Mark was freaking out over the Chronivac when they got home. The emiter array was still smoking, and occasional sparks were still coming from the main unit. Worse, the two identical Tony's were no longer quite so identical-- the original Tony St. Martins had gained about fifty pounds in the hour since they'd returned from the zoo, and was looking pretty chunky compared to the perfectly fit Tony body that Claire was now in.
"This is great," Claire said. "I like being a guy."
"Why am I getting fat?" Tony asked.
"I dunno," said Mark, flipping through the Chronivac manual. "Let me call Tech Support."
He did, and a woman with an Indian-lilt answered, "TransDem Tech support. We are here to help you be a better you. How may I help you?"
"Hi, this is Mark St. Martin. My Chronivac is on the fritz, and the warning screen said we're not going to be able to do physical transformations for six months."
"Six months? Ah, that is a common error encountered when you override a previously running background program without clearing that program first."
"I thought I exceeded the distance of the emiter array."
The woman laughed. "Oh no, that is nor a problem anymore. The ray-beam effect is useful for focusing, but the newer models have the ability to use N-waves to focus from a distance and triangulate via satelite. Your error was caused by conflicting programs. The sparking and smoking you're seeing from the emiter right now is a sign that it is processing and interpolating the errors, finding a way to work through them. The process can take up to six months, but may go faster, depending on the proximity of the subject to the emiter. What does the display say now?"
"Uh..." Mark opened the laptop. "It says 5 months, 21 days."
"You see? It's processing."
"But I didn't have any other programs running!"
"You must have. Let me see...." There was a blipping and beeping from the Chronivac, then the woman on the phone laughed. "Ah, of course. It's one of Emma Chase's clever little workarounds. I'm so glad we've hired her."
"Hired her?" Mark said, baffled.
"Oh yes, she's very good with the Chronivac. Would you like to speak with her? We can send her out for a service technician visit."
Mark was turning from baffled to alarmed. "Uh...yeah, I suppose so."
"Excellent. I will end this call then and allow Emma to take over. Thank you for calling TransDem."
The woman hung up and a moment later there was a knock on the bedroom door. Mark opened it, seeing instead of the TransDem bellhop guy, Emma in her Girlscout uniform. She stepped in, winking, and tapped a merit badge on her uniform which had the same insignia as was engraved atop the still-sparking Chronivac. "Thanks," she said. "My first service call. You guys helped me earn my TransDem merit badge."
"What?" gasped Tony, distinguishable only from Claire in how pudgy he was.
Emma grinned. "TransDem liked the way I hacked the Chronivac, so they offered me an internship. I'm a field agent now."
"How?" demanded Mark.
"Easy," she replied, "the hacks I did on Tony, plus the fact that I made certain to download the Chronivac reference manual into my mind before I registered my own profile with TransDem. That's initiative, and it also qualified me as a field rep."
"What's happening?" Tony demanded. "Is this why I'm getting fat?"
Emma nodded. "Sure is. I couldn't change your physical profiles after you registered them, but you could, so I put in a subroutine that stated if you gained weight, then lost it, then gained it back again, you'd never be able to lose it permanently.
"What?" gasped Tony.
"Simple," Emma explained. "You went up to a weight, you dropped down to a lower weight, then you went up to a weight again. Now that you've dropped down, the Chronivac is adding the mass back. From the way you look, it seems to be doing that in fat."
Tony boggled, while Mark said, "Wait a second. I've been reading the manual, and TransDem isn't supposed to make changes without our consent."
Emma grinned. "I wrote the program before I went to work for them. But now that I can, I can offer you some workarounds. May I?" She gestured to the Chronivac.
Mark stepped out of the way and Emma went and flicked a few keys, popping up some screens. "Well, it says here that Tony turned into a regular gorilla weighing some 537 lbs a few days ago, then went back to his new form, then went up to being an 821 lb gorilla today. So checking those, the Chronivac should stabilize with Tony at a weight of 537."
"I'm going to be a blimp!" Tony yelled.
Emma grinned. "If it's all fat, yes. But you could make it muscle, or just extra size. You want to be a bodybuilder or a giant? Or maybe just a gorilla again?"
"Better than being a lardbutt," Tony said, the Chronivac still sparking.
"I also," Emma said, taking a memory stick from her beret, "saved a copy of Tony's original biometrics. I'd been planning to use them to blackmail you, but I'm not allowed to do that as an employee of Transdem." She plugged the memory stick into the laptop's spare USB port, and corresponding lights on the Chronivac flashed. "You can go back to what you were if you want."
"Okay then," Mark concluded, "easy enough to fix." He clicked the UNDO key on the keyboard and a menu popped up: "Revert last X changes? Y/N?"
Mark pulled down the number menu to 17, then hit Y, making sure that the emiter was pointed at the fat Tony.
Rapidly, Tony lost his fat, then he into giant gorilla, then Tony turned back to Tony, then an ordinary gorilla, then Tony, then Tony turned to stone, then to Tony, then to a jackass, then to the former Tony, then into a greyhound, then back into the original Tony again.
Tony looked at himself, no longer the handsome model ballet dancer pretty boy, but regular old big-nosed Tony. "I'm back to myself."
"For the moment," Emma pointed out. "You didn't disable my program. Which weighs more," she mused, "a giant gorilla, a stone statue, or an ordinary jackass?"
"Some combination of the three, I'd guess," Claire said as the emiter flashed Tony began growing, not fatter, but larger and stonier, becoming some sort of big-nosed Tony donkey-gorilla gargoyle which must have easily weighed a ton.
"The Chronivac is set to interpolate unclear commands randomly," Emma explained. "It's an amazing device."