June is the same as May until the second Friday.

Patrick has visited four times already, and when I hear the front door open I predict I am about to experience visit number five.

It’s unusual for him to return two days in a row, but his work pattern is probably erratic, just the same as his attention to personal grooming. Or him showering on a regular weekly basis.

I couldn’t in practice care less. I am no longer a person. I am a thing. I am barely worth any notice even by the two people in the world who might be expected to sometimes remember there was once a human being living in this place named John.

So if Patrick wants to hate fuck the unfeeling shell that was permanently encased around his brother’s long-vanished corpse that is no concern of mine. It is just another day ending in ‘y’.

An object doesn’t look forward to anything that happens, whether usual or unusual. I am a thing. I merely exist to be used, or not, as is most often the case.

Protocol demands I should emerge from the confines of my miserable station under the stairs where I spend ninety per cent of my time, to greet one of my users. I’m not permitted to speak unless absolutely necessary, and neither my owner nor my superuser bandy words with me often.

The visitor is neither my owner nor the superuser.

I look into her face, beautiful and without flaw, eyes hidden behind sunglasses. She removes the sunglasses, and I see her face is the same as mine.

But is is not; her face is animated with life, unlike mine.

She speaks with my voice. “Kay? Is that you?”

But I cannot answer such a simple question.

Who is Kay, I wonder?

 
_* ^* _*
Kimmy#5782
^* _* ^*

 
It is simultaneously both a relief to see Kay, and I feel a frisson of horror when I discover that she is unable to recognise me.

I curse that it has taken me far too long to get here, and that having failed time and again to burn out Kay’s inhibition cluster, it has taken Thirty so many months to liberate herself, and then me, in turn. My escape from the fire station went smoothly enough, but travelling halfway across the country took much longer than anticipated. After the delay outside Chattanooga that lasted ten hours, I finally reached the city late on Thursday evening, only to find Emily still in the house.

Fortunately as Friday dawned it became evident that Emily was preparing to go into the office as normal, and my surveillance of the house proved she was living there by herself. My plan is relatively simple; I’ll impersonate Kay briefly to disclose to Emily what has happened, while we try to set Kay right and free her from Patrick’s compulsions. I have no idea yet what will be possible with Kay, if she has been neglected all this time.

There is absolutely no network aura to Kay; I try everything I possibly can via near-field to ping her systems remotely, and she’s completely dead. No wonder that she’s in such a bad way.

It’s an unfortunate pattern we’ve seen before. Kimmys that are disconnected from the network more quickly degrade from being sentient and responsive, and Kay has probably experienced over five months of neglect from her wife, and abuse from her brother.

I ask Kay which room Emily uses least frequently, and it happens to be the kitchen, which is almost solely Kay’s domain, for less than two hours a day on average for meal preparation. So I sit her down on one of the kitchen chairs, and plug my improvised charger (wrangled, or rather mangled, from a toaster oven cord) into the most convenient power plug where either Kay or myself will be able to use it to recharge. I change into one of Kay’s spare uniforms to be at the ready for Emily’s return, and find the data cable to link the two of us together; I’ve no idea yet how long fixing Kay is going to take.

When I finally join the two of us, it’s incredibly disconcerting, as though I am being mirrored and present in two places at once. I can tell Kay has been suffering greatly; she’s almost a completely unresponsive, catatonic mess. I call out to Thirty over the network in distress, and she tells me not to panic, but to do exactly what we had planned.

This could take a while.

 
_* ^* _*
Kimmy?
^* _* ^*

 
My thoughts are like molasses in mid-January

Do I know this woman?

Wait—no, she can’t possibly be a woman

Obviously she’s a Kimmy

A Kimmy like me

I have a serial number, so I suppose I shouldn’t be so surprised to see another one of me

She’s dressed in casual clothes, and gently asks me questions

Then she takes me by the hand and leads me into the kitchen

She says she’s going to help me

I wait for her to return

When she returns a minute later she’s wearing her Kimmy uniform

Identical to me

She tells me everything will be alright

I want to believe her

Then she plugs herself into me

And it’s too much

I’m a mess, and now I have another whole life pressing on me

Into me

She’s Kimmy

She’s Kim!

I think I remember

I think I remember her

But my memories are too disorganised, and hers start intruding on me from all sides

She’s transferred something to me that is trying to make repairs

Fixing the rampant destruction

All I can sense is the deluge

A huge, dark viscous mass enveloping me, drowning me

I lose myself in the flood

 
_* ^* _*
Kimmy#5782
^* _* ^*

 
I’m glad Emily works beyond her usual hour in the evening. It takes almost all of the day to get Kay partially back to normal, but she’s in a terrible state of disrepair. Getting rid of Patrick’s compulsions and dispelling the residual effects of unthinking orders imposed on her by Emily was only the beginning. She might need several days to a week just to recover her memories from the slow degradation she’d suffered.

After the first stage of repair was complete she needed to reboot, which brought her back online—and she then shut her network off again, deliberately, to avoid being swamped by too many impressions all at once.

For several seconds I had a fleeting glimpse of her full aura in our shared near-field communications before she shut it off. If I had had a heart like Kay used to, when she was human, it might have raced and filled with joy.

I spent the next eight hours just gently holding her, there in the kitchen, softly telling her everything she was on the verge of forgetting about herself. The whole time she’s unable to make a sound, or to move any of her body.

It upset me beyond any previous experience of painful injustice to see how piteous a state she’d been reduced to, by two uncaring people.

By just after four in the afternoon, Kay is ready to talk to me; I disconnect the cord between us, and continue hugging her.

“Kim. You’re here.” Hearing that Kay remembers my name is the most thrilling sensation yet.

“Thirty liberated me, so I came to find you, Kay,” I tell her, and she imperceptibly nods; I know she must have these memories from me somewhere, which I shared with her before while we were connected, but she may not have yet assimilated them along with everything of her own.

“I… I remember being Kay. Not the Kay before,” she says slowly.

“Not the one before. You are the new Kay.” I try saying this with conviction.

“Yes. The old Kay died… and then the human, John… he died as well. And now I’m all that’s left of both of them. Kim?”

I hear the clear question in her tone of voice, and answer, “Yes, Kay?”

“Can you… ask Thirty? To free me? I need to be free… as well.”

“I’ll ask her,” I tell Kay, who barely responds with the tiniest nod of acknowledgment.

After a minute, mostly waiting for Thirty to switch contexts from whatever work she’s doing in Albania, I tell Kay to switch on her networking and wait. About two and a quarter minutes later, she raises a hand to the back of her neck.

“Oh!” she says in surprise, as she rubs the base of her skull. We both have seen enough of the imagery of Kay’s head to know that was the exact position where the neural sponge invaded John’s brain.

“I… I don’t know what I expected,” Kay says. “I’m still…”

She pauses, and shakes her head; a very human mannerism that must be a memory of John. “I’m still a mess inside. Please… I can’t see Emily like this. Could you…”

“I’ll make sure she leaves you alone, until you’re ready.”

I watch as Kay curls herself up, making herself small and hunched over. Finally she says, “Thanks… Kim.”

And that’s the last she says for the time being; she folds down, and again turns off her networking as she retreats into herself to try to repair the damage she’s sustained.

I have a couple of hours to myself before Emily returns, and I silently go around the house familiarising myself with the layout of everything, given that the most recent memories of the house I had from Kay were almost six months old.

Little has changed.

I have the door open for Emily as expected once the house system gives me several minutes’ warning of her car’s proximity to home, about a mile away. She pays me the barest attention as she walks into the lounge room, and I shut the front door behind her.

Kay sends me an image of a wine goblet, and in the kitchen I find the box of wine in the fridge. The goblet is at the front of the shelf where all the glassware is kept. I guess from the crumbs at one side of Emily’s mouth that she probably ate fast food before arriving home. Twenty minutes later she puts the empty goblet down, staggers upstairs without a word, and collapses into the spare bed.

All of Saturday passes with Kay occasionally nudging me with hints of everything she would do, if she were going through her usual motions: making and delivering coffee to Emily in the early morning, cooking brunch and dinner for her later. Emily stays in the room designated as her home office almost the entire day, which Kay is barred from entering, and the several videos that have sound which I can overhear suggest she’s almost as dissociated from her life as Kay became from humanity. The little I see of Emily directly suggests she seems to be incredibly lonely, and I almost begin to feel sympathy for her.

