There was no way this thing actually worked. Jack was pretty sure he'd gotten ripped off. Seriously, one-time body modifications weren't exactly cheap, unless you needed them for something medical, so it was ludicrous to think that unlimited mods were even possible, much less affordable. But then, this app was, like, super illegal, and it wouldn't be illegal if it didn't do anything, right?
He wrote code for a living, he understood its power. Granted, nothing he did was actually touching the routines of Cyberdream; he managed databases for a shipping company, which was no less a real coding job, but nowhere near as glamorous as a data surgeon or anything. That was the thing, though, wasn't it? He understood the theory behind this "Imago Dei" app; it cut out data surgeons by reading the real image (totally legit, legal API), transforming the countless parameters into human-readable output fields (also legit, used for all kinds of things), then breaking the rules by making those outputs editable and linking them to a modification routine. No need for a detailed, medical-grade scan, or access to the genetic structure the real image was based on, or years of training and bunches of red tape, just do everything with what 'Dream was set up to display; don't worry about how you got results, just tell it to get the results.
That rule-breaking would have made the app illegal, but not to this degree. Unlicensed modding was big business, and as long as nobody was getting hurt, it was largely ignored. An app that let you control your real image would have been in that same vein. What made it one of the most locked-down pieces of tech in Cyberdream was that whoever made it didn't limit it to only scanning and modifying the purchaser. If you had this thing, you had the potential to permanently, drastically alter the real image of anyone you could scan. Worse, the scanner you used with it wasn't some big, bulky piece of medical equipment; you could conceal it in your palm with relative ease.
Imago Dei could let an unscrupulous person easily change someone against their will, which meant it not only enabled serious rights violations, it could threaten the social stability of the 'Dream, and if the 'Dream collapsed, humanity was over. This app was unbelievably powerful (if it did what it was supposed to), and incredibly dangerous, and possessing it was absolutely forbidden.
Despite all that, Jack had it.
He'd been unable to stop thinking about it since he heard a news story about it. He had a tendency to obsess about things, not so much that he thought he needed to worry about his mental health or anything, but he would get thoughts stuck in his head that he had to deal with, problems he had to solve before he could rest, intrusive thoughts that just wouldn't quiet down. It helped him with work sometimes, let him really focus, but more often it was trivial things. This time, it was the technological marvel of a single program that could, supposedly, manipulate the unfathomable complexity of Cyberdream in almost limitless fashion.
Fuck it, he couldn't just not try it.
Scanning himself took seconds. It was like registering with a holo, identical actually, since they used the same routines to access a real image. The app on his datapad silently updated, and he could see his name now listed in the interface. Tapping his name opened a cascading tree of parameters. This was mostly standard; some holos would read your image so they could replicate it in their simulation on top of overriding sensory inputs, and clothing retailers used the same thing so they could tell you what sizes you'd fit into. This one just had a lot more detail than some measuring app.
Two main categories, Body and Mind. Mind? This thing could change mental attributes? He tapped on it, and was met with "To Be Implemented". Apparently it couldn't; not surprising, changing what someone looked like in even the most fantastical way was probably a much simpler matter than changing anything about how they thought. Still, it meant whoever made this was planning on altering minds, which was kind of scary and explained more of the whole "banned everywhere forever" thing. Body it was then.
In the top-level Body category, there were a number of overall parameters and numerous breakdowns for more targeted changes. Alright, he figured he could try something innocuous, just to see if it worked as advertised. Jack had red hair, and nobody likes gingers. He could start there. You didn't even need a mod to change your hair color, just dye, so this was about as small a change as he could think of.
Body > Head > Hair > Color: Deep reddish orange
There was a dropdown with various common options, or you could enter something to the text box yourself. The whole app used text descriptions everywhere, every parameter described with words and numbers rather than images. Maybe it was a trade-off, the underlying data so complex and multifaceted that it would have been too computationally expensive to model the effects anywhere except in changes to the real image itself. Gonna take some getting used to; most things had visuals, and even coding made use of graphical interfaces to cut down on the need to deal with billions of lines of characters.
He chose "honey blond" from the dropdown, and tapped Apply. He noticed there were Revert and Revert All options, which was nice from a safety perspective. Assuming this worked, which it probably didn't. He looked in the mirror.
Fuck, the app totally worked.
Jack was suddenly paralyzed by choices. Like, just Hair had more parameters than he would have expected; Color, Length, Curl, Texture...Species?...Prehensile?? Going back up a category, Head had a Species option, too, with a Cascade toggle; that made sense from his database work, it would presumably carry the change to all the child categories. Well, having non-human traits wasn't that unheard of, he supposed. Maybe...Ears? Just to see.
Body > Head > Ears > Species: Wolf
Apply
Ow. Ow! Fucking OW! After a painful moment, it was over. Jack looked in the mirror, and instead of ears on the side of his head, his hair was parted by two honey-blond-furred wolf ears. His hearing was excellent, too, and he could even move them. Okay, kinda cool, not his thing but cool. That was a pretty extraordinary change, a way bigger deal than hair color, but the app had handled it smoothly. Not painlessly, but smoothly.
Revert
Jack gritted his teeth, although it wasn't as bad this time. Well okay, if it got easier, that was even better. Alright, so he could do anything to his body, including things he probably hadn't imagined because whoever coded this up was at least freaky enough to add a prehensile hair option. So what did he want? He hadn't really thought about it; he didn't really have any problems with his body, he'd never dreamed of looking any particular way. He hadn't wanted this for a purpose, he just got stuck on the vague idea of having it and using it in...some unspecified manner. He could stand to go to the gym a little more, he supposed. Unless he could just get the benefits without doing so, of course.
Body > Muscle Tone > 20
Huh. This thing needed a readme or a tutorial or something. Although, this was kind of a weird thing to model, obviously an attribute a body could have but not something with a straightforward measurement. How would he have done it? Set a range, maybe, like 0-100? That would make sense of the number, although slightly insulting sense. What would the field let him enter? 50, yes. 75, yes. Athletic, no. 100, yes. 105, yes. Hmm. Well, if he were doing it, he'd make it like a percentage, going from "couch potato" to "peak performance", but because the app allowed you to do extra-human things, leave the value open-ended. Time to test the theory.
Body > Muscle Tone > 75
Apply
