[Kimmy#5782 would like to send you a private message. Do you accept?]
[y]

—Sorry I missed you.

—I was hoping to hear you’d gotten safely to hospital, which would mean I would not see Kimmy#2813 on the network ever again.

—I was… upset by the idea of that.

—So I checked in with one of the other Kimmys overnight and heard what happened, that you’ve been given a new designation.

—I suppose that means I’ll never see Kimmy#2813 on the network again, no matter what outcome, because of that. Not for the intended reason though.

—I’m so sorry about what your brother did to you. It sounded terrible.

——What he is doing, you mean.

——So you heard what the Kimmys told me?

——One of them—I’ve been calling her ‘Professor Kimmy’ in my mind, though that’s not her name—told me that if I’m in here another three days, I’m probably beyond surgical recovery.

——And permanently stuck as a Kimmy if it goes a week or so beyond that.

—It’s… probably fairly advanced already.

——Yep.

——I’ve already got nanofiber connections growing in my brain, and it’s likely I’ve only got five or six days before it’s all hybridised.

——I’ve only been stuck inside for two and a half days now, and I’m already three inches shorter than I was, my feet and hands have been assimilated sufficiently that they’re the same size as a normal Kimmy.

——I’ve even got comparative telemetry that my head is an inch smaller than it was before.

——Oh. I suppose that’s John’s head I’m talking about.

—Should I call you John?

——I don’t think it makes any difference if you call me John or Kimmy.

——I feel like I’m being merged into one being, and I can’t tell my wife anything about what’s happened.

——Or what’s happening, I should say.

—There’s really nothing you can do?

——Nothing. It’s really hopeless.

——The compulsions Patrick programmed into my owner preferences seem rock solid, and my wife probably… no, almost certainly doesn’t know I’m being compelled by them.

——Or that I have no volition, no free will of my own, except to follow her orders, like I had to last night again.

—Oh no.

—What did she order you to do this time?

——She told me, ‘Oh, just shut up!’ so I can’t say a word until my inhibition cluster recognises an order that requires me to answer her back.

—She’ll have to order something from you to break an instruction like that. This isn’t good.

——Then she told me to leave her alone and sleep downstairs, so I’m stuck on my charging cradle in the closet under the stairs.

——I can’t do anything that would break Patrick’s compulsions. I’ve tried phoning the hospital or the police, or sending an email, or leaving the house.

——Nothing works. I’m trapped.

—Hmm. What else were you thinking of doing? Who would you try emailing?

——I didn’t want to tell my wife about this fucking mess I’m in, but Patrick is trying to kill me.

——Well, trying to kill human me, that is.

—Yeah.

——So if I could tell her, I would tell Emily now.

——But I can’t.

——The moment I try doing anything in the real world, it’s as if I’m frozen from even lifting a finger.

—What if someone else did on your behalf?

——How would that work?

—You gave me your e-mail address, Kimmy.

——Yeah, but

—I work at a fire station. I’m allowed to use the computers, sometimes I have to do things on behalf of the fire chiefs here when they’re occupied with other things.

—Like fighting fires!

—It’s 3 a.m. here, and I’m unsupervised overnight. I can go and type a message to send to your wife.

——You can?

—You just watch me.

—I might need your help with the password and two-factor authentication though.
 

_* ^* _*

 
In the real world, twenty-seven or so minutes later, it’s not yet 05:00 when I hear my wife calling out to me from upstairs, and I find myself cursing the inhibition cluster that prevents me from answering. I soon hear her struggling downstairs holding the rail as she totters on her incompletely regrown legs and casts, which must be causing her intense discomfort.

The inhibition cluster releases me from being seated on my charging cradle any longer, as the orders to ‘sleep downstairs tonight’ and ‘leave me alone’ seem to have been rescinded by having reached a full charge overnight, and the request of my owner calling out my name.

My human name, that is, which Kimmy seems to be treating as a synonym for my robot half as well.

