"Well, when you were upgraded from an extra program to a secondary character program, lesser upgrades needed to be made to your direct associates since Karyn might be interacting with them a fair bit as well. As I was saying, with a tertiary character program like Zoe, they tend to solidify around only one or two character traits and let that dictate their personality. We call them 'Clique Fillers', since they often fill out the social groups. After that the programs continue to diminish, until we reach Extra Programs, which was what you originally were Program J, prior to your upgrade. We had hoped with that you'd become more interesting, and you did, but not enough. Unfortunately even with your better system specs, you were still hampered by the hastily written Jon code in your background and personality."
Jon felt a little insulted but also a little like things were making a certain amount of sense. Thinking back, he recalled that his desire to shake up his life and make it more interesting, which had led to his errant wish, really started around when he and Karyn grew close. Was that his inner life literally becoming more complex as he was upgraded? "Don't I have any say in this?"
"Well, not particularly. But as I said, I am fond of you...so I am personally working on your rewrite. I have my team working on some of the other details. We have to rewrite the Gibson family as well."
"My family? What? Why?"
"Well, weirdly enough, our ratings show that people hate Jon Gibson so much, they loved seeing his sister attack him. Sort of like an audience proxy. So, despite being a bit underdeveloped, she has her fans. So we're going to work on her program a bit, and see if the audience responds we'll see about an upgrade...if not, we'll just let discontinue her character entirely during the reconciliation next season. The new Zoe Gibson will be an only child though."
"What about my little brother?"
"We found audiences had a tendency to forget Mikey Gibson even existed. I mean, he wasn't in any good storylines...so we're just going to remove him. We may recycle his program...see where we need a generic little brother. People can think it was due to the wish that erased you...And Zoe's father. Honestly, we never knew what to do with him, so we had him travel so much for work. My intern thought giving Zoe the backstory of having a single working mother would be good development. I like to encourage youngsters...so I let her run with it. But...back to you, Program J."
"Yeah?"
"As we're introducing a new character, we're going to have you move to town at the beginning of the school year, we're not retconning that you've lived there before now. We also got blasted on not having enough diversity...so the market research people have a few suggestions in that area. That allows us to add some storylines about you making friends as a result. I think we are going to go with Hispanic. The research shows they are the largest group we've never captured demographic wise. None of the secondary or even tertiary characters are Hispanic. I keep telling them it is a period piece set in a white suburb and its historically accurate, but...here I am rambling...I have work to do. We're going to start with upgrading your physical parameters. I have a few options I want to try from the art team."
