It’s the middle of the night. As he sleeps in his bedroom, Andrew Wells opens his eyes slowly to what appears to be a bright light outside his window. It’s not the moon, or a street light though – it’s a spotlight. Andrew bolts upright, as the windows to his room burst open, the air pushing him back against the head board. An X-Wing goes careening to one side of the room, a GI Joe action figure is forcibly ejected from his display position. His Iron Man movie poster threatens to become untethered from it’s half-taped place on the wardrobe door. Two figures move closer towards the window, one of them gently entering over the threshold. Andrew’s face is beaming: “Finally!” he declares. They’ve finally come for me. He starts fussing around the room, explaining that he always knew that one day they would come for him and that they shouldn’t mind the mess, it’s just laundry day kinda came and went and… He’s stopped by a stern voice behind him.

“Andrew.”

He turns, slowly. He recognises that tone.

He finds Buffy standing there, anger all over her face. Spike is just outside the window, with a face that looks just as unhappy. Buffy’s arm is still sparking. “Need a chat, mate,” Spike says, slowly.

Andrew says hello to them both and starts making jokes, looking more than a little worried. Buffy asks him outright: “What did you do?” Andrew makes more jokes, but Buffy roars at him: “What did you do with my body!” Andrew starts to scream in pain, but Buffy tells him that she hasn’t even hit him yet!

Elsewhere, downtown San Francisco, Robert Dowling is in the morgue. He’s identifying the officers killed earlier tonight. He’s just had to identify his partner, Detective Miranda Cheung. The coroner is completing his report as Dowling stands over her. He declares her a victim of a vampire attack, detailing that an autopsy will clarify further. Dowling looks on, guilt on his face, but his thoughts racing.

In Andrew’s home, Andrew is thinking aloud about why a pregnancy test would have a positive result with a robot. He asks Buffy why she even took the test, and she says that her period was late. He sighs. “You’ll just have to forgive me for not putting that in!” Buffy says she’s also been nauseous, which Andrew puts down to a malfunction regarding her digestive program – another one he thought he’d licked. He doesn’t think he can help with the food, but he can help with a new arm – providing she doesn’t mind having two left ones! He presents a new arm from his wardrobe, which is filled with various robotic replacement parts. He’s rather excited!

Buffy tells him no. She would rather know why the Hell she’s a robot! Her voice gets louder, her fists now clenched. Andrew panics and tells her that Spike had asked him for help and Buffy turns to the vampire, who raises his arms in defiance. “I bloody well didn’t! No interest in going down the tin-Slayer road again!” he yells, clearly mortified! Andrew is horrified by the images, but tells him that it wasn’t anything like that! When Spike told him that someone was after Buffy, he came to Andrew for help in tracking them down. He tried, he explains, but he’s not very James Bond-y.

That’s when he came up with another idea to keep Buffy safe at the party: he laced her drink until she passed out! That’s how she ended up in her bedroom with Spike…

The night of the party, a few months ago. Buffy is drunk and being escorted to her room by Spike, who’s finding the whole situation quite funny. Buffy is trying to explain what she’s just been doing, but Spike tells her he saw: she was in the pool with Andrew. Buffy is delighted at the mention of Andrew’s name, telling Spike that he gave her a drink. Spike explains that Andrew wasn’t the only one, and struggles, valiantly, to open Buffy’s bedroom door and stop her from falling at the same time.

She clumsily starts to get undressed, but before she can do more than remove her top, she passes out unconscious on the bed, much to Spike’s amusement. He lifts her blanket to cover her and whispers in her ear. “You’re a God-awful mess Slayer, in more ways than one, but may you feel no pain till morn. What you get then, you’ve no one to blame but yourself.”

In the present, Andrew finishes the story. Spike says that when it’s explained like that it sounds awful, but Buffy tells him to shush. It turns out, he explains, that Andrew was across the hall, but technically, the Buffy with him now didn’t pass out, the real Buffy did. Andrew explains what happened next:

He and the BuffyBot slipped into Buffy’s room undetected. The Bot changed her clothes with Buffy and took her place in the Slayer’s bed. He attached a device with two helmets, one to Buffy and the other to the BuffyBot. He told the robot that when she woke in the morning, she would have all of Buffy’s knowledge and all of her memories. She’d continue living Buffy’s life until the assassin struck and Spike could take him out.

In the now, Buffy concludes that she’s not, therefore, the real Slayer, the real Buffy Summers. Andrew says that as far as her brain patterns are concerned she is Buffy, in thought, if not in body. He begins to explain using more science-fiction examples, but Buffy stops listening, taking in the revelation. As Andrew keeps babbling, Spike grabs a hold of him and stops him talking, yelling in Andrew’s face. “You have any idea what you put her through?” He clenches his fist and Andrew ducks behind something, terrified. “I wanted to help! I wanted to keep Buffy safe!” Buffy says that telling her the plan would have done that!

