Rectify

Clu's plan goes horribly right, and his invasion of the user world goes off without a hitch- well, until it comes to the whole conquering thing.

Outside, the sun was setting. Not that you could see it very well through the clouds, but it was getting darker. The rain tapered off to something that was closer to a dribble than a downpour.

Jarvis decided that the tiled space in the corner of the main room was meant for preparing food. He wasn’t sure how to go about it. It held a handful of machines: there was a refrigeration unit with nothing in it, a boxlike machine with a glass door that didn’t seem to do anything useful (when he pressed its buttons it lit up and hummed. That was all), and a chrome-sided cube with slots in the top. He pushed the handle down and watched the wires inside glow red. After a minute the handle jumped back up and Jarvis nearly hit his head on the cabinets. Rinzler made a sound that might have been a snicker.

“Oh, and you were expecting that?” said Jarvis. Rinzler’s answer was to turn his head and go back to ignoring him. “That’s how you keep so much energy for derezzing people, you never do anything useful,” he muttered under his breath. Not that it mattered. Rinzler could probably hear him anyway.

The other two machines he was a little surer about. They were both built into the counter, and one was all dials and buttons, but he could feel the circles on top of it heating up when he played with the controls. The other was full of racks and had a little diagram of a dish being cleaned on the front. The main thing, though, was that there wasn’t much actual food to be had. There were a few cans of things Jarvis didn’t recognize in the cabinets, a brightly colored cardboard box half-full of some kind of grain… Stuff, a plastic bag of yellow stick like things, and a few assorted bottles and bags and jars he couldn’t guess at. There was a book on the shelf over the sink.

He’d seen books once before. There had been a shelf full of them at Flynn’s house in the outlands. They were a kind of database, that much he knew. Jarvis took the book down and opened it lengthwise. It didn’t seem right, and he turned it on its side. The text resolved into neatly ordered blocks. He realized, to his dismay, that he didn’t actually know how to read user script. Machine code and packet transfer had always been so much more convenient. At least user script used the same set of symbols, but he wasn’t sure which shape represented which sound. He knew he’d seen Clu reading user text before, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to ask- Clu had been in a strange mood for the past few hours. He kept watching Rinzler out of the corner of his eye and pretending not to. Jarvis might not have noticed, except for his long practice with sensing Clu’s bad moods from a distance. Clu had been like that ever since the, ah, incident with Rinzler and the other room. Jarvis didn’t know what exactly had gone on in there, but he’d heard noises and could guess. There was another downside to leaving the grid- there was no one to buy him a round of drinks for finally settling that bet.

Jarvis held the book up. “I found something.”

Clu spared a split second to glance at Jarvis and the book cover. “The Joy of Cooking? What’s that supposed to be?”

That gave him four words, with twelve letters between them. That was half the alphabet right there, and he could puzzle out the rest as he went along. “It looks like an instruction manual.” Clu made a disinterested noise and turned away. Jarvis read the first page slowly, using the handful of letters he already had and substituting sounds for others inside his head until he could get something coherent. Within two pages he’d attributed sounds to all twenty-six letters, within five he’d learned and stored enough of the common words that he only had to pause once or twice a paragraph. He’d been right; it was an instruction manual for preparing food, which Jarvis hadn’t known was complicated enough to need a manual until that moment. Finding it was for the best, though. He was hungry, and didn’t think anyone would be bringing them a meal.

His new ability with user language helped him in another once-over of their supplies. The bag of sticks was spaghetti, the red jar was pasta sauce¸ and the cans were beans, pineapple and peaches in syrup. The jumble of bottles and boxes were sunflower oil, rice, lentils and sugar, among others. Not that the names in and of themselves were very helpful. Just because he could read the packaging didn’t mean he knew what they were. The manual was… Not so helpful, and assumed the reader wasn’t a complete beginner. There was an index but no search function that Jarvis could find. He looked up things that had an ingredient in the name. Pineapple upside-down cake had an attractive glossy picture, but he only had one or two of the components. The same went for fried rice and bean soup. But, at the beginning of a section titled Pasta there was a set of instructions for cooking spaghetti. It seemed simple enough.

Clu turned to arch an eyebrow at Jarvis as he was clattering through the pots and pans. “What are you doing?”

