Mackenzie was an early riser, especially that day since she wanted to put her first foot forward starting in a new school. So she had time to enjoy a smoothie with her mum before her mum had to drive into the studio and Kenzie needed to head towards school. Her dad had driven down into LA proper earlier that morning, leaving around six, since it was a full session day for The Taylors, an up and coming band he was producing the first album of. Mackenzie giggled a little at the thought, assuming the name was a little easter egg from her main backstory writer, but also simultaneously knowing she was a fan of the band's first two singles. It was odd, she logically knew that her backstory had been broadly written by programmers, and fleshed out by procedural AI, but that didn't make it feel any less real to her. She'd gotten a peak behind the curtain, but this was her world.
She snagged her black helmet, stowed her bag, and swung her leg over her Honda Rebel with practiced ease. It had cost a bit to get her and her mum's bikes shipped from Sydney, even if it was much cheaper than shipping a car. Her folks had just bought two new vehicles after the move, a Porshe for her dad and a Jaguar for her mum, but the motorcycles had made the trip. Mackenzie's was cherry red with black detailing and she had to resist a purr of excitement as the machine thrummed to life between her thighs. With a quick rev of the engine, she zoomed away from her new house, zooming towards Lakeview Academy.
So far, to most observers, the KS Chronicles was off to a tentatively promising restart. Karyn and Sarah had been restored successfully to their earlier states at the start of junior year, and the implanted scenario of Jon's departure seemed to have fully integrated. The two leads were incredibly complex programs so it had been a very delicate task. Sarah was looking to be in just the right headspace for her initial conflict with Mackenzie to take off, (Many on the main team had been rather impressed with the new character the little side group had been able to knock together, especially since they were reusing a character program) and Karyn should be receptive to making new friends.
They'd organized a series of potential events over the first week to give Karyn a chance to connect with more people, including one last attempt to get her to adhere to Rebecca. With all the arguing, they'd eventually landed on the idea of throwing everything at the wall and seeing what stuck. The real test would be once the characters got to school, but for the moment everyone was breathing a sigh of relief that the entire simulation hadn't crashed with all the edits they'd had to do.
Of course at the moment, no one knew there was another problem looming for the show, a problem that began with Tyrone McAdams. Tyrone was one of the programmers on the team, largely working on extras and minor parts of the show. In truth, the various departments basically traded him around, all keen to work with the guy as little as they had to. The source of this dislike was that Ty had gotten the job due to his dad being a network executive, who had heavily suggested bringing him on board the writing/programming staff. Then, once he was part of the team, he proved to be largely incompetent, not necessarily due to lack of talent, but due to laziness and lack of dedication.
That's why they gave him minor parts to work on, things he hopefully couldn't screw up, like the intern who got coffee for an executive at McMillan industries that wasn't Richard McMillan, basically something so far from the main action that it didn't matter if he half assed their backstory or just cloned a personality matrix. However, during the hasty revamp, it had been an all hands on deck situation and Ty had been given something a bit bigger than he was normally trusted with.
The main team worked on Karyn's memory alteration, the planned events for the first weeks of the new season, and of course prepping the handful of new programs they'd splashed out for to bring new characters in. Then, there was the small but skilled team that had repurposed Jon into Mackenzie and developed the Chois; Joesphine was a senior member of the art department, Roger one of their best personality builders, and Taylor an eager young backstory writer, all with the show runner Dr. Ellis supervising. While these two different groups were working, one person, Tryone, had been tasked with completing one of the other little necessary tasks of their big overhaul, reworking the rest of the Gibson family programs.
It was a bit more than he was typically given, but not too high stakes, and he'd actually largely managed it. As tertiary programs, the other three Gibsons could be more easily wiped and reformatted than a program like the new Mackenzie. You ran the risk of the programs having some emotional dysfunction and logic problems doing a full memory clear of tertiary programs, but the risk wasn't anywhere near as bad as it was for more advanced AIs and the team was under the gun and looking to save money where they could.
For Mikey he'd just jettisoned everything and merged the underlying program with Karyn's neighbor Stacy Riley. Stacy was a kid, just turning 4 that had previously been just an extra program, but by integrating the subroutines and better engine of the Mikey program she could become a full tertiary, which would be helpful since Karyn occasionally baby sat the kid and would make her more expressive and complex. Tyrone did that job competently enough, although it was the easiest thing he'd been tasked with. With the Linda program he'd a bit lazily just cloned the personality matrix of Sarah and Karyn's third grade teacher, and chose one of their generic handsome man models to make a new history teacher for Lakeview. He'd named the resulting program Edgar St. Ives, and wrote a very brief backstory, largely letting his AI assistant fill in the gaps. Directly cloning a personality matrix that had already been hooked up to another program had a tendency to cause glitches and the audience would no doubt complain at a character basically being a carbon copy of an older one but his rush job managed to squeak through due to everyone's attention being elsewhere.
However, the real place Tyrone messed up was with the former Zoe program. Dr. Ellis had left him some notes on potential ideas, but Tyrone basically just read them as new student, not a goth. He was in a rush to get home and catch the new episode of Alien Adoption, so he was really phoning his work in that afternoon. He decided to keep the program a freshman, since the influx of new students to Lakeview Academy was an easy place to sneak in new characters without the characters having to be new to town. The new character was going to be Cici Starr, the twin sister of the already created character of Lexi Starr, a freshman volleyball player who had been a rival of Zoe's. The decision to make her a twin was entirely so Tyrone could just reuse an already existing model, dragging and dropping in generic wardrobe packages and housing. He even copied Lexi's personality matrix for her sister two, as if twins were literal copies of one another. Then it was just a matter of editing the Starr programs to remember having twins, an tasking his AI assistant to choose some random connections in town to assign to Cici and he was ready dash out of the office, looking forward to a cold Neptunian aersolized beer and a new episode of his favorite show.
It was a badly put together character, with no real care given to any part of her. So much of her was procedural, with no care for the details and the code hastily patched together by a guy who couldn't care less. However the biggest problem with the new CiCi Starr was that Tyrone had failed to properly clear her memory cache, meaning she was going to remember being Zoe and find herself suddenly waking up 9 months in the past, looking like a copy of a girl she couldn't stand.
