The package that had showed up had been entirely unexpected. However, it had Chris's name on it, so he didn't see any harm in taking it into his dorm and opening it up. He'd never heard of a Chronivac, but it looked pretty cool.
Chris was a little hesitant to hook up mysterious hardware to his computer, so he used his dorm mate, Anthony's instead. The software installation went fairly quickly, and before Chris knew it he was looking at the Chronivac user interface. It was a long and complicated mess of drop-down menus, text boxes, and seemingly random words and numbers.
It was then that Anthony stumbled in, still dressed only in a shirt and boxers, only freshly woken up. "Hey. What's that?"
Chris shrugged. "I think it's some sort of simulation program." He poked at the little black device he'd clipped to the top of the monitor. "It's even got a little scanner that came with it."
Anthony stopped mid-stretch and frowned. "Wait. You don't know what it is, and you've hooked it up to my computer? I need that to write papers! What if there's a virus on it?"
Chris chuckled. "Well I'm not going to put it on my computer, that's for sure. Calm down, I'll uninstall it if there's anything malicious on it."
Anthony grabbed a pair of jeans lying on the floor. "You'd fucking better. Ask me next time before... Shit!"
Chris turned to see Anthony franticly begin trying to pull the jeans on, looking a little panicked. "What's up?"
Anthony pointed to the computer screen. Specifically, the little clock in the bottom corner. "I'm going to be late for class! Why didn't you wake me up earlier?"
Chris sighed, turning back to the Chronivac interface. "I'm not your mom. Besides, last time I tried you almost broke my nose."
Anthony poked his head out of the bathroom, where he was applying his deodorant. "Don't be a drama queen. You only bled for about a couple minutes."
As Anthony hurried to make himself presentable and gather his class supplies, Chris continued to study the Chronivac. The more he looked at it, the better he could make out the strange logic that had gone into the interface's design. He found a button labeled "Scan Now". He clicked it.
"Cool!" Almost immediately, a variety of names popped up, under the header "Subjects in Range". Among them were Chris and Anthony. Chris guessed this was the scanner at work, but he wasn't quite sure how it could know their names.
Chris selected Anthony's name and all the menus and text boxes filled in with what Chris could only assume was a disturbingly thorough account of Anthony's physical features.
"Woah! Anthony! You've got to see this!"
"Not right now. Busy." Anthony, now fully dressed, had ripped open a packet of toaster pastries and was devouring them as quick as he could, while sorting through a disorganized mess of textbooks.
"No, seriously! This thing just scanned you, and it's got, like, everything. I have your height, your weight, your shoe size, and even the length of your-"
"Dick!" Anthony upended his book bag and shook it vigorously. "Have you seen my Philosophy notebook? I've looked everywhere and I just can't- Oh. Here it is."
Chris scrolled through the various measurements of his dorm mate. He never thought such a little thing could be so accurate. It could be possible that a lot of the details were made up, but they seemed to be pretty correct. As he dug through the menus, he found himself in a tab called "Packages".
In it was what seemed to be a collection of pre-set traits. Chris was a little surprised to see a tooltip at the top, as the program hadn't been the most user-friendly up to this point. "Selecting a package will apply a set of preset changes to the target."
The options to chose from seemed to be a collection of vague stereotypes. There was Surfer (24), Construction Worker (40), Police Officer (35), Suburban Dad (45), Boy Next Door (18), Lumberjack (43), Bodybuilder (27), College Professor (50), Biker (47), Businessman (33), and the list went on and on. Curious, Chris selected one. He was immediately taken back to the main screen, and noticed that many of Anthony's stats had been altered in line with the package he'd selected.
"Okay..." he muttered. "Now what am I supposed to do?" He scrolled to the bottom to find a "Apply Changes" button. Seeing no other options, he clicked the button, leaving the change time to the default of 1 hour, and the duration of change at the default 24 hours. Whatever that meant.
A green light flickered on the scanning device for a moment, then stopped.
Anthony, toaster pasty in his mouth and book bag slung over his should, quickly made his way to the door. "I'm leaving. I'll be back after class!"
Chris waved halfheartedly. "Bye..." And Anthony was gone.
Chris frowned as he looked at the interface, noticing there was now a countdown timer by Anthony's name. "59 minutes until change completes."