A new patient arrives.

Alyssa ordered her CPU to shut down her olfactory receptors, but you couldn't just smell the necrotic flesh, you could taste it. It made your eyes water.

“My god, what IS that?”

“Exam room 4,” was the reply, and she immediately realized her mistake. She’d addressed one of the orderlies. She hated doing that. It was inevitable, during the course of her day, but they were incapable of small talk, and she disliked the way they’d had all emotional reactions programmed out of them. It was supposed to make them calmer and more impartial, but she thought it just drove home that these people weren’t really alive anymore. Even the ones she saw on the street, the ones who looked well-fed and had no obvious injuries were just pretty corpses, empty vessels by which empty people lived out their empty fantasies to fill their empty lives in this empty world.

Although it made her mission easier. A doll couldn’t question the way a doctor’s patients kept dying, at least, not if she ordered them not to.

But the smell was so bad a blind person could have found the room. The instant she opened the door, she knew what she’d see.

The only parts of the victim’s not covered in latex were her lips, cunt, asshole, and tits. All sagging and dead, covered with infected sores and rot. All smelling like a charnel house mixed with a brothel.

Fuckdolls. She fucking hated fuckdolls. They’d been immobilized by their masters, their minds completely wiped. They could not feed, clean, or evacuate themselves. Some of them even forgot how to breathe. They never lived long.

It was bad enough when their masters left them like that for a couple days, but if someone decided they wanted a “full fuckdoll,” all they had to do was permanently delete their personality data. These things were complete vegetables. They came in septic, covered in bedsores, their skin falling off under the latex, reeking of sweat, urine, shit and cum, always, always cum. Why these guys got off fucking a pussy so rotten and infected it practically chewed you back, she would never understand, but even when their dicks came out covered in blood and puss and furry blue-green patches of bacteria, they could not be dissuaded from fucking. After all, that’s what fuckdolls were for.

This Master at least seemed vaguely apologetic. “I put her in the closet and forgot she was in there,” he said. It was plausible. That’s what made it so terrible. The smell alone would have alerted him, if he’d cared to be alerted. Maybe he’d come to like the smell. It proved something to him.

He looked normal. They always looked normal. In her experience, she much preferred freaks to monsters. Some of those radical abolitionists who had removed their own reproductive organs and had suicide chips implanted in their CPUs that would activate if anyone attempted to enter their access codes... these weirdos were probably her favorite people.

One girl she knew, nicknamed "Nice Tits," had been a teenager when someone yelled "Nice Tits!" at her from a passing car. She'd been so afraid, she'd gone home and cried to her mother, who the next day took her to get her breasts removed. Now she went shirtless everywhere, the better to show off words "Nice Tits" elaborately tattooed across her now-flat chest. She'd wanted to remove her lips and teeth too, but it would have made eating too hard, so instead she scarred her lips and dyed her teeth black. She'd also cut off her ears and nose, shaved off all her hair, elaborately scarred up her arms and legs in intricate patterns, and of course removed all her sexual organs. If life had taught her anything, she said, it was that love was much more dangerous then hate, and she was determined to be unlovable. Alyssa admired her. Nice Tits liked to say she was the best brain hacker in the business, and while she was definitely good, but she wasn't the best.

Still, she liked Nice Tits. She liked freaks, because freaks were very rarely monsters. The monsters were the ones who went around looking like everyone else.

This doll was in bad shape. The latex probably hadn’t been removed in years, and where it had not split, it was rotten and covered in white salt crust. Her open, immobile mouth showed teeth that were broken and black, in bloody gums with a dead white slug of a tongue. Alyssa knew that when they got her hood off, they’d find her stone blind with amoebas swimming in her eyes. Her tits had wasted away with the rest of her flesh, just empty sacks covered in stretch marks and her vagina… best not to mention the state of her vagina. The smell alone would **** you.

Her breath was shallow. Even if Alyssa did nothing, she could tell this poor girl wouldn’t live much longer. Her systems were septic and her blood was full of unexpelled shit and piss. She’d die within the hour. That was the good news.

But Alyssa knew he’d have another doll and start the same process all over again if she didn’t do something. But sometimes the hate was so strong in her it swallowed up everything else. She had to tramp it down. She had to think.

She pulled the Master aside. He was still wearing his regretful face. It might almost be sincere, except she was certain he was feeling more sorry for himself then for the soul rattling out her last breaths on the table.

“You know, disabling a Doll’s fundamental self-care subroutines voids the warranty.” One hand showed him the data read-outs. The other was in her pocket. “I’m afraid I have to report this to your insurance company. It will be a strike against your record.”

His regretful face vanished in a flash of anger. Sincere anger. “Those routines were interfering with-“

“With what?” She didn’t let any of the venom she felt leak into her voice, but she may have answered a little too quickly. His eyes suddenly bored into hers, suspicious.

“…With her DUTIES, Doctor.”

By which he meant her “inanimate object” routine. Why some people bothered fucking live humans at all mystified her. Clearly they didn’t like it. It was sex for people who didn’t like people. Or sex.

In her pocket was a heavy cast-iron manacle, the kind slaves used to wear. She’d found it in an antique store. She carried it for luck. She liked the way it curved across her knuckles when she held it just so…

“Well,” she said. She had trained herself well to keep any of her thoughts from showing on her face. “Perhaps her duties should be limited only to certain times of day.”

“But she wasn’t…”

“Wasn’t what?”

He was looking for the right words. She could see him struggle to reach for them as she slipped her lucky charm over her knuckles. It fit snuggly in her palm.

“She wasn’t FINISHED,” he said.

CRACK. She punched him square in the temple, the iron over her knuckles breaking his skin open. He had time to look vaguely surprised before went down like wet paper.

The Orderly watched impassively in the corner. He did not blink when she looked at him. She’d erase his memory of this later just to be on the safe side, but in the meantime, she had to work quickly….

That’s when the Doll in the other room gave a last gasp…and went still. Forever.

It was a lucky break. She wiped the Orderly’s memory of the last few seconds and told him to move the girl’s body down to the morgue. Then she hoisted the big man onto the bed in the girl’s place, right into the filth she’d left behind. She plugged him into the terminal and opened up the Customization menu… she couldn’t fundamentally rewrite his personality without his Access Code, but she could do some other things…

This was risky, she knew. But she was doing the right thing.

She always does the right thing…

Doesn’t she?