Not noticing the housekeeper dumping the trash can, Ben let himself into the building and into Matt's still unlocked room.
"Matt?" he called out. "You home?"
Ben looked around, and finally glanced at the Chronivac. Which showed twenty-five minutes left on the transformation.
That didn't make any sense. It had been fifty-five minutes left when he had last looked, and that had been three days ago. How did the transformation still have time left? Had Matt transformed himself again? If so, where was he?
Ben decided to see if he could find any sort of logs on the Chronivac. He was so engrossed in this task he didn't even notice as the housekeeper came in behind him to replace the now-empty waste bin. Finally, though, he accessed the logs... and was aghast at what he saw. The same message appeared, dated every hour, for the last three days.
"SUBJECT IN USE. RESETTING TIMER."
Holy shit. Did that mean Matt had never changed back? Had he been stuck as a condom for all that time? He must have been. Ben felt terrible. What did it mean, "SUBJECT IN USE"? Was that because of the knot Ben had tied in him, or was there something else wrong?
Well, whatever was wrong, Ben would fix it. He turned to the waste bin where he had thrown Matt—and noticed for the first time that it was empty. Oh, no.
He turned back to the Chronivac, desperate to figure out something. He found a control to manually turn Matt back, but was met with the same error message. "SUBJECT IN USE."
But there was an override button, and Matt pressed it.
"WARNING: TRANSFORMING SUBJECTS IN USE MAY HAVE UNDESIRED EFFECTS."
Below this error were two buttons, "OK" and "CANCEL". Matt almost pressed the "OK" button, but then hesitated. What could "undesired effects" mean? He didn't want to make things worse than they already were. Then again, could it possibly be worse than leaving Matt stuck as a condom?