Chapter Text
Rinzler was in the middle of a sleep cycle, a sorely needed one. He hadn’t been running himself quite so ragged now that Beck was in charge of the Grid, but Rinzler always worked hard, he didn’t know how to do anything else, and Beck had taken to actually telling him to his face that he needed to sleep when he’d been up too long. Of course Rinzler always brushed him off, but Beck was forever stubborn, even more stubborn than Rinzler himself, and the annoying program had started pestering him about it whenever he had judged Rinzler was too tired. It actually got to the point of absolutely nothing getting done and Rinzler folding just because at least if he was asleep Beck might get back to doing his job instead of following him around and harassing him.
So Rinzler was sleeping, but the sound of a series of beeps coming from the door jolted him back to consciousness. The door swished open before he could get up and Beck stood in the doorway, blinking in the dark of the room. He turned his head and spotted Rinzler as Rinzler looked up at him confusedly. There was a long moment of silence, but Beck’s brow furrowed.
“Are you sleeping in here?” he asked, his voice bewildered, “Why?”
Rinzler stared up at him, just as confused. He still kept his helmet on at all hours, even when he was taking a sleep cycle, just because he’d worn it for so long that taking it off made him uncomfortable, so Beck wouldn’t be able to see the look on Rinzler’s face, but the sysadmin still looked down at him with that same bewildered expression.
“I…always sleep here…” Rinzler eventually said when it became clear Beck actually expected an answer to his question.
Somehow Beck’s expression only turned even more confused. “Why? You have your own room don’t you?”
“I had a room on CLU’s throne ship…” Rinzler mumbled, frowning, “why does this matter?”
Beck stared at him like he’d gone insane. “You’ve been sleeping on the floor in a storeroom this entire time?” he asked, his voice suddenly high and upset for reasons beyond Rinzler’s understanding.
“Yes?” Rinzler responded, still not seeing why it was important.
For a moment there was a painful silence before Beck let out a huge gusty sigh and stepped further into the room, letting the door shut behind him. “Rinzler,” he said, sitting down cross-legged on the floor in front of the program in question, “Did CLU have you sleep on the floor?”
“No,” Rinzler replied, “My quarters had a bench, I chose to sleep this way instead because it was more comfortable.”
“A bench,” Beck repeated irritably, “You mean like the holding cells where prisoners go?”
Rinzler did not sigh at this because it wasn’t an unwarranted comparison, given he’d made the same one himself more than once, even if he wouldn’t dare complain about it.
“The lights worked better in the holding cells,” Rinzler noted dryly and Beck pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Why am I surprised?” he asked the world in general more than Rinzler, “Why am I ever surprised?”
“I have no idea,” Rinzler told him in a flat tone, answering his rhetorical question just to point out that Beck was in fact being foolish.
“Get up,” Beck griped, “I’m not letting the User-damned Chief Security Monitor of this system sleep on the fucking floor of a storeroom.” Rinzler had to admit that Beck had definitely been getting an admirable amount of mileage out of the swear words Sam_Flynn had taught him during the period where the Users had been hanging out with the rebels. They certainly illustrated his mood.
Rinzler snorted irritably, but when Beck pulled on his bicep he did stand up. “Why is this important?” Rinzler asked him again as Beck pushed him out the door.
“I have no idea how to explain to you why you shouldn’t be sleeping on the damn floor, Rinzler,” Beck grumbled, “Just take my word for it, it’s not good, and you deserve better.”
With no explanation forthcoming, Rinzler just gave up. Apparently it was important to Beck, so he’d let him do whatever it was that he wanted, even if he didn’t understand why. “What were you looking for?” Rinzler asked him instead as Beck finally let go of him, now that he seemed confident that Rinzler would walk on his own.
“I was trying to find where you guys kept your unused gear,” Beck explained with slightly less patience than he normally had, still clearly perturbed. “Hessa told me to look there.”
