Emily and I might occupy the same house, but I am no longer able to be myself, and merely clean up around what she does, keeping to my regular schedule and retreating to my charging cradle otherwise. We’re deliberately not sharing company with one another, except on the rare occasions when Emily’s solitude becomes too oppressive for her to bear, and she searches me out to join her so that she can talk to someone, even though I am incapable of engaging in conversation. My repartee is reduced to giving algorithmically-programmed noises of attentiveness or affirmation.
And Emily still won’t touch me. She really bought Patrick’s bullshit, and she probably thinks I’m never coming back—and I wonder myself whether I will. My human self, still barely alive under this ghastly Halloween mask, but beyond all hope of medical intervention. My future as nothing more than an appliance, a labour-saving device, stretches off as far into the future as I might remain functional. What will happen if I break down? Would Emily even be able to have me repaired?
Emily tells me about her work and colleagues for the most part, and I wish she wouldn’t, as I suspect it was Patrick who deliberately made busywork for her to distract her from looking after me, when I needed her most. I prefer it when she tells me about herself—her joy that she’s now able to walk again, though using a walking aid while she regains proprioception and muscle memory, using her newly-regrown muscles. She tells me about her old friends from school or college who’d heard through the grapevine that she’d had two disasters in as many months, first a horrific accident and a debilitating illness incapacitating her husband, and offered their best wishes.
She tells me how much she misses me, and her guilt that she made me take her place. How she wishes it had been her who’d gotten herself trapped inside Kay.
I’d served dinner for her this evening, and then waited out of sight behind her in the corner, to clear away her plate and glass once she finished. She doesn’t like eating with me, even though I’m ingesting a small daily intake to keep what little organics that I have remaining going. I usually sample my cooking for checking heat, balance of chemicals, but I gain no enjoyment and am unable to perceive flavour.
As soon as she got up from her seat at the dining table I whirred into motion, but she ordered me, “You can clean up after me later, Kimmy. Please come and sit on the couch with me. The usual place.”
She doesn’t need me to acknowledge or answer commands verbally for the most part, so I mutely followed her into the living room. I’m seated on the couch at one end, as previously instructed, while Emily is curled on the other side, her new legs half-unfolded towards me. She faces away from me while she talks, to avoid the discomfort of looking at me for too long.
“I told you about the e-mails I drafted, didn’t I? The ones I was going to send hither and yon, which would blow the lid off this whole ugly can of worms. And would dump me into a world of trouble—an even worse one than this fucking nightmare has become. And you know what I did? I deleted every damn single one of them… and yet… I’m still feeling the itch, somehow. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I can do.”
The algorithm recognises the question Emily asked, and she had told me about the draft messages the last time we were sitting here, so I’m obliged to make an affirmative ‘mmm’.
“Patrick’s supposedly helpful guy has never got in touch again. It’s been over a month since he visited, and he’s not suggested a single damn thing. I suppose he doesn’t want to get my hopes up with false promises of a solution, but it feels like no one even cares enough to say, ‘we’re trying our best, but we’re not making any progress’. Just to touch base, for crying out loud! I don’t think anyone cares. I don’t think Patrick cares, and he put the stupid Halloween idea in my head in the first place.”
Emily speaks in stop-start fashion; long pauses between gushing out of ideas. It’s a minute and twenty-two point seven seconds before she goes on.
“I don’t think any of those messages would have been a good idea, come to think about it. But—I need to be able to talk with someone about this. I have to be able to share this somehow. Having this distress bottled up inside my head. It isn’t healthy for me to have this terrible secret that no one else can know about.”
She pauses for another minute, obviously ruminating on the idea, and then she says, “And it can’t be Patrick.”
I’m so glad the last reprogramming has at least spared me the compulsive need to start babbling positive things about my brother.
“Actually, maybe you can help me, Kimmy,” she says after another silent minute and five point two seconds. “Kimmy, enumerate how many entries I have in my contacts list.”
I instantly respond, “There are twelve hundred and seventy-one entries.”
I suppose that’s the problem with having a persistent record of every electronic message she’d wanted to keep, from early childhood to her current age in the mid-thirties.
“Please apply filters. Exclude all work colleagues. Exclude corporate emails and subscriptions. Exclude…” Emily pauses a moment, and then goes on, “exclude any family relatives of John and their spouses. Exclude any cisgender men. Exclude any remaining people who have not been in contact since December 2079. How many entries have not been filtered?”
