[Fic] "Start of Line" -- Chronicles of Narnia

[edenfalling]

Today is also NFE Madness day! I wrote three extra gifts this year, and will talk about each in a separate post.

Start of Line: Lucy looks around, wondering what makes the Professor's workshop so dangerous. At first glance, she can't see anything special: just a bunch of computers on a rack and a half-dozen monitors scattered about to no apparent plan, each surrounded by drifts of notepaper and graph paper. But then one monitor switches from its screensaver -- snow falling onto pine trees -- to a black screen with a single line of text.

Lucy steps closer, curious.

<Hello?> the computer says again. The cursor blinks in silent invitation. (2,550 words, written for songsmith)

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Songsmith requested alternate Narnias. Her suggestions included steampunk, space opera, and superhero AUs, but I went for a Tron fusion instead. Well, okay, I did initially want to do a WWII Tron fusion, with the conceit that Uncle Andrew had built a working Babbage difference engine, or analytical engine, to sort of bring in the steampunk aspect, but those machines just aren't the right kind of computer, and I couldn't think of a smooth way to integrate magic to paper over that problem. So I went for a ten-minutes-in-the-future AU instead.

The chief problem here was figuring out where the story ought to end. I thought initially I could cut off right after Lucy enters the Grid and meets Tumnus, but I really wanted to get some more exposition in there, and also make Tumnus a little more sympathetic than his actions would otherwise paint him. (He does essentially kidnap Lucy into a war-zone, after all.) On the flipside of that issue, Lucy needed some agency to counteract that inadvertent victim role. So I kept going until she makes her own choice to stay and help. It's still kind of sketchy, but honestly, Tumnus IS fairly sketchy early on in canon, so I figure it's a plausible extrapolation to new circumstances.

The title is a silly reference to "end of line," which is a programming command that appears with varying significance in Tron and its related canons.

Comments

[autumnia]

This was awesome. At first, I saw it was more of a modern day type of AU which doesn't really interest me until we got to the servers and Tumnus speaking to Lucy out from the computer. I haven't seen Tron at all but this reminded me of other similar movies (Matrix came to mind) so it wasn't so hard to picture this dark, gritty, computerized version of Narnia. And of course, Jadis would be a virus! But then what would Aslan be? :-)

[edenfalling]

Thanks! I am not much interested in modern-day AUs myself, since the point of Narnia is that the protagonists leave our world... unless their home environment is going to make them react significantly differently to a magical low-tech world than their canon versions do. But it was fun to adapt the whole "fleeing the Blitz" aspect to more current fears, and of course it's very difficult to do a cyberpunk gimmick if you don't have electronic computers and some kind of network. *wry*

I'm honestly not sure what Aslan would be! The obvious answer is an antivirus program, but that seems a bit limited. Maybe he's the computer itself, or the operating system? Except no, that would be the Deep Magic. *ponders* I guess he may simply be the first self-generated program, whom even Digory cannot quite account for, and who sometimes seems to act outside the system. Or at least that's who and what he is in this particular world...