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. "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 over the last hour? Yes, yes it does."
The Shih Tzu burst out laughing. Chuck continued. "That isn't even possible...I mean, the amount of changes needed to change the entire world...our units can't handle that level of detail. And...if we weren't sentient till today...who could have built a Chronovac?"
The Pug looked over. "Those Change the World simulations we ran in alpha testing...this looks like it could be one of them. But they failed whenever we ran them, and none of the beta users got that copy of that version of the software. I bet this is just an old simulation."
"I'll cancel the alert and take Q4 offline for a full diagnostic. We can switch to one of the backup servers. I'd better send a maintenance exchange to the owner just to be safe. If she is running a buggy version of the software, that could be why our server got out of whack. I'll send the owner an email telling them to discontinue use of the unit until we investigate further."
"Better do it quick....if it is malfunctioning, we could end up in trouble. Whose unit is it anyway?"
"Well, the data is still corrupted. The user profile says it belongs to a 16 year old human."
"A sixteen-year-old human?!"
"I know, right? Must be the data glitch. According to the shipping database, the unit was sent to a university student named Felicity Jeffreys."
"The boss is going to have a field day with this one..." the Shih Tzu commented.
"Well, it's not a change...it's just a glitch...maybe we should investigate before we raise a red flag," Chuck commented.
"Probably best. This simulation is so ludicrous....who knows which one of the techs was running it. Could be embarassing.