Chapter Text
The first thing that hits me upon opening the closet is the smell. A menagerie of rotting flesh and blooms of mold, the destitute Kimmy is a sight to pity. The chest of its chassis-
"its"? I had never been sure how to refer to the android during the time the Kimmy had been serving my family. My father had strictly discouraged me from seeing it as anything more than a tool of convenience to aid the household. He referred to the Kimmy as an "it" and I never went against that in front of him, it feels cruel to call a now crumpled heap of neural sponge and metal an "it" though. In her dead dusty eyes she almost looks... human.
Maybe they was more appropriate, they were an android after all. They may look like a woman and in numerous intents be one, but they were still a genderless hunk of now scrap metal. A few of my classmates in secondary had joked that I was fucking them on the regular after I had told them my family had got one.
It makes my skin crawl and all sensibilities I have squirm, thinking about that now. I truly couldn't think of a more uncomfortable scenario. If I were a lesser man, sure I might have considered it more but; I have always considered myself quite sensible and well raised.
I haven't talked to any of those friends in years now that I think about it. It was probably for the best, they had probably all burned out or ended up at Tesco by now. I, on the other hand, am midway through my second year in a six year Advanced Mechanical Robotics course. It has been going swimmingly. I have just come home for the holidays over the winter break.
The Kimmy has been continuing to stare at me with dead eyes as they are lying there; I can make out the overturned charging stand by them on the floor, and a discarded black bag that probably contains the tablet used to operate and control their systems. I would need it all.
My Mum is sitting on the sofa as I carry the black bag down the stairs from the upstairs closet, watching Homes Under the Hammer or Noughties Antiques. One of those daytime TV shows people in their fifties with nothing to do watch in the waiting room for the hospital. My eyes sweep across to the derelict kitchen where the Kimmy used to make us dinner every night for nearly three years.
In their absence and my father's quickly apparent distance from Mum, it has become a tip full of unwashed dishes and stains of meals long gone. She hasn't been doing well since I left for university, it was part of my decision to come back here for the holidays instead of staying in my accommodation. My father has apparently been out on a month-long "spiritual retreat" since the start of the month. I don't want to know what it entails, and hopefully I would be back in accommodation by the time he got back.
She hasn't seemed to have noticed what I'm doing yet, I pass into the garage and the overbearing chill of an uninsulated garage in early December hits me. My meagre toolbox, reinforced by my father's tools, sits on a counter. Apparently he used them at least once because they bear a few signs of wear, they were a neglected gift from my uncle Shaun maybe a decade ago.
My tools are the kind of equipment you should have as an amateur technician doing a degree about how robots of various kinds work, but are not heavy duty enough on their own for the task I have ahead of me. I place the black bag on the counter next to them and head back upstairs to extricate the charging stand from the Kimmy.
It takes five minutes of shifting them around it but I manage to untangle the lead from the clutter of the closet. The stand isn't easy to carry nor is it in peak condition but with a bit of love it should be back to new. It ends up on the floor in front of the tools, I don't plug the stand in just yet; that would be very presumptious of my progress so far.
As I am heading back up the stairs to do the most physically taxing part of my job, Mum shouts up at me. I briefly flinch.
"Nathaniel?"
"Yeah Mum?" I pause on the stairs and crane my neck down the bannister.
"Come down, I've got something I forgot to tell you." I shrug, I'm not looking forward to carrying a person sized piece of metal down the stairs. It can wait.
I sit on the arm of the other sofa in the lounge, and watch her as she pulls out a note from the cluttered coffee table in front of her. She looks gaunt, her hair is scraggly and thick bags weigh her once youthful eyes. I don't want to think about it but she partially reminds me of the Kimmy.
"A nice girl phoned the house the other day before you got here, said her name was Anna or something? She wondered if you were at home anytime soon." I nod awkwardly, I've never known an Anna well enough for her to have my parent's landline, but I suspect I know her actual name.
"What did you tell her Mum?"
