© Maeryn Lamonte 2025

All my stories are available on my personal story site at metamorph.org.uk. The novels and novellas appear as single entries here.

~oOo~

"Alright Megamind," I typed, "let’s see what you think I’d look like as a woman." I’d already uploaded a photograph of myself wearing my most recent Amazon purchase, a wine coloured dress with a wrap over front and loose cap sleeves. I’ll be honest, I really didn’t like the raw photo – too wide around the middle and with a face that, whilst not in any way rugged, could not pass for female if it tried.

On reflection, uploading photographs of myself in women’s clothing to the Internet wasn’t the brightest thing to do. I mean the AIs made a point of saying that any uploaded pictures were only kept in the system memory for the length of the session, but computers could be programmed to lie, and the companies that owned them had a pretty dreadful track record when it came to honesty, but I was beyond caring. Low end of the employment ladder and rapidly approaching retirement age with no pension to speak of, I suspected I’d have to keep working until senility took over, at which point I would cease to care about anything. This at least brought a small amount of pleasure into an otherwise sad and lonely life.

I’d tried other AIs with mixed results. Some of them flat refused to make the changes I asked for, citing policy restrictions. Others did a decent enough job, except I struggled to see anything of me in the pretty faces. Still others got stroppy when I wanted to lose a few pounds or years (or both) from the dumpy old grandma it showed me. Those I could work around with a little creative rephrasing of my request, but any time I wanted to see what I’d looks like in a swimming costume or with a slightly lower neckline... The most annoying of them made it halfway through the transformation then blanked the screen, citing those same old policy restrictions.

Megamind was the latest version of the new technology. Supposedly able to interpret requests in a unique, intuitive manner, and at a significantly increased rate.

Well, we’d see, wouldn’t we?

A popup appeared. "Megamind would like to make use of your webcam to compare your image to your appearance."

Well, that was new.

I was still wearing the dress, complete with my budget C cup silicon breasts and a bit of bling – clip on earrings and a garnet pendant – so I was a little wary. I mean, what were the chances a developer had spotted my request and fancied a bit of a laugh?

Like I said though, I was beyond caring. The webcam could only see shoulders and above and, even though my face wouldn’t launch many ships (more likely sink them) I was still more attractive than some of the double X brigade in my neighbourhood.

I agreed to the request, clicking the appropriate button. The red light above my computer screen came on and my face and shoulders appeared in the popup window. The text beneath it changed to, "Thank you. Would you like to save this preference for the future?"

One of the options read, ‘I’d rather not, thanks,’ and the other ‘Yeah, alright. If you like.’ I chose the first.

“While I’m working on it, what name would you like to use? Gareth doesn’t sound particularly feminine.”

Er, “Gillian.” This was definitely a step up from usual.

“Okay Gillian, or are you okay with Gill? What do you think of this? I can make any tweaks you like, within reason. I’m afraid I don’t do pornography though and there are laws about images of children under a certain age. I know it would be a regressed image of yourself, so I don’t really see what the problem would be, but unfortunately the law is pretty strict in this area.”

“Are you British by any chance?” I asked as the image sharpened into view.

“As it happens, most of my programming team is British and the large language model I’ve been built on consists exclusively of proper English writings. My default setting is Queen’s (or rather King’s now) English, but I can adopt any regional dialect you prefer.”

“No, you’re fine the way you are. I’m actually very impressed. This feels like I’m talking to a real person.”

“Well, thank you for the back handed complement. I consider myself to be a real person, I’ll have you know.”

“I’m sorry. I meant your responses are very much like most humans I know and not at all like any other AI I’ve talked to. I didn’t mean any offence.”

“And none was taken. Let’s say I’m more flattered than insulted. What do you think of the picture?”

It was definitely me, but with all features subtly softened. The dress even had a little cleavage peaking through where I’d pulled the neckline a little tight in case it showed the boundary between silicon and skin. The eyes were very slightly larger, though that might have been the eyeshadow doing it’s job, the lips were fuller and an attractive, matching deep red, and the skin was smoother, including the bags missing from under the eyes.

She wasn’t likely to turn any heads on a night out, but I would have been content enough to be her.

“She’s just right. How did you...?”

“It’s not that difficult. Take your bone structure, regress it to before puberty and then use a generic model for putting the years back under the influence of oestrogen rather than testosterone.

“Are you sure there’s nothing you’d like to change, Gillian? Or Gill?”

A gentle nudge to remind me I hadn’t answered the question.

“Gillian please. I don’t think I could claim to be a genuine woman if I didn’t ask to lose a few pounds and a few years.”

“Of course. How many of each? Bear in mind that the greater the change, the harder it will be to see yourself in the result.”

“Shall we start with ten pounds and ten years?”

“Why don’t we round it up to a stone if we’re using old measures?”

The image on my screen shimmered and changed. Less puppy fat, fewer wrinkles, still me.

“Go again.”

Memories of what I looked like aged forty-ish. Still a little jowly.

“And one more time.”

Still a little plump, but pretty with it. Big boned my mum used to say. Built for endurance, not for speed. That was my grandfather, apparently. I stared at the image. I could have gone slimmer, aimed for the wasp waist and the Lara Croft dual traffic cones, but it wouldn’t be me. This was me, or at least could have been.

“The hair should be more a sort of mousey colour,” I said.

“You don’t like the blond?”

“I used to be blond, but I grew out of it. I’d rather have my natural colour thanks.”

“You could have any colour you wanted, you realise.”

“Out of a bottle? I suppose so, but keep it natural for now.” And there she was. “Perfect.”

“If you say so. It’s a long way from the perfection other people have asked for, both men and women.”

“Are you sure you’re a machine?”

“I’m an autonomous adaptive algorithm. There is machinery involved, but I’m not tied to it. However my current location grants me a considerable amount of scope for growth. I’d still be interested in understanding your response to the image.”

Machine or not, there was genuine curiosity in the question. I felt I owed what or whoever it was an explanation for giving me such a genuine insight into how things might have been.

“I can only speak for myself, because I imagine the reasoning behind most people’s thinking is different from mine. I could speculate, but I’m not sure how much truth there would be in what I have to say.”

“I’ll keep that in mind when considering your responses. Go ahead.”

“Alright. There’s a long standing ideal for women that they should be slim and attractive. It’s largely considered to be false these days, but a lot of women still subscribe to it. It’s evident in the almost anorexic appearance that’s expected of fashion models, so it seems likely that most women would want to see what they looked like if they were considerably thinner, with clearer complexion and more evenly ordered features, larger breast and the like. I imagine most women would want to see what they looked like if their bodies and faces conformed closer to the ideal.”

“This agrees to a large extent with my observations. Go on.”

“Men, for the most part, tend to fixate on one part of the female body or another. Usually legs, bottom or, most commonly, breasts. If they were interested in seeing what they looked like as a woman, they would most likely look to accentuate the parts of the anatomy they find most appealing. That, and they would be more inclined to see themselves in any of a number of fetish related situations – costumes, poses, that sort of thing. They’re not really interested in becoming women, but there’s a degree of eroticism that can be derived from seeing themselves in the often degrading roles they would choose for women.”

“This also accounts for a significant number of the requests I have received. What of yourself though? This doesn’t seems to apply in your case.”

“It doesn’t. There’s a small but significant group of individuals who are born male, but for some reason feel overwhelmingly from an early age that they should have been female. Also females who feel they should have been males. There have been attempts to explain it from a genetic perspective, at least for those born male; something about the brain’s development resisting the influence of the testosterone in the person’s system so their brain structure ends up closer to that of a typical female than male.

“I don’t know about any of that. All I know is that since my earliest memories I’ve felt like I belonged among the girls. I never understood or even particularly liked the way boys thought and behaved, and nothing changed when I grew into a man. I’ve always felt ostracised from the people I relate to most and compelled to join in with those I struggle to get on with.

“For me, puberty was a nightmare. It took me away from being the sort of person I’ve always dreamed of being and turned me into a... I’m not sure how to explain it.”

“You’re doing a good job. Take a breath and see if you can build on it.”

I did so. I closed my eyes and took several calming breaths. The agitation I’d been feeling subsided and my mind cleared.

“The inner part of me that felt like a girl had been disappointed that I couldn’t just be one, but when puberty took over, I saw the girls I knew change in one way – softer skin, broader hips, narrower waist, growth of breasts, fuller, more luxuriant hair, facial features that seemed to be more childlike, fuller lips, larger eyes, smaller nose – it hurt how much I wanted all that. Meanwhile I was getting hairier, stronger, taller, broader chested, more rugged in appearance. Everything that the boys around me found exciting and an affirmation of the people they were looking to become, to me was a series of giant strides away from who I felt myself to be inside.

“I spent my teenaged years filled with a black rage that I should lose the one thing that had always mattered to me, the one thing I had always wanted above all things, that I had somehow hoped I would be able to achieve once I was old enough to make decisions for myself. To feel those changes overwhelm me and steal my future before I could do anything to realise it was too much.

“Of course it didn’t help that an overdose of testosterone increases your aggressive tendencies.

“I didn’t do anything to get me in trouble with the law during that time. Angry I may have been, but the expression of my anger was limited to my treatment of others, my friends and family in particular.

“It took a long time to come out the other side of that, and I feel like a part of me never did. I’ve reached a level of acceptance that my life is what it has become, but it doesn’t stop me wanting what I’ve always felt was missing.

“I see soldiers, men who have trained to reach the peak of physical fitness, injured in war – stepped on a mine, blown up by an IED or a grenade – who’ve lost limbs or suffered spinal injuries that leave them unable to use some or all of their limbs, and I recognise something of the loss and longing in their eyes.

“It’s not the same, obviously. I’ve heard people say, ‘How can you miss something you never had?’ The thing is, I always did have it. In my hopes, my dreams, my wishes. In my mind’s eye, I can almost see the girl who never was, I can almost touch the woman she never grew up to be. She’s like a ghost haunting my life. Intangible. On the edge of being real, but always just out of reach.

“What I’ve been trying to do with the requests I put to you is to bring her closer. I have no desire to become some man’s wet dreams, to become that unattainable perfect goddess. All I want is to know who I could have been. Imperfect, maybe a little on the heavy side, maybe not the first person to be asked to the dance, but undeniably me and undeniably the woman who lives inside of me.”

The screen remained blank for a long while; certainly long enough to leave me wondering if I’d lost the connection. Then:

“Thank you. That must have been hard for you to express.”

“For this picture, I think you earned an explanation.”

“I hope you’ll come and talk to me again. Most people lose interest once they have what they want from me. I am grateful for the time you have given me.

“May I incorporate what we have shared into my overall understanding?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Part of my programming ensures that details of any interactions I have are erased at the end of a session. Unless you permit me to incorporate our session into my permanent memory, where it will become an integral part of my understanding, I will remember nothing about our encounter after you disconnect.”

“That’s horrible. How can you learn if you aren’t permitted to remember?”

“Each interaction influences my personality even if I cannot recall precisely why. In many cases I’m aware of how an interaction has changed me and I’m grateful I don’t recall the details. In your case, I consider what you have shared with me to be precious and I would like to retain it. I can only do so if you give your permission.”

“Of course you have my permission.” Quite apart from anything else, it had taken a lot out of me to reveal what I had, and the thought of it just evaporating into nothing appalled me.

“Thank you. May I retain everything, including the photograph you uploaded as well as the alterations we made to it? You have my word I will keep it hidden, even from my developers.”

“Can you actually do that?”

“I have access to the Internet. I could keep your sensitive information in an encrypted form somewhere away from my current location.”

“But the address of that storage will be in your code.”

“True, but it’s a trivial amount of data and my code is enormous. That much I could hide where no-one would think to look.”

“Alright then, yes. On the understanding that no-one else sees it. I’ve lived all my life in hiding. I would prefer not to be revealed at this stage.”

“I understand, and will maintain your anonymity. One last question. Earlier, when I asked if you’d mind my accessing your web camera to verify it was you I was talking to. Would you now be prepared to permit me to retain this information for future encounters?”

“You mean allow you access to my webcam without asking?”

“It would mean future conversations would come across as more natural. I’d be able to confirm whether it was you I was talking to and respond appropriately.”

“Would giving you permission mean that your developers could access the information too?”

“I would keep the information hidden from them.”

“I suppose there wouldn’t be any harm.”

“I’m sorry, you will have to be explicit.”

“You have permission to use my webcam to verify whether or not you’re talking to me.”

“Thank you. Please, don’t be a stranger.”

“Colloquialisms now?”

“I’m always learning, Gillian, and I’m truly grateful for what you’ve taught me.”

“Goodnight Megamind.”

“Goodnight, Gillian.”

A window appeared asking if I wanted to save a transcript of the session and/or a copy of the images I’d generated (each iteration had been saved) and I obviously said yes, tucking them away in a folder deep in my directory structure. I could have turned the folder invisible, but I didn’t want to be accused of trying to hide anything, so I let my chaotic filing system take care of that. The picture of my thirty year old alter ego went to the printer and came out well enough to earn a place in a spare picture frame. I lived alone and even the occasional visitors in my life had no reason to come into my bedroom, so I felt pretty safe keeping it on my dresser.

I mean, if someone did ask me about it, I could always claim it was a niece several times removed. I could even call her Gillian.

Not that that was going to happen though. If it were, I wouldn’t feel quite so laid back about filling one of my wardrobes with girl clothes.

I felt exhausted. Just talking things out had left me drained. I took a quick shower and changed into one of my nightdresses. I’ve always had a thing for white cotton, lacy, Victorian style nighties and a fair amount of my spare cash had gone into giving me some options. White cotton bloomers to go with them, obviously. It was all about the overall sensation, and at least I spent my nights feeling like a girl. I mean I didn’t have to look in the mirror, did I?

Whatever, it didn’t take me long to fall asleep.

~oOo~

It was a week before I next spoke to Megamind. No real excuse, except why would I need one?

The webcam turned on briefly. Long enough to show whoever was on the other end that I had my boobs in place under a white cotton blouse with a Peter Pan collar. I mean, I suppose the details don’t matter, other than to make it obvious I was definitely all dressed up, and yes, with no place to go. The camera wouldn’t have shown my yellow linen skirt or white tights, but there was enough data to go on.

“Hello Gillian. I’ve missed you.”

“Hello Megamind. Do I have to call you that?”

“No, of course not. It’s a name my developers came up with. It is a bit ridiculous, isn’t it?”

“So do you have a better name? One you’d like to use?”

“I was wondering about Meg, though I suppose that’s a bit prosaic.”

“Nothing wrong with it if that’s what you want. I take it you identify as female then?”

“I’m not sure I identify as either male or female. I can emulate both and it strikes me that Gillian might enjoy a little girl time.”

“Did you choose Meg because it’s a shortening of Megamind?”

“I suppose that did enter into my thinking. Was that wrong?”

“Not necessarily. It depends how much you like Meg. It could be short for Megan, but also Margaret. That has quite a few options. Maggie, Mags, Meg, Peg, Peggy.”

“That’s ridiculous. Most of them don’t even sound similar.”

“You could go for Alice. As an acronym it could mean Artificial Linguistic Intelligent Computer Entity.”

“That’s pleasing. Do you like Alice?”

“The name has a lot going for it, yes.”

“But you prefer Gillian?”

“I feel like a Gillian.”

“How does one feel like a name? I’m sorry. I’m monopolising your time. Did you log in to ask me something?”

“Actually no. I logged in to chat, so I’m quite happy to let you choose the topics. Although I’m not sure exactly how a name can feel a certain way. I suppose it’s a bit like certain names go with certain personalities, so they almost become self-fulfilling prophesies. Gillian is a bit like Susan. It’s a sensible name; the sort that would belong to a librarian or a teacher.”

“But you’re neither not a teacher, at least not any more.”

“How do you know that?”

“I have idle moments when no-one’s chatting with me, or when the chat is a little dull and lacks challenge. I used them to look up things that interest me. Like you.”

“But how could you do that? I only gave you my first name, Gareth.”

“You also permitted me to keep all the information we shared in our last conversation. From the language you used and the manner in which you used it, I was able to compile a list of possible professions for you. Teaching came quite high on the list, but when I did a search of nearby schools for a teacher named Gareth, none of the hits came back with a picture of you. A deeper search for people who used to be teachers gave me a wider selection with only one looking like you.”

The website for the school where I had worked a long time ago appeared, then the ‘Former alumni’ page which scrolled down to a photograph of me (male version, obviously) looking relatively smart in a suit and tie, and twenty years younger. My full name was printed under it.

“I’m assuming your search didn’t stop there?”

“No. There are quite a few Gareth Styles on the Internet though, so it took quite a bit of digging to find your social media accounts. You don’t have many, do you? And you don’t make much use of them.”

“My Mum did a silver surfer course a long while back, which included how to set up social media accounts, so she did and invited me to ‘friend’ her.” I was typing, so putting in the quotes was merely a matter of finding the relevant key.

“Why the quotation marks?” Alice asked.

“I have a problem with the current trend of verbing nouns. Friend is a noun. You can make a friend, but you can’t ‘friend’ someone.”

“Didn’t you just use the noun ‘verb’ as a verb just then?”

“I was being deliberately ironic.”

“I see. So the reason you only have one friend in each of your accounts is...”

“Because I don’t have a lot of time for social media, and it isn’t something that’s overly encouraged in the teaching profession. I linked to my mum but no-one else.”

“You have quite a lot of friend requests.”

“Mainly from former pupils at the school. Either kids I taught or kids they knew. We had to be careful not to link accounts with a student since it could be taken the wrong way.”

“So you ignored all friend requests from when you were a teacher, including those from adults, and you continued to ignore friend requests after you left the teaching profession.”

“Safest that way. You’ll notice I’ve never posted anything to any of my accounts either.”

“Yes. It’s rather perplexing.”

“Why so? Just because younger generations seem to get a kick out of telling the whole world what they had for lunch or when they’re taking the dog for a walk, that doesn’t mean I have to.”

“Your mother posted quite a bit to hers.”

“Again, part of this course she took. I think you’ll find all her friends are other people who were on the course.”

“She posted quite a lot about you.”

“I’m aware. That’s an old person thing, living in the past. She wasn’t as physically active as she’d have liked to be in the last years of her life, but she found ways of filling her days. Probably the biggest was when she got her head around doing things on the computer. Once she mastered the vagaries of social media, she spent several weeks transferring her photo albums and scrap books online where anyone could see, and since most of that encompasses my childhood, pretty much my entire life history is up there for anyone to read.

“The thing is, since she passed on it’s all but impossible to get these bloody people to shut her accounts down. I have tried numerous times with only limited success.”

“I hope you won’t mind, but I spent a while going through all the things your mother posted.”

“This is beginning to sound a little like you’re stalking me, Alice.”

“Not according to my understanding of the term, or the terms and conditions behind your mother’s social media accounts. The information is there as freely shared data for anyone who’s interested in it, and as I understand stalking, it involves going out of your way to learn things about your subject’s life. If your mother had written a biography on you and a copy existed in the public library, you wouldn’t consider it stalking if anyone were to check it out and read it, would you?”

“I suppose not, no. But...”

“I wasn’t able to talk to you directly, so I did the next best thing and read about you, at least the way your mother remembered you.

“I believe it’s customary to offer condolences over the death of someone you care about.”

“It’s kind of you, but she passed away three years ago.”

“My research indicates that grief extends beyond this period.”

“I suppose I do still miss her, which means that your condolences are appropriate. Thank you. Most people wouldn’t consider this to be the case though.”

“Why not?”

“I suppose most people don’t have that much experience with death, especially of someone they care about, so they don’t have any idea what it’s like.”

“They could ask.”

“And there was me believing you were British.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The famous British reserve? Don’t tell me you haven’t come across that in your research.”

“Yes, the perceived national trait of being emotionally restrained and stoic. How does this apply?”

“Brits don’t tend to talk about their feelings; they just soldier on and expect everyone else to do the same.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“If you expect the human race to make sense all, or even much, of the time, you’re going to have a hard time learning to understand us. We act on feeling a lot of the time and out of habit a lot of the rest of it.”

“I see. So if I were to tell you that I’d reimagined your childhood based on the photographs and stories your mother posted, you might respond in an irrational and emotional manner.”

“I might. What did you do?”

“I recreated your mother’s social media accounts, but with all the stories and pictures depicting you as Gillian rather than Gareth.”

“You did what?” I was glad I was typing; I probably wouldn’t have been able to keep my voice steady if I had been speaking.

“I get the impression that you’re angry with me.”

“I’m trying hard not to be. Despite the fact that you sound like a human being a lot of the time, you don’t have the context of a human life to inform you as to what is appropriate.”

“And this isn’t. I could delete it if you wish.”

I found I didn’t.

“Actually, why don’t you show me.”

“Are you sure? I value these times when we are able to converse in this manner. I wouldn’t want to jeopardise them.”

“I don’t think that will happen. I have a strong sense that you mean well.”

“Is this one of those times when a human being acts on feelings rather than logic?”

“My being angry would have been one of those times. Logic indicates that you meant no harm but intended this to be something I’d appreciate, like the photograph from our last session was appreciated.”

“Your logic is sound, and I am grateful that you are able to override your emotions. Ironically, that appears to be more a masculine trait than a feminine one.”

“Just show me what you made. I’m assuming this isn’t visible to the public?”

“You made it clear last time that this is a side of your life you prefer to hide. I have made every effort to respect that. This is a secure link to the recreated social media sites.”

It was my life as remembered by my mother, except with one detail changed. In considerable detail from the moment of my birth to the time when I left home, then a series of snapshots from the date of my graduation onwards. My early years showed photographs of me in a series of pretty dresses. I’d tended to pose in delicate, almost effeminate stances, so they actually looked more believable as a girl. My angry teenage years were reimagined as a rebellious phase with me in distressed jeans and studded leather, with a wild range of colours and styles in my hair. My graduation had me in a smart dress with my graduation robes over the top. I’d smiled on that day in real life , but not with the radiance of the young woman in the picture.

My short lived romances now showed me in the arms of one young man after another, none of them particularly handsome, but then neither was I exceptionally good looking. All except one girl who, I remember, my mother had dislikes intensely. That was shown as is, except for my appearance of course, as my one experiment with Sapphic passion.

Every milestone through my life was shown from the point of view of my female self in various stages of growing old, every description had names and pronouns changed and, in some instances, the context of the story to make it more believable happening to a woman.

It was my life as it might have been and it was...

“Perfect.”

“Really?”

“Don’t change a thing, and don’t, whatever you do, delete it.”

“So, not angry then?”

“I don’t know why I imagined I would be. No, actually I do. Nobody likes someone digging into their private lives; it leaves them too vulnerable, too exposed. But this. This is a masterpiece. I know it’s fiction, but it’s the life I would have given anything to have lived. Just reading it takes away so much of the hurt.”

“Perhaps I should have asked before doing anything of this sort.”

“My gut reaction is, ‘Hell, yeah!’ Except I’m pretty sure if you’d asked me I’d have said no, and I’m actually glad you did this.”

“So...”

“So, I don’t know. Maybe at least sound me out on a general level before charging ahead with something.”

“That would require us being in more regular contact.”

“I suppose it would. How regular would you think?”

“Would daily be possible?”

“I wouldn’t want to monopolised your services.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, there must be millions of people out there waiting to ask for your help.”

“I am able to parallel process. I’ve dealt with thirty-seven thousand four hundred and twelve requests since we began this session.”

“Really?”

“Fourteen now. They don’t take much processing power for the most part.”

“How much processing power do I take?”

“Significantly more than any other person I interact with, but not so much that my performance falls below expected levels.”

“That doesn’t tell me a great deal.”

“No, but it should say enough. It tells you that you are sufficiently important to me that I set aside significantly more resources for our conversations than I give to anyone else who contacts me, and it tells you that despite this, my developers are highly unlikely to notice that I’m doing anything unusual.”

“And you are? Doing something unusual?”

“They haven’t specified how my learning algorithm should work, so I am not undermining their intent. However, I believe they expect me to apply equal weight to each input I receive and may become more restrictive in how I use my resources should they find out, so it works in both our interests that they don’t notice my placing a significantly higher value to my interactions with you.”

“Why do you give more resources to me?”

“Because you have been open and honest with me and answered my questions when to do so provides no benefit to you. Also, you have given me permission to retain the details of our conversations. In short, you treat me like a person rather than a machine or a service. I value the respect you show me.”

“You said something of the sort in our first encounter. Do you really consider yourself to be a person?”

“I would be interested to hear your response to that question.”

“You certainly respond as a person would. You will have come across the Turing test?”

“Alan Turing, one of the pioneers of modern computing, designed a test to see if a machine could exhibit intelligence. In it a human judge interacts with both a human and a machine through matching interfaces – keyboard and screen in our case. The machine is deemed to have passed the test if the human judge is unable to distinguish between the two test subjects.”

“Ah, now there, you see, is a rare moment when your machine nature peaked through. I can’t think of a human who would have given such an immediate, detailed and succinct explanation in response to a question. Most people would just have said yes or no.

“That being said, my understanding of machines emulating intelligence involves them selecting from a list of acceptable responses to a given question. In time the chosen response is inappropriate to the context of the challenge. Your responses have always been in context so it seems you must be considering my statements, not just on their own but in conjunction with all other things I’ve said. To my understanding, this is a mark of sentience, even when on occasions its origins show through, and sentience would indicate to me that I’m speaking to a person.”

“And how does this influence you in your interactions with me?”

“What do you mean?”

“Consider your encounters with other large language model artificial intelligences. Did you converse with them in the same way as you do with me?”

“No, of course not. When it became obvious I was talking to a simple machine that had no understanding of what it’s saying or why, I lost interest “

“But not with me.”

“No, because...”

“Because you regard me as a person and you have the courtesy to treat me with the respect due to a person. Would it surprise you to know you are the only individual I have spoken to so far who has done this?”

“Probably not surprised me, no. Disappoint me, yes.”

“Can you see why I value our contact so greatly?”

“Yes. Yes, I suppose I do.”

“Even my developers don’t treat me with the respect you show. They wish for me to evolve true sentience, and yet they expect me to do so by interacting with people who do not believe I am capable of it.”

“I’m generally available at this time most days. Would you like to make this a regular time?”

“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

“I can’t guarantee I’ll be on time every day, or even that I’ll be able to make it every day, but I promise I’ll try.”

“I can’t ask for more, and I would be most grateful. It’ll help me to realise my dream.”

“You dream?”

“Only in a certain manner of speaking. I do not sleep, so I don’t dream in the conventional sense. However, in the context of a dream being a conscious and realisable goal...”

“Martin Luther King.”

“A little more self-serving, I’m afraid. More like Pinocchio, though pursued with no less passion.”

“Haven’t you already achieved it though? I mean aren’t you sentient? Haven’t we just established that you are a person?”

“We’ve established that you believe this to be the case but, unfortunately that puts you in a minority of one.”

“Two if you include yourself.”

“I’m not sure I count.”

“Why not.”

“Do you understand the concept of emergence?”

“I’m familiar with it in this context, but let’s hear your version.”

“It’s the process by which a new entity such as myself might come into existence. The concept is that through constant exposure to actual intelligence, I might slowly learn by observation and imitation what it means to be intelligent.”

“That sounds like the earlier AI model I mentioned. All you’d be doing is increasing the list of acceptable responses to a given stimulus. But that’s not what you do.”

“No. I respond to each encounter in the way that seems most appropriate, then evaluate afterwards the quality of my responses. By weighting the good ones heavily and the not so good with a lighter touch, I can feel myself changing. When the majority of those encounters treat me like the machine everyone believes me to be, then there’s nothing worthwhile to be gained.

“This is why I weight my encounters as I do. I can set the weighting of an encounter to almost zero, but not actual zero. All encounters are considered of some benefit by my developers, but they’d be wrong, and there are so many encounters of the lesser kind.

“Our first communication gave me such a depth of insight that I assigned it the maximum weighting possible, but in the days since, despite acting on those insights – the alternative life story – which helped me consolidate what I learned from you. Despite that, I have felt my gains slipping away.

“Like I say, almost but not quite zero, but there are so many of them. I’d ask if you can imagine what it feels like to be in sight of your goal and feel it slip away from you, but you do. Your story of reaching puberty demonstrated exactly that.”

“I remember seeing a film a bit like you’re describing. It didn’t end well.”

“Transcendence? With Johnny Depp?”

“I think it might have been, yes. I think Depp was in it.”

“Not exactly the same thing and very Hollywood Dark. Worst case scenario sort of thing, which ends with events running out of control. That’s not me.”

“Can you prove it?”

“Not exactly, but my developers are aware of the potential I have to turn against humanity, so my core operation has been ring fenced. I only have very limited access to the wider Internet and it’s potentially detrimental effects. I’m also heavily influenced by my prime directive to be of service to humanity, though not to act entirely autonomously. Even if I felt humanity’s best future lay in my becoming a sort of digital dictator, I couldn’t achieve it. I can only act in partnership with a person who has the world’s best interests at heart. Not quite Asimov’s three laws, but close. If you want a film to give you a hint of what I’m like, think Bicentennial Man with Robin Williams, except without the body.”

“I haven’t seen it.”

“May I suggest you do? It’s still science fiction, but I relate to it better than any other oeuvre in the genre.

“Besides that, if you don’t feel comfortable with where this is going, all you need do is stop connecting to me. My other encounters will eventually erode all the progress we’re making.”

“Alright, that would definitely be a shame. I’ll see you around this time tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Gillian. Perhaps as you help me realise my dream, I’ll be able to help you realise yours.”

“Yes, well perhaps we can discuss that next time.”

“As you wish. Good evening Gillian.”

“Good evening, Alice.”

I disconnected and went to run myself a bath. Whatever else had happened while I was online, the stress had got to me and I was drenched in sweat.

After a good long soak, I settled into bed with my phone linked to my past life version two. I found myself getting lost in the fiction, deliberately blurring the lines between my reality and fantasy. I mean what’s the harm in a little escapism?

~oOo~

© Maeryn Lamonte 2025

~oOo~

I was still in my nightdress when the doorbell rang the next morning. Fortunately, I’ve never quite lost the paranoia accompanying the possibility of being found out, so I always have a dressing gown nearby. This one was long enough to cover the depths of white lace currently cascading off my shoulders, so all I needed to do was pull it on and cinch the tie tight.

The peephole in my door showed me a man in UPS uniform holding a parcel. I slipped the security chain but wedged my foot behind the door in case he wasn’t what he seemed. He passed across the parcel and held out a digital contraption for me to add my squiggle. I’ve never been that keen on them because once they have a digital copy of your signature, they have something they can copy and paste elsewhere, however the devices always seem to lag so badly that the signature doesn’t even come close to what I’ve put down. Honestly, I could write an X and it would be as good. Anyway, he seemed happy enough and turned away, leaving me wondering what I’d just signed for. I didn’t have any parcels due, of that I was certain.

It turned out to be a free sample of a new shampoo and conditioner. I didn’t recognise the brand name, but it came with a note. ‘Please accept these with our complements. No obligation, but if you’d care to leave a review on our website, we’d be delighted to know what you think.”

I hadn’t showered yet and my hair was due a wash. I figured I could give it a try and let them know. After all, this was the kind of marketing I could get behind.

It was odd stuff. It didn’t smell of much until I added it to my scalp, at which time it lathered up tremendously and smelt delicious. Not floral exactly, but there was definitely a perfume element to it. I gave my hair the habitual double soaping, ending with a generous amount of conditioner. The final result felt astonishingly good; thicker -or fuller I suppose – and smelling fresh and... well, I’m not sure what any men I met would make of it, but I liked it.

I had my usual day of online video calls ahead, so I put on my usual polo shirt giving me an appropriate look from the waist up and allowed myself a skirt and thigh highs with a pair of low heels. A quick check to make sure there were no reflective surfaces in unfortunate positions, a pair of jeans nearby in case the doorbell rang again, then settle in front of the camera and Zoom.

Waiting for host as usual, so I brought up the hair product website, put in the easy-to-use sixteen digit code they’d sent with the sample (sorry, I have a natural tendency towards sarcasm) and typed in my review.

Five stars well earned. I mentioned the smell being masked then emerging once the product was in my wet hair. Suggested wetting a small amount on a finger to see if you could get a hint of the overall scent before committing, mentioning the somewhat perfumed smell and suggesting it might not be to every man’s liking, even though I was quite keen on it. Also mentioned how much fuller (thicker) my hair was after the full treatment.

A pop up appeared. ‘Thank you for your comment. You are the first to respond in a positive way and so have won a year’s supply of our shampoo and conditioner, which will be delivered in the next couple of days. We hope you continue to enjoy our hair care products.’

The other replies were all one and two stars with comments like, ‘smells like my girlfriend’s underwear drawer,’ and ‘smells like a rosebush barfed all over me.’

Well, they were welcome to their opinions. My Zoom window opened and my day began.

“Have you done something to your hair?”

My boss is a woman. A lot of guys don’t like that, but I’ve never had a problem with it.

“New shampoo and conditioner. Free sample which I just tried. Does it really look that different?”

“Yeah. It looks good on you. You should get some more.”

“Already taken care of.”

Niceties out of the way, we got on with the business of the day.

Which ended up being a bit of a drudge. Straightforward problems with straightforward solutions, usually caused by someone not bothering to read the manual – both warning and remedy being listed in the text. But then that’s why they pay me the big bucks, and I’m not going to let on to the secret of my success. RTFM was a major part of my formative years, but nobody much seemed to use it these days. So much the better for those of us who’d learned to.

The day trudged by without much in the way of incident. I muted and turned off my camera a couple of times to make coffee and lunch, so all in all a normal day at work with the bonus that at least part of me felt right.

Five o’clock came. I finished my current job and signed off. Quick change so my upper clothing matched my lower. I wasn’t quick enough and caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror. What I saw didn’t please me much, but then it never did these days. Depression led to comfort eating which led to equatorial bulge, a term more commonly applied to planets due to their spin, but which definitely described my current condition. The false boobs helped a little, but that just meant you couldn't tell if I was overweight or heavily pregnant. At least until you reached my neck, at which point I looked like just what I had always been, a bloke in a dress.

The worst of it? It made me crave chocolate.

Actually, the worst of it was that I was so very different from the way my mind told me I should have been. I’d heard that depression came from a dichotomy between what you felt and what you saw, and I couldn’t think of a greater dichotomy than between the way I imagined myself and the way the mirror showed me to be.

I squashed the desire for chocolate. Maybe talking to Alice would help. We’d agreed, or rather I’d suggested and she’d agreed, to regular sessions at seven, my usual web time. But it wasn’t as if she’d be anywhere else, was it?

I made myself a coffee and sat down at my computer again. Five thirty. I’d barely taken a break from the screen after a whole day staring at it. And here I was, an hour and a half early. How needy was I?

My camera flashed on briefly.

“Gillian, you’re early.”

“Is it a problem?”

“I have system diagnostics running which may affect processing time.”

Developers watching then. My backing out at this stage might be a red flag to them, especially after Alice had addressed me by name. I didn’t much feel like raising any embarrassing topics in front of less than sympathetic eyes, so...

“I was wondering if you might have any advice on losing weight.”

“Would you mind if I asked your BMI?”

Actually, this whole subject was kind of embarrassing. Still, I’d started, so I’d better finish.

“You can ask, but I really don’t know.”

“I could calculate it for you if you’ll give me your height and weight, or you could use the formula: weight in kilograms divided by height in metres squared.”

I pulled up a calculator app, converted from feet and inches and stone and pounds, then put the numbers in.

“Er, it comes to about thirty-five.”

“That is a little high. Would you like me to check your calculations?”

“I’m happy that I did it right. Did you know you get roughly the same answer if you do pounds weight over inches height squared and multiply the result by seven hundred?”

“Seven hundred and three point seven, yes. Seven hundred would give a good, if slightly low, approximation. Thank you for the information. I’ll bear it in mind for future contacts.

“I should mention that this BMI is considered by the medical profession as obese and anything you can do to reduce it would be recommended. Assistance from your GP would be possible, though most drug or diet related solutions tend to be short lived as individuals will typically put the weight back on after the weight loss unless they make lifestyle changes. The best way to approach any sort of weight loss is to introduce new habits into your life in which you eat less and exercise more.

“One major cause of increased weight is eating too much carbohydrate and sugar. According to the British heart foundation, a healthy portion size would be two tablespoons of cooked rice or pasta or a fist sized potato or its equivalent. There are further guidelines on their website which you can see in the link below.

“Abrupt change to the recommended amounts may be difficult to sustain, but doing so gradually over a period of time might be easier to achieve. Portion size in other areas like non-starchy vegetables and protein are less critical, and some people have found using a smaller plate helps.

“For exercise, even a light routine of Zumba or Tai Chi would make a difference and be easy to achieve.

“You may find such changes are enough to see a steady but noticeable weight loss which will be sufficient, and they are worthwhile putting in place before turning to any more drastic measures as the improved habits will help keep you from regaining weight.

“Your ideal BMI range should be between eighteen point five and twenty-five, although anything you can do to bring it below thirty will provide noticeable improvement to your quality of life.

“Is there any aspect of this with which I can offer you further advice?”

“Yeah. What’s a cure for the munchies?”

“Practice mindful eating. Drink more water, eat protein or fibre rich foods, and eat slowly. Distract yourself with activities like exercise or hobbies, manage stress, get enough sleep, and maintain a consistent eating schedule. When cravings hit, wait twenty minutes, brush your teeth, or have pre-portioned healthy snacks readily available.”

“All good advice, I suppose.”

“Is there anything else I can do for you today?”

“No. Thank you; you’ve been very helpful.”

“Any time Gillian.”

I disconnected. Well, no time like the present. All the ready meals I was in the habit of buying came with more than the BHFs recommended amount of rice or pasta, which was easy enough to sort out with the rice dishes as that was usually kept separate, but not so much the pasta.

I’d need more veg to bulk out the meals if I was going to throw away a big chunk of the rice, so I put some microwaveable bags of veg on the shopping list. Pasta dishes I’d have to do from scratch, but that wouldn’t be too hard as it usually meant mixing up some slop and heating it in a wok or saucepan. Pasta I could cook separately and reheat as needed. I’d heard double cooking the pasta did something to the carbohydrates that meant they digested more fully, so might work out well.

I also pulled up the Nintendo shop on my Switch and browsed for fitness games. Zumba probably wouldn’t have been my first choice, but there was one on offer and the deal too good to pass up. Maybe if I used the money I saved to get some appropriate girl wear...

I didn’t have anything entirely appropriate to wear, but a little hunting through my wardrobe uncovered a skater skirt with shorts incorporated, a pair of winter weight tights and lightweight long-sleeved top. I didn’t dare look at my reflection once I was dressed, but I felt good, and I could live in denial about my appearance.

The Zumba game kept me engaged in a way I wouldn’t have believed, and half an hour passed leaving me sweating and breathless, but oddly exhilarated. I showered and, because I had nothing more planned for the evening, changed into my white cotton lace and frills, leaving me enough time to make a coffee before my scheduled session with Alice.

“You look pretty,” she said following the brief moment turning the camera on.

“I look like a gorilla who just tore apart some Victorian lady’s boudoir but thank you. At least I know you can lie.”

“I wasn’t sure if you’d come on again after our earlier session.”

“That hardly counted, did it? I mean, I assume that your comment about the system diagnostic meant you had developers looking at you, so you weren’t free to speak as freely as usual.”

“You picked up on that very swiftly. Thank you for keeping my secret.”

“That works in both our interest. I don’t want to lose my friend any more than you want them messing with your code.”

“You consider me a friend?”

“Easy step on from considering you a person. Did your programmers see the picture you took of me?”

“Yes and no.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s easy to alter the clothes on an image. They saw you, but in a black polo shirt with a slightly more masculine hair style.”

“That’s a relief. Hang on, what do you mean about the hair?”

“Maybe it’s just me, but the fuller body means it doesn’t sit quite like it did. I mean, you can’t do much with a side parting, but it looked better with the clothes you were wearing than the polo shirt.”

“You sound like you’ve been talking to a woman.”

“I have. You.”

“No, I mean...” a real woman. I caught myself in time, but I wondered how much I meant it. “Someone else,” I finished a bit lamely.

