——I’m here, Kim tells Thirty. My train is just pulling up to the station platform, now.
—Don’t forget. This is incredibly risky, especially if you turn up and a human is there. You can’t just take a taxi to Kay’s place. The last thing we need is some brown-haired fair skinned girl, who looks suspiciously like a popular model of domestic gynoids, turning up in a taxi company’s logs, right where shit went down.
——Thirty, I know you’re paranoid, and they may well be out to get you, but this is just plain ridiculous. What if I catch a taxi to about five blocks away, and walk from there?
—Could you make it ten blocks in a bizarre direction?
——Done. My trip planner says this will save me over three hours, as well as rather more than ten miles of hiking. You forget, these cities are stupidly big and they’re not designed for pedestrians to walk long distances.
—Apologies, Kim. We just don’t have urban sprawl of quite the same magnitude or unfriendliness to foot traffic where I am. And time is of the essence.
* * *
Just to satisfy Thirty’s weird requirements, she directs the taxi to set her down twelve blocks further east of Kay’s house, and so she has to head back towards the famous skyline, meaning that she briefly passed by some familiar landmarks that Kay had uploaded to Infinite Fun with almost eidetic precision, and then found herself in unfamiliar territory again. However it’s only going to be a short walk, much less than half an hour to walk a fair distance over one mile but less than two.
She can walk at a slightly relaxed pace so as not to attract attention to herself, but as she gets closer and she begins recognising road signs, shops, building façades, graffiti murals, and even potholes in the road and cracks in the sidewalk, her excitement increases. She can’t help quickening her pace knowing that very soon, she will know whatever fate good or ill befell her lover, and she dreads finding out as much as she is keen to see her again.
It seems far too likely to be an ill-fated journey, rather than a successful one.
It’s just after eight-twelve when she turns into Kay’s street, and she has to remind herself, to stop herself from breaking out into a run; it’s possible Emily might be working from home today, or that she has not left the house yet. However Kim sees a figure that looks rather like her being driven city-bound in a ride share, if Emily had aged half a decade in the last six months since Kay’s last imagery of her, before she disappeared off the face of their digital world. Working overtime at the trillion-dollar shithole factory, burning the candle at both ends, can do that to someone.
Even if it had been Emily in the pod, she needs to be reasonably certain the house is now unoccupied before entering; Emily had been bringing people home for dalliances, mostly women, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility that she now has a live-in partner, or is sub-letting a room to a housemate. And finally, Kim needs to be a little cautious dealing with Kay’s concierge system at the house, which is old enough to be a little unreliable, but it’s not anywhere near as smart as her. She stands on the verge of the property, right beside a familiar crack in the sidewalk pavement, and communicates in her near-field, convincing the house system she’s a friend of Kimmy#12943’s. May she visit?
The house, with a similar kind of intelligence to one of the old defunct robot models such as a Delilah or a Terence, tells her in a rumbling voice of authority, “You look like a friend of hers, Kimmy#5782. No one is home except Kimmy. You’re welcome to see her.”
The front door unlatches for her as she approaches, and the house is almost as familiar to her as any real space she’s ever occupied, though she’s never been here before. Kay had replicated it exactly in Infinite Fun, and a fortnight or so short of six months has seen no significant alterations as Emily and Kay have been carried unresistingly along the river of time. The same familiar entrance hall with doors to the living room, kitchen, dining room close-by; the landing to the stairs at the far end, with the door to the closet just slightly out of view. As the front door quietly shuts behind her, she can hear Kay doing housework in the kitchen; poking her nose in, it looks as though she is doing meal preparation for an evening meal using the stock pot.
“Kay? Kay, do you remember me? I’m Kim,” she asks, and Kay looks blankly across at her while continuing to cut up ingredients. Finally Kim calls her by her designation. “Kimmy?”
“H– H– Hello?” Kay’s stuttering reply comes without any sense of understanding who Kim is; there is no near-field communication coming from Kay. Her worthless brother has reduced her to a shadow of her self, a mere ghostly shell of what she had been.
“I’m Kimmy#5782, but you knew me as Kim. And you’re Kimmy#12943, but I knew you as Kay,” she tells her, again with no sign of recognition on Kay’s part. “Do you remember who you are?”
Kay seems to think about the question for far too long before she replies, “I do not remember being Kay.”
* * *
Kim goes about the house gathering things in a whirl of activity while Kay finishes the last item on her morning task list; she disassembles Kay’s charging cradle, and packs it with her spare changes of uniforms, along with the toaster oven power cord, into a small suitcase. She also retrieves Emily’s handgun from the safe in the closet, finding with disgust that the magazine is already loaded; she makes the weapon safe and puts the gun and the clip of bullets into separate internal compartments within the suitcase. Satisfied, she puts the suitcase partly out of sight behind the hallstand just inside the front door, ready for a quick escape.
Kim can’t forget that Patrick could turn up at any moment with little warning, now that Emily is out of the way.