Andrew sighs. “What good is witness protection if anyone knows, even you two?” He turns to Buffy and reassures her that everything she’s feeling is real. He may have used Warren’s ideas, but here he is, fighting the good fight. “It’s how I earned my way into the Scooby Gang!” he says.

“No, Andrew. This is how you screw it up!” she yells back. Spike explains that the danger faced by the Siphon is gone, so there’s no need for the Bot anymore. Buffy turns back to Andrew and asks him one last time: “Where is my body?”

Somewhere, out in Suburbia, on a quiet, normal, everyday street, a car pulls up. A woman, young, blonde, gets out of the vehicle and walks into the house she’s parked outside. She puts her keys down and begins her chores: the laundry, the washing, the gardening, the cooking… She looks out of her kitchen window into the afternoon sunshine. She’s making something, whisking an egg into a bowl with some flour. As she continues looking out of the window, she stirs more vigorously with her wooden spoon until, suddenly, it snaps in her hand. She pulls the handle out. It now resembles a stake and the woman holding it looks identical to Buffy Summers.

In Spike’s ship, Buffy is looking out of the porthole as they continue onto their destination. She’s crying. Spike walks in behind her and says hello, but she begs him to say something, anything to make her forget today. She’s upset. She thought, for once, she was dealing with something normal, something that everyday people have to deal with. Like a normal girl. And she was handling it, like an adult, making proper choices! But again, she denounces, it turns into more Slayer crap!

“I’m a robot with one arm. A walking, talking slot machine. But as fake as my problems were, you know what was real?” She turns to Spike, thoughtfully. “You. You showing up when I needed someone.” She smiles, placing her hand on his shoulder. “Thanks,” he tells her, placing his hand over hers.

Elsewhere onboard, Andrew is desperately trying to explain cloaking technology to one of the cockroaches, delighted to be back aboard the ship. When he asks one bug to activate the device, the cockroach tells him that he has no idea what Andrew is on about. Before Andrew can once again explain, Spike comes raging into the cockpit, knocking Andrew against a wall. His vampire features are out and he’s growling in anger.

“If I wasn’t possessed of such a rational nature, I could succumb to a fit of rage. Pitch you off this ant trap, for the baby scare if nothing else. Any idea what that was like for her? If you don’t fix this, you and I will have problems  with one decisive solution,” he warns Andrew, coldly.

In San Francisco, in the apartment of Xander Harris and Dawn Summers, Xander calls from the bathroom to Dawn, asking if she could fetch his eye patch. When she doesn’t answer immediately, he gets concerned and unexpectedly slams his fist into the wall, shattering one of the tiles. As Dawn walks in, she tells him to calm down and Xander apologises. He didn’t know where she was and he panicked slightly. A ring at the door interrupts the conversation before he can get into more detail.

When Dawn opens the door, she’s surprised to find Detective Dowling outside, leaning against the wall. She asks if he can smell gasoline, but it turns out it’s Dowling’s breath. He’s drunk, stumbling everywhere and he walks into the apartment slurring his words. He explains what happened with his unit and his partner earlier that evening. He tells them that his partner was used like a blood bag. He struggles to stay standing, asking them how they deal with all of this? “The way she looked, the way they drained her blood…”

Dawn interrupts him: “They drained her? They didn’t just kill her?” Dowling reacts with horror. “Just?” He explains that her veins were empty, but she had blood all over her face and, oddly, inside her stomach. Xander and Dawn look at each other and realise what comes next.

In the morgue, the coroner is about to leave for the evening. He doesn’t hear Miranda Cheung rise from her slab. Doesn’t see her lift the sheet back. He only feels her claws rip out his throat before he can register anything.

On the ship, Andrew is conducting his own ‘Captain’s Log,’ when Buffy enters the cockpit. Andrew announces that he has connecting the ships sensor’s to the real Buffy’s safehouse. Buffy looks onto the viewer and sees the Buffy baking in her kitchen. She continues to watch and begins to smile. She turns to Andrew: “My kitchen is awesome!” Andrew agrees, showing her the schematic for the home entertainment system! Spike asks her if this was what she had in mind when she suggested they run away?

Before she can go into more detail, an alarm starts blaring around the cockpit, red lights flashing. Buffy asks what’s going on, and Andrew tells her that a silent alarm he placed in Buffy’s home has just been triggered. Spike increases their speed to suburbia.

In her home, Buffy pulls her food from the oven, apron neatly tied around her waist. She picks up a glass of red wine and takes a sip. Suddenly, to her left, an intruder appears, wearing a mask and brandishing a gun! “How the mighty have fallen,” the figure says to Buffy. The wine glass falls to the floor and shatters, spilling the wine. The intruder whacks Buffy across the head with their weapon, knocking her unconscious and throwing her into the trunk of a car.