Author's note: This may get turned into a post-Legacy ongoing (with this as the prelude) if I manage to get my story mapped out. For now, though, posting as is, since despite this being no more than a basic retell of a 45-second film segment, it took me way too fracking long to get this far. Also, there may be small edits, since this site killed half of my formatting, but probably nothing big.
I own my computer, which I like very much. Apart from that, pretty near nothing.
"Take the shot!"
Clu's voice rang in his ears, filled with an urgency that resonated firmly in his base directives. Rinzler's grip tightened on the trigger, staring down the target zone to the lightjet neatly pinned beneath his crosshairs. The craft spun and turned frantically, trying to escape, but he danced behind, staying in their shadow with a deft touch as his own jet spun between the white trails.
The shot was there, but he held off, angling his guns slightly straighter, more centered. It should be perfect. Clu demanded perfection, and Rinzler enforced it. That was his core programming, his purpose, his nature. Obey Clu. Derezz the imperfections he was sent after.
The larger craft was an imperfection of the greatest kind. It spun and weaved, unable to return fire, the tail guns broken and useless after Rinzler's initial shots. They were helpless, weak, unable to fight back, unable to run from him. He tensed, prepared to take the shot, then loosened his grip abruptly, re-centering the target, adjusting his aim again. The rumbling in his chest grew in intensity, frustration building. But it would be pointless to fire randomly, like the fools who'd fallen before. The goal wasn't to damage the enemy. Even to kill them in a haphazard rain of death would be a failure. This should be done right.
The crosshairs skipped over the face of their rear gunner, eyes wide with fear and helpless anger as the boy-the user-frantically yanked on his own trigger controls. Not understanding the extent of his guns' destruction, seeking desperately for something to stave off the graceful death that stared him down. Centering the target. Re-centering. Rinzler had seen that face before, the same panic and fear and hatred staring up at him from the cage floor, the screams of the crowd surging through him, calling for deresolution, wanting to see shattered data, broken functions. Wanting to hear a scream of pain as the disk was brought down, as the helmeted figure stood victorious over his broken and failed opponent, over the program who couldn't win to save himself, to save everything that mattered. He had tried so hard, fought for... for something important.
The rumbling growl grew, the helmeted figure shaking slightly. The target. Re-center. Adjust. The perfect shot. Clu demanded perfection.
There had been blood. Redness welling up from the user's wound, leaking across his armored suit like... like a dark virus spreading through a sea. But no, this was bright, not dark, the result of victorious combat, not... not failure. Not emptiness.
It glowed-no, glistened. Not lit from within like circuitry lines, but reflecting color in the light of his disks. A deep red, stranger, more vibrant than anything he'd seen before. He'd never seen this, never known a user. Never seen one bleeding or shaken or frustrated. Gleeful, exuberant, laughing, amused. Panicked. Sorrowed. Shamed.
The drop fell, expanding into tinier fragments, spheres of red breaking the perfect smoothness of the arena cage, its crystalline hue marred by shattered glistening proof of pain. Of users.
The boy was a user. His name was Sam Flynn. Rinzler's grip had tightened on the program-no, the user. Flynn meant something. It meant something to Clu, something he had spoken of many times, to the crowds, to his guard, to Rinzler. It was Clu who cared. Rinzler just obeyed.
Flynn, GO!
Rinzler's grip on the trigger shook, Sam Flynn's face staring out with helpless fury in the target zone. The rumbling in his chest built, resonating with Clu's shouted command.
"Finish the game!"
It wasn't a game. To Clu. It wasn't. Flynn was the Betrayer. The User. The one who abandoned them, turned on them. Turned on Clu. That was what mattered. That was what Rinzler heard again and again, Clu denouncing to the city, to his guards. Clu's voice echoed in his head, rebounding in the dark shell that enclosed him, the word twisting, unable to escape. Betrayer. Betrayal.
A sick feeling rose in his gut, an almost physical pain curling inside. Of course Clu hated Flynn. He betrayed them all. He turned on everything he had meant, everything they had admired. Everything he had been, everything he had fought for.
What have you become?
His head snapped back, his gaze leaving the ship in front, leaving the users for the first time since the chase began. Clu closed in, his own position blocked by Rinzler's dancing jet, frustration evident as he surged forward, urging Rinzler to take the shot, to finish the game. To follow his programming. Obey Clu. Derezz them. Him. The Betrayer.
Creator.
He jerked his head back to face the targets, but Clu's face lingered in his mind, mouth twisting in words Rinzler had never heard, had never needed to hear.
"He made me in his image. For all intents and purposes, I am the Creator."
The growl built in the program as Rinzler's grip shook, piloting by reflex, following the trail, following the dance of destruction and flight. The rumbling noise washed through him as he closed his eyes, focused to a desperation, trying to drown out the half-heard voices and echoes that pulled at the edges of his base code, stretching, him, tearing apart and patching together from within.
"And together we can keep this world a perfect system."
