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 and clicked on the tab labeled with his name. Up popped his virtual model and he absentmindedly spun it around a couple times. Jack then moved the cursor to the left side of the screen and clicked the button that said "OTHER". Up popped a long list of options including everything from single-celled protists to Cerberus, the three-headed guardian of the underworld from Greek mythology. He scrolled down the list until his eyes alighted on the option he wanted: the "Alien" option. "Please tell me you don't mean Ridley Scott's alien," Pat said, looking over his best friend's shoulder. Jack shook his head and replied, "No, are you kidding? That just SCREAMS 'disaster waiting to happen'."
"Good," Pat said.
Jack clicked the alien option and up came another list of various alien races. Remembering what he thought aliens looked like when he was a kid, he clicked the "MARTIAN" option. The list went away and his virtual model changed drastically. It had shrunk about a foot (Jack saw that his height field had changed from 5'11.5" to an even 5 feet) and turned completely gray. Its head was large and bulbous and completely bald. It had two abnormally large, jet black eyes that looked like they were made of hematite crystal. Its nose had disappeared and had been replaced by two little holes a little above its large, lipless mouth. Its ears had disappeared and by a single, fleshy antenna the same gray as the rest of its body grew out of its head. Its neck was long and skinnier than a human's. Jack counted three voice boxes. Its arms were long and thin and ended in four-digit hands. Its legs were the same as its arms and its both its feet were one solid mass with no toes to speak of. Jack also saw that it lacked genitals of any kind. Also, it was wearing a skin-tight silver space suit made of a strange shiny material.
Jack spun the model around a couple times, a slight smile of anticipation on his face. He clicked in the text box marked "ADDITIONAL INFORMATION" and wrote:
I will speak an alien language that no human will be able to understand, but I'll be able to understand humans. To make up for this, Pat will suddenly be in possession of a translation computer so that he'll be able to understand what I'm saying. I will be able to control people's brainwaves by emitting a special frequency from my antenna. So that they will be able to obey my commands when in that state, this will be the only time that a human will be able to understand my language. My cell phone will turn into a handheld computer with several incredibly advanced functions, including the chronivac. Appropriate memories will manifest so that I know what I'm doing in my new form.
Jack looked at what he wrote. It wasn't much, but he'd be able to go back and edit it later. He set the duration of the transformation for three days and made only himself and Pat aware of the change. He clicked "SAVE ALL CHANGES" and waited for the changes to begin...