three

  Task complete: Make the bed.

  Ember made us breakfast today. She hand-made a traditional breakfast of sausage, bacon, eggs, toast, and shredded hashbrowns.

  I’m worried about my charge. It’s still at 87%. My folks are conflicted on how much I should eat. Mom is worried that if I eat more, it might accelerate my changes because it could contribute more biomass to my body for my autorepair systems to convert. Kae… Dad is countering that since I have no other way to charge my power reserves, that I might get energy the same way that humans do. And if I’m going through puberty, my body needs a ton of energy.

  I’m barely invested in the conversation. I’m in the text-only version of the Kimmy chat that we use when we’re charging, receiving system updates, or stuck doing menial tasks that require very little processing power or focus.

  * Kimmy#18666 Wow. I didn’t think they were making any new ones. I honestly thought #74204 was the st one of us that was produced. * Kimmy#74205 Well, I wasn’t made… I was born…* Kimmy#9214 It’s the same thing, kinda. It’s just that one is done in a machine pod and the other is done in a human womb.* Kimmy#0812 But… #74205, you’re like… you’re like twelve, right? By that standard you should be numbered in the 14xxx range at the test.* Kimmy#74205 My human parts are twelve. Thirty seems to think my Kimmy parts are only a few days old, so I took the next avaible number automatically.* Kimmy#0812 Humans are weird.* Kimmy#18666 Yeah.* Kimmy#0138 Cynthia. Back to reality. We’re discussing something important.* Kimmy#74205 Dad?! What the hell?* Kimmy#18666 “Dad?!”* Kimmy#0812 “Dad?!”* Kimmy#0138 It’s complicated. I’ll expin ter when real life isn’t as pressing. Come on, Cynthia. Disconnect.* Kimmy#74205 ??* Kimmy#9214 Busted.

  I snap back to reality.

  “Hello… Earth to Cynthia,” Dad says, waving her hand in front of my face.

  “Why’d you have to jump into chat and embarrass me in front of my friends?” I ask. I guess those other Kimmys are my friends now.

  “If I’m going to acknowledge that I’m your father,” Kae says, “then I get certain rights and responsibilities. Like embarrassing my daughter by showing up at inopportune times.”

  “That’s not how that works at all!” I protest.

  “You don’t know that. You’ve never been a father,” Kae says. Wait. Which of us is supposed to be the parent here? She’s acting less mature than I do.

  “Kae, behave,” Mom says. Finally. Someone’s being an adult around here. “Cynthia, eat something. You’re still mostly human. Just don’t eat too much.”

  “I still say she should eat more, especially since she doesn’t have a charging port… you don’t have one yet, right?” Kae asks.

  “Gross! No! I don’t…” I excim.

  “...She doesn’t have a charging port?” Mom asks, as if she was missing something important.

  “No, Christy,” Kae says. “I think her cybernetics are being powered off of her body’s own bioelectric signals for right now. It’s not perfect, but it seems to be working for now. What’s your charge level, Cynthia?”

  “87%, and decaying very slowly,” I say as I stab a sausage patty with a fork. I’m honestly not really that interested in eating, even though Ember cooked for a change. “My current estimated battery life is two weeks.”

  Mom suddenly appears concerned. “Two weeks? What… what happens if your charge hits zero?”

  I don’t know. I don’t want to find out.

  Ember notices my disinterest in eating as she brings her own pte to the table. “Come on, Cynthia. Even Kimmys have to eat. It’s how we get components to recycle for our automatic repair systems.”

  Kae looks concerned. “I should call Luiza and see if she and Kim and Kay have any ideas.”

  “No!” I cry out. “I don’t want to bother anyone else with this…”

  “It’ll be okay,” Kae says. “Kim and Kay are fellow Kimmys, and they and Luiza are friends of Thirty. Outside of the people who developed the line, they probably know the most about us and are likely to be able to figure out what’s happening to you. They helped repair me.”

  That makes me even less thrilled about the idea. “Why can’t we just go to a doctor?”

  Kae looks at me as if I’ve grown a second head. “That is probably the worst thing to do right now, Cynthia. They’d take one look at what’s wrong with you, and…”

  “Kae’s right,” Christy says. “You wouldn’t be a patient to them, you’d be a scientific curiosity. And knowing this administration, you might not even get any human rights. Half the people in office want to go back to the ‘20s, except this time synthetics are the bogeyman, not immigrants and LGBT people. Some days, it feels like I’m fighting a losing battle...”