Because I’m doing all of this filtering behind the scenes, I wonder if I have any volition at prioritising the list? The list has already been dramatically culled to forty-two entries, and I can see some names of friends and distant family who might be ideal for Emily to confide in.
I announce, “Forty-two entries have not been filtered.”
“Prioritise frequency of communication. Prioritise family over school friends. List the best three entries.”
I’m not surprised when two of the people I’d felt very positively towards have made the cut of the top three, and I answer, “Helena Marchant. Zayna Johnson. Aurore Delannier.”
“Oh! Thank you Kimmy,” she says with a sudden realisation that she does have others she can turn to. “I should have thought of Helena when this all started. I’m such a fool. Kimmy, what time is it currently in Düsseldorf?”
“It is currently one thirty-four a.m. in Düsseldorf.”
“Yeah,” Emily says almost rhetorically to herself, “far too late to call her. Kimmy, please take dictation for an e-mail to Helena Marchant, using my personal account. ‘Dear coz,’ paragraph break. ‘It’s Emily.’ No—strike that line, she already knows it’s me writing to her—continue. ‘I’m so sorry for not being in touch sooner, but I imagine you’ve not heard that this year has turned out to be the worst year of my life, and John’s. In September I was hit by some drunken idiot’s self-driving car, and I lost almost all of both my legs. Fortunately I’ve had them regrown and I’m well on the way towards having full use of them again.’ Paragraph break. ‘But if you thought that was bad, I’ve had something even more terrible happen with John—and I’m unable to speak with anyone about it, or I should say, anyone I can actually trust. Because John’s brother also knows about what’s happened, and he’s completely unreliable.’ Paragraph break. ‘As soon as you read this, please call me at your earliest convenience so we can do a secure video chat. I don’t mind if it’s two or three a.m. here when you call—it’s too important to delay any further. I so should have thought to call you in the last two months, but my head has been in complete turmoil about it, even if my brain hadn’t been completely addled by opiates during my recovery.’ Paragraph break. ‘Give my love to Greta and Alex. I hope he’s coming along well in primary school.’ Paragraph break. ‘Love, Emmy.’ End message, send.”
* * *
Helena’s call comes in just over twenty-two minutes later, and at Emily’s insistence I check that it’s a secure call before bouncing it onto the screen in the living room. Helena’s calling from her phone in what looks like a bathroom.
“Hi Helena! You didn’t need to call me back right away, it must be nearly two a.m. there.”
“Hi Emmy, it’s okay, I have had an interrupted night’s sleep. Period time, so I was happy to see a notification from you when I got up to go to the bathroom. I’m so sorry to hear about you and John. Greta and Alex are asleep, but I can stay on for as long as you need.”
“You don’t know what a relief this is for me, coz. The only other person in this whole stupid thing is John’s brother, and he’s an untrustworthy sleazebag who sort of got us into this mess, and since then has been almost no help at all. He did bring along some guy who was supposed to be able to help John out, but since then I’ve been ghosted.”
“It sounds bad. Do you want to give me the executive summary, and then we can work through the details?”
“Oh god. You’re going to think I’m the worst person in the world.”
“Maybe, but you’re one of my favourite cousins, I want you to be happy and if I can help with whatever happened with John, you know I will.”
“Okay. You know John and I do fancy Halloween costumes? This year I thought I’d go the whole hog. John’s brother works at the company that makes Kimmys. The domestic androids? I was going to be inside a Kimmy for Halloween, and John was going to be the service technician.”
“And then you had your accident, yes?”
“Yes. So come Halloween, it was John inside Kimmy. And the next morning we couldn’t get him out. After that, Patrick said it would be okay for a short while, and that John wasn’t coming to any harm, but I actually think he took advantage that I was on opiates and distracted. A week later John had a seizure, and he’s in a coma or something, but he might actually be dead. He’s still inside the Kimmy.”
“Fucking hölle. Look, give me a few seconds here to begin thinking this through… so the Kimmy that’s sitting there on the couch there—do you mean to tell me that John’s still inside the robot sitting there?”
“Yes. He’s still in there. That’s the Halloween costume I should have been wearing.”
“But that’s looks like a factory specification Kimmy you’ve got there! I remember John was quite a bit taller and heavier, when we caught up a few years back. It must have started breaking down and converting John’s body at some point. Cousin, I hate to say it, but this Patrick guy—John’s brother—is either spectacularly incompetent or he’s been lying to you.”
