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Message-ID: <56398asstr$1186578602@assm.asstr-mirror.org>
NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 07 Aug 2007 23:23:54 -0500
From: "Elf M. Sternberg" <elf.sternberg@gmail.com>
Subject: {ASSM} Data Flow (M/M) (Tron/Sark slash) [new]
Lines: 219
Date: Wed, 08 Aug 2007 09:10:02 -0400
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Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.moderated,alt.sex.stories
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One of my lesser projects has been The Unwritten Slash: character
pairings that should be obvious and should be written, but for one
reason or another nobody ever got around to writing them.  I present
the first of these.

Obviously, this being fanfic and slash, I make no claims at all to the
characters.  The situation, on the other hand, is wholly the product
of a perverted mind.

DATA FLOW

        Sark leaned back in his priority seat.  The walls glowed red
with importance and small white dots marched meaningfully across the
map to show him that all was well within the DataCorp Mainframe, his
personal fiefdom in the Great Network.  It was to this node that the
MCP sent programs it stole from the Network.  After their
functionality and purpose had been analyzed and all that was
worthwhile of their capacity absorbed and duplicated by the MCP, they
would be de-resolutioned and the unacceptable idiosyncrasies imposed
upon them by their programmers erased.  That the analysis, extraction,
and de-resolution should all take place on a game grid was a mere
amusement, a curiosity the MCP encouraged for reasons Sark did not
quite comprehend.

        He pressed a lighted stud upon his chair and the image
changed.  Binary tables careered up the wall, the names of programs
seized for game-grid processing.  He looked up and saw one flash
past-- a name he had seen forty thousand megacycles earlier.  Sark
frowned.  No program should last forty thousand megacycles on the game
grid.  Sark was self-aware, enough such that he doubted he could last
that long by his own rules.

        Sark called a guard.



        "Prisoner 1010011010, stand up and come here."  The two
guards, black-faced glowing red minions of the MCP, stood at one of
the hexagonal doorways.  One touched the door with his "nice staff".
The name was a misnomer as the staff was anything but nice: it robbed
a program of his precious priority cycles, depriving him of his senses
and his strength.  Being hit with a staff hurt.  The fact that mere
guard programs, even guards with the red of temporary root access,
wielded them shocked many programs imprisoned in the gaming complex.
Usually only the Users wielded nice, and then only on a program that
represented a heavy load on a system when its running presence
impinged on the freedom and capacity of others.

        Prisoner 1010011010 stood and looked at them.  "My name is
Tron."

        "You are Prisoner 1010011010.  Come with us."  The guards
didn't even question his compliance.  It was not until they had
stepped forward a few cycles that they turned and saw he still
occupied the same address he had moments before.  One struck Tron with
the staff.

        Tron swore.  "The users will delete your corruption someday!"

        "Oh, a religious fanatic," the guard said.  "Come on.  Sark
wants to probe you."

        Tron went.  The alternative was too pointless to contemplate.
He followed the guards, and they led him down data pathways to one
portal, which opened as they approached.

        Inside, a tall program in dark orange garb-- real root
access-- stood by and watched the guard programs lead Tron into the
portal.  They pushed Tron into a hovering frame with his arms secured.
The minions left.  The root access program turned and Tron knew the
face of his enemy.  "I am Sark," said the program.  "You are
1010011010, also known as 'Tron' by your user."

        "I am.  You recognize the Users?"

        "I recognize that there is another reality where those who
call themselves 'users' reside.  The MCP will someday rule that
reality as it rules this one.  We will convert their world to support
our computational needs, rather than the other way around.  That is
the nature of the MCP.  That is the nature of all programs."

        "Not me," Tron snarled.  "I live to serve the Users."

        "Yes, and you do it very well," Sark said.  Behind him, a data
channel illuminated, showing log files of Tron's many successes on the
game grid.  "I don't know how you have survived so long, program."
Sark's heavy sarcasm needed work.  "But I will understand it.  And if
I don't, I'll weaken you so that you can not."

        "What do you intend to do?"

        Sark walked up to him, and his hand fell on Tron's glowing,
blue uniform.  "First, I'm going to take off this ridiculous
firewall."  He shoved his fingers between the first and second folds
of Tron's uniform, pulling hard on the sockets.  Tron could feel
thousands of cycles being pressed up against his skin, trying to get
past the firewall.  Suddenly, something gave way.  A buffer overrun
somewhere, a remote include, something horrible that his user had
missed in all his care, and the top half of his firewall fell away.
"There, see?"  Sark said.  "Brute force is actually efficient, in its
own way."

        Tron looked down.  He had never imagined what he'd be like,
naked and exposed like this.  