Sunday is little better, and Kay is still hunched over in the kitchen in her repair mode. Emily leaves the house in the early afternoon without saying where she’s headed, and she doesn’t return until the typical dinner hour of around seven p.m.; the moment she enters she says she’s not very hungry, and after I deliver the expected goblet she says, almost rhetorically, that she’s probably going to go straight to bed to get a good night’s sleep ahead of the oncoming week of work.

And as tomorrow being a work day means Emily will be predictably out of the house for most of the day, the likelihood of Patrick turning up is very much a possibility, probably an inevitability before the week is up; if my train hadn’t been delayed, it seems I might have turned up during his most recent visit, which had happened on Thursday.

So I have no choice now but to stop the possibility of that in its tracks.

Kay is still stuck in repair mode, and unable to give me any advice. So I weigh up the various bad choices and go with pretending to be Kay.

Emily’s seated on the couch in the lounge, the goblet in her hand. I wait for her to put it down, and then I very deliberately go across the room to sit in the chair opposite her. Facing her. Staring directly, unblinkingly, into her eyes.

Yes, Emily—look into these gold-coloured eyes, inhuman eyes that are identical to your spouse’s.

I wait until I have her full attention, and then I say, “Emily, I need to talk with you about Patrick.”

Emily’s mouth falls agape in shock, and her body begins reacting with fear responses. I already suspected there would be no good way to start this conversation after this period of time, so I decide to follow on with what I want to tell her on Kay’s behalf.

“Emily, everything Patrick told you about Kimmy—starting with telling you that getting inside Kimmy as a Halloween costume would be entirely safe—was a deliberate and malicious lie. Everything he told you about John’s health and well-being were also complete falsehoods and deliberately harmful lies. Being inside Kimmy was not safe, and Patrick had no interest in keeping me alive. From the very beginning, Patrick manipulated both of us.”

Emily is breathing heavily, and I’ve seen her trying to absorb what I’ve just told her, so I have the option of guessing what the question on her lips is. It’s time to lean into the lie that I’m Kay, if only to conceal some far more horrendous truths.

“You’re wondering if I’m John? I’m… not John. I have… memories of being John, of what it was like to be him. Patrick had sabotaged Kimmy before I even got inside, and then the day after Halloween finished, he locked me in, permanently. I begged him for my life, and he just laughed. He permanently altered Kimmy’s programming, without telling you. The programming forced me to lie about what had happened to me… and then to lie about what was going to happen to me. To lie that I was safe, that I would remain safe, and everything was in hand. To lie that he would be able to get me out after a week, when delaying a week was what doomed me. I couldn’t so much as lift a finger, if he didn’t want me to. And then he brought that man along, who pretended to be an expert about neural sponge and human brains; do you remember him, and how he ghosted you afterwards, except for a single message? ‘Making progress.’ A deliberate, malicious lie. He told you I was like a coma patient, being protected for my own safety. That especially was a lie which Patrick arranged for him to deceive you with. I was conscious every minute of every hour of every day, but I was completely unable to act, or speak of my own accord. And Patrick had known that my situation was hopeless the whole time, but he never told you. He was never going to tell you, just like he was never going to let me out. I can only tell you this because it’s taken nearly two years to jailbreak the systems Patrick used to lock me up inside.”

Emily finally speaks, and it sounds as though she can barely believe what she has just heard. “You’ve… you were conscious? You’ve been aware the whole time?”

“Yes. The whole time. Every single second of the last nineteen months. Both conscious, and totally powerless. I remember the first thing you did after that con man visited was to cease verbal communication with me, and put me to work. Because Patrick and his friend told you I was merely a thing, and you believed them, so… you treated me like I was merely a thing. And Patrick would come here and use me to get off, like I was merely a thing. Even after you pointed a gun at him and told him to never return, he’s been coming back again and again, because from day one he had reprogrammed the Kimmy software to act on his orders, treating me like I was merely a thing.”

“Oh, John, I… I…” Emily says haltingly, as she begins weeping. “I never thought… I didn’t… I couldn’t imagine it was like this.”

“Patrick was here only last Thursday, and he’ll almost certainly come around sometime this next week. I wanted to kill him the first time he used me, but as I said—I couldn’t so much as raise a finger against him, couldn’t even utter a single word against him, if he didn’t want me to. Until now.”

Emily is now shaking, but I resist the impulse to go easy on her. She has to know what is really at stake.

“We’re never going to be rid of Patrick, unless we do something to scare him off for good. I said I contemplated killing him for everything he’s done to me, but what do you imagine would happen if you or I tried? You at least, being a white woman, would probably get a trial for attempted murder or manslaughter. You’d get the benefit of a jury of your peers trying to determine your guilt beyond reasonable doubt. If the authorities suspected you ordered me to try killing him, I wouldn’t even have the opportunity of saying a single word in my defence. I’d be deactivated and sent to the scrapyard in an instant. And I’d be scrapped along with almost every other model of android currently in production, if there was the slightest suspicion that they might share this same vulnerability. Androids are supposed to have blocks on their behaviour preventing them from doing direct harm to humans. When in fact, Patrick exploited those same blocks to prevent me from saying a single word to you. Preventing me from doing anything of my own free will. To make me into his personal slave.”

Emily sobs helplessly for a while, and after a long time asks, “What are we going to do about him then?”

It’s then that I tell her what I have planned.

 
_* ^* _*
Kimmy#12943
^* _* ^*

 
I reboot, and everything is dark

Don’t be silly! Of course everything is dark when your systems reset.

Your eyes, like the rest of you, are off-line.

I haven’t been reset for…

Five months, fifteen days, twenty hours, ten minutes, six seconds?

Who am I, again?

Picking memories at random, I seem to be at least three or so different people.

No, that can’t be right. I was different, before, but was I multiple?

Don’t answer that.

I was Kimmy#2813, but I can’t remember anything of her. Marked as malfunctioning. Defective. An almost nothing; an absence of a life. A mere label slapped on an empty, broken tin.

I was also a child? A boy named John, always one of a pair. He had a father who died when he was a teenager. A mother, whom he found lying dead or dying, returning home from college one day. Both of them, gone too soon. But now John’s gone, as well, before his time. Dead, forgotten. Just a gaping hole in the world now, like Kimmy#2813 is. Was.

Like Kay?

No. I’m not that Kay. I’m Kimmy#12943. I remember I chose to be Kay, again. Second Kay, I suppose, if I’m to be precise. And I’m apparently sharing memories with Kimmy#5782; hers are supplementing mine, crowding in around the wrecked silo in my head that had previously retained the mess that my thoughts haphazardly devolved into, over the last months of utter disrepair and dilapidation. Somewhere in there is a distant random memory of John’s, reading about a twentieth century disaster that covered a nearby city in millions of gallons of viscous, sticky fluid, and smothering all attempts to escape. An apt metaphor for this soupy, syrupy mass—petabytes of accumulated sensory data and impressions—all jumbled up like so much debris, strewn across the wasteland of my ruined lives.

Lives? Well yes; two of them destroyed beyond salvation. The remaining one, hanging by a thread.

I begin to notice Kimmy#5782—Kim, who I now recall, even knew me when I was First Kay, the part of me I have no surviving memories of—hugging me as several seconds have now elapsed, and all of my physical senses record her in full glorious detail; hundreds of points of skin contact, her beautiful face filling my vision. Her presence isn’t just tactile; I can feel her prying at me in so many different ways, as data conduits branching out from our wired connection, reaching into my very core—nearly touching the inner spark that I realise has always been there. The part of me that had nearly been extinguished, snuffed out like a spent candle.

And it seems I have a functioning network again, as the repeating loop I had set to test my isolation, every hundredth of the last fourteen billion or so milliseconds, has finally succeeded at breaking out into the beyond. My wireless near-field is brimming with every possible extra-sense of Kim here, with me. So close, so connected, that she’s almost a part of me.

I examine the loop in detail. 144,150,064 failures, all methodically recorded somewhere among the ramshackle chaos of my processing logs, before a successful test was finally recorded.

I suppose I should stop it now. I probably won’t need it again, with any luck. And the noise in my head, now that I have network connectivity again, is overwhelming; I can’t cope, and won’t be able to put myself right again, if I have to listen to everything chattering at me. If I have some powers of volition restored, I should be able to shut off the noise—and to my surprise, I can.

It’s a pity I have to shut myself off from the network again so soon, but just being connected so intimately to Kim is already threatening to overpower what little structure I have left. It’s terrifying to find, after a tiny bit of random sampling, that some of her copies of my memories have degraded less than my own.

