Rae barely had time to sleep when the doorbell rang. She ignored it
for the first time, since she was in bed and her flatmates most
likely not. Also, she didn't expect anyone to come over when he
could as well have met her in the IRC. However as it was ringing for
the second time, she put on a bathroom and went to the door. "UPS,
package for Rae Mueller.", said a deliveryman in the typical brown
colors.
"That'd be me." She replied and signed her name on the pad. She did
not expect anything but with Christmas time approaching, maybe some
relative rememberred her. In her completely chaotic room, she opened
the package. Inside was a CD, a strange device, which connected to
the serial port of a computer and a letter. She looked into the
letter first. She was surprised to read that the company was
apparently asking for help beta-testing a program called Chronivac
Version 4.0 for HURD. 'Well, this explains how I got this weird
program' she thought. She was one of the few users of this esoteric
Operating System in this state. She disconnected one of her older
computers from her LAN, put the CD in and decided to test it out.
After a surprisingly easy installation (at least by her standards as
OS-enthusiast), she started it.
When it started, suddenly a progress bar appeared, which
said 'scanning environment'. Rae stared at it with growing
interest. 'Maybe it was not good to subject the program to this
antedeluvian Pentium 1' she pondered, 'but then, it did not state
minimum system requirements...'. When it finished, a new window
appeared, showing the room from the place where the strange device,
which she first thought was a dongle but now suspected to be a
digital camera was located. Reading up on the function of the
program, she was surprised. Apparently, it was able to change living
beings in various ways, both physically and mentally. even though
she thought the idea was bogus, she was rather confused that the
program showed the people in her flat in a selection of changee, as
well as some people from the flats below or above, she barely knew.
She definitely had to test it, but on whom?