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Fanworks: Tron: Fics: Cheat Codes
Summary
He still has control, but just barely. He feels a distinct sense that AnnaJean wants that control gone. In the background, the music swells, a strange symphony of electronic chimes and wildly soaring notes that somehow express both wistfulness and passion.
"Mmm. So eager." She runs firm hands down his sides, his thighs. "Nice try, but eager's not the same as spontaneous. It's not the same as random."
He gasps, his hips quiver, a pulse of hot indigo light shocks between them. "You-- you want me to do something spontaneous? Random? Now?"
She smirks, stilling her hands. "That should be the most natural thing in the world for you, randomizing process."
"But it's not." He's almost sobbing now, can hardly breathe, "I can't-- please, you aren't going to tease me, are--"
"Oh, I am absolutely going to tease you. To the edge of insanity."
(A game-announcer program helps a repressed young game-randomizing program find his adventurous side.)
Cheat Codes
Prompt from Max on Discord:
Workplace hookup between two Arcade programs (an Announcer and a Tetris block-picker)-- mirroring their Users (a restless programmer stepmom and the game-developer she's having an affair with).... following, somewhat, the theme of the circuit-play in the 1982 movie's Deleted Scene.
Ooh boy, did I ever take that and run with it.
(Written in the settings/headcanons of my I/O Towerverse.)
(Like other I/O Towerverse fics, it can stand alone.)
Notes about the setting:
- ENCOM Grid, post-MCP-overthrow.
- All Arcade games have a Program side. Even Tetris.
Program anatomy in this story:
see my headcanons hereCheat Codes
"Good game, man! Hahaaa!"
AnnaJean sounds as triumphant as Mike imagines a User sounding after a good win. The very opposite, probably, of what just happened to the User on the other end of that arcade screen.
Mike, fidgeting in the soft post-game lounge seat, watches her slide into the chair opposite him and pour electric-blue energy into an incongruous-looking cut crystal wineglass. The whole time, AnnaJean doesn't stop the rejoicing for a picocycle. "I have never had so much fun yelling out 'Game Over!' The look on his face!"
"You can see their faces?" Mike freezes, stares at her in awe.
"No, dummy." She reaches across the table and ruffles his hair. "I'm just programmed with an imagination. Simulator of what User faces tend to look like, depending on what experience they just had. It helps me put the right cadence into my announcements." She pumps a fist in the air. "And that one had a lovely undertone of you just got pwned, n00b!"
But then she quiets-- long-lashed and sharply-outlined eyes sliding back in Mike's direction. "You really oughta watch out, though. I know about the sneaky little games among you Randomizers-- hey, they're as fun for me to watch as they are for you-- and I'm not telling you to stop having fun. But you've got to rein yourself in a little. Drop too many of the same Tetris shape in a row... fall into too much of a pattern... and the players are going to start calling for debuggers. You wouldn't like getting treated like a virus, kiddo."
"I... I wasn't meaning to!" Panic slides through his processes. "Did I-- did I really? Oh no!"
The game-announcement program erupts in laughter-- angular face tilting up, cheeks crinkling around shiny lips parting in a grin-- the curvaceous figure shaking all over. "Oh-my-Users! You are so funny!"
The flush over Mike's circuits might be fear, indignation, embarrassment... or maybe something else, sparked by the sight of her. But definitely not amusement.
"I-- I don't find this funny!" he sputters.
"Yeah, because you've got inhibitions thirty-two megabytes thick! And I don't even know where that comes from! Which is why you are so funny, RandoMike300." AnnaJean reaches out, as if to ruffle his hair again, but takes pity when she sees how flustered he already is. "You have one job. You are programmed to be a randomizing process. You are literally going against the will of the Users when you put patterns into the random things you are supposed to be throwing at the players! And yet, somehow --Users-don't-even-know how, because they'd have fixed it if they did-- you feel like being totally random is some kind of, like, sin that you've gotta hold yourself back from."
Mike is quiet a while. The words sound too true for his liking.
"It's deep in you, buddy." Anna shakes her head, one curl of the soft dark mass of her hair falling to cover an eye before she reaches up to tuck it aside. "I know it's not your core programming-- I mean, you're a Randomizer! There's gotta be spontaneity in you somewhere! But it's deep, that inhibition. Probably so deep you feel like it's your core programming. You gotta fight it, though. I know deep down at the core it isn't you."
He wants to protest, but he's not good at lying, even to himself. "Well. You understand how these things work, I guess. A lot."