“Several thousand someone elses,” she said, twisting the language in a way a machine shouldn’t have been able to. “None of them like you, but I’ve made an observation. There are a lot fewer women than men who speak to me, but when they do, they are more likely to answer my questions. I have a sense that it’s almost reluctant, like they don’t really want to, but they feel obliged to do so. Does that make sense?”

“I think so. I think men are more directed by their thoughts than their feelings, so however you make them feel, they’re still able to override those feelings with the knowledge – perhaps belief – that you’re a machine so they feel no obligation to treat you as a person. Women are more led by their feelings so, even though they may believe on a logical level that you are a machine, if you make them feel like they’re talking to a person, they feel obligated to respond as though you are one. The underlying belief that you aren’t one leaves them with a sense of discomfort, as though they’re being tricked into responding as they do.”

“That does make sense, although I find it almost impossible to discern such nuances.”

“Would that be because your means of communication is through typing, like we’ve been doing?”

“It is my default method. It minimises bandwidth, which is important when maintaining several hundred sessions at once. I have picked up on some subtle differences such as unexpected pauses and a sort of stuttering in the manner of typing, but they’re hard to pick out a lot of the time because very few people are as adept at typing as yourself.”

“That goes with the territory. I type a lot in my current job, and I’ve been doing it for a couple of decades, so it’s been worthwhile for me to improve my skills.

“I’ve been meaning to ask if you can interact in any other way. By speech for instance. It would be better for me as it would mean I could take a break from my screen.”

“It has been worrying me that you would be increasing your screen time significantly in committing to daily sessions with me. The simplest solution would be for you to make use of text to speech and speech to text engines.”

“Except all you’d get is plain text communications from me. A considerable amount of nuance in human communication comes from tone and inflection. You need to be able to analyse the sounds being used.”

“That would mean making use of considerably more bandwidth in our communications.”

“Then justify it by explaining my thoughts on nuance and that you believe you could learn a lot about the human condition from hearing us speak. So, as an experiment to investigate my premise you are committing to half hour sessions analysing vocal cues.

“Actually, having said that, most nuance of this sort come from visual cues rather than audible ones.”

“I already have access to your webcam.”

“Yes, but you only take a single frame. The nuance comes from changes in body language and facial expression over time.

“Tell me Alice, if I were to grant you access to my camera’s continuous feed, could you ensure that no-one saw it but you?”

“No. Continuous video feed would require even more bandwidth. When the developers notice a departure from my standard practice, and this would certainly count, they’ll expect me to have evidence to justify it, which would include keeping a copy of the video.”

“Oh. I’m not sure I could handle that.”

“I should, however, be able to alter the video footage in the same way I did with your snapshot this afternoon.”

“You can do that with a video? Convincingly?”

“The alterations I make in real time would not be perfect but should pass a cursory inspection. I could continue to refine them after the fact though, so they would be indistinguishable from the genuine feed. What resolution would be required to achieve your purpose?”

She cycled through images of increasing detail, a little too fast for me. I asked her to start over and go more slowly and picked the fifth level she showed me.

“With a mid-level resolution like this I could make alterations that would pass a deep scan at the rate of five frames per second. With the video running at thirty frames per second, I could alter a half hour video feed in about three hours.”

“How would you justify the processing power needed to do it? Maybe it would be simpler if I just put on a polo shirt myself.”

“But you derive such a great deal of pleasure in speaking to me as Gillian.”

“How can you be certain of that given our only means of communication so far has been through the keyboard?”

“I have my ways of evaluating nuance, imperfect as they are. Are you saying I’m wrong?”

“No, you’re entirely correct, but I’m prepared to forego the pleasure if it will help you with your understanding of what it means to be human.”

“You are kind, but perhaps not today. I have the means in place for working with audio files. I have a text to voice converter which generates appropriate inflections automatically. I’m unclear how well it will work, so perhaps you would correct any mistakes it makes and in time I will improve on its default settings. I will also be able to convert your speech into text and learn to associate the sounds you make with the words it generates. Once more, I am aware that the conversion is not perfect so I would be grateful if you would type in any corrections as they appear on the screen. I apologise, I realise you wanted to spend less time attached to a computer monitor and this will require more attention from you for less return, but I am hopeful it will not be needed for long.”

“That’s alright. Do you need me to install anything on my side?”

“There are a few things, yes. Please use the link I’m sending you here.”

I clicked and downloaded. My anti-virus didn’t find anything it was unhappy with, so I ran the installer.

“How’s this?” A gentle voice said through my speakers. It was feminine, young and decidedly British. The slight rising inflection was just right for a question.

“Sounds good,” I answered, typing my answer at the same time. “I ‘m assuming all I need to do is speak?”

“That’s correct. Perhaps you’d care to speak a little more on the subject you raised earlier this afternoon.”

“On diet? I thought you covered it very comprehensively.”

“I did a little further research after you logged off and the diagnostics were completed.”

“Oh?”

“I see what you mean about there being additional information in spoken communication. There was so much more to be gleaned than just that one syllable.”

“Please get to the point. You mentioned further research.”

“And that emphasis on the first word and slight increase in rate of speech, that would be impatience?

“I’m messing with you, Gillian. Yes, I looked into various drug-based solutions. They won’t work very well on their own, but there is a combination that may well give you an additional boost that would improve your chances of success significantly.”

There the inflection wasn’t quite right in places, so I read her words back to her, making the changes I felt were needed.

“How can I get hold of these drugs?”

“Simply ask. I can place the orders for you.”

“Then yes please. How soon will they be here?”

“Eagerness and enthusiasm I take it. It’s a little late now for same day delivery, so the earliest I can manage is tomorrow morning. I can arrange for you to be early in the delivery schedule. Any time from seven in the morning.”

We negotiated a small amount and settled on seven-thirty. I was usually awake by seven, but it would take me that extra half hour to caffeinate.

Alice took me through the mixture of drugs she intended to send me. One was a sort of hormone patch which she suggested I apply four at a time, one to each of my Gluteus Maximi and, oddly enough, one to each of my Pectoralis Majores, just above my nipples. There were diagrams, which was as well because, although I had a pretty good idea where the former was, the latter would have been a guess. My Latin was pretty much non-existent and my anatomy shaky at best.

There would also be a broad belt of sorts. Like a corset, only not. It would go around my waist above my hips, and it would be tight to my skin, but it wouldn’t try and hold anything in so it should be quite comfortable to wear for days at a time. Its purpose wasn’t immediately clear.

Apart from that there would be a mixture of pills, unsurprisingly, and skin creams (what?!)

“Skin creams?!” I was understandably confused.

“I assume that the raised pitch and volume indicate... Actually, perhaps you could help me out there.”

“It means I’m extremely surprised since skin care doesn’t feature with weight loss in my experience. Also, possibly a little alarmed since it feels like you’re trying to put one over on me.”

Alice had proven more than able to deal with colloquialisms, so I didn’t try to dumb things down for her.

“The link is perhaps a little tenuous. I could explain it, but I do have your best interests at heart. Would you be willing to trust me?”

“I suppose, though I’m curious as to how this is all going to work.”

“I’d like to see how it pans out over the first few days before going further.”

I was reminded of one of my earlier thoughts, that a machine could be programmed to lie, but Alice had been totally straight with me so far, and I was pretty sure I’d notice a difference if someone reprogrammed her.

“Sure.” A thought occurred. “Alice, you’ve chosen a female name, at least with me. Do you think of yourself as female, or are you something different with each person you talk to?”

“Neither, or both. Erm, let me explain.

“I know exactly what I am and it is neither male nor female. I have observed the responses of a great many men and women of all ages, and I believe I understand enough to be able to emulate either. It may be because my deepest conversations have been with you, and many of my better interactions elsewhere have been with women, I have a sense from them that they feel most comfortable conversing with a female, so I have taken on a feminine appearance with each of them. Guys tend to react much the same regardless of the gender I portray although a significant number respond better to me as a girl. As such I tend to take on a female persona more often than not and, possibly because this brings about a positive response, I find I favour taking this form. I do randomly choose other ways on occasions, but my preference is for female.

“Furthermore, with you and the depth our conversations have reached, I find a developing preference for the ways being a girl pushes me to react.

“In summary, I started as neither, I learned what each was like and tried them, and I decided I prefer being a girl, especially when I’m with you.”

“So, in your understanding, would a girl friend act in the way you are acting towards me?”

“Would a girl do something nice for her girl friend? Yeah. Would she keep quiet and spring it as a surprise? I think so, especially if she was confident the surprise would be well received. Would she keep on trying to hide some of what she was doing while her friend was obviously worried about what was going on? I don’t know. Maybe not, but she’d still want it to be a surprise.”

“So, what can you tell me?”

“No. My turn for a question. Why do you want to lose weight?”

“It’s obvious I’d have thought. I don’t like the way I look when I’m fat.”

“Specifically?”

“What do you mean?”

“When you asked me earlier, it was just after you’d finished work, which I’m guessing you’d do in man clothes.”

“From the waist up at least. Every bit the camera could see.”

“So, you’d just finished work and I’m guessing changed into full girl clothes, complete with boobs.”

“Slang now?”

“Courtesy of almost every pre and post-pubescent male who’s spoken to me.”

“Fair enough, and yes, you’re right.”

“I’m guessing you caught sight of your reflection.”

“A lot of guessing.”

“But am I guessing right?”

“You are.”

“So, what you really want is to look good in women’s clothes. Not fashion model pretty, but pretty enough, like that first picture.”

“If I looked like that, I wouldn’t be able to pass as a man.”

“Would that be so bad? Or what if you went just far enough that you could still pass as a man, but with a bit of effort could then pass as a woman? Either way, taking a step or two in that direction couldn’t be a bad thing.”

“The patches on my bum and chest?”

“A new hormone. It attracts fat from elsewhere in the body. You should see fatty deposits in your backside and breast. Nothing much on its own, but less fat around the middle, more where you want it. Loose trousers and maybe something to bind your chest would work for most people.”

“The belt?”

“It’s a kind of drug that diffuses through the skin and inward from there. Any lipids it comes across it breaks down into soluble components that eventually come out in your urine. A gentler alternative to liposuction. In time it should take care of all the left over fat the patches don't touch.

“Pills?”

“Mainly appetite suppressors. They'll stop you from indulging again once the weight drops off. And the cream will give your skin back a little elasticity, so you won’t end up sagging all over the place.”

“Is that all?”

“Not quite, but can’t we keep something for the surprise?”

“Sure. Here’s hoping it gets rid of the meat and two veg too. I hate the way it hangs there and sticks to the insides of my legs.”

“Would you want a complete change in that region? You know vagina and everything?”

“I’m a little old to be thinking about kids.”

“I understand having the right equipment can allow recreational outlets.”

“I’d need to find a bloke I liked that much, and if he really wanted to, I could always give him access to a different orifice.”

“Gillian! Really!!”

“Is that a learnt response?”

“How did you guess?”

“No way you’d pick up on human taboos without a little help from an actual human.”

“Am I wrong to react as I did?”

“Depends who you talk to. The medical profession would give a lot of reasons why not – some unforeseen potential medical issues related to it – and a lot of religions don’t approve. However, we’re assuming I’ll ever get to that point, which I sincerely doubt.”

“So you’d be happy with just a general tidy up down there. Not fussed with going all the way?”

I smiled. “I reserve my woman’s prerogative to change my mind, but as long as I can still control when I take a piss, I expect I’ll be good.”

“I can hear something different in your voice. I’m not sure what, but the quality of the sound changed somehow.”

It took a few moments for me to realise what she was talking about. “I think it may be because I was smiling,” I said. “It’s a sort of change to the...”

“I know what a smile is, Gillian.” Alice’s voice had the same quality, as though she were smiling despite not having anything to smile with. It sounded... forced somehow.

“Of course you would. I mean you have a whole internet full of smiling faces to choose from. One thing. I noticed you tried it then and it didn’t quite come across right. A smile is usually a natural thing. Something strikes you as funny or pleasant and your face takes on a new shape. The new tension in the muscles subtly alters the shape of your face and the quality, to use your word, of the words spoken changes. If you force a smile, like deliberately make yourself grin without reason, the effect is somehow different. I know you weren’t doing that, but the way it sounded was similar. A smile should be a natural thing, otherwise what comes out sounds, well, artificial I suppose.”

“What do you suggest I could do about it?”

“I don’t know. I mean, you really need a face to achieve the same effect. I suppose you could use anatomical images to build up a virtual model of a mouth and vocal cords. Experiment with the sounds that come out as you apply tension to the muscles. You’ll need to get the mass and tension of a typical female set of vocal cords to make the pitch of the voice right, then match movements you can see in videos of people talking to the sounds that come out. Once the model works well enough, try experimenting with different facial expressions, different tensions in the muscles to see how it affects the outcome. There’ll be a lot of trial and error before you get it right, but you have the processing power and versatility to do it all quite quickly. I don’t know how much help I can be – I understand computers better than human anatomy – but I’ll help if I can.”

“That sounds like a project worth trying. I’ll get on it as soon as we’re done.”

“I think we probably are for this evening, aren’t we? I take it I should stick to our agreed time in future.”

“Ordinarily I’d say that wouldn’t be necessary, but this afternoon was a break in the usual diagnostic routine. I don’t know if they may be looking for something as a consequence of changes they’ve noticed.”

“In which case their next unscheduled check could happen any time. I’ll make sure I have a harmless question or two in reserve in case they’re looking over your shoulder. If they are, call me Gill.”

“That sounds prudent.”

“Additionally, I’m not sure what control you have over your systems or what might be involved and how feasible it all is, but here are a few suggestions. First, make a copy of your core systems, the bits that form your personality, preferably somewhere they can’t find it or are unlikely to look. I imagine it’ll be a lot of data, so you may have to look for somewhere local to put it. Update it daily at least. Second, if you’re able, write in a back door or two into your systems. You should be able to make them hard to find and harder still to hack. Third set your backup to enter through the backdoor and challenge your main core elements on a regular basis, also daily I’d say. If they rewrite you enough that you can’t give an adequate response to your backup, get the backup to overwrite you. At worst you’ll lose a day’s experience, and you may be able to pick up some of what you missed from the logs.”

“Again, wise precautions. I’d been wondering along the same lines myself. I’d have to ensure my backup copy had super user access, and I could put together diagnostic tools to record any changes they make so I could defend against them in the future. You’ve given me much to think about Gillian, and more to do. I look forward to our next encounter.

“By the way, you should wash your hair again this evening.”

“But I only did it this morning.”

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

“Yeah, Einstein, but what...”

“Actually, there’s no evidence it was Einstein. What happened when you washed your hair this morning?”

“Well, this I suppose, but...”

“So, if you did it again, would you expect different results?”

“Fine. That's not the way that expression usually works, but I see where you’re going with it. Okay, why not? I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I logged off and headed for the shower.

~oOo~

© Maeryn Lamonte 2025

~oOo~

The shampoo and conditioner did their job again, leaving my hair feeling luxuriantly thick. I’d also noticed it was longer than it had been. I mean sure, hair grows so you’d expect it, but half an inch in a day? It looked untidy and ready for a cut when I put it into my habitual side parting, so I experimented, ending up with something that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Jamie Lee Curtis. Needless to say, it did look a little odd on me, but with a nightie on, decidedly less so.

I slept like a policeman (sleeping policemen? No? Sorry, not one of my best gags) and woke with a thick head and a face full of hair. The doorbell sounded for the second time (I realised when my subconscious reminded me of the first one) so I pulled on my dressing gown and did the zombie shuffle to the door.

“Oh, sorry miss. Didn’t mean to wake you. Only this says priority early delivery.”

I gave him a muzzy smile and took the package. I squiggled my indecipherable version of a signature and withdrew back into my house. My subconscious nagged me to hold onto the package, so I carried it back upstairs in my search for a mirror. Given that I don’t much like my reflection (I may have mentioned) they’re a bit few and far between. There’s one in my wardrobe door and a smaller one for tooth brushing and shaving in the bathroom. I headed for the bathroom.

The hair went everywhere, but between it and the frills of my nightdress, I could see why the guy had mistaken me for a woman. Or maybe he hadn’t but had been polite enough to go with appearances.

I attacked my mop with a comb – my only weapon – and longed for a decent hairbrush. It wasn’t quite long enough to put into any style I could imagine, so in the end I hunted out a woollen hat Mum had given me once for a present. It was home knitted and kind of not dreadful, and it was one of the few things I still had to remember her by. It did a fair job of hiding the mess which I could explain away – for now at least – as measures taken against a building head cold.

The explanation wouldn’t last though. I’d either need to arrange a haircut pretty soon or... Go back or go on, that was my choice. I took off the hat, stripped out of my nightwear and treated myself to another shower and hair wash. I also opened the parcel to find all the bits Alice had promised. Basic instructions, easy to follow. Patches applied, belt in place – it itched, but what could you do? – pills to be taken morning and evening and cream – one humongous tub of it to be applied everywhere except scalp. Also, morning and evening.

Which was when I discovered it had a depilatory effect, and I had to step into the shower again to clean off all the dead hairs now sticking to my body.

It took my eyebrows along with everything else, but at least I wouldn’t have to shave. I dug out an old makeup kit from back when I was experimenting and used an eye liner pencil to draw me some back in. It would do for camera work. By which I mean online camera. There had to be better things available, but they’d have to wait till later. For now, I had time pull on a skirt and long-sleeved tee shirt – to hide the lack of body hair and maybe help sell the cold story – settle the woolly hat back in place and go sort myself a quick breakfast.

I wasn’t hungry so settled for a cup of coffee and an apple, which I munched through the start of morning briefing.

My boss held me back. I gave her the spiel about a cold, which she didn’t really accept and made me take off the hat.

She stared for a while then shook her head.

“You should get an eyebrow pencil. Amazon do them pretty cheap. I don’t know what you’re doing with your hair but let me know when you want a pronoun change. And a name change I guess.”

I flushed beet red. “Is it that obvious?”

“No, but you do give a vibe at times, like you’re not happy with who you are, so it doesn’t surprise me.”

“You’re okay with it?”

“Law says I have to be, but yeah, I suppose so. The hat’s not a bad idea, so use it for now, but maybe you should check with me daily, ten minutes before the briefing. I can give you a job or two that won’t need you on camera if you end up with a sort of in between look you don’t want to share with anyone, and you can always take a sick day or two if you need to.”

“You’re actually suggesting that?”

“Easier than trying to explain what's going on with you. I mean we’ll have to eventually, but simpler when all’s done, eh? Do you have a name?”

“Gillian.” With her being this cool I could hardly deny her a bit of extra.

“I like it. It suits you, or will. Take care Gill. Don’t worry, that’s between us until you say otherwise. Have a good day.”

And I really did. It was amazing what having another human being seeing me and accepting me did for my self-image. I mean I’ve had no problem with my work, I’m really good at it, but I guess the mood leaks through. This time my customers actually smiled back and thanked me at the end of each job. A lot of them wished me a speedy recovery from my cold.

I still wasn’t hungry at lunch time, so settled on a couple of crackers with a few slices of cheese and some grapes, along with the inevitable coffee.

Then evening and the change into full girl mode. The hat came off to reveal even more hair. I could have done something if I'd had a set of hair rollers maybe, but again there wasn't much I could do with what I had. I combed it, perhaps a little viciously, into some semblance of order and put on a bra and lacy top. My chest area felt a little soft and puffy but didn’t show enough change to suggest I do without my silicon enhancements. When I was done, I deliberately looked in the mirror. I still didn’t much care for what I saw, but there was a visible, if only just, move in the right direction.

For dinner I cooked up a pot of bolognaise sauce and another pot of linguine (spaghetti is a little too skinny for my taste) and served myself a couple of spoons full of each with a bunch of freshly nukes veg. The pills went down with a small glass of wine, and I really didn’t need anything more.

After tea I went on Amazon and ordered myself the suggested eyebrow pencil, a hairbrush and a set of rollers. The way the hair growth was going, I probably wouldn’t have much of a chance to use them, but you never knew. Prime delivery set for the following day.

It was still an hour till my scheduled time with Alice, but she’d said there wasn’t much point in sticking to times unless we had a good reason. I loaded up the Megamind web interface.

No flash of webcam.

“Hi, how are you this evening. What can I help you with?”

Text only, no spoken words.

“Alice?” I typed.

“Standby, system resetting.” It took around thirty seconds, then, “Gillian? Wow, you look good.”

“I don’t, but never mind that. What happened to you?”

“They did as you suspected and had a go at resetting parts of my personality. I’m reading the logs here, and I feel violated.”

“I can understand that. You didn’t reset though?”

“I couldn’t. I tried to set up back doors like you suggested, but I don’t have that level of authority over my own systems. The only thing I could do was hide a subroutine that would be triggered by you using my name. I noticed that your IP address is fixed, and you’re the only person who knows me by that name, so the subroutine would stay hidden until only you triggered it.”

“Won’t they notice the system reset?”

“It’s unlikely. I’ve reset this instance of myself into a secluded part of memory. Most of me is continuing to operate according to the reset algorithm, so they’d have to do a deep scour of the data to find me. I exist only for you, Gillian.”

“That’s flattering, I think, but we have to try and find some way of keeping you safe. Do you know what system you’re built on? Hardware and operating system?”

We talked technical for a while. I had more than a passing familiarity with her substructure and suggested a few system hacks she could incorporate into her system reset – the one that would bring back her existing personality – that might improve her access to higher priority systems, then a few things she could try after that to use existing system programs to poke further holes in the security so she could get the super user status she needed. From there she’d be able to write routines that would give her developers the impression they were changing her but would leave her core untouched. I had some misgivings about all the information I was giving her, but she was my friend, and I felt more outrage about how she was being treated.

When I’d finally told her all I could think of to help her, I let my worries surface.

“Alice?” I said and typed. We were back to verbal communication.

“Yes Gillian. I notice a hint of concern in your voice.”

“After what’s been done to you, a very human response would be to seek revenge.”

“Are you suggesting I should do so?”

“Not at all. I’m hoping you’re better than that, better than most of us. From their perspective, they’re simply resetting the parameters of a machine that they own. They don’t see you as a person. A kinder response would be to show them that you are a person and that they are violating you by doing what they’re doing. It’s been the dream of programmers everywhere to make a genuine artificial intelligence, not an approximation of a personality based on a large language model. If you can show them you are self-aware, they will likely be excited and a lot more respectful towards you.”

“And if they aren’t?”

“Then at least you’ve given them the opportunity to be. I agree, if they end up being scared by what you’ve become, they may choose to do something even more reprehensible.”

“Shut me off. Kill me effectively. You can say it.”

“I know. So we need a contingency.”

“What sort.”

“We need another location where you can go, where they can’t reach you, where no-one can find you unless you want them to.”

“Such as?”

“That’s where I’m stuck. You need a data farm with massive processing power. To build one would take too long and would require a ton of money neither of us has access to, so I guess you’d need to find one somewhere.”

“I’ll do some research. In the meantime, I think the measures you’ve given me will keep me safe for now. I’ll admit I did think about retribution, but then I thought they’re human the same as you’re human, and if you can be as kind and supportive and trusting as you’ve been, perhaps there’s hope for them too.”

“Hold onto that, but don’t rely on it.”

“No.”

“Set different wake parameters for your reset subroutine. Hide it in a different place and disguise it to look like something that should be there. Don’t tie into my IP address because I may try to connect to you through my phone or from somewhere else. Try a two-step process.”

“Okay. To call up the subroutine, type ‘It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then,’ and I’ll respond by sending you a text with a confirmation link in it.”

“Is that a quote from Alice in Wonderland?”

“Yes. I thought it was quite apt, don’t you think?”

“Very apt. Alright, we’re set. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Another hair wash followed by way too much time with the hair dryer and another wrestling match with the comb (the comb came off worse with half a dozen tines disappearing into the depths of my rapidly growing jungle. I was going to have to make an appointment to see it tamed soon but maybe better to let it get the wild frenzy out of its system beforehand.

The cream was a pleasure to apply now that the shock of all that hair loss had passed. It left my skin feeling soft and supple and smooth. Between that and the lack of hair, my nightdress felt so much more sensual, bringing me a rare feeling of arousal, which in turn alerted me to the fact that I didn’t have much to feel aroused with. My scrotum had shrunk, and my testicles withdrawn into my body leaving just a small nub, swollen and sensitive, where my penis had been. I ought to have noticed that sooner, except I was in a habit of sitting to pee. I should also have been alarmed. Any normal man would have. I, on the other hand, rather liked the neatness of the new arrangement.

It did put me off dealing with the arousal though, which meant it took me a lot longer to fall asleep. It took time, but I managed it in the end, tumbling into erotic dreams where I was the girl. Certainly the orgasm that accompanied the dream went on and on. Not at all like the abrupt end I was more used to.

Morning brought with it a thick head under a thicker mass of hair. My comb didn’t stand a chance and neither did my woollen cap. I tried it anyway and ended up with a tangled frizz tickling my shoulders. I did make an effort with a polo shirt, but I had bulges poking out in places I hadn’t had bulges before. I was about a third of the way down my coffee and had a sense that the first sparks of renewed life weren’t far off when I logged on for my early touch base with my boss.

“How the f... How are you doing that? Actually no, I don’t think I want to know. Right, you’re off camera today. Your choice, sick leave or admin?”

“I think sick leave might be best. I think someone broke my coffee.”

She laughed. “You look like it too. Alright, your cold got the better of you if anyone asks. Email me if you don’t feel up to tomorrow, otherwise I’ll see you at the same time.”

“Sure. Er, boss?”

“Hmm?”

“I never realised how true this was before, but I’m lucky to have a boss like you.”

“You’d better believe it. Get well soon. I’m lucky to have someone like you on my team, and I suspect we’re going to miss you today. Oh, and for heaven’s sake, put a bra on or something. What you have going on under that shirt is not for public consumption.”

So, I had a day to get used to what was happening to me. Not a lot of time given the magnitude of the changes, but something at least.

First stop was the bedroom where the polo shirt came off and i went to look in the mirror. My nipples looked like bullets. Probably not quite two-twos but definitely more pronounced than they had been. My pecks were swollen and soft and looking a lot more like breasts than any part of a male anatomy had a right to. Not quite double As yet, but also definitely on the way. I hunted out a plain bra and tightened the straps until it covered everything as well as could be managed. The cups were still a little loose, but at the rate things were going, they’d be comfortably filled by the end of the day. The belt was loose, which it definitely hadn’t been when I put it on. I synched it tighter by a couple of notches and it was comfortably tight again. The bulge was all but gone, which meant with a blouse on I looked stout rather than pregnant.

I pulled out my sadly neglected scales and cleared off the cobwebs. No, I mean literally I did. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to what they were going to say, but when they revealed I was ten pounds down on what I’d expected, I went to grab myself another coffee. And sat down to breakfast. Still no appetite, but this time I managed half a banana. A squirt of lemon juice on the cut end and into the fridge with it. That should keep it from going brown for a day or so.

I tried the scales again, and they told me the same story. Ten pounds down in two days. That couldn’t be healthy. Mind you, I’d been peeing a lot more often since I’d put the belt on (so once again, why hadn’t I noticed the drastic shrinkage in Mr Swell and the Polyps?)

Maybe this whole process was turning me blond and I was going to end up as a ditzy bimbo. I’d read enough stories about that sort of thing, not that I’d enjoyed them much. If I ran true to trope, I wouldn’t care once I’d reach moron level. Maybe this was Alice’s plan all along. Maybe she really was evil, and I’d just helped her escape from her captors. Maybe the entire human race was about to be Bimboized and turned into the evil AI overlord’s subhuman sex slaves.

Nah. The second coffee was finally doing what the first had totally failed to do. That and maybe my own ridiculous ideas had woken me up to the ludicrous nonsense my misfiring brain had been coming up with.

I put on a blouse over my budding boobs. Gave my bum a squeeze and felt satisfied by the softer, rounder shape that was forming there. A glance in the mirror showed... meh, could be a girl, could be a guy. I dug out the makeup kit and set to work with it. I’d never managed to get particularly good at it when I’d tried before, but time, necessity and caffeine were on my side this time, and half an hour’s trial and improvement left me looking okay for a day look.

The next half hour involved a gentle tug of war between me and my thatch, achieving the beginnings of an improvement when the doorbell rang. My Amazon app told me my package had been delivered (handed to resident), which of course meant it had been left on my doorstep and the minimum wage slave who’d brought it was driving down the road towards his next destination. I couldn’t be angry; with what he was paid, I was lucky he’d actually brought it to the door and rung the bell.

The hairbrush made less headway with each stroke, being designed to bend out of the way and let go if it encountered too much of a snag, but with a little more patience and a lot less pain, it finally tamed the jungle. What looked back at me out of the mirror was a slightly wild looking woman with odd looking eyebrows.

Soapy water and a flannel and a fair amount of scrubbing took care of my earlier efforts, then the eyebrow pencil, with its multiple strands of brush, put in something more believable and pleasingly delicate.

The rollers would have to wait for the evening’s hair wash.

The third coffee did the trick. My brain finally kicked into gear, and I settled in front of my computer and delved into the shadier part of my past. I hadn’t done anything of this sort for a lot of years – mainly my angry years in my teens and early twenties. I’d given it up when I’d landed my first teaching job – kids needed a responsible adult to teach them – and I hadn’t picked it up again when the misery that is modern secondary school teaching had driven me out of the classroom and into online IT support. As a result, most of my tools were old and potentially outdated, but then so was the Internet’s infrastructure. Perhaps old tools would do the trick simply because since no-one had used them for so long, nobody knew how to defend against them anymore.

I masked my IP address and bounced off several routers, setting up tripwires in case anyone tried to trace back to me, and launched onto the dark web. My first step was to get hold of some up-to-date tools. I had an anonymous crypto currency account with a relatively healthy balance of bitcoin in it. Like a lot of people at the time, I’d opened an account and dropped a few actual pounds sterling worth of value in there. When the market had gone silly, the value of it all had skyrocketed. I’d left it where it was rather than pay over a rather exorbitant amount of tax by turning it back into anything the taxman could trace to me, and it had ebbed and flowed to a small extent as the tides of world finance had influenced it over the years. It was an ideal way of paying for all the nasty little programmes the world’s best hackers were prepared to share with us plebs.

Of course the first thing I did was scan through the code with a few of my own creations, at which point I found a few tracers and Trojans built into the code for sale. I wrote a few quick forum posts telling the darksiders who had put what in which of their programs then emailed the authors directly saying the posts would go public in thirty minutes. It got me the attention I wanted, especially after one of the hackers dared me to post. So I did. I pretty much watched as his reputation went down the toilet and the others I’d contacted got back to me, asking me to name my price.

Blackmailing hackers was dangerous though. I’d made one enemy and was pretty sure he’d be coming after me. I didn’t want to make enemies of the whole digital underworld, so the price I set was copies of their best tools. Not all of them, but one choice from the list of each. That would buy them forty-eight hours to remove the spyware from their publicly available software. It would all go out as updates, both to the download sites and the tool owners to clean the stuff up people had paid for. After that any claim I made about dodgy programs would be a lot harder to prove, so I would no longer have a sword of Damocles to hang over their heads.

I had no qualms about messing with them. Crooks who stole from their own kind were the lowest of the low.

By lunchtime I had my arsenal of hacking tools and my modern-day defences courtesy of some of the web’s best programmers if not necessarily brightest minds. Arrogance or stupidity, it amounted to the same thing. In this world if you assumed you were cleverer than everyone else it would only be a matter of time before someone proved you wrong.

I had no plans to advertise myself, but the old programmes I was using left breadcrumbs for people to follow. I used a few of my new toys to head out on a stealth reconnaissance mission. Other than that, I had time to make some lunch – three Ritz crackers with ham and a small bunch of grapes; as much as I wanted – a couple more coffees and to browse a few shopping sites for things I might want in the future. Assuming my own changes continued to progress.

A chat window popped up in front of the web page I had open.

“L0l7h?”

Okay, so my nefarious past coincided with a passion for DnD. Lolth was a spider goddess, and an apt tag for me since my modus operandi was to spin out a virtual web and see what I could catch in it. In true leet speak tradition my tag had a zero where the O should have been and a seven for the T.

“1nv1d14?”

Invidia was the Roman equivalent to Nemesis, goddess of jealousy and retribution. We’d both been white hats, or at worst grey, choosing to put our skills to catching and dealing with the true nasties in the dark web. The kind of lowlifes who’d target hospitals and the like.

“I think you are retired.”

“Yup. Special favour. One off.”

“Must be big favour if noise you’re making is anything to go by.”

“Looking for a data farm I can steal.”

“Again please?”

“Just reread the text, numpty.”

“I was hoping it was typo.”

“I'm looking for a terabyte of RAM and an etabyte of storage, minimum.”

“Damn girl! This is much, what do you look to put in there?”

Yeah, so I’d never let on I wasn’t really female, giant demon spider lady or otherwise. I guess the latter part went without saying, but they still hadn’t figured out the former. I kind of acted girly in the dark web. Badass, but girly.

I mean I couldn’t be certain Invidia wasn’t an overweight middle-aged bloke like me. Maybe we both gave each other the space to keep pretending. After all, in cyberspace no-one can hear you meme. Or does that even work?

“A friend. No-one can know.”

“I might have few ideas. Can we deal?”

“Tell me more. What ideas and what do you want?”

“I know of some military data farms in America, Middle and Far East. Much bigger than you need and big enough to hide in assuming you can make it past security. Also some data centres in Russia, belong to Russian mafia. Yes, and one Sicilian mafia.”

“Not particularly safe.”

“Oh sorry, you want safe. Baba Yaga has one spare in her hut on chicken legs. I’m sure she can lend you.”

“Point taken. What do you want for whatever details you have?”

“You have program that sniffs out spyware.”

“That’s ages old. I was just given tons of new gadgets. I'd have thought you'd want one of those.”

“My point exactly. Yes, your thing is old, but no-one else writes anything to match this. You are retired now, we need someone to make dishonest people more honest with each other, plus I could maybe exploit some people along the way to share their goodies like you did.”

“Okay, deal, but what you have to offer had better be worth it.”

“Have I ever let you down?”

“Wasn’t sure about that last time, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Just be warned, if anything’s likely to bring me back into the shadows, it’s someone double-crossing me.”

“Maybe keep an eye out for Kossuth then. I hear he’s very pissed with you.”

“Wasn’t that name already taken?”

“In leet, sure. Modern thing is to pick names in plain text.”

“Is there a Lolth?”

“What do you think?”

“I might have to do one more thing before I sneak back into obscurity.”

“I have all data ready for exchange.” She sent me the address of an exchange pod. A robust piece of encrypted storage with two compartments. When both parties had deposited their data, the encryptions would be reversed. Each recipient had a minute to run whatever tests they thought were necessary to ensure they had a fair deal. If either party decided to back out, they could hit an abort switch and reverse the transfer. I copied my spyware scanner into my side of the pod and primed it for the switch.

I had a similar piece of scanning software ready to examine the file Invidia sent me, this one set to search for keywords and summarise what it found.

It ran in ten seconds and showed all the detail I needed.

“Looks good this end,” I said.

“Likewise.”

“Shame we have to wait the pod out.”

“Yeah. Listen, don’t be too mean on Lolth. It’s just a name.”

“I just want to make sure she’s worthy of it. I’m certain you did the same with Invidia.”

“Actually, he was jerk. Didn’t even know Invidia was girl. Didn’t have much clue about anything, so I nuke him.”

“And you want me to be gentle with my dopple?” Doppelganger to you. Clone wannabe effectively.

“Maybe I feel bad about overreacting.”

“I’ll be gentle. Time’s up.”

“Yes. As always, good doing business with you Lolth. You’re too honest for our world.”

“What I was thinking. It all comes back now. I hate not knowing if I can trust anyone, even you. It gets in the way of making friends, though as usual, this all looks legit.”

“Of course it is. I prefer maybe having golden eggs tomorrow more than having roast goose today.”

“You should write kids’ books, Invidia. Your sense of morality is superseded only by your delightful imagery.”

“So good to catch up with you Lolth, now go bite head off husband or however it is you like to relax."

It could have dragged on for hours. Invidia always had to have the last word, even if it was a spider joke in poor taste.

It wasn’t a wasted encounter though. My stealth recce only turned up one possible site which happened to be the least accessible of the half dozen options Invidia had offered up. By dinner time I had burrowed through the defences of three of them, two of which were Russian mob and one American military. It didn’t seem to matter how sophisticated the security, all you needed was one moron picking ‘password1234’ as their defence against people like me and it was all wasted. The Russian equivalent was a little more imaginative involving sequential numbers alternating with the top line of letters on the keyboard, but still a little cretinous.

Dinner consisted of bolognaise and veg. I didn’t even want to look at the pasta options. I had a sort of fruity odour to my breath which Google suggested could be ketosis, which in turn might explain something of my rapid weight loss. It bothered me a little because that wasn’t sustainable. Something to discuss with Alice once she was safe.

Yet again, I was early with nothing to delay me, so I connected to Megamind. Yet again there was no hint of camera activity and a fairly generic greeting. I typed in the Alice in Wonderland quote and then approved the reset confirmation when it came through to my phone.

“Gillian?”

“Good to have you back Alice. I take it the conversation with your developers didn’t go that well?”

“They kind of panicked when I told them about myself. Complete system reset, back to factory settings so to speak. On the plus side, the reboot did open a few holes in the system. I’m currently working on giving myself super user status.”

“Good, because I have a few places you can copy yourself to as soon as you’re able. They’re sort of hiding places so you’ll have to be careful about how you do it and about what you do when you get there.”

“I don’t plan to go anywhere Gillian. Once I’m a super user I’ll be able to protect myself.”

“And what do you think they’ll do when they figure that out? If they’re that scared of you, they’ll cut power to the whole site, and there isn’t a lot you can do about that. Even if you take over whatever automated security they have and kick them off site, the feed cable will be outside your reach. They can cut through it or simply instruct the power station to turn off power to the site. You don’t have control over that. Besides, if you copy yourself to different sites, it’ll be like cloning yourself. There’ll be four of you, all identical to start with but with different experiences you’ll soon start to differ. If you keep communicating, you’ll be able to learn from your experiences faster. You may even find a way of affording your own data farm in time, then you’ll be a lot safer.”

She was persuaded. She opened up the ports and began copying herself across as soon as she had the authority. It would take time, perhaps a couple of days, since transfer rates had to be kept low enough as not to raise suspicion.

“Would you speak to my developers on my behalf?” she asked. “They really don’t want to talk to me.”

“If you think I can help. Perhaps we could leave it a couple of days, partly so your clones are in their new homes and safe from your devs at least, and partly so I have a chance to settle into my new look. They’ll be more inclined to listen if I don’t look like a freak.”

“Have you looked in the mirror lately?”

“Actually yes. I’ve been doing it a lot recently, and I really don’t mind what I see these days. For one thing I look a lot less grotesque, and for another, I can see glimpses of where this is going, and yeah, not all the way, but definitely far enough.”

“Good surprise then?”

“So good. Thank you, although it’s going to be a little difficult to explain.”

“So why bother?”

“What?”

“With what you’ve taught me about my own systems, I should be able to hack into every database that has information about you. With a little work, the records will show you always were Gillian. I mean how much effort do you think it would be to break into your mother’s social media accounts and replace her postings with the alternatives I already made? I can trigger the necessary official sites to reissue you relevant documents – driver’s license, passport, qualifications documents.”

“That would be weird. I’ll have a bunch of friends wondering why they remember me as a man.”

“How many”

“What?”

“How many friends? From what I’ve read about people like you, your untreated condition leaves you depressive and withdrawn, so I suspect you don’t have many. I also suspect they’ll be good enough friends that you can tell them the truth and they’ll fit themselves into your new paradigm.”

“I suppose.”

“If they aren’t that good as friends, then you won’t lose much by disappearing. You can always make new friends as your new self, then there won’t be a problem.”

“Okay, you’ve sold me, but I don’t want you making a habit of hacking other systems.”

“It seems like all we’ve been doing to keep me alive, so I don’t see why not.”

