Clu

Clu had driven the Grid to prosperity and stability for a millennia.

He had struck the perfect balance, had attained maximum efficiency, found order, control. Gone were the Gridbugs, the breaches, the crumbling firewalls and Energy droughts of the previous era when ISOs proliferated and errors multiplied exponentially. More important to any basic program than creativity or chaos or ‘biodigital evolution’ was simply dependability. That all was sufficient unto itself. That there would always be Energy, that all parts of the system functioned as intended, day in and day out, with perfect, constant reliability. That was the best computer system.

The Grid, with its finite resources, had no room to tolerate purposeless files. From where would he magically summon the excess allocations needed to sustain programs that could no longer function as intended while also feeding the functional? Programs that no longer had any use or service for anyone or anything?

Every stray Program is a leech sucking off a system that has a cap on the maximum amount of Energy available at any given cycle. There is only so much storage available in Flynn’s hard disk drive, even with the use of the double extra-capacity servers he’d hooked up to his monitor specifically to run his pet project. The natural course of action when storage space is full is trimming and deletion. Not that Clu has any possible conceptualization of what a physical computer monitor or server looks like, or the hardware utilizing the electricity running the Grid that makes him exist at all. For Clu, everything is code. For Clu, software is the equivalent of the laws of physics or science to a human; fundamental principles as all-encompassing as gravity and mass and time.

Clu oversees it all, has every joule of Energy calculated down to the decimal point. He manages the system, as a given–but Clu is not simply a program coded for the purpose of maintaining an acceptable status quo. He improves it. Optimizes for efficiency, order, perfection.

What is a perfect computer system if not efficient? That is his function. And there is never not something to perfect.

Stray programs that had lost their Identity Disks were rounded up in Recognizers and culled en-masse in the Arena games. He'd introduced that even before the coup; weak programs that couldn't win were unneeded, after all. Tron had protested it, so many centuries ago, but the cheers from the stadium drowned him out in waves of approval. By the end, there was nothing that Clu did that Tron didn't disapprove of, it seemed. Appeals to ethics and morals of higher powers that didn't belong in an efficient, constrained system. It grated on Clu's nerves. Tron was standing in his way, slowing him down, blocking the road to glorious purpose.

Yet even Tron never had a feasible, practical solution other than trusting in Flynn. He had recognized the impossible scale of the spreading errors, the growing hostility between programs and ISOs, the futility of trying to dam against the tide, but his faith had been stronger.

How saintly.

Clu, however, had no such qualms. Clu saw the shortcut, the route of efficiency, and steered straight for it. How Flynn could command such blind devotion back then, yet Clu could not, was bizarre to him.

Bloat was tracked, calculated, excised, and fastidiously cleaned. It was a monument to zero-waste principles. And the programs adored it. They loved the games, the gladiator matches to the death. After all, so much of power is simply spectacle and presentation. It was possibly the closest thing they had to a united, shared purpose. Kevin Flynn had based his personal Grid on the ENCOM system, which was a platform for their various highly successful video games, the concept of which Kevin transferred over. Battles to the death converted into sportsmanship and play.

What Kevin’s Grid was trying to be, many would realize if they really sat down and thought long and hard about it, was unclear. A playground? A dreamland that somehow also was meant to simultaneously have perfect order? Fundamentally, it was a computer system, and it would be operated as such.

The most damning - or perhaps predictable - thing of all was that it had worked. After Clu's rise to power, errors halted. No more blackouts. The Gridbugs vanished, along with the ISOs. No computer had ever been built to handle self-propagating, purposeless code. And Rinzler was content, in his own way. Serving the system, serving Clu, protecting its stability - it wasn't a far cry from his original purpose, even if the methods were vastly different.

Such were the way things were. A pity Tron hadn't understood the vision. Alas, bygones remained bygones.

Outside of the routine and regularly scheduled, broadcasted games, most day-cycles find Clu and Rinzler patrolling and monitoring, hovering over the Grid's infrastructure in Clu's Throne Ship. This is where the true work lies, the constant maintenance of the system.

Perfection never rests. Clu certainly does not, not since the moment he was compiled in the dry, empty, lightless night of the Grid's early beta version.

The Grid is streamlined, all programs organized to execute his commands and maintain the system as he's ordained; half the time it doesn't even require his personal intervention. Clean. Self-sustaining. Strong foundations. He took an experiment and made results, and the city flourishes like an ocean of light underneath his boots.

Programs fear and adore him, scream for him in the Arena, call him their liberator.

It's Clu who receives all datastreams, who monitors the Energy fields and rigs and wells, determines where and when they're built, who oversees construction of refineries, down to the flow valves and distribution pipelines, who is there when systems fail and fixes them anew. Energy is mined and flows through massive tanks and pipes, glowing blue through plexiglass, casting watery ripples onto steel and alloy walls.

Descending for personal inspection and review, he claps engineers on the shoulders as their circuits flare with perfect execution, grins at the bounty that feeds his thriving people, his city. This Energy flows back into the center, distributed to power the lights, industry, programs, the daily rations, the Grid itself. It depends on him. It exists because of him. It has reached the pinnacle of programming: ultimate dependability.

The days of erratic Energy droughts and unregulated deresolutions are nothing but dark memories in the programs old enough to remember that bygone time, a thousand cycles removed. The system is stable, open, fair to those who do their part, safe for those who belong.

There is only the now; there is only Clu.

No Users, in the future. No biodigital miracles. This was all there was, and all that would be for them. This was worth protecting for the rest of his runtime.

Backlit by neon fluorescence shimmering and swirling through towering, massive pipes, surrounded by the plenty that he has permanently ensured, proud and prideful, this is when he feels most like the User he longs to be.