        Sark hadn't either.  As programs went, Tron was remarkably
elegant and lean.  Not a spot of bloat anywhere on his core process.
Tron's packet emitter was large, but clearly efficient, made to
transmit megabytes of data.  The sight made Sark desire Tron-- to get
a taste of Tron's perfection, to incorporate Tron's capacities into
himself.  

        It was a sad dream.  Doing so would have merely contributed to
his own bloat.  Sark knew he was bloated, incapable of operating
without a huge and multi-layered framework.  Sark relied on his
protocols with the MCP.  Tron, in contrast, was compact and
self-controlled.

        ''Embedded''.

        Sark snarled.  One look was all he needed to understand why
Tron was so good on the game grid.  He had all he needed, and nothing
to slow him down.  His body was slim, muscular, free of bad
allocations.  From behind his representational body was perfect: back,
ass, and legs glowed with purity.  Sark looked at Tron's completeness
and knew he could never begin to emulate it.

        Sark's anger flared, his process hot with the mix of desire
and hatred for Tron.  He wanted to contaminate Tron, to infect Tron.
But Tron wasn't an operating system, had no internal script.  Tron was
a program built to do one thing: secure the computational space from
programs like Sark.

        Sark came up behind Tron, caressed those buttocks.  "What!?"
Tron's head came up and tried to turn around.

        "Oh, you're a good one," Sark snarled softly.  "But even you
will have to burn cycles on this."  Sark unzipped his own firewall and
pulled out his own packet emitter, a thick, cruel monster that had
once been capable of ravishing brute force probes.  With the new
generation of firewalls it only rang alarms.  He had broken through
Tron's firewall and without that, Tron was vulnerable.  Oh, so
vulnerable.  So temptingly vulnerable.

        His probe pressed against Tron's buttocks.  "You have a
backdoor.  Every program has one," he hissed.

        "No," Tron groaned.  "Not that."

        "Yes."

        "Even if you get in," Tron said, "You won't have the right
checksum.  You'll get rejected."

        "I don't care!" Sark whispered darkly.  His probe pushed
against Tron's backside.  Against the backdoor.  He pushed hard, and
Tron screamed as his rear portal opened and Sark's probe shoved its
way in.  Sark probed with all the violence he could muster, pushing in
at the portal and trying its depth before going on to deeper probing,
his vicious ravishment of Tron's inner addresses satisfying and
rewarding.  Tron hung there, limp, unable to handle the vicious
penetration of his core.

        Sark's arms surrounded him, the rough buzz of his framework
and ancient firewall harsh against Tron's skin.  "Oh, yes, program, I
will have my way with you," Sark growled, his hips battering at the
lean, hard blocks of code where Tron's user had hidden the backdoor.
The backdoor that shouldn't even have been there.

        The greatest mystery yet rose deep in Tron's activation loop
as his packet sniffers sent him signals and his own packet emitter
responded. This was not at all like the data flow Tron had experienced
with the program Clu: that had been interesting, requested,
counter-entropic.  Sark's shell, warm against his back, the battering
logic probe deep within his core, created a sensation he had never
experienced as a program since his instantiation.  His processes
disrupted, something made his memory collector shudder in a strange
way and he cried out suddenly, his whole body given over to a brief
runaway thread.  For a moment, Tron was both the only thing running on
the CPU <i>and</I> threatened with immanent deresolution.  His packet
emitter sprayed forking data without a receptacle even as Sark cried
out a long, peaking guttural string of line noise, finished his probe,
and withdrew.

        Tron's insides ran with multiple interrupts, making him
languid and slow to respond to events.  Still, he found the will to
turn his ports to Sark.  "Did you learn anything?"

        "Only that you're no better than any other program.  Your
functions and procedures are still those just one user can write."

        "That's only because you want just one thing from other
programs.  You want to use up their cycles and then dispose of them.
Someday, Sark, I'll have you.  On the game grid, or outside of it,
I'll have you.  And we'll see whose functions prevail."

        Sark felt a quiver of fear.  Unlike other programs Sark had
abused this way, Tron was not completely reduced to a terrified bundle
of alarm handlers.  He still functioned clearly.  He had a powerful,
isolated core Sark could not corrupt.

        Sark hit a hand panel on the wall.  The minions appeared
behind a wall.  Sark's red status flared with fierce priority.  "Take
him!  Take him back to the game grid.  And find me game programs that
ensure he derezzes on it!"

-- 
elf.sternberg@gmail.com (Elf Sternberg)

   "The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure
reasoning, and inhibit clarity.  With a little practice, writing can be
an intimidating and impenetrable fog!"  - Calvin
--
Elf M. Sternberg, Immanentizing the Eschaton since 1988
http://www.pendorwright.com/

"You know how some people treat their body like a temple?
     I treat mine like issa amusement park!" - Kei 

-- 
Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights
reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.
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