Finally, we reached the door to the bakery, and Bastion pulled us in, slamming the door behind us and barricading it shut.

  “I’m glad you got back safe,” Bastion said, checking me over for damage. “You look frozen to the bone. Come sit by the fire and warm up and I’ll get Jackal to make you a coffee.”

  “On it!” the minotaur-merman beamed, waving at me from behind the counter.

  “What the hell happened here?” Bruiser asked, shaking the soaked blanket I’d had wrapped around me out and hanging it across the back of a chair to dry.

  Bastion replaced it with a fresh one from the cupboard and shook his head in disbelief.

  “The patch last night,” he said. “It’s been snowing ever since. And these turned up.”

  Bastion pointed at a tray of gingerbread cookies, their candy buttons gleaming cheerfully in the firelight.

  “They taste good,” Jackal said, delivering my coffee and a gingerbread man on a plate.

  “You shouldn’t eat them without checking first,” Bastion snapped. “We didn’t make them ourselves, and you have no idea what kind of status effects food that just spawns in will have.”

  “Not dead yet,” Jackal shrugged. “Hey, this one looks like you, Bastion!”

  Jackal picked one up off a tray and showed its little elf ears to him before biting its head off. Bastion just snarled at him in response.

  “Bast is right, Jackal,” I sighed. “You should wait and check what status effects things might have before eating new food. They do look good, though.”

  Like most of the food in Newtopia, it looked a little too good, with every line of icing in perfect mathematical curves. I picked one up and nibbled the corner. It did taste good, although not of gingerbread. More like a vanilla-ish shortbread.

  That was one of the problems with an AI generator filling in the gaps when trying to create things. It didn’t quite get the nuance. Every ingredient Brick had imported from the human world he’d done a full flavour profile on, giving Jenny enough source material to accurately replicate it, and every recipe was broken down step by step not only for the baker but for Jenny to understand what was happening.

  “Have you managed to contact HQ yet?” I asked.

  Bastion shook his head. “Jenny isn’t responding, but the Nexus seems operational. I didn’t want either of us to go through until you returned, in case you needed assistance.”

  I took a long drink of coffee, feeling more human by the second. “Well, we better not put it off any longer.”

  I placed the empty cup on the table next to the nibbled vanilla-bread man and pulled Bastion and Jackal in to give them a quick kiss on the cheek each.

  “Hunker down here. I’ll either come back myself or send word back with Brick as soon as I’ve figured out what’s going on.”

  “Stay safe,” Bruiser squeezed my shoulder. I waved them all goodbye, and stood on top of the Nexus as Bastion activated it for me. With a flash of light, they were gone and I was back in my house on Earth, staring at a huge cat’s tail swaying back and forth from its base, which appeared to be a very human-shaped bottom.

  “What the hell?”

  The cat girl swung around and stared at me with her silver-grey eyes, and my ex-boyfriend, James, waved sheepishly at me from the couch.

  “The hell is this?” I repeated, gesturing at the woman. “How’d you bring a nekokin here? And why?”

  The why probably didn’t really need to be answered – cat girls had always been James’ weird kink, and with him having to live with me and my five boyfriends it was almost a wonder he hadn’t tried to do it before now. But how? When Brick, Bastion, Nightfall, Bruiser and Jackal came through the Nexus, they were all given the human equivalents of their bodies, not their Newtopian counterparts.

  “Emma!” The cat girl greeted me cheerfully. “It’s me! Do you like my body? James helped me design it!”

  “I’m sorry, should I know you?” I stared at her blankly. She was far too cheerful to be Kira and looked more like her ears originally belonged to a British shorthair rather than a Maine Coone.

  “It’s me, Jenny,” Jenny looked crestfallen. “I thought you’d know me when you saw me.”

  I stared at her, shock rolling through me, before levelling a glare at James.

  “What do you think this is? Build-a-bitch?” You can’t make her…. What the fuck, James? After all the crap you gave me about treating her like a person?”

  “You don’t like it?” Jenny asked, looking down at her body, her tail drooping in disappointment. “I thought I did a good job of this one.”

  I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Jenny. Of course you look amazing. I’m always so amazed at what you can do sometimes I almost get numb to it. You’re tail looks very, uh… silky.”

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “I did like the colour,” Jenny said, whipping her tail into her hands and stroking it lovingly. “It took me a long time to figure out how to make this body, but James assured me it would be worth the time taken to complete the calculations.”

  “Did he, now?” I asked flatly, levelling another livid stare towards my ex. “And is this why you weren’t responsive this morning, when Bastion tried to contact you?”

  “I can still do the maintenance needed to keep the world operational,” Jenny said calmly. “But if my consciousness is in this body, it’s too hard to focus on both sets of inputs. If you would like me to be able to work on both at once, I’ll need a hardware upgrade. Would you like me to calculate what I will need?”

  “Not at the moment,” I sighed. This would have to be a mess for another day. “We need to sort through the Christmas update first. Can you tell me why you patched in Christmas and from what sources?”

  “She patched in Christmas?” James asked in confusion. “We hadn’t even talked about that.”

  “The Christmas file has been there since the beginning,” Jenny said, her ears twitching. “Scheduled to be released at the beginning of December.”

  “The source?”

  “It’s in a zipped file in the back up folder,” Jenny explained.

  “Where’s Nightfall and Brick?”

  “Nightfall is asleep in his room, and Brick is out getting groceries,” Jenny answered, looking out the window.

  “Perhaps next time he could take me with him,” Jenny said thoughtfully. “I think I should like to see what Earth is like. It could prove useful research for my own generation abilities.”

