Rinzler

Jarvis scrambles out of the Administrator's path, beady bug-like eyes snapping up to Clu's face; his pasty-white render pales a shade whiter at what he sees there. Clu strides down the hall, a magnetic force that demands attention by virtue of existence, a venomous yellow figure against polished black steel, slicing through code-space like the prow of a ship. The Grid parts for him, peels back to show its underbelly, all sectors and signatures blinking online, guiding him to his designated target. Embedded circuits in the walls fluoresce like bubbling magma as he passes, his long coat snapping in the air and his jaw set in a hard, grim line.

The geometric doors slide open with a gliding hiss. Before they're finished opening, Clu takes a step forward, static buzzing on his tongue.

Rinzler stands at attention by the empty Master Key port. His hands hover at his sides, feet planted firmly on the ground. Always alert. Always ready.

Mechanical purring oscillates in wavelengths.

Clu paces a slow half-circle to Rinzler’s left, exactly 90 degrees sharp, until the metal plates of his chest armor nearly brush Rinzler’s shoulder. Rinzler follows the motion with a reticent tilt of his helmet, lines of golden LEDs warping across its void-gloss finish. The space between them is negligible - a scant centimeter in distance.

The majority of Rinzler's processing power focuses on that gap like a heat-seeking missile. Rinzler stands perfectly still in the way only a non-biological organism can, no shaky breathing to betray his sleek exterior, no trembles crawling up his back. His code purrs at a constant tempo, sure and stable, soothed by the presence of its Master Program. But something inexplicable twists inside him.

A shot of energy up through his neck. A whisper of ancient memory data thrusts itself forward, distorted audio buzzing to life before it’s permanently erased by containment protocols.

Flynn would have called it fear.

Rinzler does not know who Flynn is. Rinzler does not know what fear is.

Clu smiles, teeth blunt and pearly-white, skin folding smooth over non-existent bone. Rinzler’s code thrums in his circuits, his fingertips tingling with the sudden rush where scarlet lights glow over his knuckles. Rinzler’s whirring pitches, displeased at the abrupt sensation cascading through his code. It doesn't stop until the false cheer drops from Clu's face.

That should not be possible. All systems remain nominal. But that sight - in his internal classifications, in his memory logs, a null space yawns wide where similar images should populate. Rinzler's visor tilts back into position, whirring as his directories reshuffle into proper organization.

Clu stares at him for a long moment, face unreadable, and for some reason Rinzler wants him to look away. He scans the locked entryway discreetly, sensors an imperceptible hum as they look for any sign of movement. Perhaps a guard Program will scamper in and divert that laser focus elsewhere.

No one comes.

“Look at you, Tron. You were so -,” Clu gesticulates in the air to emphasize a point that Rinzler doesn’t comprehend, palm open and upturned. Who is Tron? His designation is Rinzler. His designation has always been Rinzler. Silently, he cycles through a rapid status check as Clu begins to pace again, testing their impenetrable connection, filtering through molten command lines with rapid accuracy before shutting down the internal query, satisfied that his System Administrator is in working order.

“You were his favorite, you know,” Clu goes on as Rinzler stands at attention, blue eyes glassy and staring at a point over Rinzler’s shoulder. It’s the same expression on the admin's face as when he stands on the highest point of the Tower, hands folded behind his back, looking out over the orderly kaleidoscope of the Grid towards the unbridled mountain ranges of the Outlands. Rinzler turns toward him slightly as Clu walks further away, helmet angled, and that tiny motion seems to spur him on.

“Always by his side.” Who? “He loved you like a brother - but I was the first. He made me with his own two hands. I came first. First, for Christ's sake”

Rinzler has no protocol to respond to such an outburst. He has nothing to say at all.

Clu pants hard, his chest rising and falling, in time with the tidal pulse of the Sea of Simulation's waves lapping at the rocky borders of the Grid. The Portal's illumination scatters over pixelated waves like moonlight. It's open. Activated. Has been, for the last millicycle. A sight that hasn't been seen by any running program in nearly a thousand cycles. It's why Clu has been standing on a razor's edge between insanity and anticipation.

