Confirming Carter Bk. 03 Changes Ch. 07

"So what are you saying, Sam?" Rodney said, his voice cracking as he fought back tears. "I screwed up again, and now she's going to die because of it?"

"I missed it too, Rodney. I checked your work and approved it." She said. "Manager one oh nine snuck in behind us. This is a glitch, you're not to blame."

"The problem can be corrected." Fran said. "It does, however, require a reset, and a reload..."

"How do we do it, Fran?" Tammy asked. "Give me a step by step. Feed it to my terminal if you can."

Fran closed her eyes, and strings of code began scrolling across Tammy's screen. She watched, waiting for it to end, and when it did, she scrolled back up to the top and began working her way down slowly.

Several minutes later, she looked up at Sam, shrugging her shoulders.

"We should be able to do this, but there's no guarantee." She said as she got up and went over to a cabinet. She took down a memory module, then went back to her terminal and plugged it in.

"Rodney." She said, "I need you and Sam to go through the personality profile you loaded from, and remove, then re-add manager one oh nine. Leave everything else in place. I'm going to download her memory up to the last back up, just before you came over for lunch."

"So she's not going to remember our little chat in the bedroom, or what happened in the kitchen?" Sam asked.

"No, and let's be glad that that's all she's going to lose."

She started the save on the memory, checking the module to make sure it was going, then turned back to them.

"When you remove the manager, save the rest of the file. Then re-add a clean copy of it, and make sure it has only the elements you had in the original, and don't leave anything out either, then save it again." She told them. "The profile has to match what's in her memory exactly, or this won't work. The bonding protocol is stored separately, so it will be wiped when we do the reset."

She looked over at McKay.

"She'll still remember how she feels about you, but the system will have to catch up to her memories. Having those memories will help that process along." She told him.

"How long will all this take?" Sam asked.

"About twenty minutes for the memory dump, plus anything over that that it takes you to redo the profile, an hour to reload the profile after the reset, then another twenty minutes to reload her memory. So call it two hours if you get it done before the memory dump is done. Longer if you don't."

"Then we better get started." Sam said.

She looked over at McKay, and saw him leaning down, talking quietly to Fran.

"Rodney, are you up for this?" She asked.

He looked up at her, and after a moment, shook his head.

"Will...will you do it?" He asked her.

"We'll take care of it. You stay with her as long as you need to."

Interior-Robotics Lab, Central Tower

1600 Hours

"We should be seeing something by now." Tammy said. "The memory dump finished more than half an hour ago."

She looked over at McKay. He hadn't moved from his position beside Fran since they'd brought her in.

"How long was it before you saw any activity after you loaded the original personality profile, Rodney?" She asked him.

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"Huh?" He said, looking up at her. He stared at her for a moment, then said, "Oh, sorry. It was about ten, maybe twelve minutes."

"And we added her memories on top of the profile." Tammy said.

She glanced over at Sam, then back at Rodney.

"We can give her a little while longer, but then we'll have to shut her down." She said. "If this doesn't work, you'll have to start over, and see if you can rebuild the profile, and leave manager one oh nine out."

Rodney nodded, leaning down so his lips were close to her ear.

"It's time to wake up, Fran." He said softly. "Please? I need you to wake up now."

Fran's eyelids fluttered, then opened. She didn't move, except to look at him, then over at Sam and Tammy standing on the other side of the table.

"Why am I here? Has something happened?" She asked.

"I was about to tell him to kiss her, but that will work too." Tammy said, watching McKay.

He sighed with relief, his eyes filling with tears, but he held them back. Taking a deep breath, he looked over at them.

"Thank you." He said. "I hope I'll be able to repay you for this."

Tammy looked down at Fran and smiled.

"You had a problem with your personality profile, there was a conflict with one of the subroutines that caused a problem with your bonding protocol." She told her. "You had us reset you, then reload the profile and your memories. Now I need you to run an internal diagnostic on the profile."

"I understand." Fran said. "This may take several minutes."

She closed her eyes again and lay still.

"What do we do if there's a problem?" He asked them.

Before they could answer, Fran opened her eyes and looked up at Tammy.

"There is a fault in manager one oh nine, it is attempting to access the bonding protocol and the sensory control system. I will attempt to disable, and remove it."

She closed her eyes again. It was almost ten minutes before she opened them again.

"The fault has been cleared. Manager one oh nine has been successfully removed." She said as she started to sit up.

"Not so fast Fran." Tammy said, pushing her back down on to the table. "I want to take a look first, so you just stay still."

She went over to a terminal and accessed the personality profile, and scrolled down through it quickly.

"She's right, the fault has cleared, and manager one oh nine has been removed." Tammy said, as she came back over to the table, and removed the cables attached to Fran's chest.

"We need to remove that program from the list." Sam said. "Maybe we can have the system run a diagnostic to find out why it causes this problem."

"If it was causing the problem." Tammy said as she replaced Fran's breasts. "It may have been affected by something else in the profile, we don't know for sure yet."

"So this could happen again, and we may still have to wipe her, and start over." Rodney said.

"That's possible, but doubtful." Tammy said. "I want Fran to run a diagnostic every two hours and report any anomalies. I also want to run a diagnostic here, in the lab, at least once a day, until further notice."

She glanced over at Sam, then over at Rodney. "We can't add personalities to any other androids until we see if we actually fixed the problem. This project just came to a screeching halt kids."

"There is a simulation program that..." Fran said as she sat up on the table.

"We can look at that tomorrow, Fran." Sam said. "All this has been very hard on Rodney, and Tammy and I have things we need to do. Why don't you take him home. I think he needs you right now."

(-)

So ends Chapter Seven of Book Three, Changes. This is also the end of Book Three, at least for now. I may continue this volume, because I want to explore the idea of Fran and the other androids...

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