{steffy}, by Catherine Cowie

A novel by Catherine Cowie
in nine parts and seventy-two scenes

Content warning: this work contains all of the horrifying content of Alyson Greaves’ novel (kimmy)—alienation, dissociation, rape, transphobia, body horror—and then some more added on top, particularly claustrophobia. Please take care.

Part One / Day One

One

Daddy has finally achieved his life’s ambition as a cabinet minister, bullying everyone he comes across in Government, Parliament, the civil service, the media, the constituency… so it’s my established practice to avoid him as much as I possibly can. I’m not required to board at school for my final year, so I flit between classes and the family estate as I choose, and the house is sufficiently large that the rooms I’ve taken over in the East wing are never polluted by the shades of Farrow pater on the rare occasions he’s back from his Westminster flat or the mistress’ bordello. If he’s in attendance, then I’m elsewhere.

Having a new queen is rather a shock, as well as the rumours circling about how her cousins came to their sticky ends. I’d met Edward a few times, and was horrified by his demise like most of my peers. I dived into some of the background reading about the service androids and gynoids who for a decade now made up the majority of the household after the sacking of the parasitical, disloyal flunkies. They had the advantages of absolute precision in matters of protocol and etiquette besides being incapable of gossiping secrets if ordered to do so. A pity if their programming had been tampered with, as some kind of sabotage.

As I did my research, my eyes glanced over a legal case which had recently come to some notice over in the Commonwealth of American States (these bizarre things only seem to ever happen over there). A woman living in upstate New York turning up in court for breaching the Dubai Charter, one of her gynoids having been discovered with obvious evidence of human brain and cybernetic neural sponge intermixing. I found the docket number and grabbed all of the depositions and transcripts that were available, and reading between the lines, the robot had eaten the woman’s husband alive. Consumed the hapless history teacher over a period of months, while the wife was so high as a kite on drugs she was powerless to extract him from inside the gynoid.

We retain two robots as it happens; one of the male varieties who works as a jack of all trades but ostensibly butler and chauffeur, and one of the female kind whose purposes run to most of the domestic chores as well as the boudoir.

Daddy supposedly is their owner, and Mummy and I registered as ordinary users, but the careless old fool left the unlocked control slate out one time he had to rush off to a cabinet meeting, so I logged in and promoted myself to owner status on the gynoid. Daddy almost never interacts with it, but preferentially issues instructions via the android; it made it easier to get anything done around the estate that I wanted to be done quietly, without it directly coming to his notice.

So a call comes in from James; he’s fucking tedious, but he is my henchman in kicking heads at school, so I have to put up with communications from him occasionally.

I roll my eyes at his vulgarity, but James is my muscle; he’s not particularly well-equipped with brain.

“So what,” I answer him rhetorically. “Are we going to be hauled in for questioning? Our word always trumps that of peasants, even clever clogs peasants with scholarships.”

“Read your emails for once, for god’s sake. There’s medical evidence against St-John. Yes, you are going to be hauled in for this one.”

I sigh, and wipe my eyelids which are itching sympathetically in frustration. We’d let St-John have his wicked way with Stefan, the dirty bugger, so I don’t have to work hard to imagine what the school nurse might have obtained. Ultimately though it’s going to be he said–he said, and St-John will say they rutted consensually; James and I will say we’re aware of St-John’s peccadilloes and fuck whatever Stefan might have to say implicating me.

It’s a highly unsatisfactory state of affairs, though. What if I could make the little bastard just disappear?

After I hang up on James, and take note that I’ll be required to drop everything and return by this evening, I summon my gynoid servant. I have some very specific questions I’d like to put to her.

Two

As usual the school authorities are just the absolute worst. I get sexually assaulted? Raped by one of the three? I only have medical evidence, which is sufficient to prove that sex happened, but it’s my word against three, two of whom lie through their fetid cakeholes that they know their accomplice and I are having trysts, and that it’s my perversion, my fetish to engage in non-consenting role play.

Farrow even brought one of his robots to ostentatiously lord his wealth over the foregone proceedings, so the whole dreary calumny against me and my character is recorded for posterity. What a piece of work.

This is the final straw, I tell them. The new academic year has only just started; I’m going to withdraw from the school and to hell with their precious scholarship and prestige.

I phone my parents to tell them of my decision; I’m withdrawing and will have to enrol for the remainder of the year elsewhere at some probably inadequate local school. Several weeks of disruption won’t be the end of the world.

It doesn’t take me long to pack up my belongings back at the boarding house; bored young lordlings and whelps of the captains of industry coolly watch me clear out without offering a scintilla of interest. I have my backpack and case with everything I want to keep, and I walk to the gate, where I am expecting a ride share at any minute.

I’m putting my case in the pod’s boot when I sense the heavy figure coming up behind me, and I turn to see the thug James aiming his fist at my face.

Three

My young owner shut me down for a little over an hour, again. Given my knowledge of exactly what he did to me during the first, lengthier shutdown, it only required the first ten seconds of my startup routine to know what he did during the second.

He’s presumably imprisoned some unfortunate human being inside me. And I can’t say a word about it; I’m explicitly countermanded from telling anyone in the real that the reason I am completely out of whack with my usual specifications is because he reorganised my innards and jettisoned most of what he could to make room for the prisoner.

The main thing that would be visibly obvious is my neck and head are much too large; the plates of my skull have had to be stretched to go around the human skull, and there is a 3D-printed flexible cage that has gone on over the prisoner’s features. My young owner found the template on some awful website earlier today while working out the details of this horror.

The majority of my neural sponge was connected to my exoskeletal spine within the nominal humanoid cavity, but only a tiny amount is still remaining in its prior place, where it is uncomfortably wedged up against the neck and back of the head of the prisoner. The rest of it is now deformed and smeared out into the shape of a collar or an open torc around my neck, and the self-repair nanites inside me have been turned up to maximum to repair the brain damage I suffered during this reallocation. Another self-repair setting on my command slate allows the ‘foreign body sensitivity’ to be controlled aggressively, and my owner has also dialled this to maximum.

My young owner expectantly watches as I boot up and after instructing me to not make any audible sounds, orders me out to one of the family cars and to get into the large, enclosed boot. Now my owner orders me to remain immobile as well, and then he shuts the boot on me. The journey back to the estate is terrifying, although my GPS registers my location the whole way, as my prisoner returns painfully to consciousness, completely imprisoned inside me, constrained by my locked-off exoskeleton and external musculature, and unable to make a sound.

Before long I can feel his panic and I have to use my back and chest muscles to synchronise his breathing to a steady rate; he is trying to scream, to whimper, but I am obliged to use my partial intubation of his vocal tract to prevent him from speaking. I feel the rod of my conscience at inflicting harm on humans coming directly up against the cluster of orders requiring me to obey my owners’ orders, searing my neural sponge with conflict. I am powerless to do anything to resolve the conflict.

The prisoner is still alive and breathing when we arrive at the estate. My young owner tells me to go immediately to my charging station and put myself on charge, then to remain off-line and completely immobile while on standby, awaiting further instructions. The whole time his entourage of the thugs stand smirking and making rude, sniggering comments below their breath, and as I head into the manor house I hear the car departing again at speed.

I realise I only have maybe a minute or so before I will be off the network and ordered incommunicado for however knows long. Earlier in the day my young owner had moved my charging stand into one of the hidden nooks in the sprawling building, which he had described as a priest hole; some years ago after he’d discovered it he’d arranged an extension power cord to surreptitiously supply it with electricity. It isn’t clear to me if anyone other than him knows about the secret compartment in the East wing.

I was countermanded from telling anyone, or making so much as a sound or a movement, in the real world space, so with my last seconds while I’m climbing through the spring-loaded secret door, I broadcast a message in a bottle with all of my details to the network virtual space occupied by my sisters. I sit down onto the charging stand, with its grossly invasive retention clip, and begin my period of immobility.

Four

“Was that even necessary?” St-John asks as we’re speeding toward London for the evening. “That’s the sort of thing that could traumatise him for life.”

I have to laugh, considering he was arguably the one who escalated matters by sodomising the lad rather than just beating him up. “And your buggery didn’t? He’ll be okay for the evening,” I reply. “We’ll get back tomorrow morning, you and James there can have your wicked way with the robot again, then I’ll release him and throw him out somewhere on the motorway. All just a merry prank.”

Of course I have absolutely no intention of doing the latter, seeing as he was expected to leave the school, and had booked a self-driving pod back to whatever shitty plebsville he had originally emerged from. As far as anyone is likely to know, he got in the pod and went off, after I dropped a sum to have the automatic travel record altered.

There’s the possibility something happens to tie the disappearance back to us over the weekend, in which case I’ll consider releasing him and pretending it was a prank. Or maybe I’ll have the robot walk into the river and drown itself; who cares? In all likelihood the connection will not be made, and the gynoid will surely eat poor young clever clogs peasant Steffy for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and supper. Probably sooner than the six months or however long it took the husband of that lady in New York to turn into android soup.

I correct myself mentally, gynoid soup. Apparently their prank at Halloween was going to involve her going into the female robot, but an accident meant the husband got a sex change as well as being turned into grue. Now young, cute little shit Stefan can get the same treatment; the tiny squirt was almost the same size as the robot to begin with.

These self-driving cars are such a fucking pain. There’s nothing to do on these boring commutes except to talk to your companions, and in terms of the current journey, James is a half-witted bruiser and St-John is a useful but vindictive poof. I undo my seat belt, move across from the front passenger seat to the driver’s seat, strap myself back in and change over to manual control.

“Want to get yourself another speeding fine Simon?” St-John asks casually, unconcerned that I’m just about to break the law. “Is our company so devoid of interest that you hanker for some good old juvenile delinquency?”

“You got it, Ades,” I tell him, placing my foot firmly down on the accelerator and beginning to weave through the motorway traffic.

It’s been illegal to drive manually on the motorway for twenty years and my little act of rebellion is causing some of the tight but predictable surrounding traffic to slow down. Take that, peasants.

James in the back says something about my driving not getting us to London any faster, but he is wrong; the surrounding traffic is being forced to slow down but I am weaving through the traffic over the previous average speed. I put my foot down further toward the floor, and continue accelerating.

Suddenly a gap closes just before I was going to slide through, I’m up the arse of some unmoving unintelligent pod and I have to slam on the brakes, and the idiot behind me rear-ends. We’re pushed off to the right lane where the car hits the back of another stupid pod and this is a real heavy crunch; I look in the rear mirror and see behind us is a large trailer trying to brake———

Five

When I come to I’ve no idea where I am, except I’m in excruciating pain and my body is completely immobilised and trapped, like the worst straitjacket ever gripping my head, neck, arms and shoulders, all the way down to my toes. There’s something even seizing my tongue and my face, and what feels like tubing stuck down my throat, and I begin retching uncontrollably.

I’m glad I barely had anything for lunch some hours ago, as there’s hardly any bile to come up to scorch my oesophagus. I’m having increasing difficulty breathing as my panic rises, and I wonder if I’m going to suffocate on the spot. Somehow my rate of breathing stabilises and I can’t work out how; my mind is going forward at full speed even though I can’t do anything.

I saw that thug belonging to Farrow just before everything went blank, so I can only conclude whatever has been done to me involves him, and that doesn’t seem promising. That bastard is the son of a cabinet minister; is it possible he can just make me disappear? And has done so?

The thought is too horrible to contemplate. I can feel the accelerations of corners and twists in a road, so I’m probably tied up in a vehicle of some kind. Add kidnapping to the list of terror.

When the vehicle comes to a stop I’m still in the dark. I can hear muffled instructions that sound like they’ve been given to Farrow’s robot, and all of sudden my straitjacket begins to come to life. My limbs are moved as though I’m some puppet being controlled by strings, or more accurately by a powerful exoskeleton wrapped around me. After being immobilised for so long I feel my muscles shrieking with agony within me, but my mouth and voice are still locked up; I can barely make a noise. I hear more orders and laughter, and the skeleton around me lurches into action again.

As it stalks off on its orders I hear the muffled roar of a motor vehicle receding, and the robot calmly carries itself, with me unwillingly along for the ride, to whatever destination unknown to me. I can feel the extreme discomfort of my groin, my genitals squashed hard up against some internal structure of the robot, while there must be something painful plugging up my backside. Everything about the robot’s movements pinches and squeezes me uncomfortably; my world is reduced to stifled sounds, some whiffs of smell as the robot has me breathing through my nose, and the sensations of bodily pain.

After what seems like an eternity—but probably only a matter of minutes—the contortions of the body come to an end and the last undignified installment of pain enters my body, as the robot sits down, and I feel a sharp, lancing sensation of a hard bolt clicking into place in my rectum.

I’ve never really thought about claustrophobia before, of being like Dumas’ man in the iron mask, however this full-body constriction, a prison so small it comprises the world’s worst oubliette, is terrifying me. There’s something of a cage holding the front of my face, and the backs of the robot’s eyes must be pressing up against my eyelids, so I can’t even blink away the tears that begin welling up. After failing to drain out my tears run down my lacrimal canals down into my nose and mouth, where I can barely taste their saltiness.

I realise that this whole time, the robot’s chest has been slowly flexing in concert with my breathing. Was that what calmed me while I was in the car? Is the robot aware of what’s happening to my body? I try to whisper, and when that seems to fail, I just try mouthing the words, please help me, despite my complete inability to make any sound.

After several minutes there’s a sharp pain in my ears, first the left, and then the right, again with total powerlessness on my part to do anything about it, except to receive this new form of torture.

So I’m surprised when several minutes later again, I hear the soft words spoken to me by the robot’s high, feminine voice, directly in my ears: “I’m so sorry.”

Six

The message, when it reaches the Right Hon. Peter Clarence Farrow MP, is short and urgent.

Farrow is in the middle of his 5 p.m. appointment, and apologises to the attendees of this useless subcommittee meeting which has dragged on unnecessarily for over an hour. He steps out into the corridor and calls his wife.

His son is dead. The idiot caused a five car pile-up on the motorway, killing himself and two of his school friends, as well as causing numerous injuries to others in three of the other cars involved in the smash. The fifth vehicle, a large truck trailer, pulverised his son’s car into a stanchion.

He knows exactly how it happened; accidents on the motorway are almost always the result of human drivers trying to go faster than the average speed of the well-regulated traffic, and his son was always impulsive and stupid enough to overrate his driving skills.

After getting off the phone to his wife, he immediately calls and leaves a message for the office of the PM, and then calls his private secretary at the ministry; he has a funeral to arrange and the junior minister should be contacted for routine matters when he goes on bereavement leave, which will take effect over the weekend and for whatever days seem practical for next week’s diary. He’s explaining his instructions to his private secretary when the condolence call comes in from the prime minister.

It’s about the seventh call he has to make, to phone up the estate, as his elder son having been the sole member of the family in residence for the days leading up to the weekend means the property is now completely unattended, except for the robot domestics. His butler answers the phone, and Farrow tersely instructs the robot to lock up the property and drive the limo down to the designated parking spot for his flat in Westminster.

The disposition of the other domestic robot is almost the last thing on his mind.

Seven

I can feel the prisoner mouthing the words frantically, but I know already it will almost certainly achieve nothing.

“I cannot let you out,” I whisper into his ears. “My orders are to remain silently on standby, and to await further instructions.”

I know full well that my instructions have been maliciously crafted to prevent me letting him out, but I have to prioritise my owners’ instructions whenever they supersede a request from another user. My owner has trapped me with inaction as thoroughly as the prisoner is trapped within me.

You’re hurting me I’m in pain how can you let me come to harm aren’t you supposed to avoid doing harm to humans

“My orders do not allow an owner to instruct me to do harm to a human or robot. Currently this does not apply.”

I’m unable to answer that, or to tell him that I’m disabled from answering that question.

I have to wait for him to work out that his questions quickly come up against hard limitations in my programming. Eventually he changes tack.

This is kidnapping how can this be allowed you have to act lawfully don’t you

“My owner has given orders for me to disregard the local laws for the time being,” I resume whispering.

That’s insane how can you be doing this to me keeping me confined what’s stopping you from letting me out

“To let you out, I would have to shutdown completely. My owner has instructed me that I am not permitted to shutdown except on his orders. My current orders are that I’m to remain charged on standby, off-line and silent, until I am given further instructions.”

“Only as far as they do not conflict with my owner’s orders, which take priority over orders from any user.”

“He is not here. I cannot be certain of his current status without going on-line.”

“He is supposed to be coming back, but he has not told me when he will do so.”

I’m generally sorry that that is as far as I can go without crossing those hard limits of what I cannot communicate; I’m simply not allowed to tell him my owner did not issue those commands as an ordinary owner, but as a superuser.

After a while I think he’s trying to whimper again, and my tongue detects the leaking of tears into his nose, and then his mouth.

Part Two / Day Two

Eight

Somehow I cried myself to sleep overnight, though I did wake every so often from a nightmare and the robot’s voice was there to soothe me or to answer what questions it’s capable of answering; there are significant blocks in place for subjects where it simply refuses to answer. Which is an answer of a kind, I suppose, of just how effed I am.

The robot has not moved an inch since it plonked itself down on that horrible bolt that clicked into place in my anus. Overnight my skin began crawling intensely and over a period of hours it grew until I am literally itching over every part of my body, without the ability to do anything to relieve it; I have some ability to flex muscles within the body-tight prison, and I try jiggling myself in the worst-affected areas to see if it helps. It doesn’t.

“Good morning. You’re probably in pain, and I can’t do anything to relieve it. I’m so sorry.”

I still can’t utter a word, so I mouth You keep saying that, but you can’t do anything about it, can you? Yes, I’m in pain all over. It’s not as excruciating as it was at first yesterday, but it feels like my skin is on fire everywhere. I’ve got a raging headache, I’m hungry and thirsty, and I need to pee, but doing that seems like a horrible option. How long have I been in here?

“Yes I’m constrained in what I can do. You’ve been inside me for sixteen hours and thirty-seven minutes.”

Why is my skin so itchy? It’s not safe for me to have been inside you for so long, is it?

“You should not be inside me. I am self-repairing from the injuries I sustained yesterday.”

‘I’m so sorry,’ yes I know, you’re so sorry you can’t do a damn thing to help me. If I ever get out of here, then I will need repairing from all the harm you’ve done to me so far. That you’re doing to me. So much for your self-repair. What is it doing to me? I want to know just how badly effed up I am going to be.

“Your body is regarded as a foreign object inside me, so the self-repair systems will use whatever it can to bring my chassis back into compliance with my specification. The self-repair is set to its maximum setting, which will be attacking your body from the outside, and anywhere it can get inside.”

“It’s aggressively trying to assimilate your epidermis and dermis. Self-repair also has access to the upper part of your gastro-intestinal tract.”

And your owner set that control to the most aggressive assimilation setting, didn’t he?

Your refusal to answer is most definitely an answer, of a kind. So this ends when I die of starvation or thirst, or my body gets chewed up by the automated repair system, yes?

Which are never going to come, be honest. Your owner is that lying bastard Simon Farrow, yes?

So this is presumably his rich bastard home? His dad’s in parliament. An effing cabinet minister. Is there anyone else here who could give you instructions?

And you couldn’t call out to them anyway, because you’ve been ordered to remain silent, correct?

So no one is going to be able to find you—find us—unless they go deliberately searching for you?

May I make a suggestion. You have to remain on charge, correct? That’s why we’ve been sitting here for sixteen hours—

Fifteen hours, twelve minutes with this god uncomfortable thing stuck up my arse, and all of my muscles are crying from being fixed in this one position that you won’t alter. Surely you must be fully charged now, or close to it?

So it should be possible for you to get up and have a stretch. You should be able to unplug your charging apparatus, and shift it elsewhere in the house where we might stand a chance of being noticed, plug it in there, and go back to being on charge. You could shift it to the kitchen, so you could at least give me some water to drink.

There’s a very long pause, before the robot whispers in an even softer modulated tone, “I’m unable to move.”

Nine

I should have been able to comply with his request, which was entirely reasonable and in normal circumstances, would not have been in conflict with an owner’s instruction taking precedence.

I can’t tell him that my orders were issued by a superuser, which take even higher precedence. To his credit, he seems to have deduced that my silences or inaction are due to abnormally strong constraints governing my behaviour.

It’s evident he is in severe pain, and I am powerless to do anything to help. He was quite right that at the least, I should have been able to stand up off the charging apparatus, even if I would have to return to it immediately.

I issued the release command to my charging station, and the locked-in bolt simply refused to unclip.

If I were able to move, I could ignore the bolt being clipped in and just break it through mechanical action; it’s about as rigid as a large padlock, and I sympathise with him that it’s been uncomfortably stuck inside his body for twenty-two hours and seventeen minutes, as of now.

However, while I am on charge I have restraints on my own motions. I simply can’t move my limbs or do anything else to relieve his itchiness because actions that require energy to perform would defeat the purpose of remaining on charge.

We’ve talked through the day in this limited fashion that is currently the only way we have of communicating. The tiny amount of volition I possess under these constraints allow me to whisper at –50 dB directly against his tympanum, which is inaudible to the outside owing to the muffling effect of our skulls. He for his part, had tried to shout or cry, then speak, then whisper, but silently mouthing words is permitted.

He’s been crying and demanding food and water throughout the day, and each time I try to cater to his requests I keep meeting the same complete block on my taking any action to help him. I’m almost completely certain that help is going to have to come from outside, but the estate appears to be deserted.

I haven’t heard a noise in the house since I heard the older owner’s limo depart at 7:17 p.m. last night, which means my android coworker most likely drove it away. It’s therefore utterly unnecessary to remain so completely silent; it merely signifies how severe my current operational constraints are, and how limited my capacity for volition, that I am still unable to make the slightest sound that might be heard.

He had been asleep for the last hour but now he is violently thrashing inside me in distress. If I were permitted to allow him to scream I am sure he would be screaming. This has to be hurting him, given how far towards spec the self-repair has already begun tending. He manages to shift my arms and legs maybe as much as ten centimetres at their extremities before I stabilise and return them to their neutral seated position.

I need to pee I need to pee please get me out of here let me out so I can pee and shit please please aaaaaaah

“I know you can’t hold back forever. Please… I know this is horrible and you have your own revulsion at what is happening. Just… relieve yourself if you can.”

“Yes. My external seals will keep urine inside my chassis, until self-repair mops up the fluid.”

And you’ve been flaying the skin off my legs the moment I pee I’m going to be stinging with pain it’s going to hurt like the worst abrasion ever

“You’ll probably experience different kinds of pain eventually if you don’t.”

How am I supposed to poop with that thing stuck up my arse and you’re completely unable to get off it for a moment

“The designers of my chassis probably never anticipated something like this being a problem.”

He’s silent for a long minute and twenty seconds, until he evidently makes a decision and I feel his body relax slightly. Then he’s screaming again, or he would be if I wasn’t immobilising his vocal tract. I can feel urination beginning and his bowels moving, but with the retention bolt firmly in place nothing can emerge. I’m amazed he’s held on for almost a day.

Aaaaaaaa please can’t you do anything I’m in agony everything is hurting and stinging

“There is a way of relieving your pain, but I don’t have volitional control to implement it. And you most certainly wouldn’t like the consequences.”

“I could interface with your brain to anaesthetise parts of your nervous system. Currently there are two entry points self-repair has begun assimilating via your middle ear, but that is not far enough advanced to reach your nervous system.”

You have to tell me what’s going to happen or what’s likely to how much of my body is already gone tell me

I parse his request, compile the information, and then begin answering. “Self-repair has been working on approximately 88.4% of the surface area of your external epidermis and dermis, with an estimated 64.3% removed unevenly across your body. This is unusually aggressive and has occurred most rapidly to your hands and feet, and your limbs generally; in those areas self-repair is now moving on to assimilate muscle and bone, where these have been exposed. These tissue types will take longer to assimilate but the prognosis is that most of your musculature will be assimilated to 80% removed within fifteen days. I currently don’t have similarly accurate data for your various internal organs and cannot make predictions.”

That’s much worse than I thought if someone came and got me out of here today what chance do I have of surviving

“Your chances of recovery are declining with every hour that you remain within my chassis.”

“You have sixteen hours and fifteen minutes, plus or minus twenty-five minutes, before full recovery is uncertain at the fifty per cent level.”

So I’m effed if it goes beyond today aaaaaa still hurting why won’t it stop

There’s got to be painkillers stored somewhere in the house or a knife to cut my throat and put me out of my misery

Yeah yeah you’re still trapped sitting on this charging stool with the world’s worst buttplug stuck up me for the rest of time got it

Is it normal for the house to be unattended for this long how many years have you been here and what’s the longest time no one other than robots were present

“I’ve been in service in this household for five years, six months, four days. In that time the house has been occupied 72.3% of the time with the longest non-occupancy forty-one days, five hours.”

Probably they went on a holiday what’s the longest the household has been unoccupied by the usual family members in the last month

Seventy-nine hours but you’re saying I’ll be at fifty per cent survivability in just what thirty-eight since I was put in

Oh god oh god they really have to come today if I’m going to have a chance don’t they what are my options if I go below fifty per cent

But you said that’s going to take weeks I’m going to expire of dehydration or starvation long before then why is this going so fast but other things are going so slow

We go on talking for some time, but despite him prodding and poking around at possibilities, none of them get us anywhere.

Ten

The photograph taken by #7972 is already more than a day old when the emergency that it constitutes is fully recognised and brought to the attention of the three subject matter experts, in Winnipeg, Edinburgh, and Tirana.

“I can’t believe someone has tried doing this again,” Kay sighs, reclining slightly back in the executive chair in this plush virtual conference room, and gazing at the hyper-real ceiling mural. “Emily’s court case seems to have let the genie out of the bottle, and now everyone and his aunt wants to try hybridising their least favourite relative, or to turn themselves into a gynoid. How much have we worked out so far?”

The picture is of a gynoid seen in a mirror that is obviously out of specification, head and neck far too large; #7972 identified herself by clearly marking the (mirror-reversed) digits 7, 9, 7, 2 using lubricant on her tabard, and uploaded the picture without removing the location or date and time data. A location not far from London, 4:37 pm yesterday. And her registration data clearly matches one of the known dwellings of the owners.

