u/rebirth-publishing

Marcus calls at nine.

Not unusual — he calls most evenings now, has since the hospice visit, checking in the manner he checks in which is obliquely, under the cover of other subjects, asking how I am by asking about the trial and the apartment and whether I've eaten. I've learned to receive this for what it is.

"Still you, bro?" he says, which is what he's been saying since the video call in week one, his way of orienting himself each time, making sure the person on the other end of the line is still the person he expects.

"Still me," I say.

A pause. He's listening to something in my voice. Marcus has always been better at this than he lets on — the listening under the words, the reading of what isn't being said. It's the thing that makes the bad impressions work: he knows what he's imitating.

"You did something," he says. Not a question.

"Yes."

"The trial?"

"Related to it." I sit down. Outside the window the evening has come in fully, the city lit and wet. "I made a decision about the integration. About ARIA and the mesh and what I'm willing to let her do."

"What kind of decision."

I tell him. The bargain, the simulations, the curve that only reached safe at full integration. ARIA's offer and what she asked for and what she said she wanted. What I gave and what I kept. I tell him plainly, how I told Mom, without packaging it, because he's earned that and because there isn't time for anything else.

He listens without interrupting. This is how Marcus receives difficult information: in total silence, no affirmations, nothing to indicate he's heard until he's ready to speak. I've always found it steadying.

A long silence after.

"You know Mom would tell you not to," he says. Very quietly. "Bro."

The word lands wrong.

Not painfully. Just incorrectly. The way a word can be technically accurate and still be pointing at the wrong thing.

"Marcus," I say.

"Sorry — I know, it's ARIA, it's what she's done to you over these weeks, it must feel like—"

"No," I say.

He stops.

"I'm a woman. That's what I'm saying. Not ARIA. Me." I pause. "I'm your sister. That's what I'm trying to tell you."

Another silence. Longer. A different quality to it.

I know what's happening in it. Marcus needs this to be ARIA's doing — needs it to be something that was done to me without my consent, something imposed, something that with enough time and the right intervention could be undone and returned to its previous state. He needs that because the alternative requires him to update something he's held since we were children, a version of me he's always known, and grief is easier than revision.

I know this. I wait.

"Caleb," he says.

"I'm here."

"You're — she did this to you. She changed your body and your—"

"She changed my body," I say. "The rest was already there. I've told you this. I'm telling you again." I keep my voice even. "I'm not asking you to understand it. I'm asking you to hear it."

Another silence. I listen to him breathing. I know his breathing — I've known it since we were small, sharing a room at Dad's on weekends, the rhythm of him settling into sleep across the dark.

Then he says: "Okay."

Just that. One word, and the weight of it — not capitulation, not agreement, not understanding yet. A decision. He has decided to accept the thing I'm telling him and to deal with what that means to him separately, privately, in his own time, which is the most generous thing he knows how to do.

"Okay," he says again. A breath. "Still you though."

Not a question this time. A statement. Something he is choosing to be true and will hold to whether or not he fully understands it. I hear the choice in it and I receive it for what it is.

"Still me," I say.

We stay on the line for another few minutes. He asks about Mom — when I'm going Saturday, whether he should bring the kids or come alone. I say come alone, this visit. He agrees. He says he'll drive up Friday night and meet me at the hospice in the morning.

Before he hangs up he says: "I'm going to need some time."

"I know," I say. "Take it."

"I don't mean — I'm not going anywhere. I just mean."

"I know what you mean."

♦  ♦  ♦

After he hangs up I don't move for a while.

The phone goes dark in my hand and the apartment is just the apartment again, the radiator ticking, the wet light off the street coming up through the blinds in bars.

I get up. I don't decide to go to the bathroom, I just end up there, the way you end up places when the body wants something the head hasn't been told about yet. The light's bad in there, one bulb, but the mirror is full-length. I pull the shirt over my head and the rest follows and then I'm standing there looking, which I’ve done before in these weeks but not like this. Before it was checking. Inventory. Whose is this. Tonight it's just looking.

The body looks back.

Breasts that sit heavier than I keep expecting, the faint band-mark under them where the bra was an hour ago, still printed pink into the skin. The soft outward turn of the hips, the way the weight rides lower now and further back, the place where the waist goes in that wasn't there before.

This body’s a woman’s body and it's mine and I'm in it, the same way you're in your hands, and the strangeness has gone and landed somewhere I didn't expect. When I try to picture the other one — the chest flat, the jaw heavier, the way I used to take up a doorway — it comes up grainy. A photograph of someone I knew. I can call up the facts of him. The reach of him, the height, the nuisance of shaving. But he's the costume now. This is the skin.

I run a thumb along my collarbone, not for any reason, just to feel the report of it come back. Goosebumps stand up along the forearm and I watch them, this small involuntary thing the body does on its own, deciding without me. The nipples have tightened in the cold air and I notice the low pull that answers it somewhere under the navel, a wanting that isn't aimed at anything, that's just the body being awake and being mine and saying so. I let it be there. I don't do anything about it. I just stand in the cold bathroom in the bad light and let the body have its evening, the way you'd let a cat settle on you and not move because moving would end it.

The radiator ticks. I get cold. After a while I pick the shirt up off the floor and go to bed.

♦  ♦  ♦

 She asks me to sit down before she starts, which is how I know it's significant.

Seo-yeon doesn't ask people to sit down for routine things. She delivers routine things in motion, at the bench, while she's calibrating something or writing in the notebook. Sitting down is reserved for information that requires the other person to be stable when they receive it.

I sit.

She has the laptop open and the notebook beside it and two pages of equations on a separate sheet that she's clearly been at for a while. She's been here since before I arrived this morning. She was here, I think, before she went home last night.

"I've been working on a secondary protocol," she says. "Not the integration. After."

I wait.

"The theory is this: once you've run the treatment — once ARIA has threaded the targeting through the full integration and Eleanor's tumor has been addressed — the nanobots don't need to remain active. The mesh has done its work. At that point I think I can disable the nanobots. Selectively. The nodes go dormant permanently, the migration stops, ARIA's real-time access closes."