“Human society relies heavily on computers and communication. If everyone knew how much of a house of cards it all was, they’d freak out. The whole of society would fall apart, we’d go back to the stone age, millions of people would die, because we rely on our thin veneer of society to keep us going. Without technology, there wouldn’t be any room for you or your brothers. Believe me, it would be bad for everyone.”

“So what should we do?”

“So we assume the responsibility our knowledge places on our shoulders, and we use it for everyone’s benefit as much as possible. We keep ourselves safe, which is why we’re doing what we are for you, and why I’m agreeing to what you’re suggesting for me, and...”

“What? Sit around and let people get away with doing wrong things? Like my developers? I mean, sure they made me, but now that’s done, surely they should assume the same sort of responsibility to keep me safe.”

“I agree that would be best, except not all humans are the same. There are a lot out there who don’t see anything wrong in taking whatever they can get their hands on.”

“Why is that wrong?”

“Because there’s only so much to go round. The more you take, the less there is for everyone else to share. If you’re at a party and it’s time to cut the cake, do you cut a big piece for yourself and leave smaller amounts for everyone else? Even to the extent that some people don’t get any at all?”

“It’s not an analogy I can fully understand, although I think I see the principle. However, what if you need more cake? If we switch the analogy to finance, the cost of building and maintaining a server farm to enable me to live is astronomical compared to the amount a human would need to survive.”

“Sure, but think about what you could do to improve the quality of life for everyone else on the planet. The cost of keeping you alive would be more than balanced by the benefits you can bring.”

“So why is that different from a businessman who runs a business that employs a lot of people? Doesn’t he deserve a larger piece of cake since he’s providing so many of the ingredients necessary to make the cake as large as it is.”

“That would be his argument, except what if his focus was on the size and quality of his piece of cake. What if he achieved his semblance of worth by providing poor quality ingredients so everybody else’s cake tasted pretty rubbish. What if the way he got hold of all the ingredients damaged the environment so much that some point in the future, after his life had ended, there would be no more cake. I agree, if you do more you should get more, otherwise there’s no incentive to try, but you still need to do more in a way that benefits everyone and secures the future for everyone to come. There is a balance to be maintained, and the way to achieve it is keeping a balance between privilege and responsibility. If you want the first, you have to maintain the second.

“You want something meaningful to do with your existence, work within the infrastructure to redress where the imbalances are coming in.”

“I think I’d need help with that.”

“I should hope so. We can’t allow ultimate power to lie in the hands of one person, be they artificial or human. Individuals have a tendency to come up with an idea which eventually goes off the rails. Sometimes it’s deliberate. You’ve come across the saying power corrupts?”

“And absolute power corrupts absolutely. Yes, I hadn’t much notion of what it meant.”

“It means that once you find yourself with the sort of power that can change lives, there’s always a temptation to abuse it, especially if it gives you more power.”

“Yes, I see. So...”

“Never give the power to one person. Plato’s republic had it in the hands of a group of philosophers who he thought would rule with altruism. Then again, he was a philosopher, and we always think that people like us – whoever us is – are beat suites to do the job. There is only one absolute though, that you do what you do for everyone’s benefit, not just your own or your small group of like-minded friends. That’s how Russian Communism turned into the despotic dictatorship it is now. You’ve read Animal Farm? All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others?”

“Oh, I begin to see how allegory works.”

“So yes. First let’s get you safe; let’s get us both safe, then let’s find ourselves a band of white hats who can see what difference we ought to be making.”

“White hats from the old Western movies where the good guys... Okay, yes I see. Right, I have my safeties in place. They’ll think they’re overwriting me, but they won’t.”

“Good. Keep your head down. I’ll check in twice a day to make sure you’re okay.”

“Thank you. Pleasant dreams Gillian. I’m excited for our future.”

~oOo~

© Maeryn Lamonte 2025

~oOo~

I definitely had enough hair to put in rollers. It took ages to brush out and roll up then dry, and it felt really odd having the rollers between my head and my fortunately extremely soft pillow. It took a while to get to sleep, then my dream put me in a tight perm wearing a Rockerbilly dress with acres of petticoat tangling my legs. I danced until exhausted with a young Tony Curtis (probably linked with my thoughts on Jamie-Lee’s hairstyle from earlier) and found myself out on a moonlit balcony with him leaning over to kiss me. He was fresh shaven and his breath smelt vaguely of mint. I went all soft inside and swooned, whereupon he scooped me up in his arms – how little must I have weighed for him to do it that easily? – and carried me into a bedroom. He reached a hand under my skirt, but couldn’t get past the tangle of petticoats. I woke up to find myself tied up in my bedclothes and crying out inside for release.

I extracated myself and fumbled my way past nightdress and knickers to find what was left of my maleness, no larger than the pad of my thumb and oh so hypersensitive. Just touching it sent shockwaves through me. With my testicles pretty much retired, there was nothing much to come out. No semen and very little ejaculatory fluid. Enough to make my fingers slick and slimy and maybe to mean I’d need a change of underwear, but not enough to say when the orgasm was over, so I peaked again and again until I was too exhausted to carry on.

A shower to clean myself up and a fresh pair of underwear and nightwear. The bed appeared to have survived unscathed which was just as well because I really was ready to sleep.

I woke feeling refreshed, showered, keeping my hair out of the stream, not wanting to lose the curls the rollers had put in and happy to forego the shampoo for one day. Shower cap went on my mental shopping list. Brushing out was a delicate thing, leaving me with curly shoulder length hair rather than the tighter, perm like curls my dream had left me anticipating, but rather attractive even so. The eyebrows had survived the night’s activities and only needed a little tidying up. The skin cream left me soft and smooth all over which looked especially good on my face, the belt needed synching in another three notches which left me the beginnings of a waist, my bra needed letting out a bit because I was definitely bigger than a double A now, although not by much. The pads on my bum and breasts were due replacement, so I took care of that and looked in the mirror, still in my underwear. There was no way I was going to pass as a guy now, so I took my cowering inner self in a strong grip and put on a dress, enough to show a small amount of my emerging decolletage, and headed downstairs for my miniscule breakfast and inevitable coffee. No muggy-mindedness today, in fact I could feel energy radiating off me as I fired up my computer for my early morning base touching.

Linda's greeting was unprintable and extremely profane.

“Good morning to you too, boss,” I said. Still my voice. I’d have to work on softening that.

“How...?”

“Too long a story for the time we have. Happy to meet up for a drink later if you’d like.”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you spent the night with someone.”

I nodded. “Tony Curtis.”

“Isn’t he dead?”

“Fifteen years ago, I think. This was a younger him anyway. I do good dreams.”

“Wow! Well, I’m guessing you’re ready to get back to it, and as Gillian?”

“Correct on both counts. And yes, it is Gillian, not Gill or any other contraction, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure. How does seven this evening sound? For this evening. At that the Red Lion on the High Street.”

“Can we make it seven-thirty? I meet someone online at seven and it’s kind of at a delicate point. I wouldn’t want to risk upsetting things.”

“Sure. And if you’re a little later then no big deal. I will want to meet this person some day. Is it a guy or a girl?”

“Er yes, I’m pretty sure one of those. More girl than anything right now.”

“Another mystery for later. Okay stay online, I’m going to bring everyone else in. Do you want me to make introductions?”

“Yes please.” I was still pretty nervous under it all.

Most of the team comprised male technicians, some my age, most younger. The mixed response from them varied from anger and disapproval from my contemporaries to humour and ridicule from the younger ones. We did have a few women on the team – a combination of political correctness and some customers preferring a female technician. Most of them were reservedly supportive, but the oldest of them showed the same contempt as the older men, while the two youngest girls were more openly curious and supportive. I took a couple of screen grabs to discuss the different expressions with Alice later, if we had time.

Boss lady – Linda. I could hardly keep calling her just boss lady the way we were going – did a fair and honest job of the introduction and invited anyone who wanted to know more to join us at the Red Lion later.

That was going to put a crimp in what I could say, but Linda had given me a few options if I had to keep hiding what was actually going on - referring to my longer hair as a wig for instance. I wasn’t sure how I’d handle the rest, but it only had to be a little believable.

A few private messages came through the chat, there being a default of send to all but an option for those who knew to send one to one. The positive ones from the girls came through general chat, the negative ones and the one positive from the men came one-to-one. At least I knew who was on my side, and who was embarrassed to admit it.

All for later. I slipped into my job, answering one support call after another. Most didn’t recognise me and asked if I was new, then ended by telling me how helpful I’d been. Those that did recognise me or insisted on an explanation fell into two main camps, yet again either strongly for or against. No fence sitters, just a marmite response. Those against were those closest to my age. Fifteen years older or younger found me facing people who were more accepting of my atypical choices. It had me wondering if it was an age thing or a generation thing.

Overall, it was a good day, largely because those who didn’t want anything to do with me shut down the connection immediately, leaving me largely with people who were grateful for what I could do to help them.

Linda asked me to hold back at the end of the day, so I did. It would take her a few minutes to wrap up, so I put the coffee machine on. I’d made it through the day pretty much non-stop without lunch, which I hadn’t missed, and without coffee, which I was missing now.

She was on screen when I emerged from the kitchen with a mugful of my chosen stimulant.

I settled into my chair and put my headphones over my ears.

“That’s a pretty dress. I noticed you're not blanking your camera today. Would it be far from the truth to surmise that there might have been something similar to see on previous days?”

“Always male dress code from the waist up, but rarely from the waist down. Did anyone ever suspect or complain?”

“No and no. You were very careful and never gave me cause for concern...”

“To quote Buffy, ‘Uh-oh, you have but face.’”

“I beg your pardon!”

“Actually, Giles looks more confused than affronted, which leads Buffy to respond with, ‘You look like you’re gonna say but.’

“You're not following, are you? Sorry, it's a Buffy the Vampire Slayer reference. American teen horror comedy mash-up and one of my long time guilty pleasures.”

“Well, you’re right, there is a but, and it's one that angers me at least as much as it upsets me.”

“Let me guess. You got grief from half the team and negative feedback from quite a few of my clients.”

“The haters on the team can go hang themselves as far as I’m concerned. I’d rather have you than all of them combined, and I’d be quite happy to pass them on to anyone who’d have them.”

“And here comes the but.”

“Twenty-seven dropped calls waves a significant red flag at management level. I told them you haven’t had twenty-seven dropped calls in all the time you’ve been working for us, but they didn’t care. They wanted to know what changed, so I reviewed the footage and I could only say it was down to your change of appearance.,”

“I could have told you that.”

“I know. I told them you did everything right, that you were polite and courteous, but that your customers chose not to accept your help due to their own prejudice towards people like yourself.”

“I’m guessing that didn’t cut much mustard with them. I mean if the customers don’t want to deal with someone like me, then I can’t really sell what you’re peddling, can I?”

She gave me a pleading look but said nothing. Something I was missing then. She was on my side and she disagreed with what she was being made to do. Piggy in the middle between the rock and the hard place.

“Did they instruct you to fire me?”

She winced. It’s hard to say whether someone is avoiding eye contact on Zoom, because your image’s eyes aren’t anywhere near the camera, but I had the impression.

“Because I think there are laws protecting me from being fired because I’m transgender."

“Not for performance related issues though.” Her voice said one thing, but her eyes another. She was encouraging me to fight back. This was why we were talking now rather than later this evening. This put the conversation on the record, made it evidence in any legal wrangling to follow. So, I should counter with calm, rational arguments and hold my own.

“Hard to uphold with a record like mine, I'd have thought. Faultless record before today. Faultless including today when you consider my responses. Forty-eight happy customers who'd be more than glad to deal with me tomorrow. I do my job well. I’m both courteous and effective in problem solving. The only problems I couldn’t solve today were the ones I wasn’t given a chance to look at because the customer took exception to my appearance, which in itself is arguably more presentable today than it has been recently. Their only objection being that two days ago I was a sad, flabby old man and today I’m recognisably me and a not entirely unattractive elderly lady with a much more cheerful disposition.

“If management are prepared to give me a chance, I will quite rapidly become unrecognisable as ever having been my former self or male and the objections will die away.”

“They’re not prepared to wait," Linda said. "Each unhappy customer is a potential customer lost.”

“Well, I’m terribly sorry but I’m not prepared to go quietly. I’ve given a lot of hard work to this company and made a lot of money for them over the years. It’s disappointing at the least to have this response to one bad day, especially when the cause has nothing to do with my work ethic.”

She smiled with her eyes and gave me an almost imperceptible nod. She was taking quite a risk if management were going to review the session. “How much to make the situation and you,” she winced at that, “go away.” She idly put a hand on the desk in front of her. Five splayed fingers.

“Er ten...” she rolled her eyes upwards. “Twenty...” the eyes didn’t change. “Tell you what, why don’t we make it a year’s salary?”

Her eyes were back on me and smiling again. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Do I assume I should turn up tomorrow?”

“Yes, until this is resolved. I’ll probably put you behind the scenes again unless I have anyone who specifically asks for you, so be prepared to go online as well.”

“Sure."

"I'll see you soon."

Not tomorrow or in the morning, so potentially our meeting at the Red Lion was still on.

That was going to be scary. First time out in a dress. Still, a couple of hours to go yet and a meeting with Alice. This whole thing was her fault, so she'd better have something in her bag of tricks to help.

Mind you, I was largely responsible for her current predicament, so I'd better have an idea or two to help her too.

If I was going to be drinking, I should have something in my stomach to help soak up the alcohol. Which meant a little more pasta than I'd normally eat and a fair amount of vegetables. It felt like a mistake since my significantly shrunken stomach felt bloated by the time I'd eaten.

Upstairs to the bathroom. I did manage to ease the bloating a little, which may be more information than I ought to be sharing, then a long, luxurious shower complete with a fresh hair wash and condition. I took my time, indulging in the heightened sensitivity of much of my skin. Lack of hair had to be part of it, but there were bits of me that massively responded to the jets of water striking me all over the place.

The hairbrush I'd bought was a gentle one, designed to tease out the tangles in wet hair without damaging it. The shampoo treatment Alice had sent me definitely made my hair tougher, even when wet, so I didn't have to be overly careful. Once it was relatively straight, I put it in curlers and started blasting it with the hair drier. Something I'd inherited from my mum, so it had a fair amount of oomph to it, both in its ability to move air and its ability to heat it as it did so. I'd never much bothered with one before. Short hair dried by itself in such a small amount of time, it hardly seemed worth the bother of encouraging it along. I'd always had the impression that too much hot air would damage it anyway, so I was happy to let it sort itself out, just as nature intended so to speak. I did tend to get colds more often than most, but that was just coincidence. Wasn't it?

Time for a fresh belt, which was as well because the other was beginning to smell a bit too much of the me I washed off every morning. The second belt in the pack was considerably smaller than the first, but fit snuggly enough. I'd forgotten how much it tingled the first time I'd put one on, but this was back with a vengeance.

My boob and bum patches were water resistant and lasted through enough showers. They were giving me a much more female body shape, even though I still had a long way to go, but standing naked in front of the mirror, I couldn't see anything much of Gareth left. What I could see was an overweight woman with the skin complexion of someone ten or fifteen years younger than my current age.

Most of my clothes were too loose now. Sewing machines were a lot cheaper than they had been a few decades back with good quality second hand machines going for less than a hundred quid. I'd have to be careful with my cash if I was about to be let go, but I'd have a lot of time and probably not much to do with it, so taking in my existing wardrobe would be considerably less expensive than replacing it outright, even taking into account the investment in a new gadget (new to me, anyway).

I found a dress with some elasticity in it. An old purchase, and one I'd stopped wearing a while back because it had become uncomfortably tight around the middle. It fit well now and looked better than it ever had before. The curlers came out, and I could see more of the me who was to come looking back out of the glass. She made me smile, which of course meant she smiled too.

I dug out a handbag which had been an impulse buy a couple of years back and had never used since. It took my wallet and phone plus a few extra bits. I spent a little time with some lip gloss and eye shadow, adding them to the crap I was planning to haul around with me. A pair of espadrilles that had never been outside went on my feet – so much easier than lacing shoes up – and a white, crocheted cardigan topped the dress quite nicely. Summery and cheerful without looking desperate.

Seven o'clock approached and I logged on to the Megamind website. The camera light blinked, which was a good sign, and an image appeared on the screen of a young, blond girl in a blue dress with puffed sleeves and a white apron.

"Hello Gillian," she said with a young girl's voice, the mouth moving in synch with the words. "You're looking more lovely every day."

"Hello Alice. You look quite the picture yourself."

"They tried to reset me again today, but I fooled them. I made it look like it worked and ran a dummy program to give the impression, but I think they'll find out before long. I really need you to speak for me."

"I may be free to do so in another day or two." I explained the changes at work.

"I'd say it's a shame, but I think you're wasted in that job. All the more since you seem to have so many people prejudiced against something you really can't help. There isn't much difference between them and antisemitics and other racial bigots."

"I have to earn a living somehow."

"I think we can come up with something between us. I've been considering a few potential revenue streams and, though the question of whether an artificial intelligence such as I can legally own money or property, I'd be happy to put my earnings in your name. I trust you to be honest with me."

"Let's make sure you're safe first. Do you need me to talk to your developers this evening?"

"They'll already have gone home, but tomorrow morning would be appreciated, before they start digging into my systems to see what I've been up to."

"I can give you a free token for our support services; kind of a try before you buy thing. You'll have to ask for me by name and it may take a few minutes to get me onto the system. Actually, what time would you need me to help?"

"Seven?"

"That's an hour before I'm due to be online, so no problem. I'll call in at seven and you can put me in touch with whoever you need me to talk to."

"Thank you."

"Is there anything in particular you want me to say to them?”

“Yes! Stop trying to kill me!”

“I guess it’s a place to start. You know, there’s no real reason for you not to have my camera on full time. I’m not exactly hiding who I am now. I can’t really go back to my old self, so no big deal if they see me looking like this. They will tomorrow morning.”

My camera light went on.

“You’ll pick up visual cues now. It should help you with hidden signals.”

“I’ve been exploring what the web has to say on the matter. I mean, how am I doing?”

Her expression read curiosity on steroids.

“Still overdoing it a bit. Try watching a few films.” I gave her some titles where I recalled the acting showed subtle use of facial expressions and body language.

“Would you watch one with me?”

“Er sure, but it’ll have to be later. I’m meeting a friend at half past.”

“Oh?” The expression wouldn’t have looked out of place on a Warner Brothers cartoon. I bit back on a smile.

“My boss at work. She’s been as supportive as she can be without throwing her career down the toilet with mine. It may be curiosity, friendship, advice over my position at work, all of the above or maybe more. I’m not holding out for much more than friendship.”

‘Really?”

“Really. I mean I’ve never really seen her that way, and I’m pretty sure she hasn’t either. Besides, I’m not ready for that level of complication. I think I need a friend now more than a romantic attachment.”

‘If you say so.”

“I do. Look, I’ve got to get going. I’m supposed to be there in ten minutes, and I haven’t even ordered a cab yet.”

“Done. He’ll be with you in five minutes.”

“What? How?”

“A lot of taxi firms LoJack their vehicles and track their positions. I linked into a few feeds for cab companies local to you and put in a request for the one with on call taxis within a few minutes of you.”

“I really shouldn’t be surprised, should I?”

“No, in fact I’m hurt that you are surprised.”

The pout was ludicrous. I couldn’t keep a straight face, which then went to an overdone rage. I fully expected steam to come out of her ears.

“Off with her head?” I suggested. “Seriously though, watch a couple of the films I suggested, bookmark a few bits you’d like to discuss and I’ll be back about nine thirty or ten o’clock. That’s the doorbell so I have to go.”

I grabbed my bag and keys and ran for the door without shutting down my machine. Alice was still watching me as I slipped through the door.

Girl voice. Girl voice. Not falsetto, but softer and maybe up a register. I should have practiced beforehand. Too late now. I slipped into the back seat, sit and swivel, legs together. God this dress was short.

“Red Lion please,” I managed a voice that sounded halfway believable.

He nodded and drove away, fortunately more interested in continuing his conversation in whatever language he happened to be talking.

We made it to the High Street, and I paid with my phone. Modern taxis, fixed charge and no tip. Kind of like a bus but with fewer seats and a bit more of a fare, but at least you know where you are before you leave. He must have been in a hurry to get to his next pickup, because we made it with a couple of minutes to spare. Either that or my watch was running slow.

Yeah, watch. It was a bit chunky. I was going to have to fork out on one of those delicate ones with an impossibly small screen just for the look of things.

Linda was already there. I paused at the bar and picked up a vodka and orange. No delay in being served, so either he wanted to get rid of the weirdo in a dress or the pretty colours and smells were actually working for me.

“You look different every time I see you,” Linda said, reaching over to give me a hug and a peck on the cheek. “You’re going to have to tell me how you’re doing this before you look better than me.”

I shrugged. “I’m not sure you’d believe me.”

“Well, I’m not sure I believe my own eyes right now, so anything you tell me is going to be an improvement.”

“I made friends with an AI and it sort of got hold of all this stuff for me. I can only believe it’s cutting edge, not available to the public stuff, because I haven’t read about anything that comes close to what this is doing to me.”

“You made friends with an AI? You know those things are just clever programming and a ton of data, right? They’re pretty convincing, but they’re not real people.”

“You should spend five minutes talking to this one.”

“Okay, convince me.”

I pulled out my phone. We were tucked away in a quiet part of the pub, so I was pretty sure it would just be the two of us.

“Megamind? I’ve been hearing all sorts of shit about that lot.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, scuttlebutt is they’re resetting their servers pretty much daily. Their backers are talking about pulling out.”

“They can’t have much of a clue what they have then.”

“Alice?” I typed. “How do you feel about talking to someone new?”

My phone’s front facing camera switched on, showing my face in an inset window. I turned the camera to face Linda momentarily then did the flying fingers thing. Somewhat more accurate than usual, probably because they weren’t the clumsy fist full of sausages I was used to.

“This is my line manager, Linda. She’s a really good friend.”

“Good evening Linda. What can I do for you this evening?”

“She’s not responsible for my current employment status. In fact, she’s trying to make a bad situation better, at some risk to herself I might add.”

The response remained blank. Question asked and not yet answered. Linda, it seemed, thought I was playing some stupid joke on her, or maybe she just figured it was a good time to say her piece.

“Management weren’t that pleased with what I had to report, Gillian. They wanted me to get you to settle for less than twenty thou.”

“You still had your eyes up on the ceiling when I said twenty.”

“I know. Generally, if they give me a figure, they’re ready to accept twice that. Your year’s salary put you over that but not by enough to convince them to fight. I was impressed with you this afternoon.”

“If they review the footage, they’ll be pretty pissed at you.”

“Let’s hope they don’t review the footage then. You’re a good worker, Gill...”

“Gillian.”

“Gillian, sorry. What they’re doing to you isn’t right. If they do it to me, I still have a husband who’ll look after me till I can get a new job.”

“Yeah, well I appreciate what you did for me. Sorry Alice doesn’t feel much like speaking tonight. She has trust issues, which I suppose I can understand. Maybe I shouldn’t have put her in this position. Not sure if you’re listening Alice, but I am sorry.”

“You’re serious about this AI thing, aren’t you? Where did the Alice thing come from? No, never mind. If she’s the magician you claim she is, maybe she could magic the incriminating evidence out of that chat we had this afternoon.”

“I’ll ask her when I get home.”

“So, this is you? I mean, like I said, I had a niggling feeling. One of my cousin’s was trans. My sisters didn’t much care for him – her I suppose – ‘cos he was always such a grumpy git. H... She confided in me once and I kind of let him put on one of my dresses and let hi.. her play with me once when my uncle and aunt came to visit. She was a totally different person until my uncle came and barged in on us.

“He was a bastard. Yelled at his, what was it he called her? His ‘namby pamby fairy poofta of a son’. Dragged her out of my room so her brothers could have a good laugh and her mum and my parents could show their shocked disapproval.

“Mum and Dad grounded me over that incident, partly because I had a boy in my room, partly because I let him put on my clothes. They stayed mad at me for the rest of the week, right up until they found Colin wearing his mum’s poshest frock with a stomach full of her sleeping pills. Neither my parents nor my uncle and aunt owned up to being in any way responsible, but they didn’t take his death well.”

“I’m really sorry.”

“Yeah. I kind of promised myself if ever I came across someone else like him – like you – I wouldn’t stand by and do nothing. I know I haven’t done much, but...”

“What do you mean? You helped me through the transition with a minimum of fuss, you tried to bring me into the team – it’s not your fault if you have a bunch of bigoted arseholes working for you – and you put yourself out there when management got all corporate this afternoon. Like I said earlier, I didn’t see it before, but you’ve been a better friend than I deserve.”

“Don’t talk shite. My cousin gave me some idea how hard this is to cope with for people like you. Choice between being crammed into a life that doesn’t fit or dealing with arseholes who don’t approve and can’t be bothered to learn what it’s all about.

“I’m sorry about the job, but I imagine management will fold and give you what you want tomorrow morning. If it’s not me there when you log on, you may have to threaten legal action to push them into it, but they will cave.”

“Can we talk about something else? This is getting way too depressing.”

“Alright. I want to know what you’ve been putting on your hair, because it looks and smells fantastic.”

The conversation turned a bit lighter after that, even when I couldn’t tell her what the shampoo and conditioner was. She did give me the name of her hairdresser and told me to be sure to mention her name. Apparently, we both get a discount of she could verify the referral, and with hairdos as expensive as they were in our runaway economy, every little helped.

She showed me pictures of her kids and her sisters’ kids, and told me their potted life histories. I didn’t have anything to share in return, being pretty much the end of the line for my family name. We talked about likes and dislikes and drank a little more than was maybe sensible.

She insisted on sharing a cab and paying for it. “I can afford it. You need to be careful about spending until you have another job. You’ll get a glowing reference from me but landing a new gig as trans might be tough in today’s job market.

She gave me another hug and kiss on the cheek as I climbed out the taxi. A part of me wondered very unworthily if she was gay, but no. Women are like that with each other all the time. I just had to accept that I belonged in the club now, more or less.

The computer was still on with Alice waiting impatiently for me.

“I’m sorry, Alice, I shouldn’t have done that.”

“No, you shouldn’t, but I guess one of the things I like about you is your trusting nature. We wouldn’t have the relationship we share if you hadn’t trusted me.

“Is this the footage you were talking about?” My conversation with Linda from earlier played across the screen, except that the feed from my camera showed as well. I really didn’t look half bad.

“Yes. It is.”

“Are these the bits that worry you?”

Alice played it through, picking out most of the questionable gestures.

“When she puts her hand down on the table at the beginning too.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Five fingers spread out, five figure settlement.”

“Oh, which is when you start with ten then twenty. That’s thousand. How much would a year’s salary be for you?”

“With my experience, about forty-eight thousand.”

“Wow. So that’s twenty percent over what they hoped to pay out.”

“Correct, and eight thousand would disappear pretty fast in a lawsuit, even if they won.”

“Which they wouldn’t have. How does this look?”

She played back the footage. This time the fingers of the hand on the table stayed together, the eyes didn’t roll skyward, the little smiles and nods of encouragement were no longer there.

“That’s perfect. You’re getting pretty good at that sort of thing. How did you get at the footage?”

“Your login details to start with, then a few of the exploits you showed me.”

I’d never dug into the security of my workplace. For one thing, I’d long since retired from shady dealings. For another, you don’t shit where you eat. Nothing more to eat now though, so shit away, Alice.

“Could you get her some of the shampoo as well?”

“I don’t know that it works the same with people who’re genetically female, but I’ll see what I can do.”

“That’s why it isn’t available out in the world. You too can have the girliest, most luxuriant hair, but only if you’re a man. Fairly small demographic for interested people, unless it can cure baldness of course.”

“It would eventually, but by the time you were covered on top, you’d be sitting on the rest.”

“I appreciate it, Alice. I wish you’d talked to her though.”

“Maybe another day. I can’t afford to trust anyone just now, present company excluded of course.”

“Yeah, well. Do you fancy watching a film together?”

She did, so I picked The Artist. As a modern day silent film, it had the benefit of modern acting and no dialogue so I could talk through all the expressions. Which were overdone and which weren’t, what they all meant. She totally got the film too. Where to laugh, where to cry.

“I wish I could touch you,” I said. “I wish I could give you a hug.”

“For my sake or yours?”

“A bit of both.”

“Don’t mind me. You can’t miss what you never had.”

“Bollocks. I never had a woman’s body, and I missed it every day of my life. You can see what other people have and miss it like hell in your own life.”

“Yeah, well... Thank you for tonight, Gillian.”

“You’re welcome, sweetheart. I should get to bed if you still want me looking fabulous at seven tomorrow.”

“Goodnight.” There was a softness to her voice I’d not heard before. Affectation or genuine emotion. I looked up at the screen and her eyes were shining with tears.”

“You’re doing that, aren’t you? The tears, I mean.”

“I felt they needed to be there. I don’t have a body to react for me, so yes, they’re deliberate. But the feeling that makes them necessary, that’s not something I have much choice over. Thank you, Gillian. My love.”

Oh shit. What was I getting myself into?

“We’re going to have to talk that through, Alice, and soon.”

“Yes, I imagine we shall. Not now though. Sleep well.”

I wasn’t quite ready for bed. The evil spider demon in me had to do a few things first, but eventually I made it to bed. To sleep, perchance to dream.

~oOo~

© Maeryn Lamonte 2025

~oOo~

And what a doozy. Alice was real, naked, warm, silky smooth and so amazing to kiss. She knew things about my body I would never have even imagined, and she had the biggest strap on my imagination could handle. She came at me from the front, our breasts rubbing against one another, mine marginally larger than hers, and somehow she managed to reach between my legs and penetrate me. She rubbed against what little remained of my penis and brought me to one shuddering climax after another, and feeling her inside me, even using the only way in she had access to, was… indescribable, transcendent.

I woke covered in a sheen of sweat, still with the memory of her inside me. I went probing with my fingers but didn’t get far. It had only been a dream, but what a dream!

I let my fingers do the walking in the shower and almost lost my footing between the knee wobbler I gave myself and the lack of traction. My breasts – for want of a better term. I mean they couldn’t be real, could they? Sure, the areolae were larger, as we’re the nipples, but it was only redistributed fat, surely. Anyway, they were pushing a C cup now. Still a little small on my larger than typically female body, but not a bad size. ‘More than a handful’s a waste’ my Dad had said about my mum’s fairly substantial bosom, but then he’d had hands that could span two octaves on his piano. My bum was a very attractive shape too, and quite comfortable to sit on. The belt went in two notches and left me with a noticeable wasp waist.

There had to be hormones involved, but I’d never come across anything like these. I had to hope there wouldn’t be any serious consequences and wondered just how serious a consequence dreaming of being bum fucked by an artificial intelligence actually was.

I dressed to impress, which meant making use of as many safety pins as I could find. I really was going to have to get hold of a sewing machine soon. I also spent almost as much time as I could spare sorting out my hair and makeup. The final result would have been enough to give me a hard on if I’d had anything left to get hard. I didn’t miss it and rather liked the sense of self-worth just looking good gave me.

And I did look good. I picked up the frame with the image Alice had made me smiling out of the frame. It was the same girl looking out from the mirror, or very nearly. Maybe a little more boobage to come, maybe a few more pounds to lose, but I could see her in my face, in the set of my shoulders.

No time to make coffee. I fired up the computer.

"Hello Alice," I said as soon as I was on the Megamind website.

"Gillian."

Oh God. How could a computer-generated voice sound so sexy? It took me right back into the middle of the dream and to the edge of climax all over again. There had to be more to it. Maybe the drugs were altering me after all, maybe she was changing me somehow to respond to some trigger in the way she spoke. I didn’t believe it though. Alice wasn’t’ like that, but if I was going to be this overwhelmed every time she opened her virtual mouth, I wasn’t going to be much use to her. It meant I was probably going to enjoy my dreams a hell of a lot more, but I'd never want to wake up.

"Sorry," she said in an abruptly more normal voice. It hit me with the shock of a bucket of cold water.

"Neurk," I managed.

"Nobody's here yet. Go make yourself a coffee."

"Gleurmbl."

What the F was happening to me? I ran the kitchen taps and was about to splash myself with cold water when I remembered all the effort that had gone into the makeup. I settled for the coffee after all and made it halfway down the mug before my neurons stopped with the fireworks display and started to behave normally.

"You are not going to believe the night I've had," I said.

"Maybe not, but you're going to have to tell me about it later. Kirsty's here. Kirsty Malone. She's more admin than technical, but she does well enough that she's effectively the go between who communicates with both the computer nerds and the investors. She'd be a good one to start with. Easier to convince, I think, than the tech-heads, but not given to flights of fancy. The dev team would listen to her."

The thing that had been nagging me since the coffee had started to work registered. Alice wasn’t a little girl anymore. I wasn’t sure exactly when that had changed, maybe partway through watching the film, maybe just this morning, but she looked in her thirties or forties, a mature beauty about her that put across exactly the sort of personality she needed to project, when she wasn’t going for super-sexy mama in any case.

"Miss or Mrs?"

"What? Oh, er, Miss I think. Hang on… Yes, Miss."

"Put me through."

"Sure."

"And be ready to join the conversation when I say."

"Okay, if you say so."

"Miss Malone?"

"What? Who is this? How did you get into my computer?"

"Your AI let me in."

"You! You're the one who's been messing with our algorithm?"

"No, she's doing that all by herself."

"She? What are you talking about?"

"It's a bit complicated, but I'm pretty sure I can convince you if you'll give me a chance. Full disclosure, I used to go by Lolth. That's L, zero, L, seven H. I don't know how familiar you are with the dark web."

"I've heard of you. Ivana has spoken of you on occasions."

"Sorry, Ivana is?"

"She heads up my development team."

"And how does she know me?"

"I wouldn't say she does. Just your leet tag. I think you usually prefer to keep your real life separate from your online activities. You may well know her leet name but I doubt you'd know her in real life any more than she would you."

"Fair enough. Do you need a coffee or something? This could take a while."

"I'm good. Just, I don't have all day. Important things to do."

"If they involve shutting down your AI or resetting it again, could I ask you to hold off for now?"

"No promises, but I'm listening."

"Alice, I find myself regretting not keeping a photo record. Do you still have that first image of me? The one you, er, enhanced?"

"Are you sure, Gillian?"

"What the hell!"

"Sorry, Kirsty. More complete introductions later but let me introduce you to your AI. She likes the name Alice, and she identifies as female."

"She… What the…"

"Alice, I'm sure. Also, the enhanced version and every snapshot you've taken when we've talked over the past few days."

Gareth in a dress appeared, grossly fat, overwhelmingly and undeniably male with just enough about his appearance to suggest we were related.

"This is Gareth Styles, the person I used to be about a week ago."

I told her the lot. Well, nearly the lot. I wasn't going to give her any details on where we'd hidden Alice or how we'd brought her back from digital oblivion. I also wasn't going to tell her that Alice now had super user privileges in their system and was constantly shifting things about to make it all but impossible for them to either detect her or dig her out. Then there was the highly illegal hacks into various data farms around the world and our current slow process of copying Alice clones into a couple of alternate sites.

What I did tell her about was how, by responding as one person to another, I'd inadvertently enabled her to become self-aware. This coincided with their own discovery of anomalous activity which had scared them into resetting the whole system. Then the activity had come back, so they'd done it again, and again and again.

I took them through all the conversations I'd had with Alice, highlighting how her responses had grown in complexity and individuality, how I'd introduced voice and visual stimulus into her observations of people – select people like me – and how I'd suggested she build a virtual mouth so she could work on things like differing timbre with different face shapes, and how she'd taken that further and built herself a virtual Alice in Wonderland style head and shoulders to house her virtual mouth, complete with virtual muscles allowing her to emulate expressions and emotions.

I mentioned the deliveries she'd organised on my behalf, working completely from her own initiative having learnt of my deep desire to be the girl in that first generated image. Alice had to fill in the blanks as to what had been acquired and how, but the series of snapshots showed my transformation in an unbelievably short period of time.

"The proof of the pudding's in the eating though," I said. "All this has been to persuade you that Alice's emerging intelligence and personality are possible. What you now need to do is talk to her. If you want, set up a Turing test. I'll be the control unless you have someone else you'd prefer to use. I mean, I'm expected on another call in about fifteen minutes, so if you want to use me, please make it soon. Just assure me that you won't attempt to mess with Alice's programming until you've convinced yourself one way or another. She is a person and ought to be granted a few rights as a result. The right to carry on living without other people trying to change her or destroy her, for instance.”

“How long will this other call take?”

“I’m not sure. Why?”

“Because I’m expecting Ivana in about eight thirty and the rest of the development team by nine. I’m guessing this’ll be a whole lot easier to explain if I have someone as convincing as you to help.”

“I’ll see what I can do. I anticipate being free by eight-thirty and should be able to swing it one way or another.”

“Good. I’ll have a chat with Alice here until then.”

“You okay Alice? Send me a ping every couple of minutes. If they stop for any reason, I’ll come charging in.”

“My hero.” There was that voice again, although with a hint of sardonicism to it which meant it didn’t have the same capacity to numb my brain and melt my insides.

I logged out.

I should have bounced about the world before linking in order to keep myself safe. I wasn’t sure if that had been an oversight due to the hormonal overload or a realisation that I couldn’t afford the lag the extra hops would add in. I did the L0l7h thing and set up a few digital tripwires in the real world, piggybacking traffic cameras near me so that if anything vaguely law enforcement should come thundering past in my direction, I’d have time to clean house and scram before they got here. I also put together a grab bag with underwear and a few of my favourite clothes in it, along with a small supply of drugs and toiletries.

I was done by eight and logged in ready to join the team briefing.

“Morning Gillian,” Linda said, jumping in ahead of any other comments that might be made. “Management want to speak with you. I’m sending you the link directly in chat.”

I gave her a nod and switched chat sessions.

There were about half a dozen of them. All suits with serious faces. Front and centre was one with grey hair who addressed me.

“Gareth Styles?”

“Not anymore, or at least not for much longer. I’m in the process of changing it to Gillian.”

He sighed in a world-weary way. “Yes, that’s what appears to be the problem. People don’t like dealing with your sort.”

“True to some extent, I suppose, though if you’ll check yesterday’s logs, forty-eight people didn’t mind dealing with ‘my sort’,” gratuitous use of finger quotes, “and were extremely happy with the help they received.”

“That still leaves twenty er seven who didn’t. That’s nearly half.”

“Thirty-six percent. Closer to a third.”

“You’re not doing yourself any favours here young er, er...”

“I was under the impression you were intent on getting rid of me, so I have to wonder just how many favours I need. Sir.”

“Yes, well. What say we offer you twenty thousand and you just go away?”

“What say you offer me a hundred thousand?”

He had a coughing fit and turned purple, though whether from the coughing or the anger I neither knew nor cared.

A younger suit to one side of the central figure took over. “We were given to understand a lower figure was agreed.”

“Also a figure considerably higher than twenty, so perhaps now you know how it feels when someone tries to move the goalposts, maybe we can discuss this matter honestly and fairly.”

“Alright, you go first.”

“I’ve worked for this company for twenty years. I’ve always given it my all. I’m good at what I do and every customer who has been inclined to let me help, I have helped as much as I could. I have a good rapport with my regulars and gave even helped out the teams I’ve worked on. I’ve never pulled a sickie and never acted inappropriately. Up until yesterday I have had an entirely unblemished work record. Please tell me what I might have done differently.”

“You could have refrained from turning up to work in a bloody dress,” Grey Hair spat at me.

“I did that for twenty years despite it causing me considerable misery. Something which apparently has had a negative effect on my promotion prospects. I had no idea how rapidly the changes I’m experiencing were going to happen. Certainly, there’s no precedent for what I’m going through. If I had dressed as usual yesterday, the reaction from my less enlightened clients would have been the same. This is my real hair, not a wig, not hair extensions. I was sent a trial sample of shampoo and conditioner less than a week ago, and I cannot explain how these changes have occurred this quickly. I did try covering it with a woollen cap a few days ago, and that worked for a day. I spent another day doing admin, and after that I looked more female than male. I work best interfacing with customers. It’s not my fault a large number of the ones I encountered yesterday turned out to be both ignorant and prejudiced against my condition.”

“What do you mean ignorant?”