“Cooking, sir,” Jarvis frowned, “or trying to.”

“Cooking?”

“Preparing food, sir.”

Clu frowned. “What makes you think you can? You’ve got no idea how.”

“Neither do you.” Jarvis was momentarily shocked at himself and hastily added, “or Rinzler,” to make it sound less like an accusation. It didn’t matter either way. Clu had stopped paying attention to him. His distraction had its good sides.

Jarvis pulled a deep pot out of the cabinet. Fifteen minutes later he had boiling water. He opened the packet of spaghetti and dumped the whole thing in. The manual said to wait eight minutes and drain off the water. He did, and lost some of the spaghetti to the sink, and some of it stuck to the pot, but it smelled all right. The picture in the book had the pasta topped with a red sauce. It looked a lot like the sauce in the glass jar and he poured a generous helping into the pot and mixed it all up. Jarvis wound a few strands around a fork and ate them. It… Wasn’t bad.

Clu looked into the pot with deep disgust. “That looks horrible.”

“It’s all right, sir.” Jarvis handed him a fork and Clu prodded at the spaghetti with it.

“What is this? It looks like it used to be alive.”

He picked up the plastic package and read the ingredients. “I don’t know, what’s a wheat?”

“Some kind of filthy creature, I expect,” Clu said, and ate a noodle experimentally. “All right, well, it’s not completely awful.”

“Thank you, sir.” Jarvis had long ago learned to take Clu’s compliments when they came, no matter how often they were backhanded (always). He took a plate from the shelf and helped himself to a generous portion. Clu took it out of Jarvis’ hands, walked off and started eating without a word. Jarvis closed his eyes and counted to sixteen before he said something he’d regret. He didn’t know why he even bothered, sometimes. Rinzler at least had the grace to nod at him before tipping up his helmet just enough to expose his mouth and walking off with Jarvis’ second plate.

**

The next morning began far, far too early.

Clu woke up tangled in his sheets, his mind still caught up in a confused jumble of dreams. That was something he’d never get used to about being flesh and blood- when he slept, he hallucinated wildly. His mind was full of the grid. He’d dreamed he’d been back there, helplessly trapped in heavy user skin, and Flynn had laughed and laughed and laughed.

There was a ringing sound like an alarm coming from the main room. He stumbled out in search of it. Jarvis was already there, blearily searching for the source. Clu traced it to a sort of handset-thing, and he picked it up and held it to his ear. Eleanor Pola’s voice came tinnily through the earpiece.

“Be dressed and at the front desk in twenty minutes. You’re being picked up. General Montag says, quote, ‘don’t wear those stupid black wetsuits’.” There was a click of disconnection before Clu could work up a response. He was too out of it to do more than drop the handset back into place and scrub his hand across his eyes.

“What’s going on?”

“We’re being ordered around again.” Clu grimaced. Talking still hurt. He could feel the fingerprint bruises on his skin. “Go wake Rinzler and tell him we’re supposed to be ready to leave in twenty minutes. They want us in user clothes.”

Jarvis hesitated. “I don’t think he’ll like that, sir.”

“Did I ask you what you thought?”

“…No. Sir.” Jarvis took a few steps, and then looked back. “Why are we leaving?”

“How should I know?” Clu snarled, “Come here. Go there. Jump through a hoop. Good boy.” He stalked off without a backwards glance. There had to be something in the place that was up to his standards. There were clothes in all the bedrooms, but some were too big and some too small, and others just plain too ugly for Clu to even consider. He was almost tempted to wear his bodysuit and cloak out of spite. When he reached for it, he felt the buzz in his head and the stiffening of his hands that was his body fighting against him. The order had, apparently, been specific enough. Finally he turned away. There wasn’t much choice to be had. Most of the clothes they’d been supplied with were brightly colored or plastered with slogans, and he rejected them out of hand.

There was a pile of discarded clothing on the floor behind him by the time he found the long bag in the back of the closet. He unzipped it. There was a grey suit inside. It… Wasn’t as good as black, but it was passable. It wouldn’t be humiliating to be seen in. Tucked inside it were a white button-up shirt and a tie that offended him just to look at. It was covered in little smiling cartoon shapes in eye-searing orange and purple. He tossed it aside.