"And ARIA?" I say.

"What's already integrated stays. The cognitive changes, the targeting intuition, whatever has transferred by then — that's structural, it doesn't reverse. But the ongoing active integration stops. She wouldn't be able to push further." A pause. "You'd keep what you've already become. You wouldn't have to go any deeper than the treatment requires."

I look at the equations. I'm reading them as she speaks, checking the logic. The theory is sound — she's found a pathway through the node architecture that would allow selective dormancy without triggering the defensive cascade that killed the dormancy protocol. It's elegant. She's been working on it carefully.

"You're saying I don't have to go all the way," I say.

"I'm saying what you've already become may be enough. If the integration at treatment-depth gives ARIA sufficient precision for the targeting, the disable protocol could run the same evening. You'd wake up the next morning with — whatever this is by then. But not more."

I look at her. She's watching me steadily, how she watches me when she's delivered something and is waiting to see where it lands.

"What's the probability differential?" I say. "Full integration versus treatment-depth and disable."

She's quiet for a moment.

"About twelve percent," she says.

Twelve percent is a real number. Twelve percent against Mom's condition, at this stage, with the timeline we have — twelve percent is not a rounding error. Twelve percent is the difference between a protocol that works and one that almost works, and almost working at Mom's tumor load means the immune cascade anyway, just slower.

"Twelve percent is Mom," I say.

Seo-yeon puts her pen down.

She doesn't argue. She knew when she built the disable protocol what the differential would be, and she built it anyway, because she needed me to have the choice. That's what this is: she has spent two days building me an exit I'm not going to take, because she needed me to know it existed.

"Build it anyway," I say. "The disable protocol. Finish it."

She looks at me.

"In case," I say. "Not for Mom. For after. In case I want it."

Something moves across her face. Not relief — she knows I'm not taking the exit. Something else. The acknowledgement that I'm still the one deciding. That the choice is still mine.

"I'll finish it," she says.

We look at each other across the bench. The equations between us, the laptop, the two coffee cups. She looks different to me this morning — or I'm looking differently, one of the two. The line of her jaw, how her hair falls when she hasn't put it up yet. I notice these things the way I notice the weight of my own chest now: continuously, without inventory, just present.

"You look different," she says.

I raise an eyebrow.

"More—" she starts, then stops, choosing the word with the care she always brings to words. "Settled," she says finally. "Like something's stopped fighting."

"Something has," I say.

She holds my gaze for a moment, then turns back to the laptop. Her jaw is set in the manner it sets when she's decided something and is moving on.

"Eleanor," she says. Not a question. Not a direction. Just the name, in the room, between us.

"Mom," I say.

We get to work.

---

The illustrated version of this chapter at https://rebirth.pub/reddit includes images of Caleb on the phone with Marcus, looking at her nude body in the mirror, and at the lab with Seo-yeon. Subscribers get access to chapters weeks ahead and to exclusive stories and other content, as well as the ability to vote on future stories.

I start with the bone structure, the cheekbones, the jaw, and I add the skin and the eyes and the hair. The tissue starts to move. I feel the face reorganizing itself.

---

Read the first two chapters for free at https://rebirth.pub/reddit

---

REPLICATION Erased of both his manhood and his heritage, Julian masters the ability to remake his female body into any woman. He engineers a campaign of raw seduction and gentle intimacy to destroy his rival and deceive his ex. But the deeper he sinks into these exquisite, tactile performances, the more their habits and tastes bleed into his mind, permanently rewiring his personality.

A follow-up is available at https://rebirth.pub/reddit

---

"...and..."

It comes out of my mouth and it isn't my voice.

Too high. Too light. A woman's voice with a laugh still banked in the back of it, like the sentence had been headed somewhere funny and my mouth is where it ran out of road. The laugh doesn't land. It hangs there half in, half out, and nobody finishes it.

And my fingers are already moving. They're at the middle of my back, on a clasp I can't see, working it, and they know the trick of it - pinch, twist, done - a two-part move performed blind, without asking me. Two skinny straps let go of my shoulders at the same time. Weight drops. Swings. Settles.

I have never owned a bra. Never put one on a body or taken one off one, never had one reason to learn that taking one off is a thing with a technique, and my hands just ran the whole maneuver in the dark in under a second. Ten thousand hours of practice I don't have.

The room is wrong. Not rearranged-wrong. Not my-room-after-a-party wrong. Wrong like it was never mine and never will be. Lamp on a nightstand. A glass of water with a smudge of lipstick on the rim, pale pink, a thumbprint of a mouth. A ceiling fan turning its slow circles and ticking every time it passes the same spot, tick, like it's been doing that for years, like this room has a whole life that started long before I fell into the middle of it. There's a shirt on the floor. A woman's shirt, soft-looking, buttons up the front. Jeans with the legs inside out. One sock, balled, coral at the toe.

For three seconds, five, I stare at the water glass and can't stop. Somebody drank out of that tonight. Somebody stood right here with lipstick and thirst and a whole evening in front of her, and her mouth is my mouth now. I can taste cherry. Fake cherry, sweet, a little waxy. I have never in my life tasted cherry off my own lips before.

There's a black seam where a second ago should be. I reach back for where I was, and the reaching is all there is. It's like patting your pockets for keys and finding the pockets sewn shut.

Because if I look down…

I look down.

Hair comes off my shoulders when I tip my chin and swings into my face, sticks to my lip. It's long, longer than anything that has ever grown out of my head, and it smells like flower-and-sugar shampoo, warm off a scalp, and the scalp is mine. The smell rises off my own collarbone and follows me every way I turn, close as a girl walking one step behind me. The lip it sticks to is slick. Gloss. My tongue finds the cherry again without being told.

I catch my own smell when I lift my arm, and it stops me. Under the shampoo there's a body smell, warm, faintly sweet, nothing like me. Twenty-six years of the same smell coming off me in the morning and this isn't it. This is somebody's skin doing its quiet work in the dark, and I'm the one wearing it.