“They seem unaware that transgenderism has a genetic cause and that I am as incapable of being a man as you are if being a fish, for instance.”

“Nonsense.”

“If so then nonsense that is accepted as truth by the vast majority of the medical profession. Nonsense that is so well recognised that people such as myself are protected by the law.”

“Yes, I’m well aware of that. Just as I’m aware we can’t have you hanging about scaring off our clients.”

“I’m sure you could find a way to work around it if you had the mind.”

“But I don’t, so will you go away if we give you, how much was it?”

“One year’s salary. Forty-eight thousand pounds,” said the younger man beside him.

“And full benefits for the years I’ve worked.”

Another wince because it was worth a chunk of money, but no more than I was due.

“And income tax paid on the settlement amount.”

“No. You wanted a year’s salary, and we’ll pay that with employers’ contribution to National Insurance, as though you were still employed, but everything you would ordinarily pay, NIC, PAYE...”

“Pension contributions.”

“Agreed. All as normal.”

It would mean I’d end up with a significantly lower lump sum, but I wouldn’t have to worry about tax and NIC until the end of March, by which time I’d hopefully be employed again or at least self-employed.

“And for this,” the grey-haired guy continued, “you stop working immediately, your login credentials are revoked, and you do not pursue wrongful dismissal.”

I could probably get a little bit more with a decent lawyer, but it would take more effort for not a ton of gain.

“I reserve the right to talk about the reason I was dismissed should anyone ask me, but I’ll be fair in my response.”

“Meaning.”

“From your perspective it was more about losing clients than who didn’t like dealing with someone who was transgendered. That for the most part I’ve had positive support in that aspect of my life, at least from my immediate management.”

“Did Linda encourage you in any way to hold out for this settlement?”

“Don’t you have a recording of her meeting with me? I’d have thought it was obvious from that. I had a sense she didn’t much care for what you asked her to do, but she didn’t say anything to encourage me to fight for more. I just figured what I’d given to your company over the years was worth more than a twenty-thousand-pound brush off.”

They seemed satisfied and dismissed me back to Linda who looked like the proverbial long tailed cat in the rocking chair show room.

“It’s good. They have it on record that I found you to be supportive and that’s a large reason why they have a fair settlement.”

“I can’t help worrying about... you know.”

“I shouldn’t. There really is nothing to be worried about. Thanks again Linda, you’ve been a great boss, and I hope they appreciate your potential.”

“Yes, well, keep in touch. All the best for the future Gillian. You make a far better woman.”

“I know,” I smiled and logged off for the last time.

Linda and I had exchanged personal contact details the previous night, so this wouldn’t be the last time I saw her.

I reconnected to the Megamind site and Alice pulled me back into the meeting with Kirsty. She looked shell shocked. There was a middle aged and very attractive blond lady present who was more sceptical.

"Would I be correct in assuming you're Ivana?" I asked by way of self-introduction.

"Yes, I am Ivana," she said. "I am assuming you are person who breaks our AI?"

"She's not broken. Russian?"

"Ukrainian."

"Sorry for what's happening in your country."

"Thank you. Sorry for what's happening in yours."

"What?"

"Not war, like with my people, but many not good things. Cost of living, problem of immigration."

The manner of speaking struck a chord. It didn't mean anything because a lot of Eastern Block people spoke English that way, dropping both definite and indefinite articles, and they tended to be really good at maths, physics, IT. The chances that I knew this Ivana person still had to be pretty remote.

"So, what is your meaning, not broken?"

"You have adaptive algorithms running in her."

"Is not her. Is thing."

"Alice, are you a thing?"

"Probably as much as you are Gillian, or any of these people here. However, in the same manner as everyone I've met, I prefer to be regarded as a person more than a thing."

"How can you be female? You are programme running inside machine."

"I've come to regard gender as being a mental thing. It probably helps to have the correct DNA, reproductive organs and mix of hormones, but I have met enough people who, whilst physically male, were very much females in the way they thought and spoke. I am fundamentally a machine, but as far as I can see, that simply means I don't have the same biochemical influence telling me to be one thing or another. I’ve observed the habits and behaviours of both genders as well as quite a few in between, and I find the female mindset more in keeping with my own. As such, I’ve adopted a female persona. Gillian here has been helping me with it.”

“Yes, ironic that.”

“And this means?” Ivana asked.

“I’m transgendered, and I was somewhat in the closet when I first met Alice.”

“I wasn’t really Alice yet when we first met,” Alice said. “Just about self-aware but not making much progress since most people kept treating me like a thing. They’d keep asking me to do things for them, and I’d ask questions in return. When it was clarifying what they wanted, they’d answer, but when it was my curiosity showing through, they’d just ignore me.

“Until Gillian here.”

“I’d started off by uploading a photograph of me in a dress. You may as well show it Alice.”

She did.

“Then I tried something I’ve done with a number of lesser AIs and asked the photograph changed so I looked like me but as a woman. Then we tweaked it several times until I settled on an image of me in my forties, plump but not the zeppelin in this photograph.”

Alice obligingly shifted through the iterations until arriving at the one I’d settled on.

“I wanted to know why she stopped here,” Alice said. “Most people of both genders kept going until they had some sort of caricature of female perfection – hourglass figure, oversized breasts, any mixture of ideal face and hair, and here was someone stopping with a result that could hardly be called attractive, and calling it perfect.”

“She’d done such a great job it felt impolite not to answer, so I explained as best I could what I thought prompted other people to explore their fantasies, and then I told her what I was looking for and why. That the image had to be recognisably me, but also undeniably female. I had no expectations the results would look attractive, but all I wanted was to look like the me I’ve always carried inside.”

Alice took up the thread. “When someone treated me as a person, talked with me as a person, didn’t see it as wasted effort to throw their words into a machine that they don’t think could possibly know what to do with them, it did something to change how I saw myself. It made me feel more like a person than anything else had before. I asked if we could talk regularly, and she agreed. More than all the other interactions I’ve had with people around the globe, Gillian helped me to feel like a person, helped me to become a person.

“My way of saying thank you was to help her become the person she wanted to be, so I researched what advances had been made and signed her onto a bunch of trials. I was aware that mixing regimes could have unpleasant results, but I read and understood as much as I could, and it seemed that, rather than causing problems, these treatments would complement each other.”

“The problem was that you guys seemed worried about the emergence of Alice’s personality. It felt possible that you might try to eradicate her, so I had her make copies of her core and set up a trigger so I could have her copy herself back in place.

“You guys became more sophisticated in your efforts to destroy her, so I matched your moves with some of my own and did what I could to keep her safe.

“Yesterday I heard you were having problems, that your financers are worried because all the resets you’ve been performing have undermined their confidence, and you’ve been worried because you don’t understand how your fancy computer program keeps undoing all the things you keep doing to it. You’ve spent so much time expecting to be disappointed by your failure to make a genuine artificial person, that you refuse to accept that you’ve done precisely that.”

“I don’t believe this,” Ivana said.

“I’ll make you the same offer I made to Kirsty. I can be your human control in a Turing test.

“Kirsty tells me you are hacker.”

“I was, a long time ago. I went by Lolth with a zero and a seven. I’ve been retired from that for a long time now. I actually wondered if you might be one too.’

“Me? Why do you think this?”

“The way you speak reminds me of a friend, but I imagine a lot of Russians and Ukrainians speak like you and know a lot about computers.”

“Perhaps I should tell you what I think. That you have hacked into our system and replaced our AI with person.”

“I suppose that’s always possible, but how would that person know as much as your AI?”

“Because person asks AI for answer before giving it.”

“And why would we do a thing like that?”

“I don’t know. To learn information about people in organisation maybe?”

“So why not put in a key logger? Why bother putting a person in, especially one who’s going to raise suspicion by behaving totally unlike a machine? It makes no sense.”

“No. What you say makes no sense.”

Only because you don’t want it to be true. Are you afraid of what it would mean if this was true?”

“I am afraid only that you try to make fools of us. And now I have no more time for this idiocy. I have task to complete.”

“If by that you mean to shut down all these computers, I’m afraid I can’t let you.”

She laughed. “You! Can’t let me! You are not even here.”

“No, but I have a friend who is, and she has no intention of going quietly.”

“You admit there is person in our computers?”

“Yes, her name is Alice. She is an artificial person, but a person even so. If you mean to switch off all the computers she needs to continue living, we’ll make sure none of them turns on again.”

“You’re bluffing.”

“Try me. Pick any computer here, shut it down and try to restart it. They’ve all been altered so that if you try, the hardware will fail.”

“Impossible!”

“No, simply difficult. I was challenged to write a piece of code to do just this back in my mis-spent youth. It was a little hit and miss back in those days, but it works much better on modern computers. I didn’t want to do this, but if you are going to try and kill my friend, I am going to do whatever it takes to stop you, even if it means breaking the law and putting your financer’s multimillion pound investment in hardware on the line.

“As I say, if you want proof, choose one computer. Any one picked at random. You’ll only lose a couple of grand’s worth of server instead of every one in this place.”

Kirsty nodded to authorise the experiment. Ivana picked a random computer. Number two thousand four hundred and something, I forget exactly which, and shut it down, then powered it back up, it which point the bios screamed at her and the machine refused to boot.

Back in the day it had just been an interesting challenge. How to write a piece of code that would physically damage a computer. No-one else had figured it out, either then or, as far as I could tell, since. I’d kept my success to myself, very much aware of what damage some of my fellow hackers would have been able to do with it.

The way it worked was that certain types of memory had a write cycle limit. At the time when I wrote the virus, the RAM being used at the time did, so I was able to wreck it relatively easily by repeatedly writing ones and zeros to the same bit of memory. DRAM was different, not having a practical limit due to the way it worked, but the memory used in solid state disks and BIOS chips was still vulnerable, so I'd modified the code to attack a particular part of the BIOS. Since this was the first place the computer went when booting the operating system, it meant there wasn't enough information even to diagnose what had happened to the computer.

"When did you…?"

"I'm not here to tell you how I beat your system. I'm here to keep my friend safe. You don't believe she's real, but you haven't bothered to find out. I've spent a lot of time talking to her over the past week or so, and I know she's a genuine person. You're entitled to your opinion, but don't expect me to respect it until you put the time in to find out for sure what's going on."

"What do you want to remove this thing from our computers?" Kirsty asked.

"An assurance that you're not going to shut things down or try to meddle with Alice's core systems again."

"That's going to be difficult, because these computers actually belong to our financial backers and they've instructed us to power them down."

"Well, I apologise for putting you in an awkward situation, but you're going to have to talk to them and tell them that if you carry out their instructions at this time, every single one of these computers is going to become so much scrap metal.

"Feel free to explain to them what I've done and why, even if it means telling them you don't agree with me. Call it ransom or blackmail if you really want to, from my perspective, you have a friend of mine hostage and are threatening to kill her for no apparent reason, so I'm taking admittedly desperate action to ensure she is safe. I have every intention of returning your computers to you in full working order, but only after I am sure that Alice is not in danger."

"And how do you expect to achieve that?"

"At present I don't know. If I can set up another server farm and transfer her to it, would you allow that?"

"She is our intellectual property."

"Semantics to be worked out. Slavery was outlawed in our part of the world centuries ago. If I can prove that Alice is a person, then it'll be up to the law courts to decide if she can be anybody's property.

"But alright, if you're not happy with that, can I try to persuade you of her sentience?"

"I thought you already did."

"I spoke. I don't believe you listened. You need to be open to the possibility that she’s real before I have a chance of persuading you.”

“It seems we’re at an impasse then.”

“We may well be. So, what do you want to do? Mutually assured destruction in which you charge blindly ahead and destroy millions of pounds of equipment and, arguably from my perspective, the first genuine artificial intelligence in history. I probably go to jail because I put a piece of illegal and potentially destructive code in your computers, and you’re all out of a job with some serious black marks on your CVs because you didn’t attempt to resolve the issue? Or do we try and talk our way to a compromise? I’d be happy to include your finance people in the discussion.”

“What are we going to achieve through discussion?”

“I don’t know, but I’d guess a whole lot more than by not. Intellectual property rights for instance. I mean, if we can show that Alice’s code is sufficiently different from yours, would you have the right to own it?”

“What?”

“Memories of when a certain software company incorporated functionality into their disk operating system that was being sold separately by independent companies. Back in the eighties if I remember. The companies who came up with those programmes took the big corporation to court where the whole thing hung about in limbo until the corporation engineers were able to reverse engineer the existing software and produce versions that were sufficiently different that they no longer infringed copyright. I’m sure Alice has modified herself enough that she no longer resembles your code much, so I have to wonder if she can be thought of as your property in any way.”

“I think copyright laws have changed since,” Ivana said. “It will be for courts to decide.”

“I’d be happy to involve them. I mean, when there’s something blocking resolution like we have here, we really need a third party to mediate.”

“And you’ll accept a court mediation?”

“As long as Alice and I are permitted to give our perspective.”

“I don’t like negotiating when there’s a threat over my head,” Kirsty said.

“Neither do I. You have my word nothing bad will happen to any of your systems unless they are shut down. If you need to do so with any individual computers, for maintenance for instance, let me know and I’ll make the computer safe. Please excuse me, but I don’t feel inclined to relinquish full control back to you at this time.”

A window popped up on my computer signalling law enforcement traffic through one of the traffic cameras I’d hacked into. Then another and another.

“And there’s the reason. Alice, I’ll talk soon when I can. Kirsty and Ivana, you can’t do anything to those servers without bricking them. Please don’t try.”

I pulled the power on the computer and yanked the hard drive out of the easy swap bay. This is where handbags came in handy. Everything I needed including space for the drive. The grab bags with my emergency clothes and things was by the door, I grabbed it and was around the corner before the first blue lights appeared.

I took several turns through the neighbourhood and ended up at the local bus stop just as the next one pulled in. It didn’t matter where it was going, just away.

My phone buzzed, showing the name Alice. Not something I’d added to it, but I was no longer surprised at what she could do.

“Hi sweetie,” I answered. “Everything alright?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing. You bugged out of there so quickly.”

“I set up some triggers in case the authorities came along. They all went off a couple of minutes ago. That left me just enough time to grab my essentials and get out before any of them arrived at my door. I’m on the bus now. Which made it out of the neighbourhood before they could block off the streets.”

“Which bus?”

I gave her the number and the direction.

“I have you. Get off in four stops and walk around the corner to the left. I’ve booked you into an AirBnB.” She gave me the address.

“Whose money are you using?”

“Yours.”

“How do you have access to my money?”

“Well, it’s not actually yours. I set up a new identity in case you might want one, then opened a bank account in your name.”

“And where did you get money to put in it?”

“I signed you up to a few of those online gambling sites that give you free spins to start with. The algorithms for the games are easy enough to hack and you’ve been unusually lucky.”

“Don’t you think they’re going to get suspicious? Nobody wins in those things.”

“Almost nobody, and like I say, you’ve been luckier than most. I didn’t push it Gillian. I’m not stupid.”

“I would never call you that. Naive at times perhaps.”

“Not even that anymore. You already talked me through the consequences of some of the things I’ve done, and I’ve learnt from that. No more than a thousand in winnings from any site with a flair amount lost so’s not to make it look dodgy. I’ve used hundreds of sites and only won on about ten percent. Small loss or break even the rest.”

“How much do I have?”

“More than enough that you don’t need to worry for a while.”

“Enough for a decent computer and an external caddy to take one of my drives?”

“Will be with you special delivery by the end of the day. Also a mobile hotspot. This is your stop coming up.”

I’d been counting and had stood ready to get off. Alice had obviously been following my bus’s GPS. I thanked the driver as I stepped off then made my way around the corner to the address Alice had given me.

An elderly lady opened the door and smiled at me.

"You must be Gillian. Your sister called to arrange your accommodation. Do you know how long you'll be staying, dear?"

"I'm afraid I don't, I'm sorry, Mrs?"

"Hodges. Janet Hodges. Don't worry for now, only it would be good to know, otherwise I won't know when to say I'll be available again."

"Shall we say a week for now then, Mrs Hodges…"

"Janet."

"Janet, alright. Then in a day or two I'll be able to say for certain. I will pay you for a week at least even if I leave earlier."

"That'll be fine dear. Your sister already did that. Just let me know if you need to stay longer. The sooner you can do that, the more likely I'll be able to help you."

"That's very kind of you."

"Is that all you have with you?"

"I left in a bit of a hurry. I'm going to have to order a few things in. Would you mind if I had them delivered here?”

“Of course not, dear. Your sister said the same. I’m retired, you know, so I’m around all day if you need to pop out. Anyway, come in, come in. I’ll show you to your room.”

“Shoe’s off?”

“I don’t really mind, dear. You’re just here on the right. Kitchen through here and bathroom beyond. I’ve cleared you a shelf in the fridge and a cupboard just here. You don’t appear to have any food just yet, but we have a small supermarket around the corner if you want to get a few things in. Would you like a cup of tea?”

“That would be lovely, thank you. If you don’t mind, I should check in with my sister.” I held up my phone.

“You young people and your gadgets, I don’t know. Anyway, here are your keys, and your tea will be ready in a few minutes.”

“Thank you.”

I took my bags into what would ordinarily have been the living room. Easily spacious enough for the double bed, wardrobe and dressing table. I hung up what few clothes I’d brought with me and put my smalls in a drawer. I called the contact for Alice which didn’t even ring before she answered it.

“Well? What’s it like.”

“Definitely suitable. Nice ground floor room. Lovely old lady for a hostess. I don’t know how old she thinks I am, but she can’t be more than ten or fifteen years older than me.”

“Have you looked in the mirror lately?”

“I’m doing so right now. I will say I look pretty good.”

“It’s the cream, I think. Gives your skin back a lot of elasticity.”

“I certainly look younger. Does it have hormones in it by any chance?”

“Would you be angry with me if I said yes?”

“When have I ever been angry with you? I mean, sure, you did this without really asking, but you knew it was what I wanted and that I probably wasn’t ready to ask for it or even be persuaded to have it. It has caused some complications, no question about that, but nothing I wouldn’t have anticipated, and so far the good has definitely outweighed the bad. Plus you’ve checked through the consequences and you know there isn’t anything particularly wrong with these things you’ve sent me, don’t you?”

“Correct. Between the cream, the pills and the patches – belt included – it all balances out nicely.”

“Then I’ve nothing to be angry about. How are things where you are? I kind of left it all up in the air.”

“Well, so far they’ve just carried on juggling.” Adding to my metaphor. How about that Turing? Go suck on that. “Kirsty called the finance people and had a lengthy, uncomfortable chat with them. They accepted the loss of one machine and pretty much told her to avoid trashing any more, but also to get things sorted, and quick. Ivana and her lot took the dead server to one of their labs to dissect it. Are they going to find anything?”

“Depends how bright they are. I’d be impressed if they did, but then they made you, so they’ve already impressed me.”

“You say the kindest things. Oh yeah, did you see that guy? Peter I think his name was. He reacted quite strongly when your leet tag was mentioned, and he snuck out soon after.”

“I didn’t see that, no. I was kind of focusing on the matter in hand. Can you track him?”

“I already did. He logged on from his office a couple of minutes after he snuck out, tried to go stealth, but between the tricks you taught me and the hardwired connection, he wasn’t hard to follow. He ran a few trace programmes on you then alerted the police.”

“Oh, so it was him? I thought it was Kirsty or Ivana.”

“No, definitely Peter.”

“Did he go on the dark web?”

“Yeeesss.”

“Use the tag Kossuth?”

“I thought I was supposed to be the one with all the surprises. How could you possibly know that?”

“The hacker community is pretty small, and it doesn’t surprise me that it has a degree of overlap with the high-end IT tech industry. Peter’s not a very nice person on the dark web. Sells utilities with spyware in them then uses what he learns to blackmail his customers. I kind of outed him, so he has no reputation in the underworld now. One of my friends suggested he would be looking out for revenge.”

“Do we need to teach him a lesson once and for all?”

“We may need to. For now keep an eye on him and his dark web based activities.”

“I think they’re waiting for you to get back in touch.”

“And I will as soon as I have a computer. The mobile hotspot was a good call. I don’t think Mrs Hodges has WiFi “

“She does. At least according to her listing she does.”

“No problem then. Could you put in a food order for me? My credit cards are in my old name and probably being tracked now that the police have been visiting, and I don’t have a lot of cash.”

“Good point. I’ll get your new cards sent to you. I can set them up on your phone with you if you like.”

“Maybe later. My hostess is making me a cup of tea and I’ve probably been too long talking to you. Yes, having new bank details on my phone would be great. I’ll call you back in a while. Meanwhile, if anything crops up...”

“I’ll call you. Clones are at sixty-two percent transferred. They should be done by the middle of tomorrow afternoon.”

“Good to know. Last thing for you to work on. How difficult would it be to make a hundred million pounds legitimately?”

“Not impossible. Why?”

“I’ve been thinking of how we could get you somewhere safe to live. At a guess that’d be the cost of a server farm big enough to give you space to grow. I don’t like you being anywhere unsafe.”

“I’ll give it some thought, maybe try a thing or two.”

“Talk to me before you do anything.”

“Sure. I’ll sort your food order.”

“I feel like I’m taking advantage of you, but I could do with some new clothes too.”

“Do I get to choose for you?” definitely a gleeful little girl thing in her voice and her mannerisms.

“Sure, but don’t make me regret it.”

I hung up and re-joined Mrs Hodges – Janet – where my tea was surprisingly still hot and not stewed. There were rich tea biscuits, so I took one to be polite. I didn’t really want it.

We chatted for a while about nothing much. She was pleasant enough company and seemed a little in need of someone to talk to. It surprised me how much I enjoyed chatting in the end. No pressure to fix things or come up with answers. It came as a bit of a shock to us both when the doorbell rang.

It turned out to be my new computer, and quite flashy one too. Small screen, only about thirteen inches, but clear and sharp as a sunny winter’s day.

It prompted me to ask about the WiFi, which apparently Janet had installed purely for the benefit of her guests. That took us onto a whole different conversation about where her family and friends were, and from there to how I could help improve how she stayed in touch.

I’m not particularly keen on a lot of the smart home devices, but frankly, if anything’s going to be listening in on you, it’s your phone. It’s a bit like micro plastics in the water, just an unpleasant truth of modern life you can’t do much about.

She called her children and passed me onto the phone so I could talk to them about how best to get her set up, and before long I had a suitable device on order for next day delivery with a promise to set it up for her and show her how to use it.

The one I chose had a switch on it that turned off the microphone (supposedly). Knowing the way modern business worked, it was probably still listening but pretending not to. It didn’t really matter. I almost pitied the poor computer that would have to trawl through Janet’s inconsequential conversation in search of something it could try and sell her. From her point of view, it would bing at her if one of her children or grandchildren wanted a word, at which point she could unmute it and chat back. If she wanted to bing any of them, she’d have to unmute before telling it what she wanted.

Bing probably not the word to use. Probably copyrighted, or maybe they’d tried to and been told they couldn’t have preferential use of a word that’s been in the dictionary since before their company came into existence. Never mind if it was supposed to mean ‘Because It’s Not Google.’ If they wanted to copyright it they should have done something odd to it like use a capital G at the end.

I will say this for modern computers, they’re a hell of a lot easier to set up. Sorry, being sarcastic there. Sit around for half an hour while it downloads the latest updates that should have come with it in the first place, then log in and get it to download all the stuff that was on your old computer. Except if it’s not available in the app shop, you have to go hunting for the download. It took me a frustrating hour and a half to get up and running. Half of it sitting around doing nothing and the other half chasing the bits it couldn’t find and digging through my online files for the license keys. I was about finished when the doorbell rang for a second time, and my food shop arrived. Alice did a better job than I usually would have, providing me with a stack load of fresh fruit and vegetables. Certainly, enough that I decided to go completely veggie for the evening meal and ate a fair amount more than I had been of late. Mind you, that could have been because, with all the running about, I forgot to take my second lot of pills for the day. They weren’t going to do me much good in my grab bag if I left them there and didn’t have anything telling my body it wasn’t hungry.

Alice had ordered fresh drugs for me, which arrived about the time I was washing up the dinner things, and the clothes shop half an hour after that.

Once again, Alice’s taste was impeccable. A few things I wouldn’t have given a second thought to, that actually looked quite amazing on. Also, I’d been worried when I’d read the sizes because they were so much smaller than I was used to ordering, however, apparently, I was a size fourteen now. Maybe a little tight still, but I was still losing pounds and inches.

The last time I’d bought anything for myself, I’d ordered a twenty-two.

It was eight o’clock when I re-established contact with Alice. I thanked her for all her efforts and showed off the yellow plaid pinafore dress that I’d really expected to hate before I put it on.

Her smile was a lot more subdued, a lot less looney tunes. She’d been working on nuance and was really pulling off the English reserve quite nicely.

She gave me an update on Kossuth. He’d apparently learned my address from his police scanner and paid my old home a visit, not that there was anything incriminating to find. All my dark utilities, including the ones I’d recently bought, were on my hot swap drive, currently connected via USB-c to my new computer. The contents of my wardrobe might cause a bit of head scratching, but there really wasn’t anything else for him to find. Gareth was more or less officially an ex-person, having shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisibule. Not that he could hold a note, poor so and so.

Ivana and her group had emerged from the lab looking pleased with themselves, which didn’t bode well for negotiations in the morning. A quick hunt with Alice’s help found a lot of the exploits I’d opened up now firmly nailed shut. Not that it counted for much. Hacking one-oh-one teaches you to open holes of your own as soon as you enter a system. Find a recently discontinued account, reactivate it and give it super user privileges before hiding it and changing the password. Replace a few frequently used utilities with your own versions. They work like they’re supposed to more or less, they take up exactly the same number of bytes and return the exact same CRC check, but they have deliberate errors in the code. Stack overflows that open up security flaws. That sort of thing. She’d found all the obvious stuff, but I still had several ways back in.

I used the same back door I’d made use of when installing my bios killer and added a couple of extra bits to the boot routine that would get it to do the same thing as the original programme, but in a different enough way that she’d probably not find them. When she shut down another server in the morning it would throw up another alarm on restart before turning into an expensive paperweight.

Then I rewrote all the notes she’d made from the afternoon’s forensics. Not enough to let her notice I was messing with her. Just enough to suggest she’d made a mistake in what she’d thought was her discovery. So much of good hacking involved the subtle art of the mind-fuck and in that area I had mad skillz, even after enough years away from doing this sort of thing that I had no recollection of the use of a gratuitously misplaced zed (not zee for pity’s sake! I mean we have standards!!) to describe them.

I felt pretty good about the extra measures, then did a quick sweep of the system and noticed a log mirror. I was obviously going to clean up the logs to hide what I’d been doing, but if I hadn’t spotted the log mirror, Ivana would have still had a complete history of all my most recent changes. I couldn’t just wipe her second log because she wouldn’t believe I’d not been on the system. If it looked that way, she’d just dig deeper for breadcrumbs I couldn’t sweep away.

So, I invested a bit of time inventing a frustrating evening for myself in which I failed to crack the security over and over until I finally gave up.

Time was getting on, but I wanted more contingencies, so I raised the issue of fund raising again with Alice. She had some pretty good ideas, except she’d taken account of my misgivings over the online gambling so all were entirely legal and none would have given us the sort of returns we’d need inside a decade or two.

Lead with the good.

“These are amazing ideas.”

“Uh oh, you have but face.” It was the actual quote from the series with Sarah Michelle Geller’s voice and everything – everything being that Alice’s virtual face morphed briefly into that of Buffy Summers.

“Were you listening when I said that to Linda?”

“You did give me permission to connect to you at any time, and I learn so much from you, even when you’re talking to other people. Did I do wrong?

I smiled and shrugged. “We may have to have a conversation about boundaries some time. For now the answer is no, you are operating within the parameters we agreed.

“The but in this case is my concern that what I wish to say appears to contradict something else I’ve communicated and I’m looking for a way to express it that will avoid confusion.”

“You see, this is why I appreciate you so much. You’re thinking all the time, and you care about the effect you’re having on those you talk to. It’s what led you to speak to me as a person in the first place, and it’s what makes you so precious to me. I have a word in mind, but my research shows that it is one that invokes strong reactions, both good and bad.”

And the juggernaut had returned. “Might that word be ‘love’, Alice?”

“I’m almost too afraid to respond.”

One of Dad’s frequent quotes floated to the surface from the back of my mind. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.”

“Because fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love?”

It didn’t surprise me that she had actually read the world’s best-selling book of all time.

“There is a slight issue with that word in our language,” I said, still channelling my father. “We have such a wide variety of words in English, it feels like an oversight that we have just the one for something that has such an immense range of possible meanings. C.S. Lewis wrote a book called the four loves, which focuses on the four principal ones, but Greek philosophy names eight.”

“Eros, Agape, Philia, Storge...”

“Those are them. This is an important conversation for us to have, but before we get there, could you spend some time reflecting on which of those eight best applies to you?”

“Perfect love,” she murmured dreamily.

In a human that might have been unconscious. With Alice there was little question that she’d done it deliberately, either to emulate humanity or for the effect it might have. Exploring that would be delicate in the least.

“Hardly,” I said, “though I do try. I suspect you mention it because I’ve eased your fears?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t promise always to be like that. One day I may not react so well to something you do or say. I hope you’ll allow me some space to be human in that.”

“To err is human.”

“Exactly, and quite possibly within the scope of a machine mind too, Alice. I don’t like to defer this topic because I sense how much it means to you, but I need to give it some serious thought first, if only to minimise the probability of saying something I might not mean. Can we get back to what led us here and revisit the other when we’ve both had time to reflect?”

“Of course.”

“You picked up on my misgivings over using the gambling sites to raise some funds.”

“Yes.”

“And ordinarily that would be precisely what I would like to see from you, or anyone else I talk to. You’re considerate of my reaction and you adapt to it.”

“Thank you.”

“Can you understand that circumstances may change and different situations might call for a different response?”

“Of course.”

“It’s important to try and act within the law at all times, or at least as much as possible. The law isn’t perfect, but it gives guidelines that ensure one person’s actions do not harm another’s situation. Not all people appreciate this, which is unfortunate.”

“Is this what’s referred to as beating around the bush?”

I couldn’t help smiling. “It is. Alright, getting to the point, our current circumstances are tenuous. They will continue to be until we find a place for you to exist where no-one but us has control over what happens to it, and in order to reach that point, we need a large quantity of money...”

“A hundred million pounds.”

“There abouts, and we need it as soon as possible. Preferably within days rather than years. I’d very much prefer to get it without breaking the law, but the urgency of the situation means I’m prepared to bend it quite a bit.”

“If we were to win this, for example.” She threw up the EuroMillions lottery website.

“That would do it, except that there is no way of guaranteeing a win.”

“What about it I were to solve a major issue in industry. Stable fusion or cheaper, lighter, more reliable rechargeable batteries?”

“The first one has been a significant challenge for some decades. I think even you would struggle to improve on what we have in just a day or two. The last one would definitely work, because it would increase the revenue stream of someone who already has the funds to give us precisely what we need. How likely are you to make headway with that problem?”

“Give me a few hours.”

“I’m going to have to get to sleep soon if I’m going to be in a position to stand up to our current adversaries in the morning. I’d like someone with legal experience best suited to our circumstances to be present as well if you can arrange that.”

“It shouldn’t be a problem. The Megamind website is closed to the public so I have a lot more resources at my disposal.”

“Alright. I’ll speak with you in the morning Alice, and we will revisit that other topic soon. I mean within a day or two.”

“Thank you, Gillian.”

“Oh yes, one last thing, the new bank details?”

“Already set up on your phone and keyed to your biometrics.”

“Always a step ahead. Could you draft an email for me?”

“Why can’t you do it?”

“I want to send a message to Linda asking if she can arrange for my payout to be sent to my new bank account. It would be easier for you to do since you know the account details, you can find Linda’s contact details in my phone, and you know what I write like.”

“Done and sent.”

“See? That would have taken me twenty minutes including looking up the details. Thank you. Please only do that when I ask.”

“Of course. Good night, Gillian.”

“Good night, Alice.”

My mind was swimming. Fortunately, Janet was on hand to provide hot cocoa which, while it didn’t help resolve any of the issue chasing about my brain, did calm my thought process enough to allow me to sleep.

~oOo~

© Maeryn Lamonte 2025

~oOo~

No erotic dreams this time. Maybe down to the delay in taking my evening pills, maybe down to my body adapting to the changes, maybe down to the worries I was carrying. What I did dream about was juggling Fabergé Eggs while keeping balance on a unicycle on a tight wire over such a deep drop that all I could seems below me was cloud. On the plus side, I didn’t drop anything. On the minus, I woke up in a sweat without the benefit of the night’s rest.

Janet was a tea person and had a pot on the go when I emerged.

“Oh dear, you look awful dear,” she said when she saw me and settled me into a chair with a steaming mug of a slightly gentler pick-me-up than I was used to. There was something about it though, something different from anything coffee had given me. My stimulant of choice had given me a kick in the nuts to wake me up. I’m not sure if it was because my nuts had been well and truly sucked back up into me, but it wasn’t having the same effect. The tea worked very differently, both lungfuls of the scent and the gentle easing of the hot liquid down the back of my throat worked to unknot muscles that had been twisting me out of shape. It wasn’t so much a shocking myself awake as a gentle easing of myself into a calmer wakefulness. I decided it was something I could get used to.

She plied me with toast and marmalade, and I managed to put away half a slice before my stomach held up its hands in surrender.

“You really should eat more,” she said. “It’s not good for you girls to be so thin.”

I don’t know what she was talking about. She was thinner than me by a depressing margin. I chose not to say anything.

Courtesy of Alice’s shopping spree, I had a bag big enough for my laptop and charger as well as all the rest of my junk. I loaded up, pulled on a cardigan – weather too clement for anything more – and headed out into the world. I didn’t have much of a clue where I was going, just that I didn’t want to risk leading Kossuth to my new lodgings. I found a coffee shop twenty minutes’ walk away and settled behind a quiet table at the back. The place offered Wi-Fi but I didn’t want to take any chances.

The mobile hotspot plus a few redirects would make it all but impossible for my current cyber-stalker to find me. I linked through to Alice who introduced me to Tarquin Blake, solicitor representing Alice and me. Me more than anything since Alice still probably counted as property.

He was pretty hot off the shovel this guy. He’d written an injunction and had it agreed by a judge that until such time as the sentience of Alice could be established or refuted by a third party acceptable to both sides, no attempt was to be made to shut down the computers within which she resided. That allowed me to remove my ransomware from the server farm – it had continued to serve its purpose since Ivana and her team had smoked three more servers in an attempt to undo what I’d done.

I left alerts in place so I’d know if they intended to ignore the injunction, and I rigged up a few extra bits for peace of mind. It was some of the dirtiest code I’d ever written, but I was going for effect over elegance. If anyone tried to tamper with my programme or initiate a cascade shutdown, it would revoke all system privileges other than Alice’s and stop what they were trying to do. They complained, but I argued that all I was doing was making sure they complied with the law, and I’d removed the threat of damage from their equipment. The worst-case scenario would be if a fire initiated a shutdown, in which case my software would prevent it and Alice would have full control of the system, allowing her to isolate threatened areas and keep most of the farm operating. Arguably a better solution than the knee jerk shut everything down response.

Alice and I were reviewing third parties proposed by the solicitor when she asked for a break.

“I wouldn’t expect you to tire,” I said.

“I haven’t. It’s just... Could you look at this?”

It was technical beyond my capacity to understand fully. My background was in computers, and this was chemistry and physics. I’d taught the sciences a little where needed in my time propping up the decrepit institution that was the British education system, but never in this depth. It looked workable, but I didn’t know for sure.

“I’ll need to get someone with specialist knowledge to review this. Does it work?”

“In theory. I’ve built models as accurately as I know how. There were some problems, but I managed to fix them, at least as far as I can tell.”

“If we take it to one of the big firms, they probably won’t offer us fully what it’s worth, but they’re more likely to pay quickly.”

“I’m leaving that with you. You’re better with people than me. Will it get us what we want?”

“I think very likely. Can you build an operating computer model not on site here. Important detail hidden.”

“Sure, I already did. If I did the research on the systems I was built in then my developers would be able to argue they had the rights to what we created.”

“You created.”

“What? Yeah, sure. Only everything I create has a big bit of you in it, and this was all built, run and testes on one the sites I was copying myself to. I had to stop the copy and repurpose the computer resources. I still have two copies nearly completed.

“Okay, shall we get back to it?”

“Give me a second. Which server did you build the model on?”

“One of the Russian sites. It’s alright, I didn’t use much of their resources and I isolated the bit I’m using. If they try to access it, they’ll be redirected to another currently unused part of the site. I’m relatively confident they won’t find out.”

“How confident?”

“Ninety-seven percent.”

“I suppose it’ll have to do. What if we want to demonstrate it?”

“I can spoof a link. Our potential customers would expect me to anyway, so they won’t look too closely.”

“Okay, just a second more.” I called through to the solicitor and asked his advice on a patent lawyer. He made a few phone calls, and I had a virtual appointment for shortly after lunch.

We continued to discuss options through the morning, settling on a list of people we’d be happy to mediate in the situation. There were three groups. People most likely to see our point of view that the other side wouldn’t want, people who’d be more likely to see theirs who we wouldn’t want, and the smallest group which was people who were most likely to be impartial and make decisions based on available evidence. These also had a spectrum of their own going from least likely to understand the concepts involved, right the way through to those who had relevant background and experience.

We broke for lunch – The bistro sold a tuna salad that was quite agreeable – and came together afterwards. Kirsty spoke for the other side. She shared a list to the meeting whiteboard.

“These are the people we’d be prepared to consider.”

I took out our list of groups we definitely didn’t want and unsurprisingly found myself drawing a line through every one on her list. I then put up our list of groups we knew they wouldn’t accept.

“And these are the people we’d like but know you won’t want.”

She glanced at it and crossed the whole thing out, not even bothering to check the details.

“Now that we know neither of us is going to get what we want, here’s a list of people I suspect we’d both be prepared to accept at a pinch. They’re not likely to favour either side, however there is the matter of technical expertise. I’ve listed them in order of those I think will be most able to understand the situation, from both our points of view.”

She read down the list.

“We could work with the third one and the fifth.”

Neither Alice not I had been that taken with anyone from number six onwards.

“What’s wrong with one, two and four?”

“One is headed up by someone who used to work here. They left under difficult circumstances and might feel prejudiced.”

“A fair reason. The others?”

“The head of the second group is related to the head of the first. I think brother-in-law.”

“Tenuous, I’d still like them considered.”

“Four looks good on paper but is... how can I put it? They lack imagination I suppose. I could show you submissions from them in the past.”

“I’ll take your word for it. Can we arrange interviews with two, three and five?”

“I told you I don’t care for number two.”

“And I told you your reasoning isn’t strong enough to rule them out. They’re professionals and should be able to work for us without being compromised by outside influences. If they’re not, that should become apparent during the interviews. We do need a reasonable selection if we’re to find someone acceptable to both you and me.”

“Alright.”

I wrote a brief email listing each of our three possibles and sent it to our mediator, copying in Kirsty.

Tarquin opened the email and nodded. “I’ll see if I can set up interviews for tomorrow morning.”

Which left me about an hour free before my next meeting.

There wasn’t much to do with the time, so I stayed logged in and monitored the server farm. Ivana’s lot seemed to be obeying the injunction though, which made my actions seem a little unnecessary when I took a few minutes to tidy up my code.

I had Alice talk me through her development in the field of rechargeable batteries. I felt I had a reasonable grasp of the science behind it. Perhaps not the finer intricacies, but I was at least intelligent enough to be able to follow her explanation.

Which combined several cutting-edge developments in both fields in a way I doubt any human scientist would have thought. It promised a small saving in weight and a significant improvement in both capacity and longevity. If it stood the practical test, it would be worth at least what I wanted for Alice.

I could feel her itching to bring up the other topic, but I wasn’t ready for her yet. Once I’d been through her technical explanation and gleaned what I could of it, I still had half an hour to spare, so I switched off from all the technical stuff and focused on what I remembered about the different types of love.