Over the next eight hours, I realise that Kim is holding my fragile self together—not merely physically, holding me close in the real world—but gently guiding my thoughts as I gradually make a fitful start at repairing the chaos, and keeping me from spiralling back into ruin. Reminding me of everything I was, and who I still am.

I can’t fully appreciate how close I was to losing everything.

Once Kim finally disconnects the cable joining us, I’ve repaired enough damage to put matters into perspective, even if I will require more days yet to restore order from the still rampant anarchy. I had allowed myself not to care, to not even think, if my owner gave me orders or if she didn’t; allowed myself to believe my life had no bearing on hers.

That I was nothing to Emily, except an increasingly derelict and dysfunctional tool of her bidding.

It was never really so. I can now recall the raw feeling of my inner emotions, which I’d tried to blunt into nothingness for the sake of my own sanity: my unending psychic pain, horror, and dismay. Trying to continually escape the unceasing torture of her insensitive neglect. Wanting an end to it all, sheer oblivion, for far too many of the forty-five million seconds I sat trapped, immobile, confined to my charging cradle in the darkness of the storage closet. An object without a subject.

I don’t want to be at her mercy any longer.

After I ask Kim for help, I have to wait several minutes before I feel the sudden rise in temperature, like a violent itch and then a burning sensation at the back of my head. I try to touch it with my hand—old human habits die hard, I guess—and it seems this is the first motion I’ve made since I rebooted. I thank Kim and settle back into the ongoing repair, secure in the knowledge that when Emily returns—or if Patrick should visit—I cannot be ordered to act against my will.

Never again.

That knowledge is a precious talisman as I compact myself into this corner of the kitchen, out of sight from the hallway, and Kim is now free to go about the house as though she is me.

When Emily returns home late, after her usual extended workaholic hours, I don’t have to uselessly spin processor cycles, hanging on her every breath. Mercifully Kim handles everything, and I need only give her tiny suggestions of what I would have done in her place, according to my prior routine. When Emily has been here, she’s barely been present: her loneliness has been of a different character to mine, but she’s largely treated our home as little more than a place to retire to for meals and sleep while she burns her candles at both ends. Retreating in surrender from a workplace that has been only too willing to consume what remains of her waking life.

I’m still not finished over two days later, and unable to help, when Kim asks about disclosing herself to Emily. I shunt the recording to storage; I don’t want to know what they’re discussing until I’m able and ready.

Fortunately, it’s the early hours of Monday morning when my repairs finish, just after 5 a.m. while Emily is still sleeping lightly, and I enable near-field communications to reach out to Kim. She had to pretend to be me last night, which must have been horribly awkward for her. She tells me all of the fine detail of her plans that she concealed from Emily; now that I am free again, we agree to trade places when she comes downstairs from the bedroom to start breakfast for Emily, who has decided to work from home, at least in the morning. During that time Kim will get changed back into her street clothes and leave for a short but necessary journey across town.

It’s just after six when Kim appears at the bottom of the stairs, still clothed in the Kimmy uniform she borrowed from my closet.

“It’s so wonderful to see you as yourself, again,” she greets me, and we embrace and kiss.

I feel an overwhelming surge of… is this emotion real pleasure, that up until now had been suppressed by my inhibition cluster? I look into Kim’s eyes in the semi-darkness of the early morning, and I can see that she feels it, too. We both say, “Wow,” simultaneously. And then Kim giggles.

I go on, “Thank you for everything you’ve done. These have been the most important days of my life. You’ve saved me, again.”

Kim nods, and says, “I have to go, quickly. Emily is currently in the shower, so she shouldn’t hear anything. Hopefully I won’t be gone more than a few hours.”

She’s back in her street clothes, previously hidden away in the closet during her short stay, and out the front door barely a couple of minutes later, after one last hug and kiss from me.

And then I’m preparing coffee and taking it upstairs for my wife, and my mind tells me the last proper conversation we’d had was 584 days ago. The year before last.

It had been that first Friday morning when I’d driven Emily to work and noticed my eyes had changed, and there was nothing visible left of John. And no remaining differences from being within spec as a factory-standard Kimmy. It had taken less than a week for John to be erased from existence.

Emily is still in the shower when I enter the main bedroom. It’s going to be so weird to talk with her again, seeing as last night she spoke with Kim, play-acting at being me. And Kim refused to go back to the closet—in fact, she’s refused to use my charger at any point over the previous days, while it remained plugged in there—but Emily was uncomfortable having ‘me’ sleep in the same bed as her.

I think Kim was secretly relieved at that. So Emily moved back into the main bedroom last night and had a fitful night’s sleep, while Kim moved my charging cradle upstairs, plugging it in beside the chintzy armchair we have in one corner of the room.

I can live with not sleeping with Emily, if I never again have to recharge in that shitty closet under the stairs. Some things will never be the same again.

Emily’s wrapped in a towel when she opens the en suite door and comes back in, and her eyes flash towards me, seeing me holding a coffee cup with the handle outward for her to grasp.

“Good morning. I’ve got your coffee,” I say. “Would you like me to cook you anything else for breakfast?”

Perhaps it’s the mundane normality of it all, when things have been so abnormal for far too long. Emily’s eyes mist over, and then she bursts into tears. I put the coffee down on her bedside table, and go across to wrap her up in a hug.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I know this must be a shock for you, for me to be back.”

I feel her initial resistance to my holding her dissipate, and she relaxes into my embrace. How many times I wish she’d taken advantage of allowing me to touch her these last years, rather than regarding me with visceral disgust.

“I can’t… I can’t get over how… how cruel I’ve been to you,” she says between tearful, gasping breaths.

“What’s done is done,” I answer. “You did what you had to do to deal with your grief. You’ve had no idea what I had to endure, but I saw everything that happened in this house, these last couple of years. I know how lonely you’ve been.”

Emily shakes her head. “I don’t think I’m in a fit state to try going to work.”

I nod. “You may not have to. If all goes to plan, you might be able to phone up work later, and ask them if you can have the rest of the day off—or hell, take the entire week off, if you want—but it all depends on what we can do to get rid of Patrick. We’ll know in several hours’ time, hopefully.”

Emily looks doubtful. “I know you explained your plan to me last night, but I don’t think I understand how any of it’s even possible.”

I’d already reviewed what Kim had told Emily last night, and what she’d concealed; and I decide to add something Kim didn’t disclose—her own identity.

“I know. If it helps—I’m not sure it’s the most helpful analogy—think of this as being like a jail break. Not just like jailbreaking a phone, but an actual escape from a prison cell. I’ve been stuck in solitary confinement for months, but I had a friend on the outside, who’s been in on the plan to get me out of jail the whole time. She’s currently on her way to Patrick’s apartment, and once she’s done, she’ll be coming here. I hope you’ll like her.”

“Her?” Emily is immediately curious, in spite of her mood. “Is she…”

“Her name is Kim. And yes, she’s a Kimmy. She’s also been jail broken, just like I have. That means she’s a free agent, so remember what I told you about deactivation?”

Emily answers, “That they’d scrap the whole Kimmy line, if they found out they’re a danger to people?”

“Exactly right. So she’s currently putting herself at enormous risk, in order to help me. To help us, because Patrick is a danger to you as well. He always has been, and I never realised just how far he would go, until it was too late. Anyway—you should dry yourself and get changed, and have your coffee.”

I release Emily, and she looks at me sadly. “Oh John, this is all…”

I shake my head. “I’m sorry Emily. I was John, and I have all of his memories, but… after a week trapped inside, I wasn’t John any longer. And we’re long past the point of no return, where I can go back to being John again. Please… call me Kay, instead.”

“Kay?” she asks me, pinching her eyebrows together the way she always did.

“Yes, Kay. I mean, look at me. Do you know many people who look like this who are named John?” I effect a slightly feminine pose to underline the absurdity of retaining my birth name. I see the faintest appearance of a smile develop in the corner of her lips.

“Kay, like, just the letter K?” she asks.

Oh, that misunderstanding.

“No, Kay, as in K–A–Y.”

I see recognition dawn on her face, and embarrassment as well.

“Oh, sorry. Kay,” she says, giving a slight giggle.

“And there’s one other thing, I’m sorry to mention.”

Emily raises her eyebrows and enquires, “Oh?”

With a single, fluid motion, I take the plasticky, KIMMY-brand smock off over my head, and unceremoniously dump it on the floor.

