"Before we do anything involving you making changes to your bodies," Jeff said, "we need to make sure that I can revert any change to you that goes wrong. For instance, if you lose your Chronivac abilities, or maybe even worse things happen."
"How can we do that?" Pris wanted to know.
"Do we need to merge you with a Chronivac, too?" Rachel asked.
"Tempting, but no," Jeff replied. "Do both of your bodies have an emitter?"
"No, just the first one," Rachel said. The rectangular outline appeared on her belly, and the door opened, revealing the Chronivzc emitter inside.
Jeff asked, "Can you duplicate the emitter?"
"I didn't try when I grew my second body," Rachel answered. "I think I can, but I didn't want to mess with it unnecessarily. I woildn't need a second emitter unless I needed to cause a transformation near my second body, and my bodies were separated by more than the emitter range."
"I'm not sure whether we need both of your bodies to have emitters," Jeff said, "but we should have another emitter connected to my PC. When I moved you back from the laptop to the PC, and merged you with the Chronivac again, I saved a copy of your merged program just in case anything went wrong. Right now there's no Chronivac program, or Anya program, on the PC, because you transferred yourself to the doll. I can reload you on the PC, and connect an emitter, so that if anything goes wrong, I still have a Chronivac, and a 'you', to work on fixing things."
"Wow!" said Pris.
"Before, when you said there were two of me, I corrected you, because there is only one e of me, with two bodies," Rachel said. "But if you reload me on the PC, there really will be two of me!"
"I hope you don't mind that," Jeff said. "But I think we have to have a Chronivac in reserve."
"Oh, I agree," said Pris. "But it will be so strange!"
"I'll try to duplicate the emitter," Rachel said. She looked like she was concentrating for a minute. "Thee's a block against the Chronivac making copies of itself, or the emitter, but I'm pretty sure I can fix that."
"Please try to be as close to absolutely sure as you can be, before you try," Jeff said. "If the only emitter we have gets damaged, we're seriously fucked."
"OK, let me study the code more," Pris said.
"This is going to take some serious concentration," Rachel added. "Try not to interrupf while I'm working on it." Both Rachel and Pris lay back down on the bed. As he watched, their eyes rolled up, showing only the whites.
Jeff sat down on his desk chair and waited patiently, hoping that Anya, who had both the Rachel and Pris bodies, was doing OK. He had no way to tell, and per her request, stayed quiet so as to not disturb her concentration. She remained silent, with all four of her eyes rolled up, for quite a while. Eventually Pris said, eyes still rolled up, "I'm making progress, and it's definitely tricky. You were right to caution me to be sure. I've found several possible issues. There is at least one additional failsafe in the code, in case the main block against duplicating the emitter is removed or bypassed."
Rachel said, "I know how to eliminate that failsafe, but I'm double checking whether doing that might cause any problems. This may take quite a while longer. You might want to leave me alone to work on it, so that you can do something else in the mean time. I'll come get you when I have a definite answer."
"Thank you," said Jeff. "I'll go downstairs and leave you to it." He was on tenterhooks, wanting to know whether duplicating the emitter was possible, without causing any problems for Anya. He didn't feel like he could think about anything else, but to pass the time, hezxd like to play a game on his computer. Unfortunately that might disturb Anyaz's concentration. It's too bad that his laptop was no good for gaming.
Wait, he thought. Since I upgraded the laptop to make Anya more comfortable in it, it probably IS well suited for games now! He took teh laptop and charger, and a game from his bookcase, and headed downstairs.