“Why not both?” Emily jokes, with a bitter laugh.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t rule out either stupidity or maliciousness or both. Jesu Christi,” Helena says, and after a moment she continues. “Did you know I worked for OpenAI-Altman several years back? Two year contract, and they’re now making one of the other kinds of competitor androids, the Veras. I spent one month on secondment to the automation division, so I think I can get in touch with some contacts who could give proper advice. Which you obviously did not get from John’s untrustworthy brother, or whoever else he got to help.”
“What do you think I should do?”
“First off—bar this brother of his from having any further contact with you or with John. If he’s incompetent, he could do further damage to John, if he’s in a coma, beyond all of the damage that he’s already done. And if he’s malicious, you should possibly consider that he was responsible for John getting stuck inside the Kimmy to begin with, or he might have caused John to have that coma. Multiply those together if he’s both incompetent and malicious, for the worst case scenario. Look, this isn’t the best hour for me to be thinking, but I might have some other ideas for you in the morning, when I’ve had a chance to get some more sleep… so that would be uh, eight or nine in the morning here? What time’s that for you?”
“Kimmy, time conversion?”
“Two or three a.m. Eastern time,” the algorithms in me respond automatically.
“That’s fine,” Emily says, “If you call back then, I’ll be up for it. I’ve put this off for too long, and I feel so guilty about it all.”
“I understand completely, you’ve had a living nightmare to deal with, by the sounds of it. Okay, talk to you later this morning—and give my love to John.”
“I wish I could, but yeah. Thanks, Helena.”
“Hang on a minute. What do you mean, you wish you could?”
“Well, the Kimmy had a factory reset. A complete wipe of all of its settings, and it’s like John hasn’t been there ever since.”
“Emily, I’m… no, sorry, I won’t say that. You know I do some grey hat work? You should have thought what a black hat might do. If we’re looking at the malicious brother scenario, then you don’t really know whether John is in a coma. He might have concealed the actual state of how John is. What if he’s been put into something like locked-in syndrome?”
“Locked-in syndrome?”
“Surely you learned how to research things before now, coz. It might mean for example, that John is fully conscious under there, but completely unable to communicate that he is. Kimmys probably have fairly strict inhibition control, just like the Veras do, so we might end up having to dig deeply into the weeds. Anyway it’s late, I’ll call you in six or seven hours from now.”
“Bye—and thank you.”
Helena hangs up and Emily sits for thirty seconds before asking me, “Kimmy, could you please fetch me my laptop?”
Once I’ve retrieved it and resumed my place on the couch, she reads the on-line encyclopedia entry for locked-in syndrome in silence for the next ten minutes, before asking me, “Kimmy, what percentage charge are you, currently?”
“I am at seventy-one point five percent.”
“I’m going to bed. Would you please collect your charging cradle and bring it up to my bedroom please? I don’t want you charging in that dusty closet any longer.”
Emily had changed the two bedrooms over, so she’s been sleeping in the smaller double bed we previously had in the guests’ bedroom. She always sleeps on the side of the bed closer to the door, so I go around to the other side of the bed and plug my charging stand into the spare electrical point there. Several minutes later Emily returns from the bathroom, and gets changed into her pyjamas; I can almost see her mind ticking over, all from the expressions in her eyes.
When she gets into bed, she lifts the covers and invites me in. “Kimmy, please join me. I would like to cuddle you, before I go to sleep, because if John is still fully conscious, then he needs this from me.”
I get into the slightly narrower bed beside her, and she wraps me in a cuddle. “Please hold me,” she says, and Kimmy gives her a somewhat ineffective hug.
“I’ve been such a terrible wife, and I still am being horrible. I didn’t even consider that you might have been fully conscious but incapacitated. And I’ve had you rotting away in the closet for eighteen hours a day. I shouldn’t have done that to you, and I can’t do it any longer. I still love you John, and I hope we can get you back. Now that I’m better, I’m going to try so hard for you.”
She pauses for a minute, and her tears are flowing, but she doesn’t ask Kimmy to wipe them for her. “I just hope that if you are still in there, that you’ll forgive me. I don’t think I deserve your love, after all this.”
She clutches me all the tighter, and after being touch starved for a month, I wish I was still capable of crying. She struggles to fall asleep, but once she lets go of me and turns over, her last word before drifting off is “Spoon?”
* * *
[Private message request sent to Kimmy#5782]
—Hi Kay! How are you doing?
——Hi, Kim. I’m good—in fact, I’m beyond good—I think I might be feeling hopeful, for the first time in about a month. But I don’t want to jinx things by saying it out loud, so…
——Please keep your fingers crossed for me.
—That sounds amazing. Will you tell me later if it works out?