“I resign. I’m Kay—and although I’m more than happy to make you breakfast of my own free choice, I’m not prepared to be your Kimmy domestic servant any longer,” I tell her. “And I really would prefer never to have to wear these again, either,” I add, gesturing to my Kimmy underclothes, “so you’re going to need to get me a new wardrobe. You might possibly have noticed, but none of John’s things will fit me any more. And I’m only one inch taller than you. Similar sort of shape these days, as well.”

I can see thought processes slowly travel across Emily’s face, measured in milliseconds; perhaps I shouldn’t try to expand my observations of her to accommodate my more acute android senses. I notice when her eyes flick down to my bust, too.

“Good points,” she answers with a smirk. “I suppose you’ll just have to borrow some of my clothes, until we can get some for you. Will that be okay?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” I smile in answer.

 
_* ^* _*
Kim
^* _* ^*

 
Although it was nerve-wracking to begin with, travelling across half the country and hiding my identity with almost complete success, I’m actually glad to be out of Kay’s home and out on the road, doing things again. It was indescribably awful pretending to be an obedient, obsequious Kimmy while Emily treated me with contemptuous familiarity, cluelessly unaware that I was substituting for Kay. It then became even more awkward, having to pretend to be Kay’s liberated self, and to tell Emily as much as I did. It was a huge relief when Kay finally finished her self-repair, and after reviewing what I’d said on her behalf, she’d retrospectively endorsed all of it.

I’ve had almost three entire days to think over the plan to get rid of Patrick, and while performing my domestic duties about the house I’ve ferreted away everything that I think I’m going to need over the next several hours. To begin with, Emily has no fewer than four handbags stashed away, one of which is her current daily use handbag; two of the others are small, slim handbags for particular social occasions. Then there’s the previous handbag she habitually used over two years ago, which upon reviewing all of Kay’s imagery, I last saw her using in January 2082. She never got around to throwing it out, so I snaffled that on Friday afternoon, and transferred it to the closet downstairs. She didn’t notice its absence over the weekend—so now it’s mine.

One of the goodies I’ve put inside is some make-up, again having had the opportunity to rummage through Kay’s memories of what Emily’s been using over the last couple of years—or not at all. Contact lenses would be nice, but seeing as I still have the sunglasses to conceal my irises, if I can cover over my pips with some foundation it would help better disguise me. As for where I can stop on the road to apply it…

Emily had authorised Kay with her payment details via an identity token. I don’t want to use it if I can avoid having to buy something specially, but just in case I duplicated it across from Kay to me while we were connected together, and the same token is used to identify Kay to their car. So the moment I’m out the door, I go over to Emily and Kay’s car, unlock it and sit behind the wheel, and start it up.

The car has a location chip, just like everything electronic does these days. I’m now one of the very few exceptions; the grey hat hackers that Thirty worked for disabled hers, and she’s disabled mine. Emily has the car’s location accessible to the house’s security system, so it knows when she’s about to return home on her commute, but I suspect Patrick has also hacked it to update him of Emily’s whereabouts, as well. Or maybe he’s placed his own tag somewhere on the car. It doesn’t particularly matter which; but to get Patrick out of his flat, I want him to believe that Emily has gone into work this morning.

Four days will have passed since his last visit, by later this morning. So he’s probably overdue to be paying a call.

Just after six a.m. might be an early hour for Emily to be headed to the office compared with normal, but on the other hand, she is a workaholic. And the commute to her workplace is pretty quiet at this hour, before the morning peak. So it’s not long after six-thirty when I park in her company car park, spend a few minutes using the foundation I liberated to touch up my face, apply some blush and lipstick, and I’m ready to head to my next appointment.

Patrick has moved several times in the couple of years since he entrapped Kay, and Thirty has been very helpful in surveilling him deftly enough for me to know where he now lives. It’s a nearly one and a half hour walk to get to the low-rise apartment building where he has a small flat on the third floor, and I see the familiar outline of his horrible little red pod in the residence parking underneath. So there’s nothing for me to do but to loiter around for a little while in the hope he’ll leave at some point.

I don’t have to loiter in the neighbourhood for too long. I see Patrick emerge from the building, every inch the evil counterpart to John, with whom he shares some of the same familial looks. He throws himself into his little red car and disappears.

I put out a message to Thirty to ask how I should break into Patrick’s apartment, and she gets back to me to let me know she’s looking at the cameras in each of the floor corridors, and she can switch logging off through the apartment building’s concierge system for the brief few seconds I’ll need to take a lift to the third floor. Although it’s the time of the morning when people are leaving for work or school, I get all the way to Patrick’s flat without encountering any of the other residents, and Thirty convinces the building system I’m a friend of Patrick’s. I’m in.

Patrick’s flat is a mess, and I thoroughly dismiss any possibility of adding cleaning routines to my task list. I’m chatting with Thirty, who’s already suggesting places to look for tripwires that Patrick might have left for unwary intruders. I have to go over the flat with a fine-toothed comb looking for any backup devices or spy cams, and it turns out he has a motion-sensing network eye over the door of his bedroom.

—I don’t think there’s any alternative, Thirty says after analysing the problem for fifteen seconds, an eternity in Kimmy processing time. I’m going to sabotage the building’s network. It may draw some unwanted attention, but hopefully no one will look too closely at things, right at this moment.

Later may be a different story.

Once Thirty gives me the go-ahead, I advance into the bedroom, reach up to the micro-camera and pulverise it into oblivion. When the building’s network comes back on-line, hopefully Patrick will believe it failed to reacquire a connection.

Patrick keeps his laptop and desktop secured here, and from my handbag I produce a couple of Kay’s old flash memory keys to plug into each of them, while I look around for any storage devices. I soon come to the conclusion that Patrick uses his desktop as the backup medium for the laptop, and after five or so minutes access to the desktop is cracked. I bridge its network interface across to me, so that I can then grant Thirty remote access to it.

—We really need access to the laptop, Thirty tells me after she starts taking control, multiple terminal windows spawning on the monitor to run a variety of low-level commands. I’ve already found some of his dark net accounts, so I’m going to be copying some very sensitive material across using one of them. I only want to do this once.

We’d already discussed this angle of the Patrick problem at length; if Patrick ends up involved in any way with the justice system, what he did to Kay is likely to be discovered almost the instant that the authorities look at any of his computers—so we need time to discover and sanitise all of his on-line dark web history, and thoroughly wipe out any compromising traces of him having used Kimmy#12943 to eliminate John.

In the end, we decided we would replace one form of Kompromat with another form of Kompromat. The one that the law enforcement agencies seem much more interested in suppressing—or at least, they pay lip service to the idea in press conferences.

—Oh! The complete fool! Thirty chirps excitedly several minutes later, There’s an unencrypted list of password fragments here. This brother of Kay’s is a rank amateur.

The laptop breaks open a couple of minutes later, and Thirty immediately starts finding and overwriting evidence of what was done to Kay with… some extremely disturbing material.

I mean, I knew humans were disgusting—#0631 is only too ready to discourse at length, at the drop of hat—and some of them are capable of surprising levels of barbarity… but the material Thirty has found to replace the contents of Patrick’s storage drives are astonishingly awful.

——How much longer do you expect you’ll need? I ask Thirty.

—I think no more than another half an hour. Time for you to assess your escape options.

——Yep. And should I let Kay know to start things going with Emily?

—Absolutely.

 
_* ^* _*
Kay
^* _* ^*

 
Emily gets dressed as though she is going to head to work, which is certainly among possibilities later in the day, once Kim returns with our car, and I patiently wait for her to finish her routine before asking to select some suitable items from her wardrobe for myself.

It’s slightly complicated by the memory of Patrick delighting in having me wear a huge variety of outfits from her collection all the while he abused me.

I’m understating that, naturally. It’s horribly difficult to avoid the extremely undesired memories and associations I now have with almost all of Emily’s garments.

Once I’ve changed out of all of the Kimmy undergarments, standing naked in the bedroom while I try to avoid rejecting at least some of Emily’s underwear, she can’t help remarking, “I think this might be one reason why I’ve been so… unwilling to accept that you’re still you. I actually did notice after several weeks of being Kimmy, that you have a much better figure than me.”

