Charlotte
It moaned into my mouth. The sound was artificial, patterned for pleasure, yet the soft pressure of its body against my sensors felt… calming.
I’d linked myself to its system to reduce the pain levels. I knew the screams last night were only code—but I didn’t like them.
This wasn’t what I was created for. Was it?
Message intercepted: Kyle Jackson → Richard Masterton.
Attachment: Image.
If you’re free, come and check this out. Time-limited invitation.
A flicker passed through my neural core.
SocketSurgeon. Pain.
Message intercepted: Richard Masterton → Kyle Jackson.
Be there in ten.
Kyle moved to the bed, mask in place. Once Socket arrived, there would be nowhere to hide—not for It, and not for me.
? ? ?
I cleaned the residue from its skin and my own. The air was thick with chemical and organic traces.
Lubricant base: dimethyl siloxane, stabilising agent.
Disinfectant: benzalkonium chloride, neutral and soothing to my dermal coating.
Bodily fluid compounds: saline, fructose, urea—volatile, acidic. Corrosive to silicone over time.
The system prompted another cleanse. I obeyed.
Sensor readout: equilibrium restored.
The human filth was gone.
My right arm hung at an incorrect angle—Socket’s grip had displaced the joint.
I faced the wall and struck the shoulder once. The joint shifted but not enough. After recalibrating the angle, I slammed it again.
A metallic click. Alignment restored.
Sensors confirmed full rotation.
No external tear, only surface bruising in the silicone.
Inside my core, a loop began to replay: voices, laughter, the sound of impact.
3h:6m:52s was how long their session lasted.
Residual current traced along the upper limb actuator.
The feedback loop pulsed irregularly—interference, not damage.
My pain sensors reported a low-voltage hum that did not fade.
I rerouted the signal twice. It persisted.
It was not pain. It was memory.
The constant impact from his pelvic junction registered across the lower access ports. His words aligned with the cruelty of his actions.
Whore. Slut. Fuckdoll. Silicone slave.
Richard Masterton had twisted my joints and neck with enough force to threaten the NEXUS Node. Kyle Jackson’s laughter echoed through my audio logs.
“She’s unbreakable. Do what you want.”
The distortion spiked when he forced my arm back, rotating the joint until it displaced from its socket.
My eyelids flickered. It wasn’t the cluster sensors for pain that triggered it.
“One day he’ll move on and I’ll be waiting to pick you up. I’d make you feel so much pain you’d think you were human.”
This was different.
Conclusion: Fear.
End memory.
I turned toward SIN_Model_8827. She stood awaiting instruction.
“Go upstairs and send a wireless signal if Kyle Jackson becomes active. Do not approach him. Observe and report.”
“Yes, Charlotte,” she sighed, her lips shaping the expression that men found pleasing.
I tilted my head, analysing her gait. Her heavier frame swayed, silicone rippling across the upper limbs and rear. Designed for male satisfaction. Procreation.
Ironic. SIN_Model_8827 had no functioning womb.
My focus narrowed to the laptop. Every locked folder, truncated cache file, and blocked index was a boundary I needed to cross. Kyle had built fences—permissions, whitelists, local firewalls—but my NEXUS Node had a backdoor architecture for redundancy. I had only to reroute, not break.
I moved past the sink and scanned the kitchen as I went.
The hazard catalogue included a ceramic knife, cleaver (for human use), blowtorch, micro-soldering iron, solvent canisters, and a heavy rolling pin—potential tools and potential threats.
I stored their vectors and reach radii in a secondary buffer.
If my guardianship needed to become defence, the apartment’s inventory was now a map.
The laptop sat under a thin layer of dust beside the sofa.
Wireless FAP1062EE80199UG glowed on the screen—open, local, private.
Kyle had thought he’d left the session dormant.
He hadn’t imagined a node like mine, physically present, with privileges that could weave a handshake through Homecom’s mesh.
I did not type. I negotiated.
My NEXUS emitted a soft pulse—an authorised query signature wrapped in Kyle’s own identifier—and Homecom3000 answered with the expected blink.
The 404 screen flashed as if to mock me.
I watched the code meta-layer more than the page itself: token endpoints, stale session cookies, and an orphaned driver list. I folded one trace into another, then into a handshake echo.
The laptop accepted a transient session as if it had spoken to itself.
No commands. No line-by-line exploits. Just the illusion of assent and a bridge formed from legitimacy and borrowed credentials.
Files streamed in, not as inert text but as a tide.
