Then again, your optical sensors might be a little out of alignment. But as long as she knows how to push your pleasure nodes, right?” Yori said serenely.
Visper did not grin as widely as she had anticipated. Too late did Yori remember how close Visper’s friend had been to Radia and Jalen. The only exchange likely to have been going on between Visper and Quorra lately was of an alien grief and comfort laced with old, old memory scars.
“True,” Visper said nonetheless. “How Clu must love us and the way we keep luring those pesky ISOs out of their towers and all the way across town for some liquid energy or bumping purple bits.”
“Clu can go interface with a bit,” Yori spat with a venom that surprised even herself. If even half of what Tron suspected about his involvement in the ISO conflicts was true...
“No!” Bit cried, swooping down toward them.
Yori shot it an apologetic look. “Not you, Bit.”
“He’s the Grid’s only bit,” Visper reminded her.
“Yes,” Bit trilled mournfully.
“Sorry, Bit.” Yori reached up to touch it, but Bit moved out of reach. “He can go interface with a bug, that better?”
“Yes.”
Visper finally grinned to her fullest. “Would you look at that. Even a bit knows where Clu can stuff his ISO-hating malware.”
They both laughed.
Microcycles passed. The millicycle crawled on as it always did.
Pum put her music box aside (to unanimous relief) and it was promptly snatched up by Anemone (to unanimous delight). Ni and Teck moved on to playing ‘bop the bit’ with Visper, trying to make it chirp in time with Anemone’s music. When they tired of that, they dug up a datahex from somewhere and started playing Jenga. Sei gave up on getting through the milli without crashing herself in irritation and retreated to her designated idling pod against the wall.
Yori finished her designs and spent some time jokingly extolling the many advantages of Pum turning her already unique, curly orange hair fluorescent. First and foremost on the list being that it would annoy Clu.
Instead they ended up reminiscing on the system they had left behind, where the chromatics had been almost diametrically opposite to this system’s. Back then the orange (‘red’, Flynn insisted) of Pum’s hair had been as grey as Yori’s blond and Tron’s brown, as grey as the pink of their skin and the blue of their eyes – as grey as anything that wasn’t pure energy. Now they, and Clu, the ones shaped in the image of their respective Users, were the only ones with any color in a system that produced only black or white hair, and no colored light unless you manually pigmented it.
“Don’t tell anyone this, but when the ISOs showed up, I felt a little relieved that I wasn’t the strangest thing on the Grid anymore,” Pum confided in Yori. Her thin lips twisted. “But if I’d known Clu would transfer his annoyance from me to them, I would have taken it back in a tick.”
Yori was just trying to decide whether to comfort Pum with actual comforting words or by ragging on Clu, when Sei chose to exit her pod – and turned right back around at the sound of Visper, Ni and Teck’s cheering and jeering as their Jenga tower derezzed into noisy little voxels. Pum didn’t need any more cheering up after that.
Pum went to join the Jenga contest, leaving Yori to her nostalgic mood. She found herself contemplating the unlikely scenario that Sei – or one of the others, but most likely Sei, even as staunchly old-fashioned and User’s Will-reverent as she was – might grow fed up with the rest of the crew one cycle and decide to leave. Thanks to Flynn’s benign repurposing techniques, Anemone had joined them without much difficulty, but Yori couldn’t help but think the reverse wouldn’t be as easy.
Living in the Encom network quickly taught a program that all Users wrote their programs differently. Code (in)compatibility could be a serious issue, performance and efficienty varied wildly, to say nothing of the great and sometimes hilarious variety in work uniforms. But here on the Grid, Flynn had taken that simple fact of life to extremes. In Encom 511, Yori had known some of the programs he’d written before the MCP rose to power, and they had been perfectly ordinary in their differences. The earliest Grid-native programs, too, the ones who had laid the system’s foundations, were still close to what they might have been in the Old System. But the younger they were, the more outlandish their code and functions got. More and more often as the Grid grew and changed, Yori felt Flynn’s betas were as alien as ISOs.
She would have written it off as time, as the User years passing by and the digital world evolving, while the Shiva sisters and Tron escaped obsolescence only by virtue of regular upgrades and revisions to their code – were it not that Flynn openly admitted the way he wrote his programs was experimental. Just like the entire Grid was an experiment. What exactly he was testing for, he would not – or perhaps could not – say; ‘perfection, world peace, the cure for cancer, easy-peasy stuff like that’ had become his standard dismissal. But apparently not deleting anyone once the experiment was done was part of the experiment. Typical User oxymoron.
One thing Yori did know was that Flynn’s programs were coded to be flexible. When he tried to explain it once, early in the Grid’s runtime, Yori had accused him of trying to make them all interchangeable, and he had only half denied it. Flexibility was low on the list of an Old System program’s priorities, though, and when Flynn tried to force it into their functions anyway... well, Tron was suitably miserable, at least.
