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.
This is also an interesting way to think about Tron’s reaction to Flynn telling him that Ram is dead.
“Oh, that’s sad… Anyway, here’s Yori!”
Oooh. Good point. Yeah, that basically was Tron turning off an emotion because it wasn’t useful right now…
Also, makes me think some more about Flynn doing the same thing. He, too, went back to his cheerful self scarily fast, after each time he saw someone die.
…Which, yeah, could be interpreted in various ways. Ranging from a human sort of “repressing it out of necessity,” to “emotions behaving the way they do in dreams, because Flynn still isn’t sure he’s not dreaming all this”
But, the possibility of “Flynn’s mind acting like a program mind” is…. quite intriguing.
My headcanon about the Encom system is that when it digitizes humans, it makes them function like programs in many ways. And yeah, maybe this does affect emotions!
Especially since the experience of feeling an emotion is largely physical; a big part of it is the way the body reacts to the feeling. So I can imagine that the more one’s body is rendered like a program, the more one’s emotions might follow…. Wow.