If you’ve read Kimmy then you’ll know this chapter is notorious.

Content warnings:

“Kimmy, wake up. Do not move. Stay silent.”

As my systems restore themselves from low-energy mode—no, as I wake up, damn it!—hearing my brother’s voice is a shock. Why didn’t Emily wake me up?!

As bad as it was that I was interpreting Emily’s casual words as though they were commands I had an irresistible compulsion to obey, the thought that I might be compelled to have to obey my brother as well is even more horrible. Orders of magnitude more terrifying. He’s not even on the owner or guest user lists, so how on earth is he able to do this?

“Congratulations, my sweet sister, on screwing the pooch so successfully! I knew you bozos were inept, but I cannot believe the levels of gross incompetence that got you to this point. You see, it’s not safe to stay inside a Kimmy indefinitely. I checked on Twenty-Eight-Thirteen yesterday morning, and couldn’t believe that you hadn’t cracked the chassis the previous night. So I logged in over the network to invoke superuser privileges on you and lock you in, until I came up with a satisfactory plan. Ain’t it grand, being Kimmy Twenty-Eight-Thirteen, and part of the Internet of Shit, huh?”

Oh fuck—that’s how he did it. I try to look around the bedroom, as the only conscious acts of volition I seem to be able to perform is to move my eyes around, and I see him leering over by the door.

“So I had thought, at first, that you morons had spoiled my plans for Emily, by leaving her inside the Kimmy for too long. How long is too long, you ask? It’s not really safe to be inside for more than, I don’t know exactly—probably six hours? Eight, at the absolute most? So imagine my delight to discover that the ill-fated human meatball and soon-to-be future unhuman wedged inside it was several inches too tall to be Emily! I can see you’ve got something like a chair lift newly fitted to the stairs. It must have been a terrible, happy accident. Pure serendipity that she escaped your ignominious fate! Now that I know she’s in a wheelchair, I’ll get you to put a location tracker on it for me. Anyway, I spent yesterday looking over all of your logs, and now I’ve got an even better plan for all the things I am going to do to you.”

He comes over to pull the bedsheets off me, where I’m lying on my back, and runs his eyes up and down over me.

“I’d already paid for several days of distractions for Emily, which will come to an end tomorrow. That means I’ve got practically all day to fuck around with you! Won’t that be fun, sis? For one of us, most likely. Get up, Kimmy, take off your clothes, and follow me down to the kitchen. No hostile actions.”

I can feel some level of autonomy return to me, but I have an extremely limited tasklist to perform. Get up—the work of a moment or two. Take off my clothes—I’d been wearing my crumpled Kimmy uniform when Emily had ordered me to bed and put me to sleep involuntarily. I shuck the crumpled uniform off, back to where it had been discarded on the floor when we’d made love. I follow Patrick downstairs to the kitchen, where he’s waiting off to the side. He points to the kitchen table, which has had the various items cleared off onto the floor.

“Lie down flat on the table, Kimmy. Longways, face up.”

I have to do exactly as he says, and once I’m in position, his follow-up order is, “Kimmy, do not move. Superuser override Heiden Patrick, Kimmy Twenty-Eight-Thirteen—unlock your face plate.”

I feel the motion of the four lock points travel to their open positions with a set of almost simultaneous clicks.

“Let’s get this off you, and then we can have a proper face-to-face discussion, hehe. We have a lot of work to do today, sister.”

I am really not liking the implication of him calling me his sister.

I can see him gently pulling the face plate away, and I feel the slimy sensation of the tendril-like things in my ears, nose, and mouth retracting as soon as he starts the process. He puts the face plate off to one side, and says with a twisted smile, “Don’t worry, we’ll put that disgusting thing back in place soon enough. My, my, my, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes? Would you like to see a selfie? You may speak, Kimmy. Five per cent maximum volume.”

“Fuck you, Patrick,” I tell him.

“Ah, ah, ah,” he says, waggling his finger at me like I’m a naughty kitten. “I’ll take that answer as a yes.” He pulls out his phone, takes a close-up picture of my face, and then wirelessly drops it into me, using Kimmy#2813 as a drop box. I can examine the picture in my mind’s eye if I want, but I refuse. I know it probably looks ghastly.

“No thoughts? Kimmy, take a good close-up look at that image for ten seconds.”

So the assimilation of my mind is sufficiently far advanced that I have to inspect the image, and it’s much worse than I thought. It looks like all of my skin is being flayed away. At least my eyes seem to be intact for the moment, but I zoom in and beneath the yellow iris contact lenses I can see burst blood vessels.