The sealed door to the control room slides open once more, and an enforcer strides inside, pinging status politely. Clu's broken expression hardens like cooling glass, and he steps forward.

Rinzler activates his lightcycle with an easy flick of his wrist. It purrs to life, tires like burning haloes, sleek and coal-black and well-tuned. Without a word, he speeds off onto the flickering circuitry of the Grid, matched only by his upside-down reflection against the tempered glass of the highway. Halogen lights flash over the black sheen of his visor.

Sightings downtown. The order is to locate and detain the infiltrator - at all costs.

Rinzler clicks deep in his throat, and dips his weight to the side with the curve of the road. His lightcycle turns with him, and he vanishes into the neon city like a blinking comet.

When the fracture point finally hits, it's nearly a relief when the tension breaks. The wait, the suspicion, the spike of raw fear whenever Rinzler tilted his head too far had nearly driven Clu to the brink of madness.

It's Flynn's voice that does the trick.

Accompanying his Administrator on a routine inspection, the cyber-weather opens the skies with electric rain. Energy drizzles down, prickling on their digital renders, drenching the black steel city in a glossy sheen. Neon billboards flicker with advertisements and pronouncements through steaming mist. Only a handful of sentries follow in formation, trudging stoutly through the dampness; security should be impenetrable this deep in the city proper.

That's when the rebel hackers strike. Holograms fritz out and flicker back online to Flynn's face, older, weary, stubborn. But it's not just a display. He speaks. A prerecorded message, though it only manages to affect a few of the displays on the block, given the slapdash infiltration. It hits both of them like lightning scrambling a power grid.

And Rinzler... Rinzler just buffers.

The path back to safety is the most graceless that Rinzler has ever been. The administrator just manages to lock the entryway to the throne room before his security program starts seizing. Rinzler claws at his helmet, chest heaving; Clu deactivates it, baring Tron's pallid, sweat-slick face gasping for air. Rinzler slams his head against the pristine floor, cracking the alloy, sending fractures through his own render. Clu bellows at him to stop, to control himself, but Rinzler is beyond parsing any verbal command. Backlash tears through Rinzler's systems, antimatter meeting matter. He sputters, scrambled output interlaced with metallic shrieks.

"Fight for the User! Fight...User! Fight Clu!"

"You serve me!" Clu thunders, but that only sends Rinzler into another fit of frenzy. The ancient directive, suppressed under conditioning, finally boils to the surface, breaking through the cracking eggshell of Rectification.

"Rinzler!" Clu roars, shaking him hard. The absolute authority of it seems to knock clarity into Rinzler for the briefest nanocycle.

"Clu," he gasps, in a voice that's not quite either one of his two halves, and then his eyes roll back into his head. For a paralyzing moment, Clu is convinced he's finally derezzing. Desperation drives Clu to abandon pride.

"You serve -," he insists, even as Rinzler moans and shakes his head in denial. "Listen, damn you! You serve... the system." Rinzler stills at that. His eyes refocus on the golden smear above him, blurred by static filming over his visual feed.

"I...fight...for...," Rinzler manages, croaking, eyes glued on Clu's face.

"You fight," Clu finishes for him, exhausted. Because that is the core of it, the bedrock of what Tron was made to be. A shield. He fights. For all. For the system and all who need it. "You fight."

Yes, that's right, a quiet voice in Rinzler says. How could he have forgotten? Always, for the System. And Clu was the System. And the Users were the System. His conflicting directives find a point of convergence, of parallel purpose. Finally, Rinzler stills, eyes wary and wide, circuits dimming back into steady crimson. After a long moment staring up at Clu, Rinzler disentangles himself and unfolds, light as air, swaying slightly.

Before Clu can rise from his kneeling position, before he can issue a single command, Rinzler slips away, disappearing through the doors that part for his security clearance, leaving nothing but rain and a false god on his knees.

