"I am going to skin Tyrone alive!" Dr. Ellis angrily declared while throwing his tablet across the room; given they were currently in a virtual meeting space, represented as a space age looking conference room, the tablet didn't shatter, instead simply dissolving into a wireframe before winking out. 'I wish it had broken, then I'd get a break from reading this shit,' Elias thought bitterly as he reluctantly resummoned the tablet with a gesture. Even as a virtual avatar, the older programmer/showrunner looked tired, sagging against the large egg shaped silver chair in which he sat. This was supposed to be his chance to relax after the grueling weeks of the retool, but instead he was already back in crisis mode, all because of one idiotic junior programmer.
Elias was joined in the room by what had been dubbed the crisis team. Una Palu, a 30 something Polynesian woman and one of the senior writers was on his right, along with Taylor McKenna, the junior writer who'd helped with the Chois. The short haired blonde was a bit nervous and a bit confused to be invited to a meeting with what was essentially the show's senior management and had kept quiet so far. Roger Chowdry, Elias's preferred personality coder, had been called in from the technical department, and Juan Valde was there to represent quality control. That department was normally responsible for implementing on the fly changes, fixing bugs, and troubleshooting, but this particular problem had risen to the level of needing the showrunner to intervene. Olive Jupiter, a junior producer on the show was sitting in as a representative of the higher ups, being the only one who'd worn an avatar skin with a formal suit for the meeting, and looking a bit out of her depth. Finally Josephine the modeller had been called back from vacation and looked extremely pissed about it, basically alternating from scowling at Dr. Ellis and scowling at the data in front of them.
They'd been talking for over an hour and what they'd established was that Tyrone McAdams had really shat the bed. Setting aside his shoddy half assed work on reallocating the resources of the other other Gibsons, what he'd done with Tertiary Program Z, formally Zoe, had the potential to bring the whole multi-billion dollar franchise that was the KS Chronicles crumbling down. His implementation of the new Cici Starr might be the single worst piece of coding and writing Elias had ever laid eyes on.
"Okay, so obviously Mr. McAdam's kid messed up on this one," Olive offered, referring to Tyrone's dad who was also a more senior producer. She absently pushed a strand of her multicolored, purple, green and gold, hair out of her face and suggested, "why don't we just remove the program? I realize we'd be losing a tertiary, but, and I know I'm normally the one counting beans, that's not the end of the world."
"It's not that simple," Elias sighed, "Roger, explain it to her."
Roger nodded, "When Tyrone created the Cici character, he did it very recklessly. First off, he used broad swath AI to insert Cici into the background of countless characters around Lakeview, especially in the incoming class, so she's more ingrained in the simulation than we'd like for an easy pruning. Then there's the fact that he failed to make backups of any of the programs he was modifying, so if we suddenly plucked her out, you'd have the Starrs and lots of other characters wondering where she's gone. It might be possible to manually erase memories of her from all the affected programs, but it would take a massive amount of time and manpower." In general with character programs it was far easier to add memories, skills or other elements than it was to remove them. For instance they could drop a new childhood interest in birdwatching into Kyla Leeson's mind without too much trouble, as long as it didn't create too much conflict with her other files, but removing Aileen Hawkes passion for skateboarding could severely damage the mentality of the program, possibly breaking it if not done delicately and ideally while the simulation was deactivated.
Elias nodded, "neither of which we have right now. The show's just gotten back on air and going on a sudden new hiatus will kneecap all the momentum we're hoping to build. Plus I know you know, Olive, that we just don't have the budget right now."
"And before you ask, we can't just get rid of the Starrs," Una chimed in, "Lexi is a central figure to the incoming freshman class and the family as a whole are key parts of Lakeview's social tapestry. I mean, if we really have to we could put them on a bus somewhere, but it would seriously muck with projected storylines for years." The writing staff often played the longhaul in today's modern full simulation entertainment programs, seeding characters and motivations well ahead of when they would hopefully come to fruition on screen. It was difficult since you didn't have perfect control, but it was possible to influence if not dictate the flow of events if you were prudent about it.
Olive rubbed her temples, "Okay, so we can't just erase her, and she's hard to put on a bus since her family's important." Olive paused for a moment, "it's a little dark, but could we just kill her? I mean, arrange a car crash or something like that, so Lexi's fine but we get rid of Cici before she ruins everything by running up to Karyn and yelling she's Zoe Gibson?"
Una scoffed, "killing her would make an even bigger unplanned impact than suddenly making the family move away. That'd be a massive event, radically change Lexi and her parent's personalities, and take the focus of the whole Lakeview Academy, if not the whole town. This season's supposed to be about Sarah's fight for Homecoming Queen and Karyn's new revamp, not getting bogged down mourning some girl the audience has never heard of!"
"Well we need to do something," Olive snapped, "don't be so wedded to the story you just rewrote anyway, be a little flexible!"
"I am being flexible," Una insisted, her glowing red left eye flashing bright, "but I'm also trying to tell a good story!"
"Ladies please, we're all on the same side here," Ellis interjected to defuse the brooding argument. Olive had a good point that sometimes the writing staff needed to be more willing to roll with the punches, but Una was more correct in that they shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
"We can't kill her anyway," Josephine said curtly, "a violent death of a young person like that, so front and center, could get our rating bumped up a level of maturity which wouldn't fly with the advertisers." Besides Elias, Josephine was the oldest member of the team and had been in the game a long time. People obviously died in Lakeview, but generally off screen so to speak, and typically from natural causes. In order to make sure the show wasn't rated too maturely on the violence rating scale, life was pretty charmed in the immediate vicinity of Sarah and Karyn. Murders, industrial accidents, deadly auto collisions and more were subtly averted by the production team.
