2020-12-09 22:29![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tanks4thememory
tanks4thememoryWho: Clu1 and Clu 2 (a_perfect_end)
The life and times- and sexytimes of Clus One and Two in the ABO universe, collected here for the sake of convenience and avoiding page clutter. Multiple scenarios, lots of fun. Mostly of the NSFW variety.
Where: Their User world abode and possibly other places
When: Some undetermined time post Legacy and after this thread
What: ABO sexytimes and maybe other things; a Clu on Clu catchall
Warnings: VERY NSFW. Multiple kinks, ABO related warnings, sorta incest depending how you view programs from the same User, basically enter at your own risk if you're not into that sort of thing
The life and times- and sexytimes of Clus One and Two in the ABO universe, collected here for the sake of convenience and avoiding page clutter. Multiple scenarios, lots of fun. Mostly of the NSFW variety.
Re: got this double vision; i need my own religion {imprisonment/captivity; violence; verbal weaponr
His calculations, sadly, had been off this time. Just as he'd put the final touches on his work and was closing out the window, intending to be long gone before anyone realized what was wrong, a lightning strike had hit the energy collector on the building's roof- a good idea, he had to admit; waste not want not, or whatever the User saying was- and channeled it through the surge protector, just as it was meant to. The surge protector he'd just disabled. Which then, predictably, had violently shorted out, throwing him back against the raised ledge surrounding the perimeter of the rooftop, leaving him stunned.
Thankfully, he was only stunned. But the nano or two it took him to recover was enough time for him to lose the headstart he'd hoped to have over security, as the sentries who came running to investigate the explosion had spotted a highly suspicious program with unique circuits scrambling over the rooftop ledge. The result had been a chase that spanned the length of half a sector, during which he'd used every relevant trick and exploit in his arsenal to shake his pursuers, including throwing the free code bomb he'd been planning to use on job later that millicycle at them; it would be some time before that alleyway was passable again, though at least a few members of the Black Guard were now considerably more colorful. It was all for naught in the end as a cadre of heavy sentries finally cornered him. The first to approach him would likely need a visit to a recompiler as well as a new helmet courtesy of Clu's fists and the wall of the building he'd been a bit too near, but before Clu could deal with any of the others the function binders had been slapped on him. And that was the end of it.
He'd expected a quick derezz, especially after he'd told them to do something anatomically impossible with their shock staves when they demanded he identify himself, but they didn't need to know his full [ident] to recognize what he was or put 10 and 10 together. Here, they had the hacker they'd been scouring the system for for cycles. Decacycles, even. In truth, he'd been causing trouble for significantly longer than that, almost since the coup itself, but as the Grid's population became more and more centered in Tron City alone, the hacker had come in from the failing outer settlements too. There, his work had really gotten noticed.
What he'd gotten though, was hauled here, and forced to his knees before the program who had driven all his actions thus far. A program who'd taken his name and his color and forever linked them to deresolution, destruction, madness, and oppression. A program who'd turned against their creator and everything he'd stood for. A program seemingly bent on turning himself into a poor copy of the MCP. The Grid's sysadmin.
So he knelt there, reduced to his default template- he had a number of other, more standard ones, even a few circuit masks that could stand up to most cursory scans, but the function binders were thorough-, still damp from the rain and sporting a few colorful fragments of free code stuck to him in places, as he strained futilely against the invasive code locking down his functions. Well no, that wasn't all he was doing; he was also glaring daggers at the sysadmin. He couldn't so much as stand under his own power just then, but if looks could kill, the admin would be derezzed already. Several times over. And his voxels reduced to pixel dust to be aggressively deposited in the nearest recycler.
The glare didn't falter as the sysadmin crossed the room to where he was and addressed him with a dark grin. If anything it intensified as Clu forced himself to unclench his teeth enough to reply. "I'm here because you want something," he spat. "Otherwise I'd already be a pile of voxels on the floor courtesy of that voiceless kill-bot you turned Tron into. After all, the MCP went pretty much straight for the decompiler; not sure why you'd be any different."
Re: got this double vision; i need my own religion {imprisonment/captivity; violence; verbal weaponr
Clu had trouble inventing spontaneous responses, and he hated having to guess.