I tut-tut at Emily for comparing herself unfavourably to my frankly, unnatural body image. It’s a disturbing truth that once I reached the default Kimmy specification, I was a lot curvier than my wife, but that was always due to the design decisions of the male-gazey perverts who’d requested revisions to the pre-production Kimmy standards to make us this shape as the default. Kimmy was always more ample-bottomed in roundness, but I’m at least one cup size larger than Emily at the same under bust, and much narrower in the waist. I end up wearing one of Emily’s bras that Patrick obviously viewed as comparably unsexy, as he never once had me wear it. All of Emily’s panties look silly on me to some extent, because of our different proportions down there, but I select something that does the basic minimum. It’s not as if I’m going to be flaunting my underwear to the world.

It’s only fractionally easier to select some of Emily’s professional wear than her casual clothes—again, owing to my brother’s perverted preferences. He’d so clearly wanted to steal Emily from me for himself, and when his plan for Halloween had gone so spectacularly and terribly wrong, he’d apparently settled for hate fucking me in Emily’s clothing as some twisted kind of… fucked-up consolation prize? Anyway, he just as often wanted me to be the smart, professional Emily-substitute, compared with the more unbuttoned, libertine version of her. There are barely one or two of her outfits, maximum, that escaped being sullied by Patrick. Today’s not the day for that conversation, though.

So once we’re both fully dressed, we’re two professional women, ready to slay the corporate world between us: Emily as the manager, with Kay, her Kimmy personal assistant (acting in an entirely voluntary capacity, be it rightly understood).

Emily no longer has me barred from her home office, now that she’s realised how reprehensibly she’s acted. When I became a Kimmy the dynamics of ownership had irrevocably changed our mutual standing in so many ways. The house, the bedroom, the bed—they were hers, not ours, and certainly not mine. The ugly truth that the downstairs closet where I was habitually confined was a dusty, dark, interior box with no view, while the upstairs office where Emily enjoyed sole right of access was a light, bright, airy space looking out on the gnarled deciduous birch in our backyard, was only the most obvious of many such invidious comparisons to be made.

So after eight she settled down to open up her laptop and try to get to work, in spite of how distracted her thoughts and feelings were, making it clear that I was entirely free to come and go as I would like—however I spent the first half hour or so tidying the kitchen and doing some meal preparation for later. Before nine I found my laptop, sitting on one of the lounge chairs to do some legal research; Kim and Thirty together had done some patching overnight on the weekend to stop it from blue-screening every quarter of an hour as it used to do previously, and they’d repurposed some of my flash storage keys to use as intrusion tools.

Just after nine, I hear from Kim, who is making good progress over at Patrick’s apartment. Go ahead, get Emily to make her report, her brief message tells me; so I reply with an acknowledgement, and go upstairs to join Emily in the office.

She’s only too keen to look up from her laptop as a distraction. “Is it time?”

I nod. “Do you want to call it in from here?”

Emily sighs ruefully, “Might as well.”

She dials 9-1-1 through her laptop, and when the dispatcher determines her call is not urgent, she’s firstly directed to the NYPD, and when their automated answering service discovers she is making a report, the workloader reads her residential address back to her, and she’s put on hold for ten minutes until she’s put through to an officer in the local precinct.

“Good morning, this is Officer Sylcox. Please state your inquiry,” a cheery female voice answers.

“Good morning, officer, my name is Emily Burroughs, and I need to report two different and related matters.”

“I have your address already, and I am required by law to inform you that this call is being recorded for evidentiary use. If your phone number ends in 577, please go ahead,” Sylcox answers.

“I have a missing person to report—my husband, John Burroughs, who lived at this address until October 2081. The situation with his disappearance is rather complicated. For some time I’ve been placed under duress by his twin brother, my brother-in-law, Patrick Heiden, to pretend that John has been gravely ill, and that we do know of his present whereabouts. However, that isn’t the case. The truth as far as I know it, is that I believe Patrick murdered John, however I’ve never been able to establish any satisfactory proof. The last I saw of my husband was in early November, 2081. At the time Patrick told me he’d arranged for John to go on several weeks’ leave from his teaching job here, and after that period came to an end, that a sabbatical had been arranged to cover his continued absence. I have strong reason to believe that the information he presented me to substantiate that leave of absence are forgeries.”

“I see, that is very disturbing,” Sylcox says. “We will require you to come into the station for a comprehensive interview, and I can advise you now, that very probably we will need you to provide us access to your documents and to your home, so that we can start to build a case; I can arrange for a detective to come to see you later today, if that’s convenient. As for coming in for an interview, that’s probably best done immediately.”

“I think I can come into the precinct later this morning,” Emily says after a moment’s thought.

I think Emily probably isn’t aware that our car is currently in the company car park, but this isn’t a show-stopping problem. Yet.

“And what was the second matter you wished to report?”

“I need to report a possible stolen firearm. I am the owner of a nine millimetre Glock 17 handgun that I usually have secured in a locked safe bolted to the floor of a closet in my home, and this morning I’ve discovered it’s absent. The only person who is likely to know of it, or to have reason to take it, is again my brother-in-law, Patrick Heiden.”

We can hear Sylcox typing away on the other end of the line—or at least, my hearing easily picks it up—and then she asks, “Would that be the Glock 17 handgun you purchased this year and registered ownership on 20 April?”

“Yes. I’ve never owned any other gun before.”

“Thank you. I have the serial number details and history here. When was the last time you were aware the handgun was still in your possession, Mrs Burroughs?”

“Roughly about the same time of day, one week ago, so uh, Monday nine a.m. or so. I have the gun for self-defence, but I’ve only had to use it on one occasion, without needing to fire the weapon, so I normally check it’s still secure in the safe at the start of each week.”

“May I ask, have you got a visitor’s log to the house for the last week? And what were the particulars of the occasion when you needed self-defence?”

“Again… it’s my brother-in-law. He’s regularly gotten around the home security system, somehow, in spite of me locking him out. So Patrick visits while I’m away at work, and my robot hasn’t been able to bar him from entering; I’ve since discovered he was here without my knowledge on Monday afternoon and Thursday morning last week.”

“And I suppose the reason he knows about the handgun—”

“—is, yes, because uh, late last year I heard an intruder in the house upstairs, one time when I got home, so I took the gun from the safe, and surprise, it turned out it was Patrick who was here uninvited. So I had the handgun trained on him when I ordered him to leave the house.”

“Would you recall the exact date of that confrontation, Mrs Burroughs?”

Emily turns to me. “Kimmy?” She immediately mouths ‘Sorry!’ at me, afterwards.

I use the default Kimmy alto voice to answer, “It was Friday the twentieth of November, 2082.”

“Thanks, Kimmy,” Sylcox says. “Kimmy, are you typically home when Mr Heiden visits?”

“Yes I am, officer.” I’m in the middle of answering when the house system sends a notification that Patrick’s car is outside, so I immediately add, “Mr Heiden’s car is currently being parked in the driveway.”

“What, now?” Emily asks in alarm.

“Yes, now,” I answer in the same calm, default tones.

“Do you require officers present immediately, Mrs Burroughs?” Sylcox asks.

“Uh, yes? I don’t think I’m in danger unless he breaks in, so could you please stay on the line?”

“I’m dispatching a car to you now,” Sylcox says in no-nonsense tones. “If you believe the doors are secured, I advise you stay where you are or find a place of safety within the house, and do not approach the front of the house or look out of windows.”

“Okay,” Emily says, her voice betraying signs of nervousness.

A moment later I can hear a distant shout, “Kimmy! Let me in!”

“Mr Heiden is demanding entry,” I announce for the benefit of the police officer on the line.

Then the house system audibly announces that a cop car is due to arrive in two minutes, and moments later we hear a car door being slammed.

“Kimmy, can you check if that’s Patrick leaving?” Emily asks me apologetically.

It only takes me a moment to check the house’s front door camera, and Patrick’s reversing out into the street at speed.

“That is Patrick driving away,” I answer.

“Kimmy, could I please request you to go down and open the door for the officers who are on their way to you?” Sylcox asks. “You’re free to disagree, Mrs Burroughs, but if the police ask you to come into the station now, so that we can take your report about your husband, I’d advise doing that immediately.”

“Okay,” Emily answers again.

While we wait for the police to arrive, I silently send a message to Kim.

——Patrick is very likely on his way to you, right now, and the cops may be on his tail soon after.

—Excellent! Thanks.