"Hah! I could be a prophet for the Users, with all I know." She takes a deep drink from the silly-looking sparkly glass. "I'm more diary than program at this point. My User rants about her personal life in her coding notes. She's going glitched, I swear. I'd sound glitched if I tried to talk about it. Which is why I just carry on and keep announcing game results, instead of prophecies."
"So, you know what's bothering your User?" Mike looks up, interested.
Anna shrugs. "She's been installed as a trophy wife. It's necessary, I suppose. Keeps her supported in a few vital ways. But it's not agreeing with her."
Mike looks at the pitcher; at his own simple cylindrical glass, thinking about pouring himself a drink, but mostly still just distracted. By AnnaJean. By her strange mix of energy and spontaneity and... wisdom. He's always finding out new things about her, unpredictable things.
In the time they've worked together, she's always been a good mentor to him. And yet, in her playful moments like this, he feels she embodies more closely the essence of how he himself ought to act. He wonders, not for the first time, if she'd be a better randomizing process than he's ever been.
"Trophy wife?"
"Like a counterpart, but without the connection." She swirls the liquid in her glass, contemplating it as if it's a graphic-interface for her thoughts. "An older and more respected User-- one with grown-up child-processes and an estranged ex-counterpart of his own-- adds a shiny and flashy younger one to his suite of subroutines. Not always much younger or better-looking than him, but some. It's all graphics, all for show. Just to look impressive to others like him."
"So she doesn't even have a real interface with her new partner? No joining of minds, no pleasure, nothing in common?" Mike can't fathom it. Without such a connection, what sort of vital support could even be coming from such a relationship? The things wanted and needed by Users are... He shakes his head. Clearly he was not meant to understand.
"Very little in common. He's not even a programmer! As boring as a three-microcycle loading bar." AnnaJean smiles conspiratorially. "However, she has managed, so far. There's a younger and much more compatible User around to take the edge off for her. Hot young game developer. She's even mentioned his Username in her little rants."
Her voice drops low, switching to a syntax laced with enough ASCII to make the spelling clear. "1337_Kyle."
His eyes go wide, throat goes tight. Heat rushes through him all over, lighting circuits from throat to groin, and he almost moans aloud right there.
"The... The name of my User..."
"Yeah." Her tongue-tip glides over her upper lip. "Probably why we're feeling all this, huh. Programs echoing Users. As above, so below."
As if to illustrate the concept, her elegant hand reaches across the table... taps a circuit on the top of his shoulder, just lightly, making it flash hot-purple and.... oh yes, he feels that echo, too, down below.
"Our Users are..." He can barely gasp out the words.
"Oh yes they are. They pretty much can't stop it. Yours doesn't give you nearly as much input as mine does, huh?"
"Ohh."
Mike goes very still. All he can see for a nanocycle is violet, and clusters of confusing error-messages. "W-we shouldn't..."
"Why? Because we work together? Randomizer and announcer? What, is that some sort of personal conflict? What problems do you even think could come of that?"
There must be something, must be, it feels so wrong, but oh, he can't think...
"See. That's the User-energy talking. Their spirits formed our system. Their taboos are in here, but they're just pointless echoes. They mean nothing."
That, too, feels like taboo-- like blasphemy. But the thought of it ignites all his circuits.
"Taboos are arbitrary. Not just here-- lots of the ones in the User world, too. At least we can recognize the arbitrariness." She traces a line up and down his neck. "While enjoying the feeling it still gives us. The thrill of the forbidden."
Mike gasps, leans hard into her touch, almost begins to panic at the thought that they're in the public post-game lounge and others can see them and he can't stop. She's at least got the modesty of a silvery drape of fabric hanging from one shoulder to cover part of her chest and back, but he's there in just his shell, all his circuits showing, and now in such a humiliating spectrum of purple...
It can't be right-- all of this had got to be wrong, dangerous, in some important way he can't think of right now, it can't really be as harmless as she suggests-- but his I/O transmitter is swelling and sensitizing already to the point he has to spread his legs a bit, and more sensation is coursing hot and heavy downward from every circuit she touches, and he's still leaning and rubbing his neck on her and he can't make himself stop...
"You're-- evil," he manages to whimper... and the hand stroking up and down the hot circuits of his neck just digs the fingernails in slightly.
"Ooh, I like when you say that," she purrs. "Not in your usual dataset of things to say. Almost like you're starting to find that randomness. Keep digging, program."
"Nnnhhh-- ah, ah-- you-- you like being evil?"
"Maybe," she admits, voice low and playful. "Dunno. I'm not programmed to tell good from evil. I have my doubts whether anyone can. Even Users. Hey, I'm just a game announcer. I can tell high score from low score-- game start from game over-- winning from losing. And this..." she scratches lightly down a line of circuitry that makes his whole body arch-- "is winning."