If Tron doesn't want to be found, no one on the Grid could ever locate him—not in the past, when he had been Flynn's protector, and certainly not now.

Rinzler vanishes into the familiar, neon dark of the Grid. He is fleeing. He is taking stock of himself. The city is his territory, his hunting grounds and his purpose, and he knows every alley, every skyscraper like his own code. It shelters him now, like a cradled palm, hides him when he wants to be unseen.

Rinzler - Tron - Rinzler - who am I?

I fight. I fight. For the System. He was built for that purpose, an eternity ago that feels like a dream, back in an old ENCOM monitor where calm, assured hands typed in every string of his code.

Yes, he can recall that log now. He remembers many things that had been locked away from him: Clu looming above him in the aftermath of betrayal like a shadowed ghoul. Threat-assessments screaming, enemy, enemy, error. Tron couldn’t defeat him. Not with Clu’s admin-level protections, written by Flynn himself. How badly that had come back to bite them. Tron had accepted his death when he threw himself into Clu’s path and screamed for Kevin to run.

He'd lain still, staring up at Clu’s silhouette against the turbulent sky, expecting deresolution… but mercy did not come. Vicious, single-minded wrath on that simulacrum bled into something far, far worse. Something that almost looked like pity or horror or exhaustion. Clu’s hands (shaking, or was it just the twitches from his own malfunctioning render?) had pushed the shattered pixels back together messily, the crystalline tinkling sounds of cubic data fragments spilling over his gloves. Tron had moaned in agony, writhing away.

“Shh, shh. I have you. I’ll fix it,” Clu had whispered, heated and strained against Tron’s ear, voice barely captured by failing audio modules. Tron hated the look in those blue eyes. Tron hated the mask of Kevin’s face twisted into a mockery of his humanity.

“I’ll won't waste you. I’ll make you perfect.”

Always, always, it came back to perfection. Tron didn’t know what it meant, even now; he suspected that at some point, neither did Clu. Later, anyway, it no longer mattered.

Rinzler had loved it, the same way Clu did. The power. The control. The sense of self, no matter how overwritten or constructed. The delight of executing tasks pertaining to one’s directive, the jubilation of knowing all your work served that purpose. He had tasted slaughter, grown accustomed to its bitterness, its eternal stain.

He had been Tron, once. He had shouldered burdens since the first cycle he was compiled in Alan_One’s ENCOM monitor. He bore the MCP’s tyranny and the burden of being the assigned protector of a blooming world and uprisings and loss, and he can shoulder the future of the Grid itself if he must. Because to do otherwise is not in his programming. Because there is no other way forward.

The thing is, a thousand cycles is such a long time. Impossibly long. A millennia. An eternity. A hundred lifetimes. How much of Tron has fallen silent over the long epoch of service?

He's been going through his recovered memories, carefully, shaking off the dust of corruption. Tracing the roguish grin of Kevin Flynn's booming laugh, staring at the blue lines of his own old pattern. Going back to Genesis, back to square one. And he remembers.

He remembers standing on a high skyscraper as the Grid unfolded before them like a glimmering ocean of neon, crystalline towers and the distant Stadium, a sea of life and light. The tall Grid-mountains rising up over the metropolis in towering obsidian cliffs of digital shale, fogged by dense mist tinted green by the city skyline - so unlike home, so new he could still smell burnt dust. He remembers the stardust trails of lightjets plunging through atmospheric haze and grinning as he gunned his own forward harder, faster. The grand, blue-black vistas, the arcs of lightning spearing through the sky, the perfection that Flynn had wrought from nothing and that Clu had polished.

How much they had loved it all–his own fierce protectiveness, Kevin’s earnest care, Clu’s relentless focus.

And then the fractures. Kevin’s long, then longer absences. Gridbugs chewing at foundational code, security protocols stretched thin, attracted specifically to… ISO sectors. Programs he knew disappeared one-by-one, rebellions sparking and then deleted. That final, horrible calculation that Tron had flagged and yet hadn’t wanted to believe would happen.

