Singularity app
Player Information ;
Your Nickname: Kuruma
OOC Journal: kadath
Under 18? Not even in base 21.
Email/IM: green.and.dying@gmail.com / time held me
Characters Played at Singularity: none
Character Information ;
Name: Kevin Flynn
Name of Canon: Tron
Canon/AU/Other Game CR: Canon
Reference: Character bio at the Tron fan wiki, and plots of Tron, Tron: Evolution, and Tron: Legacy at Wikipedia (which is, sadly but not surprisingly, much better-written than the Tron wiki.)
Canon Point: Right before his disc gets stolen at the End of Line, on the theory that he was restored from save, since he never puts the disc back on for the rest of the film.
Setting:
"The Grid. A digital frontier.
"I tried to picture clusters of information as they move through the computer. What did they look like? Ships, motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see.
"And then, one day...I got in."
Welcome to the Grid, the world inside the computer. Its Creator is Kevin Flynn. On the outside, on an Earth much the same as our own, he's CEO of Encom Software, a brilliant programmer and technological visionary.
On the inside, he's God.
Flynn discovered the Grid by accident, zapped there from a research lab by the vengeful Master Control Program on the Encom mainframe. He found himself in a world of glowing circuitry, where programs sought with religious awe to make contact with their "users," while Master Control sought to rule the real world. With the help of the loyal security program Tron--and his user, the likewise loyal Alan Bradley--Flynn deleted the Master Control Program and reappeared in the outside world.
Obsessed with returning to the Grid, Flynn built his own system, importing Tron and creating a second program, Clu (for "codified likeness utility"), to maintain the system when he couldn't be there. Flynn had real-world commitments: Encom, and his wife and young son, Sam. But at least half his heart was inside the computer.
In the technological fantasia of the Grid, where minutes in the real world pass like hours and physics are what the Creator says they are, an entire civilization grew up in response to Flynn's quest to build the perfect computer system. Impossible structures rear into the endless night, lit only by the blue and white glow of circuitry. Enormous machines float through the air without wings. On the Game Grid, programs, the citizens of this world, compete with each other for prestige--because after all, the Creator got his start as a video game programmer.
All went well for hundreds of cycles, until something happened that wasn't in the plan. From the distant wastelands emerged programs that Flynn hadn't written, spontaneously arisen from the Grid. Flynn, enchanted, called them the isometric algorithms, ISOs, and discarded his mission to perfect the Grid as empty next to the wonder of what the system had produced on its own. Clu, made in Flynn's image, tasked from the moment he was compiled with creating the perfect system, saw what the Creator was doing, and rebelled. He betrayed Flynn and launched the Purge, seeking to eradicate the ISOs and perfect the Grid on his own.
The portal to the real world, laser-driven and power-hungry, and thus only kept open for a few hours of Grid time, closed, locking Flynn within the computer. Flynn and Quorra, the last surviving ISO, fled into the wastelands beyond the city, and Clu went on to build his totalitarian perfect system, marred only by the continued existence of his Creator, his Creator's adopted ISO, and his inability to leave the computer and perfect the real world.
The status quo has held for 20 years--on the outside. Inside the computer, it's been closer to a thousand. Clu rules undisputed but with the knowledge gnawing at him that that the Creator is still out there, and Flynn waits in the Outlands beyond Clu's reach, safeguarding Quorra, with little to do but dwell on the past.
(...Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaah, Flynn didn't tell anyone, even the painfully trustworthy Alan, that he was spending his nights beaming himself into the Grid, so no one knows where he is. Computer guys, man.)
Personality:
"You're messing with my zen thing, man."
In the beginning, Kevin Flynn saw the possibilities, but not the consequences. He was young and invincible. He'd coasted through one of the most rigorous technical universities in the world on an electric blend of brilliance and audacity. He'd written the planet's best-selling video games, and held the records in most of them. He was the first human being ever to discover the universe that existed inside the computer, the first to know just how much heady power users wielded within it. Obstacles were just things that raised his score when he finally won. So of course, when he made one tiny mistake, he didn't notice.
Inside the Grid, where a night in the real world stretched for weeks, Flynn grew up while he wasn't paying attention. Some things didn't change. He was still brilliant, and still took on the universe (both of them) with bravado, but he finally grasped the magnitude of the responsibility he faced as the Creator of an entire world...and wasn't equal to it. The unanswerable question of whether anyone could have been does little to reduce the weight on his conscience.