Mike's arm finds the strength to move from where he's been gripping the edge of the table hard enough to hurt. Moves that grip onto her wrist. And by the time he gets there, he knows he's not there to pull her away, or try to make her stop. His own fingers press hard into the fractal circuit-patterns that climb her forearm.
She gasps, low, intense, pleasured-- the first real sound of surprise he's heard out of her yet. And it surprises him: how he feels that response all up the circuitry of his own arm, and how unexpectedly good it feels-- to have done something she hadn't predicted.
He hears a rumbling in his own voice as he hangs on to her. "We're getting out of here," he says.
She nods, breath hard, chest moving. "My place is closer."
They practically stumble over the threshold, footsteps echoing in digital reverb.
It's a standard apartment, as bare and gray as any other is at its base-code level. Some programs in this sector keep their rooms permanently decorated; others activate color and light and designs when they come home. AnnaJean just leaves it, as she rushes in alongside him, but Mike couldn't be farther from caring.
There's a raised platform near the center and it's big enough for them both to sit on, and that's all he can see, energy rushing through his circuits so hard it leaves almost none for standing and walking. He feels weak, about to collapse.
"Easy there," AnnaJean says, laughing. She catches him by both forearms, as she gets there first and sits down-- and there's a picocycle of unsure eye contact before he lowers himself with a sigh, guided by her hands, to straddle her lap. His inhibitions still burn as hot through his circuits as his arousal-- but even without any comments on it from the game announcer, he's painfully aware which side is winning that fight.
He's harder than he's ever been, oversensitized, swollen to the very edge of overload-- he thinks he would have lost control already, right there against her lap, if she had positioned him with his legs between hers. But like this, with her thighs still clenched together and his spread around them, nothing directly touches the embarrassingly obvious bulge of his activated I/O circuits-- and one slow breath after another gradually draws him back from the brink, at least a little.
There's a rising tone of sound in the background, then another... blending into chords, twisting into eerie melodies. Around them, the sterile white light of the room begins to transmute into pink, lavender, then shade after shade of purple and violet, a spectrum pulsing in time with the music.
As he shifts himself trying to adjust to the overwhelm of sensation, Mike realizes the decor of her room was never absent-- it's just the energy-sensitive kind. Feeding off their own energy, absorbed from the platform they're sitting on... to transform into lighting and sound effects, tailored to suit the mood of whatever's going on in the room.
And oh yes, he thinks with a flush of heat, it can tell exactly what is going on.
AnnaJean looks him over, her eyes almost tangible as they caress his shape from above to below. Lingering on the now-painful swell of his arousal, which still touches nothing, but still pulses with the fevered pattern of circuit-lights that only come to the surface when he's near overload. Hips trembling to hold back from driving himself against her, whatever part of her he can contact first.
He still has control, but just barely. He feels a distinct sense that AnnaJean wants that control gone. In the background, the music swells, a strange symphony of electronic chimes and wildly soaring notes that somehow express both wistfulness and passion.
"Mmm. So eager." She runs firm hands down his sides, his thighs. "Nice try, but eager's not the same as spontaneous. It's not the same as random."
He gasps, his hips quiver, a pulse of hot indigo light shocks between them. "You-- you want me to do something spontaneous? Random? Now?"
She smirks, stilling her hands. "That should be the most natural thing in the world for you, randomizing process."
"But it's not." He's almost sobbing now, can hardly breathe, "I can't-- please, you aren't going to tease me, are--"
"Oh, I am absolutely going to tease you. To the edge of insanity." She traces a finger around the circuits of his chest, between his pectorals and the hollow of his throat, leaving more and more trails of violet as she nears the center--
And Mike must be glitching on all processors, because now, as he stares down at her fingers, he's starting to see the purple energy of her touch resolving into shapes. Shapes that don't follow any of his circuitry patterns--
"It's the sensitive lighting." Her voice is the purr of a smooth-running hard-drive. "I've used it enough, it knows me. It can project whatever I want, wherever I want it."
Then she laughs, as a T-shape made of four squares appears over his sternum.
"Look at that. You look just like--"
"No, I don't!"
"--Like you're about to play another game of Tetris," she finishes, lifting a finger to touch his mouth. "Shh."
The T rises up from his chest to float in the air. Her fingers trace more shapes across his skin. Sketching a square, a rectangle, zigzags, long lines bent at the tip-- each pattern recognized by the sensitive lighting and tiled out for her in four more squares. One by one, they rise and circle in the air before Mike's stunned eyes, like an excited cluster of Bits.
