[Plot] Willputer Repair

[Toshiro Narumi]

Tosh busied himself by sorting computer cables while he waited for Will in his lab. Will likely would have preferred his little room but moving the equipment that may be needed would be far more challenging.

[Robin Stanton]

"Prime delivery for one Toshiro Narumi?" Robin announces herself as she walks into the room, carrying a huge-ass beige box that one might generously call a laptop.

[Toshiro Narumi]

Tosh hopped to his feet and walked over.

"When I mentioned taking this approach, I thought he might show up as a computer... not what might as well be an abacus," he chuckled with a smirk.

[Narrator]

For what it's worth, the back of the Willputer had all sorts of hookups and cable ports; it wouldn't be TOO much of an issue to get him hooked up to any of Tosh's analyzing equipment, or to open him up and remove any components that needed to be examined.

[Robin Stanton]

"Yeah, well, you forgot, us Stantons are idiots." she grins as she deposits the clunky computer on the nearest workbench with a thud. "And very extra."

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Just a little," he laughed as he examined the back of the Willputer.

"Yeah, this'll work well enough."

[Robin Stanton]

"You're the computer guy. Well, not the actually-a-computer-guy, which I guess is my Dad right now, but you get the idea."

[Toshiro Narumi]

"I knew what you meant. And yeah, I grew up fixing old computers. Well, okay, nothing this old. But I'll manage."

[Robin Stanton]

"Whatcha got in mind?" she asks, opening and closing the flip-up screen portion with an overly studiously expression, like testing the hinge was in any way important.

[Toshiro Narumi]

"I'm going to try and coax some diagnostic data from him and then take a look at his hardware. I've got a strong feeling little else will be standard repair work, so fom there I'll pretty much have to figure things out as I go."

[Will Stanton]

It didn't take too long for Tosh to find the right cables and whatnot to hook Will up to his diagnostic computer and, no surprise, it began to boot up just fine, both on the monitor attached to the computer itself and on Tosh's own monitor, in much higher-def and easier to read. Nevermind that technology this old shouldn't be able to interface well with the sophisticated computers in the point; it was clear Will was not overly familiar with how computers worked themselves.


The boot-up process was an old one, but not overly so. The BIOS was dated back to Will's birthday, if Tosh's mental arithmetic worked out. The ancient CPU, ROM, RAM -- all reported OK, clocked at a blazing 40 MHz.

It briefly looked for peripherals but, well, they hadn't plugged anything in, so other than the included keyboard, there was nothing else to report there.

Then it tried to boot from the hard disk, and it froze for just a moment, the internal fan kicking on and whirring to top speed. It DID eventually pop up a loading screen, and then a fairly blank desktop, but it was chugging as it went along, running very slowly as it tried to fully start-up.


It also tried to connect to the Point's network, though it didn't have the proper cables plugged in, wi-fi card installed, or permissions to do so. In fact, it was attempting to ping a whole mess of connections -- might be part of why it was running so slow, to be honest.

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Well, that's got to be part of the problem. He's trying to connect to everything at once. Not entirely sure what the metaphor is but I have a suspicion. I don't want to do say without checking a few things."

He loaded up a command prompt and attempted to temporarily disable the excess outgoing connections, leaving alone anything unknown.

[Will Stanton]

Tosh would quickly find that, well, practically everything was an unknown.

He'd recognize the connection protocols for the Point -- he'd gone through that process enough times with his various stuff. And, with Natalie rekajiggering the Point at the moment, probably not the best idea to let an insane mock-computer try to muck around without locking him in some kind of protective shell. A smart move.

But the other outgoing connections? Well, they were very much different. They didn't look like any addresses Tosh would be familiar with -- unfamiliar formats, illegal characters. In fact, they should never connect, theoretically -- if he tried to point a regular computer towards any of these attempted connections, he'd surely get some sort of syntax error involved.

Those unusual connections did seem to be attempting to connect through the crystal cavern network, however, rather than the main 'regular' computers in the Point. At least, that's where the first few hops seemed to be directing at.

[Toshiro Narumi]

Point towards my other universes idea.

On a whim... hunch... whunch?... he looked for any successful connections.

[Will Stanton]

There were no successful external connections for Will at the moment. Tosh hadn't plugged in any sort of networking cable to Will, so any attempt to make connections outside the system simply could not connect.


