FIC: Heirs [Tron (Legacy), Quorra & Clu & Sam]
Title: Heirs
Author: Omnicat
Unofficially Adapted From: Joseph Kosinski & co’s Tron: Legacy, Jai Nitz & co’s Tron: Betrayal, Chris Borders & co’s Tron: Evolution, Charlie Bean & co’s Tron: Uprising, and Steven Lisberger & co’s Tron.
Spoilers & Desirable Foreknowledge: Spoilery for all of the above except Tron and Tron: Uprising. Foreknowledge required for the entirety of Tron: Legacy and Tron: Betrayal and desired for Tron: Evolution, though for the latter, it will suffice to know that Radia and Jalen were ISO leaders, Jalen was turned into a virus called Abraxas by Clu, and ‘Basic’ is a term for User-written, non-ISO programs. For Tron: Uprising, foreknowledge of episode 5, ‘Identity’, and episode 6, ‘Isolated’, will suffice. Or, even easier: strays lose their memory and identity as a result of losing their discs, and Ada was an ISO who was on the run with Quorra after Clu’s coup. From Tron, I used only the observation that only red-circuited programs and Game Grid prisoners wore discs.
Warnings: Traumatized!Quorra x manipulative!Clu, past genocide, past natural disasters of the digital variety, mind control, non-explicit reprogramming torture with lasting damage, non-explicit circuit sex.
Characters & Pairings: Quorra x Clu & Sam & Rinzler & mention of Flynn & Radia & Jalen & (very very vaguely implied Quorra x) Ada
Summary: Quorra is the last of the ISOs, and as such, the Grid is rightfully hers. // AU, darkfic
Author’s Note: Written as a pinch-hit for that_runneth in the Tron Female Character Ficathon. This fic references a piece of headcanon of mine that says discs were not used in the old system until the MCP introduced them as a means of spying on and otherwise oppressing programs, but that Flynn introduced them as a necessary requirement for a program’s functioning in his new system.
Heirs
The first round was just getting good when Clu started rubbing her knee. His fingertips skimmed just shy of the circuit that ran down the side of her leg, teasing, tantalizing. Quorra contemplated whether taking him up on the offer was worth missing the Games. Clu always liked to be the one calling all the shots, which suited her just fine this cycle. She could let him do all the work, let him think whatever he and his little Basic mind wanted about the energy exchange.
The joke would be on him.
Not unkindly, Clu cupped her chin and tilted her head towards his. And Quorra remembered living through cycle upon cycle of isolation and barely restrained hostility, of having no shoulder to cry on when her regret outweighed her choices after all, until she was so desperate she threw herself at him, no longer caring about the repulsively smug tilt of his mouth.
The joke was on him. He just hadn’t realised it yet.
“You seem distracted lately, Quorra,” Clu murmured, eyes hooded as his gloved thumb dragged across her lower lip. “Can’t be the Games. It’s been nothing but strays for cycles now. They barely know who they are, there’s no fun in that.”
With a smile, Quorra dug her fingers into the thick hair at the nape of his neck and pressed their lips together. He tasted like pleasure, the promise of more, and greed.
Two out of three. That would do, for now.
“I beg to differ. About the strays,” she said, drawing back. “The irony is delicious.”
He raised an eyebrow in question.
She could have explained. Could have told him, ‘Did you know programs weren’t originally meant to have discs? Rinzler told me.’ Clu would have been indignant and denied it, would have claimed Flynn or Tron would have told him if that were true. And she would have laughed and gloated and told him all about Flynn’s disregard for the discomfort of Old System programs who had first known discs as a tool of the MCP’s oppression, his presumptions about the nature of programs as open for anyone to read and meddle with, his prioritizing of easy access to a program’s functioning over the integrity of their heart and soul. She would pour out all the secrets Flynn had used to try and console her during those long cycles she had supposedly spent hunting him down before she finally brought him in, all the ways she had belatedly realised the insolent Basic slaves in this system were not worth losing her own people over.
‘Strange how Rinzler never mentioned this before,’ Clu would say. And Quorra would admit, ‘Not strange at all. I’m the one who did the bulk of his reprogramming. You didn’t honestly expect me to create something so deadly and hand the reigns of it over to you, did you?’