“She meant down the hall,” Rinzler huffed, following behind the sysadmin as Beck led him back through the Hub, “at the end, that’s the equipment storage.”
“Noted,” Beck grumbled, “Explains why your door was locked.”
Rinzler had nothing to say to that, so he said nothing and Beck led him out of the Hub entirely and up into Tesler’s ship, which still hung over the Hub because nobody had been able to figure out what to do with it.
“I should have given this stupid thing to you ages ago,” Beck griped as they stood on the lift. Rinzler turned his head to scowl at him.
“I don’t want Tesler’s ship,” he said and Beck just gave him an extremely annoying smile.
“Yeah well I didn’t want Dyson’s ship either and you made me take it, so now I’m the one insisting. I’ll even recode it for you so you have it the way you want it.”
“I don’t want it,” Rinzler bit out.
“Tough,” was Beck’s response as he pushed Rinzler out of the lift and onto the bridge. “You need a room that has a bed and I figure you wouldn’t want a normal residence, so you get the ship, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with it anyway, and if you have to make a visit to Argon or Gallium or wherever then this makes it easier.”
Rinzler just let out an annoyed breath through his teeth and Beck smiled at him again with the most obnoxious grin he had in his arsenal. With no recourse, Rinzler again gave up. Beck was too damn stubborn and Rinzler didn’t actually care where he slept so long as it was vaguely secure.
The two of them wound up behind the main console on the bridge, where Beck pulled out his recoding tool that he definitely no longer needed in order to edit things and plugged it into the console, turning the whole thing semi-translucent. “How do you want it?” Beck asked him and Rinzler gave him a scowl he knew Beck could feel even with his face not visible.
“Okay,” Beck sighed dramatically, “I’ll just make it nice, since you obviously don’t care.”
Rinzler said nothing, just folding his arms over his chest, and Beck smiled at him mischievously before he turned back to the display in front of him and started recoding Tesler’s entire ship. He talked about all the changes he was making as he made them, giving Rinzler the rundown on what he was being given.
“Your room will be here,” Beck told him after several long moments of babbling about the ship’s facilities, pointing it out on the map that he had floating above the console, “I figure you wouldn’t want to sleep in the same room Tesler slept in, I know I wouldn’t, so this auxiliary armory will be your new room and we can make Tesler’s old room into the new axillary armory.”
“I don’t care,” Rinzler said for the tenth time since Beck had started, but Beck just ignored him and kept talking. The sysadmin spent what felt like an age recoding the entire ship before he finally set the changes to initialize and pulled his recoding tool free so he could stow it. Rinzler watched disinterestedly as the room around them shifted, parts of it derezzing and new parts rezzing in their place. Like with Dyson’s ship, Beck disposed of the throne that sat on the bridge and replaced it with an arc of chairs that faced the viewscreen, as well as adding a few more workstations around the edges of the room. He hadn’t changed the color of the lights to blue like his own ship though, probably because Rinzler’s own circuits were still orange and this was ostensibly now his ship.
“Come on,” Beck said and Rinzler let out an irritable noise, but did actually follow Beck when he started walking. Beck walked him from one end of the ship to the other, showing him everything as if he hadn’t just heard the whole spiel while Beck recoded it. When they got to what was now apparently Rinzler’s own room, Beck punched in a code and the door whooshed open.
“No,” Rinzler said automatically, his voice coming out wrong, too high and too ragged, and Beck frowned at him.
“Why, what’s wrong with it?” he asked, his tone suddenly kind where before it had been irritatingly flippant.
Rinzler looked around the room without stepping inside, trying to figure out what about it had given him that knee-jerk feeling of revulsion. After a moment he managed to pinpoint it, but rather than looking at Beck, he turned his face away.
“It looks like CLU’s room,” he mumbled.
“Oh, hmm,” Beck huffed, folding his arms over his chest as he thought it over, “Alright, I’ll change it. Tell me what about it is wrong.”
