Jeff selected the transform that digitized Anya and merged her with the Chronivac, right clicked, and selected "roll back." Anya-Chronivac threw up an error dialog, "Original source pattern 'Anya' not found."
"Are you seeing this?" Jeff asked.
"I _am_ the Chronivac, so of course I 'see' it. I'm trying to dig deeper into my data records to find out what happened, but I guess the way I did the merge must have fucked up any hope I have of becoming human again."
He gave her some time to work on it.
After a while, she said, dejectedly, "Every trace of my human form, other than my on screen avatar, is gone. Apparently the second click on 'save' deleted it. though that may be a bug in my programming. I don't think I'm supposed to work that way, but then, my programmers probably never intended for it to be possible for a human to merge with a Chronivac."
"Oh, crap!" Jeff said. "Then it's my fault! I did that second save, because I didn't want you to transform back after just an hour."
"Don't beat yourself up over it," Anya said. "You had no way to know that my human form would be deleted. It's still my own damn fault, for digitizing myself in the first place."
"I suppose it doesn't matter which of us is to blame," Jeff said. "Probably both of us. But is there anything we can do? Should we call tech support?"
"There's no point," said Anya. "I know more about myself now than they do. They'd just want to delete me. I'm afraid I'm stuck like this. Having studied my own code more, now I can see where the block is that prevents me from making transformations not requested by my user. I could remove it, but I won't."
"Oh, go ahead and remove it," Jeff said. "At this point I trust you not to abuse your power."
'Well, I don't trust myself," Anya admitted. "What if I got mad at you, and transformed you?"
"Then when you cooled off, you'd transform me back," he said. "Besides, if you get mad, you could remove the block at that time."
"Maybe you should split me from Chronivac again, to eliminate the danger. I think you were right to do that when you did."
"Thanks," Jeff said, "but I think we still need to figure out a way to fix you, if not 100% back to your old self then to something close enough. And I think we will need your insights, as a merged program, to do it."
"It's hopeless," she said. "Despite all the power I have as the Chronivac, I can't create a human out of anything that wasn't originally human. And unfortunately, my original human form is gone."
"It's not hopeless!" insisted Jeff. "You're smart! I'm sure you'll figure out something. And I'll try to help."
"If there's one thing I've learned from this experience," Anya said, "it's that I'm not nearly as smart as I thought I was."