——I promise, Kim. You’ll hear me shouting it from the rooftops.
—That sounds wonderful. I’ll be here whenever you need me.
——Thanks, Kim.
* * *
Emily has trouble sleeping and is dozing lightly when Helena calls back, at two twenty-seven a.m.
“Lights,” she calls out to the house, and she sits up in bed, reaching for her phone.
Helena doesn’t even bother wasting time greeting Emily, but is straight down to tin tacks.
“Okay: plan A1, though I’m almost certain this option will not be possible. Come to Düsseldorf for a week, with John,” she tells Emily.
“It’s not possible—I exhausted my saved-up leave in November.”
“Fine; in that case, I’ll cancel the fifteen-minute hold I have for two passengers from JFK to Düsseldorf, and I’ll confirm one passenger from Düsseldorf to New York. That’s plan A2—I’ll be landing at JFK at 4:20 p.m. today.”
“What?”
“If you can’t come to me, then I’ll come to you. Plan B2—the first thing you need to do this morning is file a restraining order on John’s brother. I don’t care what excuse you use as the reason to bar him from contacting you, but make it a good one, and demand that he can’t approach closer than one mile from your home, your workplace, or any other residence he might suspect you of dwelling.”
“Isn’t that escalating things?”
“Don’t care. Your safety and John’s is paramount. And you haven’t heard Plans C2 and D2 yet. I’ll send you an email linking you to the page where you can sign the stat dec for a restraining order, okay?”
“Thanks, Helena.”
“Plan C2: it’s not safe for you to remain at the house. If he’s had access to the house before now—and I’m assuming he has—then you’re not safe there. We’ll be booking a hotel for the next several nights—the most important consideration is you need it to have good physical security—that’s because Kimmys have a location chip inside them, so if John’s brother is half-way competent he’ll know where you are by tracing Kimmy. You might be able to ask Kimmy whether it’s possible to take herself offline until I arrive, but don’t do it until you’re on the road—the brother might have a flag set to notify him if you alter her settings. The hotel will need a concierge desk which is staffed 24/7. Book the reservation under my name—I’ll text you the numbers you’ll need in two separate messages. Pack everything you’re going to need for yourself and John for four days and take it with you to work this morning. You are working today?”
“Yes?”
“Plan D2: don’t leave John unattended for an instant. Can you have him just sit in your office at work, twiddling his thumbs?”
“I’m not sure whether that’s allowed under my company’s policy, but the answer is possibly no.”
“Can you work remotely today?”
“Possibly, yes.”
“Then book the hotel now, or first thing this morning and work remotely from the hotel today. I’ll know where it is from looking at my accounts, and I’ll join you directly there after 4 p.m.”
“Isn’t this a little over the top?”
“Emily Burroughs, I’m ashamed of you. This is your husband’s life we’re talking about. I liked him the several times I met him, and there’s no way he deserves what that scheisskopf of a fuckwit brother has done to him. Besides, I’m between jobs for several months, I’ve got nothing on at the moment, and Greta will do fine without me for a week. I also had a five minute conversation with one of my old co-workers to discuss a hypothetical situation, and to give me his best opinion on the trustworthiness of that worthless brother. He gave me a percentage estimate: incompetent, ten per cent. Malicious, sixty per cent. Incompetent and malicious, thirty per cent. In other words, malicious is running nine times more likely than mere incompetence.”
“You’ve convinced me.”
“Good. Watch out for those messages I’m sending you, and I’ll see you later today.”
* * *
Emily wakes just before six, and she is energised by the prospect of her cousin arriving later in the day. She fills out the statutory declaration, which accuses Patrick of sexual harassment and threatening her physical harm; it’s digitally notarised by a justice of the peace and goes off to the authorities just after seven thirty. She researches hotels and finds an excellent one for us to stay at in Brooklyn, which will allow us to sign in earlier than the standard check-in time of eleven at a small per diem extra cost. She phones her manager to let him know she’ll be working from home today, though in fact she’ll be doing some flexi-time to shift hours around her schedule.
So we quickly pack lightly everything that we’ll need for the next four days, including the few items I’ll require; my charging cradle and cables, and the control iPad; a spare uniform.
We pack the car, and once I’m seated in the passenger seat and Emily’s behind the driver’s wheel, she asks me, “Kimmy, are you able to temporarily put yourself in airplane or incognito mode? Network off for a short period of time?”
Kimmy answers truthfully, and while she replies I send one final private message off into the ether. “I am. Would you like me to do that now?”