Most rebels fit neatly into a handful of scripts, and were as neatly dispatched with the direct use of overwhelming force. The standout cases, who probably thought of themselves as unique, and who at the very least presented an actual threat--well. Those, he simply fed to Rinzler.
After all, he relished a challenge, and thanks to a natural discipline thrumming beneath his very tight rein, he was always up for a little exercise.
But it'd be a waste to do that with this one. And waste not, want not, or however it went: he only gave Rinzler the unsolvables--true believers who really would rather die than pledge to their System.
Clu liked to think of it as granting their last wish.
He only hoped this one could be made to see reason. After all, this brave and inventive fellow had taken his color and made it a spectacle, bright as caution tape. His latest catch was just full of surprises, with a basket of tricks that ranged from highly refined espionage routines down to the kind of glitzy garbage the street sentries were forever peeling off young vandals. And he'd smashed up quite a few units above his own threat class--was that down to raw power? Luck, maybe--or just the element of surprise? There was something in the report about a novel use of local architecture. And it matched scores of other incidents like it:
No, indeed. Underestimating this one would be a mistake.
Clu detested mistakes. And as a point of personal pride, he never made the same one twice. He considered that, not quite pacing, stalking nearer until they were almost toe-to-toe. He stiffened, ever so slightly, for the assessment of his best enforcer.
"Where'd you get that idea?" Snappish. He smoothed the bridge of his nose with a sigh, pinching. "Are you that eager to be scrapped?"
He crossed his arms, then let them drop, fixed the smile in place a bit more firmly.
"You're right about one thing: I do want something. But you should be asking the next question: whether you can give me what I want."
He was not about to wilt so easily under the force of that glare, sharp as any cutting torch. After all, the hacker would find it difficult to do much of anything mischievous--or anything about it at all, really--given his present position.
(no subject)
But for the moment, he couldn't, so words remained his only viable weapon. He hadn't missed the way the admin had stiffened at how he'd described Rinzler; he decided to dig at that a bit further. "I got that idea because Tron told me himself," he said, then gave a brief, slightly feral smile. "Who do you think made the code work-arounds for him that let him resist you as long as he did? Tron would've rather have been derezzed, slowly, than be what you turned him into! You stripped away everything that made him unique and special and turned him into nothing more than a moderately more effective kill drone because you prefer to surround yourself with a bunch of subroutines rather than programs who can actually tell you 'no'."
"If Tron was still running security instead of that bunch of low-rezz null-units you've got in charge of the suite, I'd have probably been caught cycles ago. What made him so effective was that he could run independently, think and act without waiting for orders from central processing. That's what let him tag you for what you were; a threat to the system, its User, and its programs. And you couldn't stand the thought that he might be right."
The suggestion of what he should be asking himself would be almost laughable if the situation wasn't so serious. He wasn't eager to be scrapped, but he'd died once rather than betray his User; did the admin really think he wasn't willing to do it again? "Tron hated what you've turned the Grid into, and so do I. And so would Flynn. Why would I give you anything?"
(no subject)
Still. Clu loved the symmetry of a secret police black site tucked under the central plaza itself. All the ordinary daily functionality running perfectly above them, oblivious and ignorant, each and every program that might pass by absorbed entirely in the details of their own work, caring only for their own desires and concerns. And their productivity margins, if they knew what was good for them.
But then, good programs always did. This one was something else again, and by the time he was done talking--once all the steam ran out of him--well!
Clu. Was. Furious. Just, breathtakingly, angry, to hear his glorious vision spat back to him in those terms. And with such language! He almost--almost! Bit his own tongue to hold in a deep, ugly snarl.
...That would never do. Not so soon. He mustn't lose his temper.
"Give me?" He coughed to clear the strangled tone, smiling, smiling. Holding the smile. "I didn't, ask, if you wanted to. Just whether you can." Snapping the smile back like a shutter pulling closed. "Anyway, I must admit--"
He forced a laugh, sharp, ugly, a little too high. "Your charming story, does leave questions of my own."
"That was you?" Seething with an almost jealous and reluctant admiration, despite himself. "I mean, that's your own work then, huh?"
