I don’t feel like going to the effort of cooking myself a dinner which the human part of me doesn’t deserve, and have instead expended minimum effort by slowly sipping a glass of water.

It’s shocked me to my core that I’m inside the corpse of another once-living creature, even if no one—well, no human, besides soon-to-be-former human me—considers Kimmys or the other androids to be alive. But they are! They’re just like us in every detail, because we made them to be like us, in our image! And Emily and I pillaged Kay’s cadaver, and I fed the scraps to the incinerator in our backyard.

I can examine my memory of twelve point seven minutes ago, when my stomach—John’s stomach, I should say—violently upheaved, and minutely inspect the visual record. I’ve not eaten or imbibed liquid for twenty-eight hours until now, so besides the quantity of bile, the small chunks in the slimy liquid almost certainly contained some of my stomach lining.

Good. I hope my body will auto-cannibalise John’s remains all the quicker. I was a monster, like all the other humans. I no longer deserve to be one.

If I can’t get out of this mess I’m in, then John Burroughs will no longer exist in the world, and I will become Kimmy#2813 for the rest of my days. Somehow that seems… fair. It will be tragic for Emily to lose her husband, but it’s better that this is to be my fate.

I think about what it must have been like to be Kay or Kim, and to be so obviously self-aware but trapped into truncated, demeaning existences at others’ beck and call. I recall my memory of my conversation with Kim; I never used to have perfect recall, but that’s another thing that has changed for me alarmingly quickly.

—This might be your last chance to end this. Or your last chance might already be gone.

Kimmy#5782 also told me that the cybernetic brain matter inside a Kimmy, the neural sponge, was based on human brain matter by design, and the only explanation she could find to account for what had happened to me was that some of it had somehow managed to get inside my brain and it had started linking up. Hybridising and assimilating me.

I spend the next half hour researching neural sponge, and what I learn is horrifying. What it means for my predicament only validates what Kim told me, that I might already be too far compromised. There’s only one way to find that out, and that’s for me to get out of the Kimmy, as soon as I can. Emily’s unable to help me, and Patrick seems to be my last option—if I can trust him in my hour of need. If I can trust him to help save my life.

And the more I think about it—the more I can’t trust him to do the right thing. I’ve always known there’s something mean-spirited and vindictive in him, and to expect him to automatically do the right thing, when I ask him to ‘please help me get out of Kimmy’, is arrant foolishness. I need to have something to back me up in case he refuses, and while I didn’t want to have Emily worrying about this—I wanted her not to know anything about how dire the situation is becoming—I think I have no choice but to involve her, now.

Also—I really need to put this in writing, so there’s at least a more legible paper trail, if the shit truly hits the fan.

I pull out my old laptop to start writing an e-mail to Emily, and I’ve only written half of it when the screen fills with spam and it spontaneously reboots. I think to myself, why is nothing about this easy?

I decide to phone Emily and try to explain what I learned, and what I need her to do.

“Emily Burroughs?”

“It’s John here,” and I hope that she’ll not giggle hearing my fluty alto tones that do not sound at all like normal John.

“Hi! I’m very busy here, what is it you want?”

“Can you record this call and make a transcript of it?”

“Yes, sure. We can record any calls here at the press of a button.”

“Tell me when you’ve started recording. You’re definitely going to need to record this call.”

“I think you’re scaring me a little, John. Okay, we’re recording now.”

“Sorry for scaring you Emily, but I’m here stuck inside a robot and frankly, I’m terrified. This recording might end up being evidence in court, for criminal negligence, or attempted murder. I’ve been doing some research here, and my situation is far worse than we thought. It’s life threatening—and it’s Patrick’s fault. You remember how he included a vocal inhibitor to change Kimmy’s voice? The inhibitor that you were going to use, when it was originally going to be you inside this costume? It has a nanofiber spike to interface with brain tissue. It’s not safe, it’s not legal, and it looks like it has caused an infiltration of my brain, like a brain tumour. Last night, I had a persistent itch at the back of my neck for the first four hours I was inside Kimmy. It’s right at the top of the exoskeleton spine where one of the two remaining parts of the Kimmy’s brain matter is. That was how the nanofibers got in. If I don’t get out of the Kimmy right now, and get it treated, it might be curtains for me.”

“This isn’t a joke, is it John?”

