Content warnings:

On the Thursday morning drive home I’m alone with my new eyes staring back at me whenever I glance into the reverse mirror.

More than anything else they are the sign of my permanent imprisonment inside this garish Halloween costume. While I could see the yellow contact lenses I was able to pretend there was still something visible of John in the world, and that I might have some hope, however slim my chances or unrealistic my wishful thinking, of being restored to my old human shape again.

But no longer. Farewell John, you poor, benighted fool. Welcome Kay, to the sisterhood of the abused and disempowered.

I have time during the commute to query my new body’s specs and assess what is left of my previous frame. The fast progression of my brain’s hybridisation is surprising, but there’s a depressingly inevitable logic to it. In the ninety-two hours since Patrick rebooted me on Sunday, the neural sponge expanding into my brain matter doubled in size, and doubled again, and doubled again, and doubled again. My colleagues at my school who teach math would tell me, that’s the power of exponential growth. And now that 51.8% of my brain by volume is assimilated neural sponge, even a dimwitted former history teacher—it seems unlikely in the extreme that I’ll ever teach again—can understand that the next doubling, currently underway, is going to be the last.

I can still faintly perceive the slow beat of my heart somewhere in my torso, uselessly pumping less and less blood redundantly around John’s slowly decaying corpse, and unlike every other Kimmy in service I’m obliged to breathe and exhale. So little consumable organics are going into me that I’ve not needed to excrete anything since last Friday, and I suspect I couldn’t, even if I wanted to, just for old times’ sake. My feet and hands have been in spec for a couple of days now, so my extremities are probably already consumed down to the bones; the skin, nails, muscles and tendons long gone.

I’ve probed my old teeth with my new tongue—the old one’s been swallowed up entirely—and they feel loose, and are probably going to fall out fairly soon. If somehow the defective iPad app allowed my face plate to be taken off now, some of them would likely be ripped from whatever is left of my gums. Most of the musculature of my face is gone, so Emily or Patrick would find themselves looking at my skull and the greasy streaks of my sinuses. At least I’ll never have another bout of hay fever or nasal congestion. One very minor victory over the flesh.

I’m under the rod of my tasklist to a degree once I’ve returned home, and I let it occupy my body while my mind spirals in this horribly unproductive fashion. At least once my domestic chores are completed I will have even more time for bleak and doom-filled predictions of my future as a household appliance and sometime fucktoy for my abusive sibling.

I soon realise it was far too hopeful on my part to expect I would remain unmolested before the weekend, and so I’m in the middle of cleaning the kitchen when I receive notification of his imminent arrival. My programmed compulsions annoyingly won’t let me escape out the back door into the yard, as I discover when I put my hand on the handle but I’m unable to turn it.

“Hello, Kimmy,” he says, as soon as he discovers me in the kitchen, walking up to place a hand on my shoulder, probably to compare our heights, now four inches different. “Or should I say… John?”

There’s no point in trying again; I’ve already begged for my life for no result. The best I can possibly and realistically ask for is to be allowed to be myself, rather than this compromised, debased travesty with my hands tied behind my back.

“You’ve won, Patrick. You murdered me. John is gone,” I pessimistically say, “or he’ll be as good as gone, before the day is out. I am a Kimmy for good, now. Please, why can’t you just leave me be? Why do you have to destroy who I was, as well?”

“Oh, Kimmy,” Patrick says, and then he laughs at me, before going on. “That sounds like the voice of resignation, right there. And no, I’m not going to leave you be. Why should I, when I can do anything I want with you, and you’re completely powerless? Are you terrified of what I’m going to do to you?”

I can’t misdirect, or refuse to answer direct questions from him, so I reply, “Yes, I’m terrified, whenever you’re here.”

“Good. You should be,” he says, with vehemence. “Especially today, now that I’ve got some reprogramming to do to you. Why don’t you finish what you’re doing here in the kitchen, and come up to the bedroom in ten or so minutes, once I’ve got everything ready? Good Kimmy.”

Patrick sneers at me, slapping my behind with malice, and then he saunters out of the kitchen. I’m guessing from him carrying a rucksack in his other hand that he’s got his laptop with him, which almost certainly means I’m utterly fucked, in addition to the prospect of my impending rape.

I try following him, but my compulsions actually stop me right in the doorway, as my tasklist of kitchen jobs to be done is incomplete. I swear to myself colourfully and silently for several seconds at being trapped by my own damned tasklist, while I try to fire off a message to Thirty.

[Private message request sent to Kimmy#3430]
[Private message request not accepted]
[Kimmy#3430 is offline]

——Thirty, he’s here, and I think it’s going to happen; the next stage of whatever he’s got planned for me.
——But he’s got me trapped downstairs, while he’s setting up whatever it is he’s going to do to me upstairs.
——I may not be able to get you the information you need. I’m so sorry.