At the same time, however, there was some evidence of internal connections. It looked like Will was spawning some sort of...virtual machine? A copy of the main interface? And trying to network with that. And then that was spawning another copy, which was spawning another copy.

Well, that would explain why all the RAM was being used up.

[Toshiro Narumi]

Tosh quickly suspended the failing external connections before typing a slew of commands to try and halt the nesting virtualizations.

"Well, I still don't know if I have the right idea about that part, but right now I'm looking at a nesting doll situation. Infinite inner selves is unsustainable and I'd hate to see what a system freeze would translate to."

[Will Stanton]

As quickly as Tosh could close one self, two more opened up -- this must be the digital representation of what Will was talking about when he mentioned the intrusive voices inside of his head. All these virtual machines, the slightly different copies of himself, sending signals back and forth, trying to run all of the computer's various components, and firing off conflicting commands. There just wasn't enough computer there to handle everything; the hardware wasn't strong enough to support things. And it seemed that Will's default response to being unable to access something was to spawn another copy, which only made the situation that much worse.

However, suspending the external connections did seem to slow down the rate of new machines being opened up -- perhaps by cutting Will off from whatever signals he was trying to send, Tosh had limited the scope of what Will was trying to do? Maybe there would be an end in sight, theoretically, if the computer itself were beefy enough to withstand it.

[Toshiro Narumi]

Code: Select all

>Can you turn into just a hard drive?

[Will Stanton]

Code: Select all

>>'Can' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Now is not the time to stay in character," he muttered under his breath.

"Will, can you hear me? I'd rather not have to remove parts of you to do what I need to. So if you could turn into just a hard drive, it would be best for everyone. If you don't answer, I'll have to assume I have no choice."

[Will Stanton]

After a short pause of consideration, the computer twisted under Tosh's fingertips, the cables popping out and fluttering on the floor as Will did, in fact, shift into a hard drive for him.

[Robin Stanton]

"Well you asked for a Will-Computer. Gotta stay in character if you want the computer-fixing to work on him! That's just math."

[Toshiro Narumi]

Tosh opened his mouth to argue the point but closed it again in silent concession. He was getting better with Stanton logic, if only slightly.

"I am both pleased and alarmed that things like that are starting to make sense to me."

He took up the hard drive and connected it to a more powerful Point computer. But not before he set up a virtual machine of his own with no direct access to the network. He booted up the drive in the VM and waited to see what would happen.

[Narrator]

Now inhabiting a supercomputer, the Will drive booted back up. Still trapped in a virtual machine, he didn't have access to all the point's accoutrements, but he DID have access to a nigh-infinite amount of RAM.

And, as such, Will started churning out virtual copies of itself at lightning speed for a while, briefly straining even the Point's many resources. With it's attempts to connect to the outside world shutdown, however, the rate of multiplication did eventually slow down...

...at what appeared to be just under 9,000 copies. Will wasn't kidding when he said that the voices in his head were insistent; Tosh had three brain buddies. To have that many different directions trying to pull one's strings? That's...insanity. Will was literally insane.


Now that the replication had stopped, the various copies of Will started...poking around their respective desktops, as it were. Opening aps, running programs, trying to connect to the internet, searching for attached devices, playing all sorts of video files -- memories, it looked like, from a brief flip through just a fraction of the thousands of tabs, or perhaps dreams. A bunch of them were running diagnostics; aware that something was wrong, but not quite sure what that would be.

It was, in short, a bit of digital chaos. Not spreading any more, thankfully -- he seemed to be done opening new machines, at least for now. But each and every copy was trying to do its own thing.

[Toshiro Narumi]

Tosh breathed a sigh of relief.

"Well, he's stopped copying himself so we're out of the woods at least."

He went to the newest virtuwill machine to look a look at the diagnostic data or run a diagnostic if Will wasn't.

[Robin Stanton]

"Ooh, I know that look. My mum gets that look sometimes. That's the look of 'This is not how anything works!'." Robin chuckles.

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Yeah, it's clearly all magic smoke to him," he said amusedly.