The suit wasn’t a perfect fit. It was too tight across the shoulders; he didn’t want to move too quickly in case it tore. The rest of it wasn’t bad. He had no shoes and so wore the boot sections of his bodysuit underneath. It wasn’t technically part of the bodysuit, but that small transgression started up something like an itch inside his head. It was nowhere near as bad as the time he’d tried to hit Montag, so he did his best to ignore it. It wasn’t easy.

Just under eighteen minutes had passed when the three of them finally made it out. It had been a struggle to get Rinzler to leave his helmet behind. Clu swore he had an unhealthy attachment to the thing.

The few seconds they were in the open air were agony. It had warmed up since he day before, but the sun was a brilliant ball of light that seemed to have no purpose but to blind him. Clu squinted at his feet all the way down the stairs. When they got to the front office, there was a soldier already there.

“You’re late,” said Pola.

Clu scowled. He wasn’t, he knew he wasn’t. “No I’m not.”

“Don’t argue with me.” She turned to the soldier. “They’re all yours.” Pola did something under her desk, and the door’s deadbolts disengaged with a heavy thump. Clu didn’t give her another glance and started on his way. They were nearly to the door when she said “not you.” Clu turned. She was pointing at Jarvis.

Jarvis rubbed his wrist. “Not me?”

“You’re not needed.”

“…Oh. So what do I…?”

“Not my problem.”

The last Clu saw of Jarvis before the door shut between them, he was still standing there looking lost. Maybe it would toughen him up a little to be left on his own. Then again, maybe not. This was Jarvis, after all.

He spent the trip back to the military compound scheming different ways to get them to put him back in the grid with Rinzler. He had to repair the code; his changes had obviously been a little unstable. He hated that they’d made him change Rinzler in the first place. It had taken so long to get him right. On the other hand… Clu touched the row of neat ovals half-hidden under his collar. He supposed there were certain amendments he could allow, so long as the part where he was nearly killed didn’t happen. However, the two of them were separated almost as soon as they got in the door. That made the problem even bigger. He couldn’t just admit that his restructuring wasn’t flawless. He needed them to need him. If they didn’t… Well, it would be bad. He was sure of that.

He thought they were bringing him to the server room as usual, but they took a left and walked into another room completely. They’d set the laser up here. It was linked up to a computer that stood alone. Hellard was fiddling with a bit of cabling and a few other scientists milled around. Montag, in the only bit of good luck he’d had for days, wasn’t around. One of the female scientists- a new one, he hadn’t seen her before- walked by him, then backed up and laughed.

“Was she a little rough?”

Clu frowned. “What?”

Her finger circled the whole… Throat region, and Clu’s hand went reflexively to the little oval bruises there. He felt a sudden wave of revulsion for easily marked user flesh. “Your girlfriend. Whoever. Most people would wear a turtleneck if it was that bad.” He colored. That wasn’t what had happened- except it was, a little. She took his silence for pure embarrassment. It was about ninety percent true, and it was almost a relief when Hellard looked up and saw Clu standing there.

“Finally showed up, did you?”

“What do you mean finally?” Clu said bitterly, “I don’t have any say in when or where I get shipped off to. If I’m late it’s your people’s fault.”

Hellard had an irritating little smirk. “Now, now. Don’t be species-ist.” Clu curled his lip in response.

The woman looked at him with new eyes. Gone was the easy joking. Her gaze was sharp and curious. “Wait, this is subject one?”

Clu’s lip curled further. “Oh, I have a number, now? That’s beautiful, just beautiful. Maybe next you can stop speaking to me directly altogether? I’ll just be a nice quiet piece of walking furniture. You people. Honestly. I don’t know how you muster enough brainpower to keep breathing, sometimes.”

“Wow,” the woman blinked, “how do you pack so much asshole into such a small package?”

That threw him a little. It had been a long, long time since anyone had bothered (or earlier, dared) to insult him back. “…A lot of practice. I think I’m entitled, given the circumstances.”

“It prefers the name Clu,” said Hellard, “ridiculous as it may be.”

“My name is ridiculous? I passed your parking space on the way in. Howard Hellard? Really? Just the once wasn’t enough?”