As I settle back into my tasks I reach out to Kim, and tell her how terrified I am, but nothing she can tell me is able to settle my mood of dire foreboding about what Patrick has in store for me.
 

_* ^* _*

 
I try to influence my programming by performing my cleaning and meal prep tasks expeditiously, but finishing them in seven minutes doesn’t allow me to go upstairs before the ten minutes are up, and I make busywork for myself in the lounge room for the remaining time before I am compelled to go up to the bedroom, where Patrick is seated on a chair in the corner, his laptop screen facing him. It’s the worst of all situations; the curtains are drawn, there are almost no reflective surfaces that might reveal what he’s reviewing on the screen, and he is immediately issuing orders that further limit my actions.

“I’ve got your costume laid out for you on the bed, please change into it and then lie face down, legs apart,” he says with almost complete disregard.

It’s mostly Emily’s kink-wear that is laid out on the bed, and I try pleading for one last time while I’m obliged to start disrobing, as Patrick continues typing away in his corner.

“Please, Patrick,” I begin saying. “I was your brother. Please don’t torment me any further—”

“Oh shut up, Kimmy,” he says dispassionately, with barely a tremor in his voice, but it’s enough for me to be completely silenced, while I continue taking off the little that functions as my uniform: the hideous plastic smock with the legend KIMMY stamped on the back. The slip-on flats. The shapeless pants and the plasticky panties. The cloth shirt. All with the same tacky branding visible somewhere.

I’m forced to listen to Patrick’s unfiltered thoughts as I start putting on my wife’s lingerie, which is close enough to one-size-fits-all or relatively similar to my own size as a near-to-spec Kimmy, that it fits my body without difficulty. If I could still feel the sensations of my insides I would probably be sick to my stomach, but instead I have this out-of-body weirdness, of feeling utterly nothing, while my fratricidal, rapist brother outlines his contemptuous plans for me.

“I have to dispose of you, John, and I need to make it look like you’ve suffered a horrible accident. So you’re not going to see this one coming, but when you find out what it is, you’ll know instantly it’s the end, and it’s going to be curtains for Johnny. If you thought there was no coming back from where you’re currently at, then you haven’t learnt anything. Then Emily will be calling me over to ask what can be done, but tragically, there’ll be nothing that can be done. You fucked up all of my plans for Emily, so I’m going to have Kimmy chew you up and spit you out as soon as possible.”

I’m disabled from talking, but once I’m dressed in Emily’s latex top, and shiny, slinky tights, he tells me, “You may speak again.”

I’m still following his instructions, which means I’m lying down and spreading my legs as I make my entreaty, “Please don’t do this to me.”

He plugs the data cable into the socket in my perineum, and he tells me, “Ha ha, no. You’ll just lie there and take it, Kimmy, you little slut.” He starts taking his clothes off while in the back of my mind I perceive the activity of new modules being dropped into my owner preferences’ storage. It seems to take hardly any time at all before I notice my processes terminating and my vision blanks out —
 

_* ^* _*

 
I can’t tell if anything inside my head is any different, after my reboot progresses for half a minute, while I try to ignore that my brother has pulled me half up, bum in the air, so he can take my cunt from behind.

It feels as though I have nothing to lose, so I taunt him.

“Are you scared of fucking my ass, Patrick? Or would shoving your penis up my butthole make you gay?”

“I know you’d enjoy it,” my brother tells me. “I always knew you were the pervert out of the two of us.”

“I’m pretty sure fucking your brother makes you the pervert here. I, N, C—”

“You’re not my brother any more, you’re my slave,” he shouts, and he redoubles his fury plunging into me. “I’ll do whatever I like to you, and I’ll make you enjoy it. Adult mode program P2.”

I’m not surprised that once he finishes hate fucking my vagina, he shoves me back down on the bed and begins sodomising me. I am however disgusted to learn that program P2 obliges me to stroke him, forces me to simper and groan, and… ugh. I can’t escape to Infinite Fun quickly enough.
 

_* ^* _*

 
Patrick jumps in the shower afterwards and I’m still immobilised. Once he’s finished he orders me to continue lying still until five minutes after he leaves, having made a complete mess of the bathroom in addition to the bedroom. It does mean I’ve barely started cleaning up after him when I get the house’s notification that Emily’s nearly home, less than a minute away; much earlier than expected.

There’s simply no way I can strip and remake the bed with fresh bed linen, put everything into the washing machine, and return the upstairs rooms to the state they were in before Hurricane Patrick blew through. And it’s completely unknown to me how I’m going to explain the situation to Emily, who’s wheeling up the path once I race downstairs to open the front door for her.