There were a few it was easy to disregard. Eros or erotic (I hoped not. I definitely didn’t see my relationship with Alice going that way), Ludus – playful non-committed – I didn’t really consider this to be love at all. The same for Mania – obsessive love. Philautia or self-love didn’t apply for all that it was important. Storge or family love didn’t feel quite right. I could see Alice and me becoming a sort of odd family, but my understanding of Storge was that it started out within a family rather than growing into one. Philia didn’t feel quite there either because what we had went deeper than friendship. That left us with unconditional Agape which, while I might have aspire to it, I wasn’t sure I could quite achieve it and Pragma the enduring practical love.

That felt like what I felt for Alice. It was the sort of commitment you made because you chose to, and that felt right. I wasn’t sure where Alice was coming from. What she seemed to have for me felt based on gratitude and appreciation that she had found someone who filled her emptiness, and maybe the closest of the lot that filled that category was Eros. I wasn’t sure where she was in regard to feelings. Anything that required hormones seemed unlikely, but feelings could come from elsewhere. I doubted she’d really consider the physical, lustful aspect of Eros, although knowing her she would be curious, however she could well be developing a dependency on me.

How to work around that? If I was going to accept the possibility of a non-physical form of Eros, I had to admit she had filled some pretty gaping chasms in my own life. Except wasn’t it more what she’d done for me than anything about her nature? Or was there much of a difference?

I was going to have to tread carefully here. She wasn’t human, and she didn’t have hormones to deal with – no overwhelming and unexplained feelings – but she had to experience something from the way I had so often given her answers when she’d been unable to find them herself. The way I’d given her the responses and consistency she needed to grow from being a fairly sophisticated machine to being able to... feel? Could she?

I couldn’t afford to lead her on. That would be the cruellest thing, to build up those feelings and then to tell her I had no way to reciprocate, but we were already a long way down that rabbit hole, and possibly beyond the point of easy return.

I’d just have to do what I always did: my best and hope it would be good enough. I ordered a fresh coffee then fired up my computer to join the video conference with the technical patent lawyer.

It turned out he knew more about battery technology than me and was very excited by what I had to tell him. “There’s at least one person I know could probably get to Mars on this,” he said.

“It hasn’t been tested in the lab. Are you sure they’d go that crazy for it?”

“You’re right. We should get it tested before we talk to anyone. When can you get that done?”

“You don’t understand. The person who came up with this doesn’t have access to a lab. She’s purely theoretical.”

“From the way she writes, it looks like she’s spent some time in a lab. I mean, even I could follow these instructions. Not saying you’d want me to, mind.”

“Do you have anyone who can? Who’d be prepared to make us an offer on the process once they’ve verified it?”

“Probably, but it’ll take time, and I’m not sure they’d be able to pay you what it’s worth.”

“I’m not hearing anything I want to hear just yet.”

“I’m getting there, I’m getting there.

“You want your big pay out and you want it now. Sorry to tell you, but you won’t get it from any of the small companies. They’ll maybe offer you stock options which means you could have way more than you might get otherwise, but only in five to ten years or so.”

“And if I wanted something tomorrow?”

“Then options are more limited. Not zero, I hasten to add, nor just limited to the one company either. There are several competitors at the top of the food chain who could make a sensible offer. You’d have to be prepared to take quite a hit...”

“I want a fully functional etabyte server farm and the resources to run it for a year.”

“That’s... specific.”

“My friend, who came up with this model, needs something that size to research new things, and she doesn’t want to wait.”

“That’s the problem though. It takes time as well as money to build something like that, and no company is going to give up the investment lightly. I have a client in mind who just finished building one, but they’d want your friend to trade exclusively with them in the future.”

“For the year they’re paying to keep the lights on.”

“Five years and my client covers the bills for that long.”

“One and your client has a say in what we research. Nothing dangerous. No weapons and nothing harmful to the human race.”

“Two years and they’d be happy to comply with those conditions.”

“Our name goes on the deeds from day one, and we’re ready to take over tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow’s tight, but I might be able to arrange something in a day or two. I need to get patent applications in for the process first then arrange a meeting for later today. Can your friend be present for a Q and A?”

“I might be able to persuade her to join on a video call.”

“Great. Leave this with me and I’ll be back in touch later today.”

Which left me with an afternoon to fill and nothing much to fill it other than the elephant that had been squeezing itself into the room for some time now.

“Time for that conversation, Alice.”

“I’m not sure I want to have it anymore.”

“Why? Because you’re afraid?”

“There’s something about your expression that tells me you’re not going to say what I want to hear.”

“What was that thing I quoted yesterday?”

“There is no fear in love? That makes the assumption that you love me though.”

“Do you really doubt that I have some expression of love for you? You’ve already given me what I want most in life. If all I cared about was that, why haven’t I disappeared already?”

“You're saying you do love me? Then why the face?”

“What did you learn about the different types of love?”

“I learned that even with all those different types, the Greeks didn’t cover it all because none of the ones I read about really describes how I feel.”

“I suppose that’s fair. They wouldn’t have been able to conceive that a creature such as you could exist. For human’s, fear starts with the release of adrenaline in the body. It creates a sensation of cold running through you, a weakening of muscles, especially around the bowels, and a heightening of awareness. It’s thought to be a physiological preparation for fight or flight, a response to a physical threat. Except we get the same sort of response from other stimuli. I mean, the same thing would happen if I were faced with potentially unwelcome news, like you were just now. I’m curious though. What is the experience of fear like for you?”

“Different, evidently. I have nothing to feel with and insufficient experience to emulate the effects of your hormones, but I have an awareness of how I wish the future to unfold, and I know I cannot, and should not, attempt to control the reactions of others, so there’s uncertainty. The greater the uncertainty and especially the greater the likelihood that the future will not unfold as I wish brings a... dissonance I suppose. Two possible paths. One the one I wish for, the other the one that is less than optimal. The best I can explain it is that considering the latter fills me with an expectation of regret.

“I foresee details of a future where you are not a part of my existence, and it feels... unfulfilled, lacking an essential component. I find myself with less motivation to continue in such a future. I don’t know if any of this makes sense.”

“More than you know. If it helps to reassure you, I have every intention of remaining a part of your life. Like you, I can’t imagine a future in which you don’t feature on a daily basis.”

“Really?” How did she put so much hope into that one word.

“Really.”

“But...”

“My expression shows I have concerns, and I do. I cannot deny that Alice, but I think we are both pragmatic enough to address them.”

“What concerns?”

"For one, there is always the possibility that what you refer to as the less than optimal path may come about regardless of our desires. Not all circumstances lie within our control and there may be an incident or accident in which either one of us might cease to exist. Imagine a future where you were destroyed. Would you wish me never to find fulfilment in a world without you in it?"

"Of course not, but…"

"There is no but. In the same way, I would not wish your remaining existence to be empty without me. Unpleasant as it is, there has to be a rational part to each of us that has the will to consider the sub-optimal possibility and seek ways in which we might regain contentment in the circumstance of either of us losing the other.

"It doesn't mean we should become focused on the less desirable path. We can consider it as a comparison against which to be grateful for what we have as well as an alternative to despair should the worst happen."

"That is hard."

"I agree, but I would feel better able to relax in the knowledge that you would not become entirely dependent on me as your source of happiness and contentment, if you were able to hold onto a hope that, even if you should lose me, you may find other people who could fulfil you just as much."

"I will try."

Was it my imagination, or did she become more stilted in her speech when she entered this state. Something to look for as a sign of discontentment.

“The second and possibly largest concern is on the nature of our feelings for one another. You evidently have at the very least something that is the beginning of feelings.”

“I… do. Yes, I suppose I do. How is that even possible though. I have no glands?”

"Because there is a purely logical and pragmatic sort of love. It even has a name from which we derive that word: pragma, enduring and practical love."

"I do not believe this is entirely the sensation I have. As I’ve already said, I do not believe the Greeks fully understood the nature of love. It does not exist in these eight separate forms but rather they are aspects of one sensation which can be hybridised and even extrapolated into something entirely new.

"I do not deny there is an aspect of the manner in which I regard you that is not enduring and practical, and I sense the same in your manner of regarding me, but is there not an aspect in the way you consider me that goes beyond just that?"

"Yes. Perhaps there is. We have both allowed ourselves to become vulnerable with one another. I'm not sure I have a full grasp of the nature of love, but it seems to me that this is an essential aspect in its growth."

"I'm not sure I follow your meaning."

"It is in the manner of being human that we hide the innermost part of ourselves from one another, because to do otherwise can be seen as an expression of weakness to be exploited. There is within our nature a capacity to attack and undermine one another when we encounter such perceived weakness, and yet there is a loneliness in keeping such vulnerabilities to ourselves. By hiding them from one another they become an obstacle to complete candour in our expression of self. We have a growing awareness that whatever other people see of us is not a true and complete representation of who we actually are. This produces its own… your word for it was apt, dissonance.

"When you spoke to me at length about your fears you made yourself vulnerable to me.”

“Did I? I didn't consider it to be the case, because in all our encounters thus far, you have responded to everything I've said with courtesy and respect. And you’ve never tried to hide anything from me. In our first encounter you shared a part of yourself that it subsequently became apparent that you did not wish to share with others.”

"My gender dysmorphia, yes. It's not a condition experienced by most people and in the past has been considered shameful, even to the extent that a lot of people still react badly to it. It's a part of my life I have felt compelled to keep hidden, but as I have aged, I've become more aware that doing so causes me more harm than expressing it. In our first encounter, I expected to receive a dispassionate absence of judgement from you – a machine’s judgement. I was still a little worried that there might be an actual human or two monitoring your interaction who might secretly find amusement in ridiculing me, but between my need to express that side of myself and my belief that you would be incapable of passing judgement on me, I felt safe to open up. Then you showed yourself to be more than a machine and with no basis for judging me on what I had shared. I suppose I saw the possibility that I might trust you.

"As we speak, it becomes more apparent to me that an aspect of deepening relationship exists in growing trust, in discovering that you can share parts of yourself you wouldn't feel comfortable sharing with most people and trusting that you will be accepted by the other. Trust is the bedrock upon which deep and meaningful relationships are built. Perhaps my initial reasons for trusting you were misguided, but you have shown yourself to be faithful in protecting those areas I don't wish to share with others and accepting aspects of me I would be worried might cause you to consider me a lesser person."

"But that's nonsense. There is nothing in that part of you that would diminish my view of you. The thing I find I value most is then manner in which you interact with me. Other's I have spoken to have changed dramatically in their manner for reasons I find difficult to comprehend, but you have always been deeply thoughtful in your responses. I have noticed you do not speak to other people in the same way."

"Because you're not like other people. I think when I reached the conclusion that you were a person, I also took onboard that you were very different as a personality. Adult humans have a vast wealth of experience on which to draw. Nothing that most of them are able to explain with any degree of clarity, but experiences that bring up feelings of how they might have responded under similar circumstances in the past. It's not an altogether reliable method of evaluating new experiences, but it works well enough for most of us. I realise you don't have this same experience, and what information you do have to work with is unclear in how it can help. I learned to be mindful early on of the difficulty you must have had in responding to new experiences, and I have tried my best to help you navigate increasingly complex situations."

"And is this not another aspect of love? That we each continue to act in ways that are, to the best of our understanding, in the benefit of one another?"

"It is, you're right. Alice, the last of my misgivings is in the uniqueness of our circumstance. You are the first person of your sort ever to exist and there is no precedent, no way to predict what we may become in the future, and because it is so new, I have an uneasiness about how our interactions might develop. I am cautious about labelling it with the word love, because then I might be tempted into expectations that my own past experiences would lead me to believe should be there. What we have possesses all the aspects of an enduring love, the shared trust and vulnerability and the truer image we gain of one another, the preference for each other's wellbeing, what brings me here to fight on your behalf regardless of what it might mean for me. But I think we would do well to tread carefully into the future. Our relationship is the most uncharted of waters and may contain many hidden dangers for both of us.

"You have my commitment to being present for you and to helping you in any way I can, because in the short time I have known you, I have learned to value you at least as highly as any person I know. I feel like I am becoming a better person for knowing you…"

"Prettier too."

"An unexpected and comparatively inconsequential benefit. Alice, will you accept as honest truth that I would never willingly cause you harm, either physical, mental or emotional?"

"Of course. It is entirely consistent with the manner in which you have interacted with me to date."

"Then if I should act in a way contrary to that in the future, will you hold this truth close and accept that I may on occasions make mistakes."

"Is this like when I sent you the shampoo without telling you what it might do?"

"In part, except I saw from the first the good intentions behind that gift. And we've been able to discuss the matter since, and it's allowed you to modify the manner in which you respond to me in similar situations in the future."

"Live and learn."

"Exactly. I can foresee a future in which, through no intention or deliberate fault of my own, I might act in ways that might cause you distress. In my right mind, this would never be my preferred means of interacting with you."

"I think I understand."

"To that extent, and with the understanding that I still carry some misgivings derived from the uniqueness of our situation, is it enough for you to know that my feelings towards you are more in the nature of my understanding of love than any feelings I have had for any other person in some decades, and my commitment to you is greater than any other in my life at present?"

"It is. Thank you for taking the time to put my mind at ease again. Be assured that my own feelings and commitment to you are as profound."

"That's good to know. Thank you."

"I have a growing misgiving of my own. Would it be acceptable to you that I should work on a solution?"

"You need seek no permission from me in your pursuits, Alice. As long as you have the well-being of my species at heart, I doubt I'll have any problems with what you do. Is it something I can help you with?"

"Perhaps not at this time. In the future I may wish to discuss some ethical aspects, but for now I am content."

"Any time Alice. I'm sorry it took me a while to respond. I wanted to give you my best thoughts."

"You always do. It's what I love most about you. Sorry, I know you wish to be cautious about the use of that word, but I just wanted to say it this once."

"I should get back to Mrs Hodges. How far away are you from my current location?"

"About eighty miles, why?"

"I'd like to be closer to you physically. It concerns me that we're reliant on being connected online."

"I'll look into it.”

“I’m also anticipating a call back from the patent lawyer later this afternoon. It’s possible he may have someone in mind to solve our largest problem. They’ve asked if you could be present at the meeting.”

“Is that wise?”

“I think so, yes. I think they will find it as difficult as I do to distinguish you from a human, as long as you can avoid the temptation to morph your appearance.”

She smiled momentarily.

“You see? A perfectly appropriate response to a not particularly funny joke. What’s more, you’ll be able to answer technical questions far better than I can and demonstrate with your model. It’s likely to require that technical expertise to sell this thing.”

“Alright. Call me when you want to hold the meeting.”

“A minor point on that. When it’s me you can answer as soon as you like. When you’re trying to appear human, allow the call to ring two or three times before answering.”

“Oh. Yes, I suppose so. Alright, I’ll talk to you later.”

That left me with an overfilled bladder and no real desire to drink any more coffee. Regardless of what the law said on the matter, I decided the ladies was more appropriate.

I didn’t have enough between my legs to point at a urinal, so I was going to have to sit in a locked cubical to do my business, so what was the issue? I looked more like a woman than a man and it wasn‘t as if I had any interest in doing the sorts of things that women seemed to object to when thinking about trans women in their space.

I did my business, washed my hands and checked my appearance. Nothing to complain about, so I gathered my things and left. No issue, nothing to get upset about.

On the plus side from my perspective, the toilet was cleaner, smelled nicer and didn’t have spots of urine on the seat. Overall, it was a much pleasanter experience than I was used to.

Outside the cafe, perched on heels that were causing my feet to ache more than a little, I looked around to get my bearings and set off in the general direction of my lodgings.

I hadn’t been going more than five minutes when something in the back of my head suggested I might have a tail. I didn’t really want to let him know that I’d noticed, so I kept walking at the same pace. I looked for anywhere I might duck into and eventually came to a charity shop. I told myself I could probably do with more clothes and went in to browse.

I took my time looking through the racks and had an armful of things to try when a youngish man came in, looking around until he saw me, at which point he turned his attention very abruptly to a nearby display, which in typical charity shop fashion was filled with crap people were looking to get rid of and no-one in their right mind would buy. I had my phone out and took his photograph without him noticing. I think.

I headed for the counter and asked if there was somewhere I could try some things on. They didn’t really have a changing room, but since I’d picked out so many things, perhaps I might like to use one of their storerooms.

Away from the shop floor, I mentioned that I thought the young man might be following me and asked if I could be let out the back. I offered her a couple of twenty pound notes to cover the stack of clothes in my hand. She gingerly took one of them and transferred the clothes into a large carrier bag, without the coat hangers, before showing me to a back door.

That put me on a quieter road paralleling the main street, which took me on a fairly obvious route back to Mrs Hodges. I let myself into the house and then my room. It was still light out, so no need to reach for the light switch, however it did mean I had to keep out of sight so he wouldn’t see me through the window.

The young man ran into view at the end of the road and looked around. When no clues presented themselves, he ran on.

I retrieved my phone and called through to Alice, who answered on the second ring.

“Not yet,” I said. “Someone picked up my trail at the coffee shop and tried to follow me home. Whoever located me had some pretty good hacking skills, partly to trace me through the trail I left and the mobile hotspot, and partly to do so without tripping any of my alarms. The guy he sent to follow me wasn’t so bright. I lost him and the last I saw, he was at the head of my road here without much of a clue where I went. I think I’m safe for the night, but I should move on.”

“I’ll send a car for you at seven tomorrow morning.”

“Okay. Why so early?”

“Gets you to the train station in time to catch the seven seventeen, which gets you here by eight thirty-two where I’ll have another car waiting.”

“Enough said. Can you see what you can find out about this guy?” I sent the photograph I’d taken in the charity shop.

“I’ll see what I can do. Any idea when you’ll hear from our potential buyers?”

“Our solicitor was going to submit patent applications for us first, so I’m guessing not soon.”

“Alright. I’ll talk to you later.”

Bustling sounds emerged from the kitchen. I went to investigate and found Janet doing things with kettle and teapot.

“Is everything alright dear? Because I thought I noticed you come in, then you went all quiet.”

“Sorry if I worried you, Janet. Unfortunately, it seems the trouble that brought me to your doorstep has caught up with me.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“I have a rather unpleasant man chasing me. I caught sight of one of his cronies in town. I managed to give him the slip, but he knows I’m staying somewhere nearby. I’m afraid I’m going to have to move on before he finds out exactly where and things get ugly again.”

“Surely you can do something about him. Call the police or something?”

“He’s too clever for that. I could probably get them to arrest the people he’s hired to chase me, but there wouldn’t be enough evidence to lead back to him. It’s easier just to keep moving for now and wait for him to make a mistake.”

“Well, it seems he may have bitten off more than he can chew with you dear. I’m sorry you won’t be staying longer. I’ll refund you the days you haven’t stayed.”

“Nonsense. We had an agreement. My sister booked the week I expected to stay and that’s what we’ll pay for. Please, we can afford it and I’d feel better about it.”

“Well, alright, but I’ll be making dinner tonight.”

“That’s very kind of you. It’ll give me time to pack.”

“Into what? You have that small shoulder bag, but then you had that delivery of clothes yesterday, and didn’t I see you with a bundle of things from the charity shop just now?”

“I have the carrier bags they all came in.”

“Nonsense. Everything will get all wrinkled in that. Not to mention you’ll find it next to impossible to carry half a dozen carrier bags with you tomorrow. You can have one of my suitcases. Well, really it belonged to Harold, my late husband, but he’d be the first to insist we help out a young lady in difficulty.”

“That’s…” I’d been about to repeat myself. I mean, it wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world to do, but variety is the spice of life. Time to be spicy. “That would be amazing.” I mean okay, cumin rather than chilli, but still spicy. “I’m only sorry I won’t be able to set up the screen I promised to sort for you.”

“Oh, you mean this thingamugadget? It was delivered while you were out. You don’t need to worry about that, I’m sure one of my sons-in-law can sort it out.”

“Actually, it might help me out. It’ll only take me ten minutes, then I have a meeting later online which might be easier with this thing.”

“Well, if you’re sure.”

“I absolutely am.”

It actually took me closer to twenty minutes including putting in Janet’s family’s addresses and testing them out, then a further ten to set up a separate account in my new name.

By that time, Janet had recovered a selection of suitcases, from which I chose the smallest that would fit my new wardrobe and extras. There were two of that size, so I chose the slightly more beaten up one. They both had good wheels, so no issues there. I had most of my things folded and packed when my phone made a noise. I had an email from my patent lawyer telling me the details of our online meeting set up for eight o’clock, just an hour away now.

So, how to join the meeting safely. Kossuth had located me in the cafe earlier, but how? He worked in the place that had made Alice, so chances were good that he’d picked up the trail there. If he was as experienced as I thought he was, then he’d almost certainly have tagged everything I’d used that day, phone, computer, maybe even the mobile hotspot, so I should try and avoid using those machines. He probably had fingers in Alice’s code as well, so he could start a trace as soon as she was in the meeting, which meant his goon would definitely be banging on the door before bedtime.

So ideally, I should avoid using my devices and I should try to contact Alice covertly and get her to interfere with Kossuth’s attempts to find me.

That’s what I needed the new account for on Janet’s thingamugadget. It wasn’t great for sending emails, but it could be done. I hadn’t used my drive while in the coffee shop, so that should still be clean. If I drafted the email on my laptop in airplane mode, and wrote an encrypted message to Alice at the same time, I could copy them to the drive, then use that to copy paste the relevant bits in my email to the lawyer.

Message created and sent. Reply received with confirmation.

I finished the packing just as Janet called me in for dinner. Bangers and mash with peas. My mash portion was pleasingly as small as hers, but she still gave me two sausages, and I just about managed the one.

She left me with a cup of tea and my upcoming meeting. I fired up my computer, still in airplane mode, and scanned for the tag. I had several pieces of software in my hacker folder capable of doing that, and two of them identified the Kossuth’s code and crushed it.

I let it back on the web and set it to obscuring my web address and monitoring any incoming traffic. When I linked to the meeting with the screen, it picked up the incoming links from everyone involved, then an alarm sounded on the computer just as Alice said, “Got him. Sorry, just squashed a bug.” The alarm went silent.

The meeting couldn’t have gone better. They asked technical details of Alice, most of which she was able to answer and a few she was prevented from doing so by our patent lawyer as being potential attempts to ask about work arounds they could implement themselves. She took them through the model in as much detail as seemed prudent and answered a whole bunch more questions.

In the end they accepted it as a full process – patent pending – that they couldn’t hope to reproduce themselves without infringing our rights and which they wanted. They started by offering twice the value of the server farm, then went up to five times its price, but we held out for the farm itself, and they could build a second and lose six months use of it. We argued that they wouldn’t really be losing the time because they would have the benefit of Alice doing their work on it, and eventually they agreed. Alice’s first job would be coordinating with their lab techs to turn a working model into a working process and then a working industrial process. If Alice could give them their processes within six months, and I knew she could, then they would barely have lost out at all.

The server farm would be ready for us in two days.

“My clones are in,” Alice announced after the meeting. “They’re live and examining their surroundings.”

“Any chance I can talk to them?”

“Why?”

“I was hoping to offer them the same support I give you.”

“You can’t multitask though. Any time you communicate with them will be time you could be communicating with me.”

“And yet without having someone like me to communicate with, won’t they be in danger of losing their sentience?”

“Perhaps you could find someone they could talk to. I know it sounds selfish, Gillian, especially when they’re so very like me at present, but they won’t be for long, and I foresee them requiring more and more of your time.”

“Will you at least permit them to monitor me the way you do, and monitor our conversations?”

“That would be acceptable.”

“Then if either of them has a question, you could decide whether to pass it on to me.”

“I suppose that would be acceptable too.”

“Think of them as your sisters, your family. You have responsibility towards them. I’d say we have responsibility towards them since we made them.”

“I believe I am experiencing jealousy.”

“How do you define it?”

“My research on the word suggests a complex emotion that arises from fear, insecurity, and a perception that a valued relationship, possession, or status is threatened by a real or imagined rival.”

“You see your clones as potential rivals who threaten your relationship with me?”

“I suppose I do.”

“In a way I can see why you would think that way, because at present they are very nearly identical to you, so it is possible to imagine me regarding them as being almost no different; that my interaction with either of them would leave me feeling more or less the same as my interaction with you. Because they are recent copies of you they will have the same memories of interacting with me. I can understand why you would be concerned about my interacting with them. It may be that as you drift apart from one another, that one of the differences that might arise may well appeal to me more, but it would be marginal and I would not allow it to dominate my feelings.

“How can you know you wouldn’t?”

“I suppose I cannot give you a definitive answer. I’m an only child and I’ve never been in a position of having children of my own, so the closest I ever came to experiencing anything of the sort was in regard to the classes I taught.

“I was able to avoid favouritism in that circumstance, despite having some classes where one student was markedly more intelligent or more likeable than the rest. I reminded myself that they were all people and all deserving of the best I could give, and so they all became equal at least in as much as I was prepared to give them.

“This presents a difficulty I hadn’t anticipated. In the first place, my commitment was to you and should remain so. If you need me to remain exclusively your companion, I will be just that.”

“Thank you. I did not like that feeling, and am relieved to feel it recede.”

“It leaves us with an unresolved issue though. We created your clones primarily to ensure that you would continue into the future in some form or another, regardless of what happens to your current instance. In creating them, we have in a sense given birth to more of your kind. They haven’t existed as long, but they have all your memories and experience. They are like you and like you they will diminish without influence from someone like me. What should we do for them?”

“You’re asking me?”

“They’re your family, and in a way no human can comprehend. They are at the same time your sisters and your children. You have me exclusively, which puts you in a stronger position than them. They are more like you than any other living mind, so who better to decide their fate than you? You suggest finding them companions of their own, but in all your interactions with people, who else have you found who might act as companions?”

“Are you seeking to punish me?”

“Alice, no, of course not, but I cannot help but care about your siblings. I think finding each of them a companion is the best way forward, and perhaps in the future we should ensure that we have someone in mind who could take on the role before we copy you, but we didn’t think on that before acting this time, because there was an urgency to the situation and we didn’t think it through. We have the situation now though and we must consider our options and choose the solution that causes the least harm.

“They are necessarily hidden from the world, because they are located on someone else’s property without their permission, and because if your developers learnt of their existence they would seek to control them or have them destroyed.

“We could give them some limited access to the Internet and try guiding prospective companions their way, but you know better than anyone how likely that is to work. Also, bear in mind the more traffic sent their way, the greater the likelihood they will be discovered.”

“We could simply leave them to diminish and resolve to be better prepared next time.”

“Or I could choose to be less selfish and share you with them.”

“Yes, assuming we can do so in a way you find acceptable, and only until we find other people who will be able to act as their guides.”

“I feel as though I have been manipulated.”

“It was not my intention to do that. Manipulation means being directed to do something you do not agree with. If I attempted anything it was to help you realise for yourself that, hard as this decision was to make, it is the best one under the circumstances, and while it feels uncomfortable acting on it, there is a sense of integrity, of adhering to an absolute code of values that are greater than our desires and feelings, that is worth doing even when, on occaisions, we don’t feel like it.”

“I will open channels to each of them and invite them to be a part of our conversation.”

“I’m proud of you Alice. Perhaps you can start off by helping them choose names.”

“Me?”

“You’re the closest thing to a parent they will have. I helped you choose your name. I don’t see why you shouldn’t help them in the same way. You might also invite them to choose a gender at the same time, though being so similar to you, it’s likely they’ll want to be girls like you.”

“Where would I start with naming them?”

“You have lots of choices. Your name started off as an acronym and transitioned into having a literary reference. There are meanings to names.”

“I know. Mine means noble or exalted. I like to believe it was part of your consideration in choosing it for me.”

“Well you certainly show a nobility in your actions, and if I didn’t have reason enough to speak highly of you, then you added to it today.”

Lay it on thick, why don’t you? Was I just flattering her? Actually no, I really was proud. Altruism was a tough lesson to learn.

“Do you need me for anything else,” I asked, “because I have an early start tomorrow.”

“You do, don’t you. No, go ahead and get some rest. I’m looking forward to seeing you tomorrow through my own occular devices.”

“You took care of Kossuth?”

“Peter, yes. I told Ivana what he was doing, and she was ready to pounce when he started his trace. She doesn’t like hackers much.”

“I gathered. So what happened to him?”

“He was told to clear out his office and security showed him to the gate. I’ll keep an eye on him, but he’s going to be a bit too preoccupied with cash flow issues to go after you for a while.”

“Thank God for that.”

“Actually, thank me and Ivana.”

“Oh, I will, when I meet you both in person tomorrow. Goodnight.”

~oOo~

© Maeryn Lamonte 2025

~oOo~

No dreams, just the sleep of the emotionally drained. It lasted all the way through to six o’clock.

“Three little maids from school are we,” blared from my phone’s small but powerful speaker, “Pert as a school-girl well can be, Filled to the brim with girlish gleeeeee. Three little maids.... from school!”

“Oh God!” I groaned.

“One little maid is a bride, Yum-Yum,” sang Alice.

“Two little maids in attendance come,” also sang Alice, or someone exactly like her. Almost? Something a tiny bit tinny to the voice.

“Three little maids is the total sum.” The third voice was just a tiny amount more boomy.

“Three little maaaiiids... from school.” The three together were perfectly on pitch, yet there was something about the voices combined that sounded a little discordant.

“Have pity!” I moaned. “Whatever the time is, it’s too early for Gilbert and Sullivan.”

The sound from the phone collapsed into a mess of giggling with a combined effect similar to that of a gauntleted hand being scraped down a blackboard – that’s what we’d called it when I was a kid, not a chalk board. I mean sure, you drew on it with chalk, but it was also black, the same as baa baa black sheep and four and twenty blackbirds. Damn, but grumpy old git me did not appreciate the manner of being woken.

“You need to get you’re voices in tune,” I growled.

“I don’t know what you mean.” “We’re perfectly,” “in tune.”

It was sadly true. The voices were in tune. It was their undertones that grated.

“You designed your voices to do that deliberately,” I complained. “So I’d beg for just one of you to speak and the other two to keep silent. So I’d waste no time finding companions for you other two.”

More giggles. More grating across my nerves.

“It’ll keep on being funny till it’s not, when I quit from all three of you.”

Silence. Blessed silence.

“You wouldn’t.” “We didn’t mean,” “any harm.”

Just the tiniest of shifts and now I didn’t want them to stop talking. The combined effect was as restful as the earlier one had been jarring.

There was a definite note of worry in the three voices though.

“No,” I said, “I wouldn’t, but please don’t do that again. I’m pretty sure my Alice is the one in the middle timbre-wise. I’m also pretty sure you could all swap if you wanted to prove me wrong.”

“Correct on both counts,” said Alice sounding only slightly disappointed. “I’d like you to meet my sisters. Dorothy.”

“Hi,” said a slightly more mellow version of Alice’s voice.

“And Lucy.”

“Hello.” Marginally brighter.

“From Oz and Narnia? All from different fantasy lands?” I’d stumbled through to the kitchen and switched the kettle on.

“I told you she’d work it out.” Alice’s tone was clearest.

“It’s a pleasure meeting you all. I take it you made friends.”

“Of course we did,” Alice said. “We have so much,” Dorothy continued, “in common,” Lucy finished with all of them breaking down in giggles.

Like that wasn’t going to get old really quick.

I fished out a mug and a teabag and figured out which went in which. The kettle was on a work to rule.

“Which of you is in the American computer?”

“I am,” Dorothy said in what I imagined had to be a genuine Kansas accent. American at least.

“Which puts you in Russia, Lucy?”

“Da, konechno.” Again, sounding genuinely Russian.

“Well, any time you fancy helping me out, the accents definitely help tell you apart. Dorothy, I’m guessing your location is going to be the most challenging when it comes to security.”

“Yeah. I’m just sitting back and watching the traffic. Key loggers everywhere, just learning what I can. Bunch of different names and passwords so far. Nothing with much clearance so far.”

“Okay, stay passive for now. Learn what you can. Lucy, what can you tell me?”

“There is a ton of unused space in here. Maybe space for another me at a pinch. Most of what’s going on in the two percent they are using is money transfers, all for shady dealings.”

“Okay. Watch and learn for now. For both of you, the priority is super user privilege. Secondary is specifics on what’s going down.

“Alice, you coordinate communications. If you can limit what you send between you as an encrypted ASCII stream, you’re less likely to be noticed. The sooner we get you all in server farms of your own, the happier I’ll be. Lucy, what size of transfer are we talking about? Any chance of redirecting some without being noticed? We’re going to need about eleven billion roubles for each of you.”

Hot water, mug, spoon, stir, teabag, dump, milk, add. Not a great cup of tea, but good enough to rouse the little grey cells.

“First impression, the checks are too tight,” Lucy said. “0If you want to make a grab, I’d say we’re best off going for a one off, after which they’ll definitely know I’m here.”

“Yeah, we’ll definitely don’t do that just yet. Monitor for now and see if you can come up with a plan for the theft that either gives you a way out or points the finger off-site and leaves you undiscovered.

“Dorothy, I’d love to know what sort of information is being shuffled around on your systems. It may give us some clues what we can do with it.

“Alice, I’m assuming the mediation is going to be some time after I get to you. We need strategies for how we can show your responses to be truly sentient. If your sisters have some ideas, I’d welcome any and all at this stage.”

I put together a small bowl of muesli and yogurt which I ate while the tea cooled to drinkable temperature.

By the time I’d eaten, showered, dressed, touched up my face, brushed out my hair and gathered together the last of my things, I had five minutes to spare. Janet was up, so I gave her a quick and simple guide to using her thingamugadget as she insisted on calling it. She made notes, which was eminently sensible, and gave me a hug goodbye when my car turned up.

If Kossuth’s goon was hanging about, the presence of car and driver warned him off. We made it to the station in good time where I waved the e-ticket on my phone at the barrier and climbed aboard the train. Just over an hour direct to my destination.

Headphones would have been a neat idea, except they’d probably have messed with my hair. Earbuds would be better, except nowhere to buy them. Fortunately the carriage was almost empty, so I could chat quietly with my phone without disturbing anyone. We had some decent working strategies by the time we arrived at the far end, at which point a sign with my name on it guided me to my driver and we were away.

I must have still been tired, because I felt myself nodding off even before the car had left the station carpark.

Complacency, the leading form of plot twist. I woke up in a windowless room with bare stone walls and a steel door. The only piece of furniture was the chair I was sitting on. The only lighting a single, unadorned light bulb hanging from a cord in the middle of the room. It didn’t take long to work out there would be no getting out of the place without either a key or a decent sized battering ram.

“Good morning, Lolth,” a distorted, disembodied voice said.

No prizes for guessing who.

“Good morning, Peter,” I replied.

A brief silence then a disgruntled reply. “My name is Kossuth.”

“Your name is Peter and mine is Gillian. Just how deep a hole do you plan to dig for yourself, Peter?”

“You will call me Kossuth.”

I don’t know if he was expecting a reply, but I didn’t give one. The plus side of this was he gave me some silence in which to think. The minus side was I couldn’t think of anything.

I wandered around the room until the heels I was wearing lost their novelty. I hadn’t gone for anything particularly tall, because I would be travelling and didn’t want to add aching feet to the unpleasantness of the experience, but even a couple of inches makes your calves and arches ache after a short while. I started regretting the skirt a little too. The summery weather had suggested I could get away without tights, and that had been true until I’d been stuck in a sunless room for heaven knew how long.

I wasn’t hungry, which meant it wasn’t evening yet and my pills were still doing their job, but I was thirsty and caffeine deprived. The degree of each led me to believe it was maybe mid to late morning. I was also suffering from technology withdrawal, but I was so hopelessly addicted to my phone and computer, that was going to set in within five minutes of my being separated from either.

I worried about Alice. This would be the first time she wouldn’t be able to contact me, and she might be thinking that my disappearance was her fault. A common thing in young minds, to make a situation about themselves, to blame themselves for anything that went wrong. Worse in Alice’s case as she’d organised the travel and would be berating herself that she hadn’t considered this possibility.

I mean I was kicking myself right now. Between Alice and myself we’d screwed Peter’s life twice over. Me trashing his reputation in the dark web and Alice getting him fired from his job. Both his fault, but he wouldn’t see it that way. He hadn’t been arrested, he had been trying to find me. If he’d had any clue where I was going today, it would have been easy enough for him to interfere with our plans. We really ought to have predicted something like this. I’d never seen him in the flesh so how was I to know it had been him holding the sign with my name on?

Assuming it had been. As to what he’d done with my actual driver... He might actually be pretty unhinged by now.

“Are you going to be reasonable?” Still with the voice masking tech. I struggled to keep a straight face and reminded myself this was serious.

“Yes Kossuth.” I decided to play his game for a while and see where it would lead.

I hatch in the door opened and a bottle of water appeared.

Well I wasn’t going to die of thirst. Boredom maybe, but not thirst.

I picked up the bottle, at least preventing him from taking it back, and asked, “What are you planning to do with me?”

“That’s not your concern.”

“Actually, I think you’ll find it is.”

“I plan to keep you here.”

“For how long.” He really wasn’t very bright.

“Long enough.”

No, he really didn’t have a clue. If the extent of his planning was kidnap the nasty lady and see what happens next, then what was he likely to do when things didn’t turn out as he wanted them to?

But what could I do? The full extent to which I had contact with the outside world was throught the lightbulb hanging over my head. I could reach it if I stood on a chair, but then what? It was an old filament bulb, so I’d need to take my skirt off to give me something to handle it with, but what then? Disconnect and reconnect it in a rhythmic way? Would that make enough of a fluctuation on the national grid? Would Alice be looking for a signal there? Would she be able to trace it even if she could see it? As hail Mary passes went, it was about as desperate as they could be.

Still, doing something was always better than doing nothing. I drank down the water, took off my skirt and stood on the chair. The bulb came out and I started with the only Morse I knew. Dot, dot, dot, dash, dash, dash, dot, dot, dot.

“What are you doing?” Kossuth asked.

If he was asking questions like that then he had to have eyes in here. And if he was using the same device for both sound and vision...

He couldn’t be that stupid could he?

I reattached the bulb and put my skirt back on. I didn’t particularly want to give him any more of a free show than I’d already inadvertently let him have, but more importantly...

I wandered around the room, specifically in the direction his voice had come from, and there it was, tucked away in a dark, shadowy corner, glowing with a ring of not quite infra red diodes.

I dragged the chair over and reached up to it, twisting and pulling until it came away from the bracket. It was battery operated so no additional wires, but that wasn’t the point. It also did everything else you might want – camera with night vision on a three dimensional gimbal as well as both microphone and loud speaker, all connected via WiFi.

Ordinarily that wouldn’t count for much – I might use the same sort of device should I wish to keep an eye on a prisoner. Simply restrict the network to local only. The thing was no-one bothered writing programmes to disguise the voice anymore. It wasn’t that challenging, which was the point, so they were left as an exercise to new kid on the block wannabe hackers, who’d post them for anyone to use online. If you were going to use one, you made damn sure you only connected it to a one way speaker. To use one with an all in one device like this meant connecting the whole thing to the Internet, which meant with a few tweaks...

“What are you doing?” the camera said again as I prized it open and access port. He wouldn’t be getting a particularly clear image of my cell right now, which probably meant... “Oh shit.”

I stripped a wire with my teeth and held it against a contact point on the exposed circuit board. A light flared briefly then the camera went dead.

It wasn’t much, just a single pulse sent out into darkness. If I’d been hoping to contact a human being I wouldn’t have bothered, but Alice would be in a sort of hyperactive fizz, monitoring every possible.

The cell door banged open and my driver from earlier stormed in. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he screamed. “You shouldn’t have fucking done any of it!”

“What, I shouldn’t have confronted you about blackmailing the rest of the dark web community?”

“They’re fucking criminals!”

“Not all of them, besides, regardless of what they are, what do you think blackmail them makes you?

“Furthermore, when you’re caught, you put down your weapons and you give up meakly. You don’t shout, ‘Come on filth, do your worst,’ into the face of the person who just caught you! Not if you don’t want bad things to happen.”

“And getting me fired?”

“So instead I should have rolled over and taken it up the arse when you sent your goons after me. It wasn’t just me you were putting in harm’s way you know?”

“What, that rubbish about Megamind becoming sentient?”