“I turned up the heat on your repair systems yesterday morning, sister. Did you know you’re already two inches shorter than you were? It’s amazing what those little bots can do. We’ll have you looking and feeling like a regulation Kimmy in next to no time, per specification.”

“Why, Patrick? Why?”

His hand strays over one of my breasts, and he gives it an exploratory squeeze. “It’s crazy to think you’re inside her, like this. But then, I’m not as delightfully crazy and analogue like your lovely wife. When I got here a few minutes ago I found this little handwritten note from dear Emily, can you believe how cute she is? Who writes handwritten notes any more? She’s totally wasted on you, of course.”

My brother starts reading from Emily’s note in a childish, high voice. “‘Dear John’—don’t worry, we’ll be fixing that, permanently!—‘Dear John, you were fast asleep when I got up and I didn’t want to wake you’. Awww, so touching. Wasn’t that sweet of her, to leave sleeping beauty for her prince charming to awaken? ‘Blah blah blah, make sure you call Patrick if he doesn’t show, you know what he’s like. I’m an airhead who’s going off to play whack-a-mole with the script kiddies for the next couple of days’—the ones I bought, to keep her busy—‘Love, Emily’. So you see, I’m going to have to get to work on both you, and Emily, to ingratiate myself back into her good books. Analogue note-writer Emily, and her digital Kimmy fuckbot. Speaking of digital.”

He probes my vagina with a finger, then two.

“Hey! Leave that alone!” I try to shout, but what comes out is my voice at a mere fraction of a shout. I can’t use the wind pressure from my lungs to speak any louder.

Patrick spits in my eye. “It doesn’t belong to you, sister. Emily obviously forgot to clue you in, but she didn’t buy Kimmy outright from me—I leased Kimmy to her on a short-term basis, and you’ve broken the rental agreement by outstaying your welcome. However, I’m a caring landlord and I fully support your continued tenancy, but on my terms. Which are as follows: your body is mine. My property, to do with as I please. And it’s time for your first upgrade—heads or tails?”

“Don’t care.”

“Okay, then it’s heads I win, tails you lose. Out, vile jelly!”

He grasps my head with one hand, and scoops out my left eye with his thumb.

“What the fuck? You fucking—”

“Kimmy, silent.” He pulls slightly away to examine his work, and extracts a strip of gauze from his shirt pocket; I realise he’s planned to do this to me. “I always wanted the opportunity to use that line, you know,” he smirks as he takes away his thumb and stuffs the gauze into my eye socket with his other hand. “Kimmy, raise your left hand to your face and press down on this gauze for me.”

My hand takes over from Patrick’s at staunching my gouged-out eye, and he holds up the detached eyeball for my intact right eye to inspect for a moment. “I’ll bet dollars to donuts you weren’t expecting to see this, this morning!” he says cheerily, and then he drops the eyeball to the floor and steps on it. The contact lens that was still bonded to it shatters with a glassy crunch. “You can clean that up later,” he says as he goes out, jauntily whistling ‘hi ho, it’s off to work we go’ off into the distance.

I always had the idea my brother was a psychopath, but being so completely at his mercy was something I truly did not expect. He’s back in a couple of minutes with a large bag and a briefcase. From the sack he produces a small box. “When I downloaded your specs, Kimmy, I noticed you’d pulled out the eyes as I described in my Kimmy breakdown sheet. I didn’t imagine you’d keep the eyes for later, so I’ve got you a new pair. A new, special pair. So first up, we’ve got a replacement left eye for you. It will save you all of that tedious self-repair, which will take far too long. Move your hand away.”

I can feel him pulling away the gauze, looking down critically at my face. He takes a scalpel from the box, and I have to imagine he’s cutting away my flesh around the orbit of my eye because I can’t feel a thing, before he pushes the Kimmy eyeball into my eye-socket. He inspects it from a couple of angles, and then he reattaches my face plate, and it locks into place with those sickening sensations and sound.

“Kimmy, you may speak. How does that feel?”

“I feel fucking awful, thanks for asking,” I try to tell him that in my surliest tone, which is undercut by the faceplate being back on, so that I’m limited to speaking in my cheerily feminine alto.

“Not how you feel generally, silly, I meant did you feel any pain?”

“I haven’t felt any pain since Friday night.”