“Hi darling, I’ve just had the worst morning, possibly the most boring meeting in the entire twenty-first century, so after all the overtime on the weekend I told my boss I’m flexing off for the afternoon,” Emily says once I’ve shut the door and her ride share has disappeared down the street. “Wanna go out and get tacos?”
 

_* ^* _*

 
I was forced to eat my share of the tacos for the sake of appearances, even though I felt nothing except sensory data while I ingested the meal—I experienced no taste whatsoever, just a chemical breakdown of individual flavours. Even more inconveniently, I was obliged both to lie about my lack of enjoyment, and to hide my chagrin that Emily continued to incuriously fail to notice that something is seriously wrong with me.

Things didn’t improve upon getting home; I tried to sneak away during the afternoon to hide the worst of the evidence, but Emily was insistent on cuddling on the couch; after I cooked a quick dinner for us both and Emily asked me to carry her upstairs there was nothing I was permitted by my compulsions to do that could prevent Emily from seeing the mess of the bedroom.

“What on earth has happened here,” Emily asks almost rhetorically, and I have no possible answer to give apart from what actually happened, but I’m sure my brother has come up with some nonsense for me to respond with, and I hope it’s as unconvincing as every other lie I’ve been forced to tell this week.

It is.

“I didn’t want to say anything before now, Emily, but you see I’ve been getting incredibly horny inside here, with no way of being able to get myself off,” I say by rote according to Patrick’s script. “Kimmy obviously has the wrong hardware for me to be able to do anything to myself, without using a lot of imagination.”

“Oh, so that’s why there’s ladders in my good pair of tights, huh?” Emily has found her clothes and reaching out from the side of the bed, retrieved the ruined pair of tights I’d been wearing while my brother ravaged me. “And what the fuck is this, John?”

She’s indicating the stains on the bedsheet.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t have time to change the sheets—” I’m compelled to say, while Emily shakes her head and then interrupts me.

“Why do you keep lying to me?” Emily shrieks. “You keep saying everything is fine, and then I see something like this and it’s just bullshit! What’s the fuck’s gone wrong, John?”

I’m forced to answer, “Nothing’s wrong, it will be no problem to clean—”

Emily gives a short scream of anger and violently hits me and shoves me away. “Shut up! I don’t want to hear any of that crap,” she shouts.

I stumble backwards and stay on my feet, but I’m now unable to say anything, and so after several moments of taking in her furious glare, I return to my tasklist, which is internally imploring me to start cleaning up the mess.

“What on earth do you think you’re doing, John?” she demands.

“I have to tidy—”

“Fuck it, John, you’re not a Kimmy.”

“Hello, my name is Kimmy, and I’m here to help,” I answer, and I realise it’s one of the built-in canned responses that my confused half-Kimmy brain has decided is the correct response.

Emily stares at me, eyes wide in shock, and when she finally manages to speak her words come out in a guttural croak, “What did you say?”

“I have to tidy up all of this mess,” is what comes out, as if I hadn’t said something different just a moment before.

“No you don’t,” Emily says. “Please stop what you’re doing and come here. I meant the other thing you said.”

I try answering, but I find I’m unable to say anything. It’s as though Kimmy didn’t actually say anything, and the previous answer has been filed into the memory hole. I end up just sitting on the side of the bed, looking across at her.

Eventually Emily says, “I know something must have gone wrong, and you obviously can’t tell me what it is. I don’t know what has happened, but I’m… no, we’re going to sleep on it; I’ll call in sick at work tomorrow. And then we’re going to get to the bottom of this.”

Emily tells the house to dim our lights, and she crawls into our bed, throwing her clothes off. I’m still sitting on the side of the bed, and she tells me to take off my uniform and get in beside her.

She clutches me to her, and starts sobbing softly, “What are we going to do about you?”

I still don’t have an answer I can give her, when she falls asleep in my arms.
 

_* ^* _*

 
Emily is awake relatively early, well before her usual waking time for getting to work, on account of us having gone to sleep exceptionally early in the first place. I couldn’t sleep, not merely because I no longer need to, but owing to whatever fresh horror was done to my systems yesterday morning, I’m now living in fear as a result. Overnight the final doubling of neural sponge occurred, and any remaining quantity of human brain tissue inside my skull is negligible.

“I can’t help but remember you’ve made me breakfast every single morning, except that day when I let you sleep in,” Emily says, “and you’ve been doing the chores around the house as though you actually are a Kimmy. Hold up your left hand, John.”