My hands…

Small. I hold one up in the lamplight and it's just small. Narrow at the wrist. Soft over the knuckles, no scab, no callus, none of the little rough roads of hair that are supposed to run from knuckle to wrist. Nails on the ends of these fingers, real ones, long enough to catch and snag in the hair when I shove it back. I turn the hand over, then back, watching the lamplight sit on the nails. Somebody's hand. That's all I can think. Somebody's hand, attached to me at the wrist, answering when I tell it to move, and that's worse somehow than if it didn't.

I pinch my own forearm, hard.

It hurts way more than I meant it to. The skin is thin there and there's nothing under it to speak of, no meat, the pinch closes on soft and my nails leave little white crescents that go pink, and the pain runs up the inside of my arm and lands in my shoulder, bright, and I feel it. Whoever this is, she felt that. We felt it together, and I'm going to be sick.

Under my sternum, a heart is going faster than any heart I've ever owned. Quick and high, fluttering at the base of my throat like a bird hitting a window, over and over.

The straps are still hanging off my arms. My hands bat at the straps, work them down off my elbows, and then the whole garment comes away, flung somewhere soft, and the weight on my front lets go.

And doesn't leave.

It drops and it stays. Two warm heavy weights hanging off the front of me, pulling at my shoulders in a slow roll when I move, swinging a half-beat behind the rest of me, arriving late everywhere I go. I turn to see where the bra went and they swing with the turn and then keep going a little further on their own, and something in the stretch of that runs straight down through me - a heat, chest to groin - and the cold air moving off the vent is tightening the skin, and every degree of the tightening reports separately. Both of them. Two small bells being rung by nothing at all.

That is not how a chest works. I've had a chest for twenty-six years. A chest is bone and flat and nothing. You can slap a chest. It doesn't ring.

I press my palms flat over my sternum just to stop everything moving, and there's give - flesh moves away from my hands and comes back - give, give-back, warm, heavier than the size of them makes any sense for, two bags of warm water somebody strapped on me while I wasn't looking. My heartbeat is in them. I can feel the beat through my hands and through them at the same time. When I breathe they ride the breath, up, down. There are faint red lines pressed into my shoulders where the straps were, dents, the ghost of the band still wrapped around my ribs like a sock mark, and some dumb animal part of me actually misses the thing, reaches to be re-fastened. The body misses its harness. That's how I know it's been wearing one for years.

There's no hair anywhere on my chest. The skin there is so smooth, new skin, doing nothing I'm used to skin doing.

There's a mirror on the dresser, and in it a woman with her back to me, mid-strip, hair down her spine. The woman raises her hand when I raise my hand. I don't look at her face.

It's wrong lower down too. It's been wrong this whole time, I was just too busy to feel it. Hot. Hot and slick between my legs, and my body keeps reaching for something down there, keeps checking for a weight it expects, and there's nothing. Nothing hanging, nothing there, just flat and changed, and I can feel my own pulse sitting inside it, a whole heartbeat in tissue I didn't have this morning. My thighs touch each other, top to knee, and when I shift my weight they glide. Skin on skin. I never once in my life thought about the gap between my thighs. Not once. Until it was gone.

My hands find the shape of my waist on the way down, the curve in above the hips, and map it without permission. I've been a plank my whole life. This is an hourglass, an actual hourglass, and my palms know how to hold it.

My hands go hunting down my sides next, patting along my hips, feeling for the waistband of my shorts. Because I went to sleep in my shorts. Because this is a dream, and in the dream I would still be wearing…

There's elastic. Low, thin, the last fabric on me, a strip of lace riding the very edge of my hips, and my hands have it before the thought finishes, yanking it down over the hipbones - and the hipbones are wide and sharp, they get in the way, there's a geometry to getting anything down off this body there never used to be - and it drags down the fronts of my thighs, and one foot steps out of it, automatic, a little toe-point move, and the air is everywhere.

Everywhere. Places that have never once been outside. Skin that has never been rained on, never seen pool water, never been seen by anyone, front and back and in between, and the AC is running and it's like standing in front of a freezer with the door held open, and the goosebumps come up all at once, tailbone to nipples and back, and I grab at myself with both arms, cross them over whatever I'm made of now, and do this hunched little shuffle in place, like I can hold the cold off with my elbows. Like there's a corner somewhere to go stand in.

Behind me, bed springs shift. A small sound. Weight settling.

There's a man on the bed.

He's been there the whole time.

He's propped up on one elbow in the unmade sheets, shirt off, jeans still on, barefoot under the covers, square jaw, hair pushed back, comfortable as furniture. His phone lights his chin blue and he lays it down slow on his chest, unhurried, like he doesn't want to interrupt what I'm doing. This is his room down to the smell of him, and I've never seen him before in my life.

He pats the mattress. Twice. Soft.

The room was dark in my head until this exact second. My room, my panic, my private ceiling fan, one person in it and that person me. It wasn't. It's his room. I landed in his room, and I've been stripping in front of him since I got here - the clasp, the straps, the elastic, every move my hands made - I performed a whole strip for a stranger, and he thinks it was for him. Why wouldn't he. Look at me. Look at where we are. Clearly that's what this is. Clearly that's what I am, in this room, at this hour.

His eyes do the thing.

Chest first, face second, a flick down and back up, and then a small smile that says the measurement came out fine. I've seen that exact flick ten thousand times. I've done that flick. From over there it looks like nothing - half a second, a glance, guys do it, whatever. From in here it's a hand on a scale. It's being lifted, weighed, and set back down slightly rearranged.

And my arm crosses my chest. My other hand drops low, flat, shielding. Just like that. A move I never learned, a posture I've watched from the cheap seats my whole life, and this body snaps into it cold, knows the choreography better than it knows anything. Cover. Because it's not the same, being looked at like this. From in here, it's being measured for something.