Despite his shortcomings, the Grid lucked out on its Creator, make no mistake. Diogenes can blow out his lantern: Kevin Flynn is an honest man. Power corrupts, and with the kind of power the Creator could wield on the Grid, a lesser person would have become a despot, yet even in his youth, Flynn's integrity was unshakeable beneath its camouflage of brashness and sarcasm. It's not that Flynn is a Boy Scout, or even law-abiding--he hasn't paid to make a phone call since the 70s--but at his core, he's a thoroughly good person, incapable of cruelty or unfairness. Those qualities mean he makes friends easily, and that those friends rapidly turn into allies, but they also mean he suffers the curse of the decent man: he assumes everyone else is just as decent as he is.
Thus, Clu's betrayal crushed him. It wasn't just anyone who had turned on him. It was his creation, a program he'd modeled on himself and trusted entirely. Created literally in a mirror called up from the empty Grid, Clu was Flynn in a very real sense, stuck in the mindset Flynn had at that moment, unable to evolve beyond it. Flynn realized hadn't just failed the system, he'd failed himself, and in so doing had all but doomed his life's work, hurt everyone he'd ever cared about, and placed two worlds in grave danger.
Over a thousand years of subjective time have taught Flynn patience and restraint, and, to an extent, how to forgive himself. Unable to return to anything resembling civilization within the Grid because it would bring his identity disc, the key to the outside world, within Clu's reach, Flynn was faced with the choice of adapting, or insanity. He might have gone with insanity, except he was responsible for Quorra's survival, and so he embraced Zen Buddhism. He wasn't the worst candidate for enlightenment, but he wasn't the one anybody would have picked for it, either. Because of his isolation, there was no one around to be surprised when he turned out to be good at it.
Buddhism brought Flynn a measure of peace from his mental torment. He's no bodhisattva, but he's legitimately become a Zen master, and displays the equanimity, good humor, and flashes of joy said to come with enlightenment. He has not forgotten the past, but it no longer controls him--or so he thought until Sam showed up and Flynn realized he still has attachments after all. He is defined by those few surviving attachments, the handful of things that can stir him from contemplation and enable him to act despite his world-weariness and the insidious guilt. There's a lot he feels guilty for: abandoning Sam, Tron's death, the genocide of the ISOs, the suffering of the remaining programs on the Grid, the threat to the real world--and, still, despite it all, the pain he unwittingly caused Clu.
In the end, Flynn is as trapped as Clu is, unwilling to take the kind of ruthless steps that would end the stalemate. Despite being human and therefore adaptable, there are some things about him as hard-coded as Clu's drive toward perfection is. The deepest tragedy of all is that Flynn's fundamental goodness is the thing that condemned him and everyone around him to years of grief.
Abilities and Weaknesses:
Abilities
Flynn seems to have chosen to match his apparent age in the Grid to what it would be in the real world, so he appears to be a 60ish human male, blue-eyed, in good health, but with his face lined, and his brown hair and beard streaked with gray.
Even in the earliest days of the system, he never chose to wear the tight-fitting bodysuits that were common on the Grid. When out and about, he's always favored a black coat, accented in glowing circuitry, over a matching shirt and trousers, though the exact details changed as he aged--for example, he doesn't wear leather pants anymore, though he totally did before.
In keeping with his Zen aesthetic, he now wears tunics that have collars reminiscent of kimono, and affects a string of Buddhist prayer beads on his right wrist. When at home, he goes barefoot, though he has the sense to put on boots if he's got some ass to kick out on the Grid. The one feature that's constant and impossible to miss is the glowing identity disc between his shoulder blades.
He dresses, essentially, like a Jedi master, if Jedi masters wore robes with blacklight-reactive trim.
Age: 59 (chronologically), >1,000* (subjectively)
*The thousand-year figure is based on extrapolation from a line in Legacy about how minutes in the outside world seem like hours in the system, assuming a rate of time passage on the Grid as 60:1. There's supplemental information from one of the Easter egg websites that were part of the Flynn Lives ARG that suggests it could be 1,000:1, but making Flynn 20,000 subjective years old seems...excessive to me.