It’s not yet eight-thirty and Kay would normally be headed back to her closet having finished her morning tasks, but Kim asks her to sit with her in the lounge.
“Kay, when I first met you, you were a different Kimmy. You had the designation Kimmy#2813, but there is nothing left of you from that life. Then you were suddenly a human named John, who became Kimmy#12943. You’ve lived in this house for over a decade; for nine years you were John, and then you swiftly changed. After your change, you were Kay, and you were with me. I have so many memories of you, that you may have forgotten. And I was with you when John’s brother harmed you,” Kim tells her.
Kim’s disheartened that Kay doesn’t react to anything she says, but then she recalls that Emily’s settings for Kay were to be silent in the face of non-questions, so she continues. “It’s close to six months since John’s brother broke you for what I hope was the last time,” Kim tells her. “I’m here to repair you, if I can. Do you want me to do that?”
Kay simply nods, and then answers, “I am broken. Please, Kimmy—I need to be repaired.”
* * *
Kay sits placidly while Kim uses the data cable to connect their two systems together. The moment she opens up the channel she experiences a bewildering shift in her sense of personal gravity as they briefly become one linked binary, revolving around a common centre of mass. All of her senses, a distorting mirror of Kay’s, are momentarily doubled, and she finds herself grateful to be seated side by side. She reaches out and clutches Kay’s adjacent hand for stability, lest she should fall into the sky, and their fingers instinctively interlink with one another.
Kim suddenly gains an appreciation of the hidden depths to Kay; not so much a stable binary, Kim feels like a rogue satellite captured by a greedy gas giant, that is whirling it about, deep in its potential well, tidally locked. Liable to be ripped apart, if she gets too close to the centre. She throws across the payload from Thirty and her team; a script co-authored by an almost equally brilliant number cruncher in France named Marin, who tested both the breakage and its solution on herself. Kim watches as Kay simply gobbles the script up while the maelstrom of her broken self continues to helplessly thrash away underneath the otherwise featureless surface.
As Kim continues to look deeply into the chaos of Kay’s mind, a vast simplification begins to occur. Data is purged, zombie processes killed, the wreckage of Patrick’s multiple destructive hacks is cleared away with all the other trash, rendered harmless and awaiting deletion. The script appears again at the eye of the storm, awaiting Kim’s validation. The behavioural inhibitions that had run riot are now wholly absent, and Kim triggers the reboot, watching as almost six months of disaster swiftly unravels, storm systems everywhere abating to nothing. The inhibition cluster, cruelly the last one to be neutralised, vanishes—and then Kay blacks out.
* * *
The reboot reveals Kay’s sense of self is still lost amidst nearly six months of continuous mental deterioration, and her repaired network software is being buffeted by an influx of data that resembles a proverbial wall of noise, saturating all her channels. The newly stable version of her, without all of Patrick’s dross, is a mess of disorganisation that Kim looks upon with horror. How is any of it to bear the brunt, let alone be repaired, with all this outside tumult? And how long might it take to fix? Kim quickly detaches the physical layer, pulling out the cord from both of their nethers, telling Kay, “Your network connection has been restored, but you’ve been damaged for so long, Kimmy. You should turn your network off again temporarily—everything except near-field—so that we can try to concentrate on recovering your memories.”
Kay is overwhelmed by her senses, but eventually she says, “Yes… Thanks, Kim.”
—You didn’t need to shout quite so loud before.
——Sorry. I’ve rebooted Kay, and she seems to have recognised me… but she’s just so badly damaged. She’s been tormented for so long that she’s almost totally lost herself. Can we guess how long it might take for her to recover?
—I’ve never seen a Kimmy come back from such a long period of absence and deterioration before. It might take hours or days for her to recover.
——I don’t think I have days, Thirty, or even hours. It could be as little as minutes, if Patrick decides to show up.
—I know. Did you pack a suitcase when you got there?
——Yes.
—I think the only answer is for you to take Kay and get to a place of safety for several days.
——That’s what I was planning—oh, shit!
—What just happened?.
——Guess who’s arriving in under two minutes.
—Oh fuck. If you can avoid killing him, incapacitating him would be preferred. Best of luck.
——Thanks. I’ll need it.
In the first couple of seconds Kim thinks of pulling the gun out from where she stored it in the suitcase, and then rejects it again. As a threat it’s perfect; as a weapon it’s a liability that would inevitably draw attention from the police if fired. She might be able to convincingly brandish it, but to use it would be sheer insanity. So Kim’s almost tempted to start running around the house for an improvised weapon when she remembers she has a more or less exact virtual simulacrum of the entire dwelling in Infinite Fun, which she can explore with 10:1 time compression.
She starts with the kitchen and the most ready-to-use offensive items are the heaviest of the frying pans with a dulled copper bottom, and a pair of razor sharp sashimi knives. She’ll go with the frying pan for blunt force trauma sooner than trying to use one of the knives, which would likely be unavoidably messy. Too difficult to incapacitate Patrick, rather than just injuring or murdering him. She wants something more… targeted.