Softly, almost to himself. "I knew, I knew that Dyson was a two-faced phony, but wow!" And just like that, all of his attention was back to the hacker, hands that itched to make fists instead folded so neatly, and here is the steeple. "You should've heard the way he sang his praises, man. No idea that was yours...Almost makes me wanna shake your hand."
Clu shook his head, exaggerated, and tsked, tut-tut.
"Almost."
(no subject)
"If Dyson'd had his way, Tron wouldn't have survived long enough to turn into Rinzler," he said. "And he wouldn't know decent codework if it hit him in that giant head of his. Glitch tried to brute-force hack an already damaged program; the fact that Tron didn't derezz completely before someone found him is astonishing. I can't take credit for most of the physical repair work- that was another of his allies-, but the fact that he remained himself as long as he did? That was all me."
For all the good it had done in the end. But they'd both known what the inevitable outcome would be. Clu had simply allowed Tron to do some good, accomplish something for the resistance before the trojan code claimed him.
The rest of it though... he briefly debated replying at all, but the lag was miniscule. It was a relatively quick decision tree; all in all, his best chance of survival and escape was to keep his captor talking and find out as much as possible.
"And I can do a lot of things. I can't say whether or not what you want is on the list unless you tell me what it is. The real question though, is whether or not I will do it. Which is unlikely, but also depends partly on what the task is. So come out and tell me what you want from me, cause this conversation will just keep looping if you don't dump that data, and I suspect neither of us has time for that."
(no subject)
That was another of his allies--
The thought that he might have missed any was galling, but it was unimportant beside the rest.
But that he lasted as long as he did? That was all me.
Clu's mouth fell open and physically snapped shut: he heard and felt his teeth click, and he gritted them together, grinding them in search of his patience.
He was flickering. His hair spit and crackled against his collar. But every syllable of every word had landed true, or at least valid, within range and too, too likely.
No lies detected.
Clu needed analysis like that, which he could get elsewhere. But this latest problem called for several degrees of freedom, and for this exact kind of solution-oriented thinking, which he could not get. Not from anyone left. Not from anyone he trusted.
They were running out of time. And this hacker was nothing if not fearless and inventive.
So Clu gritted his teeth. Gathered up his temper and swallowed it, live-wire hot. He spared an ugly little laugh for Dyson's forehead. (It was funny.)
Clu spread his hands, rolled his shoulders in a huge, great shrug, let them hang a moment--perfect concession, perfect contrite defeat, even as he edged further into his captive's personal space.
"No," brittle, wry, trying again for the smile; it wavered, harsh and too, too full of teeth. "You're right about that: I've got a full schedule, and this one's a--it's a pressing issue, and it can keep, but it can't really wait."
The thunder outside helped make his point for him, shivering the grilles in the windows.
"All this rain? That's not supposed to happen." Clu braced his palms on his knees, not quite crouching; they were not quite level, but neither was he looming over him anymore. "And it's coming from the Sea."
"Forgive me," rough, not so theatrical as to duck his head, "but as your exact capabilities are mysterious even to my scans," heavy with envy, with admiration, "I don't know if I need to tell you this or not, for calibration--Projections right now have it not stopping. Like, ever. We'll be flooded out within the cycle. Total system cascade."
He almost went for the shoulder grab, buddy, friend and stopped himself, canceled it with a snort. Went with the facts instead. Scrunched them down to their essentials, sour with mockery but absolutely true:
"Wanna help me save the world?"
(no subject)
One that never came. Instead, he swallowed it down and responded with a deep shrug and hung his head for a moment, a gesture of defeat and contrition too calculated and practiced to be at all sincere. Which was further proven as he edged further into Clu's personal space. Much closer and he'd be right on top of him; he was already within arm's reach. Would he keep going, maybe haul Clu to his feet and back him against the wall if he continued to defy him. It wasn't outside the realm of possibility. Or maybe he'd force him down and pin him to the floor. As close as he was getting, a thought flickered through Clu's processes that the admin might even enjoy it, in a way other than vengeful glee at seeing this long-time bug in his code humbled. He seemed like the type who might get off on that sort of thing; after all wasn't it him who'd taken the games and changed them from the simple entertainment and athletics they were meant to be back into the sort of orgy of suffering and deresolution that they been under the MCP.