OC/AU Justification ;
If AU, How is Your Version Different From Canon, and How Will That Come Across? n/a
If OC, Did You Run Your Character Through a Mary-Sue Litmus Test? n/a
And What Did You Score? n/a
Samples ;
Log Sample: Log, with mod permission.
Network Sample: [Flynn's used to an entirely different set of gestural controls, and has triggered an audio transmission unwittingly. He's talking to himself, and his voice sounds familiar to anyone who knows Clu, to the point where the differing user IDs might cause a double-take.]
--at the heck? Just give me a keyboard, man.
[Apparently he figures out what he's looking for, because he falls silent and the window fills with Unix commands, scrolling up and out of view almost too quickly to be read. Somebody's a fast typer...who hasn't quite figured out he's broadcasting yet. Bear with him a second.]
# ps -f
UIDPIDPPIDCSTIMETTYTIMECOMMAND
30571389138700:00.18ttys0000:00.35csh
30572617261600:00.41ttys0010:00.66network
[There's a pause in the flow of attempted sysadminning.]
...Huh.
# man network
[The help file for use of the network pops up, and after a moment, Flynn chuckles.]
I see. Hey, folks. What's up?
Your Nickname: Kuruma
OOC Journal: kadath
Under 18? Not even in base 21.
Email/IM: green.and.dying@gmail.com / time held me
Characters Played at Singularity: none
Character Information ;
Name: Kevin Flynn
Name of Canon: Tron
Canon/AU/Other Game CR: Canon
Reference: Character bio at the Tron fan wiki, and plots of Tron, Tron: Evolution, and Tron: Legacy at Wikipedia (which is, sadly but not surprisingly, much better-written than the Tron wiki.)
Canon Point: Right before his disc gets stolen at the End of Line, on the theory that he was restored from save, since he never puts the disc back on for the rest of the film.
Setting:
"The Grid. A digital frontier.
"I tried to picture clusters of information as they move through the computer. What did they look like? Ships, motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see.
"And then, one day...I got in."
Welcome to the Grid, the world inside the computer. Its Creator is Kevin Flynn. On the outside, on an Earth much the same as our own, he's CEO of Encom Software, a brilliant programmer and technological visionary.
On the inside, he's God.
Flynn discovered the Grid by accident, zapped there from a research lab by the vengeful Master Control Program on the Encom mainframe. He found himself in a world of glowing circuitry, where programs sought with religious awe to make contact with their "users," while Master Control sought to rule the real world. With the help of the loyal security program Tron--and his user, the likewise loyal Alan Bradley--Flynn deleted the Master Control Program and reappeared in the outside world.
Obsessed with returning to the Grid, Flynn built his own system, importing Tron and creating a second program, Clu (for "codified likeness utility"), to maintain the system when he couldn't be there. Flynn had real-world commitments: Encom, and his wife and young son, Sam. But at least half his heart was inside the computer.
In the technological fantasia of the Grid, where minutes in the real world pass like hours and physics are what the Creator says they are, an entire civilization grew up in response to Flynn's quest to build the perfect computer system. Impossible structures rear into the endless night, lit only by the blue and white glow of circuitry. Enormous machines float through the air without wings. On the Game Grid, programs, the citizens of this world, compete with each other for prestige--because after all, the Creator got his start as a video game programmer.
All went well for hundreds of cycles, until something happened that wasn't in the plan. From the distant wastelands emerged programs that Flynn hadn't written, spontaneously arisen from the Grid. Flynn, enchanted, called them the isometric algorithms, ISOs, and discarded his mission to perfect the Grid as empty next to the wonder of what the system had produced on its own. Clu, made in Flynn's image, tasked from the moment he was compiled with creating the perfect system, saw what the Creator was doing, and rebelled. He betrayed Flynn and launched the Purge, seeking to eradicate the ISOs and perfect the Grid on his own.
The portal to the real world, laser-driven and power-hungry, and thus only kept open for a few hours of Grid time, closed, locking Flynn within the computer. Flynn and Quorra, the last surviving ISO, fled into the wastelands beyond the city, and Clu went on to build his totalitarian perfect system, marred only by the continued existence of his Creator, his Creator's adopted ISO, and his inability to leave the computer and perfect the real world.
