Jeff's life for the next couple of months becomes much like it was before. TransDem's modifications ensured that the previous issues with the distance were a thing of the past, so now the entire world was aware of, and unconcerned by, the existence of a Dog-boy.
Once a week, though, Jeff would be taken by Mark, or by another friend, to a nearby TV studio, where Jeff would record a new ad for TransDem. His favourite was the one they shot in the adjacent park; Jeff got to play fetch and catch for most of the day, until they got just the right shot.
The ads were having an impact, too; people were expressing an interest in becoming pets. After the third ad was filmed, Larry informed Mark and Jeff that there had been 50 applicants already, and TransDem had set up a dedicated side-business to support those who applied. The requirements were that there had to be both an owner and a pet in the application, that there be no sexual association between the two prior to application, and that the owner must have had experience owning a pet. Also, they set a lower limit on applicants' ages, so that the prospective pet had to be at least 13, and those under the age of 18 had to have parental approval; that last part was established by a rapid law put in place by various governments around the world.
It was the day of the seventh ad that Jeff was introduced to another pet. Caroline had only been a pet for a couple of days, and was still getting her bearings somewhat. Jeff noticed that Caroline kept subtly trying to adjust her clothes to cover her chest and crotch more, although she showed no signs of actually being uncomfortable with them on display as they were. Caroline's owner, her brother Alan, was only 15, and was still shocked that her sister wanted to become a pet, although he wanted the best for her, and always wanted a real pet (his pet mouse, although treated well, just wasn't the same).
Caroline, like Jeff, had a dog-like personality. Jeff had heard that some pets (by this time, already in the thousands) chose other personalities, with cats and horses being the more common choices. Larry had brought her in so that they could do an ad showing two dog-people interacting. However, they ran into a slight problem.
Jeff was erect the moment he saw Caroline. And despite knowing that he shouldn't, Jeff couldn't help but flirt excessively with her, and Caroline was all too attentive to it. Mark and Alan had to keep both on a tight leash to keep them from jumping each other. Larry quickly called off the shoot, and instead filmed two separate commercials; Caroline was remarkably photogenic.
Larry called Mark a couple of weeks later, and asked to be put on speaker-phone, so Jeff could hear, too. Larry then explained that the sexual incident with Caroline had given TransDem researchers an idea. Apparently, there were two problems that had arisen - first, sexuality between pets had become a problem, especially when they were of different personalities. Second, the issue of breeding had been raised. And in coming up with a solution to these problems, TransDem had thought of a new modification. They wanted Jeff to sign off on it, being the spokesperson for both TransDem and pet-people. And so, Jeff and Mark were asked to come in to the head office.
Jeff found himself sitting in an office emblazoned with the TransDem logo, reading through the details of the new modification. TransDem's idea was to make small genetic modifications to the various pet-people. These modifications would make them slightly more like their respective pets. The key difference was that sexual behaviour would be made to be similar to the pets physically as well as psychologically. Other changes would enable pets to also get jobs more suited to their chosen personality. Jeff liked this, as his engineering studies were not nearly as interesting to him, being a pet, as they had been prior to his change, but it was where his aptitude was.
Intelligence and related traits would not be affected, but physical adjustments would be made to provide both variety and genetic similarity. The researchers had even found a way to create a small chance that natural human births would create a new pet-person, rather than a normal human. Pet-people would actually be mostly incompatible with humans; they couldn't quite remove the possibility of crossbreeding with humans, but it was far lower. Cross-breeding with other species types, such as between a dog- and cat-person, would not work at all, however.
Jeff had two sets of decisions to make. The first was whether this plan was something he supported. The second was that, if he went ahead with it, what variations did he want?