Chapter Text
Clu probed his tooth with his tongue and got sharp pain and the fresh taste of metal for his efforts. It was loose in the socket, and had been ever since he’d been kicked in the face some twelve hours previous. The pain when he touched it always came as a surprise. It was half because he kept forgetting he hadn’t fixed it yet and half because of the strange rawness of sensation filtered through actual nerves and flesh.
He hadn’t thought the user world would be like this. It was messy. Sloppy. The grid, imperfect as it was by his standards, was a logical and predictable paradise compared to this place. There at least disorder was a product of bugs in the system. Here, it was the system. If this place held order Clu had yet to find it, and maybe that went a long way to explaining Flynn’s obsession with the ISOs. Users seemed to have a pathological attachment to chaos.
He moved his jaw too quickly and the pain brought him back into the moment. There was, of course, the larger problem.
Clu was bound to a chair. His hands were tied behind his back, and his legs spread and fastened to the chair legs at the ankle. He hurt. It was an entirely different kind of hurt from injury on the grid. In some places the pain was duller, a steady throb like standing at the edge of the sea, and in others it was sudden and sharp. There was blood- blood, what a disgusting and unnecessary biological byproduct- in his teeth and crusted at the corner of his mouth. At some point he’d bitten through his lip.
He still wasn’t sure how things had gotten so far out of control. It had started so well- he’d outmaneuvered Flynn, and even if Flynn’s son and the ISO had slipped through his fingers he’d lost the battle and won the war. Clu had his army. He had his war machines, and his plans, and Rinzler at his side. He’d seized the open I/O tower, made his grand speech, and somehow, that was the high point. Even if he hadn’t seen it at the time, everything that came after was downhill. In retrospect there were three problems. The first was a miscalculation of scale. The room on the other end of the laser was so much smaller than he’d expected, and the arcade on the grid, with its strange arches and bright sign, had been no idiosyncrasy of Flynn’s but an exact and faithful model of the place the laser was housed. It was much too small for Clu’s machines, and much too small for his army to come through in more than ones and twos.
The second was, much as he hated to admit it, himself. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting of the user world. A larger, more perfect grid? It wasn’t what he’d found. No. This place was a world that, on the surface, almost made sense. Beneath the veneer was pure chaos. There was no interface, or none he’d been able to find. His and his army’s skins were dull facsimiles of what they should have been. They no longer glowed, and their stripes and insignia were no more than fabric and dye. His disk vanished in transit. The control linkup Clu had so painstakingly built to connect him to his troops was gone entirely. Even his own body felt wrong, heavier and hotter; more solid, somehow. New flesh.
They’d- he’d- tried to work with what he had. And that was his third mistake.
He’d realized too late that grid weapons were useless. The physical laws were different. Everything was cruder, messier. There was no order. They had no disks. None of their weapons could find energy reserves to draw from, but that didn’t stop the users, no. They mowed his army down with little bits of explosive steel and heavy machines. Users, it turned out, and by extension the new bodies Clu had knitted together, didn’t come apart in neat pieces when killed. They bled and broke. Worst of all he couldn’t fix any of it, not his army or himself. It was crude and ugly and inelegant but effective, and it had taken him days afterward to come to terms with how thoroughly he’d been beaten.
Now he was here. Here, with blood in his teeth and plastic ties cutting into his wrists, in nothing but an orange jumpsuit. His world had narrowed to rooms made of concrete and fluorescent lights and no windows, and men with guns at the doors. He could smell the stink of his own unwashed body. In that moment he almost laughed at his own stupidity. Why had he wanted to come here? What had possessed him to think he might even make it his own?
The tooth he’d been worrying at was on the top left, first after the molar, and he had to force himself to leave it alone. He couldn’t pull up his own code and fix it, and healing the user way, if it healed at all, was all he had. Could users grow back their teeth? Clu doubted it. Everything else about them seemed designed to be as inefficient as possible.
There were three men in the room with him. They were all dressed the same way, down to the little colored patches on their sleeves. Clu assumed that meant the same thing here as it did on the grid. It was a uniform, which meant they were all in service to… Someone, whoever that might be. Did users have a single leader, or was it a distributed network? Not that it really mattered- one of the men was a guard, and stayed by the door with his gun in his hands. The other two he’d nicknamed. There was the ugly one (self-explanatory) and the short one (also self-explanatory). Clu had already used up most of his imaginative names on the others who’d come and gone. These two were the hands-on type, which was to say they seemed to enjoy the sounds he made when kicked in the ribs.
Blood collected in his mouth and he spit it out. It stained his jumpsuit a muddy black-red, but he couldn’t find it in himself to care. The ugly one loomed over him.
“We know you’re not human.”
“That’s funny,” Clu’s mouth was throbbing. He wanted to say of course not, you pack of idiots. “I was going to say the same thing about you.” The short one punched him in the gut. Clu wheezed, curled into it, clenched his teeth and wished he hadn’t.
“Hey Ramirez, you ever watch Battlestar?” said ugly, over his shoulder. The man at the door shrugged. “It’s not bad. Johnson’s got some disks if you want ‘em. Anyway, there’s these things called cylons, right? And they look just like people, but they’re not.” He crouched down until he was eye level with Clu, and right up in his face. Clu could see the sweat-dampness of his collar, the wet sheen of the fluid that lubricated the man’s eyes. It repulsed him as his own blood repulsed him. “So what are you? Because we tested your blood, you know, and it’s not quite right. Things where they shouldn’t be, things people don’t even have,” he grabbed Clu’s chin. “You were made, not born.” Clu snapped at the hand. It earned him another blow. For a few seconds he only saw stars, and the ugly one was already talking by the time Clu was paying attention. “-Kevin Flynn.”