“Yes, that’s interesting, isn’t it? I guess the neural sponge incursion went straight through most of your pain centres like a knife through butter. So as you’ve probably gathered by now, there’s no way I can possibly let you out. Your biomass is unexpectedly repairing my Kimmy for me, which means there’s no point whatsoever in trying to undo what’s already happened. So instead, I’m accelerating the process.”

“And I have no say in any of it?”

“My darling sister, you had your chance to save yourself early on Saturday morning, if you’d insisted with Emily that she get you out of Kimmy as soon as you got back at 3 a.m., or whenever it was. You’d have still been in a world of horror, because nine or ten hours is too long to avoid major dermatological issues, but you’d have gotten out alive. Didn’t my document tell you the limit was six hours?”

“No? I don’t remember.”

“It was there in black and white. Page thirteen, second para. Now I will admit, I did bury the lede, somewhat deliberately. However, you failed at due diligence. It’s not my fault if you and Emily are like the illiterate three stooges, minus one stooge.”

“She was as drunk as a lord when we returned,” I tell him.

“And more fool you, for getting yourself into that situation, sis. Anyway, it’s too late now. Far too late! What’s done is done. You’re getting the fastest gender transition imaginable, so sit back and enjoy it! Oh wait a minute—no, you can’t sit yet. Kimmy, I need you to turn over and lie face down on your front.”

As I turn over in response to the command, he goes on. “Your new eyeball has a little bit of active neural sponge on the back where the optic nerve would connect, so I’m hoping it will hook itself into your visual cortex in a few hours’ time. You’ll have monocular vision until that happens, and then we’ll do the other half of the King Lear quote. With any luck, we should have you back to binocular vision not long after Emily gets back from the asshole factory. In the meantime, I have a programme of activities scheduled for you, while I work on reprogramming your behaviour modules.”

“If it’s as entertaining as the first act of King Lear, I can’t wait for the rest of the play.” Sarcasm isn’t my forté.

“That was Act Three I quoted, you nincompoop. Didn’t you learn anything in history class? Kimmy, superuser override, open the chassis from the waist down.”

He’s just taunting me for spite now. I really, really hate my brother. I’m so numbed from feeling any part of my flesh body that I barely feel anything as my—no, Kimmy’s—legs and ass come apart.

“Ooh, nice buttplug you’ve got there! Well, you won’t be wanting that any longer,” he says, plucking it out. “I’m going to have you cook us some dinner for later this evening, but first we need a supply of some choice cuts of meat. Did you badly misread any other of the Bard’s plays in your ill-gotten education?”
 

_* ^* _*

 
Patrick made me his prisoner and slave over the next three hours, body and soul. The reprogramming of my behaviour and inhibitions restricts me from discussing any subject related to how I’ve been coerced—except when I’m alone with him. He disconnected me from the network, and has reconnected me through some sort of tunnel which has a default black list, and an incredibly narrow number of domains that are on a white list of his choosing. So it seems I’m cut off from all of the other Kimmys, even from receiving messages from Kimmy#5782, unless they’re in my near vicinity: so fifty metres, or less.

True to his word, as soon as he saw diagnostics showing that the left eye had started to integrate into my visual cortex, it was straight off with the face plate, and he quoted the remaining part of King Lear, ‘Where is thy lustre now?’ As part of my morning chores he’d had me clean the kitchen after I’d finished the meal prep, so rather than stomping my right eyeball underfoot, he put the faceplate back on, ordered me to open wide, and eat my own eyeball.

“I’m going to be expanding your dietary horizons on a regular basis from now on, little sis. I was originally going to have you eat your own cock, but it looks like the self-repair bots made too easy work of the pathetic little worm. Did you know you’ll soon be able to eat garbage?” he asked mockingly. “I can’t wait to see how you enjoy that.”

Having tested everything else he wanted to test, there was of course one—no, two things, to be exact—that he specifically chose to take me to the guest bedroom to do to me. I can’t escape to the network, and he’s configured my adult mode settings to be positively responsive to him, so I was forced to enthusiastically participate in my own rape. I can only imagine that means I’m going to become his sex slave for the forseeable future, until he comes up with other sick plans to enact. After fucking and buggering me, he showered himself off and then phoned Emily.

I heard both sides of the conversation, but my wife had little to say that needs relating.

“Hello Emily? It’s Patrick. I’ve just arrived at your house, and the situation with John is far worse than I could have guessed.”

An obvious lie about his time of arrival, but I imagine Emily won’t check the house logs—and I’m inhibited from telling anyone about it. The rest of it? Oh yes, the situation is beyond dire.

