"Yes, I think that's a good first step," Dr. Ellis said while an overwhelmed Jon just marveled at how different she felt. The programmer turned to her, "I'm going to have to get in some of the team for the next steps. Josephine to fine tune the model, Roger to code your new personality and I might let that new kid Taylor write your backstory. Tomorrow's going to be a busy day."
"What happens to me for the night?" Jon asked with a strong Perth twang.
"Oh I'll just put you back on pause for a moment," Elias said before hitting a quick button and Jon knew no more.
Mackenzie blinked back to consciousness, still laying on the odd medical med she'd been before. She realized with a jolt that she was thinking of herself as Mackenzie; she remembered being Jon, but that just didn't feel like her name any more. Ellis wasn't alone in the void with her this time, instead there were three more people. An older severe looking woman with her greying brunette hair held in a bun was looking Mack over critically from behind a pair of cat's eye glasses. There was also a bearded Indidan man typing notes on his own tablet off to the side, and finally a young woman with short blonde hair who seemed to be bouncing with excitement.
"Ah, Mackenzie you're back with us, how are you feeling?" Ellis asked when he saw she was rousing.
Mackenzie jutted out her chin defiantly, "Why should I tell you?"
Ellis turned to the bearded man, "dial back the rebellion a little will you Roger? We want feisty not combative."
"Can do boss," Roger said as he hit a few quick keys. Mackenzie instantly felt a little bad for coming on so strong and bit her lower lip, "sorry about that, this is just, a stressful situation, y'know?"
"That's perfectly fine my dear, adjusting to a new personality is certainly jarring. How do you like your new model, Josephine had made some fine touches," Ellis informed her.
Kenzie looked down at herself, seeing she was largely how she'd been after her initial transformation but everything seemed to have been touched up. Her large breasts were more symmetrical and bouncy, her facial features all subtly blended together more beautifully, and she noticed a few small moles had been added, one to the top of her thigh and another tiny one under her left boob. There was a teensy scar on her right ankle, and her ears had now been pierced, both in the lobe and once in the upper cartilage. Her hair had been styled and now was perfectly wavy, and a shade darker than it had been at first. All in all she looked a little more natural, with a few minor imperfections while at the same time enhancing her overall beauty.
"Crikey, I'm gorgeous!' Mackenzie proclaimed with unexpected pride. She hadn't wanted to be turned into a girl, but she felt immensely pleased with the results.
Josephine pushed up her glasses, "Thank you, I take pride in my work. Now if you'll excuse me Elias, I need to go work on the models for her family." Josephine then strode towards the strange floating door.
Elias nodded, "That's fine. I'll have Taylor send you the notes on them once we work out the rest of Mackenzie's backstory." Taylor must be the short blonde woman hovering around the edge of proceedings. Elias turned to the younger woman, "Taylor, would you like to tell Mackenzie what you've roughed up so far?"
"Absolutely!" Taylor turned to Mackenzie, "First of all, let me say it's a pleasure to work on you. You're my first major character so I've really swung for the fences here. I really hope you like it."
"Calm down, I'm sure it's great," Mackenzie said with an easy charisma Jon had never possessed. A little flirtatiously she added, "You wouldn't let a pretty girl down, would you?"
Taylor took a deep breath, "Right-o. Well to start with your full name is Mackenzie Lyn Choi. You're half Korean and half White Australian, with distant Irish ancestry on that side. Your mother Charlotte Choi, maiden name Goldhill, is a former Olympic Snowboarder, winning multiple medals for Australia in her youth. After getting too old to compete, she transitioned to commentating and now works as a sports commentator. She's recently been hired by ESPN to work states side as an anchor." That was plausible since Lakeview was only a little ways away from LA where one of their major offices was located.
"Sound's like she's pretty accomplished," Mackenzie mused, "big shoes to fill." Roger and Taylor shared a brief look; that was exactly the sort of response they were after. Between her new personality and personal history, they wanted Mackenzie to want to live up to her parents, particularly her mum, giving her some of that drive to win that should bring her in conflict with Sarah.
"Yes," Taylor soldiered on, "you two are quite close, though we're still writing some of the specifics. You're an only child since she couldn't afford the down time of pregnancy again while she was still competing, but she's a rather affectionate mother." It also meant they didn't need to bother writing any siblings, or spending the money to make programs to play them. They were springing for Secondary Character programs to play the Choi parents; Taylor had argued that only using a Tertiary for Linda, Zoe and Mikey had just contributed further to Jon's blandness problem, since it led to an uninteresting home life. It was going to strain the budget, but it would hopefully pay off in the long run.