The status quo has held for 20 years--on the outside. Inside the computer, it's been closer to a thousand. Clu rules undisputed but with the knowledge gnawing at him that that the Creator is still out there, and Flynn waits in the Outlands beyond Clu's reach, safeguarding Quorra, with little to do but dwell on the past.
(...Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaah, Flynn didn't tell anyone, even the painfully trustworthy Alan, that he was spending his nights beaming himself into the Grid, so no one knows where he is. Computer guys, man.)
Personality:
"You're messing with my zen thing, man."
In the beginning, Kevin Flynn saw the possibilities, but not the consequences. He was young and invincible. He'd coasted through one of the most rigorous technical universities in the world on an electric blend of brilliance and audacity. He'd written the planet's best-selling video games, and held the records in most of them. He was the first human being ever to discover the universe that existed inside the computer, the first to know just how much heady power users wielded within it. Obstacles were just things that raised his score when he finally won. So of course, when he made one tiny mistake, he didn't notice.
Inside the Grid, where a night in the real world stretched for weeks, Flynn grew up while he wasn't paying attention. Some things didn't change. He was still brilliant, and still took on the universe (both of them) with bravado, but he finally grasped the magnitude of the responsibility he faced as the Creator of an entire world...and wasn't equal to it. The unanswerable question of whether anyone could have been does little to reduce the weight on his conscience.
Despite his shortcomings, the Grid lucked out on its Creator, make no mistake. Diogenes can blow out his lantern: Kevin Flynn is an honest man. Power corrupts, and with the kind of power the Creator could wield on the Grid, a lesser person would have become a despot, yet even in his youth, Flynn's integrity was unshakeable beneath its camouflage of brashness and sarcasm. It's not that Flynn is a Boy Scout, or even law-abiding--he hasn't paid to make a phone call since the 70s--but at his core, he's a thoroughly good person, incapable of cruelty or unfairness. Those qualities mean he makes friends easily, and that those friends rapidly turn into allies, but they also mean he suffers the curse of the decent man: he assumes everyone else is just as decent as he is.
Thus, Clu's betrayal crushed him. It wasn't just anyone who had turned on him. It was his creation, a program he'd modeled on himself and trusted entirely. Created literally in a mirror called up from the empty Grid, Clu was Flynn in a very real sense, stuck in the mindset Flynn had at that moment, unable to evolve beyond it. Flynn realized hadn't just failed the system, he'd failed himself, and in so doing had all but doomed his life's work, hurt everyone he'd ever cared about, and placed two worlds in grave danger.
Over a thousand years of subjective time have taught Flynn patience and restraint, and, to an extent, how to forgive himself. Unable to return to anything resembling civilization within the Grid because it would bring his identity disc, the key to the outside world, within Clu's reach, Flynn was faced with the choice of adapting, or insanity. He might have gone with insanity, except he was responsible for Quorra's survival, and so he embraced Zen Buddhism. He wasn't the worst candidate for enlightenment, but he wasn't the one anybody would have picked for it, either. Because of his isolation, there was no one around to be surprised when he turned out to be good at it.
Buddhism brought Flynn a measure of peace from his mental torment. He's no bodhisattva, but he's legitimately become a Zen master, and displays the equanimity, good humor, and flashes of joy said to come with enlightenment. He has not forgotten the past, but it no longer controls him--or so he thought until Sam showed up and Flynn realized he still has attachments after all. He is defined by those few surviving attachments, the handful of things that can stir him from contemplation and enable him to act despite his world-weariness and the insidious guilt. There's a lot he feels guilty for: abandoning Sam, Tron's death, the genocide of the ISOs, the suffering of the remaining programs on the Grid, the threat to the real world--and, still, despite it all, the pain he unwittingly caused Clu.
In the end, Flynn is as trapped as Clu is, unwilling to take the kind of ruthless steps that would end the stalemate. Despite being human and therefore adaptable, there are some things about him as hard-coded as Clu's drive toward perfection is. The deepest tragedy of all is that Flynn's fundamental goodness is the thing that condemned him and everyone around him to years of grief.
Abilities and Weaknesses:
Abilities
- Zen. Flynn is a serious student of Buddhism, and it's improved him as a human being. He's forgiving, hard to anger, and very patient.