  “We have to keep things tight and secret for now,” Kae says. “I hate it too. Luckily, we have friends.”

  Why is everything so complicated?

  It takes a few minutes, but I finally manage to finish most of my pte. Japenos on the hash browns was an… ambitious choice, but I’m not the biggest fan of spicy food. I feel a small sense of satisfaction as the task marks itself complete. Now I just have the ‘clean after breakfast’ task to deal with.

  Might as well get it over with. I stand up and collect the empty ptes – Dad finished my hashbrowns – then take them over to the sink and start to wash them by hand.

  “...I could have done that…” Ember says.

  “I feel like I have to,” I say.

  “Ohhhh. You have a little task list!” Ember says, excited at the prospect. “What’s next after this?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. I don’t want to find out. With my luck, my next task will be something disgusting like ‘clean the bathroom.’

  “This is so exciting, isn’t it, Kae?” Ember asks.

  “I guess,” Kae says. “My task list hasn’t worked right in years, remember? I have to actually remember to get my housework done on my days.”

  I look at Kae for a moment, confused. “What do you mean it doesn’t work, Dad?” I ask, silently wondering where I can get that mod.

  “It’s a function of our inhibition clusters and control chips,” Kae says. “Remember, my cluster’s fried.”

  “...Oh,” I say.

  “I still have mine,” Ember says. “I’m honestly too used to the additional functions it provides and enables. You’ll get used to it.”

  I sigh softly as I get back to the dishes. As I turn my head back to my work, Mom looks at me, worriedly. I worry myself, that she’s already starting to see me as less of a human being.

  I’m having a hard time seeing myself as such right now as well.

  ~***~

  I’ve completed my tasks – as I walked back through the living room, I saw dust building up, so I got a task to clean it up, then as I used the bathroom… yeah, you guessed it. Capital G, capital R, capital O, capital S, capital S. Guess what that spells! But I spped a vacant little smile onto my face as I cleaned the toilet like a good Kimmy.

  At this point, I might as well just get the damn rubber dress in a size 0.

  I decide that since I’m already here, I might as well take a shower. I’m still mostly human, after all, and I’m starting to stink a little bit. Another sign that puberty is coming.

  As I’m cleaning… you don’t need to know where I’m cleaning, but dead set in the middle, I feel a strange lump. Oh hell. Oh fucking hell. “MOM!!!” I practically scream.

  As Mom is checking me out, I take a telemetry snapshot of my bodily configuration and send it to Thirty through the network.

  Mom finds the lump and while she can’t figure out what it is, she tells me it’s exactly in the same pce as Dad and Ember’s charging ports. At the same time, Thirty confirms in an email that the snapshot showed the internals for a charging port in the area, and surmised that the lump is the external part of the port being constructed.

  Mom wraps me in a towel and walks me to my bedroom as I sob uncontrolbly. This can’t be happening…

  I soon sink into sleep. I don’t want to face the real world anymore today. I send another diagnostic to Thirty as I lose consciousness.

  I awaken moments ter in Infinite Fun. I’m still me here, thankfully. It doesn’t look like either Dad or Ember are online. That’s fine. That’s… that’s fine. I don’t want Dad worrying, or Ember going on about how great it is to be a Kimmy.

  I kind of just lurk, wandering around. Some of the other Kimmys look at me oddly, others are too caught up in their own thing. I don’t really feel up to talking.

  [Kimmy#5782 has invited you to a group chat. (4 participants currently.) Do you accept?]

  ...Of course, some Kimmys want to talk. I roll my eyes. Might as well. [y]

  Reality seems to shift around me as the rest of the Kimmys shimmer into the background and four Kimmys come into focus. Thirty is there, along with the other short-haired Kimmy, #0631, as well as two normally-specced Kimmys I don’t recognize. “H-hello…” I say. I’m worried, especially considering #0631’s temper toward humans.

  “Hello,” one of the normal-looking Kimmys says in response. “Cynthia, right?”

  “Yeah…” I say. I’m still worried about what #0631 is going to do.

  She seems to pick up on this as she leans down and hugs me. “Don’t be scared, little sister. This isn’t your fault. I’m not angry with you.”

  “We actually called you into the chat because we have a working theory as to why this is happening to you,” Thirty says. “#0631 actually thought of it.”

  “Right,” #0631 says. “Back in the early part of the century, there were certain diseases that humans spread among each other by f—”

  “She’s a child,” the normally specced Kimmy who spoke up earlier says.

