So I’ve been thinking about the time system in the ENCOM system…
The Tron wiki pretty much ONLY talks about the time system as it applies on the New Grid.
(Saying that a millicycle is about eight hours, a cycle is about a year, and that time on the Grid is about a fiftieth of a year in the User world).
But that would make a microcycle about half a minute in Grid time.
Which doesn’t make sense with Ram talking about being stuck in the cells for 200 microcycles. He says it like he’s been there weeks or months, at least. Not hours or less.
So, in my writing (which is set in the Encom system) I tend to treat an Encom microcycle as a day.
But while working on my latest story, I had reason to wonder what exactly an ENCOM year is, then.
And I think I’ve figured it out.
ENCOM programs are made to interact regularly with the User world. So, their time system would be connected much more closely to User time.
So, I suspect an ENCOM “cycle” is equivalent to a year in User time.
And a millicycle should be a thousandth of that, and a microcycle a millionth.
So for ENCOM programs, if a microcycle is a day, then a cycle is like a million days (and a millicycle is like a thousand days).
That would mean (if I’m doing my math right, which is not certain, lol) one ENCOM cycle is like over two thousand years for a program.
Now, a program would have very different feelings about time from a User. Since programs are meant to interact with Users, they’re probably okay with waiting a couple thousand years for something a User would wait one year for (as long as that wait is within typical expected function for the program).
But I think, from now on, if I want to write about a period of time that’s more like a year for an ENCOM program, I’m gonna say maybe… a quarter-millicycle.
Okay, a few more things occurred to me.
Now, as for the contrast of one year to thousands of years…. programs and Users would have very different feelings about this sort of thing.
For every task that sounds absolutely ridiculous to a User, there are probably programs that find it perfectly ordinary because it’s part of what they’re programmed to do.
Looking at things from a program viewpoint requires throwing out a lot of the human viewpoint, and replacing it with the simple question, “Is this within my programming?” If yes, it’s fine! If no, then– at the very least– it feels weird and wrong.
So, since programs are meant to interact with Users, they’re probably okay with waiting any amount of time– even a couple thousand years– for something a User would wait one year for… as long as that wait is within typical expected function for the program.
OR… alternatively…
Perhaps a microcycle for ENCOM programs really is like half a minute…
and Ram really had been locked up for only about 100 minutes from his viewpoint…
…but, by the same logic above, it still felt far too long to Ram, because he wasn’t programmed to be in prison and fighting gladiator battles for even one minute.
Perhaps those minutes even literally felt to him like days or longer, because he was stuck doing something so far outside his programming.
Maybe for programs, the phenomenon of “time flies when you’re having fun and time drags when you’re not” is a much more vivid and literal time-dilation effect than it is for Users.
And… maybe this explains why Ram (a nerdy math calculator, by programming) turned out to be so startlingly successful as a fighter in the games.
Maybe he felt so damn uncomfortable, so far outside his rightful role, that the drag of all that time gave him freakin’ Flash powerscompared to the Red warriors who were enjoying themselves.
…I don’t know how much sense this makes, it literally just occurred to me now. I have yet to examine all the implications.
(For one, it would mean that Sark’s request for military programs was probably a request for easier opponents rather than harder ones, even if he didn’t admit that. Which is an intriguing idea but does NOT fit into the story very well. I shall have to give this a bit more thought.)
One more thing that occurred to me! Tangentially related, because it’s about the mess that is on-grid time, but probably not connected in any coherent way:
ALT
Programs– or at least Yori– apparently know what nanoseconds are.
Or… at least they know of something that they use the word “nanoseconds” for.
Might not be anywhere near the thing that it means in the User world.
She seems to be using it to mean either a distance they’ll have to travel, or the amount of time it would take to get there.
From our viewpoint watching their travel, that time is definitely more than a matter of nanoseconds. But then… we know more time passes on the inside.
Is she, for some reason, translating the time to what it would be out in the User world?
Or is Flynn just perceiving her saying it that way?
(I have a fairly strong headcanon that the Programs have little if any actual vocabulary from the User world… they mostly speak a computer language of their own devising… and the system that digitized Flynn acts kind of like the TARDIS in Doctor Who, connecting to his brainwaves and translating communication into something he might be likelier to understand. Perhaps with less-than-perfect success.)