- Enormous integrity. There exists the possibility you could get Kevin Flynn to do something he thinks is wrong, but it's a vanishingly small one.
- Motorcycles. He's great at light cycles, and he's a good enough rider in the real world that he owned an overpowered Italian sportbike and didn't kill himself.
- Straight-up genius. He doesn't act the part, but Flynn has a mind for computers all but unrivaled in his world.
- Experience. He's over 1,000 years old, and not all of that was spent sitting around.
- PhD in computer science. This means Flynn understands a great deal of information theory and advanced mathematics on top of the programming, and that, as someone who made it through grad school, he didn't just learn, he learned how to learn.
- Haaaaaax. Flynn used to regularly crack a corporate mainframe from his bedroom, and forged himself a keycard for the same corporation's maximum-security research facility.
- Accustomed to ancient computer technology. This is actually good--Flynn is used to doing more with less, and will always try to get things right the first time.
- Accustomed to ancient computer technology. It's also bad. What's HTML, man?
- Dude is like 60. He's in as perfect physical health as it's possible to be for a human of his age, since aging within the Grid was a choice for him, but now he's stuck as a man past his physical prime.
- Terrible in a fight. If forced to fight physically, he's in trouble. He's not even that good with disc combat.
- Passivity. As a result of his Buddhist principles, Flynn has to be spurred into acting.
- World-weariness. He's older than any human has a right to be, and there are only a few things that can make him really care.
- Identity disc. It's probably not a good idea to have yourself stored on something so easy to steal.
- Clu. If Sacrosanct had Facebook, Clu would be Flynn's "it's complicated."
- awesome glowy Jedi robes
- prayer beads
- super-special Creator-edition identity disc, also usable as a (not very effective against non-programs, especially in Flynn's hands) thrown weapon.
Flynn seems to have chosen to match his apparent age in the Grid to what it would be in the real world, so he appears to be a 60ish human male, blue-eyed, in good health, but with his face lined, and his brown hair and beard streaked with gray.
Even in the earliest days of the system, he never chose to wear the tight-fitting bodysuits that were common on the Grid. When out and about, he's always favored a black coat, accented in glowing circuitry, over a matching shirt and trousers, though the exact details changed as he aged--for example, he doesn't wear leather pants anymore, though he totally did before.
In keeping with his Zen aesthetic, he now wears tunics that have collars reminiscent of kimono, and affects a string of Buddhist prayer beads on his right wrist. When at home, he goes barefoot, though he has the sense to put on boots if he's got some ass to kick out on the Grid. The one feature that's constant and impossible to miss is the glowing identity disc between his shoulder blades.
He dresses, essentially, like a Jedi master, if Jedi masters wore robes with blacklight-reactive trim.
Age: 59 (chronologically), >1,000* (subjectively)
*The thousand-year figure is based on extrapolation from a line in Legacy about how minutes in the outside world seem like hours in the system, assuming a rate of time passage on the Grid as 60:1. There's supplemental information from one of the Easter egg websites that were part of the Flynn Lives ARG that suggests it could be 1,000:1, but making Flynn 20,000 subjective years old seems...excessive to me.
OC/AU Justification ;
If AU, How is Your Version Different From Canon, and How Will That Come Across? n/a
If OC, Did You Run Your Character Through a Mary-Sue Litmus Test? n/a
And What Did You Score? n/a
Samples ;
Log Sample: Log, with mod permission.
Network Sample: [Flynn's used to an entirely different set of gestural controls, and has triggered an audio transmission unwittingly. He's talking to himself, and his voice sounds familiar to anyone who knows Clu, to the point where the differing user IDs might cause a double-take.]
--at the heck? Just give me a keyboard, man.
[Apparently he figures out what he's looking for, because he falls silent and the window fills with Unix commands, scrolling up and out of view almost too quickly to be read. Somebody's a fast typer...who hasn't quite figured out he's broadcasting yet. Bear with him a second.]
# ps -f
UIDPIDPPIDCSTIMETTYTIMECOMMAND
30571389138700:00.18ttys0000:00.35csh
30572617261600:00.41ttys0010:00.66network
[There's a pause in the flow of attempted sysadminning.]
...Huh.
# man network
[The help file for use of the network pops up, and after a moment, Flynn chuckles.]
I see. Hey, folks. What's up?