And Clu would derezz her on the spot. Probably before she finished her third sentence.
So she didn’t say any of that. She just shrugged, asked “Don’t you?”, and slid off of the arm of his chair, into his lap.
“Combatant 3: violation. Initiate final round.”
The interfacing was just getting good when a disruption of Clu’s directive, Clu’s perfection, made his energy burn caustic against Quorra’s circuits.
Chaos. Just the news she’d been waiting for.
“Rinzler defected,” Clu deadpanned.
He didn’t look at Quorra. He didn’t have to.
“Yes sir,” the faceless, toneless, hacked Sentry lied. “SamFlynn kept calling him ‘Tron’, sir.”
“Oh. That old bug.” Quorra made a concerned face. “We never did fix that after the previous User - well.”
She glanced at Clu from the corner of her eyes. Nervous. Fearful without implying actual guilt. Convincing.
“Find Rinzler. Fix him. And bring me this program who claims to be a User.”
Clu’s voice was a perfect facsimile of detached rage, until that last word.
After he and Quorra had forced the truth about the ‘real world’ from Flynn at long last, Clu thought the system safe from further User interference.
He thought Flynn had told him everything.
Quorra could barely contain her mirth and excitement as she clipped off a “Yes, sir,” and turned on her heel, striding from the throne room with a hex of Black Guard in tow.
Half-dissolved orange voxels crunched underfoot as, genuinely curious, Quorra circled the User, committing all his features and dimensions to memory. His face was easy on the visual processors and his body had the solid build associated with Clu and physical strength. Some foolish part of her was disappointed, though. Even after all this time, after all her studies of and experiments on Flynn, she had expected... more, out of at least one of these beings.
“So you’re Flynn’s... son.”
Son: a randomly generated biological creation of two Users, one of the female and male sex each, meant to perpetuate their source code after their own version starts to deteriorate. The female variant is called ‘daughter’.
“Who the hell are you people?” Flynn’s son demanded, trying to turn his body to follow her movements but held back by Rinzler’s grip on his shoulder. “And what do you want from me?”
50% of this User’s code was identical to Flynn’s. When she sent the Call, she had scarcely dared to hope she would be so lucky.
“I’m Quorra,” she said, facing him and smiling brightly. “And this is my loyal security program Rinzler. ‘He fights for the ISOs!’”
She laughed at her own joke without shame, because there had been precious few others willing to do so for the past thousand cycles.
SamFlynn only stared at her. “The what?”
“Me,” Quorra said, sobering only the slightest bit. “As for what I want from you: this...” She nodded at Rinzler, who removed SamFlynn’s disc and handed it to her with a respectful half-bow usually usurped by Clu. “...and your User privileges.”
SamFlynn, it seemed, understood more of the system than his embarrassing fumbling in the arena suggested. His expression shuttered and hardened, all hostility and confusion replaced by a guarded blankness.
“What for?”
“Only to protect my home and my people,” she said, and this time, she did sober. What was left of her people. All 458 of them, the faces and name tags that had been triggered in her memory banks post-coup carefully guarded and encrypted. Hidden, for now. But not much longer.
She fed a first measure of power into the disc, and a display of SamFlynn’s recent history lit up, icy blue against her own warm gold. “You see, SamFlynn, I’m not like the other programs in this system. Rinzler here - ” Without looking up from the holographic data, she waved a negligent hand in his direction. “- and all the others you’ve seen, they’re just tools with an attitude. What minds they have are made up of nothing but slavish devotion to their designated functions, seasoned with a tiny little sliver of personality copied from the User who wrote them.”
“But you think you’ve evolved beyond that,” SamFlynn guessed. “Funny how that kind of thinking always seems to go hand in hand with crimes against humanity. In every sense of the word.”
Smiling a smile copied directly from Clu’s face, Quorra looked up into his eyes. “I didn’t have to evolve beyond it. I was never like that in the first place. My kind, the Isomorphic Algorithms, were not written, SamFlynn - we were born spontaneously from an endless Sea of possibilities. Free to do, choose, feel, and be whatever we wanted.”
‘ISOs have no functions, no purpose, so the system won’t be bereft by their deletion. And if they all go together, if there’s no-one left behind to mourn the loss of them as a friend or mate - well, then there’s really no reason for them to fear death, now is there?’
