"The Universal Rectifier Zero moved gently through the solar wind, in the stellar orbit that was once occupied by the Earth."
A whole new universe
is an Alternate Universe story based on TRON: Legacy. This is the sequel to A whole new world, and starts eight years after the ending of the previous story. Clu and the programs have reshaped the solar system, by demolishing the planets and rearranging their matter into a Dyson swarm, and over sixteen million spaceships, flown by programs and rectified users, leave the system with the mission to rectify the entire universe. During their interstellar and intergalactic travel, they encounter a slew of Starfish Aliens as well as a pervasive humanoid alien species that seems to defy physical laws. Relentlessly, inexorably, they take over the universe and make some discoveries along the way that accelerate the process.
This fanfiction contains examples of:
- Alien Abduction: In chapter 5, Alan Two (formerly Jet Bradley) is abducted by the Grays. Being quite familiar with a number of weapons from the Grid, he soon fights back and wins.
- Arc Words: The last words that Clu pronounces in the story (which are also the first he pronounces after he leaves our universe) are the same words he said when he had just been created. "I am Clu. I will create the perfect system."
- Death Is Cheap: Clu abhors death, calling it "the ultimate imperfection", so he wants negate it entirely and revives someone should they dies. He demonstrates that he can, indeed, defeat death, by killing a child in front of that child's father, digitizing him, repairing all damage and rezzing him back alive and in a better shape than before.
- Fantastic Measurement System: Zigzagged. When aliens talk to the programs and mention a measure of time or distance, the translation subroutine converts the alien units of measure into "cycles" and "units", used by the programs but fantastic for us.
- God Guise: When interacting with primitive civilizations, the Grays pretend to be gods.
- Humans Are Special: Justified in that there are planets inhabited by humans throughout the universe, but all of them have been purposefully engineered by the Grays, in order to use their brains as Wetware CPUs. However, none of those civilizations has ever reached the industrial age, which makes the humans from Earth even more special. In the end, it turns out that there's a reason for that too.
- Shout-Out:
- Avatar: One of the planets that Clu visits is Earth-like, inhabited by a primitive population, and contains a material with unusual properties which makes rocks float. In addition, all creatures on that planet have an organ that lets them connect their brains to a living distributed intelligence.
- Daft Punk: Just before resurrecting a dead character, Clu explains that he will return "harder, better, faster, stronger".
- Eliezer Yudkowsky: Clu encounters the aliens of Three Worlds Collide, though their encounters end quite differently than in Yudkowsky's story, and Alan Two even mentions Eliezer Yudkowsky by name when discussing the term "technological singularity". Clu also discusses some ideas by Eliezer Yudkowsky, like belief in belief and the need to eliminate death. Another scientifically savvy species discusses the desire to "live in the universe with the least amount of <something>".
- The Bible: Clu reaches a population living a timeless existence. He proceeds to demonstrate that their gods lie to them, and tempts them into abandoning their current life and joining him.
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The translation subroutine works pretty much in the same way as the Babel Fish.
- Unreal: A character is named Ilan (="Nali" backwards) and another is named Nuwondi (one of the exclamations uttered by the Nali, though in that case it sounded more like "new-on-DEE").
- Starfish Language: The first aliens encountered by Clu talk by modulating flashes of light in color and intensity. Even Alan Two's translation subroutine is affected by this; instead of making the listeners perceive their own language as usual, it just translates the aliens' language as text subtitles.
- Stealth Pun: At one point, Rinzler, who was once Tron, uses the Trace On command to debug Clu. In 8-bit home computers, that command was shortened to "Tron".
- The Grays: They appear as a species that has existed since the beginning of time, always with the technology to travel faster than light. They perform abductions in order to study the evolution of life, but they ignore the principles behind their own physics-defying technology, they don't know who they are working for and their own bodies possess features that violate the laws of biology. For this, Clu dubs them "the Impossible Species".
- The Stars Are Going Out: The first sign that the universe is about to end is that less and less galaxies can be seen, because the expansion has become so fast that they recede from an observer faster than what it takes for their light to reach the observer.
- Translator Microbes: The programs are able to understand all aliens they meet thanks to a subroutine that transmits the brainwaves of the speaker into the listener's brain, translating them into a format that the listener can understand. Discussed when the leader of a tribe of primitive humans asks Clu how he can know their language. Clu replies that he doesn't, but the primitive human hears his own language when Clu speaks, just like Clu hears his own language when the primitive human speaks.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Clu conquers, not because he hungers for power, but because he genuinely believes that anything imperfect must be made perfect with all possible means, and that his way is the only possible way. In the rare event that he fails, he resorts to genocide to rid the universe of imperfection."Whenever I look around, I see unexpressed potential. I see cultures that could be so much more. It is my duty to make them reach and exceed that potential. (...) In time, I want everyone to reach perfection.".
- Wham Episode: Chapter 13, which reveals how could the Grays exist in the way they are described throughout the story, as well as why our universe possesses unintuitive properties such as wave/particle duality and relativistic distortions. It turns out that the entire universe is a computer simulation. Wave/particle duality exists because of reused code, relativistic distortions are a side effect of the system not being fast enough to keep up with that kind of speed, the Grays were capable to defy the laws of physics because they were hard-coded into the simulation (as opposed to emerging through evolution) and the humans of Earth were "more special than the rest" because a program glitch made their intellectual evolution nine times faster than intended. The real universe has 26 spacetime dimensions (as opposed to 4 like our universe) and non-linear time. In the final paragraph, Clu reaches the 26-dimensional universe, where he meets face to face with the creator of the simulation (his name is Elyon,
one of God's names in Hebrew). Clu declares his intention of rectifying the 26-dimensional universe too, and in response, Elyon screams in horror. That's right, even God is afraid of Clu.
The non-canonical omake chapter contains examples of:
- Crazy-Prepared: Clu reveals a subroutine he had implemented, that is activated whenever someone tries to manipulate his code without his consent (essentially hacking him into submission). It causes hundreds of recognizers to appear and attack whoever was trying to hack his code.
- Unexplained Recovery: Kevin Flynn returns to life six billion years after being erased from the computer in his arcade. The situation is lampshaded by both Clu, who gets angry at witnessing a phenomenon that contradicts what he knows about physical laws, and Kevin Flynn himself, who, after being asked how his return was possible, merely says that "the powers that be" - meaning the author of the story - gave him a second chance.
- Shut Up, Kirk!: Kevin Flynn starts a philosophical speech about purpose, in an attempt to make Clu desist from rectifying the universe. In reaction, Clu punches Kevin in the mouth mid-sentence and tells him to shut up.
- The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: After Kevin mentions "the powers that be", Clu realizes that not only he can read the story being written, but he can address the author directly and even interfere with the process of writing the story.
- The Unpronounceable: The chapter is set on a planet called Yqql-rrr and mentions an alien named Oojxx-kkkz who ruled a colony on a moon called Nkhh. Justified in that the heavy atmosphere of the planet caused local creatures to evolve with multiple vocal apparatuses that can emit many sounds at the same time.