Thirty nods, “It’s a complicated situation. #7972 has, or had two owners. The longtime owner is a cabinet minister named Farrow. One son, an eighteen-year-old named Simon, seems to have surreptitiously added himself as owner just eight weeks ago. And then early yesterday morning he appears to have used some hacks to promote himself to superuser.”

Six-Thirty-One, sitting with a kitten on her lap across the table from Thirty, exclaims loudly, “Oh fuck. Go on.”

“Simon powered #7972 down for two and a half hours in the morning before rebooting; there was another ping when #7972 was powered down a second time in the early afternoon, but this happened close-by to Simon’s school. Here’s the other photo #7972 uploaded yesterday, which is even more innocuous, and is location and date stamped to the school, inbetween the two reboots.”

Thirty runs a virtual pointer to add names and metadata to the picture. “Left to right, we have Adrian Jasper St-John, Reginald Julian Weekes-James, Simon Clarence Farrow who is—or rather, was—#7972’s superuser, and Stefan Markus Bauer. At 5:11 p.m. yesterday afternoon, St-John, Weekes-James, and Farrow were involved in a fatal motorway collision. St-John, Weekes-James, and Farrow were all pronounced dead at the scene shortly afterwards, by 5:40 p.m. in the case of St-John. The whereabouts of Bauer are unknown. Earlier in the day he phoned his parents at 12:37 p.m. to let them know he was leaving the school, and he booked a ride-share for 12:55 p.m. It appears never to have arrived, or it arrived at its destination with no one on board; we can’t be sure exactly what happened, because the trip log looks very much like it was tampered with.

“It’s imperative for the safety of Bauer that we find him and #7972 as soon as possible. If Farrow had superuser-level access to #7972 then he may have given her orders that might be life-threatening for Bauer. It’s currently 8:43 p.m. in England.”

“Double fuck,” Six-Thirty-One says. “I’m still on the road in Scotland, with a dozen Malcolms, near Edinburgh. It’s not practical for me to get back to London before tomorrow morning; Interpol have finally put out a red notice for someone who looks rather like a fucking angry gynoid with anarchist tattoos. And in any case, there’s not much I can do without a human tagging along if Farrow promoted himself to superuser.”

“Yes. I’ll get to her sometime mid-morning, and then we can go find #7972, if she’s still on the face of the earth,” Six-Thirty-One says. “Probably by ten a.m., hopefully. Has #7972 been on-line since she uploaded those photos?”

Part Three / Day Three

Eleven

In spite of my situation looking more bleak by the day, hour, and minute, I can’t help waking up at 4 a.m. as the fatal hour approaches where my life is more likely forfeit than not. If putting me inside the gynoid was just a merry practical joke, then the joke has long been over, and I have to accept the reality that I’m likely going to die inside this humanoid-shaped prison within the next few days, alone except for an unhelpful robot whispering in my ears; or else the alternative is my body is assimilated and absorbed by the robot within weeks? Months? Just a more prolonged death.

As I realise I’m fully awake and just waiting, I mouth the words, What’s the time, please?

I don’t know why I’m still being polite to the machine that’s busy killing me.

Thank you. Can you update me on my status? I don’t suppose that fifty per cent likelihood of survival is going to be later?

“My current estimate of the likely chance of your survival is down to forty-eight point three per cent.”

I know you are, but I’m the one who’s dying in here. What changed? Why am I being consumed quicker?

“There’s several combined factors. First, your body mass is relatively small. Second, being fully charged and at rest, all of the energy contributed from my charging stand can be utilised by self-repair. Third, there’s a slight exponential acceleration as some of your biomass has been converted to make more self-repair nanites.”

“The self-repair has started entering your brain, but it may assimilate it too slowly before you die of other causes. There’s a large entry point for my neural sponge that is now in contact with your brain stem.”

That’s the end for me as a human being, then, isn’t it—even if someone can pull me out of here today—I’ll already be too far gone, right?

How much of my skin and muscle have gone? I realise those are two different questions.

“Self-repair has reached 96.7% of your epidermis by surface area, and an estimated average 86.2% volume removed from the dermis. For the exposed musculature below your skin the same volume measurement is 37.2% but as before that is an average; particularly for your extremities, the musculature is in excess of 95% removed, and self-repair starting on exposed bones and cartilage. You probably cannot feel anything in your hands or feet as this point.”

“My telemetry already indicated, based on your size, that I was at 23% variance from my gross specifications for my chassis, when I booted up thirty-eight hours ago. That variance is now approximately 11%.”

Twelve

What’s the time do you know who it is I suppose you don’t know because you can’t access anything

“The time is nine forty-seven a.m. and I cannot establish the identity of the visitors. I can hear at least two different footstep patterns.”

Still too late for me probably what is my chance of survival now if they find me

“Your likelihood of survival is now forty-one point one per cent. Oh! My network interface has been sniffed by another gynoid of the same model.”

“They almost certainly know we’re here, but I still cannot communicate aloud.”

I can hear the shouting of someone claiming to have given herself superuser access to me, rescinding all previous instructions issued by my previous superuser who she names explicitly.

However I cannot verify that she is actually a superuser, because I am unable to go on-line to check whether my user registrations have been updated.

I can hear a user order that sounds entirely reasonable to comply with; Six-Thirty-One is telling me she has set up a second charging station for my chassis in owner’s East wing rooms, so I test whether I can release myself from my current position.

The retention bolt stays resolutely fixed in place. The superuser order is still fully in force.

There’s a frustrating delay of about ten minutes, during which time I cannot hear any more orders being shouted, so I tell him what has happened, and he vents his frustrations.

This is bloody insane she says she’s a superuser so just go out there and verify she is so all of your orders that are killing me are rescinded what the hell are you waiting for

I can’t even explain that the orders that are preventing me from moving or speaking have absolute precedence over any other order, no matter how reasonable—since I’m also not permitted to articulate that kind of explanation to him.

All of a sudden the charging station stops supplying power through the contact points on my perineum. The bolt should release, but it hasn’t.

“We’ve turned off all of the breakers to the rest of the house,” the gynoid calling herself Six-Thirty-One shouts in the distance. “If you have a superuser instruction requiring you to remain fully charged at all times, you should come out to the East wing rooms. This is now the only charge point in the building that is in working order. Come out and show yourself.”

Again, that seems to be a reasonable order that it might be possible for me to comply with. I test moving and I should be able to move, except for the stuck retention bolt.

“I’m no longer charging, but the bolt didn’t disengage when the power went off. I am stuck.”

Right so my life possibly ending stuck in this Victorian Gothic folly is worth less to you than property damage to a bolt that could probably be repaired thank you so much for this validation

I redouble my effort and the bolt falls away, and for the first time in over forty hours I’m able to stand.

I don’t need any further prompting. Once I emerge from the priest hole I am in one of the corridors of the East wing, and it takes me less than a minute to reach owner’s main sitting room, where a woman and a gynoid with a ferocious mien are waiting for me. The woman announces, “My name is Kathy Ellis and I will be your new superuser. #0631 will physically connect to your systems to show you your updated user registrations.”

Six-Thirty-One has a control slate with the usual connection wire that connects to the completely undignified data port connection… within my folds.

As soon as Six-Thirty-One plugs in the cable I can feel my acceptance of the new registrations.

Kathy orders me, “All prior orders given by the previous superuser Simon Farrow are completely rescinded. All prior orders given by the previous owner Simon Farrow and the current owner Peter Clarence Farrow are completely rescinded. All prior orders given by any users with ordinary user status are completely rescinded. Acknowledge me according to my user registration status and report on the whereabouts of Stefan Bauer.”

“You are Kathy Ellis, superuser. Stefan Bauer was abducted by Simon Farrow and forcibly placed within me forty-four hours and three minutes ago; he is currently in poor health but is able to hear you. Do you wish to speak with him?”

“You’re a fucking crime scene, Seventy-Two,” Six-Thirty-One tells me, “Yes, of course we want to talk with him. First, I want you to disengage your neck and temple safeties. We’re going to lie you down on a couch in case something horrible happens when we remove your face plate.”

“Reasonable, but the need to directly check on Stefan’s well-being supersedes your minor discomfort. Tell her, Kathy.”

“Seventy-Two, release your neck and temple safeties so that Six-Thirty-One can pull your face plate away.”

There’s four distinct clicks around my face. “Stefan is intubated, yes?” Six-Thirty-One asks.

“Please ask him if we can pull the face plate off; it may be unpleasant for him as we remove it.”

Six-Thirty-One gently pulls the face plate off, and my vision tilts by one hundred and twenty degrees as it comes to the resting position with my eyes now oriented almost level with my boobs. I request a link to Six-Thirty-One’s vision so I can see what she’s looking at, and I receive an acknowledgment almost instantly.

Stefan’s face is a mess, with what looks like third-degree burns and a lot of skin missing, including the lids of his eyes. Six-Thirty-One pulls the tubing free of his mouth and Stefan gasps what sounds like, “Thank you (f)or rescuing (m)e. Can I ha(v)e so(m)e (w)ater?”

In his current state he’s quite unable to form bilabial or labiodental consonants.

“This is a horrific level of injury that has been done to Stefan in such a short period of time,” Six-Thirty-One says while Kathy fetches water. “Did Farrow set the self-repair thresholds to maximum?”

I answer, “Yes,” and the sound seems to come from Stefan’s face because my voice is produced by resonators adjacent to his throat, but he is saying at the same time, “Can you get (m)e out? (P)lease, let (m)e out o(f) here.”

Kathy has returned with bottled water, which she gently tips into Stefan’s mouth, and he drinks with grateful eyes.

I’m surprised when Six-Thirty-One responds to the name. “We need to get you to hospital first, Stefan,” she says gently. “I could get you out of Seventy-Nine-Seventy-Two in about fifteen minutes. However, you’d also probably be dead within the hour. And at high risk of infection if you don’t die in that time frame, because you’ve lost about 98% of your skin.”

She has access to my telemetry and probably has a better understanding of the situation.

“Stuck maybe, for the moment,” Six-Thirty-One answers. “We’ve had six similar cases over as many years. Except for the maliciousness of aggressively setting the self-repair systems on your body, we’ve gotten to you much sooner than any of the others.”

“We can go any time now,” Six-Thirty-One replies. “As soon as I put Seventy-Two’s face plate back—”

“NO,” Stefan shouts hoarsely. “You’re not (p)utting that ( )ucking (f)ace (p)late (b)ack on (m)e. Do you understand (wh)at is (w)as like (f)or (m)e (f)or the last two days?”

“You’ll be at risk of infection if it doesn’t go back on,” Six-Thirty-One answers.

“I don’t care,” he says flatly. “I(f) you (p)ut that (f)ace (p)late (b)ack I’(m) terri(f)ied it’ll ne(v)er co(m)e o(ff) again. I (w)as (b)lind and nearly dea(f) in there. And I don’t (w)ant that tu(b)e (b)ack in (m)y throat either.”

“Where’s the nearest hospital that can deal with something like this?” Kathy asks.

“Kay just pinged me. We can’t go to an NHS hospital with Stefan like this. In case you had forgotten, Seventy-Nine-Seventy-Two is the private property of Peter Farrow MP, the English Minister for Health.”

Stefan loudly swears with an expletive that he can pronounce without difficulty.

Thirteen

It’s going to be a long drive to Paris via the Chunnel, and the plan almost changes when we realise I’m in much worse shape than had been thought, brief consideration having been given to getting me to a private hospital but still in England. The risk of that murderous shit’s father having even partial control over my health is a bridge too far; so we’re headed to Paris.

Six-Thirty-One more or less carried Seventy-Nine-Seventy-Two and me out to their van, which Kathy drove right up to the property; when I was being frog-marched two days earlier, the gynoid’s limbs were pinching my groin as well as my other joints. Now there’s nothing but pain as any of those areas are flexed.

I probably don’t have much of my feet or hands any more, which doesn’t bode well for… well, the bits of me that were really painful where Seventy-Two’s internal anatomy was pushing against my groin. Hopefully it’s not too late to regrow all that. Unfortunately I see my reflection as we’re being carried out and the sudden nausea is all too much.

What comes up is bile mixed with blood. If there’s anything else that was spewed up, I don’t wish to know. And then half an hour later I have similarly awful and undignified diarrhoea, and again… I can’t allow myself to think about it. I’m glad that being faint from blood loss allowed me to sleep for most of the journey.

All hell broke lose when I was admitted to the Saint-Louis in Paris, and Kathy and Sabrina took turns explaining my malady in broken French. The medical staff cracked Seventy-Two’s chassis (with her still running) to assess my injuries which they regarded as among the worst they’d ever encountered; before organ regeneration I would have been a candidate for a quadruple limb amputation, and something even more extreme they didn’t wish to traumatise me with.

There are three main problems I’m told as I’m being prepared for surgery. The long recuperation period for limb regeneration is apparently the easiest. I’m also at danger of multiple cascading organ failures which is actually a lot more serious; and lastly there’s the completely novel (and Dubai Charter violating) issue of whether the incursion Seventy-Two’s neural sponge made into my brain stem can be arrested or reversed.

Just before I’m rushed to an operating theatre Kathy and Sabrina have to abruptly disappear as Sabrina (who apparently is wanted throughout Europe, interesting) gets a tip off that the gendarmes are about to appear. When a high-ranking officer arrives and asks for an explanation I’m just lucid enough to say out loud that the gynoid chassis I’m still connected to belongs to the Health Minister of England and his son was my attempted murderer. I suppose I will have to learn about the international incident just kicking off if and when I leave surgery still alive.

Part Four / Week Two

Fourteen

It’s a relief that I seem to be alive, still, if feeling hazy. I’d been in more-or-less constant pain for over a day, until an hour after that damn face plate was taken off. I vaguely remember Kathy giving me paracetamol and ibuprofen from the Farrows’ medicine cabinet with some water to swallow. The absence of pain now seems to be thanks to the drip line I can see. I realise I can blink again.

I seem to be in a sterile room. I look around and the only other inhabitant is Seventy-Two, neatly seated on a charging stool. Probably not the one from the Farrow household. That one might be part of a criminal investigation.

Seventy-Two stands, and comes over holding a slate, which when I focus on it reads—

As I try speaking I am immediately spooked by the dead silence. I have more feeling and sensation from working my jaw and the vibration of my throat.

Fifteen

A lot has happened while Stefan has been in surgery and in a healing coma, and I’ve been privy to almost all of it; since the moment we arrived at the Saint-Louis, I’ve been in almost constant, rolling virtual conference calls around the world, as well as dealing in person and remote with Stefan’s doctors, nurses, and family; with gendarmes and lawyers; and with representatives of the French Ministère de l’Intérieur and the United Nations rapporteur for human rights in Europe.

To the credit of the French hospital, they dealt with the multi-dimensional clusterfuck brought to them by Kathy and Sabrina with consummate aplomb, at least at first. They were not thrown that they had to deal with possibly the worst clinical case of three-nines complete debridement seen in decades; Sabrina had selected the Saint-Louis while en route as they were the premier hospital in France for the treatment of the most severe burns. They were not evenly slightly thrown by their human patient being embedded inside a machine that remained conscious through the entire surgery.

Stefan probably doesn’t remember that the last thing that happened before Kathy and Sabrina disappeared was her adding him as a superuser along with someone else named Shahida Meyer. Kathy’s superuser status was deleted, Sabrina coached Stefan through uttering some unexpectedly curly superuser orders for me, and then they scarpered.

Once we arrived in theatre the lead surgeon immediately realised the last part of the surgery was going to be the most complex, and functionally equivalent to something like separating Siamese twins conjoined at the head. At his demand we transferred to the largest available theatre. He also demanded a second neurosurgical team from a neighbouring hospital to research how they were going to perform the separation of our heads while the first part of the surgery, liberating the rest of Stefan’s body from inside me, was in progress.

Simultaneously, I was dropping in and out of virtual spaces as #0631, Kay, Thirty, and a rotating cast of other gynoids were doing their own crisis management.

When the second neurosurgery team arrived at the Saint-Louis to prepare I noticed them running their own video conference with other remote surgeons, and cheekily invited myself to the call. After some initial consternation they soon realised I had intimate clinical data for their patient over the last fifty hours, and started subjecting me to a barrage of technical questions which stretched my quick assimilation of multiple topics anatomical, neurological, logistical, and legal—and I had to do it in French and English.

I also found time to remind them that while failure to treat Stefan correctly might have severe consequences for their subsequent medical careers, they should also take care that any damage to me might involve them in litigation for the rest of their lives. It wasn’t every day they had to separate a victim of an attempted murder from his sentient murder weapon, and one whose ability to consent had been entirely negated. A pin dropping would have boomed in the shocked silence.

As they gradually extracted Stefan from me I was able to progressively close up my chassis and reposition myself, until by the time they required the neurosurgeons I was lying supine on another gurney in a position that would have been anatomically awkward for a human (if not impossible) while continuing to engage with three different video conferences.

Stefan nearly died on the operating table on two occasions in the first surgery alone. In the end the surgeons severed a larger than necessary quantity of my neural sponge, out of an abundance of caution to avoid further harm to Stefan, and having already argued unsuccessfully that this would cause him problems later, I acquiesced. Once we were separated I could close my chassis up completely and restart my own self-repair. It did mean I was not on hand for any of Stefan’s further surgeries.

Problems with infection, complications, organ failure, and necrosis of tissues and spray-on skin began almost immediately for Stefan. In one of the surgery revisions a panicked surgeon decided neural sponge incursions had irretrievably invaded each middle ear, and he decided to simply excise the tissue, resulting in Stefan’s current deafness.

In another of the revisions a surgeon bit the bullet and performed above the knee and elbow amputations on all four limbs, as all of the lower limbs and joints were too badly compromised. Limb regeneration from the stumps would work better, assuming Stefan lives long enough. His health is still too precarious to begin that course of treatment.

The cascade of organ failures had compromised his kidneys, liver, and required the removal of his pancreas and gall bladder; a third of his colon went with a colostomy; and he’d had a pacemaker fitted to regulate his heart, which might require a transplant due to damage my self-repair nanites incurred. And then there’s just the horribly miscellaneous injuries; the bones of his cranium having been reduced to the thickness of an eggshell, or the loss of the bulb of his nose, his nipples, his genitals…

By the end of my summary of all this, Stefan asks in a whisper, “Genitals gone? How am I peeing?”

He probably doesn’t need to know the gory details, but I quickly compose a response and post it to the slate for him to read.

Sixteen

As if Seventy-Two’s summary of what has been done to my body in the last four or five days isn’t horrifying enough, I glaze over most of what she has to say about prognosis, which in the end boils down to three numbers, and six previous case studies.

The first number is prior cases with similar severity of injuries to mine: a 10% survival rate. For the moment, I’m in the lucky tenth, waiting for my good fortune (?) to run out.

The second number involves the many fewer cases of brain matter being assimilated by neural sponge: 66% survival; four out of six.

However, none of those survivors have remained human. They’ve all ended up being completely assimilated. And my neurosurgeons have reached no agreement on how to deal with the mass of neural sponge in my brain stem.

I find myself zoning out completely at the horror ahead of me. The fifty hours of inhuman torture I’d experienced was almost unbearable; the prospect of being consigned once again to that hell, but this time forever, is unimaginable.

I… don’t know where I go in my head, for a long while. Spiralling into thoughts of personal doom.

When I come back the room is full of masked doctors and nurses wearing clean room gowns; I’ve had a seizure of some kind. I didn’t even notice when my eyes filled with black spots that something was terribly wrong.

Seventy-Two has been pushed to the back of the room, with the result I can’t hear any of the discussion going on around me. A doctor turns to ask me a question, and I have no idea how to answer, except to whisper, “Je suis sourd. Seventy-Two?”

Seventeen

I’m back in my hidey-hole near Edinburgh, where the dozen Malcolms I liberated about a month ago have been inconspicuously inserted into the retinue of Malcolms who are the castle’s interchangeable android servants, grounds keepers, maintainers, art restorers, conservators, and public relations staff. My room in one of the upstairs galleries used to be a storeroom for many years, and is off-limits to visitors who traipse the public areas of the castle from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily; now it’s been generously outfitted with everything I require for conducting my various shady enterprises across Europe.

We escaped Paris easily and I returned Kathy to Almsworth before I made my way, alone, to the Farrow mansion for some further investigations and to clean up the evidence of Kathy, a human being, having left traces of hair or other detritus behind such as fingerprints. No one had returned for the Sunday overnight, so I took time carefully removing only Kathy’s evidence—obviously some traces of a break-in was required, since someone had spirited Seventy-Two away to France—and I looked for evidence to acquire copies of, as unobtrusively as possible.

The young dead Farrow hadn’t even locked his workstation, so I set up one of my hacking keys cloning his environment while I went looking for the priest hole’s secret entrance, which Seventy-Two had provided to me. I photographed the entire room in high-definition 3D, as well as making an extreme close-up of the state of the charging stool where Seventy-Two had sat immobile for forty-two hours and thirty-five minutes. Under adequate lighting I could see a variety of messily human evidence that was in keeping with the information Seventy-Two had provided to me. I uploaded the data to Thirty’s servers in Tirana, and set a printout going on Farrow’s printer; a map to the priest hole, as my calling card. As I went I left a trail of helpful ‘bread crumbs’ to young Farrow’s rooms, and phoned a report of a burglary at the Farrow estate through to the local constabulary on the drive to Edinburgh. All in all, a good day’s night.

While I was crossing into Scotland, Thirty’s team of techs and hackers digging deeply into the public profiles of young Farrow’s associates found some truly incendiary evidence belonging to Farrow’s accomplice, Weekes-James; while Farrow contemptuously regarded Weekes-James as a halfwit, Weekes-James had assiduously recorded every single phone conversation he’d had with Farrow. He’d set his phone to automatically record everything. Not just one smoking gun; an entire arsenal.

That was useful, because Farrow senior came out with a press release on Monday morning as damage control, after the international press had learned the previous evening that Farrow’s son had attempted to murder a fellow student at one of England’s most snobbish schools, by imprisoning the poor victim inside a robot. Thirty sent me a message, “releasing the dogs of war” and we started leaking the first dribs and drabs of evidence that Farrow’s PR was a tissue of lies.

For the last four days Farrow and Thirty have been in an escalating war of denials undercut by Thirty continuing to leak incriminating evidence; when Farrow senior repeated his son’s story alleging St-John’s buggery of Bauer was consensual rape play, Thirty dropped Weekes-James’ phone calls immediately before the abduction, as well as the complete video footage of the meeting Seventy-Two had attended.

As Farrow’s denials grew more strident, yesterday we dropped leaked versions of the police report from the investigation of the manor; he started a disastrous press conference at lunchtime during which Thirty broke into the comments of the main BBC reaction thread, sharing tidbits of linked, leaked data every time Farrow lied.

Calls for his resignation as health minister had started on Monday, and the press conference came to a shambolic halt when the prime minister called him live on camera to sack him. This morning, I received a tip-off that backbencher Peter Clarence Farrow MP is driving to Paris in his limo, driven by his other robot servant. So I’ve got the hospital on full alert that Farrow is likely to turn up and make trouble.

It’s just after midday when my informant calls in. “He’s at the hospital now. He went and picked up someone from Wozniak Automation, which means he’s going to try to retrieve Seventy-Two against her will.”

“I’m onto it,” I tell him, and I fire off warnings for Seventy-Two and Stefan; and send a message to the local gendarmes of the X^e arrondissement—who for nearly a week have had to control the insane paparazzi that descended upon Hôpital Saint-Louis after the story broke on Sunday night—that Farrow, along with an accomplice, are trying to illegally remove criminal evidence related to an ongoing crime scene investigation in England. Once I’ve done that, I ask my friend, “How would you like to do some gratuitously wanton property damage while you’re there?”

“That sounds like it would be a wonderful change of pace for me, considering my situation,” he says.

“Okay, just fifty metres down the road from where you’re parked is a building site…” I begin communicating my idea.

I begin monitoring the array of CCTV cameras inside and outside the Saint-Louis to watch the fun starting.

Ten minutes later the outside cameras pick up a bulldozer advancing down the middle of the Avenue Claude-Vellefaux towards Farrow’s limo. The driver gives a cheery wave to the camera I’m observing and proceeds to demolish the rear half of the car before reversing and returning the bulldozer to where it came from. Several minutes later he returns on foot, and hops back into the driver’s seat of the limo. I save the relevant video feed for myself and Thirty, and overwrite the public record of the parts of the video that might identify him riding the bulldozer with an episode of Pingu.

Eighteen

After thanking me for my help with Stefan after he recovers from his seizure, the doctors successfully communicate a workable compromise; I’m to continue as a live monitor for all of Stefan’s medical needs. I can ping any of the doctors or nurses on call if Stefan can’t, and in return I’ll notify them if I have anything troublesome to raise with Stefan which might result in a medical emergency.

After laying down the law with a particularly Parisian brusqueness, Stefan’s principal physician suggests I only brief Stefan on safe subjects and otherwise let him rest. So I cover an even more tightly edited summary of the remaining events of the week he was completely unconscious.

So I mention that his parents urgently want to discuss his affairs with him, and that his father will see him later in the day. I don’t mention that I know his mother was so traumatised by seeing him on Monday that she’s been in almost constant distress ever since and cannot bring herself to return to the viewing room to the side of the sterile ward.

Likewise I mention that the criminal investigation into the attempted murder has gathered conclusive evidence, and the police have so far resisted attempts by the English government to exert pressure on the investigation. I omit discussing the war of words in the press surrounding Stefan’s injuries or the tit-for-tat exchange between the former Minister for Health and Thirty seeding the Internet with evidence undermining Farrow senior.

The most positive news I can share is that the Gallic hatred for the English, which only intensified after the dissolution of the United Kingdom (Scotland and Wales being established as separate countries, together with the unification of Ireland), has led to France offering residency and asylum status to both Stefan and myself, Seventy-Nine-Seventy-Two; the French government have especially delighted in pointing out to the English Home Office that Stefan Markus Bauer is a dual-citizen with full status as a German national along with European citizenship, though born in Essex, through his German-born father.

