Little Computer People

Alright Boss. I've finished my preliminary report on the scanning chamber you asked for. Don't know who you got the thing off of. It just seems like a huge waste of energy except maybe for one or two unlikely even for the company we tend to keep.

-Elizabeth

Entry: From Here to There

Logical beginning point. Other than the bare metal-ness of the inside of the chamber, which gave off this really disturbing 'The Fly' transport pod feel it wasn't all that bad until everything got warmed up and the process started. The whole inside gave off all kinds of rattle and static, some I'm willing to concede normal people wouldn't hear, but it hurt. Everything hurt really just before the big zap. Ever gotten shocked? Hold that tingly pain feeling for a good minute or two and have it go all over your body. Also it left a funny taste in my mouth after I arrived.

As a final note on the process: Yes I know about those guys that did this using a focused energy beam to transfer objects into and out of their target system, but I like the pod/chamber setup better. Maybe it's because they had the scanning and digitizing beams attached to something that is remote controlled, can aim even at the consoles that are supposed to control it, and they've got an amoral AI heading up the company in all but name.

People: Crowds Beyond Imagining

For the sake of clarity, and preserving my sanity, anything and everything that resembles a human (two legs, two arms, a head) is going to be referred to as a Sprite. There are ways of telling at a glance if what you're talking to is a Program or something else, but Sprite has a neutral connotation to the 'people' I've spoken to on the matter inside and they can be very grouchy if you give them the wrong label.

The majority of the time Sprites are either at rest, or preforming some sort of task. During the short amount of time I was there I couldn't tell by looking what any one or group of sprites were doing as it related to the analog world. Perhaps with more time to study i could figure out patterns but for the moment it's a headscratcher.

While sprites seem to be less spontaneous than people I can verify that they do things unrelated to their given tasks either for personal enjoyment, maintenance, or 'just because', much as we do. Still seems somewhat odd that a program would want to read, or play ball, or want a family, but it might all just be part of the digitizing process and it's affect on my perceptions while inside.

The People You Meet: Color Coded for Your Convenience

There's a good deal of variety when it comes to what a sprite wears and other than the actual cloth favoring muted near-grey tones by and large the bits of clothes range from 'normal and functional, to 'impractical but neat looking', and even a few 'absurd could only happen in a cartoon' styles. The biggest difference, other than the washed out tones is that every sprite entity (and even a few definitive non-human whatsits) has glowing lines that run along and through their clothes.

Red: Security/Anti-virus/Possibly System Manager (kernel?)

Notes: These sprites tend to look blocky, inhuman blunt faces with very male sounding voices. I could be wrong in guessing that they're universally male since every other sprite variant has male and female representatives but I haven't seen anything but the big lumbering brutes. These guys do not take jokes, do not like it when something does not answer their questions promptly and correctly, and running seems to make them even angrier.

Blue: The majority of programs/processes/scripts in-system.

Notes: These come in all shapes, genders, sizes, and personalities. Pick a crowd of people. Any will do. Now desaturate their clothes, add blue lines running across their bodies, gray out the skin and eyes. There you go. You have the major ethnic group of the inside of a computer.

Green: Infected programs/processes.

Notes:I"m not sure what starts these infections, but those sprites who's glow lines go from red or blue to green abandon whatever task they were doing before, and start doing whatever their new imperatives dictate, which seems to mostly be 'spread the infection along.' Most sprites can't see the infected for what they are until they become aggressive. A couple sprites even managed to fool security grunts, how i"m not sure but that was one of the few tiems i"d bothered doing more than passive observation. Risky I know, but I helped give the sprites in red ID a new problem, saved a family, and I got to experiance Sprite Death first hand.

Death: The Big End of File

When a sprite dies their body dissolves. In one case the death or 'deletion' is accompanied by a orange/white flash of energy but in another this hadn't happened. Maybe this final energy flash is dependent on how much power a sprite has before they go, beyond x amount and there's a final combustion, if not then a slow fizzle. only saw two examples, and i caused both. Would have to stud further.