by Narrator » Tue Jan 26, 2021 1:46 am
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.