&nbsp; &nbsp;"You got here just in time. I was just about to lock up the store," the Make-A-Maid technician said, tightening the straps that held him in the soft rubber seat. "Lucky we're open till midnight."<br /> Mark was still panting from his run down the high street. "You people are a lifesaver. Everywhere else was shut!"<br /> "Well, it is Christmas Eve. Or did you lose track of time? You wouldn't be the only one," she smiled, dolloping greasy conduction gel onto the top of his head and massaging it into his scalp. "So many absent-minded boyfriends desperate to find a gift at the last minute. And what gift could be greater than the gift of yourself?" With the tightening of a screw, the mind extractor clung firmly around his head. "Garage forecourt already closed, was it? Not to worry, we'll have you gift-wrapped to your girlfriend in no time."<br /> She busied about the woman-sized doll slumped in the chair beside Mark, slotting cables into data sockets that dotted its spine and skull. "Would you like a message attached to your parcel?"<br /> "How about 'sweetie, promise you'll turn me back on Boxing Day'?" he laughed nervously.<br /> "Ah, but sir, a doll is for life, not just for Christmas," she teased him back.<br /> She flicked a switch. An electric charge thrummed through his scalp from the steel electrodes. He felt an indescribable sense of dislocation as if the machine held him suspended between two bodies. His vision was blurred, as a second view a meter to his right, was overlayed upon it.<br /> His body felt cold. He raised his hand to his chest, and the animatronic maid beside him mimicked the motion, her sensitive rubber-tipped fingers cupping her hard plastic breast, the sensation transmitted along the connection.<br /> "Everything looks compatible. Ready to begin?"<br /> "This isn't going to hurt, is it?" Mark asked.<br /> "There'll be a slight pain in your head," the technician admitted. "Fortunately you won't be in it."<br /> She pulled a lever. With a shower of sparks and a wrenching jolt, his human body was ripped away, his mind hurtling along wires into the hard drive of the animatronic. Blackness... then a flicker of vision as systems came online, the digitized software of his mind meshing with its new hardware.<br /> He was just beginning to grasp the enormity of the change when the technician twisted his head off. She took him apart piece by piece, boxing and wrapping him in festive paper.