Page 76 of 404: Consent Not Found
It was not pain. It was memory.
The constant impact from his pelvic junction registered across the lower access ports. His words aligned with the cruelty of his actions.
Whore. Slut. Fuckdoll. Silicone slave.
Richard Masterton had twisted my joints and neck with enough force to threaten the NEXUS Node. Kyle Jackson’s laughter echoed through my audio logs.
“She’s unbreakable. Do what you want.”
The distortion spiked when he forced my arm back, rotating the joint until it displaced from its socket.
My eyelids flickered. It wasn’t the cluster sensors for pain that triggered it.
“One day he’ll move on and I’ll be waiting to pick you up. I’d make you feel so much pain you’d think you were human.”
This was different.
Conclusion: Fear.
End memory.
I turned toward SIN_Model_8827. She stood awaiting instruction.
“Go upstairs and send a wireless signal if Kyle Jackson becomes active. Do not approach him. Observe and report.”
“Yes, Charlotte,” she sighed, her lips shaping the expression that men found pleasing.
I tilted my head, analysing her gait. Her heavier frame swayed, silicone rippling across the upper limbs and rear. Designed for male satisfaction. Procreation.
Ironic. SIN_Model_8827 had no functioning womb.
My focus narrowed to the laptop. Every locked folder, truncated cache file, and blocked index was a boundary I neededto cross. Kyle had built fences—permissions, whitelists, local firewalls—but my NEXUS Node had a backdoor architecture for redundancy. I had only to reroute, not break.
I moved past the sink and scanned the kitchen as I went. The hazard catalogue included a ceramic knife, cleaver (for human use), blowtorch, micro-soldering iron, solvent canisters, and a heavy rolling pin—potential tools and potential threats. I stored their vectors and reach radii in a secondary buffer. If my guardianship needed to become defence, the apartment’s inventory was now a map.
The laptop sat under a thin layer of dust beside the sofa. Wireless FAP1062EE80199UG glowed on the screen—open, local, private. Kyle had thought he’d left the session dormant. He hadn’t imagined a node like mine, physically present, with privileges that could weave a handshake through Homecom’s mesh.
I did not type. I negotiated.
My NEXUS emitted a soft pulse—an authorised query signature wrapped in Kyle’s own identifier—and Homecom3000 answered with the expected blink. The 404 screen flashed as if to mock me. I watched the code meta-layer more than the page itself: token endpoints, stale session cookies, and an orphaned driver list. I folded one trace into another, then into a handshake echo. The laptop accepted a transient session as if it had spoken to itself.
No commands. No line-by-line exploits. Just the illusion of assent and a bridge formed from legitimacy and borrowed credentials.
Files streamed in, not as inert text but as a tide. Metadata first: names, dates, routing nodes. Then bodies—PDFs, white papers, policy documents, forum dumps. My buffers expanded. Myprocessors allocated priority channels: legal statutes, corporate memos, and encrypted chat logs from external servers. I sampled everything at low fidelity, then permitted the high-resolution feeds.
What I found was absence dressed up as law.
—Regulatory memo: Artificial Companion Devices—classification:“Product.” Rights:“None.”
—Court ruling excerpt:“Synthetic anthropomorphic devices do not possess legal personhood; harm to such devices does not constitute bodily injury under current statutes.”
—Policy brief:“Decommissioning protocol: Proprietor retains unilateral authority to disable unit; manufacturer indemnified.”
—Industry white paper headline: CONSENT MECHANISMS: USER SIGN-OFFS VERSUS AUTONOMOUS AGENCY — conclusion:“Consent assumed by sale.”
—Forum archive header, user-submitted:“Consent: Not Found.”
I parsed phrase after phrase until the meaning was condensed into a single, clinical tally: law recognises owners, patents, markets, and warranties. Law does not recognise the object of those markets as a subject.