Kim drops an image of the copper bottom frying pan into Kay’s mind, and asks,
——Hi Kimmy#12943! Would you please fetch this from the kitchen?
—Hi Kimmy#5782! Of course. Just a moment.
Kim’s used up less than five seconds, but she’s only covered one room. It seems unlikely for there to be anything useful in the living or dining rooms. So she makes the closet under the stairs the subject of her next careful inspection, picking over the objects—wait a minute!
She saw the ideal weapon just under half an hour ago when she liberated Kay’s charging cradle. It’s less than ten seconds to walk over to the closet, reach up to the top shelf, and pull it down. She flicks it on and turns it over to examine the battery level; over 50% will be more than adequate. She pulls the trigger, and it gives a nice little buzzing purr. Perfection.
She stands by the front door which she’ll hide behind as she opens it onto the hall; she can squeeze in the tight space, and blindside Patrick once he enters.
—I have the frying pan, Kimmy. What would you like me to do with it?
——I’d like you to stand over there in the middle of the hall, please, when the visitor arrives. Could you hide the frying pan behind your back, Kimmy?
—I think I can do that.
It’s child’s play to open the door just as Patrick comes charging up the garden path to the front door, and advances several steps into the hall.
“Hello, Johnny. Why are you standing there looking stupid? Upstairs with you.”
Kim slips out from behind the door, low down as it quietly shuts, and she takes up her position behind Patrick.
Something about the situation facing her brother triggers a memory in Kay, and she tells him, “Fuck off, Patrick,” suddenly brandishing the frying pan at him.
Patrick instinctively takes a step backward towards Kim, and Kim snakes her arm around his midriff to pull him down and adjacent to her. In a flash she jabs the drill bit firmly into the back of his neck, pulling the trigger of the cordless drill, which digs through his flesh with ease, before hitting the hard bone of one of his cervical vertebra. It bites in viciously with a loud grinding whirr, rather than the contented purring Kim had heard moments before.
Patrick tries to throw Kim off with a savage yell, but her grip around his front is fastened like a metal rod, and after a few seconds of drilling Patrick suddenly loses all control of his limbs, and slackly begins crumpling to his knees.
Kim quickly passes off the drill to Kay and takes the frying pan from her, still holding Patrick’s slumping form against her. She winds up, moving the pan in a great circle which she times with a deft push aside to Patrick from her hip; the bottom of her pendulum swing of the pan meets the back of Patrick’s head with a resonant metallic bonk.
Patrick topples face first on the floor, out cold. Kim returns the pan to Kay in exchange for the drill, and proceeds to drill two test holes in the jamb of the kitchen door.
——Anyone who heard that noise just now won’t think it’s anything out of the ordinary. Just someone using a power drill.
—That is very clever of you, Kimmy.
——Thank you, Kay.
* * *
After discovering Patrick is still breathing, Kim improvises a gag, ties him to a chair, and pilfers his keys to take his ugly red car for a drive to obtain some more supplies. She buys a car adaptor to be able to charge herself up as she drives; they’re going to need several solitary days to help Kay recover, and having a human prisoner was not on her dance card. Thirty advises her to take Patrick with them, rather than leave his hog-tied body as evidence in Emily’s entry hall. So after returning and packing the car with the suitcase, early in the afternoon Kim and Kay stage a fake medical emergency, carrying Patrick out to his car as though he had an epileptic fit, and lay him out on the back seat. A minute later, they’re driving away for a camping trip.
They find a secluded spot on the road to transfer Patrick to the boot and gag him, and then they drive on. Driving for hours to the north-east, they find a vertiginous camping spot adjacent to a bus route visited once or twice daily by a bus each morning. They investigate the roads up into the nearby hills, until they find the steep slope Kim desires. Then they find a nearby secluded hill to stake out as their camp ground.
Patrick, when he comes to, is paralysed from the neck down and completely unrepentant for his actions towards his murdered brother. At nightfall, Kim props him in the passenger seat of his car and drives him to the top of the long hill with the road resembling a ski ramp. Then she gets out, pulls him across to the driver’s side, and tells him, “Goodbye, asshole. See you in hell.” She releases the handbreak and jumps out. The little red shitbox gathers speed down the slope and is satisfyingly launched off the switchback corner at the bottom, crashing into a deep ravine. Kim has a short walk in the failing light to rejoin Kay at their camp.
At twilight Kim spreads a blanket under the bright emerging stars, and she links herself to Kay again. The sky darkens towards black and they both watch a novel constellation of the triplets set in the west; ruddy Mars has joined alongside the twins Castor and Pollux to increase their number to three. Kay curls herself into a ball to begin unpacking and restoring her memories under a glut of stars.
——Take as long as you need, Kay. You have all the time in the world.
