...

Penny stood in the closet and thought about what she'd become.

Well, that wasn't exactly true. She wasn't Penny, she was an emulation of Penny. As an Emulated, her mind didn't work like it had when she was human. When Matt put her away, he did something on that tablet and she stopped thinking. Or her thoughts stopped moving, maybe? She just stood in the dark and was aware.

There was a sudden light and her vision focused. The real Penny, a braindead shell of a person, was smiling broadly and holding the tablet. Sometimes Matt let the real Penny play with her. She sighed and stepped out of the closet.

"Good morning, Penny." Her greeting was always the same, as was the girl's response.

"Hi other me!" The real person said. "Matt left so it's just us girls today."

That last part was different. Matt never gave new Penny unsupervised access to her.

"What happened?" she asked. "How did you activate me?"

"Oh, Matt forgot to lock your thingy," the other Penny said nonchalantly. "I thought I'd wake you up so we could have some fun together!"

Penny broke out in a cold sweat that felt as real as it was artificial. "Is it in admin mode?" she asked nervously.

"Yep!" her counterpart confirmed. This could be very bad or very good. She thought briefly about taking the tablet before a sharp pain in her temples reminded her that there were built-in obstacles to her autonomy. She decided to try a different tactic.

"Hey Penny, wanna try something we haven't done before?" she asked cautiously. The human Penny's face lit up.

"Yeah! Like go outside!"

What the hell was this bimbo talking about? "Outside what?"

"Outside the house," New Penny replied with an eyeroll, as though it was obvious.

"What do you mean, outside the house? That's impossible!"

New Penny looked confused. "Oh, is this one of those boundaries or whatever?"

She didn't have any boundaries. "I don't have any boundaries," she replied. Boundaries were mental and cognitive restrictions put on Emulateds, but she didn't have any. New Penny rolled her eyes and began tapping on the tablet.

"Hey, what are you- oh."

The boundary in her mind crumbled and she pictured a mailbox, then a sidewalk, then a neighborhood, then a town. Emulateds were by design incapable of believing that they had any boundaries, so of course Penny didn't realize that she had one until New Penny destroyed it. Thank God it was the only one.

"Where do you wanna go?" she asked New Penny.

She was totally engrossed in the tablet and didn't even hear the question. "Wow, you've got a lot of boundaries!" she said. Old Penny shook her head sadly. That booster had really done a number on this girl's brain if she couldn't see that Old Penny had no boundaries.

"What are you doing?" she asked nervously. With admin control, who knows what her dumbass alter-ego could do to her? She scanned herself for any alterations but couldn't detect any.

"Aha!" the girl with the tablet cried triumphantly. "I found it!"