His eyes snapped open and he faced the user again, the face consumed with desperate, helpless frustration and fury. Just as before in the arena, in the cage. Just as with thousands of programs over hundreds of cycles, in cages and streets and skies and towers of light and darkness and war. He had deleted their imperfections, showered their shards to the sky and wind and cold smooth ground by a toss of his disks, a turn of a light-ribbon. By blasts in the sky. The faces flickered across his crosshairs, across the user's helplessness before him, and Rinzler savored the victory, the perfection to Clu's ideal even as the echoes in his helmet built in a keening of shame and loss.
But there was another face. Linked by form, not expression. By the tilt of eyes, the shape of face. It didn't flash before the user's image, but drew itself slowly out by semblance and traces of shared features.
Clu.
But not Clu. The face Rinzler saw was contorted in expressions so bizarre and foreign to Clu's nature that... he didn't know what to feel. A laughing face. Cocky. Full of expression, life, amusement. Smirking in satisfaction as he surveyed the latest structures, commenting on what a few lines of code could do. Dazed but victorious, collapsed over the hull of the solar sailor after displaying power beyond anything they had expected. Grinning in pure joy and exuberance as he... as they raced through the Grid, lightcycles speeding out to lead in turns, his own enjoyment of the challenge shaded slightly by the desire to protect the user beside him.
Greyer, worn, darkened through the black helmet as Rinzler's jet flitted by overhead. No joy in this changed face. No fear. Sorrow. Loss.
Rinzler closed his eyes, opened them, and the faces were gone. It was just the young user, sitting in the rear-facing gun seat, as Rinzler's crosshairs found the perfect shot, the perfect moment to fire and end the game, end the users, end the ISOs that had given them hope.
No.
The view changed as the program yanked back on the controls, shooting up, away from Kevin Flynn and his son, away from the craft that had to be destroyed, had to be saved. He wondered if his helmet had broken as his vision shattered into pictures that made no sense, knowledge that could not be excused. Data flashed in broken streams, corrupted signals churning in his mind. He had violated his primary directives, he had destroyed and failed to destroy and both were wrong, both could not be forgiven.
He was damaged beyond all repair, beyond all function. He gagged, hunching forward in a useless defense as his programming rewrote itself, deleted, reconstructed. Back and forth, destroying, protecting, and he tried to cling to something, with no way to tell truth from deception, corruption from base code.
He had abandoned Clu, had abandoned Flynn, and he had to derezz them, protect them, serve or help or end them. As his craft shot up, climbing into the dark clouds that flashed with orange and white reflections, desperation and despair were all he could be sure of.
I have to remember.
Crashing sounds rose up from beneath as stuttering shots rang out, a panicked shout in a voice the program hated and served, treasured and hunted. Clu. Flynn.
No. I have to fight.
The jet's nose dropped, and he plunged toward the ground. Beneath him, the spiraling white lines pitched downward in a roll, Clu's yellow jet diving between, spraying fire into the target's rear and sides.
Urgency building, he slammed his controls forward, trying to drop faster, catch up to the tangled ships before... before what? The sickening shame built again, frustration bubbling beneath the panicked desperation that drove him down. Before Clu finished the job that should have been his?
No! No no no no no...
It wasn't his task, it couldn't be, that was wrong. Everything is wrong, a small voice wailed in despair and panic. Rinzler was tasked to destroy the users, to follow Clu, but the program recoiled from the thought in rage and pain. He couldn't fight for Clu, he wouldn't be that again. Rinzler's directives were false.
Rinzler was false.
What am I?
He let go. Released all control, effort, vague attempts to hold himself together, to hold back the flood of shattered, jagged data that cut at the edges of his mind. And it destroyed him. Images, voices, people, programs. Over a thousand cycles of death and pain and betrayal flickering in a stream of broken fragments that far surpassed what he could process.
The lightjet continued to speed downwards, the program dropping blind as he curled in on himself, the last remnants of coherence reaching through the deluge of code for shards of sense amid the madness.
Because far back, among the torrent of pictures and faces and names and unforgivable failings, there were names.
Flynn was there. Clu as well, of course. Neither new, but even the brief flickers he caught were so different in meaning, so immensely warped from Rinzler's memories.
Others, too. Sark. Ram.
Yori. Yori was... important.
They were all important, all pieces of meaning amidst the overwhelming flood. He knew them, and they… they knew him. And if he followed the trails, he could look back, could find something…
Alan-One.
"Alan?"
"Where did you hear that name? ...It's the name of my user."
Alan-One. His user. His creator. And Flynn, his ally, later his user.
His friend.
The program pulled out of the fall, leveling out just below the level of the rolling combatants. He stared into the twisting mix, traced the path of Clu's yellow lights bearing down on the users in their damaged craft. And despite his fragmented processing, shattered data and rewritten base code that was still barely a foothold in the mass of command protocol that defined Rinzler, the program understood.
"I fight for the users."
Tron flew.