[Plot] Willputer Repair

[Robin Stanton]

"I mean he usually doesn't go on about secret lizard people unless we're actively fighting Skrulls."

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Each Will is trying to be something else. I must have unknowingly given access to conspiracy theorist Will."

"It would be fascinating if it wasn't threatening to fry his brain."

[Robin Stanton]

"Okay but... where did he download that from?"

[Toshiro Narumi]

"At first glance, another dimension. But the data doesn't quite match. Unless you mean something else."

[Robin Stanton]

"He downloaded a conspiracy personality? From another dimension? From that ancient-ass hunk-a-junk harddrive? How!?"

[Toshiro Narumi]

"No no no, I'm sure he generated that himself. I originally thought he was getting memory data, but I haven't verified anything."

He continued trying to find anything new or altered.

[Narrator]

Just as he had originally suspected, the alterations were in the core personality aspect section -- the very low-level bits that made Will, well, Will. The same memories, the same experiences -- just through a different filter, as it were. From a computer's perspective, the libraries of code that ran everything had some fundamental changes.


This was all very fiddly, and hard to make heads or tails of; Tosh wasn't exactly an expert in WillCode, nor was any of this commented very precisely. But there seemed to be several hundred different variables at work here, all of them basically setting values to...something between 0 and 255.

All the personality aspects in the VM's Tosh hadn't let try and connect were exactly the same, line for line. In retrospect, this makes sense -- whether Will was on a mission with the X-Teams, or moping about in the halls of the point, or resting as a couch in the common room, he had the same basic personality attributes -- a bit melancholic, awfully caring, enthusiastic, helpful, submissive, zany, easily discouraged and so on. They were common bits to the Will Tosh knew and called friend.

But the Virtuwill Machine that downloaded something? Quite a few of those variables had changed. Not all of them, mind you, but several variables had gone from near zero to near max -- perhaps they related to paranoia, or anxiety, or suspicion. As a result, this aspect of Will was filtering everything through a new light, causing him to react differently then 'normally'.

Maybe that was what the Will upstairs meant when he said she was noticing parts of his personality she never thought were there before. Maybe, somehow, aspects of his core self were being...overwritten? No, it can't be overwritten; the other Virtuwill Machines were running as normal. Added to? Conflicting with one another -- what would happen if a super-paranoid version of Will and a super-trusting version of Will tried to occupy the same space? Or a stoic one and an emotional one? Ambitious and lazy? Prey and predator, as he had tried to explain to Sam?

If the MGH had truly opened Will's mind up, perhaps it had become too open.

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Huh... okay, the download did alter his personality attributes. But don't worry, it's isolated to this one layer. I can roll it back with no harm done."

"As for where it's from, I'm starting to think it's impossible to say for sure. It could all be from his own mind."

He poked around for anything related to MGH, as well as a native process for rolling back updates.

[Narrator]

There is indeed an MGH sub-routine running. In fact it's fluctuating between about 700 and 800% of system resource usage, which is of course impossible, especially since HDD Will is installed in a regular Point computer. A quick check shows this particular service-executable is using barely any of the actual computer hardware and is instead leaning heavily onto the mysterious BIOS. Not that a hard-drive should have it's own BIOS to begin with, but there it is, continuing to make the computer do the impossible.

[Narrator]

As for the rollback system -- there wasn't one. Apparently, this kind of change was not something that normally happened, which might indicate that the personality changes were coming from outside Will to begin with.

[Toshiro Narumi]

"God I'm wishy-washy today. It probably isn't internal, though this MGH subroutine is a likely conduit for what's going on. If he was an actual computer, I wouldn't think twice about treating it as malware. But I hesitate to decide that for him unless I absolutely have to."

"Though we're pretty close to that point unless I'm misinterpreting the severity of the problem."

[Robin Stanton]

"I mean duh, the MGH's what lets him do all this non-sense to begin with." Robin says, looking over Tosh's shoulder while still standing on the other side of the workbench, neck stretched and looping around so her head's next to Tosh. "If it's malware then we all got it."

[Toshiro Narumi]

He groaned, feeling like an idiot.

"Shit. You're right."

"But it's definitely in overdrive. If only I could throttle it somehow," he said as he used a tool to take a closer look at the MGH subroutine, hoping for some evidence of a connection to what's going on.

[Narrator]

The most obvious thing he'd notice is that the sub-routine is basically set up to reinforce itself. Throttling it down might be a temporary solution but it'll just spin back up to current levels. At least it becomes a little more clear as to how it's using non-existent resources since it seems to mostly function as some kind of data-transmission protocol that is hooked directly into the BIOS which seems to be providing the computing power from seemingly nowhere.

[Toshiro Narumi]

He put that idea on hold and moved up to the next Will up the chain. It was time to begin experimenting with closing a VM. First, he'd do what he did before to see if the paranoid virtuWill respawned. If it did, he'd get more aggressive and try inhibiting or even getting rid of that layer's VM capability.

[Will Stanton]

It seemed that, in the current configuration, the various Virtuwill Machines couldn't contact one another -- he had closed all their connections, remember? So the paranoid version didn't react at all when Tosh closed one of the VMs --it had no contact with the other one.

However, again, once he closed one, another one popped up again to replace it -- the central BIOS kept churning out more copies to replace ones Tosh was trying to close. He would have to do something more significant to the system if he wanted to actually keep things shut and reduce their number.

