As Jeff sat down to work the Chronivac, Skype started to ring, forcing a dialogue box to jump to the front of the screen right where Jeff was about to click. He accidentally answered the call, with webcam, whilst still naked.
"Shit," Jeff muttered as he tried to hang up.
"Yo, how's my favourite soda machine?" Too late, the call connected and Skype jumped to the front of the screen.
The caller was Jeff's best friend from school, Ethan. He was a handsome, tall boy with tan skin and rare green eyes, plus a few freckles. Apparently, the Chronivac had gotten far enough into the process to change the memories of Jeff's friends. Ethan didn't seem particularly phased to see Jeff naked like this.
"H-hey Ethan, bad timing," Jeff flustered, "I answered by accident, just let me get dressed."
"Why?" Ethan looked confused, "Are you out of order today?"
"What?"
"Why else would you cover your nozzle?"
"Uh, yeah," Jeff frowned, "Sure, that's it. Look I gotta go, I'll catch later."
Jeff disconnected the call and took a deep breath. That was too weird.
The boy-turned-soda-machine minimised Skype and went back to reprogramming the Chronivac. The Chronivac window faded. The program had stopped responding. The extra load of RAM from the Skype call had crashed the program!
Jeff had no choice but to let the program restart. When it finally re-opened, everything had reset to default - even Jeff's data seemed to be missing! He started panicking. He had to fix this!
Meanwhile, Ethan had become concerened that Jeff was out of order. Ethan knew that downtime can be a pretty distressing time for people like Jeff. "Inanis", as they were colloquially called, didn't tend to get sick too often, especially those who produce food or drink. They had a high resistance to typical human diseases. However, they could be injured or just develop a bug, and this would render them "out of order". Ethan was further concerned because, as far as he remembered, Jeff had never really come to terms with being an inani. He always seemed very out of place amongst inanis, but because he was one, he was also out of place with "normos" (the name inanis came up with to retaliate against the whole "inani" name). Catching an inani illness for the first time might really upset his best friend, so Ethan was on his way over to Jeff's house to help him through it.
Of course, Jeff wasn't aware of the misunderstanding.
Nor was Jeff aware that Ethan was a...