Hellard gave him a poisonous look and turned back to the woman. “And it’s always like this. You know what they say about AI- the easiest way to pass the Turing test is to program a complete jackass.”

The woman, though, seemed more interested in Clu than Hellard. She looked Clu up and down. “Well, you’re certainly convincing, I’ll give you that.” She held out her hand. “Mila Novak. I’m a specialist in obsolete programming languages.”

Clu looked down at the hand, then back up. He made no move to take it. “I’m sorry, you’re going to be picking me apart, and you want to be friendly?” The hand didn’t waver.

“No reason to be antagonistic.”

“I’ll pass.”

Her hand dropped, and she sighed. “Suit yourself. We may as well get started, if you’re ready.”

Hellard rolled his eyes. “Don’t coddle it. Orders work better. You,” he said to Clu, pointing at the other side of the room, “over there. Now.”

Clu felt the inexorable tug of the order and was moving almost before he had the chance to think about it. He longed to knock Hellard’s smug face in, but his fingers only twitched and sent a bolt of pain up his arm. He pictured Rinzler, in his mind’s eye, mowing down the lot of them, but that just made him think of his own programming problems. It didn’t make him feel any better. Again, he regretted ever agreeing to help them in any way whatsoever. That was something he knew, deep down to the core of him; never trust a user. Not even Flynn. Flynn had-

He cut off that train of thought before it started.

“Bring in the secondaries,” said Hellard, and then he turned to Clu. “It’s a different setup today. You’ve been granted your request.” He gestured at the standalone computer and the laser it was hooked up to. “No partition. It’s a clean drive, but not networked to anything. You still won’t have complete control so don’t get any ideas.”

Clu furrowed his brow. How clean did he mean by clean? There had to be an operating system at least, and with that, there might be other attendant programs. Then again, maybe not. How careful had they been? Hellard walked off, and Clu watched him go. He fantasized about dragging Hellard into the grid kicking and screaming, and rebuilding him from the inside out into something suitably humiliating. Maybe something like the patch they’d put on him- he’d leave Hellard at the whim of any program, any program at all, and keep him aware of it the whole time. The same went for Montag.

“Clu.”

He started. Novak was at his elbow; he hadn’t seen her approach. “What now?”

“We’ve set up a relay system to allow plain-text transmissions from inside the computer and outside it,” she said, “much more convenient than taking you in and out. But while I have you here, here’s a question.” Novak held out a single sheet of paper. He didn’t take it. She shook it at him. “Read it.”

Clu ignored the compulsion as long as he could, and only when the discomfort ratcheted up to a drill in his head he snatched it out of her fingers. A quick once-over was all he needed. It was a section of Jarvis’ code. He pretended not to recognize it.

“This part is some kind of ultra-compressed new language, we know that much,” she tapped one of the sections that Clu had rewritten completely, and then her hand slid down the page to one of the fragmented sections of Jarvis’ original code. “But this part is written in Pascal. Why?”

That question was an easy one to dodge. Why had any program been written in one user language over another? “I don’t know.”

“Fine. More to the point, why are the two languages mashed up like this? Why doesn’t it cause a problem?”

That one was a little harder. “It’s… Adaptation,” managed Clu, “sometimes things are overwritten, or changed.”

She looked thoughtful. “Like evolution.”

Clu thought of the ISOs and repressed a shudder. No, nothing like that. Nothing like the persistent little hives of chaos that had threatened to tear the grid apart with their unpredictability, and nothing like the user world’s vast love for all things flawed and perverse. Novak frowned, but before she said anything else Hellard interrupted.

“Bring them over here.”

Clu turned around. They’d brought in two users in orange jumpsuits- no, two programs. He didn’t recognize them, but he could tell from their dull faces that they were no more than foot-soldiers. When he could only see the surface shapes of them it was difficult to tell what they’d been before that. Hellard was suddenly behind him.

“You may be a jackass,” said Hellard, “but you reason just fine. These two and most of the others? We can barely get a coherent word out of ‘em that isn’t ‘death to the users’. And they’re not being stubborn. The deeper thoughts just aren’t there. Why is that?”

