To Kimmeh, the best Kimmy of my acquaintance
I am a bad, or difficult author—sometimes I set puzzles for my readers, expecting them to remember other relevant works and work out what is going on—and why.
In this case, the other relevant work is Kimmy.
My chapter titles match the equivalent chapter titles in Kimmy—which is where my stories diverge.
This is the reason behind the slightly eccentric chapter numbering—I’m not going to use every chapter of Kimmy as a jumping-off point. The anthology currently contains seventeen stories up to and including chapter One Hundred and Fifty-six.
So my chapter One diverges right from the beginning.
To read Two in full context, you should read chapter One of Kimmy, then my chapter Two.
Similarly you should have read up to chapter Three of Kimmy before reading my chapter Four; all of the events in Kimmy up to chapter Four inform the scenario of my chapter Five, and so on, etc. usw.
I already have some horrible ideas for ‘Part Two’. If you’ve read Alyson’s novel I’m sure it won’t require too much deduction to work out one of them. I did have some additional chapters ear-marked as points of departure, but the collection currently has at least one story from each individual part of Kimmy, up to Part Ten. Whether these get written will depend on whether I have time, and a compelling alternate narrative to give voice to.
One last thought—although you should have read Kimmy because it is amazing—I’m not entirely sure whether you need to have, in order to work out what is happening in this anthology? Although these stories depart from Alyson’s novel to quite marked degrees, going off on wildly differing tangents, I think the common setting will give enough of a clue as to the ongoing through-line of the novel’s plot, though obviously you’ll get a lot more out of these stories if you know the source material I’m riffing on.
Part One
One
I look at the lifeless robot lying on our kitchen table, and after taking in the yellow tape with bold markings of MALFUNCTIONING UNIT—DO NOT OPERATE and thinking for about two seconds, I believe my dear wife has lost her marbles this time.
I ask her, “Please don’t tell me that is what I think it is.”
Emily is looking at me with a huge grin, saying, “It’s a Halloween costume, silly! What do you think?”
I already had guessed that much, as well as speculating that on our salaries, or certainly on Emily’s much larger salary than my own, there’s not even a slight possibility she’s bought it outright. Instead, she’s probably acquired it heavily discounted from my brother, who works for that company which makes these things, which given his past history is several red flags rolled up in one giant red flag. “I think it’s a huge mistake—I’ll revise what I asked before. Please don’t tell me you paid a small fortune to get this from Patrick?”
Emily tries to look at me as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, and says, “It was very heavily marked down.”
I have to let her down gently, and I sigh. “But Patrick sold it to you, right?”
“He might have?” she replies, trying to sound off-hand.
“We’ll have to check it for booby traps then. So, please tell me how this is going to work,” I ask, and Emily fills me in on the entire prank, which would involve her being inside the robot—sorry, gynoid—that would comically malfunction at some point during the party, requiring me as a service technician to come along, and ‘fix’.
Knowing my disreputable twin brother, there’s got to be some weird stuff going on with the gynoid, and I’m really unimpressed with Emily organising this delivery without having a word with me before now; my brother simply can’t be trusted around women, and Emily shouldn’t have contacted him without me being included in the loop. Along with a malfunctioning Kimmy, we’ve also received detailed instructions from Patrick on how to strip the insides of the gynoid; in addition, an iPad with a cracked version of the usual control suite for operating the robot—that especially does notinspire confidence—and instructions for 3D printing a cage to protect Emily’s face and eyes, which will be pressing up directly against the gynoid’s face plate.
“There’s a neural probe in all this?” I ask in alarm some minutes later, as I’m reading through Patrick’s documentation. “Why on earth would he need to include that?”
“Oh, that’s in order to change how my voice will sound, when I’m in the costume,” Emily says. “It only changes how your vocal cords respond.”
“Yes, but that means this probe will have a direct interface with your brain. These things get used for all sorts of horrible pranks because they can be easily reprogrammed—how do you know that’s the only behavioural change he’s designed the probe to do?”
Emily’s face falls. “He wouldn’t have done something malicious like that, surely? I’m his sister-in-law.”
“I’m sorry to be so negative about my own flesh-and-blood, but I wouldn’t put it past him. I’ve learned the hard way that he can’t be trusted around women.”
Emily has an idea. “Is there a way we could find out how the neural probe’s been programmed?”
“There should be. I just don’t trust my brother further than I could kick him, or to give us an honest answer if we asked him.”
* * *
So it ended up costing us a couple of hundred dollars extra to loan the equipment used for manipulating neural probes, and to our huge surprise—or perhaps Emily’s surprise, anyway—the neural probe was not only set to change Emily’s vocal response. It’s hard to tell exactly what the other behavioural changes were going to do, because they were far more complicated than the small number needed for the vocal modifications; but we learned a valuable lesson about trusting my brother.
I convinced Emily to go without the neural probe at all, just using her natural speaking voice when play acting as the gynoid, named Kimmy. Although it was creepy beyond words getting her into the costume—and I felt strangely queasy about using the cracked or hacked control interface for altering how Emily behaved when she was inside—the Halloween party went hilariously.
Emily got into character, though I could easily tell which of the several Kimmy gynoids was her, as soon as I asked them questions; so when she did the slapstick routine immediately after some guy nearly choked on an olive, I arrived on the scene as the service technician to fix the malfunction. Emily did another couple of pranks, one of which almost didn’t come off as funny, so at that point I called quits on the game and did the big reveal, by taking off her face plate for a minute, before putting it back on and rebooting Emily.
Emily’s colleagues were hugely impressed by her commitment—the calipers pulling back her eyelids, which along with the yellow iris contact lenses looked beyond metal—as well as her attention to detail, while I got the sense that we’d brought our costume double act to an impressively high, new level, especially when we lined up in the costume parade after desserts had been served, and won the award for Best Costumes. Bigger and brighter things might be in the wings for her.
