Lizzie wasn't really that interested in the gym herself. After a few minutes of trying some basketball, which didn't work too well considering her height, she excused herself. Wondering if she should walk home--she could always use the machine to make Erica forget she had ever been there--she looked around and her eyes lingered on a phone book lying on a desk.
A thought came to her and she looked up Master PC Dealers.
Surprisingly, there was a phone number there. She dialed it on her cell phone.
"Hello," said a male voice on the other end. "I'm Jon from the magic shop. Customer service department. Can I help you with something?"
"I'm Lizzie," she said. "I didn't know if I could call you but I guess I did."
"Is there some product you've been having trouble with?"
"Come on! If you're really from a magic shop, you should know my name and why I'm calling and all that, right?"
"Only if I look for it, but you're right, I did watch a bit. But what seems to be the problem?"
"Well, uhh... I can tell you if I used someone else's computer, right?"
"Of course you can."
"And you don't care what I do with it?"
"A product is a product."
"Well, okay, first I used it on my brother."
"And you made him a girl?" replied Jon.
"Yeah. See, you do know those things if you're from a magic shop. First I wanted someone who'd be like a brother and a sister at the same time. Well, I wanted her to do girl things with me like talk about cute boys and go shopping with me. It didn't work. She didn't want to do either of those!"
"It worked," said Jon. "She did want to talk about cute boys--because she liked to talk to you, not because she was attracted to them. And she didn't think of shopping as a girl thing, so making her like girl things didn't change that."
"I know, I fixed it! But then I wanted her to be convincing when dressed as a guy and she wants to buy this studded leather purse! No guy would wear that!"
"You figured that one out too," said Jon. "She didn't disguise herself all the time, the purse was for when she wasn't disguised."
"Yeah, but it still isn't working. I said she agreed to pretend to be my boyfriend, and the first thing she does, we go out somewhere where everyone knows she isn't my boyfriend. And I said she'd enjoy pretending, and she didn't."
"Well, you are going out."
"But it isn't what I said. And I also said she's convincing when she's disguised as a boy. So she tells me that her skin's too smooth and she doesn't have a beard and people call her a dyke. She isn't convincing at all."
"You... Hmm." said Jon.
"She also says she'd get more dates if she looked like a girl, meaning she wants dates. I just made her a lesbian, why would she want guy dates?"
"Well, she might want to date lesbians who like femme girls, but I see your point," said Jon. "You're telling me the Master PC isn't working very well. Let me see... What kind of phone are you using?"
"Er, a Genom 2032 model."
"I think that has enough memory."
Suddenly a loud shrieking sound came through the phone, hurting Lizzie's ear. She pulled the phone away from her ear and nearly dropped it. A second later, she could hear someone yelling through the phone--"It's okay now!"
Lizzie raised the phone again. "Mr. Jon?" she asked.
"You're right," replied Jon. "There have been a lot of revisions of the software. The older software wasn't wrong--it did work--but it sometimes didn't do things in the way you meant. And I wasn't specific enough when I wished one up, so I got the older version. People shouldn't have to become Master PC lawyers the same way I had to become a wish lawyer, so I've uploaded a new version to your phone. This one will, I promise, make exactly the changes you tell it to, in the way you want it to."
"How can you do that?" asked Lizzie. "And what's that about the wishes?"
"Magic, of course! And forget what I said about wishes. Anyway, it's really simple. Turn on your phone and enter the password. When you need to type in text, the top of the phone magically turns into a touchscreen, or you could use voice commands. Voice commands only happen on purpose, never by accident--I learned my lesson from the stone. And don't worry that it was your brother's computer. You reported the bug, so I'm giving you the new version."
The phone turned itself off, and when Lizzie turned it on again, she found that entering the password made the phone's open cover glow--it really was a touchscreen now!
Her first order of business, of course, was to do what she had been trying to do, but which the program kept messing up. She brought up Erica's profile and made sure that Erica really was convincing as a guy. Then she decided to do a few other things....