A warm, soothing voice and a strong, soothing hand against her back. Clu’s madness had been a balm when nothing else could quell the grief and despair of those dark days before the Purge. Of Radia’s loss and Jalen’s corruption, of system fault after gridbug attack after system fault after gridbug attack, of the brothers and sisters who had emerged from the Sea alongside her crushed or torn apart or infected, of everyone she knew and loved (oh, Ada, Ada Ada Ada) strewn across the floor in a liquid cascade of glowing voxels, their data melting to nothing, of a world tearing itself apart under the strain of too many programs -
“The primitive little minds of the Basic programs didn’t know what to make of us. They decided we fell into the same category as anything else that wasn’t them or their precious User - a nuisance and a threat, with no right to the system. The system that had birthed us, called us into existence out of nothing, while they were planted here for no other purpose than to serve it.” She had to take a deep breath before she overheated. “But Flynn, who had built this world as a toolbox, realised how extraordinary our emergence was, how much more meaningful our existence.”
A soothing, weathered hand and a soothing, croaking voice. ‘You’re like them, and you’re like us, but at the same time you’re unlike either. You’re the best of both worlds, merged into something new and extraordinary. Streamlined and flawless like a program, but complex and adaptable like a human. Not bound to a programmed directive nor guided by animalistic instincts. You’re a miracle.’
“...you’re the miracle?” SamFlynn whispered.
Quorra snapped out of her reverie.
“Oh, he mentioned us! How nice.” Rage boiled up, quicker than her processors could follow, a kilocycle’s worth of repressed frenzy, and it was all she could do not to spit in SamFlynn’s face. “How hypocritical. Flynn promised us a place in this system - promised us rule of this system. But when Clu crashed due to Flynn’s conflicting directives, he did nothing to protect us from him. He hid while half a million of my people were slaughtered at the hands of his malfunctioning tool.”
While I helped him slaughter them. Out of some misguided feeling of guilt for our existence. Out of desperation to escape the agony of waiting to be picked off one by one by errors, bugs and tensions the Creator should never have allowed to exist in the first place.
“Quorra...” SamFlynn kept his voice low, soft, cautious. Soothing. “If that’s true, all you needed to do to get my help was ask.”
Soothing. Ha. Ha!
Quorra’s laughter was brittle, sounded unhinged even to her own ears. “Yeah, right. That’s what Flynn said - when he could still talk. ‘I’ll help you, Quorra, I’ll keep you safe, I’ll make it all better.’ But all he had to offer was empty platitudes, a hole to hide in, and more fear.”
And lo’, the pretence of assistance and comfort melted like voxels after a fresh kill. “What did you do to him?”
Ever the perceptive servant, Rinzler gripped both of SamFlynn’s arms tightly.
“The same thing I’m going to do to you, User.”
Quorra had worked on Tron and Flynn and countless random Basics before this, but she still couldn’t get used to the screaming. She didn’t waste any time disabling his voice, though. The Portal would close within a millicycle. She had a deadline to make and lots of work to do.
Luckily, the garbled, gibbering mess she’d made of Flynn and the many dummy copies of his code she had used to practice on, had paid off. One used-up wreck of a man kept in quarantine stasis for Clu to gloat at was enough. This time, this time, she would cut the User privileges out of the User’s code without destroying them, and she would repurpose him without scrambling his mind.
What chance did Clu, with his Admin privileges and his army, stand against an ISO with User privileges and the loyalty of a User on the other side of the screen?
Clu had had Flynn and Abraxas, the champion of the ISOs twisted into his very own pet monster, had had the highest system privileges a program could have - and had Quorra, the one who came willingly. Because he did so love for his collection of things he had taken from the User to be complete. Quorra would have SamFlynn and Rinzler, the champion of the Basics twisted into her very own pet monster, would have higher system privileges than any program was granted - and have Clu. Clu, repurposed, back in his rightful place and cleansed of any heretical ideas about free will for Basics. The system would belong to its rightful heirs again.
And maybe, once she’d had SamFlynn show her around the other world, the ISOs would take that too.