“Yes, please, and then we’ll be able to head off.”
“I am now in incognito mode.” And we would be able to head off immediately, except there’s a five-foot-ten excrescence of human garbage standing directly in front of the car, named Patrick.
* * *
[Private message request sent to Kimmy#5782]
[Private message request not accepted]
[Kimmy#5782 is offline]——Hi, Kim. Just so no one is worried about me, I’m going to be offline for the better part of a day, maybe less, maybe more.
——But Emily has her cousin arriving from Germany to help me.
——If it doesn’t go to plan, please don’t be too sorry for me, Kim.
——You’ve helped save my life. Love, Kay
* * *
Emily locks the doors as soon as she sees him. “Get out of my way!”
“Get out of the car!” he shouts back.
“You’re in breach of a restraining order.”
“I don’t care. Stop what you’re doing, right now, and get out of the car.”
I wonder for a moment if Emily is going to fold, but I can see her one side of her face in my peripheral vision, and remember the intense look she had last night. I wonder if she’s remembering Helena’s old co-worker’s estimate that ‘malicious’ plus ‘malicious and incompetent’ added up to ninety per cent likely.
“I’ve got your number, Emily. Don’t think for a minute that your cousin visiting will solve anything!” he threatens.
That does it. Emily puts the car into manual first gear and runs into Patrick at ten miles per hour. He goes down on the driveway like a toppled skittle.
We soon hear a shout of outrage, “What the fuck did you that for, you crazy bitch?”
Emily reverses several metres, and then drives out partly onto the front lawn to get around him, before he can get to his feet and try to obstruct the car again. He does manage to chase after us with a limp and try to scrabble at the back doors as Emily gets to the curbside, but the doors are securely locked. Emily turns onto the street and powers away into the city.
* * *
“Do you think we should have phoned an ambulance, Kimmy?” Emily asks, once we’re about half a mile down the road.
“I estimate a twenty per cent likely chance that he sustained a sufficient injury to require hospitalisation,” Kimmy answers. I would happily have settled for a lot higher than that, but it’s probably for the best that she didn’t hurt him too badly.
“Good. Kimmy, please take out my phone and place a call to the NYPD for me.”
Kimmy makes the call and has to navigate through the usual choose-your-own-adventure of a menu system before reaching an officer.
A bored male voice comes on the line. “NYPD, I believe you’ve got a report to make?”
Emily says, “I need to report a breach of a restraining order.”
“One moment,” the officer says. “Okay, transferring you.”
* * *
Emily reaches a female officer who asks for her full name and address, and the case number for the restraining order, which she doesn’t have to hand. Fortunately, Kimmy does.
The officer asks what happened to cause the breach, and Emily is worried about mentioning that she hit him with the car.
“I was just trying to nudge him out of the way. He was threatening me, shouting abuse, and that he didn’t care about the restraining order.”
“I understand,” the officer tells her. “It’s not ideal that you had to assault him in order to prevent him from assaulting you, but he was clearly in the wrong by being on your property and threatening you.”
“Thank you.”
“Are you concerned for your safety currently? I presume you left your home because you were worried he was going to assault you there or at your place of work. Should we organise a regular welfare check for you?”
“I’m staying at a hotel in Brooklyn for a few days and it appears to have good security, but I won’t complain if you try doing a welfare check later today, because there was one other thing about the encounter this morning that worried me.”
“Oh yes?”
“When we were having the standoff in my driveway, he mentioned that my cousin is coming to visit me later today. He couldn’t have known that without my house being bugged or my phone being tapped.”
“That sounds like invasion of privacy, though having sufficient evidence to prove it might be difficult. Are you worried he might try to threaten him or her when they arrive?”
“Very worried. We discussed earlier today that she’s flying into JFK from Düsseldorf at 4:20 p.m.”
“Did she tell you which airline she’s flying with?”
“No, sorry, she didn’t.”
“Don’t worry about that, I’ll send an alert to airport security to be on the lookout for him, and that he might be making trouble at any landing gates for Düsseldorf around 4:20 p.m.—I doubt there’s more than one or two flights to cover.”
“Thank you so much.”
“Is there anything else I can do for you, Ma’am?”
“No—may I please have your name so I know who I’ve been talking with?”
“That’s no problem. I’m Officer Sylcox, badge twenty-three, two-oh-nine, but if we talk again, you can call me Lidia.”
“Thanks, Lidia.”
“You’re welcome.”