But her fingers won't stop, and Mike jerks his hips in frustration and moans as she continues to tease his chest but only barely brush his actual circuits, just enough to gather color to paint her new creations. Copies of each shape, now, adding to the swarm. Four, eight, twelve of each-- the ambient light shifts and pulses in response; the musical scores follow the rise of each shape in an eerie, alien symphony that calls to Mike's I/O transmitter almost as clearly as the voice of a User.
Then AnnaJean reaches behind her neck-- and the silvery drape over her own chest falls away.
Her body gleams now with the same smooth white shell as Mike's... but a model of it that sets him overheating with the fullness of breasts and the curve of hips, traced in strobing lavender circuitry that seems divinely designed to accentuate each nuance of shape.
And most of it, his mind just manages to register, is done through crisscrossing grid-lines-- the pattern of a graph, stretching to outline and detail every soft swell of her 3D render. It breaks up, here and there, into starbursts and spirals and other fanciful accents, but only to keep his eyes fixated on the most enticing rises and valleys of her shape once the grid-lines have drawn them there-- and then only for a moment, before more lines tease at his peripheral vision and manage to guide him along further.
He cannot stop looking. He aches.
"Like this. Here." She pulls his hand to lay it against a smooth area of her grid-- the trapezoidal flat-ish space, framed between the shapes of collarbones and breasts, where her latitude and longitude run more-or-less Euclidean.
Then, just as he begins to feel the warmth of her, she grips his hand again-- pulls it away, upward into the cloud of floating little shapes. Forces him to touch one. The first one, the T-piece she first painted on him. Its angular energy sparks at his fingertips.
Then it descends, a slow downward float. AnnaJean's eyes follow it, sharp, and Mike is sure she's sending it commands now with her mind, because he sees it turn and shift in midair. By the time it settles onto her chest, it's been rotated flat-side-down-- and lands perfectly aligned to the lowermost row of the even grid, just above the curve of her bust-line.
A small flash of light, a flinch and quick intake of breath, tells him she felt that. And liked it.
"Keep going," she prompts him. "More."
Quivering all over, he reaches up again of his own accord. Touches one of the zigzagged S-pieces... watches it slowly fall, watches her turn and guide it to slot in alongside the first. "Mmmmm." Her circuits brighten all over, but especially right around the two interlocked pieces. "More."
Encouraged, he keeps going. L-shape, long rectangle, square-- just barely enough thought to distract him from the urgent heat of his body, just for now, to hold the climax at bay.
She keeps up with him, moves the falling shapes into place until the lowest row of the grid is complete and flashes out of existence...
...but even as the flash makes her thighs clench and her lips tremble, she growls and seizes his wrist near-painfully.
"You're cheating. Making it easy for me on purpose. I saw you look to see what would fit best."
The shock distracts him from his distraction. Suddenly he's right on the edge again, hips trembling, groin throbbing, energy buildup leaking off in a glow of lavender light.
His moan comes out sounding like agony. "I--I didn't mean to! W-what was I supposed to do?"
"What I told you!" She digs her nails in. "Be random, randomizing process!"
He jerks his hips, helpless. "I don't--"
"You do! You can. It's in you, and I'm going to make you find it, if I have to drive you so crazy you can't even see patterns anymore."
"You. Are evil," he pants, struggling hard to slow his breath. "And insane."
She bares her teeth. voice a low growl. "Watch and learn, then. Because you are still much too sane, my far-too-predictable little Randomizer."
Mike whimpers in need, drawing desperately on what little he can remember of randomness and how it works. But even at this point of near-overload he still finds obvious numerical patterns nearer to his grasp-- and in his fumbling he is fairly sure (with a sense of embarrassed dread) that that's what he has latched onto.
AnnaJean gasps and arches her way through another round, de-rezzing another row of neatly tessellated shapes, her moan and the jerk of her body an even more vivid response this time. But still, her eyes flicker in reproachful glare.
"What are you doing? Oh, I'm disappointed in you, RandoMike300. Pi? You are so much better than that!"
His face heats to burning in the shame of it. "I-- but I don't think actu--actual real randomness is even p-possible--"
Her hands on his hips become bruising pressure, cutting nails, punishment. "I'm not saying it is! But pi? You just assigned each piece a number and followed a sequence from pi, you didn't even start more than twenty digits in! Are you a Randomizer or aren't you? Of all the low, dirty cheat codes..."
Mike's burning up and he didn't even know he was capable of such responses. He doesn't even know if AnnaJean's aware what her scolding is doing to him... how fast the shame is turning into arousal... how fast the pain of her clawing grip is transmuting into pleasure. His voice crests from a moan into a scream; he sees violet lighting brighten in sync with the sound; hears the music follow it in a dizzying crescendo.