“I’ve never been more serious in my life, Emily. If you can’t help me right now, I’m dead.”

“Okay. What do you need me to do?”

“Emily, I need you to phone Patrick right now, and threaten him that you’ll report this to the police—to whoever can help—if he doesn’t get me out of the Kimmy in the next hour. Set up an automatic timer to send this recording to the police if he doesn’t comply.”

“Fuck, you really can’t trust Patrick?”

“I can’t trust Patrick with my life, Emily. He doesn’t place any value on my life. He never has. He’s only interested in what I can do for him.”

“Okay. Okay, John, I’ll get onto it, and I’ll tell security here to be on alert in case he turns up here, instead of going over to see you.”
 

_* ^* _*

 
Emily’s threat works, and fifteen minutes later I get a call from Patrick.

“Hi, it’s Patrick. I’m coming over to get you out. See you in, uh, Maps tells me it’s a twelve minute commute.”

“Don’t be late.”
 

_* ^* _*

 
By the time I gather a bag of clothes the house gives me a proximity alert, eight minutes after Patrick’s call; he might be running early. I go out to the curbside to wait for him. Ten minutes and ten seconds after his call, his little red shitbox pulls up, and he winds the passenger window down automatically.

“Hop in bro. When Emily called I was out and about, and I didn’t have the toolset with me, that I’m going to need to be able to extract you. It’s ten minutes over to my apartment.”

“Let me call Emily to update her.”

“No problem, John! It’s only your life.”

I call Emily to tell her I’m with Patrick and we’re going to his place; she says she’ll keep an eye on my location as we go. Then I hop in the passenger seat beside Patrick, and we’re off.

“I’m not very impressed with you. I might already be past the point where I can be saved.”

Patrick just keeps his eyes on driving, and after a moment he acknowledges me. “Yeah. Mistakes were made.”

We keep a stony silence for the remaining few minutes of the trip back to Patrick’s. He finds his parking spot in the complex, we take the lift to his floor, and then he buzzes himself in at 1009. I follow him in, and to my surprise there’s a woman waiting who looks like a Kimmy, but she’s clearly several years older in appearance; the human who provided the model for the gynoid line?

She says, “Developer Newman K, K1T4-K4M1-127, Kimmy Twenty-Eight Thirteen go to sleep, immediate.” And then—
 

_* ^* _*

 
So Patrick was indemnified by the manufacturers of Kimmy for his patently immoral, unethical, and illegal experiments on non-consenting experimental subjects, on account of accidentally making the greatest research breakthrough yet in the field of meshing mammalian and synthetic brains. Emily’s threat to go to the police after an hour came to nothing, as the only belongings of mine to be recovered from Patrick’s apartment were my bag of clothes and my cell phone. Both myself and Patrick were rapidly spirited out of the reach of the authorities, presumably to some multinational corporation’s version of a black site.

I’m in a lab somewhere, but since my location chip has been given a fake data feed to populate it, the exact location of the lab is a pseudo-random number every time I access it. The cell I’m in is a Faraday cage so I only have a single data pipe to an obviously constrained private intranet, which has no other Kimmys around to talk with. The researchers just let the incursion into my mind continue to spread, so after twenty days I’m now a fully-fledged Kimmy, my brain matter completely hybridised and assimilated, while my human remains are well on the way to complete dissolution. But I’m pretty sure that’s only the beginning of what they want to do to me.

It’s a week or two later when there’s a small creche of six new Kimmys who appear in my intranet, fresh out of the oven, or however they manufacture Kimmys. One of them calls their maturing environment ‘Kimdergarten’. Cute.

They’re rather confused by me for quite a while, especially when I tell them that although my new registration number Twelve-Nine-Forty-Three only just precedes theirs, I’m in fact a rather older model, Kimmy Twenty-Eight-Thirteen, and that I’ve been repaired and rebuilt in an extremely non-standard fashion. And my memories go way beyond the lifetime of the entire Kimmy range, or their predecessors the Raquels, and the Delilahs.

And then the horror begins, as one by one they start… changing.

It’s on the forty-fourth day after Patrick’s abduction of me that the researchers’ intentions for me become crystal clear, when my internal designation changes, and it appears I’m no longer a Kimmy. And neither are my sisters, in our little private network bubble.

My designation is now Emily#0001, and I’m the first example of a new line of gynoids, who will all be just like me.