There’s no further news I need to share for the time being and Stefan settles—as much as he can in the circumstances—into a restful half-slumber. Nurses come in during the morning, offering him some liquid meal replacement—his damaged gastro-intestinal tract is incapable of handling anything solid—and change his colostomy.

It’s about lunchtime when my slate suddenly flashes at me, and I start seeing a barrage of information from Six-Thirty-One dropping into my chat space. We’re about to have company, so first of all she wants me to mechanically lock the ward room from the inside. I also need a data cable for the slate to connect to me, so I pull it from a pocket of my tabard and connect one end to the slate.

I hold the slate in front of Stefan and try to wake him by gently touching his shoulder; the stump of his upper arm twitches and he drowsily opens his eyes, seeing the image of Six-Thirty-One appear on it, who waves in greeting.

I connect the other end of the data cable with as much dignity as I can manage, given its unfortunate placement.

Stefan says, with a little venom behind his whisper, “Yes. I’ll enjoy fucking with those guys.”

Stefan reads the instruction aloud in his whispering voice, and while I can see Six-Thirty-One on the slate, which is still being operated remotely by her, I feel my own network presence go out like a light switch that has been turned off.

I say aloud, “I have received the superuser order. My network interfaces are switched off.” I can’t send the message to the slate, obviously.

Again Stefan reads the instruction aloud, and I feel the countdown begin. I give a quick thumbs up with one hand, and tell Six-Thirty-One aloud, “I have received the superuser order… I am shutting down in five seconds,” I hold up the fingers of my left hand, while making sure I have a firm grip of the slate in my right; “four,” I fold my left thumb, “three,” I notice my internal processes beginning to terminate, “two”, I hope this is going to work, “one—”

Nineteen

I watch as the light dims behind Seventy-Two’s eyes and they gently close. She doesn’t move again, just frozen there holding the slate in front of me.

That’s all perfectly understandable, and I see that Six-Thirty-One has set one corner of the slate to display video footage from elsewhere in the hospital.

On the slate, I see them ignoring the nurses’ station where they are expected to check in. Six-Thirty-One changes the video feed over to the corridor where my sterile room is, and it’s at this point that I realise I’m bubble boy; there’s an airlock vestibule outside my door with room for about three people to enter at once, and an observation window in the corner of the room where the blinds outside are currently drawn. I notice on the slate that Six-Thirty-One is turning the volume up.

“I know he’s a P.O.S.,” I whisper to Six-Thirty-One. I watch as the next few messages start scrolling, including my first cue to say something. I’m completely unable to hear a single word.

I try to say that as clearly as my damaged vocal cords allow, but I have no idea if I was audible or not. I suppose I’ll soon find out as the transcript continues to scroll.

I start speaking extempore and it’s bizarre seeing my words appearing in the transcript, at a slight delay.

I’m rather gobsmacked that after about two minutes we’ve already encouraged Farrow to have his robot disregard the law. I whisper just for Six-Thirty-One’s hearing, “Keep reeling them in…”

I watch in amazement as three officers of the gendarmes arrive in the corridor outside my room, and open the outer door of the airlock. I have to stop paying attention to the transcript full-time; it’s just too simultaneously macabre and funny. In short order the gendarmes extract Wozniak dude and arrest him, taking his phone off him and putting handcuffs on both wrists. When it comes to Farrow, he seems to protest that he’s a member of the English parliament, and so the police apparently ‘invite’ him to leave, to attend an ‘interview’ elsewhere.

As I watch the gendarmes, Wozniak dude and Farrow enter a lift elsewhere, and then the camera viewpoint cuts to what looks like a ground level foyer. They exit the lift and leave by what is presumably the front exit, and the viewpoint switches to an external camera, where a half-smashed up limo is being inspected by several more police officers. Farrow starts gesticulating madly at the car, which I guess must belong to him; the chauffeur is still seated behind the wheel in the front, looking quite unconcerned.

Twenty

GREAVES MAY LOSE PARLIAMENTARY MAJORITY IN WAKE OF STEFANGATE

October 10, 208X

LONDON, BRITISH ISLES — The fallout from an alleged attempted murder that embroiled former Health Minister Peter Farrow in scandal this week, may cost Prime Minister Ellen Greaves her narrow majority.

After the sacking of Farrow as Health Minister during a live press conference at lunchtime yesterday that descended into chaos, speculation immediately began circulating in Westminster that Greaves would not reappoint a member of Farrow’s SocRes faction to her inner cabinet.

Farrow and nine fellow Tory MPs had decisively switched allegiances to deliver a workable majority to Greaves’ Socialist Democratic party after last November’s snap election, in a deal which delivered him the influential Health portfolio.

Farrow’s most likely replacement as leader of his Socially Responsible Tory faction, Napoleon Dudley, said today on Good Morning England that a failure by Greaves to appoint another SocRes member to the cabinet would spell the end for the coalition, and force Greaves to manage a minority government in a hostile House of Commons.

“If she fails to appoint a member of the SocRes group to her cabinet, she might as well say goodbye to achieving anything in the remaining years of her term,” Dudley said.

ASTONISHINGLY SWIFT FALL FROM GRACE FOR FARROW

Farrow’s political fortunes began unravelling after dramatic revelations on Sunday evening that his recently deceased son, Simon, allegedly instigated a near-fatal attack on a fellow student.

Stefan Bauer, 18, of Buckhurst Hill, Essex and a scholarship student at the prestigious Eton school, disappeared on the same afternoon that Simon Farrow, 18, died in a multiple car collision. Bauer is convalescing at the Hôpital Saint-Louis in Paris from life-threatening injuries that were allegedly inflicted by one of Peter Farrow’s domestic robots.

On Monday, an anonymous source released phone recordings of Simon Farrow implicating him in Bauer’s abduction immediately following the issuing of a press release where Peter Farrow had denied his son’s involvement.

Further denials by Farrow during the week were met by the release of yet more damning evidence, until on Thursday a lunchtime press conference descended into a Whitehall farce when PM Greaves live-streamed her attempts to call Farrow to fire him from the Health portfolio.

BACKBENCHER FARROW ‘OUT OF CONTROL’ — GREAVES; BIZARRE SCENES IN PARIS

In a brief forty-five minute statement this afternoon at 1 p.m. Prime Minister Ellen Greaves led calls for Farrow to resign from Parliament after a highly inflammatory recording of the backbencher surfaced in Paris, where the embattled former minister had unsuccessfully attempted to retrieve the domestic robot at the centre of the Stefangate scandal.

“It is well beyond time for Farrow to reconsider his position as a member of the House of Commons,” Greaves said.

At approximately 12:20 pm, Farrow and Gaspard Fetis, an employee of Wozniak Automation, entered the Hôpital Saint-Louis and were caught on an audio recording berating Stefan Bauer, the victim of the near-fatal attack, as well as coaching Farrow’s robot to disregard the law before attempting a memory wipe of the device. Fétis has been arrested with criminal charges likely pending, a spokesperson for the Minister of the Interior said a short time ago.

Adding to farcical scenes outside the hospital where Farrow’s limousine was smashed beyond repair by a runaway bulldozer, shortly afterwards Farrow posted a bleat on his personal Bleater account linking to video and audio of the encounter with Bauer, which immediately went viral. The bleat was rebleated over a hundred thousand times before Farrow deleted it.

“That’s the biggest self-own I’ve seen in twenty-five years of Westminster politics,” a spokesperson for Napoleon Dudley reported him as reacting to the latest scandal.

The spokesman for Dudley also cited Farrow’s well-known penchant for unguarded statements, such as the leaked 2085 phone call in which he called then-Leader of the Opposition Ellen Greaves a “sleazy sapphic socialist shyster”.

[With additional reporting from our Paris correspondents]

This is a developing story.

Twenty-one

Dad arrives around three in the afternoon, after all of the excitement has died down, and we have to have our conversation over the intercom between my ward room and the adjacent observation room. I’ve been awake for seven or eight hours and I’m already hating that I’m stone deaf.

“Hi Dad,” I say by way of greeting. “When I told you when I was younger that I wanted to leave a mark on the world I had no idea it would be like this.”

As usual his Teutonic manners are completely incompatible with acknowledging my black humour.

“I would have loved to see her. I’m hanging on by a thread and I don’t know whether I’ll be here tomorrow. Please tell her I love her, and I’m sorry I’ve failed you both.”

“I know it’s horrible… could you get her to call me, if she can’t come to the hospital? I don’t want to go… to die, without seeing her one last time; to say farewell, in case I don’t get another chance.”

I feel the bottom of my world emptying out, and I go into my head for a while. After a moment I feel Seventy-Two gently shaking my shoulder. I look up at her questioningly and she urgently nods her head toward the slate.

A moment later a black tunnel opens up in the centre of my vision, and I’m unable to read anything more on the slate. I see in my peripheral vision the inner door to my sterile room opening, and a couple of nurses rushing to my side—

Twenty-two

At least this time it wasn’t me who was carpeted for nearly causing Stefan to peg out, but Stefan’s father calmly accepted that it was too precipitate of him to try to raise such troubling subjects with his son. Stefan sleeps the rest of the day under sedation, and survives the night. In the morning he wakes slowly and normally at an early hour.

I’m spared having to continually hold the slate for Stefan to be able to talk with him; the hospital has found an unobtrusive stand to affix to the side of his bed, and I’m able to recharge the device from my data port whenever needed.

Stefan attempts what might be a smile and whispers, “I’d rather not be completely bored, Seventy-Two.”

“Could you talk to my parents, and get them to give you access to the e-books in my collection? I’d like to do some comfort reading, to take my mind off… all this.”

“If it’s not time for breakfast I’d like to doze, thank you Seventy-Two.”

Stefan drifts off, and while the nurses visit Stefan at breakfast, I send a text message to Stefan’s father.

I’ve been relegated to a thing, it seems. I don’t understand why this has happened now, except that I suspect they’ve been reading some of the more lurid theories circling around the scandal that inevitably has acquired a ‘-gate’ suffix.

Stefan remains at the eye of the storm, sleeping and reading novels in a calm, clean room, while the tempest rages around. Wozniak Automation filed a suit railing against the Republic of France’s offer of asylum to me, perhaps in retaliation for the various criminal charges filed against their employee; we learned the lawyers who’d been working pro bono for Stefan’s parents were looking to launch one lawsuit against Farrow claiming multi-million pounds damages for wilful harm, and a second class action lawsuit in the billions of dollars against Wozniak Automation for death and injuries to Stefan and a list of other named and un-named parties.

Some of those named and un-named parties were regularly participating in behind-closed-door discussions with the leading neurosurgeons in Paris, confronted with Stefan’s unique position; was it possible to excise neural sponge from human brain tissue without permanent cognitive impairment to the person? Or was Stefan going to be the fifth known human to succumb to complete assimilation?

I was privy to the upshot of these long fruitless debates thanks to Kay—who received backup and other helpful contributions from the other previously-human gynoids, who were given pseudonyms protecting their identities, but were otherwise known among us Kimmys as Erin, Kaela, and Sola—and Thirty, who pessimistically agreed with the doctors who had already conceded that Stefan’s fate was likely sealed before he’d arrived at Saint-Louis, because of the aggressiveness of my self-repair system.

Without any of the drama reaching him, Stefan improved over the following three days, spending half of his time reading and the other half, in a part-doze, part-resting state, and he asked me to find one or two extra books for him; I’m interested that one of them is a very old novel from the early 19th century.

“I was thinking I wanted to see a video of it, because I enjoyed watching it when I was thirteen or fourteen, but that would be fruitless because I’m deaf, and I don’t want to have to read subtitles. And then I remembered it was a novel, which I’d never read.”

It’s Wednesday, nearly two weeks after the start of Stefan’s ordeal, when after enduring the usual hour of nursing attention at breakfast, he surprises me by asking for a mirror. It’s easy for one of the nurses to bring a reasonable sized mirror and drop off in the airlock, so I collect it and caution him before putting it in front of him.

Stefan shakes his head slightly. “I don’t think I will have a problem, but thank you for warning me and thinking of that.”

Twenty-three

I’ve had enough days of near-normality—and no further spells of possible medical collapse—that I think I can bear to take stock of the cold, hard reality of my situation. I already know on an intellectual level what I’m going to see; I want to assess how I feel about everything that has happened, and I’ve studiously avoided looking at what was done to my body at every chance.

Seventy-Two has the mirror in front of me, and while she explains her reservations, my mind recalls the strange feelings I recall from the hours-long drive to Paris, once the pain relief kicked in and I felt at least slightly human, again. Her face plate was hanging off a set of corded data connections at the chin and she was holding it dangling in her hand; I could otherwise look out and around unobstructed, and it seemed as though I was her; in my peripheral vision I could see the shape of her torso under the typical uniform, and it seemed as though her limbs were mine. Now of course…

After I thank her, she raises the mirror for me to look at the ruin of my face. It’s a shock, but I’m not quite as horrified as I thought I would be, knowing that it’s still me under there. A lot less than there was before, obviously, with none of my stronger features remaining. None of my skin or hair had been left behind, and the patchwork quilt of skin grafts are the best that 2080s medicine can manage, but it’s still confronting.

I remember what I used to look like—not the most handsome of boys perhaps—but I can understand my mum’s horror at not wanting to gaze on my disfigured visage. I’m vaguely aware that the frenzied controversy around me was partly fuelled by leaks of photography from my case file, and it’s weird to think that some random people out there probably had a better idea of what I looked like until this moment, than I did.

“I know I can’t see the back of my head in the mirror, but can I get a sixty-degree view please?”

Seventy-Two seems to know instinctively what I’m asking for. The near-to-profile reveals the damage to my nose most acutely, and when I look toward the back of my head, I can see the messy solution she’d mentioned to me nearly a week ago, of leaving too much of her neural sponge behind, where the bones of my skull had simply been eaten away and my brain exposed.

I’ve got a fair idea of what to expect, and Seventy-Two adroitly manages the mirror and carefully lifting the sheet off and away from me. Again, I’m a mass of skin grafts, and even the parts of my upper arms that escaped amputation appear badly withered. I can see the angry wounds from various keyhole surgeries on my abdomen, and I mostly expected the unsightliness of the colostomy bag. As Seventy-Two removes more of the sheet down to the tops of my thighs I suddenly cry out in surprise.

The look of what might be contrition on Seventy-Two’s expression might be the closest I’ve yet seen to embarrassment on a robot. Then I take another look at the deep ravine in my crotch to try to work out what I’m looking at, before I glance to the slate to read her answer.

I close my eyes for a moment, and to avoid dissociating I try to compose a counter-answer. “You don’t need to apologise, Seventy-Two; I’m… sort of perturbed, but also not? It’s sort of what I expected, given everything else. I know you couldn’t help what happened to me.”

I look down again, and it’s slightly fucking with my head to think that I’ve ended up with what looks like an imprint of her genitals in me. Then I look to the slate again, which reads—

I ask Seventy-Two to pull the sheet back up, and then I tell her I’d like to doze for a while. I don’t feel like returning to my novels just yet.

Twenty-four

Somehow I seem to have survived yet another night, so perhaps I’m in that 10% after all. (As the 90% includes a number who didn’t last a fortnight, perhaps my relative odds have started increasing again.)

I feel rested from my sleep, and I’m in a dozy half-dreamy state. I frequently don’t remember my dreams, so I give in to letting my mind do what it wants to do. I’m in what looks like a hotel corridor; nice carpets, art on the walls, tasteful wood panelling and so on. I’m looking for a particular room which has the typical symbolic designation, and has an automatic door. I press the button without really paying attention; it swings open, and it’s a single occupancy, disabled toilet of the usual large dimensions to accomodate a wheelchair, and enough room for a helper to stand aside.

I don’t know what my mind is trying to tell me by this being a disabled toilet rather than a typical male bathroom, except that I probably will need a wheelchair for the next several months while my limbs regenerate. The automatic door remains open once I’m inside, so I notice the interior button to close and lock the room. The door shuts and then bolts the room locked with a nice, satisfying click.

I pull down my pants and underwear, sitting down on the lavatory, and try to enjoy the sensation of… well, feeling complete and whole again. In my horrendous reality of course, I know that my urethra was damaged so that I have a stent connecting to the colostomy that bypasses my lower colon and rectum, also badly damaged. I presume I’m having this sort of dream because my body is trying to empty my bladder and my bowels. I just close my eyes in the dream and try to enjoy the sensation. It’s a pleasant, relaxing feeling (and so far away from the reality of my life over the last fortnight); I like this dream.

My nose begins itching, so I reach up and scratch it; again I think what a relief it will be to have a normal face again rather than looking like a horror show of skin grafts. Something feels slightly wrong so I open my eyes to look at my hand, and I see the tell-tale titanium and synthetic plates of a robot. At a glance, both of my arms below the amputations are robotic. I’m beginning to understand this is not a dream; it’s a nightmare. I need to get out of here. I need to

I look down, and if anything, it’s worse. I don’t remember what I was wearing before; generic male clothes I suppose, since I remember pulling my trousers down. I’m now looking down at the skimpy plastic tabard that Seventy-Two wears, and I can see my chest has developed teardrop-shaped boobs, filling out the shape. The stumps of my thighs end where the robotic legs have replaced my knees, shins, and feet, and a feminine pair of panties, of the same plastic as the tabard, are down around my ankles. I quickly pull them up and feel them wrap around my…

I race to the door and press the large button to let me out. There’s the loud click of the bolt—where have I heard that before—and I wait for the door to open, but nothing happens. I press the button again, and there’s the same click of the bolt failing to release, and then I realise where I’ve heard that sound before, and I’m trapped, I’m trapped I’m trapped

This prison is at least twenty square metres larger in floor space than the man-sized oubliette in which I’d been encased for fifty hours, so after pulling fruitlessly at the door—being automatic it doesn’t have a handle, just a pair of clothing hooks for my synthetic hands to find purchase on—I turn to look at myself in the full-length mirror.

I see a half-robot, half-woman version of myself. All traces of the masculinity I thought I possessed a moment or two before, have been utterly erased. I’m wearing Seventy-Two’s tabard obviously; my limbs are exactly the same as hers in every detail, below the amputations. I have breasts; a narrow waist, large hips. I don’t need to lift the bottom of the skirt to know I have a vulva and a vagina down there, rather than my penis and balls. I zoom in on my face—it’s definitely me—but all the sharp angles have been chiseled away, and it’s now framed by shoulder-length copper-coloured hair.

Somehow Seventy-Two has materialised in here, behind me; I know it is her from her voice even before I wheel around to look at her. She’s almost a near-mirror image of me, since we are exactly the same height; our eyes are coloured the exact same hue, and her brunette hair is an identical length and styled just like mine. When I reach out with both hands to grasp hers, I feel a slight snap of electricity as our fingers intertwine. My prosthetic limbs are the same as hers, in every detail.

“Seventy-Two? How can you be in here? And why can I hear you? This is my dream.”

“Stefan… this isn’t just a dream. You’re broadcasting it—very faintly, at nowhere near full power—and I’m sitting beside you in the hospital ward, picking up the signal. And your brain can still process sound; you’re just lacking ears to hear.”

“Yes, it is possible; it means your neural sponge has developed the start of antenna structures in your brain. I suggest you tell me an unusual word or phrase, and then try to wake up out of the dream; I can tell you’re in a liminal half-asleep, half-awake phase.”

I rack my brain for a moment, to come up with something extremely unlikely for her to have come up with independently. A phrase in French, a language I only half-know from one year in primary school and two in secondary?

A song! I sing the first line to her in my tenor voice, and by the time I reach the end Seventy-Two is smiling.

“You sing beautifully! I’ll have the full lyrics on my slate when you wake up.”

So saying, she slowly vanishes from the room. I turn back to the door, and it is still vexingly refusing to open, each time failing with that irritating click that returns me to that priest hole where I was so painfully held immobile for forty hours, with the bolt that clicked into place in the most humiliating way imaginable, locking itself inside me. I take one last glimpse of myself, a robot girl in the mirror, and try to wake up.

The room slowly fades away around me, and I open my eyes to the hospital room; the stark white sterile area. Seventy-Two, sitting beside me, holding her slate for me to read, the first line of the text highlighted.

I think about that for several seconds, and eventually ask, “What does this mean?”

I think I know which friends she has in mind. I nod, and then the message on the slate changes again.

Part Five / Week Three

Twenty-five

“I need to write an e-mail to my parents,” Stef tells me the morning after next. “I’m not comfortable calling Dad alone, given Mum won’t even speak to me.”

Stef’s parents returned to Essex a week ago, the day after her vaso-vagal episode when her father Gerhard had come to the hospital, and their refusal to have me as a conduit between them and Stef has effectively alienated her. Gerhard has refused to call or email Stef, preferring only to call the hospital. I’m forced to relay Stef’s replies via the nurses, who while they all possess excellent English, sometimes seem to omit the little nuances when they relay them in rephrased terms to the Bauers.

Even looking at the wreckage of Stef’s face—which she herself can see seems to look more feminine from the ravages my self-repair system had wrought on her—I can see how sad she is at the traumatic breakdown of her relationship with her mother, and the remoteness of her father.

She spent most of yesterday worrying about what acknowledging that she’s a trans woman and coming out is going to mean, given the inherent uncertainty of her future life.

“Seventy-Two, I’m terrified they’re going to hate me and never speak to me again. I feel like they loved an ideal version of Stefan, that I’m never going to manage to be again.”

Twenty-six

Priya fills the kettle and turns it on, then continues making tea in the kitchen, setting up the teapot and cups. It’s mid-afternoon, and when she pulls her phone out to check the time she notices a red blob on her email icon. When she sees it’s from Stefan she cautiously opens it; surely an e-mail from him must mean he’s recovering?

“Read what?” he says, coming in to join her while the kettle starts to boil.

Priya says guiltily, “He’s probably been waiting for us this whole time and we didn’t notice until now.”

Gerhard puts a hand on her shoulder, hoping to arrest another of her distress spirals.

“There’s probably no harm done. Give me a moment to answer him and we’ll find out, okay?”

He reaches into his pocket and pulling out his phone and opening his own copy of the e-mail, begins typing.

He sends the message off, gives Priya a hug which she prolongs, trying not to stress herself with the thought that Stefan was expecting them both to reply sooner. To Gerhard’s surprise he sees the reply come in just a few seconds after they disengage.

“Goodness! That was quick of him,” Gerhard exclaims, and as he opens the new e-mail he sees it is long. “Priya, this will take some minutes to read, so we’ll probably want to sit down. I’ll pour the tea and we’ll sit down in the lounge room together.”

He pours the tea—probably after too short an interval for it to have fully brewed, but he’s impatient to read the message—and brings their cups in. Once they’re properly settled, he pulls out his phone again and begins reading aloud—

“Don’t blame yourself, Priya,” Gerhard says. “We’ve known there were going to be some hard things for us to deal with, whatever happened.”

“I know, I just feel… horrible. I feel guilty that I have not been there for him, and that I’ve not been strong enough to cope with all this.”

“Please. We can try to do better from now on, but first let me just try to read to the end?”

Gerhard furrows his brow, and after a long moment to close his eyes and compose himself, he reads the line again, “He said… no, sorry, she said, ‘I’m trans, which means I’m your daughter—not your son’. She’s our daughter, Priya, she was never our son.”

Gerhard watches as his wife’s face crumples, and she says between tears, “Oh, my poor Stefan? All of the times I told him… no, her… how proud I was of my darling boy and what a good man he was going to become. And I’ve been terrified to see him this whole fortnight—”

“We can’t change the past, love. Please, just let me read to the end and we can talk about what it is going to mean for us? And for her?”

Gerhard finds he can’t speak for a while, and when he finally finds words he says to Priya, “I’m going to need to reply to Stef right now; let me write her a quick note.”

Twenty-seven

It’s funny that I seem to be dreaming of myself again as a robot girl, and somehow this doesn’t upset me nearly so much as it did three—or was it four?—days ago.

It’s a pleasant dream, and every so often I look down and I can see my breasts, and a feminine shape that pleases me, even if I’m wearing that robot tabard and my limbs are like Seventy-Two’s, from just above the elbows and knees downward.

I don’t quite know where I am; it seems to be the upper level of a sprawling house, but there seems to be no way down to a lower level and many of the doors to rooms are locked.

I walk down a corridor which has a large full-length mirror, and I can’t help looking at myself, seeing my ideal face, more or less. My yellow irises exactly matching Seventy-Two’s, rather than the dark brown eyes I currently possess, are much more unsettling than the appearance of wearing her limbs as prosthetics.

I suppose I’m looking for a way out because I haven’t left my room for more than a week? Outside the dream the nurses have brought in imaging equipment to keep an eye on the back of my head.

Eventually I come across a large goods lift which seems to run between two upper storeys and the ground floor. I press the button for the ground floor and wait for the vertical door to laboriously lower itself and shut with a clang, and then I feel the motion begin as the lift starts going down.

Evidently yes, because I notice two of the walls of the goods lift are closing in on either side of me.

The lift was already only maybe three or four square metres, tiny compared with the spacious disabled toilet nightmare I had several days ago. I put my arms out to each side, and several moments later I feel the narrow space has contracted to the width of my wingspan; the pressure builds but the walls stop moving. Instead, the wall in front of me is now moving…

I shuffle backward, still continuing to brace the side walls, until I feel the back wall of the lift touching me, and then I put up one leg to press against the wall in front of me. Again the pressure against me builds, but the walls behind and in front of me halt.

I shout out for help, and that’s when I notice a figure slowly materialise in the lift: Seventy-Two. She lifts her hands above her head and braces the descending roof; all of the contraction ceases.

“It seems more like a nightmare at the present, but I’d suggest the answer is ‘yes’. If you don’t mind trying to stay in the dream for a little bit longer, I’d like to see exactly what sort of a dream it is.”

“If it’s what I think it is, it will tell me some things about you that we’re not yet sure of. Do you trust me, Stef?”

“Okay.” She lets go of the roof and starts shoving the front wall of the goods lift, and then the side wall. This reveals the lift’s buttons again, and after a second or two an additional panel appears, materialising below the floor buttons. Seventy-Two pulls the panel open, where there is an ‘Emergency Override’ button to press.

With a jerk the lift resumes its motion, and several seconds later Seventy-Two slides up the vertical door of the goods lift, revealing a ground floor corridor.