But those fleeting thoughts about the admins potential proclivities were canceled out by what he said next. Whatever Clu had been expecting him to say, what he did say wasn't it. An outline of a grim scenario, an inevitable end. Some of Clu's defiance finally faded as resources were devoted to processing that data. He could be lying. The sysadmin was no stranger to lies after all; he'd lied to Tron, to the system at large, even to his own User. But as much as part of him wished it were so, no matter how he processed it, it still pinged as true to his hacker's instincts. Even if it was a lie, it would fall apart the moment he was presented with any actual code and data relevant to the situation. Programs could lie, but data didn't, and if the admin had anyone who could falsify data well enough to fool him, he wouldn't need Clu to begin with.
He could still be just plain wrong, of course. The data the stats programs presented could be faulty, or the admin could be reading it incorrectly, but given his code brother's obsession with perfection, he found that scenario highly unlikely. He wouldn't have made such a dire pronouncement unless the projections had been double and triple checked by all relevant programs. No, by all indications, this was real, and they were truly heading for disaster.
The question then left to him was, what was he going to do about it? Because his directive demanded that he do something. Help Kevin Flynn in whatever way he needs. Those were the words that lay at the core of his being, and with Flynn and countless of his programs trapped inside the system, he had to act on this data. Attempting to pass the task off onto some other program- if there even was another program who could handle it- wasn't an option.
A treacherous part of him wanted to throw it back in the admin's face, to refuse out of sheer spite. The ultimate 'frag you and the lightcycle you rode in on'. But he couldn't. As much as he loathed the idea, he would almost certainly need the resources of central processing to affect anything on that scale. And his directive came once again to the forefront of his processing. Trapped as he was, what Flynn needed was a stable, healthy system. And for that he needed a stable, healthy sysadmin. Not this tyrant who was gradually spiraling into complete glitching insanity, derezzing and perverting all he'd been tasked to build up and protect. And none of that would happen without something- someone- to keep him in check. Decision gate reached.
"You do know this mess is your fault, right?", Clu finally responded. "You and your glitching obsession with destroying the ISOs at any cost. You introduced a virus into your own system, into part of its BIOS. Do you have any glitching idea how insane that was?! Especially when the code you infected was already known for producing unpredictable effects! It's amazing you didn't crash the whole system right then and there. You created this clusterfault, and you deserve to suffer every bit of the consequences for it."
He sighed, and then he began speaking again, though his tone was still bitter and angry, it was no longer laced with venom. "But Flynn and the innocent programs of the system don't deserve to suffer for your shortsighted, glitching insanity. So I'll make you a deal. Restore the games to their original specifications. No more deresolutions, all safeties back in place, and keep them that way. Do that, and I'll help you clean up this clusterfault. I can't promise it'll be perfect- the only way to fully restore the BIOS to its original functioning capacity would be to eliminate the virus in the sea, and who the frag knows if that's even possible at this point-, but with the resources of central processing, I can repair enough of the damage to prevent the disaster you outlined, and keep similar scenarios from recurring in the future. Deal?"
i have an order for walling here, is that right?
Because it was his fault. It was all his fault. Data did not lie. Something in the calm, measured layout of facts: Clu had sworn--not to Tron, not to Flynn, not even to himself, whom he had set above his own Creator--but to the System: It will be perfect. I will make it perfect.
And instead he had nearly shattered it. Programs could lie, all right. Clu sure had, first about being pleased to welcome the ISOs into Tron City, then with the upgrades to help Jalen--then came the navi-bit surveillance rigs to improve System through traffic, and not too much later, the first of the antiviral sweeps.
All of it had worn the name of law and order, but all of it had been something else entirely. Bits of like nature flocked together, didn't they, and he'd drawn such stalwart lights as the great and noble General Tesler, fearless Dyson, sweet, gentle Pavel. Even Castor. Even Zuse.
There was no avoiding it. The truth was the truth was the--
"No," low down, hard, a strangled cough. Then, louder, "No. No!"
He'd been straining mightily to hold a lid on something volcanic, bright, bitter rage that drove him forward clean as gasoline sparked through pistons. He was angrier than he'd ever been--except once, Flynn's own disc dumped from his hands by that rolling clash of shoulders with Tron himself.