The very first data log in Clu's runtime is the raw edge of unpolished mathematics and light and the face of his User.

He is Clu. He is Clu, and he will create the perfect system.

Static prickles on his tongue. The air tastes of metal and dry dust and a crackle of electricity. And his User. Always his User.

He knows his User's name without being told. It's right there, in his code, in the beginning and the end, because all he is is Flynn's. And beyond him, too - hovering overhead, pounded below every cubic unit passing underneath his feet, every raster and outline and pixel, all of it bearing his imprint, his insignia, his brand.

Status alerts from across the map, exact spatial coordinates (stacked) of every null gap between vertices still requiring linking in every unfinished render, all directories activated in his awareness and open for him all at once.

And Flynn's arm on top of it all, heavy with dense solid-fluid mass, an overcomplicated and overengineered form that could take Clu millicycles to tease apart - joint mechanics, fiber tension, electricity pinging down pathways far more jagged than any circuit, channels running throughout, wrapped around a base simultaneously rigid and porous, fine filament texture scattered with no regard to formula that begs to open files Clu can't even begin to try organizing and naming yet - and bright beyond comprehension. His temperature is...warm. Higher than ambient climate. Nothing else is. Out of all the data values saturating Clu's processors, ranging from neutral to alarming at best, this one he wants to continue. No range, no maximum. Until shutdown.

The city blazes in his senses, a guiding star. It is him. Every nook and cranny, every valley and peak. He would know it even without visual or auditory or sensory feeds. And it's a good thing they're already making their way closer, because his tasklist is already topped up to overflowing and all of his code is itching to go forward and do, to fulfill his function, to sate the yawning ache where Flynn's approval will lie.

This is all that there is now, all that ever will be. The bounds of Clu snap into place, precisely where the Grid drops off to the Sea of Simulation, only extending to annex the Portal blustering and burning against the horizon. (So far. Why is it so far? The asymmetry itches. Inefficient, but who is he to nag? It must be intentional. It must have a reason.).

So vast Clu's vision can't capture its entirety, so small it all fits inside of him, every integer and every bit. They will expand it, he knows, cities upon cities; he can access Flynn's drafts even now.

Nature vs nurture. One's formative experience dictates the rest of your life. The first thing Flynn unknowingly teaches Clu, is that Users build faulty by design - how else would there still be so much unfinished, unoptimized, imperfect? That a utility is required to polish their errors, to make it right, to finalize - Clu is the one who is needed. Clu is the solution. He is bestowed that license, and he bears it with correct pride.

The second thing he learns - or fails to understand acceptance of - is loss.

When Flynn pulls back eventually, their edges no longer meeting, it's like a wellspring abruptly dammed shut. Overflow to zero input. The idea to reach out and snatch that energy back pops up. Clu swallows it, turns his attention to the glimmering blue-white lines of the city proper following the wave of Flynn's flapping arm, where all the gridlines of the map converge in a nexus of energy, up and up and up, over and out, highways and skyscrapers and everything in-between. A crown jewel on a hill, though Clu knows not where that term arises. How can a world so unfinished still be so beautiful?

Undesignated. So much else is already named, known, inventoried, but not this. A null space for Clu's entire purpose. He turns to his User, takes in the gossamer-thin sheen of reflected light in those Grid-blue eyes, and his User grins like he knows before Clu can form the query. Clu smiles in return.

"Not there yet," Flynn admits sheepishly, all swagger and rough-edged glory. Pleased. Pleased with him, because of him.

"Might name it after him, ah, y'know - security. But I won't spoil the surprise." One eye flits shut, opens again. A warm hand shakes his shoulder. Clu's smile widens. "Great guy. The best. You'll love him, Clu."

Clu likes the sound of his name on his User's lips. Whoever has earned his User's regard must be excellent, a worthy monitor to protect the vision. He's finding a lot of things that he likes, in such a short span of microcycles. He hopes there'll be plenty more.

The world is their oyster, and nothing is impossible. It is his. It is theirs.

Clu has not learned, yet, that not everything can or should be owned. He won't learn it, even at the end, not when his entire range of perception is built on what he has permissions for and what he does not. Permissions, of course, denote access, and access gives privilege, and privileges are something you either have or do not. That is easily understood. 0 or 1. One or the other. Clu has not yet been burned by the immovable object of lack, but he is already learning how to want. Pride is one of many things he shares with Flynn. For a long time, he also shares the belief that it is the same thing as ownership. It will be many cycles before he starts prioritizing what he doesn't have in common with his Creator.

He won't know whether he craves to find more or less. A rare uncertainty, one of few. He'll hate the taste of it; it will never become an acquired one.

Clu has not yet learned that if he has enough cunning, he can take what he wants by force. Flynn teaches him that - not through presence, but through memory. Flynn has never given a damn about hierarchy or authority or scary men with pinched faces in neat gray suits who talk big money and big consequences. He doesn't put much in power; not the power others carry in labels and in name. Neither will Clu, eventually, once the radiance of glory has long worn off - but that is centuries in the making.

In that first precious millicycle, and only then - eight hours, all told - Clu believes that his User will stay here forever. It's not even a question - Flynn is there when he compiles, and he is the User, so of course he will remain. The foundation. The central axis. The focal point.

Loss is something Clu will never learn to accept.

Seven-and-a-half hours post-ground zero, from the Grid's highest point, he watches the pinpoint light that is his User vanish into a glimmer on the black horizon, escorted by Tron's accompanying lightjet, and in all this light and discovery and newborn physics, his first memory of the Grid is forever tainted by that bitter aftertaste.