Clu opened and closed his mouth, just to make sure nothing else had been knocked loose. “What about him?”
The short one barked a sharp laugh. “You ever look in a mirror?”
“…No?”
This, inexplicably, earned him another round of violence. For a few minutes the world narrowed down to sharp blows, quick bursts of pain and his own stuttered breathing. A booted foot kicked him sideways and he crashed, chair and all, onto the floor. Clu’s arms were pinned between the metal frame and the concrete. He bit his tongue. The short one put his foot on Clu’s chest, and bore down just enough to make it hard to breathe.
“What are you? When is the next wave coming?”
Clu almost smiled but fought it back. They thought there was another army coming, after his disastrous attempt at war? “What do you think I am?”
“I think you’re a worthless jackass, is what I think,” the ugly one waved a hand to the short one. “Get him back up. You,” he nodded at the guard, “bring in the other one.”
Other one?
In the time it took to tip him back upright, the guard had opened the door a crack and was talking to someone outside. Clu’s tongue went back to his loose tooth. It was maddening; he couldn’t keep it away. There was still that pain and the half-fascination half-repulsion that came along with it. He hated being a biological creature. He missed the feel of pure energy. He missed his body being a mere cipher for his underlying code, and not this thing made of meat and jelly, that leaked and bled and stank.
There was a noise and Clu snapped out of his self-pity. They were bringing in a chair- heavy, metal, just like his- and after that, between two more guards, came Rinzler. They’d stripped him of his mask. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit, just like Clu, and if anything looked even worse than he did. Rinzler was cut and bruised, his head lolling like he’d been drugged. He still had that lightcycle purr on every breath, but it sounded wetter. The sparking scar on his throat (and Clu still regretted doing that, sometimes) had been replaced with a knotted mass of white flesh.
“This one’s been giving us trouble.” The short one knotted his hand in Rinzler’s hair and pulled his head back. Rinzler’s eyes were unfocused and the left one so bruised even his sclera was a red patch in a mass of swollen black and green. “But you know each other, don’t you? He was protecting you during the fighting. Always at your side. Probably your only soldier with half a brain.” Rinzler’s eyelids fluttered like he was struggling to wake up more than halfway, and his purr grew more labored. The short one let go. “But half a brain, no voice. There’s always something. I think you can guess how this is going to go.”
It was an old technique. Clu remembered things playing out like this a few times before, only he’d been the one asking the questions. When you had two conspirators and one wouldn’t talk, you got them together and hurt one of them until the other broke down. Simple and effective: unfortunately for his captors, only one of them spoke and the other was very, very resistant to pain. Clu had wired Rinzler that way. He knew exactly how far Rinzler could be pushed, and it was farther than these men were willing to go. At least, he hoped so.
Ugly loomed over him. “What are you?”
Clu glared up at him and delved deep into his own mind, the parts that were left over from someone else and mostly useless trivialities besides. Trivialities were what he needed right now. “I’m the queen of the outlands, what do you think?”
The short one hit Rinzler, and his purring stuttered. “Who made you? Flynn? Encom? The Chinese?”
“The what?” The room smelled like sweat and blood- two scents he was becoming intimately familiar with these past few days- and underneath it a chemical tinge Clu didn’t recognize. They couldn’t just reset the room. Did they have to clean it by hand? He didn’t envy them the job. Across the room Rinzler took another blow.
“When’s the next attack?”
That again. Clu shut his eyes. “You have a very annoying voice.” Again, there was the sound of flesh impacting flesh.
“See?” said the ugly one, “cocky little jackass, like I said.”
Clu opened his eyes. “I think it was worthless jackass, actually.”
Rinzler was, against all odds, looking a little more aware. He was focused on Clu, as expressionless as he’d ever been, but when the short one hit him Rinzler let his head turn with the blow rather than hanging limp. There had to be something to pain for users. Their bodies, and his now as well, were all chemical interactions. It had to trigger something. Every time Rinzler was hit his eyes looked a little sharper, a little more as they should have been. He could work with that.
“Worthless and cocky.” The ugly one made a hand signal, and the short one punched Rinzler in the jaw, and then in the side of his head. Then he didn’t stop. “See, bad things happen to cocky, worthless jackasses, and their friends. Now,” ugly came around behind Clu and knotted his hands in Clu’s hair, so he couldn’t look away from Rinzler. “Again. I think you know the questions by now. What are the answers?”
Across the room, Rinzler was absorbing the blows raining down on him with little more than half-voiced yelps and groans. There was a catch to his breathing that suggested something broken, and when the light hit his bruised eye just right it looked like an open wound. Maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea after all, but there was no turning back now. Clu entertained a brief fantasy of himself as he had been, and Rinzler as he had been, and derezzing the lot of the users into their component bits and breaking out by force. “If you think either one of us is going to tell you anything, you’re even more of an idiot than you look like.”
“Right,” said ugly, “worthless, cocky, and stupid.” He smashed Clu’s nose with an open palm, and from there things were a blur. He seemed to hurt everywhere at once. There was a ringing in his ears, and a mistimed gasp left him choking on inhaled saliva for a few long seconds. A hard jab to his jaw was a sharp pain, sharp as being stabbed, and he spit out a jagged lump of tooth. So much for healing.
There was a sound across the room. A shout, and an impact, and Clu looked up to see the blur of the short one on the ground and Rinzler in an awkward hunch, still bound to his chair but only by his wrists. Clu threw himself sideways. The impact was agony but he caught the ugly one behind the knees on the way down. Rinzler was already in the air. He’d jumped, gained as much speed and height as he’d been able. Time seemed to slow as Rinzler twisted his body. He’d always been graceful, and the chair came down on a single leg, right on top of the ugly one’s head. All that weight and pressure on a single point.
Clu always had loved physics.