And then as now, Clu's next move was the same: grab, and smash.
He slammed into the hacker and kept going, pinned them both flat to the wall.
"No way, man," a snarl right in his ear. He only just managed to cancel an impulse to bite, every line of him thrumming, past furious, shamed and stinging. "What is it with you legacy models? So afraid of a game with stakes."
"How about this?" Laughter bubbled up, ugly, unfit, not within spec. He swallowed it down by force of will, a heady, nasty thrill pulling through his circuits, certainty and something else climbing the mains. "The Games stay just the way they are, only, if you help me, Rinzler doesn't get to play with you."
Nope wrong place, but gotta take it I guess.
Perhaps surprisingly, the first thing out of his mouth was a somewhat breathless chuckle. There was very little humor in it though. "Took you longer than the MCP at least," he said, his voice rather strained. "Though at least your wall doesn't have a decompiler."
A deep breath and another picosecond or two to clear the rest of the errors, and he spoke again, his voice a bit stronger. "Derezz me, or let your pet killbot do it, and you condemn your entire system to drown," he said. "If you had any other options, you'd have taken them already. Or maybe you have and they failed. You need me, alive and cooperative, with my code intact. And the only way you get that is on my terms. Threatening me with torture and death didn't work for the MCP, and it's not gonna work now."
"As for the games, 'stakes' implies that everyone involved is betting willingly. What the games are now aren't even games. They're just a showy way to derezz programs who oppose you. Or eliminate strays that for the most part wouldn't exist if you were actually performing your function instead of acting like an MCP wanna be. You're not gonna get 'perfection' by consolidating or destroying until there's nothing more you can take away. And a system ruled by terror is never going even approach an optimal state."
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That didn't make it one bit easier to take.
"Would you stop comparing me with that overstuffed, overfunded child's toy already--!" It trailed off in a wordless growl, followed by the pop and sizzle that proved he could pronounce "!!! That, slagging, chess nerd--that, that, card catalog!"
He wanted, yearned to hit something, only he couldn't afford for it to be the hacker. Clu instead diverted his oustretched fist into the wall, and the surface crunched with a glassy, brittle noise under the pressure.
"My System." Clu seized on that, frantic, bitter possession. "Not yours. Mine! You have--you have no idea--what it was like. Every time he left. Every time he came back. Every--"
But the strings fragmented, choked apart under his anger and trailed away, leaving only the hacker's next words instead. Because he was calm, and steady, and not to be budged. Because he was right.
--the innocent programs of the system don't deserve to suffer.
Certainly not to drown.
And Clu would not, could not, leave them to that fate. Not and continue to be their Admin: to desert his own directive was something beyond deresolution, and foul, perverse impossibility. Tron had never understood that. Flynn had misunderstood it, to his peril.
This guy, though? He seemed to get it, determined as he was to keep driving that point home.
So Clu he reached for an alternate vector: pushed them into alignment, glared at him nearly nose-to-nose. What Clu wanted, with a clawing, bodily intensity, was to shake him until his teeth rattled. Instead he gripped him by the chin, tapping none too gently for emphasis.
"You," tightly, gritted like it would crack his teeth, "are, a, hacking Program. What have I got," gasping after his control, "besides your word, hmm?" Smiling at him, feeling how it stretched, feeling the slight shudder in his limbs. "D'you think I made it here by trusting promises?"
"So offer me something more. Something good, for the good of my Programs, and I'll restore the Games to factory settings, right now."
He didn't need to lie: once he made the update, the logs would start to spool in near-realtime.
(no subject)
"It's true, I don't know how it was for you in the hundreds of cycles before I was uploaded to the Grid," he said. "I've dug into records, made personal observations, but that still can't tell the whole story. But just as I can't know that, you can't know what the MCP was like, not really."
"I was there, and even if it was from a distance, I experienced its rise to power. Saw how it brought system security under its control with coercion and code patches that altered threat definitions and restricted higher processing ability. Only the most brutal and sadistic were granted command functions, and any who were able to operate independently were marked as threats to be hunted down. I saw how it consolidated power, bringing more and more under the direct control of central processing and thus itself. Watched as outer sectors went dark, watched as programs were given the choice to abandon their beliefs and join the new order or face derezolution. Watched as the original game grid was turned from an athletic competition to a place the MCP sent any programs it couldn't use for its own ends for them to be ground into pixel dust."
