Sam sat in front of the computer, second guessing the plan she'd come up with over the weeks while she'd waited for Missy to give birth to her husband. She'd been too afraid to mess with the Chronivac program after encountering the warning message when she'd tried to change Tom back that first day.
The list of options under his profile had been greyed out and unchangeable while he'd grown and developed inside her neighbor's dog, and Samantha hadn't wanted to accidentally mess with anything, or anyone, else while she pondered what to do, so she'd shut the program down in the meantime.
It was only good luck that everyone (except his employers) had believed that Tom was called abroad for a two month work trip, and she'd been able to answer any necessary emails posing as her husband. In reality, he'd been let go from his job due to his inexplicable absence, and Sam was starting to wonder how they'd deal with that if she transformed him back to himself immediately now that he'd "reentered the world," as it were. Was he even conscious of his state at this point? None of the puppies had been acting strange, all of them squirming and nursing and sleeping just like the others. If there was a fully aware human consciousness inside one of them, wouldn't it have been trying to communicate it's distress somehow?
The only place she could think to look for answers was in the Chronivac program, so, taking a deep breath, Sam opened it once again.
As it loaded, an initial screen appeared asking her to set the "Range," so Samantha toggled the options down to ".5 mile" to make sure her neighbor's house would be included. Multiple subjects appeared on the next page, including herself, Max, her cat Misty, Missy, Jennifer and her husband Paul as well as a few other neighbors and animals within range. How it knew the names of animals, she wasn't sure, but she didn't know how ANY of this was possible, so she let that detail slide.
Scrolling down to Tom's profile, she clicked through to scan the options.
Subject: Tom
Gender: Male
Species: C. familiaris
Breed: German Shepherd / Standard Poodle mix
Coloring: Black and Tan with White socks
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Samantha paused on the coloring option. The puppies had been a mix of colors, mostly tan or black with different markings like the "socks" indicated on Tom's description. If he had a distinctive marking, she would be able to pick him out from the litter and know that she had the correct puppy! She hadn't looked closely at each, so she wan't sure if any of the other puppies had the same markings, but she was pretty certain there hadn't been an all-black or all-white puppy in the mix, so if she changed his fur coloring that should do the trick! Sam was relieved at the simplicity of this solution.
Not wanting one of the puppies to suddenly turn white in front of Jen's eyes, she decided to play it safe and change Tom's coloring to black, hoping he'd blend in with the darker colors of his litter-mates and the change would be less noticeable. Making the necessary adjustments, Sam was about to toggle back when she noticed the other sub-options further down:
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Original Form: Human male, 39 years old, 5'10", 168lbs
Current Mentality: Original Form (1)...(3)...(5)...(7)...(10) Current Form
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His "current mentality" was set at (10), and Samantha heaved a sigh of relief, finally knowing that he most likely wasn't the Tom she'd known, aware and trapped in the form of a developing and now newborn puppy all these weeks. She momentarily contemplated sliding that scale back toward his original form's awareness, just so he'd realize what he'd done and gone through... but was that too cruel?