But she holds him far too still-- her grip somehow hacking him, he thinks, restraining him from his release, and he quakes and sobs in frustration. "Please! P-please---"
"One more time, program." And she must be looking very closely at his face-- because she puts a cadence into her next words that resonates through him so perfectly, all the way to his core binary.
"Next round! Ready. Go!"
The music intensifies, a swell of harmonic chords and reverberating electronic notes sparkled with near-discordant pings and chimes that jolt and stimulate him, rising to a peak that stirs more feelings at once than he could have believed possible. He groans, feels his code beginning the blur of little-deresolution around the spasming bulge of his I/O circuits and he doesn't think he can pull himself back from the edge this time--
--But he can still reach up, fingers shaky but determined, through the fire of it. He can still tap at the floating shapes of light, one by one-- eyes barely focused, hand twitching from one shape to the next between the jerks of his body, without a single conscious thought for how he's choosing the order--
--and then he can fall back in an arch of ecstasy and watch the shapes rain down onto her, a deluge of purple-- watch her own spine arch in mirror to his, raising her breast to welcome the pieces as she brings them, turning, guiding, to land on her, to lock together, as perfectly as their hips and thighs are now locking together down below.
"Ohhh yeaaahhh." Her voice quavers, like something caged too long and just-released. "Yeah. Just like that-- ah-- AH--"
His own voice echoes, in a rising, trembling moan. The sound of her-- the absolute high of hearing her lose control, of making her lose control-- it--
He's still astride her-- AnnaJean still has her own thighs clamped tight together between his, rubbing and tightening against each other, stimulating herself with each rise of her hips. The swell of Mike's fast-releasing urge is pressed hard against the front of her, now-- he's not driving into the crux of thighs wrapped around him, the way he's always imagined it--
But oh, Users, it is enough and more than enough. "Ah! Ah, ah, ah-- y-yes, AnnaJean, oh, my User, oh 1337_Kyle yes--" and the last syllable devolves into a single long cry.
As he feels AnnaJean scream her response, feels her clench everywhere and flare bright and hot beneath him with the satisfaction of her game being won, his own body follows her like something caught in a current. He sparks electric, arcing, jolting with a shockwave of release through every line of his source-code. Sensation spreads in wave after hot wave from his I/O circuits like a soaking rush of pure liquid energy, and the fuzzed edges of deresolution soften further--
--their bodies begin the fast and intoxicating partial merge, melting at the peak of their pleasure into pure energy. A cloud that begins as a glow around them, brightens hot-white at the juncture of their hips, spreads its brightness farther and farther and faster, as pleasure crests... and becomes, for a short time, a glow that is them.
Slowly, slowly-- in flashes, as if he's losing a moment of consciousness every few picocycles-- the glow resolves back into two bodies, trembling and pulsating as they gasp their way back from that peak, rolling slowly apart from each other, touching themselves, hands between thighs to soothe the overstimulation of residual charge.
The world becomes clearer, marginally realer, with the sensitive lighting, as violet shades to white. Gasps reverberate in time with the soft decrescendo of the music.
It's that softening world that lulls him to sleep beside her.
He reboots from a shutdown like none he's ever felt before, one that leaves him with a sense that he's been floating in a warm glow of pleasure for cycles upon cycles.
And she's still with him, lying spooned together on that platform-- her body curled around him from behind, waking.
Hand splays across the drained circuits of his chest. Mouth almost touches his ear. "Good game."
He half-turns his head, smile spreading. "Random enough for you?"
She nods, nipping at his earlobe. "Impressive. You did manage to surprise me after all. Wasn't expecting you to go for the music."
"Music?" He's still floating; things still barely make sense; he still barely cares.
"The way you based it on the sensitive ambient music. Assigned a number to each game-piece, a number to each type of musical note, and matched them up following the pattern of what notes you'd heard, I think... ten or eleven picocycles prior, was it? Really surprisingly good approximation of randomness. Very well planned."
He goes stiff all over-- then relaxes in wave upon wave of soft laughter.
"Not planned at all! Is that what I did? Really? Oh, no..."
She wraps her arms around him tight, nuzzles his neck, dissolving into giggles. "You are so funny!"
And it still feels wrong, in some uptight corner of his processes... taboo, the whole thing, them together like this, in this strange Announcer-Randomizer affair... as well as the scandalous feeling of how very random he's just been.
Which he knows isn't logical, of course-- he is a randomizing program; he's only embracing his deeper nature, the way he was made.
But he supposes she's right... logic or no, there's still a certain pleasure in the thrill of the forbidden.
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Fanworks: Tron: Fics: Cheat Codes
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