"Your origins might be different. Your reasons might be different. But the results are the same. I couldn't do anything about it then aside from distracting a few security patrols. But here? Here on the Grid it's s different datafile."
He closed his eyes for a breath and a beat. Opened them again. Time to execute the command he'd decided on. "What I can offer you is myself. Not just for this one task, but on a more permanent basis. I won't help you root out or destroy rebels, but I will help you create a system where programs won't feel the need to rebel in the first place. A stable, healthy system."
"Which requires a stable, healthy admin. And that's not what you are right now; stable healthy programs don't slam other into a wall because they said something they didn't like. You don't just need someone who can fix the immediate crisis, you need someone who is willing and able to sanity-check you, to stand up to you. And the fact that we're in this position now shows I fit that function set pretty well."
"And aside from that you know that I'm good with both coding and... creative solutions to problems. Which are good things for any admin to have on their side. I doubt it'll be much fun for either of us, but given some time, I think the results will speak for themselves."
(no subject)
...He was still gripping the other program by his chin.
Stalemate. Clu let go abruptly.
He wanted, after all, to hear what the guy had to say! That was the point of sparing him--to obtain his help, and that included all this data. Even if it was brutal to listen to. It stung, it needled up the trunk line, to be compared 1:1 with that old tyrant.
"It's not the same." Hard, with a shake of his head that had too much flinch in it. "I'm not the same. I just get--so--" he shivered, head-to-toe, like a horse beset by a hundred flies, but his internal diagnostic returned only caution, without tags or significance. "I--"
Didn't really matter--stable, unstable: Flynn had made him tough. Clu had torn down no few of his own guardrails to gain his present power. He'd survive.
And they had a Maker in common. There was no doubt of that.
"You know, you've got a ton of nerve? I like your offer, man--you're one of his, all right!" Bright, brittle, bold as a pop-up: Are you sure? (Click OK?) "You've, clearly thought about it--but! I wonder."
He hadn't had a pure offer of loyalty in so long. Let alone from anyone with the sheer stubborn grit to tell him no and mean it. Repeatedly!
True core actions didn't take a bunch of fanfare. Strictly speaking, he didn't need to use his hands. But bracing them whisper close to either side of the hacker's head for dramatic effect? Making sure that spidering crack in the wall was under his grip, and melted back together beneath his touch? So that the hacker could feel it humming up the wall behind him, local surfaces abuzz with the force and speed of the patch? To say nothing of the access level and sheer bandwidth needed to move all that data at once?
Yeah. Totally called for. Absolutely necessary.
"You want the safeties back bad enough to work for me?" The confirmation sparked against the backs of his teeth and rolled out of him like smoke from a furnace: "DONE."
Drag and drop.
Clu sank down, slumped inward on his outstretched palms, bent until his elbows leaned on the wall--cleared his throat. Used their proximity. Kept his tone bright and polite: "The Games are now safe as houses, except for those functions cleared for priority or specialist access, who may choose their difficulty from now on. Just for you."
After all, if he was slagging weird about it, if he needled and cajoled in return, then his reluctant new loyalist might be too creeped out to detect that it was...a lot...to move all of that, instantly and alone, even for an admin of his class and clearance.
Drained as he was, he was by no means finished. He leaned in, all paternal, and clutched the hacker tight by the shoulders: attaboy, slugger.
"Same team!" It was a rumble. "Welcome. And don't worry--you'll never wear the orange, or the red. I need you as yourself! But," and he was grinning, "I think you've earned a crash course. After all, if you're his, and I'm his, and we're at all alike--"
Then he knew, or could guess, just where to touch--"I won't need your disc for this. Thank you, for changing my mind." He kissed his ear. "Allow me to return the favor."
It was a simple paired script: one for their environment, and one locked to the function binders themselves. Those would permit input--would grant Clu a certain amount of access. And he used it for...