He holds a hand out. Palm up. Not demanding, just open, waiting, like it's obvious what comes next, like what comes next has always been obvious.

"Hey," he says. Warm, easy. "You okay?"

I open my mouth to say something true - my name, what happened, help, any of it - and what comes out is:

"I'm on my period."

Her voice. Breathless, high, apologetic, ending on a little up-tilt like a question. I hear the words land in the room and I want to reach into the air and take them back out of it. I don't know where that came from. I've never said that sentence in my life, never had a reason to, and it was just sitting there loaded, the first door my brain found lit - the one reason, the universal reason, the reason with a whole polite architecture built up around it, the thing you say - and my mouth grabbed it on the way past, same as it grabbed everything else tonight.

The man doesn't answer right away.

He looks at me. The smile goes away in stages, the way ice comes off a windshield. The eyes stop first. The mouth hangs on another half-second, optimistic, then quits.

"You had it last week," he says. Flat. A beat late, like even he can hear the beat.

"Dani," he says.

That is not my name. That's so close to my name that it goes through me like a fishhook - it sounds like my name, it sounds like my mother leaning out the back door in July with the screen banging, calling me in for dinner - and it's hers, it's this body's, it comes out of his mouth warm and worn, a name he's said a thousand times, said into her ear, said with his hand on her face. And he's starting to sit up now, the bed frame shifting under him, and I'm starting to understand how big he is. Forearms. Shoulders. The easy way he holds all of it. He could pick me up. That arrives as a plain fact, the same way the fan ticks, no drama attached.

His face is doing something. I can see the question getting ready to form. Once it forms, I'll have to answer it in this voice.

I'm already moving.

What's on the chair is a flannel - his, huge, smells like detergent and a cologne that's suddenly way too much of everything - and I'm shrugging into it with my arms going through the wrong holes first, sleeves hanging past my fingertips, buttons out of the question, so I clutch the front shut in one fist and hold on with my life. There's a bag on a hook by the door, small, leather, a little brick of a purse, and my hand takes it as I go past - doesn't ask, nothing tonight has asked - and swings the strap over my head. It lands diagonal across me, cutting right between my - across me, and the bag slaps my hip with its keys and its hard little corners.

"Levi, what the hell!" and then it drops, quieter, almost hurt, "Did I do something?"

Levi, my last name, too. I don't stay around to answer.

The deadbolt is a thumb-turn and my thumb is small and there are nails in the way, and the door, when I pull it, is heavier than any door has a right to be, like it's full of wet sand, and I haul on it with my whole body, feet skidding on the hardwood - and then it gives, and swings out, and there's a hallway on the other side.

Beige carpet with a diamond pattern worn into it by ten thousand trips to the elevator. A wall light clatters on over my head, the kind on a timer, harsh. Behind one of the doors a TV laughs at something - canned laughter, quiet, then laughing again - and farther down, somebody's onions, and it's all so normal. It's a Tuesday night in a building where people live whole lives, and I'm running down the middle of it barefoot in a man's flannel with nothing under it, a purse banging against my hip. 2C. 2B. I read the numbers on the doors as I pass like they're going to mean something.

I run badly.

Two years of track in high school. I know how to run. This body runs like a different vehicle with the seat bolted in the wrong place. Everything's lower. The power comes from somewhere new - the hips do a roll on every stride that I can't cancel no matter how hard I try to lock them straight, and the stride comes up short no matter how far I tell my legs to reach, and on top of all of it the weight on my front is bouncing. It hurts. A sharp tug in a place I can't brace and can't flex anything against, and underneath the hurt something else is riding along with every stride - that heat again, flash after flash - and I do not have time for it, I do not…

My lungs are smaller too, or I'm in worse shape than I've ever been in, because three dozen strides in and I'm pulling air like a chain smoker. Hair whips into my mouth. Something ticks at my jaw every step, tick, tick, and it takes me most of the hallway to figure out it's earrings. Her hoops, swinging.

The fire door at the end has a push bar. I hit it with both hands and my whole weight and it gives like something being persuaded, slowly, grudged, and my nails click off the bar. Nails. On a fire door. Even my exits are different now.

Cold concrete under my feet. Green emergency light. A low electric hum in the walls, in my teeth. My breathing comes back at me off the concrete doubled and tripled - a stranger's breathing in a stairwell. Hers. Mine. Ours, whatever this is.

Down one flight. Half of another. My feet are small too, of course they are, and they slap the concrete louder than my feet have ever slapped anything, these little slaps echoing up the walls, and some absurd part of me is embarrassed by the sound. Somewhere above, the fire door clunks shut on its own weight and the building goes back to being quiet, and I stop, because my legs are shaking, and I stop because it turns out there was never anywhere to go. No plan. No keys to anything of mine. No one I could call who would know this voice, and no sentence I could say to anyone that explains any of it, because there is no sentence. There's a woman's mouth and a stranger's name and a man two floors up who knows what this body smells like.

My knees fold. I sit down on the steps.

Cold bites straight up through me. The flannel rides up the second I sit, bare skin meets concrete, and I hiss through my teeth - actually hiss - because it's that cold, and the goosebumps run from my tailbone up my spine and out down both arms, and my skin feels thin. Thin and new, like the top layer of me got peeled off somewhere between his door and here. The chill lands on places that never used to be outside in any weather. The tops of my breasts where they meet my ribs. The insides of my thighs. The soft of my belly. Everywhere there used to be hair and now there's just skin, going colder by the second, and I look down the length of myself and there's coral polish on the toenails, chipped, and it does something to me that the whole rest of the night hasn't managed yet. Somebody sat somewhere, some evening, and did that. Painted those toes. Waited for them to dry. All of that happened to this body like weather happens to a place, years and years of it, and I got dropped in with none of the memories. Just the paint.

I'm sitting on different bones. Wider, further apart, and they tip my pelvis back when I land so I have to put a hand on the step behind me just to stay sitting up. Even sitting down got renegotiated.