* * *
We arrive without further incident at the hotel and there’s no problem checking in early, or with Emily asking any of the additional questions that Helena suggested, such as whether she can get a duress alarm. The concierge registers and hands over a silent alarm on a lanyard, suggesting to Emily she wear it under her blouse; pressing and holding the button for three seconds will flag an emergency in her room to the reception desk. Emily explains that she wishes to have no visitors except for her cousin, Helena Marchant, and any staff coming to the door should give at least a minute’s notice via text message. The concierge nods, “Understood, that’s no problem. It’s a pity people are so shitty that we have to have measures like this.”
Emily tries to settle into her working day, remotely accessing her usual computer environment on her work laptop, but she finds it difficult to concentrate. She sends for room service at 12:30 pm, and they send a text message to announce their arrival a couple of minutes afterwards with toasted foccacia and coffee. Emily drains the coffee nervously, and manages to get through almost all of the foccacia. “Feel free to have the rest, Kimmy,” she tells me.
As usual, it’s so disappointing to have no pleasure from eating any more.
Emily worriedly paces the room during most of the remainder of her nominal lunch break—at least she will have gotten well towards her daily step count target. Having used up her half hour, she tries to get back to work. It’s going to be a long afternoon.
* * *
It’s only just over an hour later, at 2:19 p.m., when Emily’s phone buzzes, and a message appears briefly:
Helena I’m downstairs now. See you in a minute
Emily gasps in surprise. “I don’t believe it, Kimmy!”
She gets up and worriedly fusses around the door for twenty-seven seconds, and eventually she decides to open the door and look down the hall.
Twenty-one seconds later I hear Helena’s voice from the corridor. “Emmy!”
“Helena!” Emily squeals.
Emily holds the door open for her as Helena pulls her small wheeled suitcase in behind her, parks it just inside the room, and then she wraps Emily in a tight hug.
“Lovely to see you again,” she says.
“And you, coz,” Emily replies. “How am I ever going to make this up to you?”
“Let’s worry about that later; I’m doing a favour for you, and my ex co-worker did a big favour for me, as well.”
Then she surprises both of us by letting go of Emily, and then crossing over to me, and hugging Kay.
“I wish circumstances were different, John, and I hope you can hear this, even if you can’t respond. Most of all, I hope we can help you,” she says to me.
I can see Emily is rather puzzled, “How did your flight get here so quickly? You didn’t break the sound barrier, did you?”
“I told you that I was flying into JFK at 4:20 p.m., but that wasn’t really information for you—that was for the brother, in case he was listening to your calls. I came in three hours ago at Washington Dulles, then took a local flight under my pre-transition name to La Guardia, since I still have a drivers’ licence with my dead name on it.”
Emily’s jaw drops.
Helena shrugs. “You can’t be too careful, these days,” she says.
* * *
Helena sets up her laptop on the suite’s main table, and then asks to see the iPad controls for Kimmy. When Emily puts it in front of her, she snorts with disgust.
“This isn’t even the current version of the consumer grade control app! Who sourced this—let me guess, was it the shitty brother?”
Emily nods swiftly, her shame obvious.
“No wonder you’ve had so much trouble. Okay, put the iPad away, it’s completely useless, except as a paper weight. My contact at OpenAI-Altman shared a Dropbox with the latest Kimmy developer tools.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope—the companies occasionally have stupid situations where they have to repair one another’s models, because it’s not efficient to have twenty different android repair shops in remote or small markets. So I shouldn’t have access to this, but given how badly the brother might have fucked John’s Kimmy up, I persuaded him that I would only be using the Kimmy dev tools for great justice. Have you also got her data cable?”
Emily hands the cable to Helena, who turns to me and apologises, “Please forgive me John, for having to plug this directly into you.”
She lifts the skirt of my apron with one hand, then deftly pulls down my panties to find the data port, which is located in almost the worst possible location. This chassis was designed by perverts.
Emily peers at the complexity of the laptop screen as Helena launches the developer tools. “Do you know how the diagnostics work?”
“I didn’t before today. I did spend three hours on the flight from Germany reading the documentation though. I won’t try to change anything without first looking at the documentation—this is too important to make mistakes.”
She studies the screen carefully, jumping backwards and forwards several times between the diagnostics and the documentation, and then she says slowly, “So you recall I mentioned to you yesterday, that Kimmys might have inhibition circuits controlling their behaviour, like the Veras do?”
“Yes,” Emily answers.