She takes off her wedding band, and effortlessly slips it on my ring finger.

“I never could have done that before. Your hands used to be bigger than this. You must have known all this time that something was wrong, but you didn’t say anything. This whole ghastly costume was your brother’s idea. He gave me the instructions for everything; he gave me the stupid, buggy control slate which hasn’t worked properly since nearly a week ago. And the kicker is that you still can’t tell me what’s the hell’s gone wrong! Obviously it was sabotaged the whole time, and you’ve been stuck inside, when it was supposed to be me in there.”

She looks at me for a long minute, and then she asks me a foolish question, “Whatever horrible things he had planned for me, he’s probably done to you instead, hasn’t he?”

“No, Patrick is really concerned that he hasn’t been able to get me out, and he’s going to—”

“Stop saying that,” Emily tells me, cutting me off. “You’ve probably been forced to say that black is white, and seven other impossible things before breakfast.”

Since I fall quiet again, unable to address anything she just said, and almost of the things I would want to say are instantly ruled out of order by my inhibition circuits, Emily becomes even more suspicious. It’s obvious the moment two and two click together in her eyes, and her expression changes.

“Was anyone here yesterday?”

I lie automatically, even though I know Emily is certain to disbelieve my answer and to furnish the proof of my falsehood, “No, no one came to the house.”

When Emily asks the house system to list the last three visits, however, she is taken aback learning Patrick has made two unreported calls, and the other visit was made by an officer of the NYPD.

Emily thinks for a moment about calling the police, but has second thoughts, shaking her head. “Let’s get Patrick over here to explain himself.”

I wish I could tell her this is an extra-ordinarily bad idea.
 

_* ^* _*

 
Emily sets up her laptop to record video and audio of the entire encounter, which I imagine she thinks is going to work like some Sherlock Holmes investigation, where he would gather the various shifty and possibly guilty parties together in the library and with a very weird set of observations correctly deduce who murdered the kitchen maid with the neural probe.

She dresses in the latex top, so that after I let my brother in she tries to surprise him by asking if he was expecting someone different to be wearing it.

My brother simply laughs at all of her attempts to tie him to having had anything to do with my entrapment, lying so openly and flagrantly to her face that eventually she can’t help losing her temper. And then he drops the keyword casually into his taunting response.

“Emily, can you actually hear how deranged you sound? Your husband isn’t here. He’s certainly not inside the Kimmy, you can see that for yourself! Why don’t you go outside and try to breathe some fresh air. Touch some grass in that wasteland you call a backyard.”

The time bomb in my mind has started ticking, and after a few more malicious swipes at Emily, Patrick simply gets up and goes, giving me one last, knowing smile. I’m doomed.
 

_* ^* _*

 
I don’t have a countdown or a visible fuse slowly smouldering; I just know that my mind has started calculating arbitrarily large, pseudo-random numbers once every second, which at some point will be used as a hash to decrypt and execute a script that he left sitting in my storage yesterday. Emily is totally unaware I’m just about to die, and is investigating completely futile methods to work out what to do next.

It’s just after noon when the bomb detonates. The first thing I notice is my that breathing stops; up until now, Kimmy’s ribs were flexing slightly to perform the same function as my diaphragm, to cause my lungs to expand and contract. I’m no longer inhaling or exhaling air, and that will soon cause a cardiac arrest.

When my heart starts racing half a minute later, no longer pumping oxygenated blood, some random motor commands are executed and then I fall over; the script then terminates my having any motor control over my body until the next reboot.

Emily finally notices when I fall over to the ground, but it is far too late.

The script now executes a deep, hidden primitive that is there in my Kimmy firmware, seldom used except in specific circumstances.

My neural sponge is being wiped clean, a substrate level zeroing out of my memories. It’s a factory reset, to end all factory resets. And this one depressingly does have a progress indicator, so I helplessly watch as it starts at 1%, and begins crawling upwards. 2%. 3%. 4%. 5%…

I start feeling gaps in my experiences appearing, sudden disconnections in my thoughts. I wonder if there’ll be any traces of my memory after this is over, like the déjà vu of remembering fragments of Kay. I hope Emily isn’t going to do anything silly, but I suppose unless she does it in the next hour then I’ll never know.
 

_* ^* _*

 
Once I have booted up, I don’t know where I am until my location chip kicks in, but it certainly looks as though I am in the house that matches my geographical position. There’s some very weird telemetry signals from inside me, but I do seem to be reasonably close to completely matching my specification. A short woman with liquid on her face is looking at me uncertainly, and I query my registration information. There is nothing there.

“My name is Kimmy,” I say in my friendliest tone, “I’m here to help. Would you like to register yourself as my owner and primary user?”