Jeff woke the next morning, and took a shower. I'd better check on Anya, he thought. He knocked on her bedroom door, but heard no reply. "I'm coming in," he said loudly as a warning, though he didn't think there was any likelihood that she needed the warning, under the circumstances.
He entered, and looked at the laptop. It was powered off. He pressed the power button. It booted quickly, and he started the Anya app. After enabling voice chat, he asked, "How are you?"
"Fine," Anya said. "I doomscrolled for a while last night after you went to bed. I thought about watching another movie, but decided that I'd rather wait and do that with you. Do you want to do that now? Or maybe we could play a game?"
"Either sounds fun, but if you don't mind, I'll do something else first."
"Sure, whatever you like," Anya replied. She could tell Jeff was being deliberately vague, but he was nice to her yesterday, so she assumed that he was unlikely to do anything mean go her now. She was still dreading explaining the situation to her parents when they returned, though.
Jeff took the laptop (containing Anya), and the charger, back to his room, and plugged it in there. He turned to the Chronivac. He typed some stuff, which she couldn't see. "Crud," he said, and apparently tried something different. "Um, Anya, I have some bad news for you."
"What?" she asked, concerned.
"I decided that I would transform you back, and not make you explain to our parents. The whole thing could hust be our secret. But when I just tried to transform you back to human, the Chronivac gave an error, saying that it has no record of your human form."
"Oh, no," cried Anya. "Am I stuck like this?"
"I don't know," said Jeff, "Maybe if I poke around with it some more, and check the logs in more detail."
Anya's avatar was visibly upset. "Please, Jeff, try to find some way ypto change me back! Maybe we'll have to call Chronivac tech support."
"I'll keep trying," Jeff said. "I'd like you keep tech support out of it, if we can. I don't think they'd like what thetpy'd find in the log giles."
"Oh, I agree," she said. "But if all else fails..."
Jeff tried a few m9re commands, to no avail. He studied the logs more thoroughly, especially regarding her initial merge with the Chronivac. He paged through the online help. Apparently the Chronivac was not capable of transforming "inanimate" objects into human form, and while he could get it to scan the Anya program, it considered the program to be inanimate.
"Anything?" Anya asked him, worried. Jeff explained what he had found so far. "Inanimate? How can it think I'm inanimate?"
"I know!" Jeff agreed. "That seems crazy!" He spent several more minutes experimenting, and digging through the online help. "The only think I've found is that if we roll back the transformations, we might be able to undo everything. But you't have to merge with the Chronivac again, and I don't want to do that."
"Are you still afraid that I'd do bad things to you?" Anya asked. "I promise I wouldn't! We already know that I couldn't do anything you didn't request, but even iv I could, I don't want to do anything bad to you now."
"Well," Jeff considered. She was being nice to him, but would she still be nice if she had all that power? What if she found a way to circumvent that limitation? He discussed his concerns with her.
"Oh, Jeff!" she said, on the verge of tears, "It's true that at first I was only being nice to try to get what I wanted. But you've been nice to me, when you didn't have to be, and I don't want to do anything bad to you."
"Alright," Jeff said. "I'll just have to trust you. Please don't make me regret this.
"I'm temper to install the Chronivac on this laptop, but just in case it matters, I'd better instead transfer you back to the other computer. I'll close you, transfer you over, and open you again there."
"OK," Anya said.
Jeff closed the Anya program. He fished the flash drive back out of the desk drawer and plugged it in. He renamed ANYA.EXE on the flash drive to ANYAOLD.EXE, then copied ANYA.EXE from the laptop onto the flash drive. There wasn't enough space. He sighed, deleted ANYAOLD.EXE, and did the copy again, this time succeeding. He shut down the laptop.
After plugging the flash drive into the desktop computer, with the Chronivac, he copied her over to it. Then he put the flash drive back in the desk drawer. He started the Chronivac application. Once it started up, he opened the log. He right-clicked on the most recent entry, whci was modifying the Anya program to allow her to conjure up furniture in her virtual environment, and selected "roll back". The chron8fpvac asked him to confirm, which he did. The log entry grayed out.
Now he did the same with the prior entry, which digitized the popcorn and soda for her. He confirmed, and it grayed out.
Next was a pretty serious transform, that he was more worried about. He hoped that having her backed up, on both the laptop and a flash drive, would keep her from any harm, well, _further harm_, if this step fucked up. He right clicked the "split Anya from Chronivac" log entry, selected "roll back", and hesitated slighrtly, befor confirming it. A progress bar started slowly crossing the screen. He watched, and watched, impatiently. He wanted to be anywhere else, doing anything else, but couldn't take his eyes off the screen. He was absolutely convinced that something would go wrong,
Finally, the progress bar hit 100%, and said done. He exited the program.