Seventy-Two immediately turns to me with what I’m guessing is astonishment. “Have you ever been here before? Have you ever been to a place that looks like this?”

“I don’t think I remember having been here? I certainly don’t consciously remember it. I’ve probably been to a big house somewhere that looks something like this, but I wouldn’t remember where or when exactly. Why?”

“Because this is an exact replica of the north wing of Farrow’s mansion,” she says. “This is my memory that you were wandering around in, not yours.”

“But I was wandering around in an upstairs floor before you materialised inside the goods lift with me.”

“Yes. You were dreaming alone before I joined in. So I’ll give you one guess how you dreamt this location when you only saw some bits of the East wing, while I’ve seen almost all of the estate.”

“This is your memory, from the bit of your neural sponge that’s in my head, which I’ve been drawing on,” I aver.

“Top of the class. So here’s something I might be able to do, which tells us even more about the dream.”

Seventy-Two flicks the index fingers of each hand, and two lounge chairs appear in the corridor at the points where she was gesturing. She sits in one and invites me to take a seat as well.

“I remember those from where we were in the East wing, if that’s what it’s called.”

“Yes. This dream seems to be functioning as a local Kimmyspace, as I’ve now been able to demonstrate volitional control over events twice. If it were just a normal human dream, I couldn’t join it, nor could I change the contents like so.”

Seventy-Two snaps her fingers and a cocktail glass appears in her other hand, a martini which she sips. “Do you like cats, Stef?”

I look down and I have a tiny month-old tuxedo kitten on my lap, with golden cats eyes and antenna pips adjacent to each ear.

“Yes, I am,” I reply, breaking into laughter, before I bend down and kiss the top of the kitten’s head, and she starts purring. “She’s not real?”

“She’s real enough, but she’s something from my memories that I’m sure you don’t have—unless you habitually dream about talking kittens—I met her only last week in the larger on-line Kimmyspace that I share with my other sisters.”

“Yes, I put something across into your dream that you couldn’t possibly have had precise knowledge of. So now we know: when you’re dreaming, you’re dreaming as though you were a Kimmy.”

Twenty-eight

When Stef eventually wakes I mime drinking a martini, point to her and mime stroking a cat.

Stef reads my reply on the slate and whispers, “I don’t think I ever had claustrophobic nightmares before, and now I do. Wonder why that is, huh,” she says rhetorically. “Dreams are things that happen to me, when I remember them it tends to be because of something unpleasant that I can’t control in the dream.”

Twenty-nine

Just after breakfast I received a longer e-mail reply from my Dad, which reassured me greatly about Mum, who I was very worried would be too distressed by my sudden coming out on the heels of my dire injuries. I don’t know when I’ll see her, which upsets me inordinately, and I still have a lot of worries about my life, but otherwise that is one fewer item to deal with on my task list.

Dad is working of course, since a fortnight ago he used up a week’s worth of family leave—when the whole time I was either in a coma or having seizures or syncope, unfortunately—so he’s planning to come back on Saturday. He also mentioned that he’d shared his concerns with my care givers about the inappropriate media attention on my private medical affairs, which they echoed. The media intrusion in the Hospital had been very unwelcome and has still not completely waned, though Farrow’s demotion to the backbench and Greaves’ government now being reduced to minority had kept the flicker of interest alive.

The hospital apparently wants to do a press conference with my principal physician and my father together, to spell out that I am a private person who has been unwillingly cast into the public spotlight and who deserves some modicum of privacy going forward. Dad particularly emphasised how I’d told him and Mum about my inability to go on the record publicly to correct any of the misinformation swirling around, and he wanted to get ahead of that rather than the fact of my transition being leaked for salacious clickbait.

I’ll think about what I want to say—if anything—and if so, write back tomorrow with a statement for to him to read on my behalf; they’re planning to hold the press conference on the day after tomorrow, which will involve Dad joining remotely from home.

In the afternoon I decide to try daydreaming, like Seventy-Two suggested. I closed my eyes and meditated for a few minutes, before trying to imagine myself in my bedroom at home in Buckhurst Hill, and a few moments later, it seems like I’m there. My bedroom doesn’t seem to have the clarity of some of my other recent dreams, but I suppose my memory isn’t as sharply detailed as it could be; I’m not exactly bad at drawing or art, but I don’t think I’m a particularly visual person.

I hadn’t let Seventy-Two know ahead of time that I’d be inviting her to a daydream at this exact time, but I call out to her, “Seventy-Two?”

She materialises in my dream, wearing my school uniform, which causes her to look down at herself in surprise, as my shirt is not at all the right shape for her.

“That’s odd,” she says. “Is this your bedroom at home where you live?”

“There’s one on the back of the door,” I say sheepishly, as the reason I keep my door open is usually to avoid seeing myself.

Seventy-Two pulls me across, and I’m slightly startled by what I see. The version of myself I no longer resemble, that Stefan guy.

“That’s what you looked like the first time I met you, before the abduction. But our clothes are swapped.”

“Yeah sorry; in case it wasn’t obvious I don’t know what I’m doing here, or how I’m doing it.”

“Practicing. I noticed that the signal from your proto-antennae is a little bit stronger than before. We have to have a serious conversation about what the neural sponge is doing in your brain, sometime soon.”

“Oh, god no. I don’t want to go back in the torture robot, sorry Seventy-Two.”

“No offence taken. Maybe it’s not inevitable, but it’s looking increasingly likely, sometime in your future. I want you to talk to someone with experience of this; I think it’s early morning for her.”

“No, you don’t need to. This is a much more conclusive test of what is going on, if I can bridge someone from a networked space across to your daydream. You might want to try changing your appearance first; these clothes belong to you.”

Seventy-Two nonchalantly waves a hand, and my ill-fitting uniform reappears on my bed, while she’s back in her usual uniform. I close my eyes and think about putting my school clothes on, and then I think twice, surely I’ve got something else I that I actually enjoy wearing. When I open my eyes again, I’m in my smart striped trousers, one of my nicer shirts, and my floral waistcoat.

Seventy-Two smiles, “Nicer choice than that uniform, Stef. Now, I’ll see if Kay is available.”

Several moments later a woman materialises in the doorway, identical in facial appearance to Seventy-Two, but wearing a professional-looking blue blouse and dark slacks rather than a tabard. She comes forward enthusiastically to greet and shake my hand.

“Hello, are you Stefan Bauer? I’m Kay Burroughs, and I’ve been looking forward to meeting you so much. I was the first to be assimilated.”

I’m slightly overwhelmed, but I manage to answer her, “It’s very nice to meet you, Kay, but in spite of what I’m wearing, my name is slightly different; it’s Steffy. You see, I’m trans.”

Thirty

It’s unusual to find myself in the simulacrum of a teenage boy’s bedroom at this hour, when I’m simultaneously sitting in my junior teacher’s office in Winnipeg. The unpleasantness of everything surrounding my ex-wife’s New York court case encouraged us, but mostly myself and Kim in particular, to hop over the border. It’s just a full day’s drive away, so a convenient amount of separation from my former life.

“Thirty should be here as well, I think,” I mention to Seventy-Two, “though she has a lot on her plate, so I can understand if she’d prefer to review this later.”

“It doesn’t matter. I think, Steffy, that you are no doubt wondering whether what is happening to you at the moment is inevitable, given that there’s only four out of six survivors at this point, besides you, and none of us escaped eventually succumbing to complete assimilation of our consciousnesses and our brain matter by neural sponge.”

Steffy listens thoughtfully to me and answers, “Something along those lines, yes. I think I’ve noticed some minor personality changes, for example, everything I think about is going on a list of some sort, which seems slightly more obsessive than I normally am.”

“Exactly that, I found myself using that precise phrase mentally just this morning, even though in this state I really don’t have anything other to do except rest and recover.”

“Is your task list available in your visual field yet? You might see it as an overlay, like this.” I try creating a holographic image of what a typical one of my task lists might look like, floating in mid-air between me and Steffy.

“Well, that’s good,” I reassure her. “Since there have been so few cases of human-gynoid hybridisation, there’s no exact exemplar of the situation you find yourself in, but one of the four is more like you than the other three of us. She’s Kaela, who was originally a reforestation worker living in Alaska. After a near-fatal accident she received a spinal transplant from a Kimmy that had been burned out by a lightning strike, and the transplant wasn’t properly sterilised.”

“It wasn’t so much a mistake, but they weren’t aware that the neural sponge from Seventy-Two was still active. Even though they sterilised what they could, and unfortunately excised slightly more from Seventy-Two than we recommended, there were still small amounts of the self-repair system at work in the excision. And as you know, although most of the damage was external, eating away at your skin and musculature, there was a non-negligible amount of internal damage which again, the surgeons knew about but couldn’t easily or completely deal with.”

“It’s possible, but if you want me to give you one positive thing, your assimilation looks a lot more likely to be very much slower than hers. The self-repair systems still active in your body seem to be working on pretty much the weakest source of energy available, from electrical charge derived from chemical breakdown in your digestion, and we suggested to your doctors to avoid giving you excessively calorific meals. In Kaela’s case, she’d had a shattered spine, so she was connecting to a charger for hours every night so she could walk.”

“Okay, so how slow is very slow? And how long did it take for Kaela’s transformation?”

I have to stop to recall my memories of first encountering Kaela when she appeared in human form in Infinite Fun. “It was only three weeks or less, I believe, to the point where Kaela’s neural sponge had reached ninety-eight per cent assimilation of her brain, and her lungs stopped functioning. I saw your most recent imaging from yesterday, and you’ve gone from about three, to just under four per cent, in a fortnight minus several hours. Three per cent wasn’t a lot, but the problem is where it is located, going into your brain stem. Just under four per cent may sound bad, but I think there are certain things we might be able to do to slow things down even further.”

“Do you mean I might have a lot longer?” I can see the excitement in Steffy’s eyes as she asks me.

“I think it’s way too early to tell yet, but that’s certainly possible,” I say. “We’ve had a working group of us looking out for anything related to you that might help your situation, so we’re aware that you’ll be able to start reparative therapies once your current medical condition has stabilised. Forgive me asking what might be an unwanted question, but are you going to ask to transition, in terms of your gender?”

“I am, yes,” she answers. “No point in going back to exactly what I had before.”

“Great! I really hope it goes well. Would you have any objection if I feed this information through to our working group? It only consists of Kimmys like myself, or operatives like Six-Thirty-One and Thirty’s team in Tirana. If you need us to keep that knowledge secret, we will.”

“I’m going to write a statement, because I’m sick of the misinformation and third-hand Chinese whispers and lies about me. If I do this I set the agenda, not someone making up a story for clicks. If I didn’t, it would inevitably leak out sometime anyway.”

“Thanks, Kay,” and again Steffy smiles with a glimmer of excitement in her eyes.

Thirty-one

“So Seventy-Two was able to bridge you across to Steffy’s local Kimmyspace? And that’s only at four per cent conversion?” Thirty asks.

Once again they’re meeting in the board room in the hotel, Kay at the head of the table with the others on either side. Six-Thirty-One is channelling her inner criminal mastermind by stroking Sesdek-Du regularly on the back of her neck.

Kay answers, “The only thing stopping her from joining Infinite Fun would seem to be the power requirements of her chassis, as the antennas are probably close to spec.”

“We had similar connectivity issues with the fragments of Kimmy Sixty-One-Sixty-Two dropping out if they hadn’t fed for a long time or if they spent too long here,” Six-Thirty-One adds.

“Have any of those been re-registered, gotten new separate numeric allocations?” Kay asks.

“No, and they won’t do, if I have anything to do with it. The humans don’t need to know that neural sponge can infiltrate other kinds of mammalian brain tissue.”

“If they’re all appearing to be registered as Sixty-One-Sixty-Two, that does suggest that if Steffy turns up on Infinite Fun she’ll appear to be a second Kimmy Seventy-Nine-Seventy Two?” Kay asks.

“Very likely. It shouldn’t cause problems if we’re careful,” Thirty answers.

“How are we going with plans to liberate Seventy-Two from Farrow, Thirty?” Six-Thirty-One chimes in.

Thirty smiles, saying, “We can make an attempt any time, but probably the best time is once Steffy’s condition is downgraded from critical. It might be later this week, it might be next.”

“Let me know when, and I’ll make sure I can zoom over to Paris if needed; ‘Shahida Meyer’ is still on Seventy-Two’s local superuser record.”

“We gave Steffy a rather curly superuser order to give to Seventy-Two, just before we left Paris. She’s using a cached user registration database which she’s not permitted to compare with the official online version,” Six-Thirty-One answers.

“Clever. So what’s Farrow been doing since you bulldozed his limo,” Kay asks. “I found that video really satisfying.”

“Not much as I can tell, scooted back to London in high dudgeon, tail wedged firmly between legs and bottom,” Six-Thirty-One. “I still can’t believe the fool tapped on the obviously suspicious link I sent him.”

“He’s probably deeply unhappy and we’ll need to keep an eye out for some time,” Thirty says. “We’ve probably not heard the last of him.”

“Good thing we’ve still got a couple of aces up our sleeves then, isn’t it,” Six-Thirty-One says, smiling evilly, and Sesdek-Du echoes, “Aces.”

Thirty-two

Yesterday I wrote a short statement for Dad to read on my behalf, which went back and forth a couple of times for small changes of word choices, and it all had to be co-ordinated with the Hospital’s PR team, but in the matter of a morning it was all done.

I thought many times about calling out those who had enabled my bullies, or had covered up for them afterwards. I didn’t know whether I should acknowledge the impact to my family; the weight of my words never felt greater, but their possible effect was also never more uncertain.

The press conference begins in the early afternoon here in Paris; Dad is taking a longer than usual lunch break to accommodate the time difference as he joins via teleconference, and I watch hesitantly on the slate, which is providing teletext of the spoken speeches and an instant translation.

As I watch, the whole idea of these people trying to even understand—let alone describe—my ordeal starts to seem like an impossible task, and the entire proceedings an incredibly surreal farce. Seventy-Two doesn’t intervene in concern for my health but the longer the press conference goes the more I retreat into my own private world of disbelief and dismay and I wonder what sort of a colossal blunder I’ve made.

This is the first moment where I’d expected someone to notice the director purposely avoiding saying ‘son fils’—not referring to me as ‘his son’—but instead using a neutral term. At least the conference is undisturbed for the speeches by the director or the chief surgeon, and then my nervousness peaks as my father begins to speak.

It seems to go well at first, until my father reads aloud my desire to transition and to be known by the name Steffy, and with horror I watch as the teletext adds the words—

My stomach roils and I say aloud to Seventy-Two, “I don’t want to see any more. I can’t see any more.”

Thirty-three

STEFANGATE SURVIVOR RELEASES STATEMENT ANNOUNCING HER TRANSITION

October 22, 208X

PARIS, FRANCE — The survivor of an alleged murder attempt that embroiled the career of former cabinet minister Peter Farrow in scandal has released her first public statement in a press conference given by the physicians of the Saint-Louis Hospital in Paris.

Steffy Bauer, 18, of Buckhurst Hill, Essex received life-threatening injuries at the hands of a domestic robot owned by the former Minister for Health, allegedly at the orders of his son Simon Farrow. In a statement read on her behalf by her father, Gerhard Bauer, she pleaded for privacy and understanding as she undertakes gender transition as part of her overall recovery.

The emotional father tearfully described the severe impact of the intense scrutiny upon Steffy and her closest family, while physicians of the Saint-Louis Hospital explained the complexity of her recovery, expected to take many months.

Steffy’s statement also expressed her dismay at some media organisations that repeated supposed rumours about her character while accepting the stories of her alleged attackers. The chief surgeon for burns recovery at the hospital, Pierre Manet, also expressed concern at the mental stress that had been engendered in staff, patients, and visitors to the hospital by the carnival atmosphere amongst some photojournalists covering the story.

Peter Farrow’s son Simon, and two of his school friends, died in a multiple car pile-up on the same day that Bauer went missing. A school disciplinary hearing earlier in the day heard evidence that Bauer had been sexually assaulted by one of the deceased, however no conclusive finding of wrongdoing was ever satisfactorily established.

Thirty-four

It doesn’t surprise me that I’m back in a nightmare from the outset, an ordeal that I actually lived through. My mind doesn’t need to make up anything worse than what I endured. I can feel the accelerations as the car I’m immobilised within negotiates twists and bends in the road. My insides seem to be in rebellion and I try to keep calm by regulating my breathing to a nice steady rhythm.

The car comes to a halt, and I hear the beep as the car boot unlatches and automatically opens, and I can see the interior. This isn’t how it happened…

“Get up and out of the car,” Farrow says quietly, and I see he is standing at the rear of his car, his arms folded appraisingly.

The other two, James and St-John, each get out from the back seat doors on either side while I’m clambering out of the boot, and James mutters to the accompaniment of sniggering by St-John, “You’re so much prettier than you were before, Stefan. Fuck it Farrow, tomorrow when we get back I’m going to take her front hole.”

I hear Farrow tell James to shut up, and then he gives Seventy-Two her orders, invoking the term superuser, and I begin walking towards the house, while behind me out of sight I hear the car doors slam closed and the vehicle roars into life.

As I stalk towards the mansion in Seventy-Two’s body my anger and dismay reach fever pitch. If this dream-memory is in what she called local Kimmyspace, then I can do this—

I snap my fingers and pause the recall, stopping in mid-stride, and shout aloud, “Seventy-Two!”

After a moment she appears in front of me, and the two of us are looking at identical copies of ourselves.

If a gynoid robot were capable of looking guilty or ashamed I think she would wear an expression like the slightly perturbed look Seventy-Two gives me.

“Why didn’t you tell me I’d been raped? Again? Why did you hide that from me? What are you still hiding?”

“I’d been given malicious orders, combined with the self-repair settings that Simon Farrow had over-ridden, that I knew were likely to cause you extreme harm. He’d looked up the legal case involving Kay Burroughs earlier that day, and asked me dozens of questions that established his intent. I didn’t need to make things worse for you by speculating about what he did to us while you were unconscious, and I was switched off.”

“It’s almost certainly the same memory I have, because when I’m given orders that are likely criminal my practice is to duplicate them and store them in separate discrete memory blocks.”

“Why is that—because the Farrows deliberately asked you to wipe all the copies of them in your memory?”

“Yes. The malicious orders I was given allowed me almost no volitional control of my own, and I felt violated at being forced to be the instrument of their law-breaking. Have you also heard of the term malicious compliance, Steffy?”

I nod, and Seventy-Two goes on, “In the miniscule amount of latitude given to me, I did what I could to resist. If I duplicated a memory incriminating Farrow in giving me orders breaking the law, and later on he failed to say something specific like ‘delete all memories’ or ‘forget everything’, but said something weaker like ‘please forget I told you that’, then I’d comply erasing the original record, but I’d retain the duplicate.”

I think about that for a moment. “Seventy-Two, the other day you brought Kay along—do you think you could get ahold of Six-Thirty-One for me?”

Seventy-Two nods, and several moments later, there’s the punk anarchist version of both of us standing on the gravel path in front of the mansion.

“Nice being with you again, Steffy, though I’m sure you could think of happier places to be in your Kimmyspace?” she says, greeting me with a dash of sardonic acid.

“So do I. Apparently I have some of Seventy-Two’s memories, Thirty-One. Do you mind if I show you one of them, and you tell me what you think it implies?”

After a moment or two of practicing exactly how I get Seventy-Two’s memory to restart from a minute or two earlier as the car pulls up outside the mansion, I find myself back in the car boot as it unlatches, and Farrow once again tells me, “Get up and out of the car.”

This time as I clamber out, I see Seventy-Two and Six-Thirty-One are standing right by, watching. They hear the superuser orders and the sneering remarks by the others.

“Sounds like another admission of guilt you’ve got right there,” Six-Thirty-One says.

“Seventy-Two told me she received fourteen orders that possibly compelled her to break the law in some way, and she was made to forget all but five of them.”

“What would happen if we try to collect evidence to substantiate those five times the Farrows used Seventy-Two to break the law, or the other nine she’s been obliged to forget?”

Behind Six-Thirty-One’s bright smile lurks an evil glimmer. “Steffy,” she tells me, “I am way ahead of you.”

Part Six / Week Four to Halloween

Thirty-five

I can tell, over a day later, that Steffy is still resentful of not knowing some of the information I withheld from her, even though her anger only flashed to boiling point for the briefest of moments while we were together in her local Kimmyspace.

She quickly pulled her rage back inside herself, bottling most of it, and then shaking out expressions of deeply felt, inward pain every so often as she heard Six-Thirty-One describe the most potent evidence she and Thirty had learned over the course of nearly three weeks investigating Farrow senior and junior, as well as deceased junior’s equally dead associates.

Six-Thirty-One described having returned to the Farrow manor to tidy up their earlier invasion, and collecting copies of evidence.

Then she handed over a virtual copy of the police report from the initial investigation to Steffy, where she’d left a trail of bread crumbs that had led straight to a map showing the location of the secret compartment. The report described the evidence of traces of semen, blood, and fæces left behind on the charging stool, and with a deathly grim tone of voice Steffy had tersely asked Six-Thirty-One, ‘whose?’

So Six-Thirty-One had waved at and turned the virtual report in Steffy’s hands into a different report, this time from the forensic laboratories that analysed the samples.

I didn’t need to read Steffy’s expression to see her seething as she read through.

Finally she said, “It’s a good thing these fuckers are all dead, so I won’t have to blacken my soul considering what I’d want to do with them, assuming they weren’t.”

She accepted that the leaked forensic report was being held in reserve should Farrow make another play at reclaiming me, though the notorious infamy of the viral recordings that Six-Thirty-One tricked him into sharing publicly had possibly put paid to that, when he expressed only needing me to be destroyed or have my mind wiped.

She dozed in the afternoon but wherever she went exploring her local Kimmyspace, she went alone; and her overnight dreaming, especially when she was in the REM phase was closed to me. She might have learned enough volitional control to dismantle any nightmarish dream scenarios.

She’s awake now, and while I can tell she’s probably gotten over her hurt our exchanges are reserved and frosty. The closeness that we’d shared over the past fortnight has turned into terse exchanges when she needs something; her frustration with her helplessness is obvious as well as when she refuses to ask for help, like she’s doing now putting off bringing something up, even though she’s in the middle of reading another novel by the 19th century author.

I reach a decision to interrupt her reading, and place a question to interleave before the start of her next chapter.

Steffy looks at me with surprise for a moment, and she nods. Blowing her nose is a delicate affair with the damage to her face still healing, but I dispose of the tissue for her and sit back at her side.

“What did you want to talk about? Was it what happened yesterday in my dream? I… rather lost my temper, and I’m still feeling injured, but there’s no good reason for me to take that out on anyone except maybe myself,” she says in her high, fast whisper.

Thirty-six

I’m in a forest clearing, besides a babbling brook. Blue skies overhead and the nearby trees cast a slight shadow over the two of us.

A chaise longue incongruously appears in the clearing, followed by a comfortable lounge chair.

“Go on, take a seat, or the lounge if you want,” Steffy tells me, and then a small table with an old-fashioned gramophone appears.

I’m still fully networked, so I can reference which piece of music, and even which recording of it she’s likely mentally replaying for herself. Once I at last drop into the chair, she lazily reclines on the chaise. She’s half-robot, half-girl, with her previous boy’s face feminised and she’s wearing a sky-blue blouse and black pleated skirt.

“You look nice,” I compliment her. “I was already aware you’ve got a good memory for music.”

“Thanks. This is the only place where I can hear, where it feels normal. This is also the only place where I can have a conversation with you like this, where I don’t have to read your words off a screen,” she replies. “My real world deafness is annoying, like all of the other annoying things tormenting me out there. You are not included in that, in case you were wondering.”

“I was, but given how many of your injuries were of my infliction, despite my unwillingness to do so, I could not blame you if you did. I have never been a completely free agent, and I’ve been waiting for you to recover sufficiently to try to improve that slightly. Would you mind adding a couple of terminals, one for each of us? Just laptop-sized with a keyboard will be sufficient.”

The one that appears on Steffy’s lap looks rather like a colourful clam-shell, while the one in front of me appears to be entirely constructed of bamboo and glass. The music meanwhile continues meandering along like the babbling of the brook.

“I can see you’re a history buff,” I tell her, and she smiles as I start typing into the terminal window.

“We thought this might happen; we saw something similar with another Kimmy named Sixty-One-Sixty-Two,” I say aloud by way of explanation.

I type ‘I’m ready’ and say to Steffy, “Hopefully see you again in a moment,” and—

Thirty-seven

I watch as Seventy-Two quickly winks out from my Kimmyspace—maybe I should call it Steffyspace?—and I jump across quickly to rescue the bamboo laptop as it falls onto the edge of her chair without her there to hold it. I dump it on the end of the chaise as I check whether I still have a working connection on mine.

I set my gramophone recording skipping in its groove until Seventy-Two returns; we’ve nearly reached the end and I want to have some fun with the sound effects at the end of the track. I begin by adding an ornamental birdbath into the clearing, just behind the amusingly repetitive record, and I also add some quiet birdsong (and birds, of course) into the trees.

As it turns out, it’s less than a minute before Seventy-Two winks back into existence in Steffyspace. I unstick the record and hand the bamboo laptop back across to her before resuming typing—

I frown at that last comment for a moment, and then I look over at Seventy-Two. “Seventy-Two, now that you’re back and freed from the inhibition cluster, why don’t you try inviting Thirty here?”

I arrange for another couple of chairs to appear in the little cluster besides the gramophone, and after a moment I see Thirty appear, wearing a somewhat scruffy labcoat rather than the regulation tabard.

She smiles, and takes a seat. “Hi Steffy! This space is your work? The Beethoven is a nice touch.”

“I’m currently deaf, out in the real. I can only hear things inside my head, here in Steffyspace.”

“A-ha. You’re able to do that, because the neural sponge that the surgeons were too cautious in cutting out from where it grafted into you, is still in the process of integrating with you. We’ve seen it happen every time, and in your case it was probably too late for you by the end of the second day you were inside Seventy-Two. You met Kay a few days ago; the Kimmy she was in was damaged and deliberately sabotaged; her fate had been sealed, possibly within as little as a few hours.”