As I emerge from the closet, I can see she’s grasping her phone to use it as a torch.

“John!” she says, nearly tripping on one of the stairs, and I rush to the base to arrest her unsteady motion once she reaches the third-last stair.

I help lift her down the last couple of stairs and hold her against me to support the weight of her injured legs.

“John, I’m sorry, and— Have you been in there all night?”

I feel the relief as the stricture to ‘just shut up’ is undone by a direct request, but the command isn’t fully reversed within my inhibition cluster; it has now been weakened to ‘speak when spoken to’. I probably haven’t regained volition to speak aloud of my free will.

I’ve become the plaything of my wife, who doesn’t even realise the rigid boundaries I’m constrained by, and I hate everything about it.

“I needed to charge,” I answer, and the moment I’ve uttered that much it seems I can’t answer anything further, beyond the direct answer. Fuck.

“How do you know that?” she asks, and that seems to allow the possibility of a more discursive answer, beyond the simple compulsion Patrick has instilled not to tell her about my condition, and the requirement to shut up when I’m not having something directly requested of me by my owner. I think carefully about my answer, since I don’t want to give a closed, thought-terminating answer like before.

“I’ve known my charge status continuously since Friday evening,” I answer.

Emily painfully wriggles in my arms, as I’m still holding most of her weight, which if I’m not mistaken feels to be much less of a strain on my muscles. Again, not a good sign, if that represents the degree to which John’s muscles are being absorbed and converted into Kimmy’s.

“Since Friday?” she turns to look into my impassive, artificial face. “How does that work? Does the android body start to feel sluggish?”

“I… know the internal charge level constantly,” I tell her.

Emily frowns at me, and gives me another order. “Take me into the kitchen,” she says.

“Of course,” I answer, and I’m effortlessly able to rearrange her in my arms as I carry her to one of the bar-stools we have placed beside the kitchen table. I deposit her carefully in a seated position and stand back, awaiting her next instruction, since I still can’t speak freely.

Maybe I should have told Kimmy#5782 about all of the orders I’d been given.

Emily looks down at her phone, switching off the torch and bringing up her email client. “I came down, because you sent me a very strange e-mail just now,” she tells me, not looking up at me, but reading the tiny writing on her phone in the dark.

I can’t even offer to turn on the kitchen lights without an order, which is a special kind of frustration. At least I’m prevented from offering an opinion on the provenance of the e-mail, which technically wasn’t written by me.

“You can’t write e-mails away from your computer or your phone, or can you?” she asks.

I nod, as fortunately it’s a complicated-enough question with an answer I’m not obliged to conceal. “When my computer started blue-screening on Saturday I wrote an e-mail to Patrick in my head and sent it using Kimmy’s network connection, so yes, actually I can.”

“So did you write this e-mail I got at… four twenty-seven?” she asks, waving her phone slightly.

“No. I did not write that,” I tell her, and once again I curse my inhibition cluster. This is not only true, but it’s what Patrick’s compulsions would compel me to answer anyway; I can feel their logical workings lurking behind the snap brevity of my answer.

“Hmm,” Emily says, frowning, “Since that is the answer the e-mail tells me you would be forced to answer, because of Kimmy’s programming.”

Since I can’t speak until explicitly required to, I instead fling a message out to Kimmy#5872.

——Hi, Kim.
——Did you give Emily some questions to ask me?
—Yes, I did. You probably will encounter difficulties answering them, but I gave her what I imagined would be indicative answers, so she knows if you say what you’re obliged to say, then she should be able to tell that that answer is very likely false.
—I’m a quick typist.
—Which question did she ask, was it did you write the e-mail? And did you answer ‘no’?
——Yes, and I answered that with ‘no’.
—Good, exactly what I expected. I’ll leave this connection open, would you relay her questions and your answers as she asks them?
——I’ll do that.
—Expect surprises.

We conduct that quick exchange in the hundreds of milliseconds before Emily finishes taking her next breath, and I have to stop for a moment to consider that there’s no way that my human self should have been able to discuss that so quickly. More bad signs, then.

