While Fifi was first getting distracted from her thesis by the thought of changing Jeff with the Chronivac, a pair of techies at the TransDem Beta Testing Division were passing the time (or rather wasting time) by watching an old episode of Timmy on the company mainframe.
"Well, it looks like Lassie fell down the well again," said a Shih Tzu in a pant suit.
"Didn't see that coming," was the sarcastic reply from a Pug in a sweater vest.
Just then, an alarm rang out through the workspace. Apparently, the data division had picked up a signal from one of the hyperspace warning beacons. Chronivac diagnostic logs were stored on inter-dimensional quantum servers, which were theoretically immune to the Chronivac's effects, and any reality changes greater than 15% on the Mandela Scale were automatically transmitted to the TransDem Data Interchange Service. The hope was that any world-altering changes large enough to effect the company would be recognized by whatever version of TransDem existed in the new reality, even if the rest of the world were oblivious. Unfortunately, this backup plan was not succeeding in exactly the way it was envisioned.
"Hey, Chuck, what's going on back there?"
"It's saying somebody made a 45-Mandela global change. Wait, nevermind, it's a false alarm."
"Turn that damn thing off, will you?"
The siren stopped.
"Ok, so what is it?"
Chuck Conway, a 22-year-old mixed-race Labrador/Dalmatian, banged away on his keyboard and sent an excerpt of the diagnostic log to the main viewscreen.
"Chronivac 4.0 unit 4-0-0-3982-c is glitching in its diagnostic report system," explained Chuck. "Either that or server Q4 is having a hilarious read-write-transmit error."
The Pug looked over the change summary and put together what it meant.
"Does that really say...?"
"That the canine race was made sentient two and a half minutes ago? Yes, yes it does."
The Shih Tzu burst out laughing. Chuck continued.
"I'll reset the data log and take a snapshot for the IT solutions department. It's probably nothing that will affect the whole device, but I'd better send a maintenance recall to the owner just to be safe."
"Whose vac is it anyway?"
"Well, that seems to be part of the data glitch. The earliest user profile stored on Q4 for this unit is from a 16-year-old human in Deerville, Arkansas."
"A sixteen-year-old human?!"
"I know, right? Ah. Here we go. The unit is actually registered to a 26-year-old university student named Felicity Jeffreys, known as Fifi for short. All I should have to do is send her an autogenerated letter and--"
All at once a shimmer flashed through everything, and the dogs were naked.
"Chuck! Where are our clothes?"
"Why would we be wearing clothes?"
Another flash, and the dogs were on the floor barking frantically. Another flash, and the dogs were all gone back to their cages in the animal testing division, and the room was filled with fully clothed humans, some with pet toys in their mouths. One more flash, and the beta testing division was back to its usual self, bustling with humans in business casual outfits. Another alarm went off, and they got a tremendous laugh at the idea that humanity had been granted sentience seconds ago by a Chronivac unit given to a Corgi.