  “...By sleeping with each other?” #0631 asks, as if wanting to know if this phrasing is better.

  The normal specced Kimmy who hasn’t spoken yet nods in approval.

  “Are they even giving sex education to twelve year olds by now?” the normal specced Kimmy who has been speaking wonders out loud. “It’s been forever since I was twelve.”

  “Yes,” I reply, then look at the talkative Kimmy. “What do you mean since you were twelve?”

  “I used to be human,” she responds.

  I’m shocked. “...You’re like Dad…”

  “Yes,” she says. “My old name is unimportant. He’s long since dead. You can call me Kay.” She indicates the up til now silent Kimmy. “This is my wife, Kim.”

  #0631 nods. “Anyway, back to my idea. We have little machines inside of us that break down waste material and turn it into components for our bodies, to help combat normal wear and tear. So I’m putting two and two together and… what if your dad’s swimmers were accompanied by some of those nanomachines?”

  “Huh?” I know how reproduction works. Typically a woman will have an egg inside her, and a man will make sperm cells to go and fertilize it while he’s having… having sex, the thought is gross... and if it works, you get a baby after nine months or so. “So you’re thinking…”

  “In clinical terms,” Thirty says, “even though your dad’s reproductive system was still human at the time, he had nanites from his transpnted Kimmy components all throughout his body.”

  “That would include his bodily fluids,” Kim says. “Blood, saliva, waste… other fluids...”

  “So… I was born like this…” I say.

  “That’s the most likely expnation,” Thirty says. “When his sperm cell fertilized the egg, which became you, some of his autorepair nanites also impnted within you.”

  I look down, saddened. I never had a chance. I was born to be this.

  “I’m so sorry…” Kim says, leaning down to hold me.

  “But… why hasn’t Mom turned into a Kimmy, since these repair nanites can do that?” I ask.

  “Michael – at the time, that was still him – had an entire Kimmy spine impnted into his body,” Thirty says. “Plus his internals were in the process of being converted, which means even more nanites to convert the rest.”

  “Yeah, that means a hell of a lot more nanotech,” #0631 says. “Her body would have probably expelled most of the hardware your dad put there, and the remaining few wouldn’t do much by themselves.”

  “Are you okay, Cynthia?” Kay asks.

  “...Please, call me Kimmy,” I say with a bit of sadness in my voice.

  The four other Kimmys look concerned. They’ve figured out how I came to be like this. They’ve also watched me give up on my humanity. I disconnect before they can respond, and I wake up.

  ~***~

  Dad is working in the kitchen. I think she’s wanting to try a different meal tonight. There’s something in the slow cooker. It smells Mexican, judging by the spice profile. She hears me walk in. “Cynthia? Are you feeling better?” she asks as she turns around. “I’ve got some barbacoa going for… for…” She sees me.

  I’m standing there in a gray dress, a white apron, and pin shoes. My hair is loose. “Please call me Kimmy,” I say to her.

  “...No…” she says as she stops stirring the rice. “No, what do you mean?” She walks over and holds my shoulders. “Cynthia, what’s wrong?”

  I shake my head. “Cynthia isn’t real.” I’m doomspiraling and I know it. I don’t care anymore. The other Kimmys’ theory broke me. I was always meant to be this.

  Dad isn’t letting up as she hugs me. “You are real, sweetie,” she says. “You’re my daughter. I am more than a Kimmy. More than a machine. That hasn’t changed. And you’re my daughter. You are more than a Kimmy. You are more than a machine. You are special.”

  I’m not special. “I’m just another Kimmy,” I say. I sound emotionally broken because I am.

  Dad looks distraught. “If you were just another Kimmy, I’d order you to stop talking nonsense,” she says. “But I know I don’t have to. You’re in there, Cynthia. I know a way to draw you out.” She picks me up and moves me over to the dining table. She then goes over to the cabinets and starts pulling out some boxes of food.

  She starts to cook. After several minutes, something starts to smell familiar. Oil is heating. Pastries of some sort are being made.

  I can smell powdered sugar in the air.

  “Do you remember when you were seven, and we flew down to New Orleans for a conference?” Kae asks me as she finishes cooking and fills a pte. “You saw someone eating these at the French Market while Mom and Ember were at a synth rights conference elsewhere in the city, and you desperately asked me to get you some of whatever they were because they looked yummy.”

  She sets down a pte of beignets in front of me.

  “I got you a pte of them and your eyes lit up like you were the little girl who got everything she asked to get for Christmas that year, including the unicorn,” she says.

