The designation was . The doctors called her Reika . She was twelve years old.
At school, the teachers praised her. “Reika-chan is so calm now.” “Reika-chan never disrupts class.” “Such a mature young lady.”
The reflection stared back. Perfect skin. Rain-colored eyes. Twelve years old, and already a relic.
Her mother, Ayumi, cried when she saw the results. “She’s cured,” she whispered into her phone, voice cracking with joy. “She’s normal.” Mdg 115 Reika 12
But Reika remembered.
The bullies, sensing no prey, left her alone. You cannot hurt a girl who no longer flinches. You cannot make her cry because the machinery for tears had been repurposed into cellular repair protocols.
In the glossy brochures pinned to the waiting room walls, “MDG” stood for Mono-Dermal Genesis . It sounded like poetry, or the name of a new shade of lipstick. In reality, it was the slow, quiet calcification of a soul. The designation was
And survival, Reika realized, staring at her reflection in the dark window of her bedroom, is not the same as living.
Not the pain—they had erased that with happy-light sedation and a rainbow-flavored gas. She remembered the sensation of being taken apart. A feeling like a thousand cold fingers pulling at the threads of a sweater she hadn’t known she was wearing. When she woke up, her body was a stranger’s house, and she was a guest who had forgotten the way to the bathroom.
She became a ghost in a perfect body.
One night, she found an old photograph. She was four, face smeared with chocolate, screaming with laughter as her father held her upside down. She stared at it for a long time. She understood the concept of happiness . She could define it, diagram it, write a three-page essay on its neurochemical basis. But the feeling itself was like trying to remember a dream that had never been hers.
She lifted her hand to the glass. The reflection did the same. She watched her lips move, forming words she didn't say aloud.
She tried to fake it. For her mother. For the doctors who checked in every three months, beaming at their miracle. She learned to smile at the correct times. To narrow her eyes in mock concentration. To sigh with a theatrical weariness that made her friends—her simulated friends—laugh. At school, the teachers praised her
It worked. No one noticed.
They had fixed the broken chromosome—the one that would have turned her muscles to stone by age ten. They had spliced in the corrective sequence, flushed her little body with nanites that rebuilt her from the inside out. The MDG-115 procedure was a success. The first of its kind.