#sam node

he doesn’t seem to feel much kinship with other AI. he never displays any interest in the other SAMs, not even an academical one, and he speaks with a lot of distaste for that angaran AI from Voeld you can place with him. he talks about and wonders how AI like him will fit in in andromeda in the future, so there’s not a complete disconnect or perfect apathy on his part, but he doesn’t seem to have any impulse to interact with AI specifically because they’re like him, like the angaran AI does

we know that mass effect AI do have feelings, if a bit different. (EDI and the geth feel, they just do it differently from us. and from each other.) SAM only speaks in a monotone and his personality is pretty flat in order to be non-offensive. but looking at his word choices and how he interacts with people, he does seem to have attachments and emotions even though he never explicitly expresses them, especially towards the end of the game: he spontaneously apologises to your twin when he’s been disconnected from pathfinder!ryder because he almost killed them by “taking too much.” you can interpret that as not having any feeling behind it, as just being something he was programmed/knows to do to make interactions with organics go smoother, i guess, but it doesn’t feel that way to me, because (1) at that precise moment, what would be the point? twin!ryder is going to do what he asks them to anyway, they’re just as invested in the pathfinder’s life as SAM, and (2) “i took too much” sounds like a sentence someone in distress and experiencing guilt would say, not someone trying to be manipulative or someone who’s just dispassionately following their directives.

(which brings up another question: does SAM have directives? just how much free will does he have? it must be pretty substantial, but at the same time he states multiple times over the course of the game that hurting the pathfinder “would go against his basic programming.” so, there must be some kind of imposition on his free will, right? on the other hand, he doesn’t act like it.)

and he does have a personality! he’s very curious, about everything! and it’s so cute! after every single main mission (and during your romance), he gets philosophical and asks for your input on some recent events-related existential question he’s thought of. from that i am going to extrapolate and say that it’s probably a general tendency of his, even though it only really appears directly after missions. he wonders about everything, large and small, finds meaning and answers and guidance everywhere. (my boy would rock at writing 8th grade book reports.) he’s trying so hard to understand the world, especially organics, and it’s adorable! i just wish he had more screentime as more than a glorified siri :( (let my robot friend ask more questions bioware u cowards. let him comment on stuff in the field! i’ve got his “undivided attention” so let me do some small talk with him while driving around. ffs.)

he’s also super, dryly sarcastic. it’s not intentional, which he tells you during that one annoying af quest on elaaden. because pacing is non-existent, that might come after the main bulk of the game where that personality trait really shines through or not at all but i will still take that one line of dialogue and run with it, if that’s all bioware’s gonna give me. so, SAM doesn’t understand why the organics laugh at what he says sometimes -- he’s just saying what it is! why is that funny? but eventually, based on feedback, he seems to figure out what reads as sarcastic or not and the team stops pointing it out, and he keeps doing it. liam’s loyalty mission comes to mind: ‘walls are not floors.’ like, either he’s stubbornly attached to stating the obvious or he likes making his human friends laugh. or both. maybe it’s both.

also, i love that his first instinct when trying to solve the problem of ryder being stuck on the archon’s ship is just. ‘well, i could kill you?’ that’s. that’s his first thought. or at least the first he runs by ryder, ‘cause it’s entirely possible bc of his processing speed (which i imagine to be substantial, if he’s a frickin artificial sentient consciousness) that he’s already thought of, evaluated, and scrapped however many other courses of action, but it’s still like. SAM. buddy. ur trying to not be scary to people. so maybe. maybe don’t kill people. even if it’s consensual?

something that annoys me though is that i can’t for the life of me figure out the pattern of how he refers to people. i think he says pathfinder/ryder when you’re in the field, even on the private channel (which ???? no one but me can hear you SAM why so formal we share a body) but goes with your first name (if it’s scott or sara) when you talk to him at SAM node or in your cabin. it might not actually be that consistent though. same thing with, like, lexi. in the conversation after ryder dies, he calls her ‘dr. t’perro’ when he recaps what lexi is upset about, but ‘lexi’ when he addresses her directly towards the end to apologise. either that is manipulative (and i don’t mean that negatively, because SAM never feels maliciously manipulative to me, i mean it in the ‘has social skills’-sense. like, by calling her lexi he’s trying to make himself more approachable/”human” so that he’ll be less frightening to lexi, who in that scene is frightened by him because he’s not “human”) or it’s something like, he refers to people by titles when talking about them but not when he’s talking to them. neither of those feel supported by the rest of the game, so [shrug].

another thing i wonder is, is this just a personality quirk of his, that he likes to be formal with people? or is it something he’s been taught to do. because he calls even people he knows very well, like the pathfinder team and the pathfinder themself whose body he shares, by their titles, which wouldn’t be required by any notion of politeness irl. so, either alec was overly careful about making him nice or he started doing that himself just cuz. he also calls alec ryder, ‘alec’ when speaking about him. no title. so i’m just ????? about this tbh

(also, what does he call everyone else? like, this interests me: what’s drack’s title? peebee’s? i feel like she would not under any circumstances tolerate being called ‘miss b’sayle’ or something like that. @ other people does he ever talk about them in game and i’ve just missed it/forgotten?)

AND ANOTHER THING. how does language work for SAM?? AI in general? like is he actually speaking english? he’s gotta be, right, he’s got to be translating from his own internal binary or whatever (sidenote: i wonder what his internal monologue is like. or if he has one. he can "partition [his] attention”, so who knows. AI are so cool you guys!!!!!!!) to english and converting it into sound or whatever the fuck. nobody in mass effect really needs to learn other languages bc of translators, and i imagine they can take care of synthetic speech too, but what if he wanted to learn like french or something. could he do that. how would he do that. could you just plug a french dictionary + comprehensive grammar book into his harddrive and voilà he’d speak french, or

i haven’t read initiation (as you might be able to tell lol) but i do know that SAM-E had to teach himself to do stuff, he didn’t come pre-equipped so to speak, kinda like a neural network, if i’ve understood it right? so, logically, you couldn’t just plug something in and that’d be it. he’d have to learn it. on the other hand, this is an irrelevant and probably uninteresting query because he probably doesn’t care. he talks about hanar language at some point and clearly knows a fair bit about it, but that’s all he ever mentions about this. meep.

edit: i watched some footage back of the angaran AI, and SAM’s actions here are really interesting. first off, yeah, he dislikes having her close (if you place her on the hyperion) and doesn’t feel any particular kinship with her. secondly, the angaran AI is very emotive. she repeatedly states her emotions (take notes SAM) and feels so deeply she murders someone out of rage and has become suicidal. (sidenote: this means robots can get depressed in the mass effect ‘verse and that makes me sad.) the question of why SAM is not emotive, when EDI and the geth and this angaran AI are, then remains. he’s got to have feelings. otherwise he’d not be sentient and, as proven by all the other AI and cole in dragon age, this unit does have a soul. souls probably come with emotions. so, are his “””poor”””” (fight me) humour skills an example of a deeper struggle with general social skills which makes him bad at expressing himself? is he too young* to experience deeper emotions (AI seem to grow more complex and “human-like” with age and experience)? or is it maybe the symbiotic relationship with his pathfinder -- that is, does he experience the pathfinder’s emotions rather than his own? (that feels kinda cruel. luckily, i don’t think it’s very likely.)

(*another question appears! wtf did the SAMs do during the 600 years between the milky way and andromeda? were they in “stasis” too or did they just hang out on the empty arks. on their own. they were probably in sleep mode, right? is there any info on this anywhere?)

Normal I guess? And since SAM is experiencing everything through Scott-including love-I don’t think SAM particularly minds if it’s Reyes