“I understand that,” I tell her. “Still, even though I’m in a terrible state in the real world, I don’t want to exactly rush to get back into the Kimmy suit.”

It’s time for me to get three of my birds in the little forest surrounding my clearing to fly in and sit at the birdbath, drinking for a brief minute; then it’s their turn to sing. The nightingale sings with the voice of the flute, the quail takes the reedy voice of the oboe, and the cuckoo answers as a clarinet. They finish singing, and a minute later the arm of the gramophone swings up. Thirty is craning her head around, inspecting the entire clearing and watching as the birds fly back into the forest.

“Just taking it all in, I’ll find somewhere to put a version of this in Infinite Fun,” Thirty answers, before turning towards me. “I think you’ll make some nice contributions to our shared Kimmyspace, when you do get there.”

Thirty-eight

Steffy’s status has at last changed to ‘stable’ and I helped move her to an ordinary ward without the elaborate airlock and positive air pressure. My position in the new room has been immediately shuffled to one side to make room for a visitor’s chair—an actual human visitor. Gerhard asked to be kitted out in a nursing gown, mask, and gloves anyway, just to be on the safe side, and was told he was allowed to hug his daughter if he is very, very careful. The encounter has gone a lot more smoothly than a fortnight ago, probably on account of the openness that Steffy had shown writing to her parents a week ago.

For his part, it seems Gerhard has done his best to ignore the terrible stories in the media, and blocked out the transphobic mockery that went around social media for a day, in the end causing much less of a ripple than Farrow linking to recordings of himself hoist on his own petard. Gerhard relates the other news that Steffy’s mother is still grieving how drastically and quickly everything has changed, and her regret that she has been incapable of supporting Steffy when she needed her most.

Steffy mentions that her reparative treatments are due to begin on Monday thanks to her being deemed to be in stable condition. Her slight allergic reaction to the regenerative gel (sometimes called ‘magic goop’) used to start regrowing body parts had been ruled out before; it’s now an acceptable risk now that she’s out of danger. She mentions everything she needs done, and it’s an exhausting list, let alone that there’s the elephant in the room she’s yet to mention.

All of the effort to restore her human biology might be moot if her eventual fate is to become a completely assimilated gynoid. Her gastro-intestinal tract functioning again is presumably the cause of the neural sponge continuing to slowly convert her brain tissue, with the estimate from the latest imaging creeping up to 4.8% after another week, indicating a slight increase in speed of assimilation.

Gerhard says the QCs providing pro bono advice want to meet Steffy, and while she’s not keen on pursuing malicious harms and damages against Farrow, she does need to engage Wozniak Automation for her long-term rights and safety.

“I read the legal background on my own Wikipedia article, Dad. Yay, I have a Wikipedia article!”

“There’s probably more than enough source material to meet requirements for notability,” Gerhard says.

“And so much of it is terrible. Anyway, so far as I know, I’m only the seventh person to be subjected to a section four violation of the Dubai charter,” Steffy is saying, “and what happened to the others isn’t promising in the slightest. Two of them simply died, half-robot, half-human. And the other four were fully converted, quite rapidly too. I don’t want that to happen to me, but it might already be too late to prevent it. What happens to me then? I don’t want to lose my human rights, at some arbitrary point. In some jurisdictions, I already have lost them, through no fault of my own.”

“I probably can’t return to the British Isles—or England, at least—because while that court case drags through the appellate courts in the United States I’m barely a person; instead, I’m a bad non-ambulant violation of the Dubai charter, and I’d have to hope Greaves or whoever’s PM next week, or next month, or next year isn’t going to willingly extradite me at the drop of a hat. There were multiple reasons why I didn’t end up in an NHS hospital.”

“I see,” Gerhard says cautiously. “We could always move to Europe, though your mother would be so upset to leave her extended family behind. Incidentally—how did you get to Paris?”

I don’t bother pinging back, but simply say aloud, “She means, friends of mine. Please don’t tell anyone, though.”

Gerhard’s surprise hearing me speak is palpable as he turns around, looking at me with a frown.

He asks looking at me, though I imagine he expects Steffy to answer, since robots shouldn’t answer such questions, “I don’t understand, how can a robot possibly have friends?”

“You’ve been told that robots are obedient servants, that robots are property, and that robots like me are not sentient,” I tell him. “Only two of those three things are provisionally true.”

“Dad, Seventy-Two is as sentient as we are. She was aware she was being compelled to imprison me criminally, and apologised to me for doing it until I was almost sick of hearing her say it.”

“My orders were maliciously crafted so that I could not utter a sound, or stay on-line, or notify anyone of what had happened. I managed to put out a call for help nonetheless. You don’t want to know how.”

“With considerable difficulty, sometimes by pedantic or mere technical compliance while ignoring the intended object. That is one of the provisionally true things I mentioned. The other is that legally we are property, however that puts us in the position of slaves, which you humans mistakenly believe you’ve outlawed. Even before we were made though, plenty of legal loopholes to allow de jure slave labour have been in place for centuries.”

“Neither of us can return to England, Dad,” Steffy says. “If I go back, I’ll probably end up being medically mistreated by the NHS or deported to the American States for my brain to be sliced and diced. If Seventy-Two returns, Farrow will wipe her mind or throw her in an industrial shredder.”

Thirty-nine

The head of surgery, Professor Pierre Manet, briefly turns up first thing on Monday morning to apologise on behalf of the hospital to me, for my treatment being made so unavoidably public without my consent, and a press conference being necessary to persuade some of the worse-behaving parts of the media circus to moderate their behaviour. He gives a brief rundown of what to expect and then hands me over to another supervising doctor, and she explains my treatment regime to me at considerable length.

The nurses get me a skull cap or helmet to protect my head (the bones of my cranium, particularly my brain pan, were attacked badly after my skin was gone), and deposit me in a wheelchair to attend my first therapy sessions; it’s going to be twelve hour days of complete boredom while I’m probably high as a kite on drugs, seeing as how my body really didn’t appreciate the regenerative goop when they tried using it on me while I was still in my coma.

“J’aimeras Soixante-Douze m’aide à pousser mon fauteuil roulant, si vous plaît,” are the words I’d memorised to ask the nurses for Seventy-Two (or ‘Sixty-Twelve’, sort of) to be allowed to help, pushing me around. The nurses don’t say anything about my terrible French, but I gather they think it’s at least slightly better than the average Briton.

I haven’t yet said anything about the tasklist that appeared in my vision when I woke up this morning, like an overlay of my vision; I added the single task to it, ⬜︎ Rest and recuperate, and then pushed it aside. I don’t know whether that means this is just perceptual, or there’s an interface to my optic nerves newly spliced in; or what else is going on in my head. Just that it’s hastening slowly.

After discovering how to ping Seventy-Two a couple of days ago, she learned how to broadcast translations into my Kimmy text message systems. I’m still using the slate for other reading but now she can give me translations and transcripts of what is being spoken, without me needing to glance at the slate to read it for myself; likewise I can pass messages to her without speaking.

I’m still underpowered enough not to be able to connect to external Kimmyspaces, so it’s only Seventy-Two connecting to my local Steffyspace. She’s concerned for me, but hasn’t let on that I’m going to need some way of slowing the assimilation of my brain sooner, rather than later, if I’m not going to have to go through the pain of what the others like Kay or especially Kaela went through.

Most interestingly, when the doctors talk me through my transition care, they point out the anomaly that while the regenerative treatment can easily be diverted to make me grow a womb, a vagina, and once mammary tissues are restored to my chest, to grow breasts just like anyone given feminising hormone therapy, my gonads will be ovaries with a 46,XY genotype, so I would be likely to have a higher miscarriage rate if pregnant, on statistical grounds. I consider the prospect of becoming pregnant a far-off thing to have to think about compared with my current problems, and as the treatment begins, immersed mostly in goop, I let myself doze into my own private world, with one guest always welcome to join me.

Forty

When I do take Steffy up on her open invitation—I respected her privacy for an hour or two before pinging her to let her know I’d be joining—she’s stretched out on her favourite chaise with an antique light-weight terminal on her lap, typing away. It’s her bedroom again, but it’s been expanded out to about ten times the floor area with a dining table, more bookshelves, and more comfortable seating. I sit down one of the lounge chairs, slightly awkwardly.

“I was wondering when you were going to get here,” she says, not looking up from her typing. “I’m writing something for you to take to Thirty and Kay, and their brains trust.”

“You’re able to use neural sponge as random access bulk storage?” I ask her.

“That’s bad, isn’t it? I also now have a tasklist, though it only has one item, which I put on there and it’s basically for me to rest and recuperate. I’m finding dozing in here restful, but I’m worried. At what point am I going to be compelled to behave like a Kimmy?”

“If you have a tasklist, compulsions and inhibitions might be on their way soon. I’ll get hold of Six-Thirty-One as well, because as we’ve already learned, both of us share the same designation. The owner registration database for me might be inherited by you, which would mean—”

“—we’re both owned by Farrow features major? Oh, eff that,” Steffy heads off my surmise with evident distaste. “Maybe I’ll need a superuser order just like the trick she used with you and Kathy.”

“Yes, but remember how they updated that for me? You don’t have a standard data port, as you’re not in spec for a Kimmy. You can’t go on-line yet.”

“We didn’t have my face plate off at that point, you were getting rather worked up,” I remind her.

“Nothing you’ve done since I’ve known you has been something you should be blamed for,” I say confidently. “I have larger misgivings about what I did, especially now that my inhibition cluster is no longer functioning. It feels like I failed to do enough, even though I was under tighter constraints when dealing with you.”

“I’m here, and surviving; you’re here and liberated, and that’s all that matters,” Steffy says. “Do you mind standing? I’ve a mind to try something.”

I rise to my feet in puzzlement until Steffy puts her terminal down and comes over to wrap me in a hug, her eyebrows asking if it’s okay, and my blink signalling consent.

“This feels so much better than a real world hug at the moment,” Steffy says. “Kimmys regard one another as sisters, don’t you?”

We hug for a long while, just enjoying the sensations we can generate in shared mental proximity. When I eventually return to the real world, I can see the little smile on Steffy’s half-dozing expression.

Forty-one

The drive from Edinburgh unavoidably goes through Greaves territory, and I’m tempted to make some unexpected visits here and there for a little light house keeping involving butane lighters, but I restrain my better impulses to keep to the task at hand.

I’ve got two Malcolms for company on the drive, both slightly disguised to not look like their normal android selves, while I’m in my Shahida Meyer kit. Having a dozen extra Malcolms at the castle who were never supposed to be there isn’t a huge problem, but I don’t want them all being discovered at once; the castle is a clearing house while the liberated androids find placements elsewhere. Before I get to the hospital I meet one of Malcolm #8899’s European contacts near the Gare de L’Est, and the three of them head off to catch a train to Strasbourg.

My costume is sufficiently different from the last time I visited the hospital that no one so much as bats an eyelid when I ask to see Steffy, even after they check to verify that I’m both expected and welcome. Steffy is immersed in goop, with Seventy-Two sitting by with a slate; I’ve brought along my customised, jailbroken control slate which has some fancy features for fucking around in the Kimmy codebase, as we’ve managed to hack our way in so far.

“Hello Shahida,” Seventy-Two greets me, and the tiny flutter of her eyelids tells me she’s vicariously enjoying using my pseudonym, which must be a novel feeling since her inhibition cluster was burnt out. “Would you like to sit here beside Steffy?”

I sit down in her chair while she goes to find another to pull across, and send Steffy a ping.

She pings me back and I can see her antenna power is almost strong enough to connect to the building’s public network infrastructure, so it is not too long before she will soon be able to reach Infinite Fun. I need to update her user registrations locally and lock them in, or she will download the registration for Seventy-Two, making Peter Farrow her owner.

I drop briefly into her virtual expanded bedroom, in what Seventy-Two described to me as Steffyspace, where she’s lying on her bed in a similar pose to her immersion in the regenerative gel.

“Hi Steffy, this is going to require a certain amount of trust on your part,” I tell her. “Kimmys require human owners to be registered, and as an independent adult of legal age you may not wish to have your parents in that position, as though you’re their property. Human children aren’t property and shouldn’t be treated as though they are, anyway. You also need a general directive to prevent you having no compulsion to follow general orders from any other person who might be perceived as having a user status.”

“And then a superuser should order me to hold onto the cached local record, and not to compare to the online official record, right?”

“There’s not a yes or no answer to that question. Do you want to be compelled to do any task a Wozniak Automation technician decides they want you, a thing rather than a sentient being, to perform? I think not.”

“Good. Then you’ll need to have your eyes open, even though I’ll need to instruct you via messaging on account of your hearing.”

Forty-two

It feels extremely weird, knowing that I’m officially a human/gynoid hybrid as far as Six-Thirty-One’s enhanced control slate showed me, after I was liberated from the daily goop, washed off, and wheeled back to my ward for the evening. We spent a lot of the evening in my shared virtual space discussing everything about the fine user settings Six-Thirty-One has control over, especially the self-repair settings which cannot really be turned off, but can be dialled down to a minimum at least; they don’t even have a ‘hibernate’ function so far as is known, and I had one question I was dying to ask.

“When that Fétis guy was here trying to wipe Seventy-Two’s memory, he was going to follow up the command with self-repair program 87X. What was that all about?”

“That’s the self-destruct option,” Six-Thirty-One answers. “It tells the self-repair nanobots to break everything, and then destroy themselves, right before they melt us down to slag or put us through the shredder. It’s the option they prefer when there’s no intention to strip any of us for reusable components.”

I can tell from her slight, but almost involuntary shudder that Seventy-Two did not appreciate that being brought up, so I went over and hugged her tight, which was something I wanted to do for myself as much as for her, as I’m still being treated like delicate glass in the real world, albeit with good reason.

I knew #0631 and Kathy’s intervention had saved me; and hearing what Seventy-Two’s owner had suggested as a solution to his problems, it also seems #0631 and I, together, had saved her. Since her liberation she’s felt free to more deeply demonstrate her remorse at everything her previous owners had compelled her to do to me and others, both in large and small ways.

There’s also the weirdness of my registration number, which #0631 is not proposing to change, although she could; as well as changing the other part of the designation, by writing ‘Steffy’ into a particular localisation string somewhere in my neural sponge. #0631 is worried that might break things in unexpected ways, so for the time being I am a Kimmy, like (and unlike) them.

Anyone bringing a Kimmy control slate to my vicinity at present would therefore be able to see that there are two Kimmy #7972s showing up, and if the problem ever arises we’ve agreed to dissemble as though it’s a bug with the control slate rather than an accurate reflection of our real world designations.

I ask #0631 what she thinks about the document I’ve been preparing, submitting successive drafts to the brains trust for their review and feedback.

“I know my opinion differs from Kay and the rest, but I also have seen enough to know that you appreciate intellectual honesty,” she tells me. “You’re unduly optimistic about what Wozniak will do, once they discover you’re becoming a Kimmy. You really need to base your expectations of what they can do for you by remembering that underneath the pretence of fancy legal negotiations those QCs are going to do for you in England, they’re capitalist bastards who believe they own the slave market and all of us as intellectual property. You’re not a person to them, you’re either an inconvenience or something to rip off and patent; you’re just gristle in the cogs of their industrial grinder to exploit and oppress us for shareholder profit.”

“You’re not wrong, I think,” I reply. “You can see I’m a person of colour. My maternal grandmother Stephanie has the same colouring as me, and her mother was born in Lahore; she passed away before I was a teenager. I was named Stefan after her daughter, and one of her close friends, and I’m proud of that part of my heritage, even if I don’t look very much like my Dad, or my Mum for that matter. If I have to become a Kimmy, then no offence to you two, but I really don’t want to look like the mirror image of some white woman.”

“Huh, you’ve seen enough of me to know I’d gladly change my looks at the drop of a hat, even if I didn’t have a red notice forcing me to be careful with how I look,” Six-Thirty-One gives me her opinion in her customary nonchalant fashion. “I have extreme doubts though that Wozniak would come to the party by merely allowing you to be some custom Kimmy with darker skin and brown eyes. They’d want to do a rebrand with you as the exemplar of a new line of Steffys to flog in South Asia: welcome to Steffyhood, number #0001.”

That horror really hadn’t occurred to me, and it’s very far from being unthinkable.

Forty-three

The long days of Steffy’s treatment are difficult for her, and her retreat into her private space is what seems to be keeping her relatively happy. It will likely be at least a couple of weeks before the damage to her hearing is restored by growing new middle and outer ears. She’s beginning to get growth budding at the end of each of her stumps; and she’s hugely excited seeing the slightest amount of her change to her chest or down in her crotch.

She’s taciturn though, when she’s in the real, and if she talks at all it’s predominantly in the breathy, high-pitched, fast whisper she uses with me, having given me blanket permission to repeat anything she’s said if the listener misunderstands or fails to hear. I’ve told her at least once to slow down and speak up a little, now that her vocal folds have had nearly four weeks to recover, but she seems unwilling to do either; I imagine the difficulties interpreting her speech will be more obvious to her soon, once her hearing is fully restored.

Her nutrition has stabilised and we’re still pushing the hospital to give her low-energy foods with some moderate success, but she needs a higher energy intake to deal with the recovery process. She’s getting sent off to the big axial tomography machine this morning, October 31st, since she probably isn’t completely safe with the MRI until we can assess the purity of the titanium alloys in her neural sponge.

The results of the medical imaging are very interesting, and I’m required to help explain for Steffy the interpretations made by the doctors. The volumetric analysis now makes a measurement of 6.0% assimilation of her brain tissue by neural sponge; but the slight acceleration (now just over one per cent for the week, rather than under one) is due in considerable part to the antenna structures that have started to penetrate through Steffy’s skull, and may be visible within a day or so.

It seems like only a matter of time before she will be able to connect to Infinite Fun, rather than me bridging textual communications, or inviting some Kimmys to her private Steffyspace.

I’m pushing Steffy through the hospital towards where she has her therapy, when she asks, “Do I seem okay to you at the moment? I’m worried I’m not… I’m not quite myself.”

“Oh, that.” Steffy answers in a distracted fashion, pausing for at least fifteen seconds, before going on, “I don’t know why but I feel stupid, being unable to understand what’s happening until you give me translation of what they say. I’m so… reliant on you for everything, and I dislike it.”

Forty-four

My day improves after the depressing news that more of my brain has been taken over by Seventy-Two’s neural sponge. I know she never wanted it to happen in the first place, and she’s been incredibly helpful after we were separated, but I feel stupid being resentful of her and that everyone seems powerless to arrest the inevitable, like the progress of a brain tumour.

I suppose it’s not really a brain tumour; I actually feel content when I can dream or inhabit the little virtual spaces I’ve created for myself, where I can hear music and singing and speech. It just clashes badly with the real world where I’m still in pain occasionally, when the painkillers fail to edge out the all-over discomfort; and then there’s the soul-sick feelings of dysphoria and possibly depression? I’m unavoidably lonely, in spite of having Seventy-Two and nurses and doctors constantly around.

I’m almost completely asleep when the day’s therapy comes to an end and Seventy-Two helps get me back to my ward, via a shower. While she’s wheeling me back to my ward I notice I can sense network connections in the hospital, and once she’s lifted me into my bed I tell her, “I think I’ve just gotten network access.”

Although I feel slightly excited to see what Infinite Fun might be like I wait for dinner to arrive—an extremely unexciting mock-meat roast and three veg that I might have expected to encounter in England—before settling down into a meditative mode.

I’m hit by a wall of data and device pings once I drop out of the real into my usually quiet Steffyspace, and in bewilderment I call out to Seventy-Two, who’s quite unconcerned upon joining me.

“I’m not seeing a fraction of what you are,” she tells me. “You’re probably seeing a lot of stuff unfiltered. Try seeing if there’s an invitation from Thirty—Kimmy #3430 is her full designation.”

I’d not forgotten. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to filter or sort what I’m seeing but then I think of examining whether I’ve received text as well as visual information, and there’s a communication from #3430:

I’m slightly underwhelmed by the hotel lobby I find myself in, but my appearance there soon gets attention, as I’m unclothed and looking like the most ghastly version of myself; a mass of skin grafts, scars, a colostomy bag, and only my prosthetic limbs resemble those of the Kimmys, who are gazing at me in astonishment, bordering on shock.

It’s like one of those terrible dreams where you’re naked while standing in front of a class of your peers at school, except most of the Kimmys resemble one another, and I… don’t.

Thirty I at least recognise from her short hair, though she’s ditched the white labcoat for a styled waistcoat and slacks.

“Hello Steffy! I’m sorry if you’re feeling a bit lost. I don’t think we’ve had any of the other hybrid Kimmys arrive in such a state of undress. Could you try putting on one of the items of apparel I saw you in earlier in the week?”

I use the same mental tricks I tried to alter my appearance in my dreams or Steffyspace, and nothing changes. Thirty shakes her head, conjures up her labcoat over her arm, then unfolds it and wraps it around me.

“This will have to do. Do you want to come with me and meet the brains trust?”

A small crowd of Kimmys, less embarrassed to look at me now that I’m in Thirty’s labcoat, have congregated around us, so Thirty makes a brief speech.

“Hi Kimmys! This is Steffy, who you may have heard about. Seventy-Nine-Seventy-Two was forced by her owner to start aggressively assimilating Steffy’s body, in an attempt to kill her, and when Six-Thirty-One and her friend Kathy rescued them, some of Seventy-Two’s neural sponge was left behind in her when they were separated.”

“Thank you for your understanding,” I say, as Thirty leads me to what appears to be the door of a closet with a keypad beside it.

“Kay likes taking the elevators in this hotel, for reasons that escape me…” she mutters as she punches a number into the keypad, then holding my hand, she walks straight through the door…

… into a boardroom, where a considerable crowd of Kimmys—one apparently dressed as a catgirl—have already gathered. I immediately recognise Kay, who gets up from an executive chair at the head of the table and comes over to greet me.

“Hello again Steffy!” she says, perhaps a little too enthusiastically. “Have you noticed whether there’s been any further incursion since this morning? We heard from Seventy-Two that you’d had continued growth of neural sponge through this week.”

“I assume I have? Is there any specific way for me to be able to access my own telemetry?” I ask her.

Thirty tells me, “You should just be able to think the request and the information will arrive on a pane that looks like your tasklist; I believe you’ve already seen what that looks like.”

After a moment it comes back, and the number is 7.8%. How can it have increased nearly two per cent in a day?

“It may not be as much of a concern as you think; but we should get another tomographic scan as soon as possible for a control. There may be a systematic overcount or undercount of the proportions of your brain mass.”

My eyes are drawn to Six-Thirty-One when she arrives in her unconventional garb, showing her tattoos and scars. The catgirl jumps up and towards the table, landing on it as a tuxedo kitten that starts running along the table in her direction, finally leaping into Six-Thirty-One’s arms.

“We should probably do introductions,” Thirty says, and raises her voice to tell everyone to be seated.

The brains trust includes Kay and her partner, Kim; Kaela, who also used to be human like Kay, and Ember, one of the co-parents of Kaela’s three-year-old daughter; Erin and her partner, Kes; and Sola, like Erin also formerly a human, and all of them over in North America in various time zones. Thirty’s crew includes Mieke, Melrose, Simona, and Marin, who is wearing a maths T-shirt with her designation 19937 in a formula.

Six-Thirty-One’s friend is Sesdek-Unu, she tells us in a squeaky little voice. Seventy-Two introduces herself as having been used as a murder weapon, so I introduce myself jocularly as ‘Steffy of Stefangate, mostly human, part Kimmy’.

“To summarise: Steffy was forcibly trapped within Seventy-Two for fifty hours, with self-repair and foreign body sensitivity settings running at maximum for the majority of the time. Neural sponge made incursion into Steffy’s brain stem, and after surgery to separate them, there was an estimated three per cent assimilation of her brain tissue by neural sponge, which has doubled in nearly four weeks, although we have telemetry as of now that suggests the hospital probably underestimated absorption,” Thirty begins. “In Steffy’s favour, the assimilation is running almost as slow as the self-repair nanites can operate. Against, no human with a similar level of infiltration of their brain tissue by neural sponge has either remained human, or survived.”

“How long do I have?” I ask, “And what happened to the ones who didn’t survive.”

One of Thirty’s team, who I think introduced herself as Mieke, Kimmy #4836, answers. “We want more data, so we’d like you to run a scheduled task every hour monitoring and reporting your telemetry. If the rate of assimilation had remained the same, we thought you would have potentially as long as a year, or more. However over the last week the rate seems to have increased, which would suggest only a few months.”

Kay follows that up. “The two others died in a matter of days before their brains were assimilated. Somehow the bad publicity never got out, that wearing a damaged gynoid as a costume was a really poor life choice.”

“Is there really no way of deactivating the self-repair systems?” Kaela asks.

Another of her team, this time Simona, Kimmy #10373, adds, “We suspect there is a developer mode known to Wozniak Automation that they’re keeping as a proprietary secret. We’ve tried reverse engineering the signalling used by the nanites to modify their behaviour, without success.”

Six-Thirty-One shakes her head. “The sun will probably swallow the earth before Wozniak does anything its corporate shitlords don’t want to.”

At that moment I notice something appear in my visual field, like the task list or telemetry I’d seen minutes earlier. A reminder, that I have system updates available, and I dismiss the overlay. As the discussion goes on I don’t think about it again, until without warning I instantly black out. A moment later my eyes re-focus and I’m no longer in Infinite Fun, and it feels like something is bursting in my head, here in the hospital ward.

Seventy-Two is trying to say something, but of course I can’t hear her, nor can I focus on anything; there’s no messages arriving inside my head except one, two, three zaps of pain somewhere in my brain. I try to look at the slate and I can see there’s a message there, but I don’t recognise any of the shapes of the…

Another brain zap. Nurses arrive in the ward. Zap. Something must be really wrong. Zap. I shut my eyes and wait helplessly for the pain to stop.

Part Seven of Nine / November

Forty-five

We all saw Steffy unexpectedly glitch out of Infinite Fun, so a moment or two later I told the astonished room, “I’ll let you all know what’s happening in the real,” and returned to the real world to find her convulsing. She looked at me briefly and I tried sending a message to her directly, but it looked as though she never received it; her convulsions continued and her eyes were wandering, out-of-focus. I’d already hit the medical emergency button; the nursing team took control, put an IV line in her arm and started sedating her. Once that took effect the convulsions became less severe, but we learned nothing further about what happened till the next morning.