"Oh, that'll be a nice change," Mackenzie said with a bit of a bitter sardonic tone. (She was already far more emotive than Jon had ever been, evidence of Roger giving her a personality matrix on the level of her underlying program) Jon's parents hadn't been shining paragons. Roger had abandoned the family years ago, and Linda wasn't the most present parent. While she came into conflict with Zoe a lot more than Jon, there had still been a certain amount of tension there. Tension Mackenzie was far more willing to acknowledge and address than Jon had been.
Ellis typed a few things on his pad, observing his subordinate's work and taking notes. "Ah yes, we do apologize about Linda. She had her work focus tuned up too highly for ages; a minor glitch, but one we should have caught."
"Anyway," Taylor said, trying to get back to the backstory she'd worked so hard on. "Your dad is Chi-Won 'Charlie' Choi, a prominent record producer. He mostly worked in the K-Pop scene, but has also worked in Australia, Britain, and the States. We think he and your mom met when she was in South Korea for her first Olympics; we'll have to fudge the years and where the Olympics happened, but most people aren't experts on minutiae from this period so we should be able to get away with it." Mackenzie furrowed her pretty eyebrows adorably in thought as she considered her whole world was a construction; she had no clue how much of it was an accurate historical recreation of a California town in the early 21st century, and how much was guess work or creative license.
"Any artist's I'd know?" Mackenzie asked, surprising herself by the genuine curiosity, even though the answer was almost certainly no. Jon didn't have a particularly diverse taste in music, pretty much just listing to classic rock from the 70s and 80s.
"You will have," Taylor said confidently, "as you might have guessed from your own inquiry, you inherited your dad's love of music and once we finalize your backstory, we'll load your memory banks with the appropriate knowledge. Suffice to say, your dad's worked with some pretty big names, and you've been lucky enough to meet some of them." This was all part of Taylor's overall plan for Mackenzie. They wanted the new girl to initially seem effortlessly cool and a little exotic, the kind of person that would get a lot of attention, irking Sarah during this point in her character arc. That meant giving her a background that could account for a lot of travel, rubbing elbows with some celebrities, and having hip parents in contrast to the McMillans.
"Wait, will I remember any of this then? If you're just going to load in all this new info, what's the point of telling me?" Mackenzie asked them, "not that it's not gnarly to get a peek behind the curtain like this."
The otherwise quiet Roger piped up, "You're a very complex program, Mackenzie. We can't just wipe you in one go without risking damaging your logic centers; adding memories is fine, but removing them takes fine work. It's not like a tier four system you can just scrub and repurpose in an afternoon. We could do it, but it would be expensive enough in time and wages that we'd be better off just paying for a new program and that's what we're trying to avoid here. Even among Secondary Character's you're rather high end and complex as far as your underlying engine goes, since we had to upgrade you to be able to work as Karyn's best friend, so it's quite valuable." While the programs worked largely on a tier system, there was some variation within those tiers. This was largely down to the amount of work the show's production team did on a new program from it's 'out of the box' state.
"Right, so, what does that mean exactly?" Mackenzie asked. "I recognize ya bruces have been doing heaps of hard yakka on my brain, but a girl likes to know what people are up to when they're mucking about in her mind."
"It means you'll remember being Jon, but your Mackenzie memories will feel more real, more present, since they're the ones that align with your new personality matrix," Roger explained. "We're having you awake now so we can let you know what's happening, so you don't freak out when the system is reinitialized."
"That's not an invitation to break the 4th wall," Ellis added sternly, "it's not that sort of show. No one will know you're program used to be Jon Gibson and trust me, you want to keep it that way."
Mackenzie felt far less defensive of Jon's life than she had before having her new matrix installed, so said, "Whoa, I'm not looking to mess up the plan. The changes so far seem defo grand, I'll keep it between us," she winked as she said it. It was probably, actually definitely, due to the removal of her Jon personality and installation of her new one, but she was actually pretty excited to be Mackenzie instead. To be fair, Jon had constantly been longing to be someone else, or just make his life more interesting than the humdrum it often was. If they left the Wishing Stone in the show, he'd probably have gone on all sorts of adventures transforming himself and the people around him. Mackenzie also understood the stakes; if her program caused problems again they'd probably delete her, so she was keen to be a team player.
