Work Text:
Bodies are strange. Some people have real problems with the stuff that goes on inside them. You find out that inside someone you know there's just mucus and meat and slime and bone. They menstruate, salivate, defecate and cry. You know? Sometimes it can just kill the romance. You know that?
Eve, in “Fables and Reflections”.
Tron once asked when Clu lost his faith. At the time, Clu had given a different answer, but the truth is? It was a slow discovery. Looking back, he traces the chained decision tree branching back to a seemingly innocuous event. Something so small it wasn’t until many hundreds of cycles later that Clu was even aware of it, himself.
There were so many things to do in the early days. So many plans, blueprints, revisions, permutations, but…all of it was preparation. They were building the perfect world. Rooting out variables, streamlining connectivity, and Clu? Clu was fulfilling his directive. It was the happiest he could remember being. And Flynn! Flynn spending so much time on the Grid that even Clu had to remind his User the Portal would close in .25 of a millicycle, so he needed to go.
“Just another nano, man, I’ve almost got this right!” Flynn would say, and Clu would smile, and go back to whatever task they were working through together until Tron, ever reliable Tron, would ping them both, and flatly state Flynn was behind schedule.
It was during the construction of the arena annex. The wireframe was up, and the compile was running for the entire millicycle, but Flynn was still running spec rates on the mutable flooring design again, and again, growing more frustrated. Clu couldn’t see the problem, stats had run a flawless model four times already, after all. But, Flynn insisted, and Clu followed his User onto the compiling stadium floor as Flynn announced he wanted to “get right down to nuts, and bolts” ( whatever that meant ) and pull up plain text scrolls at the junction points himself.
Clu wasn’t needed there, necessarily, but in those days, he still had a tendency to be Flynn’s shadow whenever the Creator was working on the emerging Grid. Plus, the fact that something was nagging at Flynn made something, therefore, nag at Clu. Deep in a junction point, all Clu knew was suddenly Flynn yelped, and flinched back so violently, he nearly dropped right through the still-compiling wireframe! Clu, alarmed, had sprinted across what seemed like an entire third of the arena. But, even with panic calling up extra resources, he was bare nanos away from missing Flynn’s grasping fingers entirely as the User nearly toppled right off the shear edge.
Yanking Flynn up by the wrists, in his fear, Clu ended up pulling hard enough to yank Flynn over the edge so fast, that User, and program collided into a heap on the safely-compiled flooring. Relief was enough to distract Clu, so he wasn’t aware of the problem right away.
Not until he felt something warm, and…fluid? Something sticky. Something all over his palm, and smeared on his sleeve. Flynn huffed a nervous laugh, and sat up, gingerly cradling his left hand.
“Ha! Thanks, buddy. Guess I got a little too close to the edge chasing the leading line on the render.” Flynn said with his characteristic smile.
Clu blinked at the red stuff on his hand, and frowned uneasily. Then, cut his eyes quickly to Flynn as his user started to squeeze down on his hand. More red fluid was seeping between his fingers.
Blood. Users have blood.
Clu had known that, of course, but seeing it for himself…
The cooling stickiness on his hand sent shivers through him, and Clu suddenly wanted, very much, to have it off.
“You…cut yourself?” Clu ventured, showing a measure of wariness that was out of step with his usual confidence.
“Huh? Oh, yeah. Deeper than I thought, too. Hang on a tic, I’ll wrap it up, and we can get back to work.” Flynn replied, quickly shifting his fingers around awkwardly to tap at the User-style coded material of his shirt. It was such a little thing, and in no time Flynn had a darkly wrapped patch over his palm, but the blood…remained.
Clu rubbed his fingers together while Flynn saw to himself, and though he was morbidly fascinated, the fact that the red liquid did not seem to flatten, or destabilize back into source data was becoming increasingly more unnerving. Beyond that, the red stuff was chaotic; prone to gelling together, then bursting into tiny droplets so small, it was difficult to detect them at all.
Increasingly uneasy with the ‘blood’, Clu decided he didn’t like it, and tried to follow Flynn’s example, and wipe it off on his shirt. That, of course, just transferred the problem closer to his core, so despite the tiny smear, Clu gingerly used two finger to pluck the shirt away from his skin. But, then what? It was another long moment before Flynn’s cough dragged Clu’s attention away from his discomfort ( which was edging a little bit closer to panic the more he tried to rid himself of the fluid ) and looked up at the User.
“Uh. Sorry about that? We can head back to Observation if you want?”
Clu had only nodded an affirmative back. But the entire walk there, kept his User-style shirt pinched between two fingers, away from his torso’s surface render.
It was long cycles before the incident aligned with other known examples of not just Flynn’s behavior, but all the memory files, and education Clu had ever accumulated about the User world. By then, Clu realized that Users were inherently chaotic, even at their most basic level. The evidence of which still made him think, sometimes. Made him relentless in calculating as many possible variables, and permutations on the lingering User-created problems left behind when Flynn broke his faith to the point of obsession. And that was the truth of it, really. It wasn't that Clu had "lost" his faith. It had been broken beyond repair already.
By then, he had a library of memories, and moments to draw from. Such a wealth of evidence toward the instability of Flynn, the deviation from directive, and plan, that…the memory in the half-constructed arena was miniscule by comparison. Then, later, even in learning more, and more about the User world, and seeing that inherent instability was not just a flaw in Flynn alone…well. Was it really any wonder that Clu was forced to take steps to ensure continued stability?
But, in tense moments, just sometimes, even more than a thousand cycles later, Clu retained the unconscious habit of rubbing his gloved hands together. As though forever trying to rid himself of the sticky phantom sensation of blood smeared fingers.