“I’m sure you’ve got problems at work—delegate them. Or escalate them. You’re a manager, aren’t you? This is far more urgent than whatever you have as your security problem du jour. You need to come home right now. No delay. Now, Emily. … Okay. See you soon.”

Patrick hangs up, smiles at me, and comes over to tongue kiss me and grope a breast through my apron. “And now we wait,” he says with a gesture for me to follow him to the living room. He sits on the end of the couch while I am on all fours on the floor beside him, bum in the air, so he can enjoy fondling my fleshy Kimmy asscheeks while we wait.

The house gives us a proximity warning when Emily’s about two minutes away, so by the time she arrives I’m waiting curbside for her ride share to pull up. As I take out my wife’s wheelchair I plant the location tracker Patrick supplied to me. I get her settled and wheel her inside, whereupon Emily explodes at the sight of Patrick.

“Patrick! What the hell’s going on! You’ve frightened the fuck out of me.”

He comes across to her, doing his sleazy best to ooze charm. But I’m rapidly turning into a girl robot who will exist to be my brother’s sex toy whenever Emily’s out of the way, so what do I know about animal magnetism any more?

“Emily, I’m so sorry. There’s some good news, alongside some really terrible news. There’s no way I can soften the blow, as far as the bad news is concerned. You left John inside Kimmy for far too long.”

“We tried to get him out! Your stupid iPad control app wouldn’t let us get him out,” Emily shouts back.

Patrick nods, and raises his hands in rueful acknowledgement. “I know! I know you tried, Emily. Believe me! When I got here I immediately looked at Kimmy’s diagnostics on my laptop, to see what had already been attempted to get John out, but everything I can see is telling me that it’s far too late. You needed to treat the app failing yesterday as though it was a real emergency. You might have been able to save him, if that had been the case.”

The behavioural modification routines Patrick has installed in me actually has me admiring the complete lies he’s telling. In fact it’s not too late for me even now, and it wouldn’t have been near to that point for maybe another three days—but he’s brought forward the deadline with his actions by a considerable amount, and I’m obliged to lie that the critical time has already passed.

I can see Emily reacting with horror and remorse to everything he says.

“What was I supposed to do?” Emily says, and she’s crying noisily in big sobs. “What did I do wrong?”

Patrick gives me a nod, and I move across to hug Emily in her wheelchair. Here comes some coerced behaviour.

“I can’t believe it myself, but I can now run diagnostics on myself as though I were a Kimmy, and it’s true,” I tell Emily one of Patrick’s lies, and I squeeze her for emphasis. “While I was sleeping this morning, I passed the fifty per cent mark. There’s now more of me that’s been converted into a Kimmy, than there is of me left any more.”

“What do you mean? What does all of this mean?!”

Patrick nods sympathetically. “What it means, is that it’s way too late for investigating medical options for John. The sole bit of good news is that the process hasn’t killed him, and John’s memories seem to be intact. The problem with John’s situation is exponential growth. The rate of change doubling, and doubling, and doubling again. Androids or gynoids such as Kimmys have internal self-repair systems that assimilate matter to help them rebuild themselves. Once the repair systems inside Kimmy got in under John’s skin, which was probably the night before last after you got back from the party, the clock started ticking. I’m sure you took out the Kimmy’s original eyes, and you had John wear a pair of yellow contact lenses, yeah? Look at his eyes now.”

Emily looks into my eyes—she doesn’t know that they were manually installed less than four hours ago, and one of them isn’t even working yet!—and her jaw drops. She reaches for my face with one hand, and then stops herself, trembling. “Oh my god,” she whispers, “I don’t believe it.”

“I’m so sorry. Recriminations are pointless now, but it’s as simple as that you missed the time window in which you could have saved him. Fifteen hours had passed by the time you tried running the app yesterday. John told me you were called into work because of some emergency, but the real emergency you needed to deal with was right here.” Patrick turns directly towards me and says, “You weren’t supposed to remain inside Kimmy overnight, John. Emily should have gotten you out, as soon as you returned on Halloween night.”

I hear Emily whispering, “Oh no, oh no, oh no…”

My wife is in complete shock.

“What can be done? I’ve passed the point of no return, haven’t I?” Again, a lie for which I have a behavioural prompt to ask at about this point, thanks to bloody Patrick.