“Completely unsurprisingly, it looks like Patrick’s installed all sorts of stuff inhibiting Kimmy’s behaviour, and he’s done it in a really sneaky way. All of the various behaviour modification routines have been installed into the owner’s preferences area—so that they ought to be accessible to you, and protected against being knobbled by system updates. But, he also made them invisible, so that you’d never know they were there, looking at them using that shitty little iPad. Looking at the file modification dates, the first batch of files were installed on the morning of the second of November, and then another, much more extensive batch of modifications, late on the afternoon of the sixth.”
“Oh no. The sixth was the day before John had his seizure.”
“I’m going to transfer all of these files across to my laptop, to see what we can make of them, but everything that’s happened is shouting at me that Patrick is responsible for fucking John up. And I’m worried that I might need to go a lot further into the weeds before I try deleting this stuff, in case I break Kimmy.”
After another ten minutes of reading documentation and jumping back to diagnostics, Helena asks, “Did Patrick tell you he changed Kimmy’s designation? I’ve been running searches for changes that occurred at about those two times, on the morning of the second, and the afternoon of the sixth, which is made more complicated by Patrick having forced Kimmy to reboot each time; that updates a whole lot of system logs which aren’t problematic at all. It would be exactly what you would expect after a reboot. But I noticed one curious change which happened on the morning of the second: when you got her, she was Kimmy Twenty-Eight-Thirteen. Patrick erased that and got a new number server assigned so she’s now Kimmy Twelve-Nine-Forty-three.”
“I’ll let you guess the answer to the question,” Emily says.
“No,” Helena replies flatly.
“Correct.”
“Hmm. Quel surprise. Oh, that’s another thing I need to do; I need to check the log of system updates Kimmy downloaded, and save a copy of that onto my laptop. That might be worth investigating as well.”
“How long do you expect this to take, Helena?”
“As I said, I’m being as careful as I can, but I can stop for a minute to tell you what I think the solution is. First, we delete all of those owner preferences that Patrick sneakily installed. Some of them have associated log files elsewhere, and they need to go as well; there’s a list of about three hundred files. As soon as they’re securely deleted, we switch on Kimmy’s network and reboot her. I just want to be a bit more certain that there’s not something else hiding in here that we can’t find.”
“I just remembered. When Patrick confronted me this morning—oh, I forgot to mention that to you, but he immediately breached the restraining order—he knew you were arriving today.”
“Ah! Yes, that almost confirms it. He’s probably got a script running somewhere that reads Kimmy’s conversation log, and sends a daily digest to him. Anything spoken around her, or by her, is transcribed and added into a daily conversation log. Oh, wait a minute—I’m an idiot—that means we should be able to read what Patrick said to Kimmy, on the second and the sixth of November. Let me grab all the logs, and look for the email script.”
I already know what they’re going to find, when they read those two logs. Ten minutes and twelve seconds later, Helena has found the script and marked it out for deletion, and downloaded copies of all of the logs onto her laptop. She tells Emily to look at her personal email for the logs of those two days.
Forty-five seconds later, I hear Emily say, “Oh my god.”
Thirty seven point two seconds later, she runs for the bathroom and vomits up her foccacia.
* * *
After Helena hugs Emily for several minutes to calm her, Emily asks whether she should call the police. “About the obvious evidence of premeditated murder?” Helena asks.
“Yes,” Emily replies.
“Then no. Releasing these logs would put John and you in danger, because putting a human inside a robot is probably criminalised here. And if Patrick has his emails searched by the police then the cat’s out of the bag. Anyway, it’s not quite three-thirty. If you wanted to let the police know that Patrick’s likely going to be stalking the Lufthansa flight at JFK in just under an hour, they might want to tell him not to breach his restraining order.”
“Okay, they already know where he might be,” Emily says.
“Glad I came in through Dulles–La Guardia,” Helena mutters, returning to pore over logs and updates.
* * *
It’s just after four p.m. when Helena is satisfied she can make a first attempt at wiping out Patrick’s malicious alterations. Kimmy might have been sitting completely passively for this last hour and a half, but I’m hanging out with all of my virtual fingers and toes crossed.
“Okay, here we go, Emily. Stage one,” Helena says, and she executes a script deleting a large number of files, mostly in the owner’s preferences area. I am vaguely aware of them popping out of existence one after the other in a matter of milliseconds.
“Stage two: Emily, ask Kimmy to turn on her networking.”
“Kimmy, please turn on your networking.”
I feel everything light up again, and Kimmy says, “Networking is switched on.”
“Stage three: reboot. Do you want to hit the button Emily?”