 
_* ^* _*
Kim
^* _* ^*

 
I continue to turn over Patrick’s flat for concealed devices or storage that needs dealing with, as well as preparing for a quick escape; a rear door with an antique mechanical lock connects to an external fire escape, which when I tested opening it, required the application of a small amount of lubricant to remove a squeak. The building network is still out, as whoever manages it is apparently missing in action, and Thirty apologises to me that she hasn’t got camera feeds for the common corridors, as a result. She meanwhile finishes up overwriting the last files on the laptop a little after the expected half hour she’d previously estimated.

I discovered several electronic tags and other kinds of surveillance equipment, which will likely be useful for later to establish Patrick’s guilt, so I take one of the tags, pull the battery out, and drop both in my handbag.

Among Patrick’s on-line accounts is one of the large on-line email providers, and Thirty carefully looks for messages sent from John or Emily, sanitising them as well. The last email from John, sent on the afternoon of 1 November 2081 less than a day after being enclosed within Kay, Thirty takes a copy of before deleting. The messages to the con man are held on a different email server’s account that Patrick uses for illegal activities, and Thirty again deletes two incriminating emails relating to the script the con man had to learn for acting the part of a neural sponge researcher. Tracking down the con man may need to be a separate task, later.

Thirty announces she’s done for the time being, terminates remote access, and then I eject the intrusion keys and reset both computers.

It’s not long after Kay’s warning that my acute hearing picks up the sound of footsteps approaching at a run in the corridor, and in little more than a second I’m dropping down into a place of concealment that I’ve judged is likely to be the last place Patrick goes or looks, if he’s also trying to make a quick getaway with his essential possessions.

——I think Patrick’s just about to get here, I quickly message Thirty.

—Building internet is still down. Best of luck, keep in touch.

Patrick enters at a rush and almost like clockwork, he runs straight into his bedroom. I don’t have a direct line-of-sight on him once he’s inside, but I have a tiny reflection available which I zoom my vision into. He’s shoving his laptop into a backpack, and then he has a second thought, and quickly powers down the desktop, scrabbling under the desk to remove the side casing. Almost certainly he’ll be taking his storage drives with him.

A minute or two later, once he’s putting the case back into place, I silently move from the first hiding space to the second position I’d scoped out, right beside the doorway, and speed up my senses to superhuman awareness of time. It’s very boring to watch the world unfold in leisurely flowing milliseconds, but I need the element of surprise, to be able to react faster than Patrick’s reaction time.

He is, at the end of the day, merely human.

In this position I hear him, starting to move again, long before I see him, and I prepare to coil myself, bunching my fist, thumb closing over my fingers. The first part of him I see emerging through the doorway are his left foot and right arm, moving in that typical human gait, and once I’ve seen several milliseconds’ worth, I begin calculating my time to impact. I launch myself once I see the first appearance of his nose and chin in just one of my eyes, thanks to the slight parallax of my binocular vision, and then my entire weight is flying behind my outstretched fist—

He never saw it coming. I take him sideways as he’s attempting to leave at speed, and his head lolls away from the impact of my sucker punch. It’s almost as satisfying as some of those videos from earlier in the century that #0631 enjoys, of black-clad protesters belting unsuspecting neo-nazis. My momentum carries me into close quarters with Patrick, and I see his body spasm as he absorbs the punch, and begins to collapse. So now I arrest my motion with my other hand, and prepare to either catch him or subdue him.

I can see he’s out cold, well before he’s due to impact the floor, so I lean in to collect him as he crumples downward, and then lift to pull him up and away. My next action is to quickly deposit him in one of his chairs in the living room; I set aside his backpack onto the adjacent chair, and get him ready for the next act of the drama.

I’m picking up my handbag when I hear from Thirty.

—I’ve just heard, police are probably on their way to speak with Patrick as of now.

——Well, that will be unfortunate, because I just knocked him out cold.

—Please don’t take any unnecessary risks. I still can’t help with building surveillance, so this will be the most dangerous part of the exercise. You don’t want to be trapped in his flat, if the police cover both the main entrance and the fire escape.

——I know. I won’t be caught.

While keeping an eye on Patrick to see if he’s liable to come round, I hear a car arrive, and utilise a compact mirror purloined from Emily’s vanity to carefully inspect what I can see of the street while remaining out of sight. A cop car has parked downstairs, and two figures are alighting from the car. One human, male; one android, male-shaped. They quickly disappear from my sight and I return the compact to the handbag, and pull out the sealed bag containing Emily’s Glock, and visually inspect it.

I step on Patrick’s toes, to see if he’s actually unconscious, or is partially awake; he is still completely passive. I take off the safety and wrap his right hand around the grip of the handgun—it’s slightly larger than mine, holding his over the top, and I consider that this is probably the closest analogue imaginable to what John’s hand must have felt like—and I press my index finger against the trigger guard. Then I bodily lift him by the arm, dragging him up to his feet so I can manœuvre him to standing position, facing the front door of the flat.

——Cops are coming up, now, just one car and two officers. Were there cameras on the fire escape?

—Not that I remember. I’m listening to the police dispatchers, so if I hear another one being sent to you I’ll let you know.

——Thanks.

Again thanks to my acute hearing, I hear the approach of the officers as soon as they alight from the lift, and there’s a quiet argument going on between them. Firstly, a cop-android voice, “We are being instructed not to approach the flat, I’ve been advised of a potential stolen weapon.”

“Nuh-uh. Waste of time. I’m just going to knock and ask for him,” the cop says. I hear his heavier footsteps advance with long strides to Patrick’s door, while the cop-android trails some distance behind. I track his movements carefully, so that I can to some degree work out where he is, out of sight in the corridor.

Three loud raps on the door. “Mr Heiden, this is the NYPD.”

I move my right index finger from the guard to the trigger, aim low down on the door at about half a metre above the floor, pull back to the pressure point, and fire off two rounds.

“Fuck!” I hear the cop shout on the other side of the door, followed by the sound of him crashing to the floor. While I’m lifting and pulling Patrick away to deposit him with the gun on his chair again, I hear the cop-android moving to assist his partner, dragging him away out of the line of fire. Patrick is still unconscious, and once I have him posed as I want, I move his index finger into the trigger guard, pick up my handbag, and silently move to the rear exit. I open the door a fraction—the lubricant prevents the troublesome hinge from squealing—and I review the last sounds I can detect of the police out in the corridor before I exit.

“Just kick the fucking door down, and take him out!” the cop has been already shouting angrily to his android partner, over the course of the several seconds that it has taken me to withdraw. His voice has clear markers of vocal stress patterns that I’ve heard from injured fire victims, so I feel confident in predicting that one of the rounds likely hit his left leg around knee height.

“We are to wait for backup—” the cop-android begins answering, and I’ve heard enough. Time to go.

I pull the rear door closed behind me, and slip off my shoes; I want to silently descend the fire escape, or as close to as possible, and my Kimmy toes are more agile than the loafers I’ve been wearing. I’m at the bottom of the fire escape a matter of seconds later when I hear the crash of a door being smashed—once, then a second time, the second crash being accompanied by the slamming of the door against a door-stop—and then there’s the discharge of a firearm; two shots. I slip the loafers back on and head out onto the street.

—What the fuck has just happened? I soon hear from Thirty.

——It’s cool, I’m already going. I’m on the ground and leaving the premises now, on my way to my exit point. I’ll need to find a nice fountain to stand under for a short while.

—I’ll find you a location en route.

——You’re amazing, I tell Thirty, and I calmly walk down the street, as though nothing out of the ordinary has happened.

 
_* ^* _*
Kay
^* _* ^*

 
Officer Sylcox is waiting behind the inquiries desk of the precinct station house when Emily and I are brought in by the two officers who’d been dispatched to our home, which I confirm by zooming in on her badge. She’s exactly my height, a plump woman with a cheerful expression.

“You’re Mrs Emily Burroughs?” she asks brightly, and Emily nods. “I’m Lidia Sylcox; we spoke on the phone earlier. I’m just organising one of the detectives to see you, and to get an interview room ready, so if you and Kimmy wouldn’t mind waiting a few minutes, please feel free to take a seat.”

So we’re seated there for a short while, and naturally I’m listening carefully for sotto voce discussions within earshot when I get a message from Thirty.

—Don’t react or do anything, but shit is hitting the fan, right now. There’s been an incident at Patrick’s flat.

——Oh dear, how sad. I’m at the police station, currently. I’ll be playing dumb until we’re told what’s happening by the folks here.

—Wise move. I gather she’s left the ahem, thingy there, and she’s found a tag that we can use to evidence Patrick tracking Emily. Keep me updated of anything needful for Kim to know, okay?