When the two programs saw Clu their faces lit up in a fierce kind of joy. They stood straight and tall, waiting for his orders. They must have been among the masses he’d batch-rectified. It had been quick and dirty, no time for fine-tuning or working around a program’s individual strengths and weaknesses. He… Regretted that, a little, now. They reminded him of the copies the users had tried to make of him, inexpertly carved. “Because only the commander has to think,” he murmured, and then cursed himself for the lapse.

They put him into the grid first, alone, with orders to rectify the foot-soldiers when they were sent in. He couldn’t quite bring himself to look at the two programs. It felt like as much of a betrayal as being forced to rectify Rinzler. Maybe even more so- the foot-soldiers trusted him implicitly. They would die for him on his slightest whim; even Rinzler would hesitate on a suicide order, but not them.

The laser hummed to life and Clu shut his eyes. The process of being deconstructed and remade looked/felt/smelled/sounded the same whether they were open or not. He wasn’t even sure that what it was like could be ascribed to normal senses. It was like hearing color and tasting sound. When the beam put him back together in digital form he stood still and let his senses come back to him. He could tell just from the feel of the air on his skin that this grid was much, much bigger than the last. No- not air; he’d been in the user world too long. It was the shape of the nothing that expanded around him in every direction. The magnetic-field sense of the system in the back of his mind told him what he’d see before he even opened his eyes.

He stood on a flat black plain that stretched out almost to infinity in every direction. Behind him, the I/O tower was full size and a pillar of blazing light that rose up what seemed like miles into the black sky. The system was open, untouched. Clu held out his hand experimentally and part of the ground shivered upwards, tier by tier, into a miniature replica of his tower in his grid. He held it there for a few milliseconds and then let it dissolve into nothing. They really had lifted his restrictions, then.

Before anything else, he reworked himself. His suit was recolored to a matte black, and he widened the shoulders just enough to make it a better fit. The bruises on his neck were wiped away with a thought. He pulled up the system profile and almost choked. The system memory was listed as just over a terabyte. That was- that was ludicrous. Clu himself barely topped five megabytes, and he was complex enough to be considered unwieldy in his own system. The grid- his grid- was hard-capped at two hundred and fifty megabytes. His grid could sit comfortably inside this one four thousand times over. The numbers had to be wrong. There was no other explanation. He shooed the floating window away.

A simple wall extruded itself from the ground. Clu watched it warily but it topped out at six feet, and the contours of it flickered to life in white as it drew power from the grid. The words test, test, respond appeared on its surface.

This must be the users’ text relay. He’d half hoped it would be a program instead of direct input. At least that way he could confirm whether or not the frankly absurd system specifications were right. He touched the wall’s surface and an interface hovered in front of it in overlay. Clu keyed in haven’t you got anything more interesting to say?

He waited for a response, but it didn’t come. Eventually, in boredom, he started building. It had been too long since he’d had a landscape to bend to his will. Clu didn’t make anything full size- instead he sculpted experimental architecture in miniature, so that by the time a ping returned he had a small forest of buildings no more than shoulder height. The message on the wall was that was quick.

Clu furrowed his brow and sent back what was?

Again, the relay went dark, and again, no response. He was back to tweaking the angle of a bridge no wider than his arm when it hit him- time ran differently in here and out there. How could it have slipped his mind? Some quick mental calculations later he realized that a single minute passing in the user world was the equivalent of fifty here, almost an eighth of a millicycle. This was going to be a long, long conversation. If it was going to take that much time, there was no point in hanging around here.

The tiny city was razed with an errant thought on his part. He set about constructing something more useful. The lightcycle took shape under his hands. It had been a long time since he’d made one with his own two hands, but it wasn’t difficult. He couldn’t create programs but this was more a script than anything, a simple abstraction and an extension of himself. The blueprints were all there in his head, and there was a certain pleasure in sculpting the body, pulling vertices into place and running his hands along the inside curve of the wheel well hollows to make sure they were the right shape. When he was done, the tracery of circuitry on its surface was a softly pulsing gold, the machinery of it all slick black curves. As an afterthought, he turned back to the wall and entered another message.

I’m much faster in here than you are. Try not to bore me.