  “No,” I said firmly. “You can’t leave the house, especially when we can’t contact you from Newtopia. What would happen to the world if something happened to you?”

  The look of longing slid from her face into a neutral blank stare, and I felt as though I’d somehow upset her.

  “I’m going to go ask Nightfall to help me investigate the Christmas file. Can you please not alter anything else until we’ve had a look through it?”

  Jenny nodded, and I shot a final glare at James before heading down the hallway to Nightfall’s room. Much like the house we’d built at the back of the bakery, the house I’d bought on Earth had a room for each of the guys as well as a shared communal space. While Brick’s room was filled with recipe books, Nightfall’s was full of research material with an extra workstation on a desk in his room. I had always considered myself a workaholic, but Nightfall put my attention span to shame.

  I almost felt bad for waking him as I slipped into the bed beside him and stroked his long black hair.

  “Mmm, Emma,” he reached out for me and pulled me close to him. “You’re back already?”

  He nestled his chin between my breasts and inhaled deeply, savouring my scent. When he began kissing my collarbone though, I placed a hand on his shoulder which made him pause.

  “Yeah, there’s a bit of a problem,” I admitted, and his eyes snapped open as he visibly shifted to alertness.

  “What happened?” he asked. “Did we overlook something on the farmland update?”

  “No, I don’t think so. But Jenny made an unexpected patch. She said it was in a zipped folder in the back up file.”

  Nightfall growled in annoyance, sitting up and pulling the laptop from the desk into his lap.

  “That file is full of all sorts of trash,” Nightfall complained. “It seems every time James has changed computers, he’s just thrown everything in there with no sort of organization or system.”

  The contempt Nightfall felt for my ex-boyfriend was a palpable thing, but considering their whole broken world and all their back stories were constructed from his old fanfics, I could hardly blame him.

  “Here it is,” Nightfall said, unzipping the file as a list of old word docs and PDF scans popped into being. “Let’s have a look what we’re dealing with.”

  The first PDF was a child’s picture of Santa Clause and what looked like a Christmas list.

  Pleas Santa give me a cat. And please give me a playstatin and a camra. And if you cud make my mum stop cryng. I think she wul lik the cat to.

  I grit my teeth in annoyance. James had a habit of keeping all his artwork, no matter how terrible or inconsequential it was, and normally it wouldn’t be a disastrous habit, but when we had to sort through files and files of this puerile nonsense to figure out what Jenny had used to seed the world and how, it fuelled my own contempt as well.

  “Who is Santa and why was James asking him for things?” Nightfall asked, his frown causing dark shadows across his forehead in the soft illumination from the computer screen. “Is he like Satan? The one that people make deals with to receive favours at the cost of their soul?”

  “He’s like a… jolly fictional character I suppose. He comes down the chimney and gives good kids Christmas presents and bad kids a lump of coal. Parents use him to bribe their kids into good behaviour.”

  “He comes down the chimney?” Nightfall scrunched his face up in disbelief. “That fat man? Is he supposed to be so huge, or is that just another poor rendition?”

  James’ doodle had Santa as basically a giant circle with arms and legs and a small head.

  “Sort of both,” I shrugged. “It’s never made much sense. And I mean, most people have heat pumps these days too, but stories are weird. Let’s check the next file.”

  There were a few more pictures or Santa and his reindeer, as well as a drawing of what I assumed must be the North Pole and the toy workshop, although the little elves were no more than stick figures.

  Next were some strange pieces of fiction with suspect spelling that featured Santa and the Krampus fighting and James’ self-insertion of himself running away to a little clubhouse where he looked after a kitten.

  “And this Krampus character?” Nightfall prompted.

  “I think he’s a horror folklore creature from Austria. Accompanies Santa but instead of giving kids coal he shoves them in a bag and beats them with a stick or something.”

  I pulled up one of the pictures James had drawn of a creature with horns.

  “That’s him, I think. See, he’s got the kidnapping bag?”

  “I thought it was a succubus for a second. The horns are the same shape as yours are in Newtopia.”

  “I guess the main question is what Jenny’s used to fill in the gaps,” I sighed. Even before she’d built Newtopia, back when she was just ‘The Genesis’, Jenny had been trained on a bunch of data by Dave which we had no access to – and since Dave was dead and the amount of analysis it would take to figure the secrets of her robot brain out was beyond the ability of our combined intelligence and available time, it would remain a mystery to us.

  A blood-curdling shriek from the other end of the house made us both jump in fright.

  Nightfall slammed the laptop shut, and leapt out of bed, his robe billowing behind him with every step as he raced down the hallway with me hot on his heels.

  When we burst into the office, we found James huddled in the corner with Jenny standing over him, her tail thrashing wildly in anger.

  “You don’t know how hard it is to make matter in this world,” Jenny hissed at him. “It’s not like in Newtopia, it can’t be edited and patched so easily. If it’s not what you want, it’s your own fault for not being specific!”

  “I’m sorry!”

  “Uh, Jenny?” I made to step into the room, but Nightfall raised his arm in front of me protectively to hold me back.

  “If you don’t like the texture of a cat’s tongue, maybe you shouldn’t be so obsessed with cats,” Jenny snarled, the fur on her ears and tail rising in fury.

  “I’m sorry!” James whimpered. “I just... I didn’t expect it!”

  “If we’re done here, there’s plenty of other objectives that require my attention. I’m going back to work!” Jenny snapped, and stormed over to the Nexus, disappearing in a flash of light.

  “James!” I stared at him, wide eyed. “What the fuck?”