[Toshiro Narumi]

He went to the root folder of the hard drive to find the program responsible for spawning the VMs. Somewhere it was set to a maximum of 9000. It couldn't be that easy, but he had to check.

[Narrator]

A few minutes of searching through code, Tosh would realize that this wasn't quite right.

The number of virtual machines had stopped at just under 9,000, true, but that didn't seem to be a hard-coded limit -- no "if 9000 then stop" command anywhere. Instead, there just seemed to be a bit of a stopping point there. Perhaps Will simply couldn't think of any more things. 9,000 was a lot of things!

The Will upstairs, still in his room? He didn't have the benefit of Tosh blocking his connections to..wherever the hell Will was connecting. So he must have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands...God only knows how many voices, conflicting ideas. But because Tosh was able to limit the computer to working only in this dimension, it had reached what appeared to be a natural stopping point. This was apparently the number of virtual machines Will needed to express all his conflicting voices without requiring the personality flips that the connection to other dimensions granted him.

However, that doesn't mean that Tosh couldn't just add a line of code setting a maximum number. He had root access, after all, and the full power of the Point's hardware to work with. There were very few things he couldn't do to Will at this point in time.

[Toshiro Narumi]

And so, remembering that the "true" Will was upstairs, Tosh reigned in his cautious nature and starting writing code to limit the VMs to two. No, three for good measure. A supplementary program would also automate the reduction process.

[Narrator]

Three Wills are better than none, one would assume!

It only took a line or two of code to set a limit on how many different VMs could be working at the same time and, one by one, all the thousands of open things shut down, one after another, until only three remained.

The memory usage plunged -- this would almost certainly run, even on Will's original janky hardware. Heck, he was using less resources than the Smart coffee maker, if Tosh was correctly monitoring these numbers. Nothing as complicated as a person should use this little memory, but that's Will for you -- magic smoke and whathaveyou.

The BIOS blackbox was much, much quieter now, too -- with less to handle, every process Tosh could trace was doing less work, well into what Tosh would consider safe operating parameters.

[Toshiro Narumi]

Tosh gave the root Will mic and speaker access.

"How do you feel now, Will?"

[Will Stanton]

"It's...quieter," Will said, after a moment. "Much quieter. That's...

...Well, that's just much better, I would say. I can hear myself think."

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Glad to hear it. And are there still conflicting thoughts? Well, more than the normal levels everyone experiences."

[Will Stanton]

"Erm....not that I can notice? Or not more than anyone would normally have, I guess?

It's hard to judge, really. I've never been the most decisive person on the planet or anything, but I'm sure lots of people aren't always sure what they want to do."

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Good. Now I'm going to restore the connectivity I disabled so things can return to a more natural state. It should be safe now that you aren't overtaxed."

With that, he turned the connections back on.

"How do you feel now?"

[Will Stanton]

While Tosh allowed for the connections to reconnect....they didn't. Or, at least, they didn't attempt to access anything; no more trying to hook up to the Point network or to the Crystal Computer. Double-checking showed that Will was able to connect; permissions were enabled and everything. They simply...weren't trying to.

"About the same? Maybe a little less fuzzy, or maybe I'm just imagining things."

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Just give me a moment to disconnect you and you can try shifting."

Tosh closed up some things and unplugged the Will drive before setting him on the floor and stepping back.

"And you're go."

[Will Stanton]

It took a moment, but the hard drive twisted and curled, expanding outwards. Slower than Tosh expected from Will's past shifting shenanigans, but not concerningly so. A guy could take it easy, couldn't he?

The most surprising thing, however, was the Will that stood before them when the shifting was done. He looked like the Will Tosh had seen when Lippencott had shut everyone else's powers off -- brown hair, a bit out of shape, freckled and...well, human. Not the green-haired boy Tosh was used to seeing, at the very least.

He blinked a little bit, rolling his head from side to side. "Whoof, blood rush."

[Robin Stanton]

"Okay that ain't right! What'd you do?"

[Toshiro Narumi]

"I... I just reduced the number of voices in his head. I have no idea why he looks like that."

[Will Stanton]

"What's wrong with the way I look?" Will frowned. "You've never seen a brunette before?"

[Robin Stanton]

"Nothing? Everything? You never choose to look like this."

[Toshiro Narumi]

"It's just really weird seeing you like this with your powers intact."

[Will Stanton]

"There something wrong with feeling like a change?" Will shrugged, flexing his fingers a little bit.

[Robin Stanton]

"This is, like, the opposite of change. This is the most boring unchanged version of you! Your hair's not even green, who are you!?" she says, clearly being overly dramatic for effect but it has a bit of truth to it.

[Will Stanton]

Will wrinkled his nose a little. "Green hair's a little...2040s, you know? I'm not sure I see the appeal."

[Toshiro Narumi]

"You didn't seem to feel that way before you let me fiddle with your noggin. It's possible I trimmed too much. Or maybe even misinterpreted what the VMs did."

[Will Stanton]

"You shut up a number of the voices in my head. Maybe that's a net win, aye?"

[Robin Stanton]

"Well apparently he turned off the colorful ones. Who even are you?"

[Will Stanton]

"Robbie, c'mon. We taught you better than to judge by appearances, right? I'm still your father."