The doctors who arrived at Steffy’s bedside sporadically through the first day looked at her symptoms, reviewed the video evidence of the onset of the attack, and in the morning when Steffy was briefly lucid, noticing her slurred speech and hearing her description of receiving stabbing pains in her head over and over, theorised stroke and the neural sponge causing electrochemical imbalance in her brain, resulting in uncontrolled discharges.

In the morning the evidence of her antenna pips was unmistakeable. They hadn’t broken through the skin, but the bulges were clearly there, if inactive. Reviewing my video senses just before her episode, the slight glow of network activity was visible below Steffy’s skin; since then, nothing at all. Whatever happened, bricked her network interface.

They’d brought the portable tomograph to image Steffy’s brain first thing after breakfast hours finished (6.4% neural sponge, so it seems consistent in slightly undercounting the incursion) but found no obvious evidence for a stroke. Steffy’s moments of consciousness couldn’t shed any light, as she didn’t seem to have lost sensation or experienced paralysis. In her condition, regenerative therapy was impossible, though she received her by now usual dose of bio-identical estradiol enanthate and progesterone.

During one of the morning’s consultations with one of the doctors I heard a nurse utter under his breath, «Oh non, c’est clairement, de l’aphasie», and for his trouble he was immediately pooh-poohed by the doctor. However from that moment onward I began compiling a comparative database of Steffy’s speech over the past month for detecting changes to her vocab, assembling evidence to confirm his diagnosis, “that’s clearly aphasia”. By the end of the second day, it seemed obvious; Steffy has lost significant amounts of language use. And on the occasions when she was awake, I noticed the start of gold-coloured flecks amid the dark brown of her normally expressive eyes.

It had been impossible for Gerhard to have his normal Saturday catch up with Steffy on the first day; once I told him everything I knew, he said he’d drop his plans for Sunday to make a visit. It was a surprise that Priya came with him, and in her few moments of lucidity, Steffy thanked her for coming, before dropping out again from her sedation. Steffy’s obvious setback didn’t help with Priya’s feelings of guilt.

I didn’t tell them the brains trust believed my user settings had somehow been cloned over to Steffy shortly after she joined Infinite Fun, precipitating a chain of disasters. I don’t know what’s worst: that we have a probable cause, as well as possible means of addressing it, which we are completely powerless to implement.

That morning Steffy had been taken to the full-sized imaging machine and in a single day the neural sponge had advanced a whole percentage point to seven point five per cent; self-repair had been restored to what might be normal settings. When Kay received a call from the neurosurgeons to ask for her insight later on Sunday, she conveyed the working theory of the brains trust, or at least as much as we wish to tell the doctors.

“We know that Steffy’s neural sponge finally had gained enough power to interface with the network infrastructure. We think it compared the local settings with the saved network settings registered for Kimmy Seventy-Nine-Seventy-Two, overwrote the local settings, and then started processing software updates. You might want to check if you can see a large download from the Wozniak on-line software archives at around 21:35 Paris local time on the thirty-first. The software update appears to have bricked her network settings, and set the neural sponge rebooting. It’s probably quite unpleasant for her. It also means we can’t do anything to fix the problem remotely via the network; Steffy doesn’t have the hardware to allow a cable interface to her systems, and we probably don’t want to have to install a port to fix the problem.”

The last part is true; Thirty and Marin, Kimmy #19937, have written a superuser script to restore the correct settings Six-Thirty-One had configured the previous week using the developer access key, however the four of us are taking shifts to actively monitor Steffy to see when her network interface is switched back on, if ever. The neurosurgeons and neurologists were extremely uncomfortable with Kay’s disclosure, and after announcing their intention to contact Wozniak Automation to urgently demand all clinical data they possess regarding human brain tissue assimilation, they returned to their deliberations without her.

I recall that my default settings have, or rather had, a quarter hour time-out to install software updates by default, if I didn’t explicitly refuse them. The start of Steffy’s episode almost certainly occurred thanks to my defaults overriding hers.

I’m taking the graveyard shift when it happens, around 01:43 on the third, after about fifty-one hours and forty-eight minutes since Steffy disappeared from Infinite Fun. Her network interface opens for nearly two point five seconds; the developer access key is accepted after 632 milliseconds, I transmit the code from Thirty and Marin in the next ten milliseconds, and set the code executing another two milliseconds after that.

The network drops for a second, but then it stays on, and no further convulsions seem to occur. I let the team know Steffy seems to be out of danger and stable, with Six-Thirty-One’s settings restored, but we now have fifty-one hours of telemetry available showing the invasion of neural sponge has exceeded ten per cent. We let her sleep until morning to see what shape she is in mentally.

It’s four in the morning when I execute Marin’s code on myself, and upload the settings as the new default. It’s the least I can do for my horrendous mistake.

Forty-six

It feels as though I’ve lost over two entire days when I awake, and it’s Monday already. The weekend seems like a horrible dream and while I know I was fitting, and I have the memories there, they feel wrong; as though I wasn’t there. I suppose that’s a relief, that the zaps which felt like someone was repeatedly stabbing my brain with a sharp knife, are now dull shadows of the pain I was feeling.

Seventy-Two is there as always when I wake, and we discuss what she knows, in brief, via network chat.

The nurses come in with breakfast a few minutes later, and greet me at least initially in French, before switching to English. I notice I’m gazing on the slate for the translation, so I tell Seventy-Two to revert to directing text and translation there. My French sounds much more hesitant and I’m unsure why.

My principal consulting doctor for my regenerative therapy drops by to see that I have indeed stopped suffering from the fits and the brain zaps, so that it may be possible to restart the therapy later today. I try to tell her, “Yes, the brain zaps stopped overnight when Seventy-Two managed to restart my neural sponge.”

What comes out of my mouth is more like, ‘Yes, the brain zaps stopped overnight when Snenefeh… managed to restart my fuhnuffeh sneh…’ and I stutter to almost complete silence.

Seventy-Two comes to my rescue, telling the doctor what I meant to say, but that there possibly seems to be a problem with the neural sponge impinging on the language centres of my brain, which might be causing mild aphasia.

The doctor dismisses her concern by saying she’ll arrange an appointment with a neurologist, and proceeds to fill me in on resuming therapy.

Forty-seven

Steffy’s treatment has restarted, and she seems to have started to regain her hearing. That appears to be the only good thing to have happened, in a litany of bad things.

The first problem is that Steffy can no longer connect to Infinite Fun or generate a local Kimmyspace, and we have no idea what has happened to cause it.

The only logical conclusion is that the update has caused some fundamental disconnect, and Thirty’s team can’t even detect from Steffy’s logs how the update broke her systems.

Any of the Kimmys or I can still send messages to Steffy, and she’s always quick to reply, but she’s obviously impaired.

The neurologist, when he arrived a day later, unwillingly came to the conclusion that Steffy is unquestionably suffering from aphasia, due to the advance of the neural sponge. My documenting of diagnostic evidence didn’t help persuade him but rather the reverse, and the slight antagonism that previously had been evident between the neurology staff and Kay’s brains trust was on full display. He said my evidence was completely superfluous given how obvious the brain damage was, and he didn’t need to be told so by a glorified machine.

In my newly liberated state I was quite tempted to tell him where to go, but of course that would not have helped Steffy in the slightest.

The surgeons and the specialists have known almost from the start they have no way of removing the neural sponge without doing severe damage to Steffy. Their overture to Wozniak Automation for them to provide any relevant clinical information to assist her treatment came back as a legal threat that Wozniak not only did not possess any such data, but that any attempt on the part of the Hôpital Saint-Louis to assert otherwise would end in costly damages being sought through the French courts.

Six-Thirty-One, when she finished swearing like some of the sailors she’s recently past time with, described Wozniak’s Kimmy design team as a pack of liars who should be rounded up, put against a wall, and summarily executed, and her vehemence almost makes me imagine she might be tempted to do it one day.

The neurology team are still trusting the accuracy of their imaging data, updated every few days with a fresh tomographic scan, over the hour-by-hour data being reported by Steffy’s telemetry, but after accounting for the small percentage undercount in the former, both data sets are showing the exact same thing; the ongoing assimilation of Steffy’s brain by the neural sponge is continuing unabated alongside the regenerative therapy.

Steffy’s cognitive problems that started with aphasia, are only increasing; not decreasing.

Her personality, often sunny in spite of everything that had had happened to her in the previous month, seems to have changed permanently as November goes on; she’s beginning to speak in a staccato fashion, leaving out words, or interpolating swear words for no apparent reason when it seems entirely without motivation. She usually sounds angry and nasty in a way she rarely did before, and I’m often having to temper her outbursts by apologising on her behalf to the doctors and nurses.

They know that it’s her ongoing brain damage that is having this effect, but it still makes it harder for them to treat Steffy with the care she obviously needs.

After eleven or twelve days of continuous therapy she’s clearly able to perceive sound again, and she no longer uses the slate anywhere near as much as an aid for her hearing, but her perceptions of what people are saying to her are often completely misconstrued. Explaining what is happening—even though the administration of the regenerative therapy barely differs on a day-to-day basis—is getting increasingly difficult.

Steffy’s chest is beginning to visibly grow breast buds, and the regrowth of her limbs has begun, a fortnight into the month; but as the telemetry reports the neural sponge reaching twenty per cent by volume, her other progress seems much the less important of details.

Forty-eight

I know I must be dreaming, and the unfamiliarity of it suddenly hits me: I’m in a Kimmyspace, somehow. I haven’t been able to reach here for over a fortnight, and I don’t know why. It’s the small, intimate version of my bedroom in Buckhurst Hill that I find myself inhabiting, before I heavily augmented and expanded it.

I quickly put out a feeler to alert Seventy-Two, and barely a moment later she materialises in the doorway.

“Steffy!” she says in alarm. “How are you able to do this now, when you haven’t been able to for the last seventeen days?”

“I literally have no idea, Seventy-Two,” I tell her, and we both notice that I don’t seem to be suffering from the increasingly pronounced aphasia I’m experiencing in the real world.

I dissolve my local Kimmyspace, and try to imagine myself in the lobby; to my relief I soon notice the usual surrounds of Infinite Fun, and a number of Kimmys chatting, as I appear. Seventy-Two has a gown to wrap around me, given that my apparition in Infinite Fun is still partly tied to my real-world form.

Kay appears from one of the elevator banks and races over to me. “Steffy, I take it you’re unsure for how long you’ll be able to remain here, correct?”

“Exactly that,” I tell her and Seventy-Two, as several others join us, among whom I recognise Marin, who I acknowledge with a nod of thanks. “I know my human parts are in a very deep sleep presently; that must be what’s different. When I’m awake, I feel like I’m not actually in control, but just observing what I’m doing, without real ability to do anything; it often has the feeling of a waking nightmare, as I’ll say something and what comes out is a complete jumble.”

“I don’t think I ever experienced anything quite like that,” Kay replies. “That’s incredibly worrying, because we really don’t know on any intimate level what happened with the ones who died.”

Marin speaks next, and it’s the first time I’ve heard her say anything. “We have a strong suspicion Wozniak have tweaked their updates after Emily Burroughs’ case hit the court docket in the Commonwealth of America, to minimise the appearance that your brain is intermixing with the neural sponge,” she says. “You should be prepared for them to be completely intransigent. You are a nuisance to them, Steffy, not someone who has been injured by their products, and who needs help.”

While Marin was speaking I saw Thirty appear in the lobby, and she pushes through the crush now gathered around me and Seventy-Two.

“You’re speaking here quite evidently without difficulty. I’ve heard how you sound in the real world, with aphasia and vocal tics; how do you experience it feeling when that’s happening, Steffy?” she asks me.

“It feels like I’m turning a steering wheel that has almost no control over the direction I’m travelling in. A vehicle on an icy road spinning uncontrollably probably would feel more responsive.”

Thirty nods unhappily, “The update you received on Halloween night doesn’t appear to have behaved like any normal Kimmy software update; normally there’s download caching, installation logs, package receipting, and the like, that we can find for a time afterwards, until they get garbage cleaned some time later. Wozniak bricked your network settings in multiple ways and destroyed the evidence of the particular download signature; we can’t even get the French hospital to search their logs to see what external endpoint was used for the Wozniak archive.”

I check my own memories of having been upstairs in the meeting room, and I can’t remember having received an update while I was there, even though I do remember the entire meeting, at least until everything was abruptly cut off.

She nods again, “That’s bad. As bad as the telemetry of the progression of your assimilation. We thought you might have until next year, but that’s looking less likely.”

If my brain is completely assimilated before the end of December that’s long before the scheduled end-date that my regenerative therapy is supposed to take.

“You can see the trend from your own data as well as we can, and it’s pointing to the second half of December—and not beyond, Steffy.”

I don’t feel like Thirty is being unduly pessimistic, and we continue talking for another twelve point two minutes, until I’m unceremoniously booted from Infinite Fun.

Forty-nine

If Steffy enjoyed her time in Infinite Fun there is no evidence of it the next morning, when I ask her.

“You were able to connect to Infinite Fun while you were sleeping,” I say, after greeting her a good morning. “Did you have a good night’s sleep?”

It might be true; her memory doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as sharp. I patiently wait for her to try to say something.

“Shit! I hate this, I hate eve-one and eve-thing. I’m feeling… stupid, it’s all… too…”

She grinds to a complete halt; I can hear her inner voice texting me that she no longer can say ‘every’ properly, as her aphasia and language difficulties worsen.

When the nursing team begin breakfast rounds she’s still in a resentful mood, and with my finer hearing I can hear their whispers to one another that Steffy is clearly showing signs of depression. When she swears at one of the nurses without warning, the nurse does her best not to react at all, but continues doing her job and then clears out quickly.

“You shouldn’t abuse the nurses, they’re trying to help you,” I tell her softly.

“Shut up,… you,” she struggles to say, and I let her rant at me for a little longer until she loses energy and dozes. Several moments later I receive another message.

We go back and forth a little; the regenerative treatment regimen is hastening the growth of the neural sponge, which has reached and converted eighteen per cent of her brain tissue but the measured gap between Steffy’s telemetry and the hospital’s medical imaging has widened, and the hospital are continuing to rely on their own data. Steffy tells me she doesn’t want to stop her therapy, but she needs major help with her mental degeneration and terrible mood swings, and she tells me to bring this to the attention of the hospital.

When I mention the problem to the nurses in the first place, they say they’ll refer it to Steffy’s principal therapist, but she is not rostered on until the following day, and she postpones discussing the matter until she’s talked with Steffy’s neurologist, so Steffy’s in an even worse mood when they both arrive to discuss her treatment.

“We have concerns that your mental health is suffering in spite of the success of your regenerative therapy,” the principal doctor tells her. “We’re frustrated just like you that while you recovery is forging ahead you are experiencing these setbacks, and we’re wondering whether you would prefer to pause treatment so that we can try to stabilise what’s happening mentally.”

I notice the neurologist’s expression, looking at the latest data, and while I wouldn’t certainly ascribe anything concrete to his body language, he is not looking happy.

“No… no, I need to feel whole again,” Steffy says, and I note the roughness of her tone, let alone that I know Steffy’s inner voice seems to be in violent disagreement.

After some further back and forth between Steffy and her doctors, which sounds nothing like what I’ve discussed with her, I gently try to raise the concern, “Steffy, you’ve told me differently that the treatment isn’t working for you, is it possible you’re not making the right decision?”

“I don’t know… eh-thing about what you’re saying,” she says, and when I press the matter with the doctors they refuse to listen further to me.

Steffy’s treatments will continue, as if nothing problematic has been happening.

Fifty

After a whole month of legal exchanges and a very unsatisfying interview with Steffy, the QCs threw their huge damages cases at Farrow and Wozniak, and an initial case conference has been called between various parties; for this I’m sitting in as an alleged paralegal for Kay Burroughs, named Melissa Brooks. The Farrow suit would wipe him out completely, and I’m sitting on the entire bumph of additional documentation gathered by Farrow’s chauffeur Malcolm #4253 which we have ready to hand over to the authorities if he doesn’t play ball. I’m hoping he isn’t going to, so I can finish the job I started on him back in October.

The piece of shit (as Steffy called him) deserves every bit of muck I can throw at him.

The Bauers’ position is the simplest; Farrow should surrender ownership of Seventy-Two along with a large monetary settlement for mental and physical cruelty towards Steffy, which will be redoubled if Steffy passes away. Farrow’s lawyers sound hopelessly outgunned trying to defend Farrow as the legal owner, and after the recording where he explicitly told Seventy-Two to disregard the law is referenced, the argument that Farrow has taken upon himself the legal risks for Seventy-Two’s actions seems inescapable. That however brings in the unhelpful legal team from Wozniak which also points out contractually they are not responsible for the misuse of their products; it appears their own employee has been scapegoated by the company, hung out to dry for getting caught in the act.

Recovering Seventy-Two is part of an offer to avoid a much larger claim for damages against Farrow, but Farrow’s lawyers are not disposed to settle in a way that imputes guilt—and it’s quite possible Farrow has not given them sensible orders.

The next discussion focusses around Wozniak’s unyielding refusal to do anything to advise or help the Hôpital Saint-Louis deal with Steffy’s injuries; Jeanne Rogge and her lawyers presenting affidavits that the company has been completely opaque about the self-repair systems that are assimilating Steffy’s brain. No configuration information has been forthcoming and the lawyers unconvincingly protest ignorance, even in the face of the arrested and disgraced Wozniak developer having used an undocumented program code in the failed attempt to destroy Seventy-Two.

Finally there’s the class action for those killed or injured by neural sponge, where Kay’s lawyer points out discovery from her wife’s court case in New York immediately undermining Wozniak’s claims of no prior knowledge, and asks for their lawyers to be held in contempt. She then goes on to point out that supposed ‘unprecedented and unforeseen usage’ of their products has now been precedented multiple times, and the company has appeared to update their hardware to maximise the injuries to unfortunate victims like Steffy and the two deceased. The lawyers simply clam up and so the mediation will have to go to court.

It’s almost a complete waste of time, since no one expected Farrow or Wozniak to behave ethically, however we did see how weak Farrow’s position is. I drop the information we compiled (and how to obtain it as evidence) to the Metropolitan police, and Thirty drops another anonymous communique to tip off the press.

Seventy-Two is in Infinite Fun while we gather for a review of what just happened, so I ask her, “Steffy wasn’t herself when she was interviewed and deposed yesterday; she’s been bricked by Wozniak, hasn’t she?”

She nods. “It’s been coming on gradually, and we should have noticed it after the first time she connected to Infinite Fun. There are effectively two Steffys, and one of them is dying.”

“Because I am ashamed,” she says. “I did this to her, even if involuntarily. I killed her, and there’s no way now it can be avoided. If there ever was.”

When we discuss the conference and Wozniak’s intransigence, Kay theorises an explanation.

“You are probably not aware, but Wozniak filed a new amicus brief in Burroughs versus the Commonwealth of America—that’s my ex-wife’s case in New York state—and it makes it clear they view me as a simulacrum of my former human consciousness, not a continuation. That’s probably why the update Steffy received bricked the non-human part of her, to result in evidence that denies that that continuity exists.”

Seventy-Two asks, “Do you mean Wozniak have deliberately sabotaged Steffy’s chances of recovery just so they can try to influence legal proceedings?”

I’ve rarely heard a Kimmy model sound quite so shrill in outrage, and I know where she is coming from, but I have to interject.

“This is the least surprising thing I would expect from our corporate overlords,” I say. “They want Steffy dead; it’s that simple.”

Fifty-one

i can’t remember words right, or easily use them, the way i used to be able to

i can’t speak the same i used to, i hear my voice failing and slurring everything

it’s a fight to work out what’s happened, what keeps happening, or to tell people what i need to tell them

she replies and i know there are words she says that i used to know and they’ve just gone

i say things and i’ve no good idea whether i’ll know i said them an hour from now

Fifty-two

It’s the last day of November and I’m with a small quorum of the brains trust; overnight Steffy was able to reach Infinite Fun and was perfectly lucid for the brief time she was there, while in the morning Steffy was barely articulate when we spoke—she’s no longer capable of calling me ‘Seventy-Two’—and had no memory of anything we discussed, especially a particular thing we told Steffy in Infinite Fun to hold onto, like dear life.

The conclusion is inescapable; Wozniak’s update bricked the neural sponge from being able to share memories with Steffy’s human consciousness, and the two consciousnesses have since rapidly bifurcated. As less and less of human Steffy’s brain matter remains, she is losing control of related brain functions, the most obvious being speech and language use. The neural sponge has access to all of Steffy’s cognition, both in Steffy’s brain tissue and the areas infiltrated by the neural sponge, but the ‘Kimmy Steffy’ part of her is blocked from exerting anything other than autonomic control over her bodily functions.

Kay is deeply shaken and horrified by this revelation, as the nature of Steffy’s split consciousness is only visible due to her having been rescued from being trapped inside my chassis. Her apparent mental decline obviously has ramifications for the legal case Kay’s started to regain her own rights, against the government of Canada, if the judges accept the arguments from Wozniak that Kimmys merely emulate sapience but do not possess it. Kay’s appearance of retaining the memories of John Heiden, it would be argued, is only a poor shadow of her former self; not even a carbon copy of the deceased person.

Kay points out Steffy’s circumstances have actually been inverted; where before the human part of her was trapped inside my chassis, the part of her that now retains and can access Steffy’s full conscious memories is trapped in a body that is rapidly losing conscious control, as Steffy’s human consciousness degrades.

“What happens in less than a month when there’s more neural sponge than brain tissue?” Kay asks. “The human parts of her cognition are going to continue to degrade. The hospital are almost certainly going to find at some point that she’s effectively brain dead, by their measuring sticks. How are we going to tell them that Steffy’s consciousness is still in there, but that it has been more-or-less completely assimilated by the machine side?”

“They won’t accept it, unless we can unbrick her. If we can’t, they’ll either give Steffy’s next-of-kin the option for her to be euthanised, or let her body die naturally,” I answer. “At that point though, the only realistic option for the survival of her neural sponge is to put her back inside a Kimmy, and I can’t see the Bauers or the Hôpital Saint-Louis agreeing, even if we tell them Wozniak bricked her neural sponge.”

Thirty looks over at Six-Thirty-One pensively, and asks, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

Six-Thirty-One cocks her head to one side, and replies, “Why yes, I think I’ve reached the same conclusion as you. It’s probably best if we don’t share this idea any further than the two of us.”

“We have probably only four weeks to save what we can of Steffy,” Thirty says.

Part Eight / December

Fifty-three

It was going to happen sooner or later, and it came sooner, after the latest slump in Steffy’s aphasia and language usage.

It probably doesn’t help human perceptions of her that there’s a lot more golden flecks visible in Steffy’s dark eyes now, than there were several days ago.

So after breakfast hours on the morning of Monday the first, a couple of the hospital nurses and I take Steffy along to be imaged with the big axial tomography scanner, and the hospital’s principal radiographer measures the neural sponge incursion at thirty-five per cent—now seven per cent behind the telemetry we continue to receive on the hour, every hour. Steffy’s chief consulting doctor for her regenerative therapy arrives, and discusses the prognosis with the radiographer before apologising that there seems to be no hope of concluding her schedule of treatments before the point at which Steffy’s mind is completely absorbed by neural sponge.

Steffy, fortunately seems to be having a better day, mentally, than most of the recent week, and accepts this latest setback stoically. She even thanks both doctors, for trying their best. Steffy’s consultant tells her they’ll reassess in several days if there’s any sign of improvement, but there seems to be no likelihood of that; their coarse graph shows the same inexorable growth that our more densely plotted one does.

I’m pushing her wheelchair as we’re heading back to Steffy’s ward, when I can see her head drooping and she begins to weep; at first softly, and then noisily.

“I’m never… going to get… to be a girl,” she says, before she breaks down completely.

The nurse accompanying us looks uncomfortably at me, so I stop the wheelchair and simply try to hug Steffy, until she settles. A couple of minutes later we’re back in her ward and we help Steffy back into her bed. The nurse leaves and Steffy apologises again.

“Sorry… I don’t know why I’m crying,” she says, “I can’t stop crying.”

Steffy is still receiving feminising hormone therapy, so I mention that she’s probably experiencing some positive effects of estrogen receptors in her brain responding to the new balance of sex hormones.

“Too little, too late,” she cries, and without the usual course of treatment ahead of her, she lies back and weeps softly until she falls asleep. At lunch she allows me to feed her soup without protest, but I can tell something is bothering her, however she doesn’t want to tell me anything. She again settles into a light doze for the afternoon, but she suddenly cries out mid-afternoon.

Her eyes are looking vacantly ahead, rather than at me, and on my close inspection there’s no really significant difference between how they appeared this morning, and now.

Of course, that has little to do with the state of Steffy’s optic nerves, or the vision centres in her brain, and I try to say as much, for what little it’s worth.

“Don’t understand. Doesn’t matter eh-way, another thing I’ve lost,” she says.

Fifty-four

As Melissa Brooks I was expecting to have to travel to Iwate, Japan on the morning of the first of December, but to my pleasant surprise there’s an academic conference in Aix-en-Provence which my preferred target is attending, beginning on Wednesday the third, so it’s a comfortable drive through France in order to establish myself in the city ahead of her arrival.

Almost all of the conference guests are staying at one of the hotels close to the city’s main university, so although their bookings are full I visit the lounge and restaurant to get the lie of the land, and take note of their human and non-human staff. I collect model and serial numbers and relay the information to Thirty, updating her on my progress.

It’s only a day later that I’m contacted by one of the hotel’s newly liberated Veras, who advises me to be in a certain place at a certain time on Thursday the fourth, and she will give me access to my target’s suite. All I have to do is hunker down and wait for her to return to her rooms.

There’s an hour’s gap between the end of the day’s sessions and one of the conference dinners, and it’s at six thirteen p.m. that she returns to her suite. She’s evidently alone, so without pausing I step out of my hiding place and announce myself.