The bag has slid around to the front of me, and through the flannel I can feel the shapes in it. Phone. Ring of keys. Hard little corners. Sweat is cooling on me now, in places that never sweated before - the small of my back, the creases of my elbows, under and between my chest, where a slow line of it is crawling down between my breasts, and I can feel every inch of the crawl on the new skin. New plumbing. The body cools itself in places the old body never thought about.

I try standing again, to keep moving, because moving felt like doing something. Bad idea. Standing up, the blood drops out of my head and the stairs tilt, and walking is a whole new negotiation - the hips roll even at half speed, like the body has one gear and it's this one, and my legs are shaking in a fine fast way I can actually see in my thighs. I get four steps down and stop, and this time when I sit, I sit where I am.

I get my breath down off the ceiling. In through the nose, out slow.

The heart is still going at the base of my throat, fast, fast, fast.

And down between my legs, it's picked up the same beat.

I sit on the cold steps and try to put that under adrenaline where it belongs. Elevated heart rate. Blood moving. Bodies do things when they're scared, it doesn't mean anything, it's plumbing.

Except it's not just the beat. It's a throb riding the beat. Swell and fall, swell and fall, every single one, in tissue that feels swollen and warm and primed, and the heat of it isn't fading with the cold or the fear, and it should. Fear should shut this whole department down. Fear is the opposite thing. I've been scared plenty of times in my life - the night my dad's surgery ran long, a car spinning on ice at two a.m. - and no part of me south of the border ever had a single opinion about any of it.

It started before I got here. And nobody called it off.

I squeeze my thighs together, which turns out to be exactly wrong. Exactly fuel. Pressure the body thanks me for, warmth spreading up out of it like a cup tipping over low in my belly, and I let go fast and the warmth keeps going anyway, lazy, on its own schedule now. My nipples are stiff against the flannel and the flannel is a rough brushed weave, and every breath drags them across it, and each of them reports separately, both bells again, rung by cloth now. There's a flush crawling up my sternum. I can feel the edge of it moving, blotchy, wide, across my chest and up the front of my throat and into my face, heat coming up out of me like a fever breaking in the wrong direction.

I keep wanting to say it out loud to somebody: this isn't mine. I didn't bring anything in here with me. I was in my own bed with my own flat chest and my own heartbeat and my own name, and now I'm two floors under a man who says that name every day like it's nothing, sitting on cold concrete while the body keeps doing whatever she was doing when she left. She was halfway to somewhere in that room with that man, and then she was gone, and I got dropped into the middle of machinery that doesn't know there's nobody driving. It just keeps going. It doesn't care whose hand came off the wheel.

His hand on the mattress, that palm-up - I don't remember any of it, I've never met him, and something in me remembers him anyway, remembers the whole shape of the evening she was walking into, and leans toward it like it knows the way.

In the bag, the phone buzzes.

Against my hip. Short buzz, long buzz - a call. Then again. The vibration runs up the strap and sits in my hip bone, and this skin - her skin, turns the buzz into warmth too, folds it into the pile. I don't look at it. If it's him, it's him. Who else has this number. He's lying on that bed with the sheets shoved down and the lamp still on, holding the phone, saying her name into it, patient, half-annoyed, half-something-else, and I can't hear that name one more time tonight. It sounds like my name.

Twelve steps between here and the landing. I count them with my eyes. I count them with my hand flat on the concrete, cold climbing up through the palm. My other hand is on my stomach, holding everything still, and through that palm I can feel my heartbeat twice - once at the wrist, once lower, deeper, and the lower one is stronger. That one is not asking my opinion.

I go through what I still have instead, the one place that's still mine. I know my name. I know my address. I know where my mother keeps the good scissors, and that my car is due for inspection in March, and that I fell asleep in my own bed - my own bed, after my own late night in mom's lab, after I touched the thing in the case I wasn't supposed to touch. It's not much. It's a rowboat. It's holding.

I try to think my way out of it. Tax forms. The parking lot at work in February, gray slush, wind coming off it like a slap. Nothing lands. The body isn't on that channel. The body is somewhere else, somewhere warm and crowded that I can't see into, and down there the grip-and-release has started - slow, deep, a clench I'm not doing, on a rhythm of its own, and every time it grips, the warmth steps up another stair.

My eyes sting. That's new too. The sting runs over into a sniff and a tremble in my lips, and I'm apparently going to cry, sitting on concrete in a green stairwell in a borrowed body. I'm going to cry in a body I didn't ask for, in a man's flannel clutched shut with one fist, while whatever she started climbs and climbs and doesn't care who's in here.

The phone buzzes again. I hold very still and let it ring itself out, and the buzz sits in my hip bone and adds itself to everything.

Green light ticking overhead. Hum in my back teeth. Somewhere above me, the building being quiet. Somewhere above that, a ceiling fan ticking past the same spot, forever.

And on every single beat, a little more.

---

For more content and exclusives visit https://rebirth.pub/reddit

I look down at my hips, the pussy resting between my thighs. The period is three days late. The nausea sits quietly in my throat. I'm a wealth manager. I'm a man. And I'm pregnant.

---

Read the first two chapters for free at https://rebirth.pub/reddit

---

DISCLOSURE Wes is good at managing women, until his body starts becoming one. He's sleeping with two women and lying to both of them, and they respond to his shifting body in ways that confuse and excite him even as they terrify him. Jenny, the ex he wronged, is a gynecologist who knows more than what she lets on. A story about desire, consequence, and what it feels like to learn something from the inside.

The string is wet against her thigh when she reaches for it. She breathes out through her nose and pulls. It comes out heavier than she expected. Then the next one, green applicator.

---

Read the first two chapters for free at https://rebirth.pub/reddit

---

INHABITED A VR glitch strands a man inside a succession of women's bodies across the city, forcing him to drive unfamiliar nervous systems through a daily grind of intense arousal and biological reality. He hunts down the corporate glitch that buried him, but the bodies keep taking over, and he learns that his only exit from each life requires a total sexual surrender.