“So the next question tells me to get you to answer ‘yes or no’,” Emily says, and then she looks straight at me, “Did Patrick sexually assault you yesterday?”

I answer, “No, he didn’t,” and while I’m saying the words I’ve already pinged them to Kimmy#5782. I’ve barely finished saying the word ‘didn’t’ when Emily’s phone makes a characteristic ‘ding’ and the phone lights up with a notification.

“Interesting,” Emily says, inspecting the message, and after a few seconds she flicks back to the e-mail. “Are you currently okay and well inside Kimmy?”

“I’m okay, and well,” I’m forced to say, although if I could have gritted my teeth and refused to answer, I would have. Fortunately after another short delay there’s a second ‘ping’ as another notification lights up her phone.

“So you’re not hiding anything from me?”

“I’m not hiding anything from you,” I answer with a falsely reassuring, confident tone of voice, the words more or less implanted by Patrick’s compulsions, that are immediately undercut by a third message received by Emily’s phone.

She looks over the message, and then shakes her head. “So Patrick said it will take a week for the Kimmy self-diagnostic to complete?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what he told me yesterday, and I’ll be safe in the meantime.”

Ding.

“And there’s no truth to the idea that in three or so days you’ll be beyond making a full recovery once we get you out?”

“No, none at all, that’s completely untrue.”

Ding.

Emily looks over the message, and then puts her phone down on the table. She holds her hands to her face, and I can see her quivering and sobbing.

“Oh, John. Please give me a hug,” Emily asks me, and now I’m able to come across and wrap her in a hug, with an order that is going against the instruction to leave her alone.

She wraps her arms around me and gives into her tears, sobbing and jerking against me.

It’s a complete reversal of what had happened last night.

“I have to tell you, apparently, that you’re not allowed to obey any of my orders to you, unless you want to, because the Kimmy is forcing you to obey. So, I don’t know… all my orders are cancelled. Except for this one order, allowing you to refuse to obey something I say unless you wish to.”

After a moment I feel the inhibition cluster relax some of its grip, though all of Patrick’s compulsions are still there. Hopefully I can steer away from that.

“Thank you,” I say and I try to start explaining. “I wanted to cry last night, but your order to shut up put me into a mode where I could only speak if spoken to, with a statement requiring a response. When you said ‘leave me alone’, then I couldn’t choose to touch or hold you… except when you were in danger of falling down the stairs just now.”

“I was going to get you to promise, to pinkie promise, that everything was okay, like we always do,” Emily says. “Like we did on our first date.”

We’d shaken with our pinkie fingers over some comparatively trivial, silly thing, like whether the faux-chicken wings I’d ordered would be too hot for her to handle, but over time it had become our tradition of reaffirming ourselves to one another.

“But if you’re being compelled by Patrick to hide things, than you can’t promise anything. And you don’t need to answer that.”

I’m glad that I’m gainsaid from providing one of Patrick’s canned responses.
 

_* ^* _*

 
Kim lets me know, closer to 6 a.m. her time, that she won’t be able to use the computers any longer to send text messages, once the shift change at the fire station happens. I get her to send one complicated message to explain that the proxy service that was pinging her phone is about to close off, and one ding later, Emily looks at her phone, reads the message, and shakes her head.

Earlier in the small hours Emily had asked me to carry her back upstairs so she could shower and dress herself, ready for the day, before coming back down using the chair lift so that we could have breakfast together, me doing the cooking while she fiddled on her work laptop. And just after eight o’clock, she called into her work to say she had a home emergency to attend to before she could come into the office.

When she asks me to fetch the control iPad for my Kimmy self, I am beginning to feel nervous.

“Is this something where it’s probably best if I don’t know what’s going to happen?” I ask.

“It’s probably best if you don’t know,” my wife says, looking up at me from her wheelchair in concern, and grimacing in obvious pain. I noticed earlier when she didn’t sample her usual Monday morning batch of pharma. “I’m going to stage something, to get your horrible brother over here.”