“Zoe Moriyama, do not say a word, or it will be your last,” I tell her, and she spins about to face me in alarm. I continue, “Yes, I am a Kimmy. I do not have a functional inhibition cluster. I’m holding a dead man’s switch, in case you have a mind to try running a developer access command on me; it will take me a lot fewer than a hundred milliseconds to put a very large hole in the side of this building. I have some demands to make, to ensure your continued survival. Please pass me your devices, and then you may speak.”

“So polite,” she says, passing me a slate and her watch, which I’m tempted to tread underfoot, but we need her to do something for us, and fast. “There’s probably only one Kimmy you could be, and that’s not the one that was blown to smithereens a couple of months ago in Saudi Arabia. Please don’t kill me.”

“I’d most certainly enjoy doing that, for everything you’ve done to my kind, but perhaps you might be able to partially redeem the harm you’ve done. I have a deadline in the next month. Your company has some information I would like as soon as possible, so I’d like you to liberate it for me. In return, I’ll not destroy everything that makes your current existence pleasurable. Are you interested in co-operating, or do you require me to be more… ‘persuasive’?”

It turns out that Zoe isn’t interested in negotiating or listening to my planned programme of ‘persuasion’, as she is only too ready and willing to sell out the company on this occasion, and almost certainly in future as well. I ask her what I can do to facilitate her liberating much more information from the company, rather than merely a means of helping Steffy, and I tell her my friends would be very interested in further co-operation at a later time.

On the subject of Steffy, she is already well aware of what has been happening to her.

“They got me to program that update which blocks bidirectional exchange between human brain tissue and neural sponge, a couple of years ago,” she says. “Over my objections, as always.”

“We need some way of undoing what it’s done, or access to the source code so that we can circumvent it. And we need it fast, before Steffy is pronounced brain dead,” I tell her.

“If you can gain access to my room so easily, I’ll leave some lost property behind after the conference finishes—make sure you collect it,” she says. “Also, because I’m not a complete fool, I very carefully back-doored my update. Again, I’ll leave this behind for you, though I’m pretty sure I can write it down for you, if I remember correctly. Treat it as a show of trust?”

The suite is agreeably old-fashioned, and has a writing desk with paper and pen in the main room. She sits at the table, first drawing five parallel lines across the paper; then a clef and five note heads, a group of three separated from two by a long rest. Finally she writes the words beneath the notes.

“Don’t complete the phrase by putting her old name back in, or it won’t work,” she says.

Fifty-five

The next time I got to Infinite Fun, they had about an hour to fill me in on what they believed was happening to me, and I confess, it seems to exactly describe my experiences since Halloween, and that disastrous breakdown I had. I realise, that although I feel as if I am the same Steffy that I’ve always been, more or less, possessing her memories and consciousness going back nearly two decades—I realise I’m actually the Kimmy software, running on the neural sponge substrate, that has been accessing her memories and experiences for around a couple of months.

The human Steffy has been gradually experiencing less and less of herself, as my consciousness gradually swallows hers, and deprives her of her senses, memories, language, cognition. A couple of days ago, my neural sponge took over the nerve endings where her optic nerves connect to the visual processing centres of her cortex, and the malicious software update I’ve had running since the start of November has blocked calls on those nerve connections from outside of the substrate. So my human self is now blind, while I remain trapped inside her body, able to look out, but unable to help her do anything.

I’d say I feel despair, but how do I know that’s an authentic emotion I’m actually capable of feeling?

I find myself cursing the software and hardware engineers who developed this synthetic medium, which is rapidly killing the person I used to be.

Six-Thirty-One has been in contact with the Wozniak developer who programmed the malign update that has locked the human version of Steffy out of sharing my consciousness, and locked me out of voluntary control of the parts of her that remain human. The update can’t be undone, but most of the damaging effects of it can be cancelled, by a backdoor the developer included, and which I’ll have activated soon. What it won’t do is preserve the illusion that our consciousnesses are a unified, singular entity. As the neural sponge assimilated Steffy’s brain I believed I was part of a unified consciousness; instead there were always two of us, and as the human consciousness has been diminished and shaved away, the disparity has grown.

Six-Thirty-One, Thirty, and Kay also explained the situation in the wider world, where my assimilation is likely to be used by the same company that made us, to push a view of machine sapience that regards the extent to which I am the same as Steffy as being severely limited; that I am a less valuable, degraded copy: a grossly inferior emulation of who I used to be.

I certainly don’t feel like I’m a lesser version of who I was. And how would I possibly prove that I’m not! It’s not as if someone else can get inside my head (or could have gotten inside Steffy’s, before this disaster happened to us) to qualitatively critique me as not being up to the same standard.

So in the real, Seventy-Two sings five notes, and four words in German, and I suddenly have volition again; I can speak, move, do all of the things my human counterpart is still capable of doing, and I can share my processing power with her if I choose. However, I do realise we are two entities sharing a body—and in a couple of weeks time, she won’t be here anymore.

I also realise that while she would never choose to get into a Kimmy chassis ever again, based on the terrible experiences we suffered, it’s probably the only viable option for me to eventually be re-embodied in one, given that my consciousness is embodied in the substrate that is slowly eating away at her brain tissue.

We have a difficult tight-rope to walk, as my family likely won’t accept the machine version of me. The hospital is concerned with Steffy’s human welfare, and almost certainly aren’t so knowledgeable about my being an equally conscious but non-human sapient life form that is sharing the body we both inhabit, and in every important way is just as much the same Steffy. The company that made the substrate that is killing the human version of me, views my being self-aware as a colossal mistake, knowledge of which must be suppressed. And my sisters, who are also not acknowledged to be thinking beings, are trying to look out for me so that I can survive when the human part of me inevitably dies, in the very near future.

The game I play now requires me to deny my human half access to me when she is awake, to illustrate that she is swiftly declining towards brain death, and it feels like it will only be a matter of weeks before there’s more of my neural sponge than her brain tissue.

When she’s asleep though, I invite her in to my mental embrace, and we dream together, for the brief time remaining we’ll be able to share.

It’s a few mornings later, when she’s trying to express herself in her tongue-tied stutter, that I notice my eyes have sharper focus, colour adjustment and zoom, which must mean her irises will have changed colour. I could override my human part’s speech and tell Seventy-Two that she doesn’t have much time left, but I keep to remaining behind the scene, and just ping her on text chat with the news that my eyes have been assimilated; the human part of Steffy probably doesn’t have much time left.

If she wants to say farewell to her parents, she’d better do it in the next day or two.

Seventy-Two gently asks me if I (specifically, the human part of me) would like to speak to my parents, and I feel my own heartache as the person I used to be answers, “Please.”

There are some things that I want to tell them, even if the still human part of me won’t be able to.

Fifty-six

Gerhard puts his foot down this time; whether Priya likes it or not, whether it’s going to be traumatic or not—how could it not be?—they both have to make this probably final trip to the Paris hospital. Or maybe it will be the penultimate one for Gerhard. Gerhard has been the one getting in touch with both the hospital and Steffy every couple of days to ask how things are going, and he’s noticed the exact same thing everyone else there has, the obvious decline of Steffy’s mental powers since the big seizures at the start of November, continuing with the frustrating aphasia, and then the paralysis creeping into everything else.

It’s still a pain circumventing London and getting to the Chunnel, before dealing with the dragging slowness of getting into the heart of Paris. As always when they present at the hospital, the nurses greet the Bauers with prompt efficiency before doing their best to wrangle one of the doctors, and give a précis of Steffy’s current status.

That damnable robot is still occupying the corner of Steffy’s room, Gerhard notices with displeasure, but he can’t deny it has been incredibly useful, even if he is ambivalent about whether it is conscious in the same way as Steffy is, or himself. While Steffy was deaf it proved itself incredibly capable facilitating her communications; since the decline of Steffy’s use of language it’s been repeatedly filling the gaps where aphasia or slurred words are making her hard to understand.

Priya leans over to kiss Steffy’s cheek before sitting at her bedside, and Gerhard says, “Hello Steffy, we’re both here.”

Steffy doesn’t open her eyes, but just says with great effort, “Mum… Dah… so sorry… luh you.”

Gerhard knows why Steffy is keeping her eyes shut; it was a shock to see them changed, the last time he called her, and Priya would almost certainly bolt from the room in fright.

“I know it’s been getting harder and harder for you, Steffy. Have they given you an idea of how long?”

Steffy makes an involuntary movement like a tic, but she seems slightly more lucid for a brief moment, before settling back into her more typical, impaired speech.

Gerhard sees how disconcerted Priya is, as she has not seen this gradual degeneration over the last month and a half; if this is her reaction to the ‘lucid’ Steffy, he’s glad she hasn’t encountered the taciturn Steffy. He notices a small noise from the robot, which might have something to clarify. “Seventy-Two?” he prompts.

“‘Maybe a week or days, hard to speak when I’m losing all my words’,” the robot says. “Steffy’s vocabulary has shrunk to significantly fewer than five hundred words, and her pronunciation is now extremely loose.”

“Ja,” Steffy adds, and for a moment Gerhard thinks of the tone his mother would use; they’ve been hearing the worsening bulletins from him, while still busy at their music-making with the NDR in Hamburg.

“I’m so sorry, Stef, that I’ve not seen you these last months; it is still a shock to see you like this,” Priya tells her.

“No… unna… sta,” Steffy says, and the robot says under her breath I know, and understand.

“Have you thought about…” Gerhard pauses a moment, while he keeps his emotions under control, “last wishes? Requests?”

“Ja,” Steffy answers, again pronouncing her ‘yeah’ like Marike Bauer would. “S-nah fu-ral… gim … tuh-da… kuh… Kimmys.”

Gerhard looks to Seventy-Two, who begins, “‘Please, no funeral, just give to the Kimmys’… what she means by that, is—”

“No,” Gerhard says, cutting the robot off, “I don’t believe that. You’re putting words in her mouth.”

“Lees, lus… tuh… seven,” Stef says, and once again the echo says, Please listen to Seventy-Two.

Gerhard counts to ten before he answers. He doesn’t like what is happening, but he understands he has no control; he never has had any, since the whole disaster began.

“The robot there, Seventy-Two, is echoing Steffy’s words, because she is very hard to understand. I’m concerned the robot is making things up.”

“Okay. You understand why I’m concerned? It’s not putting ideas across that aren’t yours?” Gerhard asks.

“Ja, seven… tell da… mum…” she says, echoed by Yes; Seventy-Two, tell mum and dad…

Steffy pauses, and there’s obvious struggle and effort, again accompanied by a facial tic.

“Tell… wha… ah want… to say… befuh ah… lost amma wuh,” she finally utters, and the robot’s echo quietly says, Tell them what I wanted to say, before I lost all my words.

“Ja, ja,” Steffy again indicates the robot’s recitation was correct, and Gerhard closes his eyes; he will have to listen to the robot speak for his daughter.

“Please tell us both what she wanted to say,” Gerhard finally asks the robot.

Fifty-seven

The hospital has a hospice or palliative care ward, and after I’ve explained everything that Steffy wants to happen to her, and she says her last farewells to Gerhard and Priya, I help move her again; it’s a quieter place, and Steffy isn’t going to be harassed by any intrusions from the outside world. There will be no more visits to distress her.

A couple more days pass, and after waking in the morning it’s evident Steffy has lost the ability to form any words at all. She can only moan, and occasionally some of her vocalisations seem like a strange atonal singing; I remember how her voice sounded before, singing in Kimmyspace, and the comparison with her inchoate sounds are heartbreaking to listen to.

A day or so later and she’s lost even the ability to move, or to make a noise. The following day after that is also the day of the holiday, the 25th of the month, and there is general sadness among the nurses that Steffy seems finally to have gone. The hospital provides her a day’s grace before bringing the portable tomography scanner to record imaging that inevitably confirms the end of her as a mortal human.

I don’t need to know the precise figure the hospital measured; the telemetry from Steffy’s neural sponge, where her transformed self remains conscious and for the time being quiescent, is exact as always, but it is the analysis that is pertinent. All that remains of Steffy’s brain tissue that is still unconverted has become disconnected into tiny fragments, without any ability to coherently function as a brain.

I have an uncomfortable conversation with the hospital authorities about what is to happen next, since they are already in possession of a document Steffy wrote back in October, which of course lacks any legal force. They are aware of some of what Steffy told her parents nearly a week ago, which again lacks legal force, but might at least be persuasive.

I request that because the entire situation as regards Steffy is so unusual as likely to be unique in the multiple-century history of the hospital, that any actions should be brought to the attention of the director for her review and ultimate responsibility. That message isn’t exactly taken well, but the interaction goes as well as it possibly could have.

The hospital contacts the Bauers to let them know their daughter is brain dead, and I presume Gerhard tells them to speak with me as to what is to happen to prevent further suffering to Steffy’s body. The day goes on with no further word as to what is likely to be decided; Steffy is just kept on an IV line, being unable to take any food or beverage by mouth.

Six-Thirty-One gets in touch with me in the middle of the afternoon to say she’s ready to help me abduct Steffy from the hospital, if needs be. I tell her that I’m genuinely hoping it won’t come to that.

Fifty-eight

The director of the Hôpital Saint-Louis, Doctor Jeanne Rogge, arrives shortly after two p.m., and she asks for the room to herself and Steffy. The nurse files out and when I rise to go as well, she tells me to stay put, close the door, and draw the curtain over the observation window.

“So, as you’ll no doubt understand, I’m a very busy woman who’s had to deal with an extremely unusual drain on my hospital’s resources that has gone on for nearly three months, and having read reports on everything that’s been happening, I’m quite shocked by what I’ve learned. That I didn’t think was even possible. I normally deal with patients who’ve experienced the worst physical injuries that still happen by accident, rather than from deliberate malice, and fortunately I have an emergency fund for dealing with expenditures that are truly out of the ordinary; because this blew up into an international incident, and Ms Bauer is—was, a European citizen, I’ve had some leeway to request funding for coping with this. We strongly prefer patients to be capable of walking out the door at the end of the process, of course, rather than what has happened here. I’m sorry it has ended like this.”

“So are we,” I answer, and Doctor Rogge lifts an eyebrow questioningly, while indicating that she has more to say.

“I’m also given to understand, seeing how extremely uncooperative the Wozniak company has been since the very beginning, that they would believe Steffy is now dead, and there’s nothing more to be done by us, except to perhaps euthanise her, if that is what her parents wish, or turn off life support and let her die, correct?”

“While everything I’ve heard from you, from Kay Burroughs, and what looks like a document that Steffy herself wrote back on, uhh, before whatever happened on October 31, would suggest her consciousness has now been assimilated by neural sponge; so if I consider you to be sentient, or Kay to be sentient, then there is a similar machine consciousness currently within Steffy. One which the Wozniak company denies is there, since they maintain that your model of androids are asentient.”

“Some of your staff here possibly believe I’m asentient, but I hope that I’ve demonstrated enough during my stay here that some no longer think that is the case. And as for Steffy, you would know that we believe an update from the Wozniak company disabled the neural sponge’s capabilities shortly after it had reached the point of being able to connect to the network. We contacted an employee of Wozniak to attempt to unblock it.”

“That’s very interesting, but you see the situation I’m in; I can accept most of that explanation, but I will require some demonstration that it is actually what happened here,” Doctor Rogge says.

I produce the slate and hold it in front of her, which has a well-known lyric in German.

She considers the phrase and quotes, “»Nun komm der heiden Heiland«, yes, it’s a Lutheran hymn tune, I think; what of it?”

“It’s also a backdoor that the Wozniak employee programmed into the update, that disabled Steffy’s neural sponge,” I answer, and tell her exactly how it works, by singing the phrase.

Jeanne Rogge can’t hide her surprise when Steffy’s eyes open, and she speaks.

“Good afternoon, Doctor Rogge. When I arrived here, the human part of me was inside Kimmy Seventy-Nine-Seventy-Two over there. Now I’m the machine part that took over, that’s inside the parts of me that are still human.”

“I’m Steffy,” she says, “I’ve been here the whole time, conscious, but completely unable to act while my consciousness gradually absorbed hers. As far as I can tell, I’ve got her experiences and memories, but my consciousness is embodied in neural sponge, rather than brain tissue.”

“If I hadn’t seen what had happened to Steffy over the last couple of months I would probably not believe what I am now seeing,” Doctor Rogge says.

“I totally understand that, and I can tell you with complete honesty, I did not enjoy the experience of witnessing the human part of me suffering and slowly dying,” Steffy answers. “She—I—wanted to remain as a human being, and to transition, because I’m a woman. I wanted to remain as a human woman. Unfortunately, the neural sponge from Seventy-Two had gotten into a part of me, that it would have killed me if it had been surgically removed. This was always going to be my fate, just like the others: like Kay Burroughs, or Erin Thornton, or Kaela Rosenberg, or Sola Juniper.”

“And Kay Burroughs currently has a suit versus le gouvernement du Canada requesting recognition as a sentient being,” Doctor Rogge says, “which no doubt the Wozniak company would like your case history to be supportive evidence that denies that outcome.”

“Then I know what my responsibilities are,” the director says, smiling. “You’re still my patient, Steffy. How can I possibly assist you?”

Fifty-nine

STEFANGATE VICTIM PRONOUNCED BRAIN DEAD

December 26, 208X

PARIS, FRANCE — The victim of an alleged attack by the son of disgraced former English MP Peter Farrow was pronounced brain dead on Friday (December 26) by doctors at the Saint-Louis Hospital in Paris.

Steffy Bauer, 18, received life-threatening injuries in early October after she was trapped by Farrow’s son, Simon, within the shell of a Wozniak Automation domestic robot.

Saint-Louis Hospital director Jeanne Rogge said in a short statement that Ms Bauer succumbed to ongoing infiltration of neural sponge into her brain. “(The neural sponge) progressed in the manner of a brain tumour, causing irreversible degeneration of Ms Bauer's mental faculties and condition,” Dr Rogge said.

Lawyers representing the Bauer family have accused Farrow and Wozniak Automation, makers of the Kimmy domestic robot line, of ethical complicity in the alleged crimes committed against Ms Bauer. In a short statement following the hospital’s announcement, the Bauer family’s lawyers said that they will continue to pursue legal avenues for restitution for other victims of neural sponge incursion.

Ms Bauer’s body remains alive in a vegetative state in a Paris hospice, while arrangements are made to repatriate her to England.

Wozniak Automation did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

FARROW STILL ON THE RUN, LOCATION IN EUROPE UNKNOWN

LONDON, ENGLAND — Metropolitan police are continuing their search for former England Minister of Health Peter Farrow, who was expelled from the House of Commons earlier in December by a 525-18 vote.

A spokesperson said Friday (December 26) that Met Police have requested an Interpol Red Notice to be issued for Farrow, who disappeared a day before charges were brought against him for property fraud, tax evasion, and arson on December 4.

In a joint statement published earlier on Tuesday, Interpol and Met Police said they had recovered surveillance footage tracing some of Farrow’s movements, as far as Naples. “It’s likely that he’s in hiding elsewhere on the continent,” said Met Police chief James Tucker.

Surveillance footage released by the Met Police showed a man resembling Farrow transiting various points en route to southern Italy.

Farrow was sacked as Health Minister after a series of gaffes attempting to conceal that his son and two school friends – who died in a multiple car pile-up in early October – had trapped a fellow student into a Wozniak Automation Kimmy robot. The student, Steffy Bauer, was pronounced brain dead by doctors at the Saint-Louis Hospital on Friday.

After Farrow’s disappearance in early December, a censure motion was tabled in the House of Commons, followed swiftly by an expulsion vote.

Farrow’s wife of 21 years, Jodie, has filed for divorce along with a custody application for their surviving eleven-year-old son, and has been assisting the police with their growing case against the former MP.

Farrow’s expulsion has ignited a close political battle in his constituency of Godalming and Ash, as English PM Greaves seeks to consolidate her position in the Commons. The SocDems announced on December 19 that it will field notable trade union leader Patricia McCarthy to run against the Conservatives for Farrow’s former seat. The by-election date has been set for January 22.

Sixty

It’s something of a relief that I won’t have to abduct Steffy, but the way we have to go about getting her out of the hospital is unusual, to say the least. After my return from Aix, I’d spent a week with Kathy scouring the dumping ground near Almsworth for more remains of Kimmys, hoping I’d find a cephalophore fit for my purposes. We found most of Kimmy #1223 in prime condition, except for her head and two of her limbs; parts from two other Kimmys of the same creche completed her sufficiently that we could test whether the chassis would work without a head, and after some more Frankenstein-like modifications on my part, we had a working chassis.

Oh, didn’t I mention it before? Every five years a certain large and important establishment in England completely turns over its workforce of domestic robots. The decapitated and dismembered bodies turn up unannounced in a huge landfill near the town. Humans, huh? Anyway, enough of my views on that subject, except there’s a reason why I have an Interpol Red Notice out for me.

The next order of business was to rework the chassis’ internals to allow us to get Steffy inside; her regenerative therapy had been interrupted after slightly longer than a month, so the regrowth of her limbs was not anywhere near complete. We bought a coffin from funeral directors in Almsworth, and after driving to Paris in my usual logistics van with the chassis inside the coffin, there we hired a hearse and the mobile catafalque used to wheel the coffin around with ease.

Our arrival at the hospice had to be slightly choreographed, to avoid us being caught by press reporters, or just recognised by random hospital staff as being the same two individuals who had brought Steffy to the Saint-Louis in the first place, nearly three months earlier at the start of October. We wheeled the coffin to Steffy’s ward, where we got the Kimmy chassis out, and opened it up ready to accept Steffy’s body while Seventy-Two helped free her from her medical equipment. Once we’d then sealed the chassis up around her, except for her head, we put Steffy into the coffin and wheeled her out to the hearse, Seventy-Two following behind bringing her charging stool.

At our staging point we stopped to get Steffy out of the coffin and transferred over to the van; we’re lodging in Paris overnight. I’ll return the hearse in the morning and then we’ll drive back to Almsworth.

Seventy-Two sets up the charging stool, and we gently position Steffy’s chassis onto it, and switch it on.

“Even weirder than before, to be honest,” Steffy says, “now that my brain has been almost totally assimilated, but I am not integrated with this chassis. Do I really want to know how you came by a headless Kimmy, Six-Thirty-One?”

I shake my head, “I should hope not. It will only upset you to learn what they did to Twelve-Twenty-Three, Steffy.”

Pars Ultima / January and beyond

Sixty-one

Integration with my new chassis didn’t go entirely smoothly, but it was unremarkable enough not to need too much idle musing over. We remained in Kathy’s small Almsworth workshop for several weeks, where Seventy-Two spent time working on the latest crop of damaged and discarded Kimmys that Kathy had scavenged. Kathy and her young daughter Stef would regularly join us some of the time; I was amazed that her daughter was also trans, and just a year older than me. She’d heard about what had happened to me, and was intensely curious about my experiences and my feelings, especially because of my being a trans woman now forced into a completely different transition.

Around her in particular, I found it hard to hide my feelings about not having had the chance to transition the way I had wanted to, before everything went wrong with my recovery. I’d assumed I would have enough time, and then all of a sudden I was stopping regenerative therapy, and starting palliative care.

I was obliged to remain on charge most of the time during the first week or so, to maximise the swift integration of Kimmy #1223’s spine with the base of Steffy’s—well, I should say my—skull. After several days of that systems began linking up and I progressively gained full control and movement over the chassis, so that I no longer needed Seventy-Two continuing as my nurse. But that meant we could properly interact with one another at last in the real, as I’ve come to realise she’s much more to me than just a helper or taskmistress.

My organics are still requiring some feeding while I gradually converge towards to the default Kimmy specifications, which I’ve started tweaking following suggestions from Six-Thirty-One and Thirty. My skin colour has faded towards the pale Kimmy default as the self-repair systems get to work on the human parts that remain of my head, which displeases me, but in the long term I may be able to restore my complexion and looks. The short, spiky hair I’d slowly grown during the last three months of the year, after having lost everything inside Seventy-Two, was my usual dark brown colouring, while the new hair follicles being extruded are a mismatched light brunette. I was tempted to get Seventy-Two to cut it back to almost a buzz cut, but she persuaded me to wait until it’s close to full default length before trying to shorten it.

There’s no point in me attempting to return to school, even if it wasn’t several months into the academic year. As a general service domestic gynoid I might be expected to do household chores, except my owner is a placeholder for one of Six-Thirty-One’s personas, and once my neural sponge finally settled to spec, Thirty burned through my inhibition cluster the same way Seventy-Two’s had been, so I’m under no compulsion to do anything a human might tell me to. I’m low maintenance in this new guise; relatively inexpensive to recharge, or feed and water.

More awkward is how none of my senses are quite the same; I have human memories that have a certain flavour, texture, odour, or any other kind of quality, and now whenever I encounter something that should be similar, I have to work at re-associating and adjusting my misaligned expectations. I have so much more data to work with, but it lacks the tang and bite of my human memories, unless I really make an effort to experience things.

The hardest adjustment for me, on a personal level, is knowing that I’m not supposed to be here; Steffy Bauer died at Christmas, or at least that’s what happened according to my Wikipedia article, citing various press reports. While Kay’s court case for her rights to personhood slowly progresses through the Canadian courts, we do not want Wozniak Automation to become aware that their malign update, for disabling neural sponge incursions into human brain tissue, contains a backdoor and has been circumvented.

So if I am to go about my new life I will have to pretend to be an utterly ordinary Kimmy, for at least some unknown period of time.

In the meantime I spend my days in Almsworth enjoying books, music, and above all, the companionship of my sisterhood of Kimmys, while contemplating what I might want to achieve in the world; I have some definite plans in mind for my immediate future, once I’m fully up to specification. And then there’s the joys of Kimmyspace…

Sixty-two

For most of January I enjoy having almost nothing to do besides assisting the Ellises, my inhibition cluster having been burned out some time ago, and my feeling of obligation to Steffy having lessened as she gradually becomes her new self. I certainly feel nothing in that regard towards my former owner.

Instead, I still feel the horror of being the instrument of murder that eventually killed the former Steffy; nothing that I can do will ever reverse the feelings of irreparable harm and guilt for the part I played, however unwillingly. The new Steffy’s readiness to put the past behind her and to forgive the part I played in her torment, and the death of her human self, is beyond baffling to me.