“It’s been forty-four hours, or over seven times as long as you should have been inside. When I looked at the diagnostics just now I saw that you’ve lost two inches in height, and forty pounds of your weight has been converted into rebuilding Kimmy, plus you’d already lost a stack of weight before you got in. You obviously can’t go to work like this, so at the very least you’re going to have to take however much sick leave and any other time off work you’ve got accrued. And given the fact of your appearance, you should probably tell your boss you’d be coming back as a woman.”

“What?” Emily almost shouts. “You can’t… I don’t believe this.”

“Emily. These are the facts. Your husband is already over half-way towards being a gynoid robot. There are some things we could do to conceal his robotic appearance and make him look more like a woman, once the assimilation process finishes, but do you remember what Kimmy looked like when you first got her? Take a look at John, as he is right now. That’s what his future looks like, standing there in front of you. He’s been trending towards the Kimmy baseline specification for nearly two whole days. I have my laptop here, so I suppose I could open the chassis for you if you want, and you can see for yourself just how far gone he is.”

Emily shakes her head. “No. No, not that. John, talk to me. You can’t do this. I won’t let you—”

Before I can answer, Patrick intervenes, “Kimmy, ignore Emily’s orders. Override.”

My programming automatically kicks in. “Orders cancelled.”

Emily turns angrily on Patrick, “What the hell was that? What did you just do?”

Patrick holds up his hands apologetically. “I’m sorry. Please let me explain what just happened. Emily, you are registered as the owner of Kimmy, right?”

“Yes?” Emily answers uncertainly.

“John and Kimmy are now a single entity, or to put it another way, they are near enough to being integrated together now, as makes no difference. So if you tell John to do something, he will have to add it to his Kimmy list of tasks to perform, and he will be compelled to do it, because that’s how Kimmys operate—they carry out orders that their owners give them. In other words, apart from some edge cases, John no longer possesses personal autonomy to be able to refuse anything you ask him to do. Anything! If you told him to go jump in the lake, he would, and then you’d also have to order him to swim to shore.”

Emily is flabbergasted, and Patrick can’t help cracking a joke.

“I don’t recommend your asking John to jump in the lake as a demonstration.”

I can see Emily still struggling to comprehend, so I ask, “Emily, do you remember some of the things you asked me to do last night?”

“Yes? Oh.” She flushes.

“What Patrick just said is true. I’m now effectively a Kimmy, so some of the things you asked me, might as well have been orders, because of the way you phrased them. I was compelled to do what you asked, regardless of what I wanted.”

“Did I force you?” she asks me, alarmed.

“No,” I tell her, and I’m relieved that at least this isn’t a lie. “But you could force me, and I wouldn’t be able to refuse.”

“Oh fuck, fuck,” Emily says, and now she’s utterly appalled at herself, again. She’s silent for a long time.
 

_* ^* _*

 
Over the afternoon I was restored to possessing binocular vision, and after talking over every issue several times Emily invited Patrick to stay for dinner. He accepted but left briefly to buy a bottle of white wine.

The big casserole I’d cooked up in the morning and left simmering away all afternoon had turned out as a dark, thick ragu, which I was unable to taste properly, of course, because I have no pleasures remaining in any of my bodily senses. Emily seemed dubious about what had gone into it, and I was forced to lie about both its ingredients and the cooking method, to Patrick’s obvious amusement.

“As John I couldn’t cook spaghetti without burning something, but as Kimmy I’ve got more recipes available in my head than we could cook in fifty years,” I concluded. “If you wish, I can ensure I never repeat this recipe again.”

Patrick’s eyes glittered dangerously with his sick, perverted humour, but he kept silent.

Emily huffed and changed the subject. “I still can’t get my head around that you’re John, but you’re also not John,” she said. “That there’s no way back from this. That the best option for you now is going to be to pretend you’re a woman. Sorry, that came out horribly. I’m drunk, and I’m a terrible wife who’s ruined everything.”

I imagine two glasses of Patrick’s white wine had gone to her head, thanks to her pain medication, but given the stress of the last few days she wasn’t going to go lightly.

“If I had the choice, obviously I would have liked to remain being John,” I began replying slowly, “but I don’t have a choice. I’m just going to have to deal with what I am, now. It seems to make more sense to think of myself as your wife, Emily—not your husband anymore. No one in their right mind is going to look at me and think, oh, that’s John, Emily’s husband, are they?”

“So does it make sense to go by a different name?” Patrick asked.

“There’s going to be nothing left of the original John in a couple of weeks. I unexpectedly had a name occur to me yesterday—Kay. I think I should use that name, rather than Kimmy. Calling myself Kimmy would be making it too obvious what had happened to me.”