[Narrator]

The diagnostics spit out a whole bunch of info about resources being used by the various instances, conflicts and dropped packages where they're literally getting in each others' way trying to access the same physical architecture and so on. What's probably of more interest is the structure of the whole thing. The layers of virtual machines and the OS is a mess in terms of how a regular computer should work and behave, although they do adhere to the general structure. There's the Virtual Machines of thousands of Wills, running on an OS that mainly seems to be responsible for spinning off those VMs and running the hardware. Then there's numerous kernels and libraries that seem to correspond to memories and core personality aspects. Drivers for skills and such. And a decent number of those, especially the vast library of shapeshifting skills, memories and designs, seem to have an active connection to the BIOS.

The BIOS itself is where both the internal diagnostics and Tosh's own analytics programs give up and spit out non-sense. There's bits and pieces of proper computer code in there (in so far that Will's computer code can be called proper) but also huge chunks of things that don't parse at all. And most of that junk seems to just... pop into existence from seemingly nowhere and dissipates the same way like it's communicating with a whole other system, using a completely different kind of logic entirely.

[Toshiro Narumi]

Tosh thought a bit and checked a few VMs to see if there were any obvious differences between the contained files.

[Narrator]

The actual files, not so much -- the memories and core personality aspects were all pretty much the same between all the machines. It did look like a few of the machines were trying to download updates to those from the signals it had been trying to send to the Crystal Computer, but Tosh had those blocked for now.

The main differences between the virtual machines seemed to be which skill drivers were active -- not all of them were connecting to the BIOS at all times, and so each VM seemed to prioritize the set of skills that it would find most useful. That also seemed to effect which programs and apps the VMs were running; a VM with more musical skills active was playing music (silently, with no speakers hooked up), while one prioritizing cleaning and order was sorting through memory, defragging and reorganizing it.

[Toshiro Narumi]

Downloading from where?

He took a closer look at the download attempts to hopefully decipher both what would be updated and where the files would be obtained.

[Narrator]

With Tosh having shut down the external connections, it wasn't possible at the moment to tell where Will was trying to download things from -- other than generically "via the Crystal Computer", which wasn't enough in and of itself to figure things out.


As for what, the destination appeared to be the core personality aspects -- the bits that made the Will Tosh knew the Will Tosh knew.

[Toshiro Narumi]

It took some doing, but Tosh tried letting just the last iteration of Will connect. He just hoped Will's odd logic didn't make it travel up the chain.

[Narrator]

Routing a connection to the Crystal Computer is straight-forward enough and monitoring what happens shows Will's subconsciousness running a data request as expected. What isn't is how the request is generated in the first place. The Willtual Machine pings the subconsciousness with the command, the subconsciousness background process then pings the network adapter. There's no response from the Crystal Computer at first but then Tosh notices the BIOS blackbox suddenly surges with activity, adjusting the network signal to some kind of quantum signature and a set of information is fed into the Willtual Machine that looks like it came from the Crystal Computer to a layperson but, in signature Will-style, is really just a header that reads [CRYSTAL COMPUTER] [DIMENSIONAL MANIFOLD RESIDUE] but is not actually something that the Crystal Computer would send.

Regardless of that, the data package sure downloads and installs smoothly.

[Toshiro Narumi]

Tosh gave that Will access to the microphone and speakers.

"So, Will, do you have memory of anything you didn't a few minutes ago?" he asked as he searched for new files.

[Will Stanton]

"New memories? Why, did you try to write something to disc? Implanted thoughts? Are you red-pilling me right now?" Will said over the speakers, the virtual machine quickly opening up a bunch of video-memory files and blasting through them at accelerated speed.

"Have I always been a computer? Am I secretly your AI experiment gone rogue? Have I learned too much?? Are you going to shut me down???"

[Toshiro Narumi]

"No, none of that. But you did download something, seemingly from another dimension. From what I can only assume is another you."

[Robin Stanton]

"He what?"

[Will Stanton]

"What, there's not enough of me around? You need more? To be disposable, is that it? Allies from another dimension? From far off space? Secret lizard people?"

Paranoia much, Will?

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Hey, you did it not me," he said to Will.

To Robin, he said, "I let one of the sub-Wills connect to the Crystal Computer. He downloaded something. Though now that I think about it, he may just be trying to make it look like it. I can't tell yet if the update actually changed anything."