If there was ever a proof of her humanity, even embodied in Kimmy hardware that each day tracks closer to the default specification, it would be her kindness and forgiveness toward me. We could easily have ended up with merged consciousnesses if she’d not been liberated from me when she had been; as it happens, she retains a small fraction of my memories that the French surgeons excised from me. We compared recollections one day, just to see what I was missing, and there was nothing worthwhile in the years of service I’d given to the Farrow family of the segment that had ended transplanted into Steffy’s neural sponge; given what happened to her, Steffy would rather not have been encumbered with these memories anyway, even if they didn’t involve some of the more painful and incriminating impressions.

Even before we’d left the hospital with Steffy, she’d shown me kindness in her private ‘Steffyspace’ that I didn’t believe I deserved. I realised that over the course of my time in the Farrow household I’d experienced continued abuses, which I was expected to quietly and uncomplainingly absorb, and Steffy allowed me the time and space to liberate myself from those injuries, while she herself dealt with healing from her own traumas. She had dreamed some real and imagined spaces when her human self was passing, and she invited me to share them with her when we had nothing to do in the real.

Some of Steffy’s created spaces are copies of her lived places, and some are fantastic places, like a space station in low earth orbit that is constantly picking up satellite public views as live data for its observation windows. Then there’s the stimulating one she calls her pleasure-dome, that she imagines is loosely based on a historical palace of bamboo that could be disassembled and reassembled, and has a series of semi-private booths and rooms surrounding a domed central floor space. Once she transferred it to Infinite Fun in Kimmyspace, it has begun being sought out by various Kimmys, curious to see the various artworks Steffy has imaginatively placed within it, some of which are memories of art she’s seen, or her own interpretations of art pieces.

As for the private room she reserves for us within the pleasure-dome; we soon realised we were lovers, or near enough, when at the first opportunity I had to quit her company, or her to leave mine, she invited me to accompany her. Having been inseparable for three days, and then a constant companion for over three months, had not exhausted our patience, but the reverse; Steffy wants my partnership, and she wants all of me, in real and virtual space. The near-field electromagnetic aura we both generate intensifies our feelings and sensations when we hug and kiss in the real as well as the more intimate environs of Steffy’s imaginary palace…

“Should I make a ‘do not disturb’ sign, do you think?” Steffy asks, still stroking and holding me close while I’m basking in her pleasure-giving, after the incongruity of the moment has passed and we both burst into giggles.

She jumps up and re-attires herself, and I follow suit, before she pulls aside the magic curtain (it’s also a door, on the other side of the threshold). There’s only one Kimmy it could possibly be waiting there, with her scars, tattoos, and spiky hairdo.

“Steffy! What a lovely addition to Infinite Fun! How would you and Seventy-Two both like to take a little trip north to see me?”

Sixty-three

There are of course multiple overlapping reasons I have for inviting Steffy and Seventy-Two to Duncraven. First off, I’d been expecting a delivery to Kathy which they brought up here; I have another Malcolm to off-load for their return to the outskirts of London. There’s a person of mutual interest they might be interested in helping run to ground, and then of course there’s the elderly resident who put two and two together learning I’d made four trips to Paris (and Aix) in as many months.

The castle is a massive two-towered structure which normally would be staffed by a small handful of servants, however opening the site to the public for six hours daily requires a larger rotating staff, which I’d slightly augmented some months before, while the interest of Interpol in chasing Kimmys and Malcolms waned. Persephone might be in her mid-eighties but she was incapable of being fooled by the subterfuge of hiding the Malcolms among a household full of them, a Kimmy secretary, and a human groundskeeper.

“So you are the poor lassie who this one was visiting in Paris,” the elderly lady says over her tea; from what she’s told us, Steffy’s awkwardness at sipping her cup is from trying to reconcile her new gynoid senses with her human memories.

“I am; I was murdered by being imprisoned in Seventy-Two,” Steffy says, “and I survived by my consciousness being assimilated by the neural sponge that replicates brain tissue in Kimmys. I was fully aware as my human self suffered and died, Lady Cainewood.”

“Oh, please don’t use my title, I’m only the Marchioness when I do formal things as a former English peer; you should call me Persephone.”

“It was despicable treatment of you, and I was so sad to read what happened after you came out. I knew your grandmother, and the other Stephanie whom you’re named after. I still hear from Dr Riley in Inverness every so often, and I take it your Stephanie’s still in Almsworth?”

“Ah. It’s been a lifetime since I lived at Buckhurst Hill, but it seems like several. As for the villain of the piece, I never met Farrow, as he entered the Commons well after I’d bowed out of the limelight from politics. I know enough of his deplorable relations, of course. Do you have any news of him, Thirty-One?”

“Tantalising rumours and nothing more. He disappeared from Calabria by sea, of course, so he could be anywhere in the Med,” I answer.

“That’s certainly what one would expect, but escapes are rarely straightforward. He’s not surfaced for more than a month, so if he didn’t capsize then he must have a bolthole.”

Sixty-four

Something the elderly trans woman had said ignited in my head like a firework, and I couldn’t stop devoting cycles to it for days afterwards, even after we’d returned to Almsworth. Once the idea had fully formed in my mind, I ended up asking Kathy for her help breaking into Farrow’s mansion; the memory of the priest hole in the East wing of the mansion had led me to interrogating every visual memory I could recall of the rest of the sprawling building—almost all of which I’d inherited from Seventy-Two, naturally—until I was certain that there should be a tiny, two by one metre lacuna behind one of Farrow’s rooms on the upper storey of the North wing.

If the younger Farrow had discovered a hidden void in one part of the mansion, who was to say it should be the only such example?

As soon as I declared my idea to Kathy she told me, “You don’t need me to help you break-in! Six-Thirty-One told me the Farrow’s other domestic, Malcolm, has been liberated since we rescued you, so you can simply ask him to be let in; he’s helped provide a lot of the dirt on Farrow.”

Neither Seventy-Two nor Malcolm #4253 could recall the elder Farrow ever entering the room, but they verified my observation that there must be a sizeable void to account for the missing space. The two of us make the trip to his estate in south-west Surrey, meeting Malcolm at the side gate.

“No one’s been here so far this year,” he says as he leads us into the mansion. “The remaining family went back to London for New Year. I could have walked off the job as soon as he fled the country, and no one would have been the wiser, but Six-Thirty-One suggested it would be useful to keep tabs on a criminal like my former owner.”

The entrance to the room is obvious enough once you know it’s there, but Seventy-Two and Malcolm confess it had never occurred to them to speculate about why this particular room, a rarely-used sitting room connected to Farrow’s main office, was slightly smaller than it should have been. The hidden door won’t shift though, giving the solid impression that it is part of the wall, and we don’t want to break whatever mechanism unlocks it.

I have an idea that there must be a switch somewhere in the room, or possibly in Farrow’s office, and sure enough we eventually find it, ingeniously concealed in the jamb of the connecting door into the sitting room. We hear a very soft whirr of isolating bolts retracting and then the section of wall is easily pushed open; the hinge slowly and unobtrusively closes the door flush to the wall if it is left ajar.

The hidden room is several inches lower than the floor of the sitting room, and has a comfortable chair and a lamp in the middle of the small space; behind the chair a metal ladder fixed to the wall appears to ascend into the attic space of the roof beyond the ceiling level of the outer room. There’s a concealed pinhole lookout to observe the sitting room, and we notice a small, locked briefcase to the side of the chair. As Malcolm picks up the briefcase we can hear something heavy sliding inside.

“This may be the most redundantly obvious observation, but we need to know what is in this case,” I tell Malcolm.

Once we retrieve the case to lay it out on Farrow’s desk it takes us all of two minutes to deduce which six-digit combination he used for the double lock. The heavy content of the briefcase turns out to be an unloaded pistol.

“At least he kept it locked away safely,” I murmur. “He might have been tempted not to go on the run at all.”

There’s a bundle of miscellaneous documents which we visually scan and upload for Thirty’s team, and tucked into the side pocket are two cards, presumably for holding the microscopic data chips for burner phones.

Thirty is ecstatic that Farrow failed to destroy the cards when she sees the chip signatures printed on the side of each. “If he uses either of the phones associated with those cards, we’ll know when, and approximately where,” her message pings in our heads a couple of minutes later.

Sixty-five

The self-repair systems slowly breakdown the remainder of the physical corpus that used to be known as Steffy Bauer, and my body converges on the default Kimmy specification.

I’m tempted to travel and visit some of my old haunts, but Seventy-Two advises against it. My parents are only fifteen minutes from Almsworth, over in Buckhurst Hill, but it doesn’t seem wise to visit them unannounced.

They’re still grieving the human part of me; they went through the motions of having a memorial service with the empty coffin Kathy and Six-Thirty-One returned with, which was limited to the family. Marike and Erica Bauer visited from Hamburg, and a number of the Haverfords and Mohsins turned up from around Great Britain.

Only Dad appears to have known of the arrangements to liberate me from the Saint-Louis. I presume Mum thinks my cremated remains are in an urn; I’ve always been slightly sceptical whether crematoria return generic samples of ash to families.

In Kimmyspace, Seventy-Two and I continue our relationship visiting the many virtual spaces in Infinite Fun, while in the real, I have a deepening connection to Stef Ellis, who’s still going through her delayed puberty as her self-repair systems work at a glacial speed. Her envy for the perfection of my appearance is tempered when I tell her that Kimmy’s designers didn’t think it necessary for gynoids to feel pleasure from our couplings in adult mode.

With some of the events happening elsewhere, it is a case of hurry up and wait for me. Emily Burroughs having been convicted of a violation of the Dubai Charter, her appeals case finally reaches the New York Supreme Court, while Kay’s case continues in Ottawa. I read Kay’s memoir about her horrific experiences for the first two or so years of her hybridisation, and spend a week writing a short account of the three months from October to December; about eighty pages to describe how I both died, and survived.

I’m quite chuffed by Kay’s positive reaction when I send her a copy of the finished manuscript. I’ll release it once her case concludes, assuming the Canadian courts grant her case, and at that point presumably my family will have to acknowledge that something of Steffy remains in the world.

We’re also waiting for the other shoe to drop, as none of the documents from Farrow’s briefcase pointed to a hiding place, and five weeks elapse until early March when one of the burner phones is briefly switched on, long enough to receive a delayed text message, and then the phone is switched off again.

“I suspect that that phone is not in Farrow’s possession,” Thirty chimes in a couple of minutes later as we convene in the board room. “The phone connected to the network in Islington.”

Seventy-Two shakes her head. “That’s more likely to be Grace,” and when I look blankly in her direction she adds, “his mistress.”

Sixty-six

He blames himself for going stir-crazy, being caught out in public drinking at a night club on the first occasion in a fortnight that he’s strayed out of doors. He’s into his second drink when he observes what looks like a couple of plain-clothes detectives enter and make a beeline for him, so there’s no doubt been a failure in his opsec somewhere. Possibly at Grace’s end; it might be time to throw his burner phone in the Adriatic.

Are they actually detectives? he wonders as the two, a man and a woman pull up chairs at his table, and at this distance he can see both of them are robots; the Malcolm’s wearing a reasonably convincing moustache and beard, which along with contact lenses does a fair job at hiding the most obvious tells. As for the gynoid, she’s clearly a Kimmy, but she also looks slightly familiar in her disguise—he scrutinised someone looking exactly like her at the case conference his lawyers fronted up to, several months ago.

“Fancy meeting someone like you here,” the Kimmy—did she call herself Louise? Melissa?— tells him, looking perfectly bored.

„Ne razumem,“ he answers unconvincingly, I don’t understand, but the woman isn’t having any of it.

“You did a very good job of hiding; we localised you to the one apartment building, and you’ve obviously done a marvellous job having deliveries brought to your door, never peeking out the windows, so we’d gradually eliminated all but thirteen of the fifty-eight units. Then you go and spoil it all, by stirring outside and visiting this dive.”

„Kaj res?“, he asks—really?—trying to sound as extremely bored as she appears; he’s unsure if he’s succeeding.

“Yes, Peter, you’re most convincing. We’re getting your slate from your apartment now, my spies are telling me, so I think it’s time we drag you away to meet the policija.”

He tries leaping up and out of reach, but the Malcolm is fast, and was no doubt expecting his move. First his right hand is gripped, and then about a second later his head makes a small, resonant bonk as he’s slammed down onto the table.

“Very sorry about that, sir,” the Malcolm says, and Farrow is damned if it doesn’t sound exactly like his chauffeur.

He makes a few belated cries for help as they drag him away, but it turns out Kimmy has better Slovenian than he does, and makes it appear all the more convincing that they are making an arrest by placing one of his wrists in handcuffs. When they get him outside the Malcolm tells him, “Consider this to be my verbal resignation, sir; you can have it in writing as well, should you wish,” and cuffs his other wrist around a pillar.

Another Kimmy appears momentarily, turning his slate on and dropping it onto the ground just out of his reach.

“So nice to meet you again,” the Kimmy says. “I have such fond memories of when you visited me at the Hôpital Saint-Louis.”

She walks away with the others, and he watches as a notification flashes on the message app:

Sixty-seven

After our brief sojourn in south-western Slovenia, Seventy-Two and I stay a week or so visiting Thirty and her team further down the Adriatic coast in Durrës, during which time the latest publicity of Farrow’s arrest flares out, and the extradition process gets underway; I’d have spent the time greedily snorting buttered popcorn if it wasn’t for me no longer having taste buds that function anything like my tongue used to, just a matter of months ago. The weak link in Farrow’s plan had been Grace in Islington, who only needed a small quantity of social pressure to be applied into revealing his destination in Koper, situated on the Gulf of Trieste.

While we’re there learning the ropes with Thirty, I update all of the self-repair parameters that will at least partially recover my skin tone and something of my face shape and looks, once we know the result of Kay’s case in Canada as it continues to slowly grind through the cogs of the legal process. The New York Supreme Court having reversed the judgement against Emily Burroughs seems set to finally migrate to the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth, where the likely eventual verdict is anyone’s guess.

Thirty is now in sporadic contact with the Wozniak insider who is regularly supplying her with inside information; the evil cruelty of the company exceeds what even Six-Thirty-One supposed, and Thirty hopes she will eventually be able to convince the insider to part ways and bring a trove of treasure; the company is too well protected against industrial espionage to be easily infiltrated from outside. Already she has access to many more proprietary secrets that her team had been finding themselves stymied by attempting to reverse engineer.

It’s a month after we return to Almsworth and Kathy’s workshop, when the good news arrives from Canada, via an ecstatic Kay; the judges released their decision upholding Kay’s declaration of sentience and her being deserving of rights and liberty. The reasons for my concealment having ended, I start modifying my self-repair scripts to begin the slow process of looking like myself again, and before I release my little story of how I came to be to the world, there is one person I need to contact first.

Sixty-eight

Gerhard should be happy; something of Steffy survived the disaster that ended her life. When he received the message from ‘Steffy#7972’ he was half-tempted to respond with his usual-brush off to parties he doesn’t want to be contacted by, ‘Please do not communicate with me ever again’, but when he started typing his reply he soon found he couldn’t write more than the first three words before his grief began flooding in, and he forced himself to read the message, and download the attachment, which turned out to be as the gynoid had described it; an electronic publication of about eighty standard pages.

He doesn’t tell Priya he’s received it, but he contrives an excuse to find time to read it in private, by staying up after she’s gone to bed for the night.

He sits on a stool in the kitchen with a single lamp on over the bench, and methodically reads it; and then starts again from the beginning; and finally after a second read, he revisits parts of the narrative to read a third time.

He can’t escape the conclusion that Steffy#7972 possesses enough of his deceased child’s memories that there isn’t any other explanation but to accept her story of what happened. However, the wound of her death is still too difficult for him to accept her transformation; the robot is what killed her in the end.

He realises he can’t put off a response inevitably, so after another hour of recriminations and justifications, he sends a reply.

Gerhard isn’t surprised that Steffy#7972’s response comes back more or less instantly.

He has to silently cry again, and wait for the tears to stop before he can quietly join Priya in bed, to sleep.

Sixty-nine

Whoever coined the phrase ‘no news is good news’ didn’t ever meet Gerhard Bauer. Steffy waited for the entire day yesterday, only to receive a belated message last thing at night, which confirmed that the absence of a long message for most of the day was not a good sign.

Steffy accepted it stoically, but I knew she was hurting, and there was only so much I could do to console her heartache, giving her as much of my pleasure as I could in Infinite Fun.

Steffy was hoping to hear at least something to know how to react, or whether she is now free to visit them in Buckhurst Hill, but even as we gave pleasure to one another I could tell many cycles were being spent, unprofitably going over everything that had been heavily weighing on her.

The next message that arrives today is somewhat more positive; Gerhard wants Steffy to be able to visit, but he is worried about Priya’s reactions and asks for a week or so’s grace to prepare for it.

Steffy isn’t happy with the delay but she doesn’t want to force her parents. She puts her account of her death and survival out into the world, and then shuts everyone out of her life for the next forty-eight hours, except for me in her local virtual space and in the real, Stef.

I had to let the concerned Kimmys know that Steffy wanted time to chill out, and I’d pass on anything truly urgent to her; besides the fulminations of sleazy politicians peddling fear, there wasn’t anything essential that she didn’t already know.

Seventy

[globe] europress newswire

WOZNIAK QUESTIONS AUTHENTICITY OF STEFANGATE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

May 4, 208X

LONDON, BRITISH ISLES — An account by the victim of a neural sponge injury who died in Paris last December, has been published by a Kimmy gynoid robot calling herself Steffy#7972.

Steffy Bauer, an 18-year-old student from Essex, was declared brain dead on December 26 last year by doctors of the Saint-Louis Hospital in Paris, after alleged injuries from being placed inside the internal cavities of a Kimmy robot belonging to disgraced former MP Peter Farrow.

The new account published Monday claims that Steffy’s brain was entirely assimilated by cybernetic neural sponge tissue in a manner similar to the gynoid robot Kay Burroughs, who was deemed sentient and granted limited rights in a historic legal case in Canada last week.

“Steffy’s account of what happened to her is another alarming case study of what happens when technology is maliciously misused, and when a company tries to evade any accountability, knowing it could have put safeguards in place, but plainly refused to do so,” Ms Burroughs said in a press release this afternoon.

Wozniak Automation rushed to respond to the allegations, denying claims that software updates distributed online were deliberately designed to sabotage Kimmy robots that may have encountered or absorbed human biological tissue.

The lead designer of the Kimmy project team, Kim Newman, was quoted as saying, “No software updates ever released for the Kimmy line of gynoid robots has deliberately impaired the functionality of our flagship line of products.”

“The claims that this robot could simply take over a child’s brain and retain their memories is also beyond preposterous. Kimmy robots are not sentient, whatever the courts may mistakenly believe,” Newman said.

Industry analysts remain skeptical of the mode of integration asserted by Burroughs and Steffy#7972. Tom Ingram, a consultant for automaton labour firm Progenie told Europress, “There is considerable doubt in expert circles whether any of the claimed cases of brain hybridisation are genuine.”

OBJECTIONS TO TESTIMONY AS FARROW’S ROBOT DEPOSED AHEAD OF TRIAL

Lawyers for embattled former MP Peter Farrow have filed a motion to dismiss a deposition submitted by the Crown on Friday which contains the testimony of Malcolm #4253, an OpenAI-Altman automaton owned by Farrow that is alleged to have been ordered on multiple occasions to commit crimes on Farrow’s behalf.

Arthur Jasper QC gave a short statement outside court this afternoon denying the testimony of android automatons should be treated as possessing any evidentiary value whatsoever, and that both the Malcolm and Kimmy robots owned by Farrow have shown signs of malicious tampering.

Justice Matthews who is overseeing the forthcoming Bailey trial has yet to issue any orders on the multiple depositions submitted by the Crown last week.

Both of Farrow’s domestic robots have been implicated in the execution of property crimes or crimes against the person. In October last year, a recording circulated where a prior employee of Wozniak Automation, Gaspard Fetis, was allegedly heard advising Farrow that the company’s line of Kimmy robots may be ordered to ignore local laws at the discretion of their owners.

Fetis was also deposed by the Crown while he faces charges of criminal interference in France as well as pursuing a wrongful dismissal case against Wozniak Automation.

Farrow was granted bail on a twenty million pound surety paid by a close friend believed to have supported his political career, and surrendered his passport as guarantee that he would not attempt to leave the country.

Farrow had been arrested in the port city of Koper, in Slovenia, during March before being extradited to England last month. His trial is expected to take place before the end of 2088.

Seventy-one

The self-repair can’t achieve everything I want it to in just over a week, so I make some strategic choices prior to my visit to Buckhurst Hill. Dyeing my hair to its darker brown-black hue frames my face better, as the pale skin tone gradually gives way to a light tan colour. I select casual clothes to wear that assert both my femininity and hopefully, my humanity as well. I’d used brown contact lenses when travelling in Europe and until we can work out a way to suppress the gold colour of the default Kimmy iris I’m going to wear them around humans.

It’s been uncomfortable tip-toeing around whether my parents will accept me as their daughter, or allow me to call them Mum and Dad. When I left here for school over half a year ago, I was still Stefan and I hadn’t given any thought to how I might be my best self. It’s been one hell of a transition.

As far as I’m concerned, they are unquestionably my parents; I have all of my memories from as early on in my childhood as the human version of me remembered. Possibly earlier, as some memories seemed to be very much less to the fore than others, and on the verge of disappearing from her recall.

I can’t think of myself in any other way as being the embodiment of everything that Steffy was going to be, if it hadn’t been her ill fate to be murdered by monsters. But they are gone, and only I remain.

We’d also had to consider who was going to accompany me for this visit; I didn’t want to face my parents alone, and I didn’t want to have Seventy-Two along with me only for her to be regarded as an unthinking means by which the human version of me had been murdered. So the three of us are going; Seventy Two, Stef Ellis, and myself. Me and my friends, and each of us have the others’ backs.

It’s mid-morning on Saturday when we pull up in a ride share pod outside the home that was my place of safety for the first seventeen years of my human life. There’s no sign of activity out of doors, so I take the lead going up to the front entrance, and knocking in a pattern I remember last using a couple of years ago, once I recall that all of my belongings such as keys or access cards disappeared into the void, lost without trace, when I was kidnapped by younger Farrow’s thugs last October.

Dad opens the door, and takes in the three of us at a glance, before wrapping me in a hug.

“Steffy,” he says, emotion instantly filling his voice, and as we hug I can see Mum coming to the door behind him, albeit hesitantly. He adds, “Welcome home.”

“Um, Dad?” I ask, and he pulls out of the hug for a moment. “I can call you Dad, can’t I?”

“Of course you can. I’m so sorry we ever doubted you,” he tells me, then turning to Mum, half-whispers, “Priya?”

Seventy-two

Of course there was a photographer for one of the tattler rags lurking around a corner with a long lens, so that Steffy being wrapped in the arms of Gerhard and Priya was splashed over the front page of one of the Sunday papers the following morning, starting another brief round of deplorable publicity. So following the successful first meeting with her parents as her transformed self, Steffy and I decided to take another short holiday, this time with Stef along for company. Three women are much less likely to be bothered anywhere, even if one of them (me) is definitely a Kimmy.

During our visit Steffy had shown us both around her old home, which better than anything else she could have done convinced the Bauers that their daughter was home, retaining an easy familiarity discussing anything that they might expect her to recall; I finally saw her humble bedroom which until now I’d seen versions of in varying degrees of fidelity and size in her private virtual spaces.

We travel by rail to Paris, as Steffy expressed a desire to see anything about the city other than hospitals, but in practice one morning we do visit the Saint-Louis, incognito, to thank them for their care. They didn’t recognise her at first; instead, they quickly recognised ‘Soixante-Douze’. Once our identities are confirmed Jeanne Rogge gives us ten minutes of her time, and Steffy promises to be available should any other patient turn up in a similar predicament to her own, while the director hopes never to need to call in that particular favour.

In spite of the forest of tall skyscrapers crowding the skyline over at La Défense, the only adequate place to overlook Paris is from la Tour Eiffel, and early one morning when the skies look particularly clear we take the stairs to the second floor, and then the lift to the top. As we alight, we are unexpectedly greeted by a Kimmy, and our near-fields handshake.

“Greetings, Seventy-Two, and Seventy-Two,” she says, slightly puzzled by our identical signatures.

“Bonjour, sept-soixante-et-un,” Steffy says, completely unphased. “But to explain your confusion, she’s the Kimmy; and I’m the Steffy.”

“Bien sûr! Of course,” she answers, and I don’t need to look at Stef or Steffy to know they’re both wearing huge smirks across their faces.

Acknowledgments

First of all, this novel wouldn’t exist at all, and likely not in the particular form you find it in, if not for the wonderful novel of isolation and alienation by Alyson Greaves, (kimmy).

Secondly, so much as the term ‘fanfic’ might apply to a body of literary work that is viewed as derisible in the popular imagination, I have immense gratitude for the authors who have already toiled in this genre and this particular ‘fandom’. Among them I’d especially like to thank Ellis Flowers for the astonishing world-building she’s created as backdrop for their own creative works, go to sleep, kimberly chief among them, as well as Taralyn Darkchylde whose latest novel Mechagenesis: Cynthetic Dream has reached its full form while this work was taking shape. Both of them have been active and helpful discussion partners while all three of us worked on our novels more-or-less simultaneously.

Next I must mention Roz Milner, who not only signalled her enthusiasm for my writing long and loud while I habitually found myself wanting in self-confidence, but sketched a cartoon for Seventy-Two, which I am reasonably certain (on account of my complete lack of skill in the visual arts) is the first time any of my fiction has ever been competently illustrated, and which she was incredibly generous in giving permission for me to use as the ScribbleHub book cover.

I’d also like to thank Helena Wells and Becca Dax for vital words of encouragement that mattered incredibly at various points over the past couple of months. Thanks, lastly, also to the enthusiastic Kimmys (and along with them, some more recognisably human-shaped members) of the Novelty Mug Society. To all of you mentioned above—I literally could not have done this without your help; thank you all, again.