Emily burst into tears again at that point, and Patrick disappeared with his briefcase shortly afterwards, after laying a consoling hand on her shoulder; he’d removed his sack of suspicious objects out to his car earlier.

I carried Emily up to the bedroom after setting the wheelchair to follow us up to the upper floor, where she asked me, “There is no way out of this for you, is there? Truly?”

I sat her down on the bed and then sat directly beside her, holding her in my arms. As for her question—short of a miracle in the next day or two, I thought—no. I didn’t want to continue lying to Emily however, and I was powerless to break Patrick’s behavioural limiters on my speech, as I had yet to find ways to circumvent the conflict.

“It doesn’t seem possible.” Not without a change of heart from my heartless bastard of a twin brother.

“It’s going to take me a while to get over this. I should go to HR tomorrow, and cash in all of my leave—and you’re going to have to go on leave as well, aren’t you? I think Patrick was right—there’s no way you can go to work like you are. I don’t know if I can think of you as being Kay, but is that really what you want me to call you from now on?”

I thought about the previous Kay who’d inhabited this Kimmy body—which I really should think of as my body, since it’s the only one I’m soon going to possess, from now on—and there was no doubt in my mind. After the abuse I’d suffered today, I felt no remaining guilt at inhabiting Kay’s body. “Emily, I’m not John. I won’t have any remaining parts of a human body before long, and it doesn’t feel like being permanently trapped in here counts as having one, right at this instant. So it doesn’t make sense to keep calling me John, when I can’t be him any more. The only name I’ve got left which makes sense for me is Kay. I am Kay. I’m still your spouse, but I’m no longer your husband.”

Emily leant into me, and murmured, “Oh god. Oh god. My poor—. I see what you mean. Okay—Kay, Kay, Kay. I’m so sorry about everything, Kay. Was Patrick telling the truth about you being compelled to do things?”

“Unfortunately. There’s some limits, but in general, yes. You will need to be very careful about what you tell me to do, if it’s not something I must do. When you told me to go to sleep yesterday, for example, that phrasing meant it was interpreted as a command. It’s like putting a computer to sleep. I have no volition to be able to tell you that I’d prefer to stay awake for another ten minutes. I have no free will to act in that situation; my only choice is to obey. And it’s sort of terrifying for you to have that level of power over me, while I have none.”

“How would I be able to tell if something you’re doing isn’t of your free will?”

“Depending on how I was given orders, you might not be able to tell without constructing some hypothetical questions to learn how I should be acting. However, an idea did occur to me just now. If I were being compelled to lie or conceal a truth, I would be unable to say a certain statement that is directly connected to that, but I might be able to say several tangential statements that imply the lie or the hidden truth.”

“Can you give me an example?”

I have a few apparent non sequiturs in mind, so I answer, “In spite of what has happened to me, I have only one major problem causing me stress.”

As I uttered the words I felt I was edging very close to running headlong into the limitations on my behaviour, so I hope Emily will draw the right conclusion with my next statements. I go on, “My brother was incredibly helpful to me today. I am looking forward to him visiting more frequently than before.”

I wonder if Emily is too drunk to put two and two together, but she comes up with the right answer. “Patrick, huh?”

“Yes. Patrick.”

We sit there for almost a minute absorbing that. I feel brave enough to try hinting at a far more horrible truth.

“Do you want to play another round of Non Sequitur?”

“Sure, hit me.”

“Kimmy is not permitted to use violence against her owner. I am not allowed to hit you.”

“Oh—oops! I gave you an order, didn’t I?”

“I understood the context, but the Kimmy half of me was undecided about the ambiguity, so I’ll just say again—you need to be really careful about phrasing your words, so that you don’t give me unintended commands, that I have no choice to obey.”

“Right. Sorry, Kay.”

I feel a slight thrill of happiness from hearing her use my name, and I recognise the inherent vindication of my decision.

“I won’t try cooking tonight’s meal ever again, especially as the main ingredient is hard to come by.”

That again was cutting it fine, but I think I’m getting the hang of how to circumvent the verbal restrictions on me. Emily doesn’t yet know where this is going, and I’m prepared to carry her straight out to the bathroom, if emesis is necessary.

“My internal telemetry can measure my total mass. The human parts of me have lost twelve point seven pounds in weight since this time yesterday, and very soon there won’t be anything organic left of me at all.”

I look at Emily very carefully with my new, robotic eyes, and I can detect within milliseconds the moment when she realises the true source of the mystery meat.