Now that you mention it, I'm curious: I keep seeing the cool program people you draw, but what is the setting in which they operate? Do they live in a computer, or do they also have a physical existence?
Primarily they’re immaterial, and can only be seen if you have the proper tools! They exist in a parallel virtual environment that mirrors the world’s own, so they can easily be walking right next to you if you knew.
That said, areas that support their existence are also thoroughly limited, so they’re stuck in some pockets and had to travel through the ~interwebs~ to get around instead.
That said, there are exceptions!
These two cuties are Rhea.EXE (left) and Alcubierre.BAT (right), and they’ve been given actual full framed bodies due to the nature of their jobs (one’s a slashy maniac, the other’s all about SPEEDY DESPATCH). There are, of course, other exceptions, but they’re really few and far in between!
They’re all called Archivists, though, because they’re all coded based on one archaic language– and the one who controls access to the language is…
Aria.CMD’s the chief administrator AI tasked with the oversight of everything related to the Archives, which is an old, redundant archival system whose beginnings can’t be traced due to its age. The Archives has basically been around even before these babies were born, and Aria got the short end of the stick of trying to sort out the mess. She’s the first AI made out of the code discovered by some nerds in the Archives, and her personality thus leaves… much more to be desired.
Of course, sometimes things mess up when they do coding, and they get a glitchy bad boy/girl/AI instead. DG.EXE is a bit of everything terrible, but they still love the Archives. Really. Even though they might be out trying to kill every other AI there is.
And this particular bad boy is the only one that predates everything, since he’s the original administrator to the Archives– he lost access to it, and he was doomed to a wandering ghost existence around the human world. Good thing for him, though, is that since he’s written by a totally different person from a far longer era than before, he gets to do all sorts of random shit like interfacing with nature, play with the weather, terraforming, shit like that. Not that he bothers using it to do anything.
Oh, and since he’s stuck that way, no humans could actually see him up until, you know, they found out how to make the other AIs and make their platforms accessible to normal people. And that’s where one of my OC world’s story starts!
Thanks for the ask <3