“Would you stop worrying about it, Tron? Everything’s just fine. Everything’s under control.”

His code burns with heat. Not hatred, no, that wasn't quite the right term. Anger. Righteous, noble wrath. Fury at the inevitable, at the loss, at an existence that only ever seemed to go wrong, at a world that had deviated from what could have been. He tries not to probe at the logs and logs of deresolution piled in his memory banks, where anger just begins to veer into a cascade of internal errors. Rectification deletes them before they can fully load.

What have you become?

After an interminable amount of time has passed as a silent shadow in the system, one evening finds Rinzler perched on a high ledge, overseeing another bustling plaza. He's recharging. Soaking up the Energy falling from the sky, helmet dematerialized, hair dripping. A neon droplet rolls down his lips; he licks it clean absently, a bright spark of sharp ice that fizzles out on his tongue.

Distantly, across the metropolis, separated by a jungle of steel and light, the Throne Ship glimmers gold against the eternal blue dusk, through a haze of electricity. It glides in its usual route over the city sectors, a stately giant; it scans for him constantly. But Rinzler remains on the fringes. He monitors the way he always has, and finds... nothing tangible, except for his own growing sense of clarity.

The system was safe to the point of blandness. No longer did ISOs blossom and build fluid structures of white light. Stability. Reliability. Freedom, for those who earned it.

Recognizers rounding up strays made him pause, watching from the shadows of the sublevels. Programs that had no Disks on their backs, who glitched at the seams, sustained by the scheduled bouts of Energy rain but useless for the System. Recoverable code was tagged for Rectification, to join the ranks of service with new Disks. It was to be given purpose when deresolution was imminent. The others were rounded up to the games to die to cheers of glory.

This, too, was part of the system Clu had built—the ritualized deresolution of imperfect components, transformed into spectacle.

Clean. Efficient. Logical for a system with finite resources and storage capacity.

This hadn't been the only way.

Tron had held the faith, had trusted in the Users like a priest of blind devotion. Perhaps there could have been another world where it the only outcome wasn't stagnation. But that was not this world, not this system.

If there was anyone who could still change the Grid, it was Kevin Flynn. Rinzler had gone to Zuse, at the End of Line, on a quiet off-cycle. But even Zuse, with his mycelium network of information and intrigue, had nothing to give him.

"Still on that old chase, hm?" Zuse had purred, alabaster features composed in an expression of amused sympathy. "Our beloved Creator might as well be derezzed for all the difference he makes now."

"You don't know where he is," Rinzler had stated rather than asked, voice crackling; a faulty signal relearning how to be heard.

"Oh, the Outlands are vast and empty, darling. If Flynn doesn't want to be found..." Zuse had trailed off, gesturing expressively with his cane. "Even Clu has given up active pursuit. It's a waiting game now—who runs out of patience first, Flynn or our illustrious Administrator?"

The conversation had yielded nothing concrete—no coordinates, no pathway to the USER who might have answers.

An absentee god who had left his creations to sort out their own salvation.

Something essential had been lost in the pursuit of perfect order, vanished with the ISOs, with their unpredictable evolution and creative potential. Something more fundamental—the capacity for programs to evolve beyond their original parameters. To choose their function rather than merely execute it.

Rinzler flits through the rain-drenched city, calculations spinning through his processes, wondering if he can somehow preserve all the things he wants to have. Errors populate just at the margins of firewalls; his Disks have never felt so heavy, so cold. Something chases him, a thousand mouths, a thousand interfaces, a void in the Grid's directory - he'll outrun it, though he knows not what it is. He only knows that if it catches up to him, he'll crash.

Trying to find a way forward that might grow beyond this, that might keep both the System stable and evolve past Clu's perfection, beyond recycling the same finite resources over and over into infinity. To break the waiting game.

To protect the system and to fight for the users. To be both Rinzler and Tron.

To be complete.