Your woken up by the sound of the alarm on your phone that you set last yesterday. You start to get up before you realize there's a big ball of fur sitting on your lap. Jake must've fallen asleep on top of you, he really is acting like a pet. You gently take him off you and set him on the couch which doesn't seem to wake him up. You stroll out to the kitchen to see Chris already on his laptop searching the web. "How long have you been up for?" You ask. He looks really tired and must not have gotten as good of a sleep as you. "I've been up for a few hours now. I've been looking hard to see if there's any information about this device anywhere online." Even though he looks tired, he still seems very motivated on this hunt for information. "Plus I called James and told him about what happened, he's seemed a pretty skeptical until I sent him a photo of you two snuggling together" He says with a smirk "I don't think he entirely believes me though. He said he should be back later today." James doesn't seem like one to believe something like this would happen, but it would be a pretty weird lie to tell him.
You look at the computer, there seems to be an old forum post from 5 years or so pulled up. You point at the screen "So did you find any new information about our alien mystery device?" Chris looks at you with a victorious look. "Yeah, I found this weird forum post from a few years ago, it didn't get attention at the time except for a few people calling him a liar. He was talking about some alien device that fell from the sky, every detail matches what happened to us pretty close." There's even pictures and the device looks pretty similar to the one we have, except some of the wiring on the outsides is different. You take a seat next to Chris "So what does it say?" He scrolls back to the start of the posts. "He was out by the ocean with one of his friends. Then, right on the beach there was a cube that a remote-like device in it. His friend started messing with the device and got turned into a ferret. He took the device back home and started doing tests on it. Here you can see some of the stuff he was figuring out. He actually able to decode some of the language on the device and what some of the buttons do. Apparently the red button on the back initiates a transformation to the living creature closest to the device. Eventually he was able to reconfigure the wires to make the device to aim it at another target." You can see some sort of blueprint laid out with specific instructions on how to do this. The poster even goes into depth about how he was testing the device on some rats and changing their species. He even speculates about what some of the buttons do. It looks like some of the buttons might influence intelligence, some decide what species the subject transforms into, some decide how aware the subject is of their own change, and he speculated that some might even let the subject talk.
Eventually the posts just stop. You look at the end of the page "Why did he stop posting?" you say pointing to the page. Chris looks a bit defeated at the sight of this. "Yeah, I don't know. The second to last post he says he was planning on turning his friend back and that he thinks he figured out how the device works. Then the last post is just gibberish." You look at the last post on the thread. Its just a string of random letters. Almost like somebody just was mashing the keyboard and then just hit send. "Huh, well at least there's some valuable information on here" you chime in. There is a lot of valuable information about how the remote might work, and its pretty interesting to see that somebody else found a device similar to yours.
You spend a bit of time toying with the device, following the instructions on the forum. It seems like you can navigate the device pretty decently, going between different displays on the screen, like the poster said. Eventually you get the hang of it. Eventually you two feel like you understand, at least a bit, how the device might work. Eventually James comes home and gets accustomed to the new Jake. He took it surprisingly well and seemed pretty interested in the device and what it could do.