what-bot:

One of the ideas I like to apply to programs to distinguish their behaviour from humans is they can change moods almost instantaneously. Kind of like videogame NPCs. This would be a lot more common in older systems and those with limited human contact (i.e. I feel like this would be to a lesser degree in the Legacy grid, but still present)

They can be freaking out fleeing from danger one second, but once the danger has passed everyone’s chilling. (See: Kevin almost runs some people over with a recogniser and seconds later the crowd are all just 🧍🧍‍♀️🧍‍♂️).

OR a security program goes from 0 to 100 rage when they see a lethal threat, then back to 0 when they’ve killed it & everything’s fine.

Also, everything is equally ‘in the past’ to them. Usually, they will be bothered by something a set amount. If nothing related to that thing changes, they will continue to be equally bothered. On one hand, they’ll talk about a bad thing like it happened last week instead of Literally Just Then. On the other hand, years will have passed and unless they have been able to move on it will still be bugging them. So they seem paradoxically more or less fine than you’d expect from a human. This would probably come from remembering everything

Especially in Encom/2.0 environments, this sort of thing adds to the fantasy vibes, like you’re in the fae world and the inhabitants look a lot like you but live by different rules

Oooh I like this

I’m always a sucker for programs whose lives are actually different from humans in ways that make real sense with them being programs

And one thing I really remember liking about 2.0 was how focused programs were on their job, a lot of the time

Like if a program’s job is to open a door for whoever has the correct permissions, then you go up to them and show them your permissions and they politely open the door for you. They do not care that you just massacred 50 of their coworkers, it is irrelevant to this door.