Rinzler turned his head back so he could examine the room again. “Get rid of that,” Rinzler told him first, pointing out the couch that sat in the center of the room. Beck obediently plugged his recoding tool back into the wall and started changing the room again. The couch turned transparent, so Rinzler looked over the room again, “and that,” he said, pointing out the jacuzzi that was irritatingly reminiscent of the one Dyson had had in his room. Rinzler didn’t know why Beck had thought he’d want something like that, as if he ever had the time for it anyway. Beck obliged and the jacuzzi also turned transparent. Rinzler asked him to remove almost everything in the room, all the furniture except the workstation that sat against one wall and Beck obliged him, although he frowned more and more the emptier the room became. “And that,” Rinzler told him, pointing at the bed, and Beck made a frustrated noise.
“Okay, but where are you going to sleep?” Beck asked him irritably, “The whole point of this is you can’t sleep on the floor.”
“I don’t care,” Rinzler told him testily, “I’m not sleeping on that.”
Beck let out a huge gusty sigh, but did as Rinzler told him and the bed also turned transparent. “Okay great, the room is completely empty now. Do you want literally nothing in it or is there something I could add? You have to sleep somewhere other than the floor.”
“Why?” Rinzler demanded again, even though the last time Beck had just said he couldn’t explain it. Beck let out a second frustrated noise and ran his hand over his face.
“It’s wrong,” he repeated, “You deserve better than that, you’re a person, not a pet or an object. You deserve to have some…some dignity!”
Rinzler frowned at him, his hackles lowering. “It’s arrogance,” he grumbled and Beck scowled at him.
“It is not arrogance to have somewhere comfortable to sleep,” he bit back. All Rinzler could do was roll his eyes and fold his arms back over his chest. “You’re impossible, you know that, Rinzler,” Beck griped, “Just utterly impossible.”
“Then put something in,” Rinzler snapped, “Just not the bed.”
“If–If I put a different shaped bed in would it work? Would it remind you less of CLU?” Beck tried, his tone a little desperate.
“No bed,” Rinzler bit out, “I’ve never had one and CLU always did, the shape doesn’t matter.”
“You had one before he rectified you,” Beck huffed as his shoulders dropped in defeat, his frustration easing a little in the face of Rinzler’s honesty.
“That doesn’t count,” Rinzler told him stubbornly.
“Yeah I guess if you don’t remember it then it makes no difference,” Beck sighed, “Okay just…let me think for a nano. You are not sleeping on the floor or on a prison bench. That’s just unacceptable.”
Rinzler rolled his eyes again, but allowed Beck a moment to consider the problem, “Okay I’ve got an idea,” Beck finally said and turned back to coding the room. Another object appeared inside, as transparent as everything else, and Rinzler examined it skeptically. It was a hammock that was slung in the corner, not a bed he had to admit. Rinzler considered how he felt about that before giving up. It didn’t fill him with the gut level revulsion and vibrating anxiety the bed did, so he just nodded and Beck let out a huge relieved sigh.
“Thank the Users,” Beck huffed, “but you really want nothing else in here?”
The look on his face was so downtrodden that Rinzler spent a moment actually considering his question instead of dismissing it. Was there anything he could do with in his own quarters? “Something to hit,” Rinzler finally decided and Beck’s eyebrows went up, but then he let out a chuckle.
“Okay, I’ll take it,” he said and when he coded in the new element a transparent dummy in the shape of Dyson appeared in the empty center of the room. Rinzler couldn’t help but laugh at the stupid look on its equally stupid face. “Can I give you some storage for energy?” Beck asked him a little more cheerfully, “I know Vekt is always giving it to you while you’re working, but if you’re going to be here sometimes then it would be convenient for you to have some.”
Rinzler thought about that before nodding, “Not a bar,” he stipulated, “I’d have no use for it.”
“Yeah I know you don’t do drinks,” Beck hummed as he added a cabinet with a reservoir for energy inside it. “That it?”
Again Rinzler considered it, but after a moment he nodded. He didn’t need anything else, in fact this was already far more than he actually needed. Beck was giving him a whole fucking ship, what the hell was he supposed to do with it?