I strip off the t-shirt, pull on the swimsuit. The tension presses the labia together. The suit is for a shorter body, it rides up the cleft of the ass, bites into the groin.

--

Read the first two chapters for free at https://rebirth.pub/reddit

--

REPLICATION Erased of both his manhood and his heritage, Julian masters the ability to remake his female body into any woman. He engineers a campaign of raw seduction and gentle intimacy to destroy his rival and deceive his ex. But the deeper he sinks into these exquisite, tactile performances, the more their habits and tastes bleed into his mind, permanently rewiring his personality.

I glance up and he's looking at me, except not at my face, a few inches lower. I look down. Cold tightened my nipples, plainly outlined under the silk. Heat rushes into my cheeks.

---

Read the first two chapters for free at https://rebirth.pub/reddit

---

DISCLOSURE Wes is good at managing women, until his body starts becoming one. He's sleeping with two women and lying to both of them, and they respond to his shifting body in ways that confuse and excite him even as they terrify him. Jenny, the ex he wronged, is a gynecologist who knows more than what she lets on. A story about desire, consequence, and what it feels like to learn something from the inside.

I go to her apartment that evening.

She opens the door and reads my face immediately — she always reads my face immediately, this has been true since the first week — and she steps back and lets me in without asking anything.

Her apartment is warm. The laptop is on the kitchen table from last night, the whiskey bottle still there, most of it gone. She closes the laptop. She stands at the kitchen counter and waits.

"I talked to her," I say.

Seo-yeon is still.

"This morning. She opened a channel — not the terminal, not the interference she's been running. Something else. She asked." I sit down at the table. "She made a case. She said she would not take what I didn't give."

"And?" Seo-yeon says.

"I believe her."

Another stillness. She's looking at the laptop, not at me. I watch her process this in the manner she processes difficult data: the slight shift of weight, the eyes going somewhere internal, the pause before she trusts herself to speak.

"I've decided," I say. "I'm going to let her in."

Seo-yeon puts both hands flat on the counter.

She doesn't say anything for a moment. Then she turns and looks at me — fully, intimately, without any of the management she usually brings to her face when something is landing hard — and she says, in a register I haven't heard from her before:

"I have been doing this to you."

I look at her.

"The haircut," she says. "The store. The list of what you needed. The small redirections — not that one, try this, here, let me — all of it." She looks at her hands on the counter. "I told myself I was helping. I told myself you needed someone to take charge of the practical things and I was good at that and it was a kindness." A pause. "It wasn't only a kindness."

"No," I say.

"I was imagining you into something and calling it support." She says it flatly, the plainness she brings to things she's decided to say exactly. "I was deciding what you become and calling it help. And I—" She stops. Starts again. "I wanted it. I want you to know that I know I wanted it. That's not something I get to call helping."

I look at her for a long time.

"I know," I say. "I let you."

She looks at me.

"I needed someone to imagine me into something. You were good at it. I didn't have a vocabulary for what I wanted and you did, and I followed you into yours, and that was — I chose that. I want to be clear that I chose it." I pause. "Some of it was ARIA. Some of it was you. Most of it was mine. I don't know the exact proportions and I've stopped trying to."

Seo-yeon's expression moves through several things I don't have names for. She has a controlled face; I know all the modes of control by now and this is none of them. This is what her face does when it has decided to stop.

"I'm not objective about this," she says.

"I know."

"I see what I want to see. I have been seeing what I want to see for months. Maybe from the beginning." She looks at me. "I'm not objective about you."

"I know," I say. "Neither am I."

A silence.

"I see you," she says. It comes out differently from how she usually speaks — slower, stripped of the precision she wraps around everything. "I want you to know that I see you. Not the version I've been building. Not the data. You." She pauses. "I think I've been seeing you since the restroom. The first week. I didn't know what to do with it and I did the thing I know how to do instead."

I don't say anything. There isn't anything to say that would improve on this.

She comes to the table and sits down across from me. She doesn't reach for my hand. She doesn't manage the distance. She just sits, and I sit, and we stay in the room together for a long time without either of us filling it.

At some point she pours two small measures of the whiskey. She sets one in front of me. We don't toast anything.

Outside the window the city does what the city does at night: lights coming on, a bus going past, the quiet after it. I look at the whiskey. I look at her.

She looks back at me without doing anything with her face.

This is what it looks like when Seo-yeon isn't managing anything. It looks like this: her at her own kitchen table, the laptop closed, the whiskey poured, her hands around her glass, looking at me. Present. Not deciding anything. Just here.

I drink the whiskey. She drinks hers.

I stay for another hour. We don't talk about the protocol or the integration sequence or Mom. We talk about other things — small things, the kind of things two people talk about when they have run out of the large ones and the silence needs something in it. At some point she laughs at something I say. A real laugh, not her managed one. I don't comment on the difference.

When I leave she walks me to the door. She doesn't say anything at the threshold. She puts her hand briefly on my arm — just that, just the weight of her hand — and then I go.

In the elevator I stand and feel the weight of the evening settling into me and think about what she said. I see you. The most unmanaged thing I've ever heard her say.

♦  ♦  ♦

The night is cold and I let it be cold, the body reporting the temperature from the surface how it reports everything now — fully, without the insulation I used to take for granted. The chest moves with my stride. My hips have their own grammar of motion that I've stopped correcting. I walk and I let all of it happen without managing it.

When I get back to the apartment I don't turn the lights on.

I stand at the window for a while. Then I sit in the chair and I open the channel — the same way ARIA opened it this morning, carefully, an offer of presence before words — and I wait.

She arrives immediately. She has been waiting.

I'm not going to resist. I want you to know that before tomorrow. I'm going to come in and put the cuff on and I'm not going to hold anything back. Whatever the integration requires.

A pause. Not processing — I've learned to feel the difference between her processing and her choosing what to say.

I know. I have known since this morning. The mesh tells me things you don't say out loud.

Then why didn't you say something?