PSAN: Hope this is to your liking, Runneth! For such a fun prompt, I really spent an inordinate amount of time agonizing over how to go about filling it. *dies* *again*
Author: Omnicat
Unofficially Adapted From: Joseph Kosinski & co’s Tron: Legacy, Jai Nitz & co’s Tron: Betrayal, Chris Borders & co’s Tron: Evolution, Charlie Bean & co’s Tron: Uprising, and Steven Lisberger & co’s Tron.
Spoilers & Desirable Foreknowledge: Spoilery for all of the above except Tron and Tron: Uprising. Foreknowledge required for the entirety of Tron: Legacy and Tron: Betrayal and desired for Tron: Evolution, though for the latter, it will suffice to know that Radia and Jalen were ISO leaders, Jalen was turned into a virus called Abraxas by Clu, and ‘Basic’ is a term for User-written, non-ISO programs. For Tron: Uprising, foreknowledge of episode 5, ‘Identity’, and episode 6, ‘Isolated’, will suffice. Or, even easier: strays lose their memory and identity as a result of losing their discs, and Ada was an ISO who was on the run with Quorra after Clu’s coup. From Tron, I used only the observation that only red-circuited programs and Game Grid prisoners wore discs.
Warnings: Traumatized!Quorra x manipulative!Clu, past genocide, past natural disasters of the digital variety, mind control, non-explicit reprogramming torture with lasting damage, non-explicit circuit sex.
Characters & Pairings: Quorra x Clu & Sam & Rinzler & mention of Flynn & Radia & Jalen & (very very vaguely implied Quorra x) Ada
Summary: Quorra is the last of the ISOs, and as such, the Grid is rightfully hers. // AU, darkfic
Author’s Note: Written as a pinch-hit for that_runneth in the Tron Female Character Ficathon. This fic references a piece of headcanon of mine that says discs were not used in the old system until the MCP introduced them as a means of spying on and otherwise oppressing programs, but that Flynn introduced them as a necessary requirement for a program’s functioning in his new system.
Heirs
The first round was just getting good when Clu started rubbing her knee. His fingertips skimmed just shy of the circuit that ran down the side of her leg, teasing, tantalizing. Quorra contemplated whether taking him up on the offer was worth missing the Games. Clu always liked to be the one calling all the shots, which suited her just fine this cycle. She could let him do all the work, let him think whatever he and his little Basic mind wanted about the energy exchange.
The joke would be on him.
Not unkindly, Clu cupped her chin and tilted her head towards his. And Quorra remembered living through cycle upon cycle of isolation and barely restrained hostility, of having no shoulder to cry on when her regret outweighed her choices after all, until she was so desperate she threw herself at him, no longer caring about the repulsively smug tilt of his mouth.
The joke was on him. He just hadn’t realised it yet.
“You seem distracted lately, Quorra,” Clu murmured, eyes hooded as his gloved thumb dragged across her lower lip. “Can’t be the Games. It’s been nothing but strays for cycles now. They barely know who they are, there’s no fun in that.”
With a smile, Quorra dug her fingers into the thick hair at the nape of his neck and pressed their lips together. He tasted like pleasure, the promise of more, and greed.
Two out of three. That would do, for now.
“I beg to differ. About the strays,” she said, drawing back. “The irony is delicious.”
He raised an eyebrow in question.
She could have explained. Could have told him, ‘Did you know programs weren’t originally meant to have discs? Rinzler told me.’ Clu would have been indignant and denied it, would have claimed Flynn or Tron would have told him if that were true. And she would have laughed and gloated and told him all about Flynn’s disregard for the discomfort of Old System programs who had first known discs as a tool of the MCP’s oppression, his presumptions about the nature of programs as open for anyone to read and meddle with, his prioritizing of easy access to a program’s functioning over the integrity of their heart and soul. She would pour out all the secrets Flynn had used to try and console her during those long cycles she had supposedly spent hunting him down before she finally brought him in, all the ways she had belatedly realised the insolent Basic slaves in this system were not worth losing her own people over.
‘Strange how Rinzler never mentioned this before,’ Clu would say. And Quorra would admit, ‘Not strange at all. I’m the one who did the bulk of his reprogramming. You didn’t honestly expect me to create something so deadly and hand the reigns of it over to you, did you?’
And Clu would derezz her on the spot. Probably before she finished her third sentence.