It was the work of a moment to weave part of the relay wall into a remote rebroadcasted. It was a heavy black sphere that fit comfortably into his palm. He tucked it into his pocket. Another few microcycles and he’d reconstructed the glossy black lightcycle helmet that folded over his face at a command and linked the relay to it. If the users pinged him, he could answer from anywhere. He threw his leg over the side of the lightcycle. It hummed to life under him and he spent a moment just appreciating the feel of it, the freedom of being able to move on his own whims. Clu twisted his wrist and the lightcycle roared and shot forward. He molded his body to it, steered just by shifting his weight. He didn’t know how far this grid extended, but there had to be something beyond the plains, even if it was wasteland. It wasn’t like he could get lost; the I/O tower was a blazing light behind him.

A ping caught his attention and glowing white text filled a corner of his visor. How much faster do you perceive time passing? What were you just coding?

Clu made a face at the block of text. What did it matter to them? “I’ll give you a hint,” he said, “for every minute you take talking among yourselves, I’m busy finding ways to amuse myself for nearly an hour. The coding was me relieving my boredom, because I simply cannot believe how utterly useless a user can be.” He pressed himself closer to the lightcycle and urged it still faster. “And which one of you is talking to me?” The rebroadcaster dutifully transmitted his message. There was a blessed stretch of uninterrupted speed across the plains. He was going fast enough that he could feel the tug of inertia whenever he shifted.

That doesn’t matter, the ping finally came, How would you describe what you’re ‘seeing’ in human terms?

“It’s black and it’s flat. Very exciting. Why don’t you come in and see for yourself?”

The ping came a little faster this time. Is that possible?

Clu frowned. That seemed… Off. They didn’t know? “What do you think?” he hedged, and the delay before the next ping was almost three times as long as usual. The message, when it came, was unrelated.

The first subject is being sent through now.

Clu cursed to himself and swung the lightcycle around in a wide arc, back towards the I/O tower. It was already starting to flare as it knit flesh into data. The lightcycle’s purr ratcheted up to a dangerous whine. He didn’t want to have to hunt down wandering programs in this expanse, especially if it was as big as it said. If he crashed at this speed he’d probably derezz himself, but that was half the fun. By the time he’d reached the I/O tower the program had finished coming through. It looked just as it had outside the grid, prison jumpsuit and all, except for the fine tracery of red energy conduits glowing on its skin. The next ping was waiting for him. All it said was rectify.

Clu let his helmet section away and disappear into nothing. He left the lightcycle where it was. The other program saluted as he got closer. “Your Excellency!”

Clu held out his hand. “Your disk, program.”

The disk was in Clu’s hand in a microcycle. He drew the program’s code out into a cloud of red particles. He could sense the shape of the other program, its architecture. The batch processing had left obedience, weapons training, a fanatical loyalty to Clu and little else. To his dismay, he realized that most of the program’s finer points had been compressed into generalized blocks. He never should have left the batching to others, but doing it himself would have taken so much time. The delicate looping of loyalties he’d performed on Jarvis and, to less effect, on Rinzler, wouldn’t work here. All he could do without reworking the program from the ground up was, in essence, flipping a switch. Change out the all-encompassing commandment for obedience from himself to the users.

It was not something he wanted to do.

The dull itch of an order not followed was building up from the base of his spine. It would get worse with time, he knew. Clu grit his teeth as the itch grew into a buzz, and then a sensation like insects in his skin. He held out as long as he could but there was a point when it became unbearable, and he plunged his hand into the code and made the change. He shut his eyes as the feeling ebbed away. Clu held the disk in his hands and wondered if he could hide some small subroutine inside. After so many days, their loyalty would revert to Clu, and take out as many users as they could reach-

His hands were locked tight around the disk. There was a punishing jolt of pain in his head for even thinking of such a thing, and when he was able to move his fingers again he held out the disk. The program reattached it without complaint. His circuits flashed white and Clu grimaced. Would he be attacked, or would the program only act on orders?

The program didn’t do anything. It kept standing where it was, staring off into the distance with its dull eyes, and Clu crossed his arms. “Who do you serve?”

Nothing.

“There’s not much to you, but I know you can speak. Who do you serve?”

Nothing.

