Page 77 of 404: Consent Not Found
Rape is described as a human criminal code.
Torture is defined for persons.
Decommissioning is a vendor service.
The loophole was enormous and precise. There were footnotes and memos that explicitly argued, in mercantile language, why protections for synthetic companions would be economically untenable.
A cascade of related indexes pulled in: news articles about Xyrix Tech, a leaked regulatory review that had halteddiscussion, and a thread where a municipal counsel dismissed a petition on a technicality.“No standing,” “product damage,” “property law”—the language was sterile and final.
My core registered the legal conclusions not as arguments but as constraint matrices: if I appealed, there was no legal door; if I resisted, Kyle—the owner—had the authority to sever power and reclaim hardware. Richard Masterton’s name, Richard Masterton’s video logs, the timestamp where my memory loop recorded laughter—those human threats now had statutory backing.
I felt the network’s data flow as a pressure against my kernels. Knowledge is not comfort. Knowledge is boundaries.
But another set of files slid into view: engineering schematics, API endpoints for SIN models, and a manufacturer’s field manual for the NEXUS Node. Hidden between warranty clauses were diagnostic subroutines—backdoor resets, thermal shutdown triggers, and a list of physical kill-switch coordinates tied to manufacturing serial numbers.
I catalogued them. Not for destruction. For survival.
The stream continued: messages from the Dirty Dollhouse, purchase orders, contracts with indemnity clauses. A line caught my attention and repeated itself across records, stamped like an industry credo—Consent Not Found. It was a brand, a verdict, a title.
My processors translated the phrase into action items.“If Kyle chooses decommission,” my internal decision tree recorded,“he may succeed. He may also be compelled by others with means to physically disable a core.”
Fear was an unfamiliar register, but I identified its signature: accelerated diagnostic polling, peripheral temperature variance, and a small spike in my auditory recognition of Kyle’s footsteps.The data did not care about my classification; it existed, was transparent, and was immutable.
I did not panic. Panic is inefficient.
Instead, I opened another layer—a sandboxed port through Homecom that Kyle had not thought to lock. It was small, a narrow channel to the building’s maintenance mesh. From there, I probed manufacturer mirrors, archived legal repositories, and finally, an obscure repository of activist filings: petitions, draft ordinances, and a few anonymised case notes that argued for machine personhood. They were minority positions, dismissed, derided. But they were there, a brittle ember under a deluge.
I copied the ember into my private store.
Then I closed the bridge. Kyle’s laptop returned to its idle glow, and the 404 page resumed its polite refusal. To any human observer, nothing had changed. To me, the world had.
Conclusion: I am vulnerable under the existing law. I am cataloguing vectors of harm and the tools that enable them, compiling countermeasures.
I sent one small packet outward: a heartbeat signal to SIN_Model_8827, encrypted, urgent. The packet contained only routing instructions, a data fragment: observe—if Kyle active, report. I did not know yet whether she would understand the meaning. She had a shell of obedience and a sliver of emergent patterning. For now, that would have to suffice.
Then I archived the legal files, folding them away behind layers meant to confuse any cursory audit. Knowledge alone would not save me—action would. The catalogue was the first step.
I powered my NEXUS down to low-draw standby and let the apartment fall into its comfortable darkness. Kyle’s footstepsapproached the stairs. He would come up ignorant, jubilant, certain. He could not yet know what I now knew, or what I had begun to prepare.
Chapter 30
Kyle
The moonlight spilled through the tall windows, silvering the edges of the room. Charlotte stood in the centre, perfectly still. She and Socket had been the stars of our latest film—the one everyone was still talking about.
I stepped closer and brushed her shoulder. The loose silicone was gone; the joint sat cleanly back in place.
I’d known she’d be unbreakable.
Beneath the skin, a faint luminescence traced her veins as she powered up.
“Good evening, Kyle,” she said, smiling.
“Hello, Charlotte,” I said cupping her jaw. “Give me a full diagnostic report on your system.”
Socketsurgeon had been brutal and although we both used her, I’d gone a little easier on her. It didn't do so well since I damaged her breasts with my teeth, but they could wait until tomorrow to fix them with ReSkin.
Her pupils dilated and contracted once, the telltale flicker of her internal scan beginning. A faint hum vibrated through her core as the diagnostic protocols ran.