So she didn’t say any of that. She just shrugged, asked “Don’t you?”, and slid off of the arm of his chair, into his lap.
“Combatant 3: violation. Initiate final round.”
The interfacing was just getting good when a disruption of Clu’s directive, Clu’s perfection, made his energy burn caustic against Quorra’s circuits.
Chaos. Just the news she’d been waiting for.
“Rinzler defected,” Clu deadpanned.
He didn’t look at Quorra. He didn’t have to.
“Yes sir,” the faceless, toneless, hacked Sentry lied. “SamFlynn kept calling him ‘Tron’, sir.”
“Oh. That old bug.” Quorra made a concerned face. “We never did fix that after the previous User - well.”
She glanced at Clu from the corner of her eyes. Nervous. Fearful without implying actual guilt. Convincing.
“Find Rinzler. Fix him. And bring me this program who claims to be a User.”
Clu’s voice was a perfect facsimile of detached rage, until that last word.
After he and Quorra had forced the truth about the ‘real world’ from Flynn at long last, Clu thought the system safe from further User interference.
He thought Flynn had told him everything.
Quorra could barely contain her mirth and excitement as she clipped off a “Yes, sir,” and turned on her heel, striding from the throne room with a hex of Black Guard in tow.
Half-dissolved orange voxels crunched underfoot as, genuinely curious, Quorra circled the User, committing all his features and dimensions to memory. His face was easy on the visual processors and his body had the solid build associated with Clu and physical strength. Some foolish part of her was disappointed, though. Even after all this time, after all her studies of and experiments on Flynn, she had expected... more, out of at least one of these beings.
“So you’re Flynn’s... son.”
Son: a randomly generated biological creation of two Users, one of the female and male sex each, meant to perpetuate their source code after their own version starts to deteriorate. The female variant is called ‘daughter’.
“Who the hell are you people?” Flynn’s son demanded, trying to turn his body to follow her movements but held back by Rinzler’s grip on his shoulder. “And what do you want from me?”
50% of this User’s code was identical to Flynn’s. When she sent the Call, she had scarcely dared to hope she would be so lucky.
“I’m Quorra,” she said, facing him and smiling brightly. “And this is my loyal security program Rinzler. ‘He fights for the ISOs!’”
She laughed at her own joke without shame, because there had been precious few others willing to do so for the past thousand cycles.
SamFlynn only stared at her. “The what?”
“Me,” Quorra said, sobering only the slightest bit. “As for what I want from you: this...” She nodded at Rinzler, who removed SamFlynn’s disc and handed it to her with a respectful half-bow usually usurped by Clu. “...and your User privileges.”
SamFlynn, it seemed, understood more of the system than his embarrassing fumbling in the arena suggested. His expression shuttered and hardened, all hostility and confusion replaced by a guarded blankness.
“What for?”
“Only to protect my home and my people,” she said, and this time, she did sober. What was left of her people. All 458 of them, the faces and name tags that had been triggered in her memory banks post-coup carefully guarded and encrypted. Hidden, for now. But not much longer.
She fed a first measure of power into the disc, and a display of SamFlynn’s recent history lit up, icy blue against her own warm gold. “You see, SamFlynn, I’m not like the other programs in this system. Rinzler here - ” Without looking up from the holographic data, she waved a negligent hand in his direction. “- and all the others you’ve seen, they’re just tools with an attitude. What minds they have are made up of nothing but slavish devotion to their designated functions, seasoned with a tiny little sliver of personality copied from the User who wrote them.”
“But you think you’ve evolved beyond that,” SamFlynn guessed. “Funny how that kind of thinking always seems to go hand in hand with crimes against humanity. In every sense of the word.”
Smiling a smile copied directly from Clu’s face, Quorra looked up into his eyes. “I didn’t have to evolve beyond it. I was never like that in the first place. My kind, the Isomorphic Algorithms, were not written, SamFlynn - we were born spontaneously from an endless Sea of possibilities. Free to do, choose, feel, and be whatever we wanted.”
‘ISOs have no functions, no purpose, so the system won’t be bereft by their deletion. And if they all go together, if there’s no-one left behind to mourn the loss of them as a friend or mate - well, then there’s really no reason for them to fear death, now is there?’