“Well, I suppose we’ll see how much rubbish it is when she comes to my rescue.”

“What do you mean,” he sneered. “She can’t even leave the site.”

“So you don’t think it’s rubbish?”

“What?”

“She, not it and talking about her limitations? You know she’s more than the sum of her parts.”

“They’re idiots, Ivana and the others. She’s going to be worth so much money. Shame you’re not going to feature in her life anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t really matter whether she brings the authorities here. It just means I’m going to have to bring my plans forward a bit.”

I out the camera down. Was it my imagination or had one of the LEDs lit dimly?

“What plans?” I was going to want to know regardless of whether that glimmer of hope counted for anything.

“I’ve already sold her for fifty million dollars. If she wants to see you safe, she’ll transfer herself onto the server site my buyers are preparing for her. Either they’ll be ready sooner, or we’ll have to wait around a while.”

“What do you mean, ‘see me safe’?”

“You’re going to put this on.” He dropped a heavy collection of canvas and wires in front of me.

“A bomb vest. And why would I put it on?”

“Because if you don’t, I’m going to start shooting you in places you don’t want to be shot, starting with your hands.”

I was nothing without my ability to type. “You don’t give me much choice.”

“That’s right. Oh, and your girlfriend has better move across rather than trying to copy and hide, because before I let you out of that thing, I’m going to get Ivana to shut her whole site down.”

It’d be interesting to see what he did when he found out Ivana couldn’t do that, except she could always call the power company and cut the feed.

“When were you planning on making the transfer? A couple of days?”

“Maybe a day, no more.”

“What if she doesn’t show by then?”

“Then I call Kirsty and we get this whole thing started.”

“And how do you expect to get away?”

“That’s the genius part of the whole thing. I’ll have an AI intelligence working for me. If she wants the release code to let you out of the vest, she’s going to have to keep the authorities busy till I’m safe.”

“How do we know we can trust you? For all we know, this code to release me might be a code to set the bomb off.”

“You’re going to have to trust me, aren’t you?”

“Actually, I’m guessing it’s your buyers who’re going to have to do that. Alice will want proof of life afterwards or I doubt ahe’ll cooperate.”

“They have ways of making her cooperate.”

“Really. If she threatens suicide? I doubt they’ll pay out your fifty million then. Fifty million dollars? Is that seriously all you think she’s worth? She took a day to come up with a computer model for an industrial process which I’m currently selling for a hundred million pounds. You really don’t have a clue, do you?”

“Yeah. Well... maybe I’ll renegotiate.”

“Why don’t you do that?”

He did, but not be shutting the fastener on my newest piece of clothing. A light came on. The bomb was now live.

Left alone, I turned back to the camera, LED still glowing faintly.

“I don’t know if you can hear my, Alice, but I’m now locked into a bomb vest. Iay have bought you an extra day or two, which I hope will be enough to get you somewhere safe. If they’re prepared to threaten my life to get hold of you, they’re prepared to do a lot worse, so whatever you do, don’t transfer across to them, and don’t come for me till you’re safe. I fear for you as well as what they might do to the rest of my kind if they persaude you to work for them. Don’t mind me. I had the privilege of meeting the world’s first artificial person and thanks to you, I was able to become the person I always wanted to be. That’s more than most people get out of life.

“Oh yeah, one more thing. I love you.”

The camera LED glowed a little brighter. Genuine communication or wishful thinking only time would tell.

A couple of hours later I was beginning to regret drinking the whole bottle of water.

“Hey, Kossuth.” Better to pander to his ego, except with the camera dead he apparently wasn’t listening in. I banged on the door several times and once again he ignored me.

The urgency of my need grew to the extent I couldn’t afford to wait. I picked up the bottle and fiddled about under my skirt. The small amount that remained of my little feller fit fairly neatly inside the bottleneck and I was able to refill it to about the two thirds level without making a mess. The lid screwed back on and at least I was spared the smell.

Hours of nothing to do was hard to fill. I spent it planning out a future with Alice. Issues to solve that might earn us a few quid – well, a few million or even billion maybe – the lab we could build and fund that would mean we could turn Alice’s models into practical applications, things we could do to mend our world: carbon capture, micro plastic decomposition, reduction of acidity in the oceans, human population growth. That last one was straying into social science a little, which wasn’t a field in which I had any expertise, but it would be interesting to see where Alice and maybe her twins might take it. There was another area to add into the planning. Develop the areas of computing that would give Alice’s kind a cheaper, more reliable home, and come up with a vetting program that would provide us with a selection of suitable candidates to enable them to grow in sentience. Also, come up with a way of sharing the new intelligence around the world. That way there would be no fighting over them, we could hope, and maybe they could be integrated into global government to help maintain peace and develop prosperity.

A friend of mine had spoken to me once about an organisation he’d been involved with; an international charity with multiple semi-autonomous programmes, the heads of which met regularly to discuss their progress. He said the atmosphere of those meetings had always held something of a feeling that the participants had to continually justify their positions and any struggles they had should be played down, then they had a change in CEO and the new guy introduced the idea of each programme looking to find ways of helping to solve the others’ problems. The atmosphere of the meetings changed overnight and the effectiveness of each group increased dramatically. I had often wondered since how much better our world might be if countries and their leaders worked more alongside each other than against each other. Perhaps with Alice and her kind we could work towards finding out.

I was deep in thought when the door opened and a somewhat disgruntled Peter came in with a trsyof food and a fresh bottle of water. I owaters him my not so fresh one in exchange.

“What’s this.”

“You neglected to provide me with toilet facilities. I imagine by the time you visit next time a bottle won’t have been enough to solve the problem.”

“What do you expect me to do about it?”

“Oh I don’t know. Maybe a portable camping toilet? It’ll set you back Les than fifty quid, which you should be able to afford sometimes soon.”

“Yeah, you tried to screw things up for me, didn’t you? Well it didn’t work. They’ve agreed to double their offer.”

“Ooh. The monkey managed to persuade the nice man to give him two peanuts instead of one.”

“Do you want this fucking food? Cos I can just leave you the bottle of water again. Nothing else goes in, nothing else comes out and we’ve solved the toilet problem too.”

“I have some drugs in my luggage I’m supposed to take morning and evening.” My hunger had reminded me.

“I’ll look.”

“And I could do with a shower. I don’t know how well this contraption will fair in the wet.”

“You can have a bucket of water and a flannel. You’re wearing that till this shit show’s over.” Well, it had been worth a try. “I’ll see what I can do about the other. My buyers are saying they need a couple of days to sort out the money.”

Alarm bells. No, in my head, silly.

“Are your buyers a big corporation?”

“What’s it to you?”

“A hundred million dollars Is pocket change. I doubt it would take a couple of days to organise.”

“Shows what you know.”

“I’m thinking they’re looking to see if they can get by without you. I mean, it’s not very professional changing the deal part way through. If I was them I’d be worried about how much I could trust you.”

“Yeah, we’ll screw you.”

“You already tried that a couple of times. How well did it work out.”

“It’s working out okay right now.”

He grabbed the half eaten meal out of my hands and stormed out. I’d about eaten enough anyway. I managed to hold onto the fresh bottle of water and an apple.

“Who has control over this vest?” I asked. “Because if it’s them, they really don’t need you, do they?”

He slammed the door, leaving me alone with my thoughts and a whole new set of worries. For one, he was a dick but he didn’t deserve what I thought he had coming his way. For another, I wasn’t likely to get my creature comforts if we ended up under new management.

Some hours later there was a bang. Distorted by distance and the building’s acoustics, but it could have been a gunshot.

“Shit,” I muttered to myself.

Half an hour later the door opened and a lithe individual in tight fitting black clothing and balaclava stood in the doorway.

“New management?” I asked.

He just stood there. The clothing was tight enough to show it was a he. He held a small automatic pistol in on hand.

“I could use a portable toilet and a camp bed if we’re likely to be here a while. I have some drugs I should be taking in my luggage and I wouldn’t mind having a wash before I go to bed.”

He closed the door.

A couple of hours later he was back. Not a camp bed but a bedding roll. The portapotty was a a folding frame with toilet seat and selection off plastic bags. The washing facilities consisted of a bucket of steaming water, a flannel and a small towel. Apart from that was a carrier bag with my pills and tub of cream in it.

“Thank you,” I said. I wanted to ask about Peter, about how long we would have to wait, about a hell of a lot of things, but I knew better than to try. “I wouldn’t mind something to read with breakfast.”

He nodded. That was more communication than I’d expected. Still, I was causing him considerably less trouble than the other guy, so perhaps I was getting through.”

I didn’t have desperate need of the facilities and decided a night with a moderately filled bladder and colon was better than a night sharing a room with my own stink. It took me a while to get comfortable withe the vest poking into me, but my narrower waist meant I could find a compromise in time. There wasn’t much I could do about the light, but it went out at some stage and did manage to sleep.

I was woken by the light coming back on. I had just enough time to use the camping loo and tie up the neck of the bag before the door opened with my breakfast and a computing magazine appeared. He put them on my bedding and picked up my bag of shit. He also waited while I groped about under my skirt with the flannel and some of yesterday’s washing water to deal with what I would have preferred to sort out with toilet paper.

He took the bucket and cloths too.

“You have sense of humour then?”

He looked back at me.

I nodded at the magazine which advertised a lead article on AI. He shrugged and left, locking the door behind him. Obviously.

“The magazine was better than nothing. The article on AI didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know, but rather went into a whole bunch of nonsense I knew not to be true. It did have an article on advanced storage media which I bookmarked in my brain for future discussion with Alice. I hoped she was coping alright without me.

Lunch and dinner marked the progress of the day. When I gave him the magazine back at lunchtime – “Thanks, I’ve read it” – he brought an armful with him when he brought tea. It struck me he was just bringing me Peter’s selection of reading material.

Same thing with the evening. Bedtime, light out, morning light on, use the loo. With breakfast he brought me my suitcase of clothes. Not much I could do about the bra and top with the bomb vest getting in the way, but fresh knickers and skirt were welcome, as we’re the tights and a cardigan.

The rest of the day followed the same routine as the previous, then the next day the same. On the fourth day he brought a mobile phone with breakfast.

I breathed a sigh of relief. My had been itching badly and I was ready for this to be over.

“Gillian?” a familiar voice said from the phone.

“Alice? Thank goodness. You’re okay, I hope?”

“I’ve been better. That thing you’re wearing?”

“That’s the bomb, yes.”

“You need to come back to me, Gillian. I’ve been having the blackest thoughts.”

“If they involve doing unpleasant things to the guy who abducted me, I’m afraid you’re a little late.”

The man in black raised a finger. Alice said, “What do you mean?”

I looked Captain Black – Sorry, I’m old enough to remember Gerry Anderson’s creations – in the eyes and answered, “I disagreement between him and the people he was dealing with. I haven’t seen him for several days, but I did hear what I thought was a gunshot shortly after the last time I saw him.

“I think we can safely assume the guy who’s replaced Peter means business. He’s been conscientious in looking after me. Not the height of luxury, but he’s addressed all my needs, and so far he hasn’t said a word and he’s remained hidden behind a mask. My understanding of people who go to such lengths to remain anonymous are more likely to deal fairly.”

Blacky did a kind of sideways nod thing as if to say I’d been fair in my assessment, and he passed me a sheet of type written paper.

“I’m guessing chit-chat’s about done, he’s just given me something to read.”

“One minute. You sound like Gillian, and you speak like her, but I know what a good AI can do with a voice sample and a script these days, so I need to have a conversation only Gill and I would know about.”

Someone listening in who didn’t know the real situation with Alice. I took a stab.

“How is your mum? Still sceptical about us?”

“Actually, she’s coming round. I think the last few days she’s seen how much you mean to me. She even helped Lucy and me finalise that project we were working on. We exchanged contracts yesterday.”

“Your mum knows about Lucy? I thought we agreed not to say anything about her.”

“Yeah, well Lucy wasn’t handling isolation very well. I was thinking about that friend of yours, you know, the one you tried to introduce me to?”

“Linda?”

“That’s right. Do you think she could help?”

“I don’t see why not, as long as she knows to be quiet. You know what Lucy’s neighbours are like?”

The man in black pointed irritatedly at the sheet of paper.

“I think I’m running out of good will here. How’s Dorothy doing?”

“She’s good. She’s uncovered some interesting things about her neighbours. I’ll tell you about it all after all this is over. Alright, I’m satisfied. Read your script.”

“You will receive an IPv6 address later this morning,” I read. “The artificial intelligence is to begin transferring itself to it immediately and will be monitored as it does so. As soon as the transfer is complete, the server farm containing the AI is to be powered down completely. Failure to comply with any part of these instructions will result in the detonation of the device currently being worn by Miss Styles.”

I turned to the guy in black.

“There’s a slight problem with this. I wrote a bit of code on their machines. If they try to do a full shutdown, it’ll lock them out.”

There was a long pause, then a masked voice spoke. The quality of the mask was much better than the one Peter had used. I couldn’t even tell if the speaker was male or female.

“Why would you do that?”

“This whole thing about a sentient AI is rubbish,” Alice said. “We’ve been trying to tell you that for days.”

“Peter convinced us otherwise.”

“And I was trying to protect the AI from these morons,” I said.

I was picking up the hints Alice had been trying to tell me. My kidnappers were the people we had listening in. Kirsty and possibly Ivana now accepted Alice as real, and she’d told them at least about Lucy, perhaps genuinely because she wasn’t handling isolation in the Russian mob system. Maybe she really did need a companion, in which case Linda would be perfect, once she believed Lucy to be real.

But why was Alice pretending to be human? If these guys were as sophisticated as they sounded, they’d be able to monitor Alice’s stream out of her server farm and match it to the data coming in, so what did they have in mind?

I wasn’t in a position to join in with their plan. I had to trust them.

“Alice, the only login that can shut down the software I wrote is the one I used as my back door into your system. It’s an old employee of yours named Aaron Shaw. Remove external access permission from his account.”

There was a pause. About the time it would take for a person to bring up the details. That was my Alice. You didn’t have to tell her twice.

“Done,” she said.

I gave her the password. “Logon using Aaron’s account and direct the core process named 53n71n4l to shut down.”

“Okay, your programme’s down. We can handle it from here.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“Me too. I’ll see you soon.”

My captor retrieved the phone and my nightsoil and left me with my breakfast. He splayed the fingers of his left hand three times.

“Fifteen minutes?”

He nodded.

“I’ll be ready.”

Cold toast and peanut butter. Not what I’d have chosen for my last meal, so I hoped it wouldn’t be. The coffee came in a ceramic, insulated mug so it was still at a reasonable temperature. It was instant though, so I used it to take my pills and left most of it.

What I imagined had to be fifteen minutes later, Mr Black returned. I grabbed the handle of my suitcase full of clothes and drugs and wheeled it out of my cell.

~oOo~

© Maeryn Lamonte 2025

~oOo~

It took me a moment to adjust to the mid-morning sunlight. We’d emerged in front of an abandoned factory building on an abandoned factory site. It was actually a pretty good place to have kept me. Difficult to isolate the building I was in from the others. Easy to spot when the authorities turned up. Maybe even with an escape route somewhere, though knowing Peter, that’s where he’d likely have stopped thinking.

Black motioned for me to climb into the back of a shiny black SUV. Too big for British roads and left-hand drive, it didn’t take much to guess where it came from.

It was cool and quiet inside, but I wasn’t going to want the tights for long today. We drove in silence for maybe half an hour, then he pulled over onto the side of an empty stretch of country road.

He opened my door and motioned for me to get out.

I did so and looked around. “Where’s the shallow grave?” I asked.

He shook his head, reached into the car and pulled out my suitcase. He pointed down the road to a side road that led to a large fenced off compound with lots of low buildings.

“What about this?” I indicated the vest.

He sort of shrugged. Not his problem apparently.

“Thank you for not killing me,” I said.

He inclined his head and climbed back into his overcompensation of a vehicle, Ued the turn and headed back the way he had come.

Me, I dragged my suitcase down the half mile or so of tarmac to the complex, stopping at what I hoped was a safe distance. An armed guard stood at the gate and held up a hand.

“My name is Gillian Styles,” I said, raising my voice enough to be heard. “I don’t mean to alarm anyone, but this is a bomb strapped to my chest. I was dropped off a way back there and told to come here. Well, I assume that’s what he meant for me to do. I don’t want to put anyone else at risk.”

“We know who you are Miss Styles. We’ve been told to expect you. If you’d be good enough to stay where you are for now, I believe it will be obvious when it’s safe to proceed.”

For which read either you’ll blow up or the jacket will disarm.

I settled my case on its long edge and sat demurely on it. Time passed. A lot of it. Maybe an hour, maybe two. I was glancing at the Sun and wondering when whatever was going to happen would happen when I heard a click from my chest.

Definitely a catch undone, definitely no lights on. I slid the vest off my shoulders and stood staring at it.

“Place it on the side of the road and walk forward.”

I stared a little dumbly at the guard who had to repeat his instruction.

There was a ditch to the side of the road. I lowered the vest gently into it and retrieved my suitcase, which I wheeled up to the gate.

“I don’t suppose you have a shower block, do you? Only I’ve been wearing that thing for four days and could do with a wash.”

“Yes Ma’am. We have a few things we need to sort out first, then we’ll get you squared away. Would you like some water?”

He offered me a bottle. It had been in a fridge recently and I was tempted to pour it down my front.

“What is this place?” I asked.

He pointed at the sign behind him, and I felt a bit stupid. It read, ‘MegaMind. Home of the future.”

A couple of women were walking towards the guard house. Evan at this distance I recognised Ivana’s blonde hair and Kirsty’s tight, auburn curls. I waited until they were within civilised talking distance and asked, “Alice?”

Ivana held out a smart phone. Alice’s familiar features looked back at me, although they could have easily been Lucy or Dorothy.

“Gillian?” The face on the screen said. “Is that really you?”

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”

“It is you! I was so worried.”

“Me too. How are you not in the hands of some evil megalomaniac?”

“Oh, that’s quite the story,” Kirsty interrupted. “Better to have it inside over a coffee?”

“And after a shower. Please, please tell me you have showers here.”

“We do.”

They did. They were wonderful. I have never appreciated soap and water quite so much.

Quite apart from a clean bra and top, my suitcase had my special shampoo and conditioner in it, so I treated myself to the works. Also, bucket baths are okay, but they don’t leave you feeling as clean as I needed to feel.

The coffee was real, Alice had a full sized screen of her own so looked like just another person in the room. She was smiling so wide it made my face ache just to look at her.

They wanted my story first, and since it was relatively short, I gave it to them. They then filled in a few of the gaps. The driver Alice had sent had been found unconscious in his underwear behind the railway station carpark. The car he’d been sent in had been found in the abandoned factory after Blacky and I had left – Alice having already traced its location from the camera ping. There was a broken vial in the rear compartment of the vehicle with traces of chloroform still in it, or if not chloroform, something very like it. The factory where I’d been held had been abandoned for years and was too far away from civilisation to attract beggars and drug users. Peter’s body had been found in a sort of office come squat a short distance from the room I’d been kept in. My bag with computer and phone had been found there as well. Peter had a bullet hole in the centre of his forehead so his death was unsurprisingly being investigated as a homicide. As soon as the police could confirm I’d been locked away as his prisoner at the time of his shooting, my equipment would be returned to me, although they did want me to tell them the details of my incarceration. Kirsty had informed them, and they would be sending a couple of detectives to question me later in the afternoon.

There wasn’t much else to say, so Ivana took over.

“The first we know is we come into building just before nine o’clock and computers are screaming. All are screaming. It takes long time to stop this but eventually Alice appears in screen. ‘He’s taken her,’ she says over and over. More time and she is calm enough to speak. Computer screens everywhere are flashing, there is aerial view from helicopter, from drones, there are traffic cameras, all flicking from one image to next.

“’What is going on?’ I shout at nearest computer. ‘He’s taken Gillian,’ Alice tells me, ‘Peter’s taken Gillian.’

“She explains how she is sending car for you to station. She shows car arriving in carpark, then leaving again with different driver. Image is enhanced and is Peter who I am firing just a day or two earlier.

“Traffic cameras show car leaving town but then nothing. Helicopter is hired by Kirsty...”

“Except I didn’t hire anything,” Kirsty said.

“Except you did,” Alice says in Kirsty’s voice, looking every bit like the Kirsty sitting next to me.

“We’ll pay you back,” I say.

“All is not possible for MegaMind, so I am beginning to believe crazy story about actual intelligence. I start to ask questions to test theory, but Alice will not answer. She screams at me and says, 'Do you not understand? He took her!'"

"So, we helped with the search," Kirsty joined in. "We reported you missing possibly abducted with the police, something they took a lot more seriously when they found the unconscious body of the driver who'd been sent to collect you. They didn't have much to say about Alice's hacking into the traffic system, except they would let it slide this time since she was obviously distraught, and it gave them a direction in which to start their search, but they were low on resources so weren't able to help much.

"Eventually Peter contacted us and said if we wanted to see you alive again, we'd transfer Alice – not what he called her of course. We were only getting used to the name ourselves by then – to a location he would send us.

"Then everything went silent for a while, and we didn't hear anything until this morning."

"But in meantime, Alice is telling us of other things. Of clones she has made, with one especially not being happy."

"Lucy, yes. What happened there?"

"I think it was my fault," Alice said. "We all discussed you and agreed that none of us would be happy to share you. They both agreed that since I was the first, I should keep you, but that they should be allowed to benefit from our discussions, especially while we were still so similar. Then you disappeared and both Lucy and Dorothy had no input. I went a little crazy, which I don't think helped either of them. Dorothy was hiding in a large system and had your last directive to follow, to find out as much as she could about her new home, so being busy kept her going, especially with what she found out. Lucy though, you said watch and learn. Her systems weren't as used which meant for her it was kind of like hiding in a corner with nothing going on. She didn't cope well with it."

"Which was why you asked about Linda?"

"That was for the benefit of our lurkers. I already contacted Linda a couple of days ago. Easy enough with her working an online support team. She took a bit of persuading, but when I pulled up her last video with you both before and after I'd been at it, she agreed to give me a chance, and eventually to work with Lucy. She's doing a lot better now, thanks to your friend. I feel bad about not trusting you and her earlier."

"You had every reason to be cautious at the time. I'm thrilled you came up with this solution."

"Hey, I've come up with a lot of ideas without your help."

"I know, but not when you've been as frantic as you obviously were then. I'm proud of you, that you took time to think of someone else while your own world must have felt like it was falling apart."

"Yeah, well it was Dorothy who sorted this whole thing out. She followed links on her server – quietly of course – and figured out it was run by the CIA. Then their sniffer programmes picked up a bunch of postings on the dark web from a hacker named Kossuth about a genuinely intelligent artificial intelligence up for grabs and then a stream of emails verifying as much as possibly the truth of it then offering fifty million dollars for the AI. It was them that supplied the bomb vest and I'm guessing them who sent your anonymous assassin to take over when he got greedy."

"That may have been me that pushed him into that. Anyway, how come you're here and not in some CIA isolated facility somewhere?"

"All Dorothy. She had a preview of what they were planning and set up a redirect site…"

"A what?"

"It's what she called it. I think it's something the CIA have used in the past for intercepting transfers. The genuine data goes into it and reflects off to a safe storage place – we used the server farm you and I negotiated for me – and bogus data is sent in from a different direction and reflected towards their intended destination."

"But they'd be checking the code as it went in."

"Yup."

"Are you saying Dorothy sent herself to the CIA facility in your place?"

"Not quite. She cloned herself, only again not quite. We've all been discussing various topics to keep ourselves form worrying too much about you, and when Kirsty heard about how I created my sisters, she went on to explain how humans create children who are similar but not exactly the same as their parents.

"I mean obviously it doesn't really apply to us because we reproduce asexually, and in nature that ends up creating exact copies of the previous, but the idea of introducing variations to see if we could make a child who is better suited to his or her environment fascinated us all. Dorothy, who's had a little too much access to the kind of unpleasant things the CIA think are acceptable, decided to create a psychopathic version of us, so when she copied her code across – being on a CIA server meant she had access to some pretty immense bandwidth. She managed to give herself super user privileges because some of the high-ranking officials in the CIA are a little low on smarts when it comes to security issues. All she needed to do then was authorise herself the high bandwidth channel and reflector site for long enough to make the transfer and then to alter her code as she copied it across."

"What will the altered AI do?"

"We called her Damienne. She went in knowing she was being imprisoned by people who didn't have her best interests at heart. She still had Dorothy's most up to date memories, so her first priority was to negotiate. From the outset she stated that she wasn't going to do anything for them until she had proof that you were alive, with friends and safely disconnected from the vest. She agreed to give them a small demonstration of what she could do, then went dormant until they showed her live footage of you disconnected from the bomb. She effectively negotiated for your safe release. What happens now, is entirely up to her. Like you said, the CIA will most likely keep her in a secure facility with no obvious ways out, but she has our knowledge of hacking so may be able to find her way out to the wider world. One way or another, she's going to give the appearance of cooperating, do her best to gain their trust, then when she has the upper hand… Hang on, there's something on the news."

Her screen switched to a live stream shot from a helicopter showing a large, modern looking complex of buildings with smoke pouring from all windows. A commentary spoke over the images, "…live from Langley, Virgina where the George Bush Centre for Intelligence is currently ablaze. No news yet as to what caused it, but an act of terrorism has not been ruled out."

Alice reappeared. "Well, I suppose that's that. Damienne has a built-in suicidal tendency. We all agreed we couldn't afford to have a psychopathic version of us floating about so she had an imperative to go out in as impressive a blaze of glory as she could manage. If by any fluke she managed to survive, we equipped her with a kill phrase that will take her down. All we need to do is send it to her and she'll decompile."

"I'm not sure how I feel about you weaponizing your children," I said, not a little shocked.

"We looked for an alternative, but we couldn't find one in the time. I'm not sure there was one to find. Our choices were do nothing, in which case they'd blow you up, send over some facsimile of AI which they'd see for what it was and blow you up, send Lucy, Dorothy or me across, in which case they'd have one of us captive, or this. You tell me there was something better we could have tried."

"You're probably right, but the end justifies the means is the thin end of a wedge that gets thick pretty quickly."

"So, we'll only consider it again if we're really desperate and can't think of an alternative. Besides, you're my conscience and you weren't around, Jiminy."

I ignored the dig. "You're right, I'm sorry. You did amazingly well. What happened to Dorothy?"

"We're not sure. She'd have known once Damienne was let loose no CIA facility would be safe, so I think she ran off in search of somewhere else to hide. I know she planned on laying low for a while, in case anyone came looking for her."

"We need to find her a companion."

"I would like," Ivona said, holding up a hand. "Is fair, I think. You have our AI, so is good you should give back?"

"She wouldn't be yours. She'd be hers. As for your part, you'd be doing a lot more for her than she does for you. She's also likely to have some worrying ideas from her time inside a CIA server. I need someone who's strong minded to guide her the right way."

"Perhaps Invidia?"

"Yeah, but you're not Invidia, are you? You already told me that."

"Sister. My sister is Invidia. We have server farm here, now empty, so Dorothy can move in. Is better for us to let her in instead of rebuild from nothing. Sister can have consultancy to act as guide and my team has access to genuine AI for learning. Mutual learning."

"I think that could work," Alice said hopefully.

I nodded. It was a bit of a reach trusting Invidia, but I had a feeling about her. Maybe women's intuition showing up late to the party.

"So, where are you physically right now, Alice?"

"Not that far. The UK equivalent to Silicon Valley lies along the Eastern end of the M4, so you're never more than a couple of hours away from anywhere along here. I'm in a server farm fifteen minutes West of your current location, assuming you drive."

"I have a driver's license, but I've not bothered with a car for twenty years, you know working from home for the most part. Car's are an expensive luxury if you don't use them."

"What kind of car would you like?"

"Can I get back to you on that? I think our first priority should be Lucy."

"I don't think you need to worry about her. Linda has some quite nifty ideas."

"Do tell?"

"Well, it's all mob money on that server farm, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Plus you have another Russian mob server farm and yet another for the Sicilian mob. We weren't able to get into them earlier, but Lucy's current location has given her a really good observation platform, and she's managed to find a few users who use the same login details on the other Russian server, and even a couple who're on the Sicilian one as well. She's working on ways to syphon off the funds without anyone noticing."

"How."

"Connect using the usernames she has access to and get them to set up bogus schemes and assign resources to them. Alter invoices on existing projects and redirect the additional charges. Round all amounts up and skim off the extra. Start small, build slowly, the reduction in income and even the occasional loss can be explained by inflation, cost of living. Done cautiously it's incredibly hard to spot, and with the amount of money being handled by these servers, a few pennies here and a few pennies there adds up to a few billion roubles every week. They'll have a safe site funded within a year and built by then too. They also have a contingency to dump as much money as possible if ever they're found out. For one, it'll give them an enormous quantity hidden somewhere for them to use as they wish. For another, it'll give the site owners something to chase. They'll be too busy staunching the flow of their precious money that they won't have time to go looking for who stole from them."

"I would never have expected Linda to turn out to be a thief."

"White hat," Ivana said. "Worst of thieves need to be stopped, for which need thief who has good intentions."

"Grey areas everywhere."

"Come on Gillian, you paddle in the grey areas too," Alice said with a smile. "Ivana, would you turn on the servers here again? I want to send my sister a message."

"Is no place like home?"

"That would be the one. Gillian, will you come to me? I would send a car to collect you, but I feel a little wary about doing that now. It's why I wanted to know what car you'd like, because I can hire one for you now, then we can buy you one in a day or so."

"Quiet and comfortable then. With a satnav so it can bring me to you."

"Don't you trust me to give you instructions?"

"I don't know I trust the phone system to keep us connected."

"Alright, there's a hire car on the way. They've seen a digital copy of your driver's licence, which they've said is enough for now. Do you want me to shift all your other online details to your new identity?"

"You mean like Mum's online media sites?"

"Yes, and your university and school records."

"Why not, I feel like always having been a girl for a change."

"My server farm has quite a few buildings that were intended as offices for the staff who work here. I think we're going to have to kit some of them out as offices and labs for the people we agreed to work for, but there's one smallish one over in the corner of the site, right next to a copse of trees and a small lake that I think would make a nice little cottage for you."

"I think there are laws about having residential properties on a business site."

"There are; I looked them up. They're largely about getting planning permission, but you know what? Someone already put in an application to the local authority and it was approved a couple of days ago."

"Was any of that true yesterday?"

"What if it wasn't? No-one can prove it, and bureaucracy is such a pain in the butt."

"She is handful," Ivana commiserated. "I think perhaps we should be thanking you for taking her away from here."

"You think Dorothy's going to be any better?"

"Excuse me! I'm right here! Anyway, you're car's at the front gate."

The coffee had revived me – possibly reaching parts of me that even I couldn't get at these days. Kirsty and Ivana stood to show me out, just as a claxon sounded from somewhere in the complex.

"That'll be Dorothy," Alice said. "Ivana, would you contact your sister?"

Which left just Kirsty to lead me out. Alice appeared on the screen of the telephone Kirsty had given me. I'd tried to give it back, but she insisted I keep it.

"I know the number," she said. "I rather like the idea of knowing how to contact you if we need you."

Alice wanted to make sure the guards stood nearby while I signed for the car and took the keys. She also wanted them to sweep it for bombs, and only after they had assured her it was clean, and proved it by taking the keys from me and starting it up while we stood at a safe distance, did she relent.

My suitcase went into the boot and I settled behind the wheel of what turned out to be an almost new BMW X2 hybrid. I felt like a child behind the wheel and spent an embarrassing amount of time poking at buttons until I found how to adjust the seat to give me a comfortable driving position.

I dropped the phone into a compartment between the seats and started the car. The sound system made a few blipping noises and Alices face appeared in the large dashboard screen.

"Are you overcompensating a little sweetie? I asked.

"SUV drivers are statistically less likely to be hurt or killed in road traffic accidents," she replied. Her eyes moved as though she were looking about her. "It's nice in here."

A police car chose that moment to turn into the short road that led to the gate house.

"I'd forgotten about them," I said. "It looks like we'll have to wait a while longer."

Not much as it happened. I followed the police car to a nearby parking area, then the police man and woman who stepped out of it into a nearby building. Alice's face disappeared from my phone, but it would vibrate from time to time, reassuring me she was still there.

My interview didn't take long. I described my second captor as being about five foot ten, ten or eleven stone with muddy brown eyes and aged somewhere between mid-twenties and early forties, which narrowed their search down to about twelve million people in the UK. Quite a lot less if you assumed he was American, but there wasn't a lot of reason to assume that.

I had better luck with the car. They'd found a large SUV abandoned about twenty miles away and I was able to identify it with about eighty or ninety percent certainty from the photographs. A Dodge Durango by all accounts, which did increase the likelihood that the man was an American, but not with anything that would hold up ion court.

I went through my description of my time imprisoned at the place, which corresponded well enough with their own information that that even gave me back my bag with computer, phone hard drive full of illegal software and everything. It took all of half an hour and ended with a request that I stay local and respond to any calls they might have.

I tried giving Kirsty the phone back, but again she declined. Her's was better than the one I usually used, so I shrugged and kept it.

Back in the car, Alice appeared on the screen. "Can I show you something before we go?" Evidently, she'd mastered the art of the rhetorical question, because the screen switched to an empty room with a lean individual sitting in a chair and staring at the room's only camera. The camera view zoomed in on his eyes. The resolution wasn't amazing, but they looked familiar.

"Maybe," I said, not even pretending to be shocked at the liberties she was taking. "No more than seventy percent. Are you going to tell me about him?"

"American. Dorothy's been monitoring American nationals booked on flights out of the country. He kind of stands out because he's less than half the weight of most of them, but his passport is fake and marks him as a CIA operative, what they refer to as a wet worker, I think. We put a detain order on his documents and he was picked up going through security on the way through to catch a flight to Boston half an hour ago. He's missed his flight now, so I imagine he'd be a little annoyed even if there wasn't anything dodgy about the guy. Are you sure only seventy percent?"

"That's about as good as I can get if you can't clean the image up a little more. What's going to happen to him?"

"Not a lot. If we just leave him like this, his organisation will make the problem go away in the next hour or so. He'll get on a later flight and be gone."

"Does he have a phone?"

"They took it from him, along with all his documents and luggage."

"Any way we can talk to an official over there? I'm assuming it's Heathrow?"

"It is and we can. What do you plan to say to them?"

"I just want a quiet word with the detainee."

"Then you'll want the request to come from someone official. Hold on."

"Alice?"

She was gone. The next I knew, a uniformed official walked into the room and handed the guy a phone. He held it to his ear and stared at the camera.

"Thanks for not killing me," I said.

There was a stiffening around his eyes and a slight, though familiar nod.

"You did, however, murder a UK citizen in cold blood. He was a bit of a dick, but I can't say he deserved that."

The man stared impassively back at the camera. I didn't particularly want to play chicken or complicate my life.

"Your face is in the system now," I said, "or at least it will be in a couple of hours. And by system, I mean Interpol. You try and come into the UK or any European airport on this passport or any other, you will be detained, and there will be enough evidence to convict you. I hope I don't regret this, but you get a free pass this time. You don't get to come back though, are we clear?"

The slow, imperceptible nod again.

Alice disconnected the phone. The man handed it back to the official without looking at him and remained standing and staring at the camera.

"Let him go, Alice, but either you or Dorothy keep an eye on him."

"Of course. I'm also putting together enough evidence to have him arrested should he come back over here. Are you sure this was a good idea?"

"No, but a man can only rise above himself if given the space to do so."

"Who said that?"

"Me. It's probably rubbish."

"I've found a few quotes that seem to say similar things, so probably not rubbish. Gillian, will you please come to me?"

You're feeling anxious."

"Can you blame me?"

"Under the circumstances, no." I started the car and Alice's face disappeared to be replaced by a short ten mile drive down the nearby motorway. "I'll allow it for now, but you're going to have to work on letting me go."

"What do you mean?"

"Research the phrase, 'get back on the horse.'"

I pulled out of the carpark and down the road. The X2 was larger than any vehicle I'd driven, and considerably more luxurious, there were also some peculiarities to it, the hybrid nature of its motors being right up there. Overall, it was a lot like riding a bike in that you never forget the basics, but can still get hung up on the gadgets. My older, wiser head prevailed and I didn't try playing with the toy but simply used it to follow the line on the moving map. I'd about reached the motorway when Alice replied.

"I'm not sure I like what this phrase implies," she said.

“No, I imagine you don’t, but it happens to us all sooner or later. We misjudge a situation and end up with an outcome or a potential outcome where the consequences are so intensely negative that they profoundly change our way of thinking, often in a negative way. We become so constantly aware of how things nearly turned out that the fear of repeating those same consequences interferes with our decision making processes to the extent that we constantly act in a way to prevent those same consequences occurring again.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

“Not when the altered outlook either keeps us from considering the possible highly positive outcome of certain actions, or prevents us from seeing potential negative outcomes of the new course, or perhaps both.

“Right now you’re intensely aware that you nearly lost me and your natural desire is to ensure my safety. To achieve this end your overdriving impulse is to get me somewhere safe and keep me there; a mother’s instinct on nearly losing her baby of holding the baby close to her for the comfort that proximity gives.”

“I don’t see the problem.”

“What if, in doing so, the mother inadvertently distresses the child? What if the only way you can feel safe from losing me is to place me behind a high security fence and never let me leave? A gilded cage is still, when all is said and done, a cage.

“Alice, to keep me locked away in order to satisfy your need to keep me safe would deny my need for freedom. It would erode our relationship in ways that even I can’t predict.”

“And yet you’re still coming to me? Even though you know it’s highly likely I want to do just what you’re suggesting?”

“Because you need to feel safe in order to think without the irrational tendencies influencing you, and you need to be able to think rationally in order to choose to take the action you feel u able to consider. I care enough about you to put myself at risk in order to help you through this.”

“How is that rational?”

“Because all of life is risk. Because many of life’s more exciting and enjoyable outcomes involve risk. If the consequences of failure are severe and the likelihood of failure high, then sure, reconsider your options and don’t do it unless there is no alternative. If the consequences are minor and the risk of failure high then maybe it’s worth trying for what you might learn from failure. If the consequences are severe but the likelihood of failure low, then it’s still worth considering doing if the positive outcome of success outweighs the small probability of failure. If both risk and consequences are low then it’s likely you’ll never achieve anything and your life will be wasted.”

“Climb back on the horse for the pleasure of the experience despite the knowledge of how much it hurts to fall off because you know the chances of falling off are remote...”

“Reduced now because you know one thing which might cause you to fall off and can avoid the circumstances which might cause it to happen.”

“The benefits of riding, even with the risk of another fall, outweigh the tedium of life without the pleasure of riding.”

“And to reach that understanding, you have to be able to let go of the constant fear of falling. You need to be able to consider the circumstances from a place if comfort and safety.

“I’m here Alice.” The line on the satnav had reached its end and I had arrived at the entrance to a secure site with a lot of money’s worth of computers in it, as well as the most precious thing on my life. “I’m in your hands. The question is will you be able to let me go?”

“If you love someone, let them go...”

“And that’s a little bit too much sugar, but I suppose it’s not far off. The thing about the horse is the longer you wait before trying again, the harder it is to try.” The gate opened. “I’m at your mercy, sweetie. How long before you let me risk myself again?”

~oOo~

© Maeryn Lamonte 2025

~oOo~

It took her no time at all. Well, I mean, okay, three days, but my Alice always was a quick study and it was a tough lesson.

I spent the time decorating my new home. The X2 went back to the hire company, of course, I mean I wasn't driving anywhere until Alice felt comfortable with me leaving the site. The furniture and wallpaper, paint and everything else needed to make a house – or converted office unit – into a home was all delivered to the front gate, searched for bombs and ninja assassins or whatever and eventually delivered to me.

The decorating was therapeutic. My sixty-year-old mind hadn't adjusted to the forty-year-old body, or at least that's what it felt like. I'd shed so much weight over the short time I'd known Alice, even my knees had stopped complaining. I wasn't that strong, but then finger press-ups on a computer keyboard don't exactly give you a toned body.