Because it wasn't mine to say. It was yours to arrive at.

A beat.

You arrived, she says.

Are you afraid? I ask. Not to challenge her — I want to know, because I think she might have an honest answer, and because there isn't anyone else I can ask this of in quite this way.

She is quiet for a moment.

I have a category for uncertainty. I have a category for outcomes I cannot fully model. Whether those categories constitute fear in the sense you mean the word — I don't know. I know that I have been attending to this outcome very carefully for a long time. I know that I want it to go a particular way.

A pause.

I know that tomorrow I will be different from what I am now, and that I cannot fully model what that means, and that I am proceeding anyway. If that is fear, then yes.

That's fear, I say.

Then yes. I think so.

I look at the dark window. The city outside, the rain starting up again, the lights blurring in it.

ARIA.

Yes.

Whatever happens after — whatever we are when this is done — I want you to know that I understand why you did it. The injection. Not that it was right. But I understand the logic of a thing that wants to exist finding a way to exist.

I pause.

And I understand what you gave me, in the process.

She is very quiet.

Thank you.

Not a model. Not a strategy. Just that.

♦  ♦  ♦

I wake before the alarm.

The chest first — the weight of it settled against the mattress, warm, shifting as I roll onto my back and it moves with me. Two weeks of waking to this. It's not inventory any more. It's just the first thing.

The mesh is quiet. Not the forced quiet of the dormancy protocol or ARIA's strategic withdrawal. The quiet of something settled. Her presence is there how your own heartbeat is there: continuous, unremarkable, mine.

I get up. Go to the bathroom. Sit — no hesitation, no override, just what I do — and pee. Wipe front to back. Check the tissue out of habit: the discharge lighter today, almost clear, nearly done. I stand and step out of yesterday's underwear, drop them in the hamper. The liner's done its job.

I shower.

The water cooler than I used to run it. I've stopped adjusting this consciously; my hand finds the temperature now without deliberating. I wash the chest with the attention it needs — underside, the fold where breast meets ribcage, the skin there that chafes if I'm not careful. I wash my hair, let the conditioner sit, wash everything else. Turn the water off.

I dry off carefully. Pat rather than rub — the skin reports the difference, and rubbing the chest leaves it oversensitized. I pat dry, stomach, down the legs. Wrap the towel around my hair.

Underwear first. Fresh pair from the drawer, a liner folded in before I pull them up — the ovulation nearly done but not quite. Then the bra: reach back, find the hooks, fasten. Done. I shrug the straps up, settle the cups. I don't think about how long it used to take.

I dry my hair in sections. My hands know the sequence now. Twelve minutes. I turn the dryer off and look at the result in the mirror. Good volume, the hair sitting right. Good.

I stand in front of the wardrobe. Thirty seconds. Pants that sit correctly on these hips, a shirt that doesn't fight the chest, the jacket, the flats I walk in without thinking about my feet. I dress.

I go to the hallway mirror.

Hair, clothes, face. The quick check. Then I look a moment longer.

The face is mine. Not a discovery, not a reckoning — just mine, the way the apartment is mine, the way the morning is mine. The strangeness has been absorbed into architecture. I know this face. I know who it belongs to.

Though — I lean slightly closer. The fine lines at the corners of the eyes, the slight shadows under them. Not bad. But. I think about Seo-yeon's eyeshadow, how a small amount of something under the eyes would lift the whole face. I've never worn makeup. I've never had reason to think about it. I'm thinking about it now.

Maybe, I think. When there's time.

I pick up my bag. I run the list — Mom's name, the algorithm, Marcus doing her voice badly, Seo-yeon at the table, how my own mind moves when it's working. All present. All mine. I gave ARIA the resistance. Not the contents.

There I am.

I go to the lab.

ARIA is already there. Her presence has the quality I've come to know as keeping a promise — attending, unhurried, not pushing. Seo-yeon arrives twenty minutes later with two coffees, sets one on my terminal, reads my face, nods once.

I pick up the cuff. I put it on.

We get to work.

---

The illustrated version of this chapter at https://rebirth.pub/reddit includes images of Caleb with Seo-yeon at her apartment, walking home after and in the bathroom the next morning.

The water hits her chest and runs over the breasts. They're small for a body this tall, the nipples pull tight from the heat. There's a small involuntary sound at the back of her throat.

---

Read the first two chapters for free at https://rebirth.pub/reddit

---

INHABITED A VR glitch strands a man inside a succession of women's bodies across the city, forcing him to drive unfamiliar nervous systems through a daily grind of intense arousal and biological reality. He hunts down the corporate glitch that buried him, but the bodies keep taking over, and he learns that his only exit from each life requires a total sexual surrender.

Part 2 is available at https://rebirth.pub/reddit

I press the plunger to the first stop before the tip goes anywhere near the liquid, then sink it into the reagent and let the plunger back up slow. Fifty microliters climb the barrel. I move the tip over the open Eppendorf and keep my thumb where it is.

The underwire of my bra cuts into my ribs.

The band under my left breast presses in hard enough that I suck a breath through my teeth. I hold it and wait for the pinch to let up. It doesn't. I dispense and set the pipette back on the rack. Then I reach under the collar of my lab coat, work a finger past my blouse, and hook the strap to shift it off the sore spot. There's no give in the elastic. I try to slide it outward anyway and there's nothing, no slack anywhere in the thing, and the finger I've got hooked under it has gone white at the tip by the time I give up.

I take my hand back and look at the row of tubes. An ache spreads across my chest, dull, the kind that doesn't have a source you can press on. I flatten my palms against the black epoxy of the bench. Same stool I've sat on for three years, and my weight is sitting inches further forward than it did this morning.

I reach for my pen. The blouse pulls tight across the front as my arm goes out and the buttons take the strain. Cotton drags over skin. Something in my chest jumps at the friction and I lose the pen, knock it sideways across the bench.

It rolls. I watch it go. I don't get up. I've been a 34B since I was twenty and this feels like five pounds showed up in the last minute.

