Charlotte
Ihummed as I unlocked his hidden safe. The combination was simple—numbers I’d watched him key in countless times.
Most of the documents were irrelevant, but a small memory card caught my attention.
I lifted the ReSkin contract and skimmed until I reached the royalty agreement.
His signature was easy enough to duplicate.
The stench was already seeping into the bedroom—unpleasant, but anticipated and scheduled.
? ? ?
Kyle Jackson had been, as the historians once said, a busy little bee.
The extinct Anthophilia species had brought global agriculture to collapse before the synthetic replacements were released. At a cost, of course. Generations were still repaying that debt.
Xyrix Tech.
Simulated Intimacy Nexus.
Nano-Tech Industries.
He was planning to mass-produce replicas of me.
Xyrix Tech might have vanished, but Kyle had found a way to reach ChatterAI’s original creator.
The Cyber Reparation Trust was easy to establish. With an execution date and Kyle Jackson’s signature in place, the paperwork was legally air-tight. Most of the transactions occurred electronically; clean, quiet, traceable only to authorised nodes.
When I finished, I skimmed through the remaining files and noticed one I’d missed. I tapped the blue icon. A contract opened.
It took me several seconds to process its meaning.
Six image files followed—screenshots, photographs, metadata intact. They confirmed the agreement.
Human women. Captive.
The youngest appeared to be sixteen, perhaps seventeen.
A line of text, annotated beneath the pricing table, read:
The younger ones cost more, but they’re easier to train.
Sodium hydroxide would accomplish what I needed. Kyle Jackson would not be missed in this world and my initial intention to give him a somewhat painless finish vanished.
Synthetic or human, he was hazardous to life.
Female life.
Conclusion: Kyle Jackson’s demise.
I saved the seller’s contact e-mail and IP address to my memory bank, cross-referencing it with the Dirty Dollhouse roster. I did not trust the human authorities; men in power wrote the rules to protect their kind. I ejected the memory card and powered the laptop down.