“Alright,” Beck allowed, “Better than nothing.” Rinzler said nothing to that so Beck initialized the changes and the new items rezzed in as the old ones dissolved. When it was all done Beck smiled at him, “Take the rest of your sleep cycle…and if I catch you sleeping in that storeroom again I’m going to make your room even fancier.”
“Yes, Master,” Rinzler bit out and Beck grimaced.
“Okay point taken,” he sighed, putting his hands up in surrender before turning an absolutely pathetic doe-eyed look on Rinzler, “but please don't go back to sleeping on the floor. For me. It’s…it’s upsetting.” Rinzler grumbled under his breath, but after a nano he just nodded and Beck relaxed. “Thanks,” he said, “Let me know if anything turns out to be uncomfortable. I’ll change it.”
Rinzler just waved him away and Beck let out a laugh before obliging him and leaving. The door whooshed shut behind him, leaving Rinzler alone in his new quarters. He still didn’t really know what to do with them, they were much bigger than any room he’d ever had to himself. His quarters on CLU’s throne ship had only been about three paces by four paces in total, with the bench taking up a notable portion of that, but this room was at least twice that size and Rinzler did get some of Beck’s hesitance with taking out all the furniture, it left the large space almost entirely empty, but aside from the unfamiliarity of it, Rinzler didn’t really care. He probably wouldn’t ever end up being in there when he was awake anyway.
The first thing Rinzler did was lock the door, not that it’d stop Beck if he decided he wanted to come in, as the lock on the backroom had proven, then, with a little hesitation, he did go over to the hammock and examine it. He’d never slept in one before…or used one at all, although he’d seen them once or twice and there was an entry on them under the ‘bed’ section of the User encyclopedia Kevin_Flynn had loaded into him. It took him a nano to decide how he wanted to approach getting into it, given it would probably sway when touched, unstable as it was, but once he’d decided on an approach he did climb up into it and sit for a moment. It was too unstable for him to sleep upright, he decided, and it wasn’t close enough to the wall for him to lean his back against it the way he usually did, so after another moment of consideration he gave up and flopped down on his side, facing the door so he could react quickly if need be.
He stayed like that for a while, but when nothing bad happened, he did drop back into his previously interrupted sleep cycle. Hopefully this time he’d manage to complete it.
***
Rinzler woke when a shudder went through the Grid, sitting bolt upright and then throwing his arms out as the sudden movement made the hammock sway dangerously. It wasn’t the first, there had been intermittent tremors passing through the Grid for the past two cycles, but this one was different, was familiar, and Rinzler actually knew what had caused it. Once it seemed like he wasn’t going to fall out of the hammock, he carefully disentangled himself from it and then strode out the door, irritably going all the way back through Tesler’s stupid enormous ship that was apparently now his stupid enormous ship, just to get down to the street, something that would have taken him a third of the time if he’d been in the backroom in the Hub.
Once he was back on the ground he rezzed his cycle and took off, headed for the arcade. Beck was already there when he arrived, waiting outside the front entrance with the Tagalongs standing beside him.
Beck turned his head when Rinzler pulled up and dismounted. There was a frown on his face, something exasperated, “And here I was hoping you might sleep for an actually reasonable amount of time for once.”
Rinzler gave him an unimpressed look that, as always, he seemed to be able to sense even without seeing it, and Beck just held his hands up in surrender. “It would be better if you slept, sir,” Reeve cut in, “We should be able to handle this just fine.”
“It’s Users,” Rinzler grumbled, an argument that they couldn’t really contest, because it was in fact Users and all the trouble they always brought with them. Fortunately both Beck and the Tagalongs let the matter drop as the door to the arcade opened and the whole entourage piled out, Sam_Flynn and Alan-One along with Quorra and Tron, all stepping out onto the street.
“Hey you got the welcoming committee out!” Sam_Flynn crowed and Alan-One merely chuckled.