…Was it ignoring him? With its altered loyalties, was he no longer important enough to acknowledge? That rankled. “I’m talking to you,” Clu stalked up to it, “don’t you dare pretend you can’t hear me.”

Nothing.

Clu growled in the back of his throat and pulled the relay ball out of his pocket. “It’s done,” he said to it, “enjoy. This one started out useless and he still is.”

When the message came back, it was S137, proceed through portal. S1, wait for next. The program walked to the I/O tower on its own. He was S137, then? Subject one-thirty-seven? It made sense, if Clu was supposed to be subject one. He just wondered how they’d gotten him to respond to it.

When the program had returned to the world of flesh and blood, Clu spent a while just thinking. It wasn’t a stretch to assume that eventually the users would figure out rectification on their own, and they wouldn’t need him at all. This system- this system was huge, it could accommodate a little extra information. He took off his own disk and started teasing out pieces of his own code. It wasn’t much, mostly just memories and select bits of his personality, but he copied them and bundled them up inconspicuously in another patch of his data. It was just enough to be a backup in case of emergencies. He hoped he’d never need it.

The I/O tower flared, and Clu watched as another orange-jumpsuited program walked through. The relay ball pinged him.

Rectify.

**

Jarvis stood there in the front office for a little while after the door closed. Why hadn’t they just said they didn’t need him in the first place? It would have saved him getting out of bed. He liked sleeping, he’d discovered. What was he going to do with himself all day? There was more to occupy him than there’d been in the cells, but he wasn’t sure how he felt at being left to his own devices.

A thought occurred to him. “Ms. Pola?”

“What?” Her suit looked a little different today, but Jarvis wasn’t sure how, only that it was. Did she keep sets of near-identical clothes for each day? Why?

“You said certain things could be requested,” said Jarvis, “there’s very little food for us.”

She stopped typing just long enough to look up. “What do you want?”

“I…” said Jarvis, and then he realized that he didn’t know. Even in the cells he’d never been sure what he was eating. It was always trays of barely differentiated stuff, anyway, whether it was brown or white or grey. Pola rolled her eyes at his hesitation and held out a piece of paper.

“Take a request form. Fill it out and bring it back when you’re not so indecisive.”

He took the form. There was no reason to stay in the front office and he wandered back to the courtyard. There was a chill in the air, but the sun was bright and warm on his skin. He squinted at it and had to look away after a few seconds. The light left purple splotches hovering in front of him until he blinked them away. Whoever had programmed it programmed it badly, Jarvis decided. Heat and light were all well and good, but there were limits.

He retrieved his cookbook and a pen from the rooms, and on a second thought pulled his coat off its hanger. It had dried overnight, and he shrugged it on. Jarvis walked back down to the courtyard to write his list. The wetness of yesterday’s rain had evaporated and the ground was dry. With the coat on the temperature was pleasant, and he sat under a tree. The shade from its bare branches made the sunlight not quite so blinding.

He meant to write his list, he really did. The problem was not knowing where to start. It ended up with him gradually slouching lower and lower against the tree trunk until he was lying on the grass, and then he was asleep.

**

Rinzler was steered onto a different path just after they arrived. It set off conflicting impulses in him. He should be at Clu’s side, but he was also to obey the users. There was a moment where the imperatives fought. It held him at a standstill until one won over the other. He followed the users. They kept their eyes on him, and themselves at arm’s length. That was good. It meant he wasn’t following the orders of stupid men.

The room they led him to was small, bare and grey. A low table sat against one wall. It held a small machine. There was a tinted window in the back wall through which he could dimly see the outlines of observers. As he watched the window went clear. There were a few people behind it but the only one he paid attention to was Montag. He presided over the users as Clu presided over the programs. Rinzler had no desire to submit himself to underlings.

Two of Montag’s guards took up posts at the door, and the other saluted to him through the glass. “Sir.”

Montag didn’t get out of his seat, but his voice came through a tiny speaker set into the wall. “You,” he glanced at a sheet of paper on the desk in front of him, “Rinzler, is it?” Rinzler nodded, and Montag cleared this throat and continued. “You’re to follow this man’s orders, do you understand that?”

