Departments: Tron City has a number of central departments which administer to the entire Grid. The three we know about from extra info in Evolution are Administration, Utilities, and Security. These departments in particular are the ones officially responsible for the maintenance, upkeep, and safety of the Grid. Other cities have their own local branches of these departments, but all the paperwork goes back to Tron City eventually. Below, the three departments are further defined so characters can affiliate with them. Characters can also be independent, working for other programs, running their own businesses, or not doing anything definable as ‘work’ at all.

Work schedule: If your character has a System job, they will usually run a daily eight- to twelve-hour shift there (one millicycle or over), with twelve to sixteen hours (1.5. to two millicycles) for rest and recreation. If they’re independent, they can make their own hours (or those set by whoever they’re working for).

Salary: Do Grid workers get paid? Well… it’s complicated. Now that the Grid has near-unlimited power to draw on (via the Portal), Administration is able to provide inhabitants with a basic level of free housing, energy, garb, and a small theoretical allowance of what nobody actually calls UMOE (Units of Undefined Medium of Exchange; thank you, Flynn~) to use on whatever they want. Due to this, one could live quietly on the Free Grid without doing anything at all, and many rerezzes do until they decide what else they want to do with their lives. Programs with jobs receive a greater allowance and thus have more financial clout, which, since the money is all theoretical and investments/money-markets haven’t made it to the Grid, translates directly into purchasing power and associated social clout. It’s not a perfect system, and could change in future (part of the fun of an entire world created as a social experiment, no?), but it works for now.

Administration: basically runs the place. They make and post rules, are in charge of the other departments, decide on changes to the city architecture and layout, make policy, and respond to the local mood. They are also in charge of making sure the Grid has adequate housing and power, dispatching the appropriate Security or Utilities divisions to handle problems that aren’t already being handled by those departments, and handing out permissions for various levels of resource access and for construction and operation of independent utilities; Eckert, for example, would apply to some office in Administration if he wanted to open up a new place downtown. While they generally wouldn’t interfere in the exchange of tasks and resources among independent programs on the Grid, they need to know what’s going on in order to maintain the system, and it can generally be assumed that they do.

There is NPC discussion about creating an office for intersystem networking, diplomacy, and immigration/emigration, but since there are very few systems with anywhere near stable connections to the Free Grid, this hasn’t been done yet.

Utilities: handle maintenance all over the Grid. While there are independent operators in all of the fields mentioned here, the size of the city demands its own dedicated squads of workers for key functions. Departments in Utilities include (but are not necessarily limited to):

System Maintenance (repair and maintenance of publicly used facilities)
Medical/Recompilation (Grid-wide first-responders, public health, and clinical care)
Transportation (road/Sailer/Light-Rail upkeep, signage, maps, pilots/drivers on public transportation, licensing, liaising with Security for deployment of minor traffic cops)
Stats/Analysis (tracking power usage, traffic patterns, weather reports, population demographics, etc etc etc, and distributing analysis and recommendations to other utilities who need the information)
Records/Comms (the Archives, secure information storage and access, comm channel maintenance, messenger services, Grid-wide news and distribution of information)

Security: Your friendly neighborhood security programs are charged with responding to and investigating disturbances and disasters, keeping and enforcing the peace, quarantining (or, in the case of gridbugs, derezzing) threats to the system and the people in it, and generally defending the rights of inhabitants to safety and security on the Free Grid. All Security branches fall under the central office, headed by Anon (currently an NPC), who reports directly to the Grid’s Admin if there’s something he needs input on. A Sentry-level security program assigned to a particular branch will have several sectors to take care of; shifts are divided between regular patrols, responding to call-ins, and filling out and studying reports. The higher one gets in the Security hierarchy, the more reports and correlations there are, and the more they tend to become specialists in Grid forensics, mediation, tactics, quartermastering, and other things. Not every Security program is a combatant, though the division overwhelmingly attracts programs who enjoy a good Game. Based on the data it gathers, Security will report to Administration in case of a system threat which requires more dealing with than putting out an alert or throwing Security programs at it, or if something for which they are not directly responsible (say, the existence of too many bars too close together in Q Sector) causes ongoing problems that could be fixed by rerouting or reregulating something.

Independents: are less regulated than System workers, who (ostensibly) need to maintain their skills and reregister every so often, and have less leeway about setting their own schedules. Independents reside and work in properties (towers, flats, shops, etc) which they sublet either from Administration or from independent property managers who operate with Administration’s permission. An enterprising program can set up shop on a street corner or apply to reclaim property which isn’t currently being used. Approximately two thirds of the Grid’s inhabitants are independents, though the number fluctuates as new people are imported. Independents can be commissioned for work by the official branches or by other independents. Many independents have jobs that don’t fall under the ruberic of system upkeep, such as various researches, performance and other arts, fashions and (legal) mods (there is a licensing system for mod providers, since a bad mod can really mess a program up, so they are regulated by Administration but not directly overseen by them), purveyors of add-ons, toolmakers, athletes, volunteer patrollers, and basically everything else, not to mention people between functions, with more than one function, or with no particular chosen function.