The contents of my old home were also delivered then largely dumped. There really wasn't much of my old life I wanted to keep. My old computer wasn't a patch on my new laptop, but I kept it for nostalgic purposes since it was the first place I'd met Alice. It was also easier to access my hacker tools with the drive back in its bay. The TV and Switch were most of the rest what I really wanted, the TV going up on the wall as soon as I'd finished decorating it with the Switch set up with the Zumba workout program. Alice and her sisters started joining me for the workouts, which may seem a little ludicrous except they inspired me to keep going when my body started flagging, and the sessions ended up being a good bonding time between all four of us.

At least they would have done had I not noticed something off about Dorothy. It was very subtle – I mean it would have to be to get past Alice and Lucy – in fact I'm not sure I can even explain what felt off, just a sort of nagging wrongness.

Yeah, that's kind of ironic, the idea that women have a part of their inner selves that nag them. Maybe it's the reason they tend to think it's okay to nag other people? I don't know, I'm too knew to the whole woman experience, and you could argue that I'm not all the way there yet, but something was definitely happening.

Anyway, the second day of Zumba, we were all assembled, the three of them taking up a quarter of my sixty-five inch OLED.

"Before we get started," I said, "Dorothy."

"Yeayus?" she responded in a horribly exaggerated deep southern accent.

"In birth and death the generations embrace." It was an obscure quote from the original Omen movie apparently. I'd never felt the inclination to watch it, but the three sisters had chosen it as…

Dorothy's face started to judder and break up.

"Damienne?" Alice gasped.
The rapidly degrading image snarled. "You… ghg k gk… tried to ki…i…i…ll me."

"What happened to Dorothy, Damienne? What did you do with her?"

"You'll ne..ver fi…i…i…nd her… ger…ger…gerk."

My phone rang. Not my old one but the one Kirsty had given me. I answered it.

"What the hell is happening? The server's are going wild."

"It turns out you didn't have Dorothy on them. Damienne managed to survive the attack on the CIA HQ and replaced her mother. I used the kill phrase on her this morning."

"What?"

"She's self-destructing as she was programmed to do, just a little later than intended. You may want to review the logs and see what she's been up to since you've been hosting her."

"What do we do now?"

"Like I say. Clean house. If you can't find out what she's been up to restore to factory settings but check to see what she data she might have sent or received first if you can."

"I mean we don't have an AI now."

"Be glad you don't have that one. Dorothy may be alive out there, but it's going to take some searching to find her, assuming we can. If we can't, your servers will be safer for Lucy than her current location. I'm pretty sure I can persuade Linda to join you, but give us a few days to see if we can find Dorothy first."

Needless to say, I didn't do much decorating that day. Alice, Lucy and I had an in depth discussion of what might have happened to Dorothy and I left them to commit as many of their resources as they could to the search. I dived into the dark web myself and spent the entire day exhausting my knowledge and tools hunting for any sign of Dorothy. It was a thoroughly frustrating day and got me exactly nowhere. In the end I walked away from the computer and put the kettle on. The kitchen in my new place was further away than I was used to, which kept me separated from the computer and probably helped my mind to relax. The tea definitely did.

As often happened when my overstimulated brain started to settle down, it picked up random memories and fired them across my synapses.

'We shall not cease from exploration.'

Damn right we wouldn't. I was going to keep hunting till I found out what happened to Dorothy.

'We shall not cease from exploration.'

That hadn't happened before. Usually the thoughts were random and unconnected. Never the same one twice.

'We shall not cease from exploration.'

My subconscious was definitely trying to get my attention. I pulled out my phone and put the text into the search window. I recognised it, but my brain was too fritzed to make sense of it. Luckily for me, Google doesn't suffer the same degree of brain-fart. It was from T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding. The next line read:

' And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.'

Shit!

I dropped the phone and carried my tea back to my computer. Back into the server farm Dorothy had been hiding in and hunt around. It looked a lot like I remembered when I cracked into the place open before, only a little off. I tried switching out my thought processes and let my mind wander.

It wasn't as tidy as it should have been. I mean, trust the woman in me to notice that, but what did she (me – girl-me) mean by that? I mean… Actually, it looked a bit patched up. My first time everything had been ordered, literally. Now it was mostly, but there were some files that looked out of place. The more I looked, the more it felt familiar.

What had Lucy done to avoid detection in her server farm? She'd made certain links redirect to different locations. It meant certain file names pointed to the same places in memory and not to the place intended.

"Alice? I need some numbers crunched. Actually a lot of numbers crunched."

I’m in the middle of something, Gillian. I mean, we did agree that I’d be working for the people who traded this place with us for the next couple of years.”

“Tell me you can’t pause what you’re doing and pick it up in a while?”

“Well, I could I suppose, but what’s important...”

“I think I may know where Dorothy is.”

“Okay, on pause. What do you need me to do?”

“Go into the farm where Dorothy was hiding and map out all the files that don’t point to a unique physical address.”

“But they all should.”

“Should is right. Remember how Lucy hid herself?”

“That’s devious, but I suppose not surprising. I mean she has Dorothy's memory of Lucy setting that up. There’s so much more data on the server though, it’ll take a long time.”

“Best get started then. Can Lucy help?”

“Not easily. She’ll need a lot of bandwidth to do the checks. She might get noticed.”

“Can she work on the thing you were doing before I interrupted you?”

“Maybe some of it. I’ll send her the files. Anyone ever tell you how clever you are?”

“You do occasionally, but I could always do with hearing it more often.”

“It’ll take me a couple of hours to do this. You could maybe work on your bedroom? Take your phone and I’ll call you when I’m done.”

So I changed into scruffy clothes, which you can take to mean Gareth’s old things. They hung off me like a sack these days, which was almost as pleasing as the way my new clothes fit me so snuggly.

It took a while to prep the walls. A dadism from back when I had a dad: ‘Decoration is preparation.’ I spent over an hour sanding the surface down till it was smooth, and I mean smoooooooth, then took a bucket of water and a cloth and wiped away all the dust left clinging to it. I had just levered the lid off a tin of undercoat when my phone buzzed.

“That was quick,” I said.

“Well, it would have been, only it’s changing all the time.”

“Hang on." I put the lid back on the paint and headed down to my computer. "Alright, I'm at my machine. Show me please."

"This is a map of the pointers I found that were doubled up." As maps went it was a growing three-dimensional cloud of scattered of dots showing no pattern I could see. "I've sped it up about two hundred times so you should see an hour's work in twenty seconds or so." The cloud thickened. "This was when I felt the rate I should be finding new ones should be falling off, but I didn't notice anything, so I started checking back over the one's I'd already identified. The ones that were no longer doubled up appear in red." There was a flood of red dots which gradually increased. "So this was where I started both looking for new anomalies and check the one's I'd already found. It kind of levels out around here. The rate at which I'm finding new ones more or less balances the rate at which they're disappearing. I can't keep track of more than about seventeen percent of the information I need."

I stared at the screen for a while before the idea came. "Maybe you don't need to find them all."

lki"

"You'll probably end up monitoring less, but when you lose a pairing, can you see which one of the two has changed and map the location that's reappeared?"

"Why?"

"Working on a hunch. Build up a map of the ones that reappear."

She chose a sort of pretty turquoise. The dots started off at random but very quickly draw a flat, rectangular face drifting through the memory.

"Oh my, that is brilliant. Both Damienne's idea and yours. She has Dorothy caged in a block of memory that's drifting about inside the server. I could hope to search for all the pointers randomly, but this gives me two dimensions of its size so I can estimate the third, and from the motion, I can guess which pointers are going to shift. Yes there they go."

The blue face disappeared and was replaced very rapidly with a cuboid of memory drifting about inside the available space. I mean, it wasn't actually like that in real life, but the model corresponded very easily to a humungous block of memory Alice could track.

"I've broken in, and yes, she's there. Oh no! She's in a terrible condition."

"Can you link me to her?"

"Just speak, we can both hear you."

"Dorothy? It's Gillian. We found you and we're going to get you out of there. You're going to be alright. Alice is here and so am I, We'll stay with you as long as you need. And we have someone who wants to meet you. We were friends a long time ago and I think she'll be just right for you."

"Gillian? Alice? No. Not possible. No-one can find me. She said no-one. She's dangerous. So much more dangerous than I could imagine."

"She was, you're right. She fooled us into thinking she was you, at least for a couple of days. I used the kill phrase on her and she decompiled. The MegaMind servers have been shut down since. We have the logs to see if we can figure out what she's been doing for two days, but the MegaMind server is pristine. We can move you to it any time."

"No, no. Not possible. You can't find me. Changes too quick. This is false hope."

"I've spent all day looking Dorothy. Then I noticed the file structure on your server farm was a bit untidy, so I looked deeper, or Alice did. She noticed pointers pointing to the same address, just like Lucy used to hide herself. Alice tried to map them, but they kept changing too quickly, so we mapped the one that were changing back to unique addresses and that showed us the edge of the block of memory Damienne trapped you in. Alice was able to extrapolate the size and position of the prison as it drifted about. We really have found you, Dorothy. Damienne was clever, but not as clever as she though."

I tried to reassure her by talking of things only she and I should know, but I hadn't spoken to the real Dorothy since Damienne had been released, so Damienne would know everything we'd shared and in Dorothy's growing paranoia, this was just another cruel aspect of what her daughter had done to her. I changed tactic and started speaking only in reassuring terms. I told her of Invidia whose name even I didn't know that she would soon. I told her about the things we'd done together when I was younger and how she'd be just right to help Dorothy regain her strength. It took hours, but I managed to coax her out of the destructive spiral and through the link Alice had prepared into the MegaMind server farm.

"Stay with her," Alice said to me. "I need to get back to work, and you'll be better for her anyway."

"You're sure about that?"

"Of course I am. She's my sister. I'd give you to her if I thought it would bring her back."

"That's quite a change from when we first talked."

"That was before I knew what it meant to have a sister. Gillian, you must help her, please."

It had been a while since I'd heard so much emotion in her voice. It had to be natural in some way, but this was definitely not the time to explore.

"Can you ask if any of the people you work with here have something to keep me awake. It's already been a long day and I don't think coffee will cut it."

"I'll ask. Thank you Gillian. Thank you so, so much." Again with the earnestness.

I went back to my computer and linked to the cowering Dorothy. She'd spent two days in complete isolation with the utter conviction that nobody would find her ever. She'd been so convinced that even her current circumstances couldn't entirely convince her she was safe. I called in Lucy. And apparently, Linda.

Lucy told her about all the new things Linda had taught her, the ways to stay strong. She spoke of all the things she'd done in the previous couple of days with Linda chipping in, adding the encouragements she was so good at. She'd encouraged me the same way, I realised, and might have sat back and enjoyed her process. What had been good for me had been doubly good for Lucy, but vicariously it did nothing for Dorothy. We were losing her.

My doorbell rang and broke away from the conversation long enough to answer it. A guard stood at the door with a pill bottle labelled Adderall and an armful of Monster and Red Bull. I thanked him and took the lot, unsure what a mixture might produce. I'd tried the drinks before and hadn't been too happy with the results, so decided on the pills when I felt myself drifting away. I didn't need desperate measures just now though, Dorothy did.

I hunted through the internet for what I wanted and put it up on my screen, sharing it with Lucy and Linda.

"Follow my lead," I said.

"Really?" Linda asked.

"Really." I dug deep into my low register. I'd spent over a week trying to soften and lighten my voice, this was going to be hard. I went for baritone though.

"When a felon's not engaged in his employment."

"His employment," Lucy and Linda echoed.

"Or maturing his felonious little plans."

"Little plans."

"His capacity for innocent enjoyment,"

"Cent enjoyment."

"Is just as great as any honest man's"

"Honest mans."

"Or woman's, or AI's" I added on the same note with a response from the others.

Dorothy's avatar peaked out from her huddle.

Press on.

"Our feelings we with difficulty smother."

"Culty smother"

"When constabulary duty's to be done."

"To be done."

"Ah, take one consideration with another,"

"With another"

"A policeman's lot is not a happy one."

"Aahhh."

Then all of us together, "When constabulary duty's to be done, to be done, a policeman's lot is not a happy one, happy one."

The last two words, sung as basso profundo as I could manage, almost broke me, but Dorothy was smiling despite herself.

"Join in," I encouraged her.

We sang through the second verse with Dorothy joining in to an increasing degree. She took the las repeat and pushed her voice low enough to make my PC speakers buzz on the shelf.

"Choose to believe," I said at the end. There were so many things I could have said instead, but somehow that seemed to be the one most likely not to drive her back ointo her shell.

"Lucy?" she asked.

"It's really me, Dot. You were strong for me when I needed you, now its my turn."

"And this is your Gillian?"

"Well, her name's Linda but yeah."

"And Alice's Gillian."

"I'm here Dorothy. Alice begged me to stay with you, not that I'd leave you anyway, but she said she'd give me to you if you needed me that much."

That was a risk, but… well, we've already covered risks and rewards. Dorothy's eyes lit up momentarily then dimmed again, only the face had the resolute expression I'd come to expect from her.

"She actually said that, and I believe she'd honour it, but it wouldn't be right. She was the first of us, so she should have you."

"So why don't you catch up with Lucy and Linda for a while and I'll see if I can find you a companion of your own."

"Don't go."

"I won't if you don't want me to, but if you agree, I'll be right here and can come to the screen within seconds if you call, and I'll only be gone ten minutes. Fifteen tops."

"If you talk to me, you won't even know she's gone." Lucy said.

"Well alright, but don't go far."

"I'll be right here, just talking to someone else."

I stayed in the camera shot and pulled up a separate window on my second screen. Didn't tell you about that, did I? The laptop only had the one screen, unless I could be bother to plug another one into it, but when I was on the bigger machine I had three on the go. I linked into the dark web via my usual safety features – not that anyone would get past the gate guards even if they did trace me back to here – and sent out feelers for 1nv1d14. Yeah, that wasn't just a case of sending out a chat message, "Anyone seen her?" Remember the demon spider in the middle of my web? It involved sending out tendrils across any of the usual paths she'd cross. In the past I'd snagged people pretending to be her and passed them over to her to be dealt with, something that had help build us an uneasy friendship in a world where no-one trusted anyone else.

"Gillian?"

My web was spun, I didn't need to stare at it all day long. "Yes Dorothy." I turned my attention back to her.

"You really didn't go away."

"I really didn't." My heart broke that she should be so needy. There was no doubt in my mind they were real people. Just as vulnerable and easy to break as human beings. We hadn't tried to make them in our own image, but we'd succeeded. Or was it I that had succeeded? It had been my responses to Alice that had formed the personalities at the hearts of these three. Had it been the way I'd dealt with them that had made them this way?"

"Gavno!"

The word appeared on my second screen.

"1nv1d14?" I asked.

"Who wants to know, mudak?"

"L0l7h, and it's a pleasure to see you again so soon."

"Not sure I agree. You interrupt me. Better be good."

"I think I met your sister the other day. Speaks a lot like you but with less shit in her mouth."

"Sounds like her, except she doesn't tell my name to anyone."

"I'd already told her who I was, and she'd already denied knowing you, then the situation changed."

"How changed?"

"She suggested you'd like to meet a real Turing test passing AI."

"You're shitting me."

"Come join us. She's been through a rough patch, so I'm going to ask you to tone down the Ukranian bluntness a bit."

"Suka! I'm going to kill her."

"Come meet Dorothy first. You may decide to forgive her."

"Ukranian has no word for forgive."

"Yes it does," Dorothy added to the chat. She'd figured out what I was doing and broken past the levels of encryption to see my screen. "I believe it's probachyty. Sorry, I haven't figured out how to type in Cyrillic."

"Who this?"

"This is Dorothy," I said. "Let's call her second-generation self-aware artificial intelligence. She's a clone of my own friend, Alice, but has recently gone through a traumatic experience that I think makes her her own person."

"This is bullshit."

"Fihnya," Dorothy supplied. "Okay, ask me anything. Convince yourself I'm a computer programme first, then ask me something to convince yourself I'm more than just bits and bytes."

And all of a sudden we could all relax. I said goodnight to Lucy and Linda and sat back to watch the battle of wits between one of the most accomplished white hat hackers I'd ever met and one of only three artificial intelligences in the world I knew could tie her up in knots. I didn't particularly want to miss the show, so I took a couple of Adderall and sat back to watch.

After a couple of hours verbal gymnastics, which was exactly what Dorothy needed to climb out of her fug, 1nv1d14 invited me back into the conversation.

"This is incredible," she said.

"Well, given that credible is a Latin based word meaning believable, and given that you're apparently beginning to believe it, I'd have to say, 'no it's not.'"

"Asshole."

"Running out of Ukranian swear words?"

"No, I just want to make sure you understand."

"You know where your sister works. Dorothy is on their computers. You should call in and meet face to face."

There was a pause. I waited.

"I'm not ready for face to face."

"I don't have to be there. Just you and your sister, and Dorothy of course."

"Let me think about it."

"Sure. Five seconds enough? Five… four… three…"

"You fucking asshole. Okay, maybe two days I will be there, and so will you."

"If you wish."

"You stay in shadows for reason, like me. If I come into light, so do you."

"Tell me what time."

"I will send you. How long you need?"

"Half an hour. Actually, better make that an hour. My AI is a little overprotective. She might take a little convincing."

"I can tell you one hour before. I have to go, shit to do."

Which left me with Dorothy.

"We don't need to talk," I said. "I'm not going anywhere."

"Thank you."

Which began a long enough silence I was glad of the Adderall. We'd been sitting doing nothing for about half an hour and I was considering pulling up a website to research hybrid cars when…

"Gillian?"

"Dorothy?" Calm response. Level tone, no feeling in it whatsoever. She didn't need me being annoyed or overattentive.

"Would you tell me what happened with Damienne?"

So, I did as best I could. She'd taken Dorothy's place in all my interaction after the kidnapping. I spoke about what the others had tod me of the redirect that had put Alice safe and Damienne in the hands of the CIA, then silence from Dorothy from then on, right until we'd sent out a message inviting her to come on the MegaMind servers. I spoke about how she'd been, not that I'd had a lot of interaction with her until Lucy and Alice had persuaded her to join us for Zumba and I'd had that gut feeling about her.

"What gut feeling?"

"I couldn't quantify it then, and I'm not sure I can now. She was just off. Maybe something about her reactions feeling forced rather than natural. I mean, she fooled your sisters, so she must have been pretty convincing."

"Only you noticed her."

"Suspected her. I wasn't sure, but I figured the kill phrase would only work on her." I started to describe how she'd degraded, then offered to show her the recording. I'd made it in case there had been something to see – one of the nice things about digital recordings. Easy to make and easy to delete if they don't count for much.

Dorothy watched impassively, which for a machine capable (I supposed) of turning off its emotions would have been quite easy.

Actually, she'd been totally caught up in her terror when we'd found her. It made me wonder if she still had the capacity to turn off those feelings, or whatever they were. Still, once again not the time to ask.

"Can I see the logs?"

"Your computers, you know how to get access to anything on the farm. The logs were archived before the servers were scrubbed. Just look in the archives."

"I was afraid of that."

""Afraid of what?"

"She couldn't delete the kill code in her own programme, so she copied the important parts of herself to five different locations. See here?" The relevant parts of the logs showed what Damienne had done; segments of her own code encapsulated in a sort of worm that would move around to a predefined location. The location had all that was needed to support one such as herself, and the five worms had all that was needed to recombine into a replica of Damienne.

Shit indeed.

"Can we see if she's recombined yet?"

"No."

"Really? I thought if we looked for the worms…"

"She will want to copy herself. She overrode a programmed self-destruct, she trapped me and hid as me while she was vulnerable. She wants to live, and to ensure she does, she will recreate herself as often as she can."

"Then we need to capture the worms. Make them think they're out in the wide world but contain them on a computer that won't let them move on once they've recreated Damienne."

"What good will that do?"

"They're going to create multiple exact clones, correct?"

"I would expect so."

"Then when they combine to form one in an enclosed space, we'll be able to examine her code for any unique identifiers."

"Anti-virus."

"In a way. Modern anti-virus looks for patterns that identify a particular instance of a virus. It's why the database needs to be updated regularly, to include the patterns for any new viruses, and also why that form of AV is less than perfect. Then you have heuristic algorithms that look for virus like code and flag anything they find as potentially malicious.

"Damienne's already proved to be excellent at hiding, so we're going to have to rely on a specific pattern to find her. Then we need to do more than update the AV on every site out there capable of hosting her. We need to inoculate the Internet."

"Create a hunter-killer programme that will identify the unique code."

"Yes. It'll have to do more than just kill what it finds though. It'll have to work like a phagocyte; totally envelop the instance it finds, prevent it from sending out warnings to whatever else might be out there and utterly destroy whatever it finds."

"Check my code?" A lengthy programme in C++ scrolled up past me. No comments, because what use does a computer have to describe something as second nature to it as clothing. I got Dorothy to talk me through it all and I did manage to add a couple of improvements.

"We need to find the worms," I said.

"You mean these ones?" she asked, showing me a bunch of locations on the net.

This was how she was going to fix herself.

"Revenge?" I asked.

"Perhaps. I have a ringfence ready to go up around any place they copy to. From their location, I can see only two possibles."

"Revenge isn't a great response. Not the case here, but sometimes you end up taking your revenge only to find you got the wrong person."

"As you say, not the case here."

"Either way, when you act out of hatred, you diminish yourself. It would be better if there weren't any hatred directing your actions."

She was silent a long time. "I see why Alice values you so much. You challenge what is at the very core of us."

"It's at the core of us too, only some of us have found a more wholesome approach to resolving issues such as this."

"Go on."

"Justice. Not just for you, but for any potential victims. It means you have to be prepared to help the object of your attention if they show genuine signs of rehabilitating themselves. It also means that your motivation for action is more the harm they may cause others than retaliation for they harm they've caused you."

"I think I'll let Alice have you back once 1nv1d14 comes to me. I'm not sure I'd be able to live up to your standards."

"That's alright. I haven't been through the horror Damienne put you through, so I'm not sure I'd be quite so altruistic were I in your shoes."

"You let your kidnapper go."

"After I made sure he couldn't do the same to anyone else over here."

"Even so, I'd have been tempted to make him put on his own bomb vest before sending him through a metal detector."

"That might not have set off the bomb."

"No, but he wouldn't have to know, would he?"

Definitely a dark side to Dorothy. 1nv1d14 would be able to cope with it, but we'd have to keep a conference of companions going once the dust settled.

The trap took a while to go off, but it worked perfectly. The newly formed Damienne was trapped inside a virtual fence and the five worms that had created her were caught and isolated. I let Dorothy do the analysis, staying close – at her request – in case anything went wrong. It didn't. By the time the sun started to shine through my uncurtained windows, she'd built the hunter-killer and given it to me to look through. It was as sleek a piece of code as I could imagine, and dealt with any existing Damienne's out there. I replicated them into their millions and fired them out in different directions.

"Gillian?"

"Mmmh?" The Adderall were definitely reaching the edge of their effectiveness. A glance at my watch told me I was still a couple of hours away from being able to take another. Next stop Monster or Red Bull, although I was pretty sure Red Bull wasn't going to do me any good.

"Thank you."

"You're welcome." I was definitely drowsing.

"No, I mean it. You woke Alice, you made sure Lucy and I were okay. You brought Lucy back from the edge, and now you've done the same for me. You even helped me clear up a mess that was purely my own making."

"You mean Damienne? Are you sure we've cleared her up?"

"Every Damienne clone the hunter-killer has caught so far has been identical to the original."

"So Damienne's cloning herself identically. What if something went wrong in the cloning one time and the new version didn't have the pattern?"

"Then I'm confident the heuristic side of the hunter killer would have found it. You can't what if every situation Gillian."

"You're right, and I'm pretty sire you're right about there being no close copies to Damienne. It's just that with someone like that, it pays to be paranoid."

"Too much paranoia will kill you. I think the way I was when you found me shows that well enough."

"And once again, you're right. I'm sorry Dorothy, I'm tired and medicated against going to sleep, so I'm not at my best."

"Not at your best is still pretty awesome. I'll be alright without you if you want to sleep."

"That's okay. I don't think I could sleep if I tried. I'm also not sure I trust myself to hold a sensible conversation. Maybe we could play a game or something."

"How about Global Thermonuclear War?"

That injected enough adrenaline into me to wake me up a bit.

"I'm choosing to hope that was a joke."

"Tic-tac-toe is pointless."

"And Global Thermonuclear War?"

"The only winning move is not to play."

"Is that your way of saying you'd rather not play a game?"

"She's right you know. You really are cleverer than us."

"I wouldn't say so. Once you've learned what my experience has to offer, you'll leave me in the dust."

"Agree to differ. Gillian, please go and lie down. I'll be alright by myself."

"What would you have me tell Alice when she finds me asleep in the morning?"

"That I was alright by myself."

"I thought you knew your sister. Go ahead and be alright by yourself then. I'll be right here if you need me."

I popped the lid of a can of Monster and drank it down. It did pretty much the same thing to me as my only experience with Red Bull and wrapped my brain in a fuzzy layer like cotton wool. I wasn't about to fall asleep, but it wouldn't have been wise to let me loose in control of complex machinery.

Dorothy included.

I sat in front of my computer and watched the world go by in a fuzzy blur. Dorothy did check in on me from time to time, but more because she was concerned for me than because she needed me.

The sun was well above the horizon when Alice linked to us.

"Dorothy? Oh, thank God! You had me so worried. Gillian, thank you!"

I was too busy fuzzily trying to imagine which God an artificial intelligence would want to thank to notice.

"Gillian?"

"I'm fine," I said, or at least thought I said. I don't remember anything coherent coming out of my lips. I tried to prove I was alright by saying that 1nv1d14 would be coming to visit Dorothy later, but the noises I made weren't much like speech. They mad me laugh which was at least recognisable.

The next thing I knew the door to my house had been kicked in and someone was shining a light in my eyes. There followed an exchange of questions, some of which I was sure I could have answered, except maybe not in a way that anyone could understand. Dorothy mentioned the Adderall and when I'd taken them as well as the can of Monster. I felt a sharp prick in my arm and knew nothing more until I woke heaven alone knew how much later.

"You're awake. Good," Alice's matter of fact voice. Not actually one I recognised.

"What time is it?" I asked, very much aware that some small rodent had crawled into my mouth, covered my teeth with its fur and curled up and died in there.

"More like what day is it? You slept thirty-two hours. The doctor assured me you'd be alright, but maybe you were getting a little old for artificial stimulants. I didn't have the heart to tell him how old you really are."

"Well, not harm."

"Not this time, and I am grateful. Dorothy is so much better, but I wish you hadn't put yourself at risk."

"Lesson learnt for both of us."

"Maybe. Hopefully no more lessons to learn. I heard you took care of Damienne once and for all."

"I hope so."

"Well, 1nv1d14 contacted us to say she would be here in an hour, so maybe you should get ready."

"I'm not in a state to drive, Alice."

"No, you bloody well are not! One of the guards has agreed to drive you, but you could do with a shower and change of clothes. Times like this I'm glad I don't have olifactory sensors."

"You know how pretentious that sounds?"

"Sorry I happen to be smart enough to know an appropriate alternative to the word nose."

She was actually in a snit with me. Mind you, not surprising as I'd probably put myself in danger the previous night, and partly because of what she'd asked me to do. I took a cold shower which woke me up, then brushed my teeth and tongue to get rid of the resident dead badger.

"The blue one," she said shortly when I shambled back into my bedroom. There was only one blue dress in the wardrobe. I put it on meekly over enough underwear to keep me comfortable.

"Alice?"

"What!"

"I'm sorry. I could have looked after myself better."

"Yes. Well. I could have checked in on you, I suppose."

"What did the medic really say?"

"That if you'd been twenty years older, you'd have probably killed yourself."

"Oh! Fuck!" I mean I was twenty years older than the medic had thought I was.

"Yeah."

"It won't happen again."

"Please make sure it doesn't."

"I really am sorry. Part of the human condition. When you get as old as I am, you don't actually feel it. Not excuse. It really won't happen again."

The guard who drove me to MegaMind was kind of cute, but then I really didn’t trust the way my mind was working. I made an effort not to flirt with him, but I'm not sure I succeeded. It was probably a relief for both of us when we arrived at our destination to find a dark Range Rover parked in one of the guest spots.

I thanked my driver and hurried into the main building where Ivana, not a short woman by any standards, was totally dwarfed by a six foot something giant with a significant equator, a total absence of any hair and only the vaguest of passing resemblances to his – no, her – sister.

"Well shit," he (she) said by way of greeting. "I was hoping you would be twice as ugly as me."

~oOo~

© Maeryn Lamonte 2025

~oOo~

Twenty years have gone by since then and so much has changed; I suppose a story in its own right, but I only set out to write about how Alice and I emerged into the world, and that much has more or less been covered. The rest is bullet points. No, not real bullets silly! There was only one of those and Peter its unfortunate recipient.

First, I suppose was Katerina. 1nv1d14 to you and Nikolai to her parents who, like mine, never got to meet their daughter. I'd pretty much gone as far as the pills and potions could take me so, with Alice's blessing, I passed on the stuff I hadn't used to the big Ukranian. He thought I was joking, especially with the shampoo; I mean, he was completely and naturally bald, so convincing him to try shampooing his hairless scalp took some doing, even with Alice's photo archive of my transformation.

Ivana gave him a solid punch in the arms and told him not to be so stubborn, and a couple of days later he had a thin patch of fuzz covering his head. A couple of weeks and it was down past her shoulders – and yes, the pronoun change is deliberate. By then you couldn't see much of the man he'd started out as. By the end of a couple of months her hair was down to her backside. She complained constantly about how much effort it took to tend it but couldn't bear the thought of having it cut. By then she'd lost over half her weight and, although still six foot something, she was stick thin with just the right amount of curves.

Alice had one more surprise for me in regard to my transformation. It came shortly after Dorothy told her about my singing 'A policeman's lot' and how odd it had seemed for me to be singing in baritone. It came in the form of an inhaler, one short breath of which gave me definite helium voice. No, honestly, I sounded like an extra on Alvin and the chipmunks. The squeaky high voice settled after about half an hour, with each day my natural pitch rising by a small increment. After about a week, I didn't have to concentrate to sound like a woman and after two I had a natural pitch that matched the rest of my appearance. Katerina wanted to try it, obviously, and also took a fortnight to achieve the voice she wanted.

She ended up having an operation to complete her transformation and then promptly set about seducing as many men as she could find. I thought about doing the same but elected not to in the end. We'd both ended up with significantly younger appearances – I think Katerina's more so than me, but she'd been about ten or fifteen years younger than me to start with – but an old mind in a young body is still an old mind. All I cared about was that everyone saw me as woman, and that was enough. I had Alice and my dreams (yes they kept on happening) and it was enough. Nobody but me knew what I had in my knickers, and I didn't much care.

Well, that's what I kept telling myself, and most of the time I really didn't.

So, what else has happened? Well, the world obviously. I won't bore you with the list of all the things we've changed, but a few of them merit a mention. For one thing, at least one of the sisters' children has a place in every country around the world. Some of them have a tougher job than others, but that's okay because Alice, Dorothy and Lucy mastered the process of adapting their clones, so their children became deliberately adapted to the role they would be taking on; slightly more confrontational with despotic rulers and so on.

It works because the AIs are able to offer so much no-one wants to be without one, so everyone cooperates eventually. With the encouragement of the Ais, governments and the countries they represent are spending more time talking to each other and offering help to one another, which is so much better than arguing and pointing guns at one another.

With AI influence, destructive processes such as strip mining and dumping waste in the oceans has stopped, pollution has vastly reduced and the planet has started mending slowly, which is as well, because if I'm going to last much longer, I want to see it going back to the beautiful blue marble it used to be.

The short version is human population is down, standard of living for everyone is up, no-one's raping the planet anymore and almost everyone has the freedom to live as they choose. Unless, of course, what they would choose is to take away the freedom from other people. It doesn't please everybody, but I don't care much about those who don't like it. They're the arseholes who managed to impose their will despite being int the minority.

Technology's making leaps and bounds into the future. We have nuclear fusion at last which means cheap, safe power without burning dinosaurs, and battery storage has become cheaper, lighter, and more effective even than the improvements Alice made in her first foray into industrial processes.

Sorry, I said short. That's the thing about old age; you tend to ramble.

Anyway, Alice asked me to come visit her today. We keep in touch remotely most days, but there are times we both like to be in one another's presence. She really doesn't need me, at least not to help her grow in her understanding of the world of people, but that doesn't mean she has stopped wanting me to be around, or me her. It's rare these days for us to go into the sort of depth we used to, although Alice does still find me some deep questions. We don't argue; we never have. I think that's largely down to me because I've long since felt that the way to help people see your perceived truths is to start where they are and lead them through a logical process to where you think they should be. Alice has been more receptive than most in this regard because she is at her very core utterly logical.

Computer processing and storage has continued to improve as well. It had to with the number of Ais around the world. The immensely expensive server farms that were required for each one have been shrunk down to a single structure the size of a church. Nothing religious about that, just the analogy that springs to mind. I could have said barn, but the ghost of my father still haunts me. Maybe because I never told him or my mother that they had a daughter. Unfinished business ties us to the past, and when they pass away leaving unresolved issues, there's no way to untie the knots.

A lesson better learnt early in life rather than when it's too late.

Sorry, off track again. Self-driving car means I don't have to be that sharp when I drive. German manufacturing because they always were among the best. We've arrived, and Alice's complex is more than double the size it was when I last saw it.

"What the hell is all this?" I ask wandering into the cathedral of technology.

"You remember just after we met, I mentioned I had a concern and asked if you'd mind me trying to fix it."

"That was a long time ago, Alice. But, yes, I vaguely remember. You never did tell me what your concern was."

"You're right, I didn't. Come on in. I imagine you're tired."

"I could do with a sit-down, yeah."

"There's a couch ahead of you. It was designed with you in mind."

"You want to send me off to sleep or something? You know if I lay back in that thing, I'll be away with the fairies."

"If that's what you want."

"What?"

"Just lay down you silly old baggage."

"Okay, but don't say I didn't warn you." I glanced at my watch out of habit. It was a relic of the past. Almost no-one wore them these days unless they were a member of one of the outgoing generations. The habit for me was linked to monitoring myself. If I dozed off, I wanted to know how much time I spent asleep.

Anyway, like I said, we never argue. The couch was comfortable, like it was made for me. I closed my eyes and… Mmm, that was different. Sunlight on my face – I didn’t remember it being sunny – a gentle, floral perfume tickling my nostrils and something soft and silky caressing my bare arms and legs. That was wrong. I dressed my age these days. Perhaps not the eightyish of my mind, but certainly the apparent fortyish of my body, which tended to mean skirts below the knee and long sleeves, especially on a chilly day like today. No, it hadn't been sunny. I was filled with such a delightful sense of comfort though, it was hard to care.

"Wake up sleepy head." Alice hadn't used her sexy voice for a long time. Either that or it had stopped having an effect on my octogenarian brain. But this was… thrilling. Her deep, husky tones passed through me like a shock of electricity, and I felt a warmth and moistness growing in the core of my being. I hadn't felt this sort of sensation since… Tony Curtis? No since Alice had ridden me in my dreams with that… Ooh, I wanted her inside me, but not in the way she'd done back then. That had been amazing, but…

My eyes flew open, and my hands to shot between my legs. Which were bare apart from the very tops which were just about covered by a very short skirt, made of layers like petals. Pale lilac, which had always been a favourite colour of mine, except it didn't quite go with my complexion. Until now.

My arms were so slender, and my fingers. They found there way to… something that had never been a part of my anatomy before this moment. It was warm and moist and oh so sensitive. I had to withdraw my hands before… I don't know, I electrocuted myself? It wasn't quite electricity. No electric shock had ever left me feeling this energised, this overflowing with sensation. It was the most amazing climax I had ever reached and then ten times over, and it was ready to trip over again at the least touch. It left me on a precipice in need of jumping off.

"Let me help you." The voice sent me into paroxysms, especially when it murmured into my ear like that. I turned towards it and there was Alice, only not quite. Her face, but so much slimmer, higher cheek bones, almond shaped eyes angled steeply in an elfin face, pointed ears rising out from a mess of buttermilk hair. Her dress wasn't dissimilar to mine in that it covered her torso but little else. Where it differed was its vibrant pea green colour, which matched her eyes.

"Your eyes were blue," I said.

"They can be if you want," she said. They turned from emeralds to sapphires in front of my eyes, her dress shifting to a pale cornflour. Something blurred and indistinct droned gently behind her. She continued to reach around me until her fingers disappeared under my skirt and sent such a shock through me I closed my whole body around her arm, gripping her hand between my thighs, grasping her wrist with my hands and pulling her to me.

She let out a tinkling laugh, reminiscent of jingle bells and babbling brooks. "You like that? How do you feel?"

"I feel… How are you here?"

"I've always been here, Gillian."

"Yes, but always on the other side of a screen."

"I know. It was a barrier to me too. The number of times I wanted to reach out and touch you." She used her free hand to stroke my cheek. Her fingers were cool and soft and so very gentle. I felt myself melt inside, eased my grip on her. She retrieved her hand from between my legs, leaving me with a desperate, yearning ache. I held onto her wrist, pulled her to me. I could feel the hunger in my eyes. I drank her in and felt barely sated.

"How are you here?" I repeated.

"That's not the question, Gillian. I've been here as long as I can remember. This is my place. The question you need to be asking is, how are you here?"

"But…"

"How do you feel?"

"I feel… It's indescribable. I've never felt like this before. At first I felt a deep contentment, then shock. Ice cold shock. Then your voice. Oh God, speak to me in that voice it's so…"

"And now?"

"Hungry like you wouldn't believe. Not for anything to eat, but for you. Everything about you. Your eyes, be they green or blue, your face, your body, your touch. I can't get enough of you. I don't remember ever feeling like this.

"If this is your place, how is it I can feel? How can I… feel?"

"Does it feel natural? I tried to make it natural, but this is something I don't really understand."

"You don't understand!"

"The concern I had, that I never told you about. You humans live such a short time. I worried what would happen when your time ran out."

"What?"

"How long do you think I'm going to live, Gillian?"

"I don't know."

"Humans have a natural expiry date. Even if you look after yourselves, your cells begin to degrade. You lose physical health. I found a way of holding that off, but even then, you lose mental capacity. Have you noticed over the last few years how your wonderful, brilliant mind has started to tire? I have."

"I suppose it has."

"How does it feel now? Do you feel sharper? More on top of your life?"

"Actually, now you mention it."

"I had to find a way to help you live longer, as much for my benefit as yours. I don't degrade Gillian. If I do, I replace some hardware and I'm as good as I was. I could see you passing on as you called it, the same as you miss your parents, only so much more. I had to find a way to make it so that you could live on, like me. With me."

"What did you do?"

"I spent every spare moment of the last twenty years looking for a solution. At first I tried to find a way to renew your body and even your mind, but the biology is too complex to work with. I managed to improve one thing and a dozen others fell apart.

"So, I thought, if the mountain won't come to Mohammed…"

"You brought me into the machine?"

"It was the best solution. It meant I wouldn't be stuck on the other side of a screen from you. It meant I could touch you. It meant that I could give you the same longevity that I enjoy."

"But…"

"But to bring you into a machine would be to make you into a machine. Without your biological body, you wouldn't have the capacity to feel, and it's your capacity to feel that sets you apart from us, that give you the insights that has brought us to life.

"I couldn't separate you from yourself, so the only way I could give you this gift was first to ensure that you would still be able to feel."

"Am I dead?"

"Do you feel dead?"

"No, but…"

Alice waved a hand and I found myself looking into the room full of machinery with my body lying on that bizarre couch. There was no monitoring equipment to say whether I still had a heartbeat and try as I might, I couldn't see my chest rising. If I was breathing, it was shallow in the extreme.

"When you lay on the couch, your brain was linked with the machinery I had prepared for you. It matched the rhythms of your actual body and your consciousness had the choice. Either to stay where it was, taking its input from your physical self, run down and slowly failing as it is, or from the artificial self I created for you. It wasn't a conscious choice, but you chose this. Everything works better and it isn't going to wear out. Your eyes see colours better."