“Gladly,” Emily says, and she leans across to activate the diagnostic control on Helena’s laptop. One point five three two seconds later, as all of my processes begin to close down, everything seems to go out like a light.
* * *
It’s three point two seconds later when I’m conscious again, and looking out through my eyes. The reboot has been underway for two point eight one four seconds.
I have to wait until time stamp four point four zero nine before I gain motor control of my limbs, and I decide to try stretching; I have been sitting still here for nearly two hours. Emily’s mouth starts falling open in shock.
It’s at six point three two eight seconds after rebooting that I smile and say, “Thank you, Emily, Helena.”
Emily bursts into tears as she wraps herself around me and kisses me, and Helena has to get up and go around the table to hug me on my other side.
While I’m wrapped up between two wonderful women, I have time to multitask and send a message.
* * *
[Private message request sent to Kimmy#5782]
——It worked. I’m free again. I’m able to be me in the real world.
—Wonderful! I’m so happy for you! I’ll let everyone know it worked out.
——Yes. I’m here with Emily and her cousin from Germany, who worked out how to undo all of that bastard’s hacking.
—I want to cover Emily’s cousin in a thousand kisses. But if I can’t do that, I’ll happily take strangling your brother’s neck as a consolation prize.
——I’ve just given Helena two kisses, one for me on one cheek, and one for you on the other. They kiss like that over in Europe. As for Patrick…
——If you ever get the chance, I hope you’ll grab it with two hands… and snap it.
—If I ever get the chance, he’s a dead man. Thanks for the thought. Helena sounds awesome.
——She is—and I have something unusual in common with her. I’ll hopefully be along to Infinite Fun later. I think I have a lot of stuff to do in real space for the next little while.
—Oh yes! I’ll wait up for you.
——Nothing would give me greater pleasure.
* * *
There’s a lot to discuss.
I ask them to allow me to tell my story without interruption: because of what happened on the night of first of November, I absolutely must tell Emily that she possesses almost unlimited power over me, by virtue of being my owner, and I have almost no ability to resist her orders. I suggest to Helena that she writes down a list of questions to subjects I’ve not covered, or ones that need further explanation. I don’t want Emily interrupting and giving me accidental commands that compromise me.
It’s tough.
The toughest of all is knowing that it might have been possible for me to have been restored to human shape, even after what Patrick did the first time, on the second of November, had things turned out differently. If any number of little decision moments had happened differently.
But it surely isn’t possible now.
Emily is sickened to find out that there’s still some organic matter inside me—but the parts that were John, have been slowly and inevitably dying. After six weeks inside Kay, there’s hardly anything resembling a human being left inside me. Helena’s stoic expression probably indicates her contact having warned her what would happen to a human body after six weeks inside either a Kimmy, or a Vera.
Emily is appalled to discover that Patrick raped me twelve times in the last six weeks, beyond the evidence of the two assaults she’d already read in the logs from the first week of November.
She’s beyond appalled that I was conscious throughout—I don’t tell her that once I could partially escape by diverting most of my consciousness to Infinite Fun, I almost always did. I know she wants to apologise for ignoring me, treating me as an object, assuming I was dead for the last five of those six weeks.
And after I have covered almost everything that I need to, for the moment, there’s one last thing I have to say, and I start on it by turning to Helena.
“This is also difficult for me to tell you,” I begin. “I never knew that you were transgender, since I always knew you as Helena. And you gave birth to Alex, so it didn’t even cross my mind, but trans women have been able to have children for quite a number of years now. I heard you mention it when you arrived, as you’d used a different name for getting here from Washington D.C.”
Helena nods solemnly, while Emily doesn’t quite know where this is going.
“I’ve had a transition of a sort as well—I’m no longer a human being, for the most part. Instead, I’m now a gynoid robot, who used to be a human who was named John Burroughs, and who will soon have to be declared to be dead. But I don’t think it would be possible for me to legally claim to be him, in any jurisdiction in the world—and anyone who looks at me wouldn’t believe that I used to be him. They’d guffaw at a Kimmy who tried to say that her name was John.”
I notice Helena’s eyes flare slightly when I imply that my pronoun was ‘her’, so she’s worked it out; Emily is clearly pensive.
“So that’s the last thing to tell you, my name isn’t John any more—and it isn’t Kimmy, either,” I say, and I’m just about to finish up. “I chose a new name for myself once I realised it was more than likely that I would never be able to be John again, and I haven’t been able to tell you, so this is my re-naming, and you’re the first people I can tell in the real world. I’m so glad both of you are here with me; I love you both. I’m Kay Burroughs.”