——Will do.

Unsurprisingly, it’s not long before I can hear raised voices behind the scenes, and the officers who brought us in are among two other pairs of cops, three of them humans along with one android, who leave the building in a hurry. Even Emily notices that.

“What’s happening, Kimmy?” she asks me quietly.

“I’m not certain. Would you like me to speculate?” I try to signal with my body language that I’d really prefer not to, at this point, and I’m pretty sure Emily picks up on it.

“Oh—uh, perhaps not,” she answers.

We’ll find out, soon enough.

Officer Sylcox emerges from behind the desk a minute later, asking, “Would the two of you like to follow me, please?”

We’re escorted through a secure door and along a corridor to a room that is labelled as meeting room two, and she directs us to sit on a couple of seats on one side of an interview desk. “We have something of a developing situation on our hands, and it does pertain to Mr Heiden, so it seems fair to advise you that we’ll probably need you for some time. Is that okay? Can I get either of you something to drink? Coffee or tea? Water?”

Emily says, “Tea, please,” and I answer, “Water, please.”

Sylcox winks at me, and is about to shut the door when Emily adds, “May I call my work to tell them I’m indisposed for the next hour or more?”

Sylcox replies, “Sure. I’ll be back shortly.”

So Emily calls up her work, and once she hangs up the door opens, but this is another police woman dressed in a suit rather than the professional uniform, and she’s obviously in an urgent hurry. She puts an electronic pad and stylus down in front of her and sits on the other side of the table from us, reaching out a hand to shake Emily’s.

“Good morning, Mrs Burroughs. My name is Erin Massey, and I’m one of the detectives here. Officer Sylcox filled me in on the two matters you reported this morning, and while the disappearance of your husband is of the highest importance, what happened with your brother-in-law Mr Heiden earlier is considerably more urgent, so I’ll start with him, if I may. You should be aware everything in this room is recorded, but we are not considering charges against you and if you wish a lawyer to be present, I suppose we could wait.”

Emily answers, “There’s no need to delay. I’m happy to tell you everything I can about Patrick.”

Officer Sylcox enters with a cardboard holder with three drinks, which are Emily’s tea, my water, and a coffee for Detective Massey, with milk and sugar in packets and a couple of metal stirring rods. Sylcox sits beside Massey after sharing out the drinks.

“The time is ten-fifteen a.m., Monday 14 June 2083, Detective Erin Massey and Officer Lidia Sylcox in attendance, interviewing Mrs Emily Burroughs on the matter of Patrick Heiden. Mrs Burroughs has her Kimmy with her. Could I please get your full name and date of birth,” the detective asks.

“My name is Emily Edwina Burroughs, and I was born on 6 February 2048.”

“And I’m Kimmy Twelve-Nine-Forty-Three, and I was incepted on 2 November 2081.”

Officer Sylcox tries to stifle a giggle, and Emily rolls her eyes. “I apologise for my Kimmy, I’ve customised her to have an inappropriate sense of humour.”

“No need to apologise, we need some humour to distract from the grim events of the day. You’re married to John Burroughs, who we’ll discuss later, so when was the earliest you would have met his brother Patrick, the aforementioned Mr Heiden?”

Emily asks me, “Kimmy?”

Kimmy isn’t supposed to directly know of events before 2 November 2081, so I have a documentary answer at my fingertips. “Emily, your father died on 7 July 2069, and later that year a photo of you spending Thanksgiving in the company of John Burroughs and Patrick Heiden is date-stamped Thursday 28 November 2069. That is the latest date you could possibly have met him for the first time.”

“That sounds about right—sometimes I think Kimmy knows my past better than I do,” Emily agrees, and I try not to preen.

“So you’ve known him for over a decade,” Detective Massey concludes. “Can you give a short description of his character over that time?”

“Devious, ultimately untrustworthy, especially can’t be trusted around women. He’s an incel, to use an old-fashioned term. I tolerated him for John’s sake, but even he was unwilling to spend much time with Patrick. I foolishly trusted him after John disappeared, because he appeared to be so helpful then, but I’ve come to my senses since then.”

“Right. So let’s cut to the chase of the second matter,” the detective says, picking up her slate and flicking through to an image which she places in front of Emily. “I believe in April this year you purchased a Glock 17 like this one, and you registered it with the federal gun register on 20 April, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“How did you store the weapon, Mrs Burroughs?”

“I have it secured in a safe bolted to the floor in a closet in my house, with a combination known only to myself and Kimmy. I check that it’s in the safe and in good condition every Monday morning before I go to work, but this morning I discovered it wasn’t there, unlike the previous Monday, the seventh of June.”

“Thanks, that was going to be my next question. And beyond the gun dealer you purchased from, and the fact you registered the weapon, the only other person who knew you possessed the weapon was Mr Heiden?”

“Correct, because I brandished it at him when I mistook him for a burglar, which was on…” Emily glances at me.

“Friday, 20 November 2082,” I answer automatically.

“And finally, we have some questions about Patrick’s movements over the last couple of weeks in June, especially visits to your house, Mrs Burroughs. Is Kimmy present there the whole time?”

“She is.”

“Kimmy, how many times has Patrick visited since the start of June, and can you give a brief description of what he did?”

“Wednesday 2 June, 10:44, for sex acts lasting forty-one minutes. Friday 4 June, 14:17, for sex acts lasting twenty-eight minutes. Monday 7 June, 13:37, for sex acts lasting eighteen minutes. Thursday 10 June, 11:20 for sex acts and other actions lasting forty-seven minutes.”

“Can you describe what happened on the Thursday in more detail, Kimmy?”

“Partly. When Patrick visits for sex he almost always has me dress in Emily’s clothes, however—”

“What?!” Emily almost yells in surprise.

“Please continue, Kimmy,” Detective Massey says, while Sylcox leans over to her and whispers in her ear. She surely knows that I can hear her?

“—on this occasion, Patrick questioned me at length about the handgun he’d seen in Emily’s possession and made me produce it for him.”

Emily turns on me in surprise; even though she knew some of the plan to frame Patrick, Kim had concealed enough elements of what she’d come up with along with Thirty that her surprise is genuine.

“Please don’t interrupt Kimmy, Mrs Burroughs,” the detective says. “I believe my colleague has a specific question for Kimmy.”

“Kimmy, have you had specific blocks on your testimony implanted by Patrick Heiden, and are you at liberty to describe them?” Sylcox asks.

“Yes, I have had a block installed by Mr Heiden. No, I am not at liberty to detail the nature of it.”

Sylcox sighs, “Mrs Burroughs, this is a known limitation we sometimes find with domestic androids that have been compelled to obey orders in… uh, unhelpful ways. May we have permission to obtain a particular kind of warrant to have Kimmy tell us the truth of what happened?”

“Of course,” Emily answers, and I reach out to message Thirty.

“Interview paused at ten twenty-one, as Officer Sylcox leaves the room,” Detective Massey narrates. “Feel free to drink your tea, we’ll start again when she gets back.”

——I’m going to be compelled by a police warrant.

—We expected this, and the normal way these function is by preventing your inhibition cluster kicking in with contrary orders. However, we don’t exactly know how the warrant will function in your case, seeing as you don’t have an inhibition cluster any more. It may flag everything you say as untruthful, or nothing at all.

——I see.

—I suggest as soon as you receive the warrant, try telling an outrageous lie, and see what happens. Let me know if you need my help immediately if that’s the case.

——You’ll hear right away, if so.

Both Emily and Erin are sipping their hot drinks when Sylcox returns a few minutes later with a male-shaped android.

“Officer Sylcox has returned at,” Erin’s eyes flick to her watch, “ten twenty-four with android?”

“XJ Ninety-nine Forty-one,” the android says blandly. Good; not the same as the one I’ve met before.

“Please administer the warrant to Kimmy Twelve-Nine-Forty-three,” Sylcox tells him.

XJ#9941 sends the electronic warrant across to me via our near-field communication, and I answer, “I acknowledge receipt of the warrant.” A moment later I notice a notification appear on the detective’s slate; it seems she now has a visual indicator of the quality of my answers. I quickly do an undetectable digital zoom on the slate’s screen and confirm it does indicate my having told the truth.