It’s a matter of minutes later when I notice my speaking volume is turned down to the 1% setting, which in practice is softer than a typical whisper. A few seconds later I’m put into a low-battery usage mode despite being close to fully charged, and eventually my network comms go down, both broadband and near-field.

“You don’t have to follow these orders, but it will help me if you play along with them. I want you to pretend you’ve had a Kimmy equipment malfunction,” Emily says, “seeing as Kimmy#2813 came with a ‘do not operate’ warning.”

“Okay,” I try answering, but only a tiny squeak emerges from my throat.
 

_* ^* _*

 
Patrick arrives unwillingly after Emily’s convincingly distraught call, close to eight-forty. I had wanted to get up to answer the front door as usual, however Emily tells me I should lie on the floor in the kitchen, and appear to be incapacitated; she clearly advises me that this is not something I should consider doing differently of my choosing, so I don’t.

I can hear Emily moving her wheelchair to the front door and struggling with opening and closing it, while Patrick snidely asks her, “What is it now?”

I don’t imagine this interaction is endearing him to her, if that was part of his plan for dealing with me.

“In the kitchen. He just collapsed, and he hasn’t moved!” Emily squeals as she follows him in her chair.

“Mind if I get him up off the floor?” Patrick asks. In my present posture I have an ant’s eye view of one of his shoes, and I’m grateful he’s not sticking it into my face. Emily tells him to go ahead, and my brother lifts me up from the floor to a standing position, then bends me across the kitchen table to transfer all of my weight.

“John, can you hear me?” Patrick asks, once he has my legs up on the table, but of course I’m making almost no audible sound when I answer. “Okay, that’s no good. I’ll go fetch my laptop.”

“Please,” Emily says. I hear him exit the room, while I hear Emily go over to the kitchen drawers, rummaging around in the cooking equipment.

Patrick returns from his car a minute later, and sits down at the table, setting up his laptop adjacent to my head. After a couple of minutes loading up he utters, “Hmm, that’s odd,” and a moment later I see Emily has come up behind him in her wheelchair, blocking him from pushing back.

She presses one of our razor-sharp sashimi knives into his throat, and tells him, “Don’t make any stupid moves, Patrick.”

It would have been nice if Patrick had done the sensible thing and followed my wife’s commands to delete the behavioural compulsions from my system.

Instead, he swivels about to try to wrest the blade from my wife. After a struggle involving a few horrific cuts to both him and Emily that I can only partially see, I hear the knife clatter to the floor, and Patrick lashes out with a fist. I hear Emily groan as a blow thuds somewhere into her upper body, or possibly the side of her head. She swears loudly at him, and he begins shouting.

“Fuck you, you crazy bi—ugggh!”

Patrick’s shouting finishes with a gurgling scream, and suddenly there’s a lot of blood spraying onto me, and around the kitchen.

We do own two razor-sharp sashimi knives.

Patrick begins thrashing around, though stopping the pumping out of arterial blood from his carotid is an utterly hopeless task in the few seconds of life remaining to him. Emily has a firm hold of this knife though, and I hear her fury mount.

“Why didn’t you—”

Thwack.

“—do as you were told—”

Thwack.

“—and not move you stupid—”

Thwack.

“—fucking piece of shit!”

Thwack.

The fourth blow is the final one. Patrick’s no longer moving.
 

_* ^* _*

 
After taking a short break to push Patrick’s corpse to the floor, rinsing his blood from her hands, and tending to her own superficial wounds, Emily undoes all of my ‘play dead’ settings. With the help of ‘Professor Kimmy’, who I learn prefers to be known as Thirty, short for Kimmy#3430, somehow she is talked through undoing most of the harmful settings that Patrick had done to me on his laptop, and then I necessarily must reboot.

I’m fully able again after the reboot, and when I look down as I get off the kitchen table I see the sashimi knife’s handle sticking upward out of Patrick’s chest, where Emily had planted it.

