Patrick made a show of thought, after which he said, “Hmmm...I’m not sure...you have any ideas?”
“Why do you think I was asssking what you wanted to do?” asked Jack, smirking slightly. He thought about some of the possibilities before asking, “Hey...thisss thing can do inanimate changesss, right?” His best friend swiveled his head around to check the program. Patrick found the inanimate button and turned his head back around. “Yeah, it can,” Pat said, blinking up a couple of times. “What’d you have in mind?”
“Well,” Jack said, “I really want to tessst the- oh, God dammit, Pat could I pleassse have my normal mouth back? Thissss hisssssing is sssstarting to drive me nutssss.” Pat smirked and turned to face the computer again. He pulled up Jack’s virtual model and clicked on the button next to it that said “undo previous changes”. A list of the changes he had done to Jack appeared on the screen. He undid the forked tongue and the fangs, but kept the ability for Jack to unhinge his jaw.
When all that was done, he clicked the “save changes” button. Pat swivels his head back towards his friend and says, “There, that should do it.” Jack nodded, examining his now (almost) normal mouth in the mirror on the back of Patrick’s door. “Yeah, that did do it. Thanks. Now...where was I?”
“You wanted to test something?”
“Oh yeah,” Jack said. “What I was saying was that I really wanted to test the limits of this thing, so I came up with a ‘go big or go home’ kind of transformation.” He walked over to his friend’s computer. “Could you get out of the chair for a second?” Jack asked his tailed friend. Pat turned his head back to the front and got up out of the chair. Jack sat down, brought up his virtual models and clicked on the “inanimate” button. A very long list of options appeared on the screen. Jack hit CTRL+F and typed the word “Robotics” into the text box that appeared. Luckily for him, there was only one instance of the word on the list. He clicked the “robotics” option and another, much smaller list of options appeared. The options listed were “full” and “partial”. When he clicked the “full” option, a bunch of different robot designs came up on the screen. “Robots?” Jack heard his friend say from behind him. The former nodded and said, “Yeah. Robots.”
“That’s your idea of ‘go big or go home’?” An anticipatory smile crossed Pat’s face. “Count me in.” Jack nodded, clicking on a template that he liked as a sideways smile crossed his face. His virtual model changed to match the template he had selected. It was jet black with a sleek, shiny body. Its arms and legs mimicked that of a muscular human, and so did its hands, but with the exception of the knuckles, which were servos. Its feet, however, were all one piece and were only vaguely foot-shaped. Its head looked like it was wearing a velodrome race helmet, except it was all one piece. Its eyes were a bright electric blue and its mouth was just a speaker with a light behind it that was the same color as its eyes. Extending from the top of its head was a six-inch antenna with a bright red blinking light on top. On its chest was a square-shaped panel that was a bright electric blue like its eyes and mouth. There was also one on it's left forearm except it was rectangular.
Jack admired his choice of form and brought up Patrick's virtual model. He navigated to the robotics page and looked over at his best friend. "What'll your model be?" he asked Patrick. Pat looked over his options and then pointed at one at the very top. "That one right there," he said. Jack looked at his friend's choice and saw that all it was was a mechanical replica of Pat with bright red, perfectly circular lights for eyes and an antenna similar to his own model's coming out of its head. It even had a segmented tail. Jack selected it and moved back to the main screen. He clicked in a text box labeled "additional parameters" and wrote:
Upon the beginning of the transformation, our pain receptors will shut down and it will be as if we are on autopilot. Anyway, the two of us will roboticize while standing in the middle of the room. Once the process is completed, we will be on reserve power and in need of recharging. We will lie down on Pat's bed. It will split in half lengthwise and the two halves will stand up, turning into charging stations for the two of us. When that happens, we will immediately go into standby mode and start charging. My charging port is at the small of my back and Pat's will be where his anus used to be. Our master/creator will be Pat's 17-year-old brother Michael, who will be a mechanical genius with a robotic arm and Pat's room will be his lab for the duration of the change. We can heal ourselves when it comes to minor damage, but when it comes to serious damage or a software problem, Mike will fix us. Also, we can either go about our required tasks with no manual input from Mike or from a remote control that he has for each of us, which is why Pat and I both have an antenna. When Mike is not using us, we will either have some semblance of free will (but our thinking will be logic based instead of emotionally based. In fact, we will not have any emotions and while transformed we will not be able to grasp the concept of human emotion) or we will be in our charging stations in standby mode.
Jack looked over what he had written, smirking when he read the part about Pat's charging port being his former asshole. “Whadda ya think?” Jack asked Pat. Pat looked over what his best friend had written and facepalmed, chuckling exasperatedly, when he came across the part about his charging port being his asshole. “You’re such a fucking moron,” Pat said. Jack chuckled and said, “you want me to change it?” Pat shook his head. “No,” he said, “keep it. It’ll give Mike something to laugh at.”
“Alright then,” Jack said. He set the duration of the change for 3 weeks, set the awareness so that nobody would be aware, and moved the cursor over to "save all changes".