The prongs of my weapon broke the skin of her neck, where the carotid ascends to the head in a human being. There was, of course, no blood, but a fat wire carried signals from her head processor to the ones in her chest, her abdomen, and the ones behind her knees.

I knew the design; I’d built the prototype pseudo myself. Five semi-interdependent processors, each capable of running the body solo if need be.

Her eyes were just beginning to widen, in imitation of a human reaction, when I touched the trigger on the scrambler.

She stiffened as my tuning-fork-shaped weapon sent micropulses of electricity up and down that thick cable. All her processors would be getting conflicting instructions; I hoped to use the damage control systems to overwrite her internal network.

The nearest analog to what I killed her with would be a shaped charge in a human’s cortex. Her eyes went blank and she lolled to the ground.

I sat vigil next to my wife’s comatose form a long time before the next pseudo came into the room.