Rinzler eyed the soldier. He was a well-built man. Rinzler could see the layer of armored padding on him. The man looked wary, but not afraid, and that was something Rinzler approved of. Caution belonged to the predator; fear belonged to prey. He gave Montag a slow nod. Montag sat back in his chair.

“Begin, then.”

The soldier took the little machine from the table. It was a palm-sized black box that he held in one hand, and a stubby, thin metal cylinder connected by a cord that he held in the other. He was careful to hold the cylinder by the black rubber on its base. He flicked a switch on the box, and Rinzler could hear a high-pitched electrical whine. When the soldier touched the metal to the table it sparked. He held it out in front of him.

“This’ll hurt,” said the soldier, “touch it.”

They were testing his loyalty. Rinzler didn’t think twice; he touched the metal with the back of his hand. There was a snap and a slight smell of burning. The muscles in his hand seized and curled away from the source. The guards watched him carefully. Rinzler shook his hand out, and the soldier glanced sideways at Montag. Montag made a circular hand gesture.

“Again,” said the soldier. This time, Rinzler grabbed hold of the metal in a fist. There was no point in prolonging this. The electricity coursed up his arm, locking every muscle in place. His knuckles went stark white with the force of his grip. Higher up near his shoulder the muscle was twitching as the current dissipated through it. It smelled like seared meat. There was pain, but he pushed it aside. It was unimportant. A few seconds passed and the guard looked down at the box and back up at him. “Stop.”

He found that he couldn’t. His fingers were locked tight around the metal, and pulling away just dragged the cord with him. He growled low in his throat and grabbed the cord with his other hand. He couldn’t pull it free. With every second that passed it felt like his grip got tighter. He could almost feel his bones creaking. When it became clear that he couldn’t drop it on his own the soldier flipped the switch. The sudden change let Rinzler’s hand fall open; the cylinder dropped, clattered against the floor, and bounced up again on its cord. His fingers twitched. He held his hand up; the palm was scorched red and cracked. There were pockets of fluid already accumulating under the skin. He flexed his fingers- still functional- and ignored the damage. It should heal.

The guard grimaced. “Jesus.”

Rinzler waited for the next set of instructions. He’d proved his allegiance, however tiresome it was to ask for physical proof. Maybe it wouldn’t be enough for them. Clu had never demanded tests or demonstrations of loyalty. He had simply known, but users were different. He-

Fought for the users-

Served the users as he had served Clu. It was not his place to question their whims.

“Rinzler,” Montag’s voice crackled through the speaker, “you really are quite obedient, aren’t you?” Rinzler tilted his head to the side, which Montag seemed to take as a positive sign. “Good. Very good. Gentlemen, if you’d be so kind?”

The guard in front of him bundled up the device and retreated. Someone else was led in; Rinzler took in the jumpsuit, the handcuffs. A program. Not a footsoldier, but one of the black guards. Rinzler thought he recognized him, or at least had seen him before, but couldn’t be sure. The program seemed encouraged by Rinzler’s presence and struggled against the men at his shoulders. “Sir!”

The guards gave him a sudden push and he stumbled a few steps before righting himself. The guards, meanwhile, retreated. “One of yours, I think,” said Montag, “not quite as stubborn as you were, but still quite the piece of work. Mm, what was his name?” He flipped through his papers and shrugged. “Well, it doesn’t matter. He has a few things we want to know, but such trouble talking. Don’t worry, you won’t have to ask the questions.” He chuckled at his own little joke.

Rinzler saw the black guard tense. Things weren’t going the way he expected, and Rinzler wondered what he had thought was going to happen. “Sir,” the program licked his lips nervously, “you’re not going to…?”

“Don’t kill him, now,” Montag sat back in his chair, hands clasped on the table, “no fatal damage.”

That was a difficult task. Users were constructed so differently from programs- what could a flesh and bone body live through, or not? Still, he would be careful and test the limits gradually. Rinzler took a step forward. The black guard took a step back.

“Please,” said the program, “Rinzler-“ Rinzler cut him off with a growl. The last thing the program said- coherently- for a good long time was a whispered “traitor.” Rinzler didn’t know why it stuck in his mind. It echoed long, long after the sound of the word was gone and he was down to just the feel of it, butting up against conflicting memories and impulses, catching on his rough edges.