Just as Jeff was preparing to open the menus again to see what he could create, his bedroom door swung open. He almost jumped out of his seat - privacy, these days, is highly valued! But he was quickly relieved, ‘cause it was only his boyfriend, Drake. He was the only one he would've let into his room unannounced, anyway.
Now, unbeknownst to Jeff, was whether he should be having a boyfriend at all! Or perhaps, by chance of the Chronivac's altered reality, it had arranged one… After all, it was impossible to imagine someone with two sets of genitals not being at least bi-curious, and a bit ahead of everyone else on the maturity level. Sixteen was pretty young to be dating or experimenting, but Jeff carried twice the testosterone of many boys his age.
“Hey Je - oh peew, man, it smells like jizz in here!”
Jeff’s eyes widened and face reddened.
“Shut up! Keep it down... my sister's down the hall!”
“Yeah - she probably smells it, too! You really can't control yourself, can you, stud?”
Drake was two years older than Jeff, but five years older-looking. He had the most attractive dirty blond hair and blue eyes of any guy in his school. As he walked over to Jeff, who was now well beyond embarrassed, he gave him a quick peck on the head and added, “M’ just giving you a hard time. Doubly hard…”
Jeff rolled his eyes in dissent. “Check this out,” he said, pointing to the computer screen. “I got a program in the mail. It makes realistic models of people, like - supremely realistic, man.”
Drake's eyes lit up from the light of the screen, noticing Jeff’s model with an equally realistic double-package on the screen. “Me-ow! Yeah, I'd say…”
“Uggh, stop being such a slut!” Jeff laughed, giving Drake a playful jab.
“Why do you want a model of yourself, dude?”
Jeff shook his head. “Wasn't trying to… I wanted to play with it, like, maybe design some superheroes or comic book characters or something… but, instead, uh, I guess it scans in your body as a reference.”
“Oh, I guess I meant how… like, you didn’t spend days designing yourself -”
“No, ummm…” Jeff hummed, pointing to the emitter. “This thing, it scanned me. Then there were a bunch of windows to click through and stuff, and… there I am! It’s so crazily realistic, but now I guess you can manipulate how it looks with the tools in the program.”
“Oooh, okay. Can you do me?”
“I think so… hold on.”
Jeff’s memory was good enough to recall what had happened earlier with his sister; the device automatically scanned her into the system. It didn’t seem to do this again, but he quite easily found a Scan button on the top menu toolbar of the application. Within ten to fifteen seconds, the emitter whizzed to life and the information changed to represent Drake’s physical attributes.
“Cool…” Jeff said, reacting to the data. “This thing is so cool!”
“Where’s the model?”
“Oh, yeah, uh - that’s just your data. The ‘016’ is code for your hair color but it can be changed in the program. It won’t load a model until we tell it what to display first.”
“This is some fancy shit, Jeff…” Drake said, now sitting down next to Jeff at the desk. “What d’ya mean, “tell it what to display”?”
“I dunno… Umm, let’s make a character… What kind of superhero do you want to be?”
Drake hesitated for a moment, then his eyes lit up. “Make me Spyderman!”
“Uhhhmm…that may take a while. I haven’t figured out how to design clothes or anything. Oooh, but - “ Jeff sat right back up in his chair, “How about, like, a man-Spider?”
Opening the same package as before (although he had only vague memories of knowing how this package worked), he clicked the DNA Splicer package, and Jeff messed around with the tools a bit to design something funny. He thought about it in his head, giggling slightly, and saying aloud:
“ManSpider - part spider, part man, all tangled up. Climbing up a wall near you!”
This made Drake laugh. “Oh my god, Jeff…you’re so weird sometimes...”
“What?! Come on, let’s see how it looks!”
“A man-spider...”
He used the splicer tool to add features - two sets of arms, instead of just one. Kind of like how a spider had multiple legs. And then, for added interest, he used the change feature DNA percentage tools and commanded some interesting attributes. It was a pain that there was no visual part - no preview, as it were.
"At least give him super-strength or something. Make ... make him really hot..."
Jeff rolled his eyes again, but he smiled, this time leaning into Drake, pushing him aside. Drake giggled and pushed right back.
“But hey, I came over 'cuz I wanted to go with you to the arcade, and then maybe go out for milkshakes later…just you and me!”
“OoooOOOooo… milkshakes. From Berry’s?”
Then Jeff got to the window about morphing duration, alter reality, awareness and all that jazz, and recalled having manipulated these settings to do something before, but wasn’t quite sure why they were important - or what the result was. He was half-distracted by Drake’s flirtatious attitude and conversations about a potential night out.
“Of-fucking-course! I gotta get my peanut butter crunch, baby…”
Partially distracted, he left the mark on the default setting, which left a rather long morph duration - 30 minutes - and just alternated the other things - Pleasure, Y, Awareness, N, Alter Reality, Y… whatever. He hurried through the windows, hoping that he could leave with Drake soon after. He clicked Submit, and the screen greeted the two young men with the window:
**Process Initiated… 30 minutes remaining...
“Thirty minutes? Jeff, I don’t wanna sit here that long!” Drake complained.
“Oops…I forgot to change the time! But… weird, there’s no cancel button!”
“C’mon, Jeff…”
“O-okay, we’ll come back later and check it out, or something -” Jeff resented.
“Just send me a pict - well, I mean, maybe we’ll come back. We gotta catch the bus, though.”
Disappointed, but with nobody to blame but himself, they got up from their chairs at his desk. Jeff threw on a pair of jeans, which further provoked his groin area; being with Drake always compounded the situation, of course. He knew an unintentional set of hardons was coming his way… but he let it be, deciding it best to cover some of it up with a sweatshirt. They left the computer running as they hurried out of the house to take the bus to the arcade.
All the while, Drake’s morph counted to 29 minutes remaining, and the changes began to take effect…