"Fine, then what do we do?" Olive asked in exasperation, "and what's the program doing while we're sitting here, talking?"
"We have the whole Starr family frozen in standby mode right now, Ms. Jupiter," Juan answered, "with looping footage of the twins on bed rest to avoid an Omniviewer blackout." Blackouts were when a region of the simulation that should be within the render zone was artificially blacked out or unavailable for full-dive viewers of the show, something that often earned the anger of those same fans for breaking the illusion of a continuous world.
"As far as anyone in Lakeview knows, the girls are out with the flu," Una added, "which will get us a week at most to figure out what to do before that excuse won't fly anymore with the characters or the fans."
"As far as we can tell, Cici has the personality matrix and most of the memory files of Lexi grafted on to her, but without removing, modifying or deactivating the underlying Zoe protocols," Roger explained. Unlike Mackenzie, who had been carefully guided into her new identity, with extra care given to make sure she'd prioritize her Mackenzie memories over her Jon ones, including fully removing the shoddy Jon personality matrix, Cici now had to warring matrixes and a completely borked memory system. "Unfortunately, it seems he didn't even properly copy Lexi's files, instead making them an inbuilt external dependency for Cici, so at the moment changing one will change the other, making it pretty much impossible to reinitialize and restructure the program without a lot of time we don't have. Frankly even if we had the manpower and time, major edits to a program while the simulation is running are just asking for glitches" If they could make it to the next season break, when the whole simulation would shut down for maintenance, they'd have a shot of fixing things, making Cici into a proper character instead of Lexi's weird double, but doing so while the program was running just wasn't possible.
"I think we're going to have to solve this on the program's level," Elias said after a moment.
"You always think that," Josephine huffed, "so keen to talk to your toys like they're real people."
Ellis bit back a retort; he couldn't afford to get into a fight with his ex when they were trying to save his show at the moment. "I think we bring Program Z online and talk to her, explain some of the situation and persuade her to not make waves. All we need to convince her to do is not cause a scene until the season break, then when the system is down we'll be able to retool her into a proper character." Hopefully by then the ratings will have continued to pick up and there'd be money on hand to do a proper rework.
"Do you really think she'll go for that, Zoe was pretty rebellious?" Taylor asked. She wasn't bold enough to mention rebelliousness was almost Zoe's only character trait, not wanting to offend her seniors who'd worked on the program.
"Not really," Elias replied, "I think she'll go along for a bit and then try to pull a fast one. She'll need some direct supervision and guidance."
"How are you going to supply that?" Olive asked skeptically, "we don't have the money for a custom program just to watch her and you all just finished explaining how hard it would be to reprogram one of the characters close to her to do the job, while the show's on air."
For the first time in the meeting Elias cracked a smile, "I think in this case we might finally have gotten lucky. It seems one of Josephine's little Easter eggs might be our salvation."
Josephine looked confused before her eye's widened in realization. Donning a thin smile despite herself she hit a few buttons on her own pad, "I see where you're going with this." With a final swipe, the image on her pad jumped to the holographic projectors on the table, displaying a full sized 3D image of what appeared to be Taylor. Well, close to Taylor; this version of her was dressed in 21st century clothing, had longer shoulder length hair rather than Taylor's short almost boyish cut, and lacked the silver metallic nails that went with the real Taylor's hands.
"Me!?" the junior programmer and writer squawked in confusion. She was aware of Josephine's little habit of using members of the show's staff as templates for the models of minor characters, and had actually been a little pleased to be added into the show she loved, but hadn't quite put the pieces together of what Elias and Jose were talking about.
"Well, actually Ms. Winifred Lions, a teacher at Lakeview starting this year," Josephine supplied.
"and more importantly for our purposes, the new volleyball coach," Ellis added. The models used for the KS Chronicles weren't rigged for full dive immersion like those used in video games; they couldn't just drop a member of staff into a character, if they could they'd just have someone take over Cici temporarily and be done with it. Well, they might be able to get the rigging done for manual control if they had time and the money to bring in an outside specialist, but if they could do that they wouldn't have this problem in the first place. What they could do though was deactivate the Winifred program and let Taylor take her double's place with just a few minor modifications to the model Taylor used for virtual meetings anyway. "I propose we have Taylor take over for Ms. Lions, directly supervise the Starr twins, and head off any attempted trouble on the part of Program Z."
"Wait, so you want me to dive INTO the show?" Taylor asked, more than a little flabbergasted. This was going to mean months living in the simulation, her physical body maintained by machines. The technology was there for it and people often would dive into games for weeks at a time, but going into Lakeview for a full season was pushing it.
Olive however, seemed to be already totally onboard with this plan. "I can assure you the production team will cover all your expenses while you're doing this, and if it's successful there might even be a bonus in it for you, Ms. Mckenna."
"Plus a promotion," Elias offered, with Una nodding along. "You did great work on the Mackenzie program already, so if you can help us pull this off, we'd be glad to have you join the senior writing staff."
Taylor ran a hand through her hair, she wanted to protest but really there was only one answer. She loved the KS Chronicles, had been a fan before she'd ever been part of staff, and doing this could both save the show and be the big break of her career. "We'll need to iron out the specifics, but I'll do it."
Dr. Ellis clapped his hands together, "good! We'll get your model modified and start having you familiarized with Winifred's particulars post haste. She's brand new so there's not too much to learn. Then, after a bit of planning, we'll have our chat with Program Z."
It wasn't necessarily a good plan, but it was the best they had in a tough situation. Although, Elias thought, not that I don't trust Taylor to get the job done, but two heads might be better than one. Program J responded so well to her revamp, she might be willing to help us out here, and she'd obviously know the old Zoe program better than anyone...