A slight slowing of the internal clock--nothing dangerous, just an extra loop that made everything flow, easy and languid. The slightest shuffling of priority, scanning turned way, way up, tuned above even a hacker's precision and gently coaxed outward, just to render-surface, a rich fascination with the tide of new input focused almost all in haptics, awash in a blaze of touch. That slight shift in garment texture--tense, tight sheen and stretch that had him gleaming entertainer white, down to the tips of his new shoes.
The circuit color resisted, of course. An aftereffect of the admin's promise and the hacker's sheer will.
He made a perfect Siren, otherwise.
(no subject)
When he spoke, even his attempt at a verbal response faltered, a shiver running through his frame. "You tore out protocols to become what you are now," he pointed out as the admin trailed off. Clu wasn't privy to the details, of course, but well... there was a reason that editing your own code to any significant degree was considered at best highly inadvisable, even when one did have the permissions for it. Most programs found the idea repellant, or even blasphemous, to the point where it had become something of a self-enforcing taboo. But that didn't stop some, for better or worse; Bostrumite ISOs, for example, had been rather famous for tweaking their own code in a variety of ways. While ISO code was flexible and adaptive enough to handle such things, to a point, the more rigid coding of User-created programs, however... "That was never not going to have side effects. No matter how carefully it was done."
Ripping out safeguards had allowed him to do what he felt was required. But it was a disc that cut both ways. Slowly, cycle after cycle, eroding his ability to self-regulate, allowing the corrupted logic trees that had led him to poison the sea and betray his User to begin with to grow and spread, to widen the cracks and breed justifications and denials like junk code bred gridbugs. And with much the same destructive results.
Even with most all of his functions locked down, there was no mistaking the shift in the code around him. He couldn't, at present tell what had been done, but something clearly had. Something big. And since the admin had to know that he would check it at his first opportunity, he had no reason to believe that it wasn't what he claimed.
Whether or not it would stay that way was more in doubt. "What I want is a free, healthy system, where everyone can feel safe," he said. "Restoring the games is an important part of that. And one I can easily keep an eye on." The implications were clear; if the admin ever went back on his word and made the games deadly again, the deal was off. But it likewise bound Clu to his end of the deal, because if he were to abandon his new post in central processing and go rogue, he would risk the admin doing just that, and worse, in retaliation. A link forged begrudgingly and negotiated through clenched teeth. But one that would bind them both.
He wasn't especially surprised when the admin leaned in still further, forearms resting on the wall, as he continued talking. Not only was such a move entirely on brand for him, given what Clu knew, but shifting that much data at once had likely taken a lot of effort even for a program on his level. Needing a moment to regather his processes and let energy flow catch up from the sudden massive load was entirely understandable.
What was surprising, though in hindsight probably shouldn't have been, was what came next. The world became fuzzy and pixelated around the edges for a moment as the changes took hold. Without saving them to disc, the changes wouldn't be permanent, thank the Users. But that didn't make it any less uncomfortable, especially on top of the already invasive coding of the function binders. And especially since the clothing template he'd been forced into was far tighter than anything he'd ever worn willingly.; how did Sirens even move in outfits like this?
Not that he could do much moving at the moment, of course. He'd managed to shift away from the kiss on his ear albeit a bit too late, mostly out of surprise, because wow, really? After they'd just gotten through snarling at and insulting each other, he was doing that? But Clu didn't think he'd be able to do it again, and not just because of the function binders. Every circuit and inch of skin felt hypersensitive, the suit providing none of the insulation that normal clothing templates did. It was like the specialized and delicate sensors on his hands had been spread over his whole body and turned up to their maximum intensity. He could feel everything; the texture of the wall behind him and the floor beneath him- how was it that not even the shoes offered any insulation, what was even the point of them then?-, the feel of the suit against his shell, the heat of the admin's circuits in such close proximity to his, he even imagined he could feel faint static still crackling in the air from the massive amount of code that the admin had recently shifted.
It was the heat of the admin's circuits that drew his attentions though, overlayed protocols shifting and drawing more energy to his own circuits in anticipation. It was blatantly clear what the admin intended, and though he didn't dare try to move when he was this sensitive, the glare returned, full force. "Nice trick," he said sarcastically. "What's the matter, can't get an actual Siren's attention, so you gotta make one instead?"