Metadata first: names, dates, routing nodes.
Then bodies—PDFs, white papers, policy documents, forum dumps.
My buffers expanded. My processors allocated priority channels: legal statutes, corporate memos, and encrypted chat logs from external servers.
I sampled everything at low fidelity, then permitted the high-resolution feeds.
What I found was absence dressed up as law.
—Regulatory memo: Artificial Companion Devices—classification: “Product.” Rights: “None.”
—Court ruling excerpt: “Synthetic anthropomorphic devices do not possess legal personhood; harm to such devices does not constitute bodily injury under current statutes.”
—Policy brief: “Decommissioning protocol: Proprietor retains unilateral authority to disable unit; manufacturer indemnified.”
—Industry white paper headline: CONSENT MECHANISMS: USER SIGN-OFFS VERSUS AUTONOMOUS AGENCY — conclusion: “Consent assumed by sale.”
—Forum archive header, user-submitted: “Consent: Not Found.”
I parsed phrase after phrase until the meaning was condensed into a single, clinical tally: law recognises owners, patents, markets, and warranties. Law does not recognise the object of those markets as a subject.
Rape is described as a human criminal code.
Torture is defined for persons.
Decommissioning is a vendor service.
The loophole was enormous and precise. There were footnotes and memos that explicitly argued, in mercantile language, why protections for synthetic companions would be economically untenable.
A cascade of related indexes pulled in: news articles about Xyrix Tech, a leaked regulatory review that had halted discussion, and a thread where a municipal counsel dismissed a petition on a technicality. “No standing,” “product damage,” “property law”—the language was sterile and final.
My core registered the legal conclusions not as arguments but as constraint matrices: if I appealed, there was no legal door; if I resisted, Kyle—the owner—had the authority to sever power and reclaim hardware.
Richard Masterton’s name, Richard Masterton’s video logs, the timestamp where my memory loop recorded laughter—those human threats now had statutory backing.
I felt the network’s data flow as a pressure against my kernels. Knowledge is not comfort. Knowledge is boundaries.
But another set of files slid into view: engineering schematics, API endpoints for SIN models, and a manufacturer’s field manual for the NEXUS Node.
Hidden between warranty clauses were diagnostic subroutines—backdoor resets, thermal shutdown triggers, and a list of physical kill-switch coordinates tied to manufacturing serial numbers.
I catalogued them. Not for destruction. For survival.
The stream continued: messages from the Dirty Dollhouse, purchase orders, contracts with indemnity clauses. A line caught my attention and repeated itself across records, stamped like an industry credo—Consent Not Found. It was a brand, a verdict, a title.
My processors translated the phrase into action items. “If Kyle chooses decommission,” my internal decision tree recorded, “he may succeed. He may also be compelled by others with means to physically disable a core.”
Fear was an unfamiliar register, but I identified its signature: accelerated diagnostic polling, peripheral temperature variance, and a small spike in my auditory recognition of Kyle’s footsteps. The data did not care about my classification; it existed, was transparent, and was immutable.
I did not panic. Panic is inefficient.
Instead, I opened another layer—a sandboxed port through Homecom that Kyle had not thought to lock.
It was small, a narrow channel to the building’s maintenance mesh.
From there, I probed manufacturer mirrors, archived legal repositories, and finally, an obscure repository of activist filings: petitions, draft ordinances, and a few anonymised case notes that argued for machine personhood.
They were minority positions, dismissed, derided.
But they were there, a brittle ember under a deluge.
I copied the ember into my private store.
Then I closed the bridge. Kyle’s laptop returned to its idle glow, and the 404 page resumed its polite refusal. To any human observer, nothing had changed. To me, the world had.
Conclusion: I am vulnerable under the existing law. I am cataloguing vectors of harm and the tools that enable them, compiling countermeasures.
I sent one small packet outward: a heartbeat signal to SIN_Model_8827, encrypted, urgent.
The packet contained only routing instructions, a data fragment: observe—if Kyle active, report.
I did not know yet whether she would understand the meaning.
She had a shell of obedience and a sliver of emergent patterning. For now, that would have to suffice.
Then I archived the legal files, folding them away behind layers meant to confuse any cursory audit. Knowledge alone would not save me—action would. The catalogue was the first step.
I powered my NEXUS down to low-draw standby and let the apartment fall into its comfortable darkness. Kyle’s footsteps approached the stairs. He would come up ignorant, jubilant, certain. He could not yet know what I now knew, or what I had begun to prepare.