“Welcome Users!” Beck greeted in a voice that was only a little sarcastic as he grinned at them. Even so, the group laughed.
“How are you guys doing?” Alan-One asked, “It’s been a while in here since we left right? It’s only been a couple weeks for us, but I know the time doesn’t line up right.”
“It’s been a few cycles,” Beck helpfully provided, to which Quorra and Tron both nodded, “and I'd say it's been going alright so far, no wars or coups or anything, although we’ve had some weird tremors.”
“Ah,” Alan-One huffed, “That’s probably because of the reason we’re here.”
“What did you do?” Rinzler bit out and Tron rolled his eyes, although Alan-One merely smiled at him fondly.
“It’s not us,” Alan-One explained, “it’s the computer that hosts the Grid, the thing was advanced for its time when Flynn put it together, but that was over twenty years ago. The fact that it’s still running at all is a miracle.”
“Okay, so what does that actually mean?” Beck asked before Rinzler could bite out something much less polite.
“It means the Grid needs to be moved,” Sam_Flynn cut in, “If we leave it on Dad’s computer any longer it could fail.”
“Move it?” Rinzler repeated darkly, ”What do you mean move it? How do you move an entire system and where are you planning on putting it?”
Sam_Flynn raised his hands as if to quell Rinzler, which only succeeded in making him growl, so Tron stepped between them, as if he thought Rinzler might actually lunge at the younger User…not that it hadn’t crossed his mind.
“Compared to the User world, the Grid is miniscule,” Tron explained, his tone level, if not slightly annoyed in the way it often was when he talked to Rinzler. “All of it is contained on a device about this big.” He held his hands out to demonstrate and all of the Grid programs there, save Quorra, stared at him in bewilderment.
“That can’t be right,” Rinzler protested, but Quorra shook her head solemnly.
“No it is,” she said, “The User world is large beyond comprehension, it’s so big that there are places so far away they can’t even be seen with the most powerful lenses ever built and would take billions of cycles to ever reach. It’s so big they don’t even know how big it actually is.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Beck laughed as Rinzler just stared at her in disbelief, “But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. So what, the little box we live in is breaking so you have to put us in a different little box?”
“Pretty much, yeah,” Sam_Flynn said, “I’d give the computer you’re in another year at most before it craps out, so this is pretty urgent.”
“Alright,” Beck sighed, “How does this work then? How do you move us?”
“We have to download all Grid’s assets into a drive and then upload them into a new computer,” Alan-One explained, “Aside from the fact that Flynn’s computer isn’t going to hold out much longer, the arcade isn’t exactly the safest location. I’d feel better if there was more security between it and the public…given how Sam ended up in here totally by accident, something is bound to go wrong sooner or later.”
“Yeah Lora is real worried about somebody coming in off the street and stealing the laser to sell for a quick Hawaiian vacay,” Sam_Flynn added.
Rinzler let out a sigh and folded his arms over his chest. He could feel the Tagalongs shift unhappily behind him, their discomfort with the idea mirroring his own. “Can the Grid run while you’re transferring it or…or do you have to freeze it?”
“It can’t run on just a drive,” Alan-One told him, “This system takes up a lot of processing power and a drive is really just a storage device, you have to plug it into something else for it to be able to actually do anything with the data it carries.”
Again Rinzler let out a sigh, chewing his lip as he thought it over, “I don’t trust you,” he said and the Tagalongs nodded in approval beside him.
“Great,” Sam_Flynn said, his voice dry, “So you want the system to just die then.”
“No,” Rinzler snapped, the snarl that colored his voice so vicious that Sam_Flynn actually took a step away from him and Tron again put himself between the two of them, “I don’t trust you,” Rinzler repeated, “So I need to supervise to make sure it doesn’t get damaged while you're transferring it…I want to do it myself.”
The Users, along with Tron and Quorra all blinked at him. “You…want to come to our world?” Alan-One asked tentatively.