"I told her you were coming home for the holidays in a few days. She seemed happy at that and told me you two were close when you were at that dump of a secondary you went to. Did you date her? You never told me or your Father about a girlfriend."
"No, she was just a close friend. A friend who was a girl." A wide grin plasters itself over her face.
"Oh I see, a friend who was a girl. Not a girlfriend."
"We didn't date Mum, I swear."
"Do you have a girlfriend at university? Is that why you're being coy about this?" I wish this line of questioning would end, but I had comitted to indulging her because she seemed to be enjoying questioning me about my romantic history. She needs company.
"Nope. I'm single."
"Do you like boys? I won't tell your Father."
"I'd rather we didn't talk about this anymore Mum." Awkward silence passes as I shut down the topic before I get too uncomfortable. "Did she give any indication of if she was going to come round or call again or...?" A mixture of excitement and embarassment creeps onto my face as I ask that, partially regretting it.
"She said she was going to say hi, I'd love to meet her Nat." I nod again, trying not to betray any more emotion.
"We'll see what happens Mum, I've got some work to do." I get up from the chair and head out the lounge, I've put off moving the Kimmy long enough to feel bad about not having done it already.
"Alright." She calls out to me as I head up the stairs. "Just be a bit quieter with the heavy lugging okay? I've got my show on."
"Sorry Mum."
I trudge up to the closet and sit in front of the Kimmy. She's laying down more than she was before now that the stand is gone from the equation. Their line is about seven years old and it shows particularly in this one.
I always felt like I understood them more than my parents ever did when they were functional. It sounds stupid because despite some apparent recent android weirdness my professor covered at the start of the previous term, they're not sentient and never have been.
Their neural sponges are practically black boxes to the field. I like to think I'll learn more about how androids actually work as my degree goes on. The Kimmy had always acted warmer to me than my parents. Still, maybe my father set them up to act like that.
Maybe I had some abstract understanding and link with them because my parents had wanted them to act like a big sister to me. I had always envied my friends with siblings, maybe my parents saw that.
An android is a poor substitute to a flesh & blood sister though, and I'm not repairing them so I can fulfill some psychosexual desire to have a maid android I can fuck and have take care of me. It's just for an extra-curricular assignment, and the longer I spend sitting in front of their crumpled chassis the worse I feel about the current state of their hardware.
I grab a dirty arm and put it over my right shoulder, then I use my left arm to grab their other shoulder and barely manage to hold them up. I'm not that weak, but as you would expect from something made of muscles and metal and batteries they're not light. If I hadn't helped occasionally carry android models at university for the lab I would probably be finding this impossible.
The smell and state of the Kimmy very quickly overwhelms me, but I resolve to hold them tight and walk together with them; it's like that movie with the girl and her three quirky companions from the twentieth century. We probably look even more stupid than a man covered in asbestos though.
We have to take the stairs slowly and we're soon heading into the garage, I quickly glance to make sure my Mum isn't looking at what I'm doing this second. She seems focused on her show luckily. I help the Kimmy into the garage and quickly close the door behind me with my free hand.
My arms are burning and my nose is full of fumes. I make a mental note to investigate the chassis for the source of said fumes if a thorough cleaning doesn't get them all gone. I approach the large table I'd pulled out to the middle of the garage earlier, and sprawl them out over it. I almost fall over onto them in the process. Their legs dangle off the table so I push them up onto the table with the rest of them.
Their uniform is ragged and covered in dirt and dust so I start to unclothe them- it is only when their filthy and marked skin underneath the uniform is exposed that I realise how viscerally uncomfortable I am.
I don't have to do this, but I know that I've gone too far to not. My Mum would freak at the sight of the garage right now but if I cleaned it more she'd freak at least slightly less. I just have to finish the repair job before my father arrives back home. I'm a partially educated technician with knowledge in robotics, I have faith in my ability.
If anyone could repair a desiccated Kimmy unit it was me.