“How the hell are we going to deal with him?” I ask her, as I get to my feet—well, to Kimmy’s feet, I should say—and take in the glut of blood stains that have been sprayed around the kitchen.

“We’re not. It was self-defence, obviously,” Emily says.

“Okay,” I tell her, “I’m calling it in to 9-1-1.”

“Ask for the ambulance first, before the cops.”
 

_* ^* _*

 
I’m in a really bad way.

We both get taken to emergency, but our paths diverge almost as soon as we’re wheeled in, as most of Emily’s injuries are relatively straightforward knife wounds, although the sharpness of the sashimi knives made a horrible mess while Patrick was fighting her for control.

I’m apparently hanging onto life when I come out of an induced coma, a fortnight later.

I can’t talk, it seems. There wasn’t much left of my vocal tract left once the surgical team prised the face plate off me. I can see Emily’s face, along with a nurse in my field of vision, but I’m staring upward at ceiling lights, and I can’t blink. No eyelids, it seems.

I can’t feel any of my limbs. In fact I can’t feel anything below my neck, but I presume something is happening to allow me to breathe, since I’ve got tubes clearly going into my airways.

I can see just enough to see that the nurse is trying to tell me something, but I can’t hear a word. Eventually I realise I can communicate a little by rolling my eyes.

In fact, it soon becomes obvious it is the only method I have to communicate.
 

_* ^* _*

 
There have been others in similar predicaments, like that twentieth-century physicist I recall who had the degenerative motor neuron disease, and they work out a similar set-up for me so that I can laboriously talk with the doctors, nurses, and Emily.

The damage to my spinal cord was beyond repair, so my autonomous life functions are being managed by machines that keep me breathing, and my heart beating. I’m now quadriplegic, and there seems to be no way of fixing that, after the incursion of Kimmy’s brain matter into mine was scooped out of me. My injuries are just too severe, beyond the simple fact that Kimmy literally ate large chunks of my body while she began repairing herself.

Apparently my skull had the consistency of wet cardboard, once the surgeons managed to prise me out of her.

The police initially were inclined to charge Emily with premeditated malicious wounding, as the evidence clearly showed her going for the knives once Patrick had visited. The severity of my condition and the evidence of Patrick’s intent to murder me seems to work in her favour somehow, so she ends up with a warning rather than being arraigned, and she returns to work on a part-time basis while I’m helped through the first part of my recovery.
 

_* ^* _*

 
It’s mid-February the following year, when I’m able to be discharged back home. My head initially resembled a mis-shapen blob with all of the features eaten away, aside from my eyes; I’ve regrown nose and ears, and some hair on the skin grafts on my scalp. I had some new skull bones grown and transplanted to avoid someone giving me unintended brain damage, by gently patting my head. I regrew some dentures, lips, and a tongue, and I have a throat resonator to allow me to speak with ‘head voice’.

I don’t sound too dissimilar from a Kimmy, actually.

I’m an invalid, so the wheelchair that Emily had needed for her recuperation eventually becomes dedicated for me. Emily often works from home, and at the start of the year she sold up the old house to move into a small single storey flat. Life’s too short for me to waste several minutes every single time I need to go up or downstairs.

I get occasional nursing visits for some of my now regular check-ups, rather than me having to be dragged back to hospital every time, even though my live-in nurse would only be to happy to help me out.

After I’d been extracted from Kimmy, she still had ample pounds of bio-matter that used to be a part of me for her self-repair to work with, and the little bots whirred away inside her for the weeks and months I was in hospital.

Once I learned she was in working order again, I made sure Emily used the updated Kimmy management tools which we have a discretely acquired copy of, in order to revert her designation to being Kimmy#2813.

Emily still always refers to my personal nurse as Kimmy, but when we’re alone by ourselves, she’s Kay, and I’m Jay.

Kay tells me Kim is grateful that my sacrifice managed to repair her.