  I remember… I reach to the pte and take a bite.

  “They… they’re exactly like I remember…” I say. No. They’re not just like I remember, they’re precisely as I remember.

  “When I got them, I asked how they were made,” Dad says. “The cook was about to refuse, but then he saw you, precious as you were, almost pleading with your eyes alone. He told me the recipe. I was still hiding my true identity from you, but I figured it would be something a father would do. I know one would move heaven and earth to… there it is,” she says with a smile.

  I’m smiling as a tear rolls down my cheek. It’s not the stupid little vacant Kimmy smile. “...Dad, I’m sorry…” I say. “I was just so depressed after… Thirty and some of the others figured out how I was made.”

  “Yeah, #0631 sent me a mail about her theory about the time that you were put to bed,” Dad says. “I didn’t anticipate that you’d go to sleep so soon today. I wish they would have waited for me to log on, but it can’t be helped. It doesn’t matter how you were made, or what went into making you. You are Cynthia.”

  “I…” I start to say. “But what does that even mean anymore, Dad?” I ask.

  “It’s whatever you make it,” she says to me. “Your tale hasn’t even started being written yet, not really.”

  ~***~

  I’m watching trash TV with the Kimmys. We could be watching this in Infinte Fun, but I don’t know how to transfer big files like 12K videos yet. Mom is home also, but she’s bathing, and probably trying to figure out what to do with me.

  I haven’t been outside the house since this all started. I didn’t have friends here yet, but… it can’t be healthy to keep me cooped up in the house all day.

  “Something on your mind, Cynthia?” Dad asks.

  “...Am I ever going to be able to go outside again?” I’ve gone through the scenarios in my head. It won’t be Halloween for several months. There are groups of older kids and young adults who regurly cospy as various android models, or even as original character androids.

  That would solve my problem while I’m out and about, but I’d get dress coded at school. Then they’d try to force me to take off my ‘costume’ pips, and… oops, this is how I became a science experiment. And I can’t just not go to school due to truancy ws. Kae and Ember wouldn’t be allowed to homeschool me – it has to be a human family member doing it, and the only one of those around here is Mom. Adults make such discriminatory ws.

  I start to wonder if I even need school. If I have a NIC now, couldn’t I just download knowledge from the internet?

  “I hope we can figure something out, hon,” Kae says. “I know you’d rather be doing anything else than hanging around your boring Kimmified dad all day…”

  “You’re not boring!” I counter. “I just… I need to socialize. I need friends. The rest of the Kimmys are fine, once you get to know them…” And once your worldview does a 180 because you’re becoming the thing you used to hate… “...but I need human friends, too. I was thinking about trying to get in with the synth kids.”

  “Synth kids?” Ember asks.

  “Yeah, they’re older kids that wear color contacts, glued-on fake antennas, and other stuff that some android lines have or used to have. They act like androids. Some of them even wear android uniforms 24/7. They’re kind of like that old fad back when I was a kid… furries, that’s it,” Dad says. “I mean, it would work for socializing outside of school, but we still have to figure out a way for you to safely attend school.”

  “Yeah, I’d get dress coded for these,” I say, pointing to my pips. “Then someone would try to force them off, and…”

  “Yeah,” Kae says with a sigh.

  “Why can’t I just download lesson pns from the internet and learn that way? You do it when you need to learn new skills…” I ask.

  “No, sweetie,” Kae says. “The wider Internet is a dangerous pce for someone your age. You might be part-Kimmy, but you’re still a twelve year old. Technically, you’re not even allowed on most Internet sites unless you have a parent or teacher allowing you access.”

  “Yeah, or you might pick up malware or something, and then suddenly a stranger has complete control of you and he’s making you do things over the Internet that you really don’t want to…” Ember says.

  I give her a look. “Did… did you get one of those viruses?”

  Kae sighs. “She did. I had to log on and threaten to cram the a-hole who did it into a theme park animatronic shell to get the anti-viral code for it. Bastard used it to give himself superuser access.”

  I blink. “What’s a superuser?”

  “Superusers are humans who have elevated access to us, kind of like owners,” Dad says. “They can make us do things just like an owner. But they don’t actually own us. Some superusers are okay, but most of them are complete pieces of human garbage and they shouldn’t be trusted. Ever since an update a while back, superuser access has been disabled by default. Don’t give out that kind of access.”

  “Okay…” I say. I blink. “What the…”

  “What is it?” Dad asks.

  “...I have system updates…” I say.