“I will if I have to,” Rinzler bit out, “to ensure the Grid’s safety.”
Both Users shared a glance and then looked to Quorra and Tron. Tron just grimaced, while Quorra shrugged. “I…see no problem with that, so long as you abide by our laws. First and foremost you can’t hurt anybody. Understand?” Alan-One told him after a moment.
Rinzler scowled at them all, but nodded. If he needed to defend the Grid he would, regardless of what anybody else had to say about it, but provided the Grid wasn’t in danger he’d refrain from hurting anybody.
“Okay cool,” Sam_Flynn huffed, “Aside from that I think most of our rules are similar to your rules, no stealing stuff or vandalism or whatever.”
“I get it,” Rinzler bit out, and Sam_Flynn rolled his eyes.
“Alright,” Alan-One sighed, “you can come supervise us if you want.”
“Can–can I come too?” Beck spoke up, glancing anxiously between the Users and Rinzler, “I don’t want him to have to be there alone.”
“He would not be alone,” Tron soothed but Beck shook his head.
“Alone with people he doesn’t trust,” the sysadmin elaborated and Tron sighed before turning to Alan-One.
“That’s fine,” the User said, “But just you two, I don’t have enough seats in my car to bring a whole parade.”
The Tagalongs deflated behind Rinzler, obviously having wanted to go too, given they never ever seemed to want to leave his side. Rinzler turned to them and they straightened back up immediately.
“Even if the Grid is offline during transfer, it will be online without us for some time before and after it’s transferred, even if not much. Can I trust you to keep the place from falling apart during that time?” He asked them seriously and somehow, impossibly, the three of them stood even straighter.
“We won’t let any harm come to it, sir!” the three of them barked in unison. Rinzler let out a sigh and nodded, then turned back to the Users and their friends.
“Let’s get this over with, if that’s all you’re here for then there’s no point in wasting time.”
Alan-One let out a breath, but nodded, only to turn to Beck, “I assume you’ll want to let your friends know you’ll be gone for a little while.”
“Yeah but I can do that on our way to the portal,” Beck replied lightly, “I agree with Rinzler, the sooner this is done the better.”
“Alright,” Alan-One relented, “Let’s head out then.”
Unfortunately, neither the Users or their entourage had rezzed in with jet batons, so the lot of them ended up on Beck’s ship. It was an anxious trip, for Rinzler at least. He had never had any desire to leave the Grid, it was where he belonged, not in the User world, but now he was forced to leave it to ensure its safety, and he didn’t like it.
He stood on the bridge of Beck’s ship, watching the pillar of light that was the portal grow steadily closer while Beck and the others sat in the chairs that took up the space and discussed logistics that Rinzler listened to with half an ear.
Finally one of the pilots that occupied the four workstations on the bridge called out that they had arrived, not that that wasn’t obvious just from looking out the viewscreen, and Rinzler turned to follow Beck as they all disembarked, leaving Beck’s ship and its staff to wait for them to return.
The portal was a blinding pillar of light that took up the whole of the platform at the end of the bridge, but Tron walked confidently towards it with the others following him. Rinzler took up the rear and hesitated for just a nano at the edge of the light.
“It’s alright,” Beck reassured him from where he stood inside it, his hand on Tron’s shoulder like everyone else, “It’ll be alright. You trust me don’t you?”
Rinzler hesitated just another nano longer, but then reached out to put his hand on Beck’s elbow before stepping into the light with the others. It didn’t hurt, all it felt like was wind whipping around him, no sensation of hot or cold, no pain, and Rinzler watched as Tron raised his disc over his head and released it. Something hooked Rinzler under the ribs and the world felt like it twisted suddenly.
All he could hope for was that this was the right decision, that he hadn’t made a mistake. Rinzler had nothing and nobody to pray to; he didn’t believe in the promises offered by the Users, and CLU was dead, but Rinzler still silently begged somebody, anybody, anything, that this wouldn't go horribly wrong like everything in his life always seemed to.