Work Text:
It’s only temporary.
Clu turned the file over and over in his hands, watching mutely as the compilers started to fidget. Jarvis’s hand was still raised to take the file from him. The design from him.
It’s temporary. He was no fool that would code a virus of this magnitude without concurrently writing its undoing. He just.. needed space. Time. Just one cycle without more of those glitch-magnets spawning from nowhere so that he could get the system in something like order and without Flynn’s glitched short attention-span wandering over to them in the middle of troubleshooting…
Breathe. Calm down. Smile. Scaring the help was not going to solve anything, and he had an image to maintain.
What had he been doing?
Oh, yeah.
“How soon will production be complete? This is a sensitive operation. Estimates won’t suffice,” Clu said instead. Over and over in his hands the delicate sliver of data flipped. Life and death in his hands, a perfect copy of the Creator in this, anyway.
It’s temporary.
He had to think of the system, of the millions of lives depending on his ability to do what had to be done. Even the ISOs themselves were doomed to perish if the system fault continued to propagate, and wasn’t that irony?
Just a cycle. Two or three max. Get it under control and then spread the antivirus. Say it’s just the Sea being an error as usual and Flynn won’t even know, man.
Jarvis was saying words. Clu grunted something that sounded vaguely like assent.This time the task scheduler took the file from Clu’s suddenly nerveless fingers, turning to gift it to the compilers who would make it happen. No more ISOs rising out of the water. No more constant system instability. No more distractions that dragged the Creator away from his own children and left them to die in the cascade of errors that was eating TRON City. Undivided attention. Just a cycle or three was all he needed.
It’s only temporary.
So why was his code squirming uncomfortably?