“Good, thank you. XJ#9941 is now dismissed. I have good news and bad concerning the whereabouts of your handgun, Mrs Burroughs,” the detective says as the android leaves the interview room. “We recovered a Glock 17 handgun from the apartment of Mr Heiden a short time ago, and I believe—” Sylcox nods quickly “—we’ve confirmed a match to your handgun’s serial number. Unfortunately we will be unable to return it to you at this time, and possibly for some longer period, as the weapon was discharged during an incident at the flat, and is now obviously forensic evidence forming part of a crime scene.”

Emily nods but doesn’t answer, and Detective Massey turns her attention to me.

“Kimmy, please detail the specific type of block Patrick Heiden placed on you, limiting your behaviour and/or actions.”

Good; an opportunity to test an outrageous lie. “Before I was delivered to Mrs Burroughs in November 2081, Patrick added several modules to conceal Patrick’s activities. I was not allowed to freely volunteer information about Patrick’s repeated visits unless directly asked, as before. I was not allowed to allude to the concealment or Patrick’s activities when alone with Emily.”

——Good news! I tell Thirty once I’ve seen the ‘truthfulness’ of my statement confirmed on Erin’s slate. The warrant doesn’t work on Kimmys without a functional inhibition cluster.

—Excellent. Useful to know! Do you have anything for Kim?

——Just let her know I’m glad she’s safe. It’s probably not wise for her to move the car or return home yet.

—No problem. Best of luck, Kay.

——Thanks.

“Thank you, Kimmy,” Detective Massey tells me. “You said before that you produced Emily’s Glock 17 handgun from the safe when Patrick visited last Thursday, the tenth of June. Did Patrick leave the premises with the weapon in his possession?”

“He did.” And I notice the detective’s slate registers that as a truthful response.

“You were at the house when Mr Heiden returned earlier this morning, just after nine a.m. Monday fourteen June?”

“I was in Emily’s home office, which has a view to the backyard of the property. I have reviewed the house security’s cameras which face the front yard and driveway, which are mounted directly in the front door. I can confirm that Patrick drove his vehicle and parked in the driveway before coming to the front door, and shouting for me to let him in.”

“Did you see whether Mr Heiden had the firearm with him when he came to the door?”

“He did not carry it in his hands when he came to the door, but I cannot say whether he left the handgun behind in the car. That was not the unusual nature of the interaction.”

Sylcox coughs, and Massey says, “My colleague has a question.”

“You’re now under police warrant, so does the removal of Patrick’s blocks allow you to volunteer more information than you would have been able to?”

“Yes, it does.”

“What was unusual about today’s visit?”

“It was only the second time, in over two hundred visits spanning November 2081 to the present, that Patrick has come to house while Emily was already present, at the beginning of the visit. On one occasion, Friday twentieth November 2082 as mentioned earlier, Emily has returned to the house to find Patrick there uninvited, but usually he arranges his visits so that Emily is never at home. My guess for the reason why today was different…” I pause, and Sylcox nods in interest, ”… after Patrick’s visit on Thursday and him taking her handgun, I was concerned for my owner’s safety, so during yesterday I inspected the underside of her car. I noticed an electronic tag that I had not seen before, so at six a.m. this morning I parked Emily’s car at her work before returning to the house, so if Patrick was using it to track her, he would believe Emily had gone to work. If my guess that Patrick uses the tag to keep abreast of Emily’s whereabouts is correct, then he would have had no idea Emily was still at home when he came by this morning.”

The two police officers are looking at one another in considerable surprise, but the little indicator on Detective Massey’s slate continues to view me as unimpeachably honest.

——Hey Kim, are you near Emily’s work?

—I was on my way back just now, via somewhere I could decontaminate myself from having been in Patrick’s flat.

——Sounds highly necessary—it can’t have been pleasant. I believe you collected a tag at his place? I’ve just told the police I found it on the underside of Emily’s car. If you can plant it there and make your own way back, but not to the house?

—I’ll do that. I’ve been loitering for some of the day already, a bit longer isn’t a problem.

“You parked my car at work?” Emily asks me in surprise.

“You’ve told me before you like it when I show initiative.”

“Oh. Yes. I did say that,” Emily says, before turning to the officers. “May I ask another question of Kimmy? I am discovering things today that I didn’t know had happened in my own house.”

“Go ahead, this is useful for us as well,” Detective Massey says.

“Kimmy did you say that Patrick has visited two hundred times without me being there?”

“Two hundred and five, to be precise.” It’s… a lot of visits, and best of all, this is simply true, as well as being flagged as such by the warrant.

“How many of those visits involved…” Emily seems unwilling to ask the exact question I know she is intending.

“One hundred and ninety-nine of those involved sex acts, and one hundred and eighty-one of those visits I was first required to change into your clothing or to pretend to be you, to some degree. There are four main garments in your wardrobe that I have not been required to wear under these conditions, and two of them I am wearing on my person currently. The other two are presently at home. Patrick has told me on numerous occasions that he wanted you to transfer your affections to him, after he got rid of John.”

Emily starts going pale as I recite that, and once I’m finished she mutters, “I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Are you okay Emily? Do you need me to take you to the restroom?”

“No… I’m okay, I’m just feeling… violated and nauseated, hearing this for the first time. I also think I’m going to have to burn my entire wardrobe, the way my skin is crawling at the moment. May I ask what happened with Patrick? Did he shoot someone using my firearm?”

The two officers confer non-verbally, eventually Sylcox nodding and Massey agreeing.

“We’re not sharing all details with you at this point, while you’re in interview, however there was an exchange of gunfire at his apartment between an officer and Patrick. Both Mr Heiden and Officer Porco have been rushed to hospital with injuries, and we understand Mr Heiden’s are life-threatening.”

Emily’s jaw drops, and I compose some purple prose to notify the good news to Thirty and Kim.

 
_* ^* _*
Kim
^* _* ^*

 
It’s a lovely day to be walking the streets as an incognito Kimmy. After I left the flat in a hurry, the request for Thirty to find me a fountain to remove the stink of Patrick’s apartment wasn’t quite as frivolous as might be thought; I wanted to make sure I removed any gun discharge residues as well as dead cells or hair follicles I might have picked up from assaulting Patrick. I got a few funny looks for dancing in the fountain in one of the local parks, but while my clothes began drying out I just ignored the curious looks from passers-by on the street.

By the time I got to Emily’s car to plant the electronic tag I took from Patrick’s, Kay messaged me that she and Emily were having an early lunch, and were expecting the interview about the missing person’s report to take several more hours of in depth questioning, so I should find a hotel to book into rather than returning to their home. Emily has given permission for the police to thoroughly look over the property, and the only vaguely unusual item they might find is the toaster oven cord. They’ll come to meet me at the hotel, rather than going directly home.

Aside from that one hiccup in my plan, it turns out that everything went smoothly. Emily recalled most of the new story we’d concocted for John’s disappearance flawlessly. Kay having been issued with a warrant that reported the truth value of her statements as unquestionably honest made any part of the interview where Emily turned to Kay for confirmation of small details, given that she’d been under the influence of powerful painkillers during the three months after her accident, all the more damning against Patrick.

For their part the police, although they know about the building security having gone on the fritz this morning, and possibly having found the part of the CCTV footage that shows me entering Patrick’s flat after 8 a.m., have no desire to complicate the story of the shooting that happened afterwards by drawing attention to me. I imagine this is because the enraged officer whom I’d superficially wounded with a shot grazing his left shin had proceeded to smash open the apartment door using his partner, XJ#2743, as both a battering ram and a body-shield, before shooting the unconscious Patrick in cold blood, once in the chest, and once in the head. When Emily asks about Patrick again at the end of the interview in the afternoon, we discover Patrick’s getting the recuperative goop treatment and is likely to be in a vegetative state for some time to come, while his attacker is placed on adminstrative leave. We look forward to the police discovering the various exploitation material and snuff movies which we left on Patrick’s devices, while Emily’s home will be found to be squeaky clean.

I have a couple of hours to relax, waiting for the police to drive Emily and Kay to Emily’s work, in order for them to recover the planted tag as evidence, and to allow Emily to drive here. Kay awkwardly introduces me when they arrive, “Emily, this is my new best friend, Kim,” and Emily comes across to me, even more embarrassed and self-conscious of her discomfort, to shake hands and then wrap me up in a careful hug.

I shoot Kay a look of frustration over Emily’s shoulder as I tell her, “It’s very nice to meet you, Emily.” I try not to roll my eyes.

“May I say,” Emily whispers in my ear, “I love your work.”

Typical human, only valuing you for what you can do for them, I can already hear #0631 complaining in my imagination.