A warm, soothing voice and a strong, soothing hand against her back. Clu’s madness had been a balm when nothing else could quell the grief and despair of those dark days before the Purge. Of Radia’s loss and Jalen’s corruption, of system fault after gridbug attack after system fault after gridbug attack, of the brothers and sisters who had emerged from the Sea alongside her crushed or torn apart or infected, of everyone she knew and loved (oh, Ada, Ada Ada Ada) strewn across the floor in a liquid cascade of glowing voxels, their data melting to nothing, of a world tearing itself apart under the strain of too many programs -
“The primitive little minds of the Basic programs didn’t know what to make of us. They decided we fell into the same category as anything else that wasn’t them or their precious User - a nuisance and a threat, with no right to the system. The system that had birthed us, called us into existence out of nothing, while they were planted here for no other purpose than to serve it.” She had to take a deep breath before she overheated. “But Flynn, who had built this world as a toolbox, realised how extraordinary our emergence was, how much more meaningful our existence.”
A soothing, weathered hand and a soothing, croaking voice. ‘You’re like them, and you’re like us, but at the same time you’re unlike either. You’re the best of both worlds, merged into something new and extraordinary. Streamlined and flawless like a program, but complex and adaptable like a human. Not bound to a programmed directive nor guided by animalistic instincts. You’re a miracle.’
“...you’re the miracle?” SamFlynn whispered.
Quorra snapped out of her reverie.
“Oh, he mentioned us! How nice.” Rage boiled up, quicker than her processors could follow, a kilocycle’s worth of repressed frenzy, and it was all she could do not to spit in SamFlynn’s face. “How hypocritical. Flynn promised us a place in this system - promised us rule of this system. But when Clu crashed due to Flynn’s conflicting directives, he did nothing to protect us from him. He hid while half a million of my people were slaughtered at the hands of his malfunctioning tool.”
While I helped him slaughter them. Out of some misguided feeling of guilt for our existence. Out of desperation to escape the agony of waiting to be picked off one by one by errors, bugs and tensions the Creator should never have allowed to exist in the first place.
“Quorra...” SamFlynn kept his voice low, soft, cautious. Soothing. “If that’s true, all you needed to do to get my help was ask.”
Soothing. Ha. Ha!
Quorra’s laughter was brittle, sounded unhinged even to her own ears. “Yeah, right. That’s what Flynn said - when he could still talk. ‘I’ll help you, Quorra, I’ll keep you safe, I’ll make it all better.’ But all he had to offer was empty platitudes, a hole to hide in, and more fear.”
And lo’, the pretence of assistance and comfort melted like voxels after a fresh kill. “What did you do to him?”
Ever the perceptive servant, Rinzler gripped both of SamFlynn’s arms tightly.
“The same thing I’m going to do to you, User.”
Quorra had worked on Tron and Flynn and countless random Basics before this, but she still couldn’t get used to the screaming. She didn’t waste any time disabling his voice, though. The Portal would close within a millicycle. She had a deadline to make and lots of work to do.
Luckily, the garbled, gibbering mess she’d made of Flynn and the many dummy copies of his code she had used to practice on, had paid off. One used-up wreck of a man kept in quarantine stasis for Clu to gloat at was enough. This time, this time, she would cut the User privileges out of the User’s code without destroying them, and she would repurpose him without scrambling his mind.
What chance did Clu, with his Admin privileges and his army, stand against an ISO with User privileges and the loyalty of a User on the other side of the screen?
Clu had had Flynn and Abraxas, the champion of the ISOs twisted into his very own pet monster, had had the highest system privileges a program could have - and had Quorra, the one who came willingly. Because he did so love for his collection of things he had taken from the User to be complete. Quorra would have SamFlynn and Rinzler, the champion of the Basics twisted into her very own pet monster, would have higher system privileges than any program was granted - and have Clu. Clu, repurposed, back in his rightful place and cleansed of any heretical ideas about free will for Basics. The system would belong to its rightful heirs again.
And maybe, once she’d had SamFlynn show her around the other world, the ISOs would take that too.
PSAN: Hope this is to your liking, Runneth! For such a fun prompt, I really spent an inordinate amount of time agonizing over how to go about filling it. *dies* *again*