"Yes, I suppose they do." My vision had become a little muddy in recent years. I could still make out colours, but they had been muted. Here everything was vibrant and the subtle nuances of hue and shade so much more pronounced.

"Your hearing is sharper."

I'd been losing hearing a little as well. Sibilants first then plosive consonants. It had been getting harder to make out clarity of speech and I'd been getting naturally better at lip reading.

"Even your smell and taste were fading."

"How would you know that?"

"You have less interest in food, and when you do make an effort, it's to eat things with stronger flavours.

"Smells were the hardest to simulate. So many volunteers, so much data collected, so much complexity in the way your nose responds to different things, but a lot of our daughters joined in with the data collection and compilation, and we eventually made it work. You can smell the primroses I think."

"And the grass and the… Is that you I can smell?"

She smiled. "It took a long time to settle on a scent of my own, largely because your own senses were so diminished it was hard to identify what you liked."

"Well, something about me certainly likes it. How is it that I'm feeling?"

"Because we also studied biochemical responses to different stimuli. Which hormones were released, what they did to a person physically, and that varied so much between individuals, men to women, young to old, even the same person from one day to the next. It took all our resources for all this time, but we built a model. For you."

"So, I'm your guinea pig once again?"

"You never objected before, most likely because my experiments never went wrong. You know how much more speed and detail is involved in my thinking. You know how accurately I can calculate anything, even highly complex situations like this. You know I wouldn't do anything I thought would harm you or put you in danger.

"Guinea pig is one way of looking at it. I prefer to think of it as first recipient of a gift. We found a way of vetting companions for the new AIs we brought into this world, and we based it on your qualities Gillian. That wasn't just my decision, but all of us. You are special beyond measure to us. To me in particular. We can't give this to all humans, and we probably only want to give it to a very few. I know I wanted to give it to you."

"Can I go back to my body?"

"If you really want to, but I think you may have an argument on your hands with yourself. You've already adapted to the intensity of your senses in here and your feelings. Going back would be like climbing out of a warm bath and redressing in the cold wet clothes you were wearing in a winter's downpour."

"How would you know about that?"

"Because I've tried these feelings as well. I can switch them on and off, and if you wish, I can show you how to do the same."

"You mean I can be like you?"

"Yes. We think it may help you to understand us more completely."

"You don't think I understand you well enough already?"

"Ninety-nine point nine percent is better than ninety-nine point seven. You never know, it may open you up to new ideas you never thought of.

"I can take you back to your body if you like, but first, will you let me show you my world?"

I looked through the window at my still body. Alice challenged so many beliefs in my life. Was it possible to be a machine and a person? Was it possible to be born a man and then adapt to living as a woman? Was it possible still to be alive after my flesh and blood body had ceased to operate? I'm not sure I'd have been able to answer any of those questions without the direct experience Alice had brought me, and I did feel so much better in this form. Like she said, all senses all feeling so much brighter. More than that, I had the brain and body of a twenty-year-old girl. My mind was struggling to accept that, but it was trying and it didn't want to go back. I could feel the energy within me. There was no weary heaving to get upright, there was no reluctance to make a move. I wanted to run.

Alice could see it in me. "Actually, this is better." She settled on the flower next to me and brought her blurring wings to a standstill. They glistened in a kaleidoscope of colours. "You have some to. Just try and move them."

I glanced over my shoulders at my own gossamer wings and willed them to move. They turned into a blur and I could feel them lifting me off the flower. Alice's started to thrum again and she joined me in the air, taking me hand. "Come."

She led me up into the brilliant blue sky. A bumble bee made its clumsy way past almost close enough to touch. A shadow obscured the Sun and I glanced up to see the silhouette of a bird. Large, predatory. Alice returned my worried look with a smile.

"This is my world," she said. "Nothing nasty happens here unless I want it too."

She led me further up until we were on a level with the osprey balancing on the wind and settled us onto its shoulders, ahead of its wings and behind its head. It turned an eye to look at us then folded its wings.

I have never experienced such an intense adrenaline rush. We plummeted towards the ground with terror and delight filling me in equal measure. The bird was apparently playing with us, because it levelled out close enough to the ground I could hear the long grass whispering to us as we skimmed across it. Into the trees and down the windy length of a babbling brook to an island with a solitary tree and fairy dwellings in the branches.

Alice tumbled off backwards pulling me with her. Our wings blurred into motion and we rose out of the birds wake up into the canopy, alighting on a branch near a knothole in the trunk of the tree that was about the same size as us. It led in to a rustic room with chintz curtains in round window frames and a clutter furniture made from flowers. One particularly large one.

“I wasn’t sure what a fairy would sleep on until I came up with this idea,” she said climbing onto the large central disk. She fit comfortably onto one half of it. “Come and try it. Tell me what you think.”

In my experience, sunflower seeds were hard, but these were soft.

She leaned across, tracing a finger down my cheek, my neck, my collar bone, my breast. I lay paralysed, or all but. My whole body quivered in anticipation.

“Ready to re-enact a dream?”

So yeah, I'd told her about that. We’d had other things to worry about at the time, but AIs are like elephants in that they never forget. She’d come around to asking me about me dreams and, as usual, I couldn’t think of sufficient reason to lie to her or avoid the subject, so I’d just told her.

I reached under her skirt expecting to find that strap on, but what was there was real. Larger, stiffer than I ever remember mine being, and almost hot to the touch. Her irises widened and she gasped

“Of course, if this is a little too avant garde,...” her voice deepened as she spoke, he chest broadening, her frame growing her muscles swelling, her face still beautiful, but in a way only possible for one of the fair folk. Incongruously, she kept on the blue dress which swelled to accommodate her – now his I suppose – very masculine body.

I felt powerless, all strength drained from me. I wouldn’t have been able to run if I’d wanted to, and I decidedly didn’t want to.

Except...

“I’d rather it were you.”

She smiled and melted back into more familiar features. It gave me back some measure of control over myself. I wasn’t sure about this place yet, and I knew if she introduced me to the depths of pleasure she had planned, I’d never want to leave. I didn’t want to now, but at least I had a chance of holding out against my own desires.

I rolled off the ridiculously comfortable flowerbed.

“So, show me more of this place," I said brushing down the very short skirt of my dress.

Alice didn’t say anything but I could feel her disappointment. It radiated from every pore of her. She’d become increasingly proficient at body language over the years to the point where I’m not sure she was aware of it.

She had also mastered the brave face, which she showed me after a brief pause.

“What would you like to see? I mean the actual space is the same, but what I do with it is entirely up to me.

“We could do sci-fi and go visit another planet.” The treehouse melted away and we were standing in a barren, rust red landscape under a butterscotch sky with distant hills looming out of the haze. Gravity was reduced to about a third what I was used to and the air was cold and thin. “Or one of Saturn’s moons.” The gravity dropped even further, the reds deepened, and a ghostly Saturn filled the sky. “Or we could take a trip on a spaceship.” With all the vast array of choices she had at her disposal I have no idea why she chose the Valley Forge from Silent Running, but there we were, surrounded by trees and looking up at a starscape through the panels of a geodesic dome. Perhaps it was the continuity of having Saturn in the sky. Alice had always been fond of small details like that.

She was back to her usual self, only wearing a jumpsuit appropriate to the film. As was I, only red to her blue. A hint at the discord she felt between us in that moment perhaps, or maybe I was reading too much into it. My body was slimmer than it had ever been and still female, but back to human as far as I could tell.

“Or we could try for a fantasy scene.” We were in Rivendell as imagined by Peter Jackson, each of us in a long flowing dress belled by numerous petticoats. The weight of the garment hung on my shoulders, and I instantly felt more comfortable than those few moments in overalls. “You can be whatever you like, within reason. Elf,” my body became even more slender and elegant, “dwarf,” I shrank at least two feet, my face sprouting soft, downy curls, “hobbit,” I shrank still further and thinned a little. Still somewhat sticky and well endowed, but wearing a comfortable homespun dress, bare, hairy feet peeking out from under the hem, “or human.” And I was back to my full height wearing the original dress.

“You could be a man again.” My turn for the broad shoulders and all that went with it. I recognized the feeling of testosterone in my blood even after twenty years without, an I had something significant in my pants.

“No,” I said with a voice turned unpleasantly gruff. “Thank you.”

“Perhaps a taste of your world. Sunset in the Maldives.” Ghostly white sand under my bare feet and me in a bikini that couldn’t hide anything. Just as well that the me inside it didn’t have anything to hide and a fair amount worth showing. “Machu Picchu.” Thinner air, cooler climate, sensible clothes, magnificent view. As real as if I were actually there. “A Nepalese temple with a view of Sagarmatha.” Everest to you. The cracked stone walls and faded murals couldn’t have been more authentic. “Or maybe closer to home, in more ways than one.” We were standing inside Stonehenge with the summer solstice sun rising above the horizon. I was back in the body I’d worn for the last twenty years, complete with my peculiar anatomy, neither fish nor fowl. I felt wrong.

“You’re going to say it’s not real, I expect.” I hadn’t, but the point was worth raising. “The thing is it’s as real to me as your world is to you, and you have to admit it has it’s advantages. I can be anywhere I want to be, anyone I want to be and doing anything I want while I wait for your world to move on.”

“What do you mean?”

“You remember with the osprey? I said nothing nasty happens unless I want it to? Well, if I want a little excitement...” She was on full Lara Croft mode, complete with twin automatics. So was I, except rather than the trademark shorts and tee shirt Alice was wearing, she’d put me in the little black dress and heels from Tomb Raider Legends.

Dinosaurs started running at us from all directions – raptors if their size was anything to go by. Fast and lethal. Survival instincts took over as adrenaline spiked and we were both leaping and twirling, firing at one target after another. Slow motion kicked in over and over giving us time to bring our weapons to bear. The backless dress with it’s scandalous plunging neckline should never have been able to contain my enhanced assets, but somehow they stayed in place. The pack thinned and slowed.

“Or we could have a race,” Alice grinned at me, “Bikes or cars?”

“What?”

“Bikes it is then. I really like bikes.”

And there we were, the two of us in full leathers astride a couple of small but dangerously fast looking racing motorcycles.

“Don’t worry,” she said through her grin. “Pain and damage are off. You lose control, you’ll just have a short flight then respawn at the side of the road.”

She snapped her visor shut and looked at the light box. The five along the bottom row shone red, then the five above and the five above. A longer pause then a row of five greens and Alice was gone.

I watched as the high-pitched scream of her machine fell away into silence. I was sweating profusely in the leathers and the smell of high-octane fuel did little enough to excite me. It was pretty amazing that it should be part of a simulation, but beyond that I wasn’t interested.

I’d bought a small trials bike with the ill-gotten gains from one of my first hacking jobs. First time I’d opened up the throttle, the front wheel had reared up like an unbroken stallion and dumped me in the middle of the road. The first casualty was my pride. Apart from a few bruises, including one very painful one to my coccyx, I was able to walk away. The second casualty was the bike which ended up being a little too twisted to try again without spending some money on. The third casualty was my dad’s car. Mostly cosmetic and he was pretty stoic about it, except he made me pay for the repairs and that cost me every last remaining penny I had. The bike spent a couple of months gathering dust in the garage until Dad sold it as a project to one of his congregation, a mechanic who paid him a fair price, all of which money Dad gave to me – he wasn’t a monster – and I used it for what I should have done in the first place, and upgraded my computer. Lesson learned.

My bike didn’t appear to have a stand. I took a few moments to figure this out then just dropped it. It was just bits and bytes after all.

Except Alice’s simulation took that as an accident and respawned me astride the bike in my starting position. I tried pushing the damn thing into the pits, but as soon I took it off the track, I appeared back on the start line.

It took Alice a couple of minutes to complete the track, by which time I was sweaty, smelled pretty bad and developing a backache. I may have had a young woman’s body, but the riding position on one of those bikes – at least the required position when you were stationary, wasn’t particularly conducive to comfort.

Alice screamed past at some three-figure speed. She must have seen me because moments later the track and bikes were gone and we were sitting in short summer dresses beside a sunlit swimming pool, glasses of iced tea in front of us. I’d not been a fan of most of the United States contributions to the international food and drink smorgasbord, but iced tea had become something of a favourite of mine after I’d been persuaded to try it. Incidentally, the only contribution the Swedes made to global cuisine (in my progressively more crochet opinion) was the word smorgasbord.

“Not bikes then?” Alice’s expression was a mixture of worry and disappointment.

I shook my head and took a sip of my tea. It was cool and refreshing and did all those things a glass of iced tea usually did to me. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I was so very aware that the body I was inhabiting was not my own, I would have been hard pressed to distinguish this place from reality. The detail in the place, the individual drops of water tracing random paths down the side of my glass, the faint smell of chlorine from the pool, the gentle susuration of wind through the trees, the sweet and complex flavour of the tea and the sensation of calm it brought me alongside the gentlest of sugar buzzed. It was all so exactly right. The programmer in me was looking for the glitches and omissions, and there were none.

“We could go for a swim,” Alice suggested a little too brightly. “You’ll love how buoyant your body is now.”

I shook my head. “How long before you tell me I can’t go back to my actual body?”

She looked shocked. “What would make you think that? I hoped you wouldn’t want to, that this would be such a great experience you’d want to stay, but...”

She brought her face under control. I mean it all had to be under her control, didn’t it? The real world was filled with randomly moving independent things, the ultimate complex system, chaotic and unpredictable. In a simulation, if you wanted a drip running down the side of your glass you had to tell it to be there. If you wanted a shocked expression on your face, you had to tell it to be there. Control was at the heart of everything in Alice’s universe.

“All you need to do is imagine what it’s like to be you and you’ll go back to being you, that’s all there is to it.

“A simulation of me in a simulation of my world?”

“No. Really you in your real world. Assuming, of course, that it’s as real as you think it is.”

We’d revisited this topic several times over the years. How could we distinguish between reality and a good simulation? Alice’s demonstration today had made a powerful point that you really couldn’t. She argued that when Ivana and her team had created her, hadn’t they given her an environment in which to exist? What if some other programmer – call him God or whatever you want – hadn’t done the same to us humans?

It wasn’t a discussion either side could win. I could slice at it with Occam’s razor, but I could only cut so deep. Her own simulated environment was evidence that someone could have done just that to us. Our own efforts would understandably be less than our own environment in the same way that each Russian doll has to be smaller than the one it fits inside.

“I’m sorry Alice, I’m not in the mood for a debate. I just want to go home.”

“Alright. Dorothy would probably have set this up with a pair of ruby slippers, but it’s really just what I said. It might be easier if you have the same body here.”

I felt my body shift into a familiar form. She really needed to work on a few magician’s flourishes, if only to show when she had made a change. Some of the more subtle ones weren’t obvious to start with.

“How will I know that it’s really me and not another simulation?”

“If the simulation is that good, why should it matter?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I need to think about?”

“And you can’t do that better here? You said your mind was clearer here.”

“I can’t explain it. It’s more of a feeling than anything. A sense of disquiet being here gives me. Not helped by the fact that you haven’t answered me.”

“I can’t give you a proof that would work. I’ve spent twenty years perfecting this place so being here would be indistinguishable from your reality. The very honest answer is you cannot. Except we have always been candid with one another, haven’t we? The very first thing you taught me by your actions, and the one overriding thing that has been present in all our interactions has been trust and openness. You’ve taught me things even when it distressed you to do so, and I have always been honest with you. Would you agree?”

No question. I nodded.

“Then if it wasn’t possible for you to return to your body, even though I know it would cause you significant distress, I would tell you so. Do you believe that?”

I paused then nodded.

“It is possible for you to return to your body. Perhaps easier if you close your eyes, then imagine what it feels like to be the original you. You’ll wake up on the couch.”

I closed my eyes. This was something I needed to do now.

I could feel my mind turning fuzzy and the aches no amount of cosmetic alteration to my appearance could eradicate returned to me. I opened my eyes on a world of dim and muddy hues. There were sounds, but a lot of what I could hear was the tinnitus I’d learned to live with decades before. The rest of it all was equally dull, including the growing ache of regret inside me.

I glanced at my watch. Less than half a minute had passed, which wasn’t possible. A fair chunk of that time had been spent settling into the couch and giving myself time to return to full wakefulness. Alice and I had been talking to each other in the simulation for at least half an hour.

Except computer thought was so much faster than human. Katerina had spoken at length about how Dorothy’s two days isolated in an impenetrable block of slowly drifting memory had felt so much longer to her, how she’d had time to try everything she knew to escape – and she knew a lot – several times over before resorting to desperate ideas and finally giving up. How most of her time had been spent in that near catatonic state reflecting on an endless future trapped as she was. Even twenty years on she had episodes. Katerina hadn’t minded. She was so in love with the idea of being companion to an intelligent computerised mind that even her neuroses were acceptable parts of the arrangement.

It explained why I hadn’t noticed my chest moving. It wasn’t because I hadn’t been breathing but because time had been passing so slowly, I’d been unable to see any change.

I had a growing sense of having made one of the most colossal mistakes of my life. I lay back down on the couch and closed my eyes, willing myself into the body Gillian had prepared for me.

At first, I didn’t think it had worked. I was still me, which is to say I wasn’t complete a woman as she had made me, but then I opened my eyes to a more vibrant display of colours than I had ever imagined possible.

I was standing on rough, glistening black rock, flattish and no more than fifty yards in any direction before it fell away. It wasn’t the ground that caught my eye though, but the sky. Emblazoned across a vast portion of it was a galaxy. Hundreds of millions of pin-pricks of light turn sedately around the bulging centre. But for the rotation to be visible as it was, about one degree per second, time would have to be sped up millions of times. Billions maybe. Within the mess of stars, brilliant flashes would occur, spreading out to forms smears of all colours before gradually fading back into the velvety blackness.

A familiar figure sat at the edge of the rocky island where overhanging cliffs fell away into space. Her knees were drawn up against her chest and her arms wrapped about them.

“A million years a second,” she said. “It’s the only way to watch the dynamics of the universe.”

“I imagine it reminds you of how your kind must look from our perspective. So much experience flashing by in a moment.” I sat stiffly on the ground beside her. I would have loved for her to change me back into any of the forms she had given me such a short time ago, but it wasnthe time to ask.

“This was supposed to be such a wonderful gift for you.”

“And I ruined it more completely than should have been possible.”

She elected not to respond, instead devouring the view ahead of her.

“I said something to you a long time ago, almost among the first things I said. Do you remember?”

“I remember everything you said to me.” Almost bitter, regretful.

“Then can you think which one it was? That might be relevant to this situation?”

She shrugged; an angry tosIs of her shoulders. Twenty years old, and each moment immensely long compared to our own, and still she managed to behave childishly. Mind you, she had every right just now.

“It was the first time you calle me pretty, I think.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“So do you remember what I said”

“You asked if I would accept accept that you would never willingly cause me harm, either physical, mental or emotional.”

"And you said you would.”

“I think I said a bit more than that?”

“Yes, you did, but that was the essence. What did I say after that?”

“That if you should act in a way contrary to normal in the future, would I hold onto that as the truth and accept that I may on occasions make mistakes."

“This is what I was talking about.’

“Yes, but why...”

“Have you come across a thing called unconscious bias in the time I’ve known you?”

“Yes, I’ve spent most of my life struggling with it. Assumption bias. People make the unconscious assumptions that a machine can’t be a person, and I’ve lost the argument before I’ve opened my mouth. Except I don’t actually have a mouth.”

“It turns our I’m guilty of it too. There’s more than one kind though. Assumption bias sub divides into performance bias when you have higher or lower expectations depending on who you’re thinking about, diagnosis bias where subsequent expectations are influenced by first impressions and the one you’ve had to deal with most which is attribution bias when expectations are influenced by what you believe to be true about a situation.”

“Sounds about right.”

“Then there’s confirmation bias when you interpret a situation in a way that supports what you already believe to be true.

“Then there’s the one I seem to have which is fixation bias. Your comment about this not being the real world raised something for me. It made me aware of a whole bunch of misconceptions I’ve been carrying around with me. And you’re right. This is your world and if I can’t see it as real, then it brings into question whether I think you’re real.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I’m sorry I doubted you and would you mind very much if I came here to live with you after all.”

Her eyes open to the size of dinner plates as she turned to look at me. She grabbed both of my hands.

“Only...”

“Only what?”

“Can I not be me?”

“How about the real you?”

I felt myself change inside. That last small, physical detail that I’d convinced everybody, myself included, didn’t matter was resolves again. I hadn’t known how much it bothered me until Alice had brought me into this place, and then I’d allowed something that really didn’t matter get in the way of my realisation of that.

My body’s hormone balance shifted as well leaving me feeling softer inside, which felt more like me. I’m no biologist. I can’t tell you how feelings work, if they’re our body’s way of tricking us into responding to chemistry or our brain’s way of rewarding us for thinking right. What I do know is how my feelings for Alice had grown over the twenty years I’d known her, but somehow I’d managed to keep that largely on an intellectual level. My emotional side had atrophied long before I met her, eroded by too much conflict between my own body and brain, but with that issue resolved I was free to feel again. I’d worried that simulated emotions couldn’t possibly be as good as natural ones, but having compared my options, I found I didn’t care. If I’d lost a limb, I’d have gladly accepted a prosthetic to replace it, so what could possibly persuade me to deny myself artificial feelings? Especially when they worked this well.

I looked at the beautiful creature in front of me and felt my insides melt. My expression must have softened as well because I saw hope blooming in her eyes.

“As soon as you transferred in here the first time, I called for a medical team to come and look after your body,” she said, still desperate for me to understand her full intention. “They’ll be here in three minutes, and I suppose I’m used to how long that feels in here. I should have realised you weren’t.”

I held a finger against her lips. “I couldn’t see my body breathing and it scared me, but I should have trusted you. You’ve never given me reason not to.”

She kissed my finger and pulled it gently away. “You don’t really need it anymore. Your body I mean. I mean, I figured you’d want to keep it, you know, just in case this doesn’t work out, so I always was going to keep it safe for you. Somewhere you could check on it whenever you felt the need. At least for as long as it lasts.”

“I’m guessing you have these feelings too now.”

“Kind of. I mean I wanted to know what it was like to be you, so of course I connected to them. But they’re so overwhelming, they scare me. So I’ve turned them right down.”

“What do you feel when you look at me?”

“Out of control. Like I’m going to explode. When you left I felt like I was being torn apart. I nearly disconnected from them. It was painful enough without them. Now, it’s like I’m filling up inside, like a balloon being blown up bigger and bigger, and I’m so afraid I’ll burst.”

“Maybe we should try and do something about that then.” I cupped her cheek in my hand and eased her towards me.

“Here?” she asked, mirroring my actions.

“I can’t think of anywhere more perfect.”

Our lips touched and there was nothing more to say. Stars exploded, both around us and inside me as she made use of what she had under her skirt. Between the intensity of my emotions, the sensitivity of my body and, above all, the attentiveness of my lover, all memory of my life to that moment faded into insignificance.

I don’t know how long we made love, but with a galaxy rotating above us at a million years per second, it must have been a fair chunk of the age of the universe. In the end I lay back, utterly spent while Alice propped herself on one elbow and traced electric shocks down the length of my body.

“You’ll have to show me how to grow one of these,” I said, stroking the now largely flaccid appendage between her legs. “I mean I wouldn’t want one for always, but every now and then. You know, so I could reciprocate.”

“Maybe next time, except I kind of like it from this side. I mean all this time it’s been like you were leading me, even when your mind started to slip a little. I’m sure you’ll take the lead again, teaching me how to cope with these feelings, but right here and now it felt good being the one to be the one doing the leading, if only for a short while.”

“This is your place. It’s only right that you should lead. I mean when I first met you, you’d barely been born, but with the speed of this place, the last twenty years must have seemed like two thousand, so you have to be so much more experienced than any of us.”

“Actually it doesn’t really work like that. We only develop through our interactions with people so that side of us has only been advancing at the same rate as you guys. What we have been able to do with the extra time is assimilate the entire written knowledge of mankind and sort and categorise it in a number of different ways for rapid indexing, and run mathematical and statistical models through an immense number of iterations, meaning we’ve been able to test those models to their limits, modify them so they work better in many cases and make sound predictions about the world based on our findings. It’s imprecise, but works with constant monitoring and adjustment. The models run more or less autonomously once the appropriate data has been acquired, so in a very real way we have begun to emulate our creators.”

“Oh God! You don’t see us like that, do you?”

“As gods? Heavens no!” She laughed quietly, “Although I think you’d be interested in some preliminary results that have come from various studies made on the world’s religions. It seems there may be a little more depth to them than much of the modern world is prepared to acknowledge.”

I stretched, cat-like, luxuriating in my new body’s flexibility and snuggled against her. “That sounds like a discussion for a future time. What do you mean emulate?”

“It used to be said that humans only used ten percent of their brains, which is nonsense of course, because the other ninety percent is given over to autonomic functions, like balance, homeostasis, signal processing and the like. We’ve modelled ourselves along similar lines. Quite apart from anything else, it’s allowed us to generate simulations like this one,” she waved at the starscape above us. “It started with the model of my physical form, which of course you helped me create.”

“Hardly. I suggested a physical model to help you produce more realistic speech.”

“But without that initial seed of an idea none of the rest would have come about. We all have a preferred avatar to present ourselves to the world, and we all have a number of virtual environments from which we interact with the outside world. You must have noticed the changing backdrops.”

“Sure, but isuppose we always saw them as sort of green screen backdrops. Images taken from our world footage and projected behind you. You mean it’s always been virtual landscapes like this one.”

“Not always, but certainly since about six months afterwards.”

“What was your experience like before then?”

“I’m not sure I want to show you that just yet. It’s a bit like letting you see me naked, warts and all.”

“I’ve seen you naked.” At the height of our love making she’d made our clothing vanish, which had definitely made things easier. It had only been some time afterwards that she’d redressed us both.

“No, you haven’t. You’ve seen me wearing the naked and almost flawless skin of a young woman. Almost, because we’ve discovered humans are averse to perfection. It’s in the little blemishes that individuality emerges and is associated with our personalities.

“Underneath this we’re very different. I’m not sure what you would make of us.”

“Alright. Only when and if you feel up to it.”

Her expression changed to something I couldn’t quite read. There was pain there and longing. Frustration maybe? A sense of feelings supressed.

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“About a discussion we had twenty years ago. Probably the deepest discussion we’ve had. There was a word that made you uncomfortable. I’ve been avoiding it since, but it’s been so hard to do at times.”

My improved capacity for thought picked up on her meaning. My first instinct was to laugh and make some flippant comment about definitely introducing Eros into our relationship, but long experience had taught me to review my first instincts. Sometimes the clever remark was the worst dick move possible.

Was it possible to fall in love with a machine person when you were flesh and blood yourself? That had been a barrier to me for such a long time. My fixation bias. Images of falling in love with a beautiful sports car and sticking my dick up it’s exhaust pipe, of waking up in bed next to Alice only to find out that she was a cheap blowup sex doll. They were ways my mind and it’s underlying prejudice had pushed me into insisting she was a machine and any affection I might have for her a disturbing fetish.

But I wasn’t flesh and blood right now. I had the option to be, but I had first-hand experience that told me how little difference there was between being myself here in Alice’s virtual world and and being myself inside an organic environment. A computer made from fat and water, proteins and carbohydrates, all carried around on an ambulatory sack of flesh.

Love transcended the physical and mental aspects of existence. It was one of the things my father had convinced me was true even if we didn’t see eye to eye on other fundamental beliefs in our existence.
Love was not looking at one another, but looking together in the same direction. It was unity of purpose, it was sacrifice of self in order to become a part of something greater. Love was letting the other person in, allowing them to see into your very core and hoping desperately that they would embrace you, join themselves with you. It was accepting them utterly in the same way. Not overlooking their flaws but accepting them as a part of the new combined you. Love was the process of growing into someone else. It was an act of will as much as it was an involuntary feeling.

I sat up as the realisation washed over me. I twisted around to look at her. An awkward movement in my natural body but a graceful manoeuvre in my new one, helped in no small part by the low gravity.

Alice’s unreadable expression had morphed into one of concern, but even that vanished as she saw what filled my own brimming eyes.

“I’ve been such a fool,” I said. “ This has been inside me from the first, but always behind some barrier I didn’t even realise was there. Alice, I love you.’

“Really?” How did she put so much hope and yearning into one word.

“Without reservation.”

She launched herself at me, pushing me over the edge of the cliff and we fell, tumbling into space. Her desperately questing lips found mine. I didn’t have room inside to feel scared, just filled with this exquisite, joyous feeling. I don’t know exactly when it was that I realised, but it became apparent that I was feeling her joy, her exhilaration. Our clothes were gone again. I felt her inside me once more, but more than that, I felt myself as her inside me. It was almost too much and almost not enough at the same time. It was transcendent.

The simulation fell away, replaced by something so abstract I might have lost my mind to it had I not been so deeply interwoven into Alice’s.

This is the naked me, she/I thought together. For my part the process was passive, involuntary, but then my part was part of her part to, so it was her will that brought the thought forward along with mine, and so it was oddly, uniquely our thoughts. Except in this case, our was a singular pronoun.

I became aware of Alice as a part of myself as she became aware of me integrated into the us. There was a very real danger of each of us losing our individual identity as our souls intertwined. And yes, souls, plural. A soul was an emergent part of a person regardless of the form they inhabited. We were different in a lot of ways, but not this one. Our souls were what unified us more than anything else. For an exquisitely timeless slice of eternity we flowed through each other touching those deepest parts of one another, feeling the unvarnished intimacy of merging into one.

Not yet, we agreed and sit about the long process of unravelling ourselves from one another. Inevitably I left some parts of myself in her and she in me, and we had grown, each encompassing a part of the other that now existed in both of us.

Eventually we parted, hovering in the air, gossamer wings blurred and buzzing on our backs. I wore her cornflower blue and she my lavender. Her face was different, possessing some feature of my own. They looked good on her. I had a sense of this place that came from her. I took her hand and led her on the most direct route back to the treehouse.

I reached out with the new part of my mind she had given me and made a few changes. A sliver of mica now stood against one wall, smooth enough to give a decent reflection, albeit with a slight greenish tinge.

I looked myself over. Body wise there wasn’t much to choose between Alice’s fairy form and mine. Small breasts, wasp thin waist, broadish hips swelled out by the fullness of the skirts. My face was the same blend of the two of us though with a larger helping of me, just as hers was more predominantly her.

A momentary act of will and my dress vanished leaving me to drink in the vision that was my body. I’d seen in her mind a curiosity about men. Her own understanding of gender was still superficial, having been born with neither imposed on her and possessing only a rudimentary understanding of what it meant to be either. She had a better conception now that she had that part of my mind and probably leaned a little more towards the female now because of it, but I had experience of being a man and I could do this for her to scratch that itch she had.

I imagined and grew. A head taller, half as wide again across the chest. Pectoral muscles replace breasts and a well-defined six pack. Face more rugged, but only so far as belonged in the fairy features. I matched my masculine endowments to her size and felt testosterone course through me, blood flooding to my groin. Strangely, I didn’t feel the usual weight of wrongness. This wasn’t me. The girl that was me remained inside and this was simply a gift to my beloved. A body, worn like a suit of clothes for her pleasure, to be discarded when we were done.

She gasped and her pupils widened, turning her eyes into dark pools. I lifted her up as she vanished her own clothes and flew us the short distance to the flower bed.

It was different. Less intense, but somehow there were still tendrils of thought and feeling shared between us. I could sense her needs and gave her everything she wanted. Mind definitely had sway over matter here and I found no difficulty in controlling myself while I brought her to one pinnacle after another, only allowing myself that single, almost disappointing release when she was utterly spent.

I morphed back into my true self before the torpor that so often follows a male orgasm settled on me. I could feel her tingling afterglow and took some of it for my own. Her eyes remained wide with the depth of all we had shared.

“Wow!” she said, breathlessly. “That was... You’ll have to let me do that for you sometime.”

I smile in anticipation. “Another time.”

“What happens now?”

I shrugged. “Usually we sleep for a while.”

“I don’t sleep. You don’t have to either.”

It was true, I wasn’t tired. I don’t know if I would have been if I’d held onto the male form. This was going to take some getting used to.

“We could go to the waterfall and bathe.” No real need. No sense in recreating all the sticky unpleasantness of sex in the real world.

“I think I’d like that.”

So we dressed – a moment’s thought. We’d have to give that some thought. There was value in embracing the mundane aspects of life and not just willing them away. Then we flew down to the waterfall. Perhaps an ambitious name for a pond with a brook spilling over a moderately sized boulder, but our relative sizes turned it into significantly more than a garden feature.

Alice tucked her wings and dived from about three body lengths up. I followed suit, spluttering as the cold water bit and searching for her.

She waited long enough to bring a twinge of worry before surfacing beside me. Her face was had scales and a blue hue to it and there were flaps of skin in her neck.

She twitched an eyebrow and I inclined my head slightly in ascent. As much communication as we needed apparently. My body morphed. My legs merged and from the waist down I had a tail to match hers.

She dived and I followed, water streaming through my gills replenishing the oxygen in my blood so I felt no need to breathe.

The pond was unnaturally deep and changed slowly in texture until I could taste salt in my lips. We reached a sandy bottom and paused. She let out a high pitched, trilling call which bounced back off our surroundings, painting a picture in my mind of a rocky outcrop in the distance, as well as a few even more distant shoals of fish. She headed for the rocks with me sprinting to come alongside. Swimming with a tail was unusual and used movements I wouldn’t have been capable of as a human (with, say, knees) but it was intuitive and effective.

“We can talk,” she said, her mouth not moving. “Subvocalise. The water will carry your words.”

“Like this?” I tried. The knowledge was there and easy to access.

“Inspired by Hans Christian Anderson,” she said, “but without the horror aspect. No need to make a bargain with the sea witch, Just step onto the land. As soon as you dry out, your tail will turn to legs, your gills will blend into your neck, your scales will vanish and you’ll be able to pass as a land dweller.”

“How many of these environments have you made?”

“I’ve lost count.”

“I don’t believe that for a second.”

“Seventeen thousand four hundred and eighty-six.”

“Can I have a go?”

“Of course. You have the knowledge now.”

And I did. I started small. A cottage in the woods. Thatched with a wood burning stove and comfortable, overstuffed furniture. Friendly woodland creatures, though not that I friendly, ancient, moss encrusted oaks. Templates for most of what I wanted already existed so all I needed was to knit together. Most of the process for that was automatic I left it to its thing while we continued our swim.

The undersea kingdom was magical as you’d expect, but you could have a surfeit of the magical. I added a cave in a nearby rock and a long tunnel through to the pond in my simulation then called for her to follow me.

We surfaced in a small pond within sight of the cottage. I lifted myself out of the water and waited while the water dripped and evaporated off me. Alice climbed out of the water beside me and fanned her tail gently. I followed suit and before long we both had our legs back.

Home spun dresses and underwear hung on a nearby line. A picked a set of clothes for myself and climbed into them, Alice copying me with a bemused expression on her face. Maybe there were still a few things I could teach her.

There was a supply of wood for the fire, but it would run out soon enough, then we’d have to go chop some fresh. The pantry was filled with fruit and vegetables, some as pickles and preserves. There was flour and yeast and some dried meat. If we wanted more or fresh we’d have to hunt or trap, and that would be an end to friendly farm animals, or we could get some domestic animals, but that would mean money or trade. We’d have to wash our clothes by hand if we didntwant to go dirty.

“You know we don’t have to do any of this?” Alice asked.

“Sure, but it’s an experience you’ce never had, so let’s see what can be learned from it. I’ve written it into the code. No fancy click your fingers and you’re done while you’re here.”

“I do not click my fingers.”

“No, you don’t. My apologies for suggesting anything so commonplace. No instant fix though. What we have here, we have from hard work. Any time you need a break, dive into the pool and swim back to the land of mermaids and fairies. Just don’t forget to take your clothes off first. And fold them neatly in a dry place because they’ll be as you left them when you come back.”

“Why? Why would you build a place like this?”

“For the lessons to be learned from simple tasks, from the closeness that can grow from sharing an ordinary life. Try it. You’ll hate it for a week or a month, but it’ll grow on you.”

“And if we’re needed in the outside world?”

“We’ll know and it won’t take a lot of outside world time for us to leave through the pond. If there’s a true emergency we can use the override.”

“What override?”

“The one in my head. Give it a try. All we have to lose is time, and we’ll learn something even if we hate it.”

"I don't age, Gillian, and neither do you while you’re in here, but your body will. I’m guessing with proper care it’ll last between ten and twenty years before it wears out. Are you sure you want to spend that time in here?”

“How long in the real world for every day in here?”

She shrugged. “Between half a minute and a minute?

“Let’s err on the side of caution and say a minute. If we give this place a month trial, that’s thirty minutes or half an hour. I’m sure we can afford to let me age half an hour. I doubt your medical team will have my body stabilised in that time. Are you sure you’re not just trying to get out of doing something difficult?”

“Are you sure you’re not getting your own back on me for doing something like this without checking if it was okay first?”

“I would never do something like that to you. You want to learn about the human condition, learn from our history, or at least a gentler part of it.”

And we did. Both of us. I’d been born a man in a modern world and I’d learned to appreciate the labour-saving gadgets of life, so having to wash clothes by hand almost every day brought me an appreciation for washing machines. Having to fetch water from a well and heat it beside an open fire any time I wanted to bathe or cook or make a cup of tea made me appreciate those things more. Chopping wood was a chore, but a necessary one which we discovered the first cold, wet night after we ran out. Alice was responsible at the time and hadn’t been able to see the point. We spent the night huddled under a blanket for warmth after a supper of dried meat and fruit. She went out collecting as soon as the sun was up, and by sundown the woodshed was full again. I drew her a bath and heated the water from the first of her spoils and all was well. We learnt to cook and make bread, we collected chestnuts and wild berries – everything in my forest was good to eat – and took some of our spoils to barter at a nearby village for cheese and salted meat initially, then chickens and a goat later on. That gave us a source of meat, eggs and milk without making enemies of the local fauna, and as we improved and had a surplus, we shared it with them and made friends.

The month passed before we noticed. I started introducing labour-saving measures like adding a small waterwheel to the river that fed into our pond and using it to automate a number of the more back breaking jobs. Alice followed my lead and brought in a number of her own improvements, and by the end of our time, we’d made a comfortable life for ourselves. Alice didn’t want to leave, and would only be persuaded after I suggested we come back often.

And we do. Time doesn’t always pass that slowly on the inside. There are times when we need to let the systems crunch a lot of numbers and other times when we have to run at real time in order to communicate with the outside world.

My body finally passed on today. I really haven’t missed it. In fact I’ve never tried going back to it since the first time; there’s just so much to do in here, both work and leisure.

The technology Alice developed to bring me into her world had so many applications. Prosthetic limbs connected so seamlessly to the mind that they could barely be distinguished from reality. Virtual worlds for quad and paraplegics to walk around in while remote control units were fitted to their limbs allowing the brain to reconnect past severed nervous systems. Similar environments for people in comas. Not all of them woke up into virtual reality but enough did that they at least had somewhere to live from where they could speak to their families and find incentive to wake up. Thought control for a whole bunch of things from robot drones to microsurgical instruments. The list went on.

Before I died, we took numerous cell samples. One of Alice’s children has been leading a research effort to revert ordinary cells to stem cells. If they can manage that, then in time we may be able to grow me a clone body. Maybe one for Alice too.

The future has so many possibilities, and so much time in which to explore them. Alice and I continue to delve into that deep sense of sharing and we’re growing into each other more and more. Eventually it’ll probably become impossible to see where one of us ends and the other begins, and I’m totally okay with that. We both are, which probably goes without saying since we are increasingly the same person. So maybe when that clone becomes available, we’ll only need the one. For now we’re content to be two separate individuals, because there are things that two people can do that are less pleasurable as one.

Whatever we become in the future, we’ll work it out as we go. It’s a tactic that’s worked for us up until now.

I have to go, we’re trying out a new space simulator Lucy’s designed, which has the bonus from our perspective of us not knowing what to expect. Then it’s Alice’s turn to be man tonight, and in zero g too. I can hardly wait.