No I will not be getting over this one because what do you mean syncing a disc makes your eyes flash? What does that do? Besides adding an extra 20 points for my headcanon that digitization does something to you physiologically even after going back outside? Need to go actually write something about this because it drives me crazy.
I think when people are digitized into the computer, they’re converted to a format that works in the computer. meaning they’re made to function like programs. All the data that makes up your mind and personality keeps functioning pretty much the same (just digitally)… but your body converts to basically a videogame avatar.
Not exactly the same as the renders of the programs themselves. We see, in every version of the system, that Users have different physical abilities… and in Flynn’s Grid we also see that injury to Sam’s body appears as bleeding, not as deresolution into voxels.
So there’s some difference. Probably because converting physical to digital matter is a different process from just simulating digital matter from scratch.
When receiving a human, the computer starts out with a particular kind of input, and has to figure out how to render it in a computer… and so it gets rendered mostly as a digitization of what came in. Physical blood gets converted to digital blood, etc.
But at the same time, I can easily imagine that some body functions simply have to be edited and changed, in some way, in order to work inside a computer.
And one function that would need to be added, entirely, where it didn’t exist before, is the ability to sync with a disc.
Programs do that. Humans don’t, usually.
So I think that function probably just had to copy a lot of the data from how it works on a program.
If a flash in the eyes is part of how syncing looks when a program does it, then it makes sense it would look the same on a human. The human body didn’t provide any defaults for how it would look. So that had to come from somewhere.
And yeah, I can absolutely believe that some of these changes leave a lasting effect, even when the human later rezzes back out of the Grid.
(Honestly, it’d be more surprising to see a computer put a digitized human body back together exactly the same way it was before.)
…Explains Dad-Kevin’s weird CGI-face in the opening scene with young Sam, I suppose.