But maybe Flynn had a point. This wasn’t the system LoraB and Alan-1 had written them for. This world was barely compatible with the purpose they had been created for. Everything really was backwards here. While Tron had to semi-permanently overclock himself to keep up with the work expected of him, the Shiva crew wasted away in inactivity. Flynn did not believe in the leisure work that had shaped the world Yori had been rezzed into; Flynn’s Grid had an entire class of programs whose formal function was to create residential sectors, exploit system functions, modify video game simulations for private use, and even to design and develop entirely new features of their own. Hobbies and off-time should be about fun and relaxation, the User said, not more productivity.
Maybe that’s how it worked for Users, and maybe, when they sprung from his spirit, Flynn’s programs had inherited a higher tolerance than most for living in a computer that never shut down yet only saw a few hours of User activity a day. But it drove an Old System program like Yori stir crazy. Maybe they would feel better about the duties Flynn expected them to perform and the lives he wanted them to live if they were repurposed a little. Just a little. Flynn’s version of repurposing was nothing like the MCP’s, Anemone said.
Yori grabbed a blank datahex and calculated light jet designs until her code stopped crawling and her body stopped shivering.
“Flynn’s pushing it again,” Ni sighed. Every time another microcycle went by, her circuits flashed. This being the eighth microcycle, she flashed doubly bright in warning.
The light looked even stronger than usual because of the excessive amount of circuits she and Teck, taking inspiration from Sei’s comment about soulless glitches, had decided on. Almost every pixel of their suits was covered in broad, new system-style light lines, branching off fractally into more delicate, Old System-like ones. Their dimmed identifiers were conspicuous dark spots below her throats. They looked ridiculous, but Yori had no doubt they would walk out of the Arcade at the end of the millicycle without a care in the computer.
“The User is testing us,” Quolli quipped.
They all laughed.
“He’s really cutting it close this time,” Ni said another microcycle later, frowning and rubbing the circuits on her arms like their bright flash had stung.
“Are we going to have to send a reminder?” Anemone looked vaguely alarmed. “Again?”
Sei grimaced. “I hate having to bug the User like that.”
Pursing her lips, Yori turned to Teck. “You know what to do.”
“I still get to tell Tron you want Flynn punched in the nodes if he doesn’t hurry up?” Teck asked, taking off her disc and quickly resetting her suit configurations to default.
“Absolutely.”
Teck turned on her heel, grinning like a gridbug.
All eyes were either magnetized to a display panel or turned up toward the faint light of the Portal, flickering down through the water from far, far above.
Anemone tucked the same lock of hair behind her ear for the twenty-seventh time, stark white against her dark skin and grey suit. “Teck should have been back by now.”
Half a microcycle left.
“Something’s not right.” They all knew it, but Yori couldn’t help it. She forced herself to breathe slow and deep, to keep her energy cycling down and her circuits cool. “Flynn should’ve given the undigitization command by now. Is anybody even on the platform?”
“No,” Sei said. “No reports of transports coming this way either.”
“If Flynn intended to stay, he would’ve come here to tell us... right?” Zava asked. There was a tremor in her voice that had nothing to do with processing strain.
“Maybe there’s been an emergency?” Quolli offered uncertainly.
There had to be, Yori thought with frightful certainty. Flynn, Tron, Teck, what’s going on?
She spun around and made for her pod.
“To your stations, programs. Initiate emergency power retrieval and reduce our energy usage to a minimum. We keep the Portal open for as long as possible. If Flynn has been delayed, every nano could mean the difference.”
This must be what a ‘nightmare’ was like.
Yori’s mind was loud and close with frantic calculations and rapid typing and shrill reports and commands and rush and energy strain and panic radiating even through such a distant connection, or maybe that was just her own mind magnified and echoing amidst operational sequences.
And then –
– the Portal winked out.
Pressure eased from their minds like a bubble popping.
Silence fell.
No-one looked up.
“It closed,” someone said. Voice small, disbelieving.
Sei reared up and snapped, “Really? How do you calculate that, bitbrain?!”
“Stop that,” Yori snapped back automatically. Her head felt numb and dizzy from the abrupt disconnect from the station and her sisters. This was a new sensation. She opened her pod and climbed out, holding the edge tight against the momentary spinning of the room.
“And start doing what?” Sei asked shrilly. “What do we do?” She clapped her hands over her mouth, fisted them in her hair, waved them about as hysteria threatened to overtake her. “What do we do?!”
Everyone started talking and panicking at once.
“We start by –” Yori rasped as she straightened up. Then she squared her shoulders and raised her voice, catching her sister’s eyes wherever she could. “Calm down, programs! We have to find out why Flynn hasn’t shown up. This might be all according to plan!”
But her gut feeling told her it wasn’t.
Her gut was right. When they teleported into the arcade, there was red light waiting for them.
Laser Control (WORK IN PROGRESS)
01 - Digitized
02 - Blackout
03 - Coup
Digitization: one part magic, three parts hard work by Yori and the rest of the laser control crew. Resistance: the only thinkable course of action when red once again swarms the system and takes Tron away from her.