Cindy sat at her control booth, booted feet on the console, watching the events unfold on her monitor. As the two men's bodies interlocked she stuffed popcorn into her mouth, her eyes glued to the screen.
Behind her, Randall from Monitoring Station 7 walked by as he often did. "Hey, Cindy." He suddenly stopped and backpedaled a couple steps, staring at his coworker's screen, the light highlighting his day-old, orange stubble. "What are you..."
Cindy held up a hand and shushed her friend, the sound reverberating off the metal and concrete that composed the walls. "Ssh! It's just getting hot!"
Randall frowned, the action deepening the subtle furrows of his high forehead. "No, seriously, what's going on?"
Cindy pointed to one of the men. It was hard to tell which, they were pretty intertwined by this point. "Okay, so that kid got a unit, and he apparantly got some really cool ideas about genetic recombination, or something like that. Doing a lot of experiments on his dad with the ripple effect on to see what trickled down the family tree, right? Then, he, get this, switches his and his friend's dad's around. When he tries to switch them back there's a blip in the Chronivac's data processor, causing a full-blown command error. That's when thing's get interesting. The two dad's fuse into one, making him and his friends brothers."
Randall peered at the screen, but not too closely. Things were getting a little too spicey for his like. "Uhm, is the other guy his friend-slash-brother?"
"Yeah."
"They, uh, look very close. Was that also part of the 'blip'?"
Cindy shook her head. "No, that part was when he switched their dads around the first time. I think it's an error in the relationship status tracker. It must have shifted a decimal place in their long-term coexistence function and changed their status to lovers. This 4.0 software has a lot of bugs."
Randall turned his eyes up toward the metal ceiling and sighed heavily. "Boy, you said it. I've tracked at least 37 instances of software glitches in just the past month alone! Whatever happened to bug testing and quality control?"
Cindy shifts her shoulders in a half-hearted attempt at a shrug.. "Anything to make a buck, right?"
"But, we're giving these things out for free."
"Then hell if I know. Now will you stop bugging me? This is some good shit, here."
A shiver runs down Randall's spine. "You know, I always feel a little dirty working in Monitoring. I swear, does anybody NOT use these things for sex?"
"Nope." As if to punctuate her lack of care for Randall's opinion, Cindy leaned her head back and attempted to toss a kernel into her opened mouth. It bounced off her petite nose and ended up somewhere in her messy, black hair.
Randall glanced down at Cindy's control console, seeing another pair of red lights beginning to flash. "Well, I hope you don't get too engrossed in, ah, whatever insanity you're watching, but it looks like you've got a couple more software 'blips' to look into."
Cindy immediately pulled her boots off the console and planted them on the floor as she tore her eyes from the screen to look at the offending red blinker. "Oh, fuck me!"
"Yeah, have fun with that." Randall continued down the hall, just as he had began.
Cindy reached over, tapping out a series of commands, pulling up only the latest in a long series of Chronivac software errors her and the rest of Trans Dem Labs had be monitoring. "Oh, fucking hell. Stupid 4.0"