At first, my brain refuses to process what I’m seeing. It looks wrong. The layers of tissue, the muscle fibers, everything looks normal at first glance. Pink and red and glistening, the way flesh is supposed to look.
But underneath…
Underneath there are wires.
Thin, delicate filaments running through the muscle like veins, glinting silver under the surgical lights. And deeper still, where bone should be?—
“That’s not bone,” I hear myself say. My voice sounds far away, like it’s coming from someone else. What the fuck is happening?
“No,” James agrees quietly. “No, it’s not.”
He probes deeper with his instruments, and I watch him expose something that looks like bone but isn’t. The color is too uniform, too metallic. And the texture, when he scrapes it with a tool, produces a sound that no human bone should make, making me shudder all over, a wave of nausea rolling through me.
“What the fuck,” I whisper.
“It’s an alloy of some kind. Incredibly sophisticated.” James is in full scientist mode now, his horror giving way to clinical fascination. “The muscle tissue appears organic, but these filaments—they’re integrated throughout. Like a neural network made of wire.”
“I don’t understand.” My heart is pounding against my ribs, pins and needles surging over my skin. “What are you saying?”
James finally looks up at me. His eyes are sad behind his glasses, and when he speaks, his voice is gentle.
“Nate, your body is synthetic.”
I stare at him, trying to find a way to process. “But I know that. I know they’ve reinforced my bones, they’ve added stuff to my body to make it better.”
“I don’t think you understand,” he says. “Your body is entirely synthetic. I can tell your heart is racing right now but…you don’t have a heart. At least not an organic one. Your body has been made from scratch in a lab.”
The words don’t make sense. They rattle around in my skull like loose change, refusing to settle into meaning.
“That’s not—that’s impossible. I bleed. I breathe. I feel pain, I?—”
For fuck’s sake, Iejaculate. I’ve come more times than I can count.
“You feel what you’re designed to feel.” James sets down his instruments. “And they’ve given you everything you need to keep believing that you’re a human. But your body is synthetic. Engineered to be indistinguishable from human tissue on the surface, but underneath…well, you’re something else entirely. Something manufactured, care of Global Dynamix.”
“No.” I’m shaking my head, pulling my arm away from him, not caring about the incision still gaping open. “No, that’s not right. I have memories. My parents, they weren’t made up, why would anyone make that childhood up? My sister, Emma. I had a sister. She was real. I had a life. I was in the army, I?—”
“Nate.” Mia’s voice cuts through my spiral. She’s moved around the table, her hands on my shoulders, her face close to mine. “Nate, listen to me. Breathe.”
“I can’t—I don’t?—”
“Breathe.”
I breathe. In and out. In and out. The air fills my lungs—my fake lungs, my manufactured lungs—and I want to scream. I bet I don’t even need to breathe at all. They always told me I couldhold my breath for ten minutes and I never pushed it past that, never tried, just accepted. I bet I could hold my breath forever…
No, no, this isn’t happening. This is all a mistake. Maybe they fixed your body too much, but you’re still you. You’re still human.
“The consciousness transfer,” Mia says, looking at her father. “Project Prometheus. Is that what this is? Did they—did they somehow take his consciousness and put it—him—in a synthetic body?”
She saiditbefore she saidhim…
“It would appear so.” James is watching me with that same sad expression. “The technology is decades beyond anything I’ve seen, but the principle is sound. Transfer a human consciousness into an artificial vessel. Preserve the memories, the personality, the sense of self, while replacing the biological components with something more durable.”
“More controllable,” I say, and my voice sounds dead even to my own ears. “That’s what Julia always said. That I was hers. That she made me.” I look at them. “She meant every word, it wasn’t hyperbole. I was hers, because I belonged to Global Dynamix, because I belong to a company. She made me as a…as a fuckingproduct.”
“She didn’t make you. She made…this.” James gestures at my body. “The vessel that was designed to be exactly the same as your previous body, your real one. And whoever you were before, whoever Nate Whitaker was—those memories are real. That person existed.”
“Existed.” I laugh, and it comes out broken. “Past tense.”