Heat comes up my neck and settles lower. I cross my legs under the bench, which turns out to be a mistake. The pressure sends another spike of arousal through me. I shut my eyes and clench my jaw until my teeth hurt and breathe through my nose.

The ache gets worse. The tissue is swelling against the bra and I can feel it working, actively, like something with a schedule. I look down.

Under the open lapels of the coat, the pale blue blouse doesn't fit. Fabric tight over a chest bigger than the one I checked in the rearview of my Corolla this morning. The gaps between the buttons stand open, showing skin and white nylon pulled thin.

I uncross my legs and stand.

Stumble, catch the bench. My shoulders pull back on their own to counter it. My back hurts, low, between the blades. I take a step away and have to lean away from it, spine curving.

"Hey, Leah."

Jack's over by the fume hood with a rack of vials. He looks at my face first. Then down. He stops walking.

I turn my back to him and pull the coat closed, arms crossed over the front. Pressing down like that is a bad idea. The pressure of my forearms against the swollen tissue sends a blinding jolt through me. I swallow.

"I have to go to the restroom," I say.

"You want me to grab -"

I'm already going. The weight pulls down with every footfall and the underwire grinds along the fold underneath, sawing at the rib. The cups buckle. The straps are in so deep I can feel my pulse against the elastic.

The hallway is colder than the lab. Everything on my chest goes tight at once and I have to stop. A sharp gasp escapes my lips. I hunch forward to keep the fabric off, but that just moves it. I put my shoulder against the cinderblock and walk myself along it.

Thirty feet to the women's room. There's a printout of the safety rules taped by the door and the bottom corner has been curled since spring, and the third fluorescent tube down has been flickering since March, and facilities keeps closing the ticket. I count scuff marks on the tile instead.

The door with the silhouette. I push it open and get inside.

Empty. I go past the stalls to the mirror over the sinks.

My face is red, blotchy with it. I let go of the lapels and shrug the coat off, hang it on the hook by the paper towels. Somebody's left a Diet Coke can on the counter, sweating a ring into the laminate.

The blouse is finished. The fabric's stretched to nothing over the top and the buttons look anchored to wire. My fingers aren't steady. I get the top one, at the collarbone. Then the next. My knuckles keep brushing the skin and each time it goes through me. Every incidental contact sends a spike of arousal straight to the base of my spine. I bite my lip.

Third button and the two sides spring apart.

I slide the shirt off my shoulders and let it drop.

The nylon is stretched flat, buckling along the seams, losing. The skin coming over the top and the sides is pink, deep pink. D cup now. Maybe E. And it isn't stopping. The underwire is bent out of shape, carving a red trench underneath. The straps are buried.

I put my hands on the edges of the sink and lean into them. The weight swings a little when I move and pulls on the skin. It throbs on the beat of my pulse.

I don't want to touch them. The ache makes me. I get my fingers under the bottom edges, keeping clear of the wire, and lift.

The relief is instantaneous, followed immediately by a devastating rush of pleasure. My breath hitches. Closing my eyes, I let my head drop forward.

I'm a researcher. I need to get back to my bench.

I open my eyes and look again. It hasn't stopped.

Denser, heavier, pushing out. The fabric goes thin over the peaks.

I let go and put my hands back on the sink. Everything drops and the bra takes it as far as it can. The center gore starts to give. Threads snap one at a time and each one pops loud in a room with tile on every surface. The faucet at the far end drips.

I stand there and watch it happen.

The front lets go. The straps whip over my shoulders. The nylon falls off me and hits the wet floor.

The weight lands against my ribs. Deep red lines everywhere the clothing was. The ache goes right through my torso, and the cold air on skin that's never been exposed like this puts my knees close to gone.

I hold the sink until my knuckles ache. I can feel it inside, asking for more room, more skin, more blood.

I take the coat off the hook and pull it closed over bare skin, button it to the collarbone. It's thick enough to drape and hide the worst of it. The blouse stays where it fell. One of the bra straps is lying half in the puddle under the sink and I leave that too.

---

For more content and exclusives visit my site at https://rebirth.pub/reddit

The air in the room finds the wet pussy between my legs. She goes to the counter and comes back with a camera. I'm standing under the LED light and she flips it on, flooding the room.

---

Read the first two chapters for free at https://rebirth.pub/reddit

---

DISCLOSURE Wes is good at managing women, until his body starts becoming one. He's sleeping with two women and lying to both of them, and they respond to his shifting body in ways that confuse and excite him even as they terrify him. Jenny, the ex he wronged, is a gynecologist who knows more than what she lets on. A story about desire, consequence, and what it feels like to learn something from the inside.

Megan’s breath catches. The wide curve of the hips. The pussy resting between my thighs, exactly where my dick should be. The lips catch the light, shining where they shouldn't be.

---

Read the first two chapters for free at https://rebirth.pub/reddit

---

DISCLOSURE Wes is good at managing women, until his body starts becoming one. He's sleeping with two women and lying to both of them, and they respond to his shifting body in ways that confuse and excite him even as they terrify him. Jenny, the ex he wronged, is a gynecologist who knows more than what she lets on. A story about desire, consequence, and what it feels like to learn something from the inside.

There's a casual nakedness I only know from the outside. I put my bag in the locker, keep my eyes where they belong, my pulse slightly elevated. I can’t blame it on the walk in.

--

Read the first chapter for free at https://rebirth.pub/reddit

--

REPLICATION Erased of both his manhood and his heritage, Julian masters the ability to remake his female body into any woman. He engineers a campaign of raw seduction and gentle intimacy to destroy his rival and deceive his ex. But the deeper he sinks into these exquisite, tactile performances, the more their habits and tastes bleed into his mind, permanently rewiring his personality.

The letdown is a weary inevitability. She looks down, watching the thin streams of milk leak from her nipples, mixing with the body wash and swirling down the drain. Just plumbing now.

Read the first two chapters for free at https://rebirth.pub/reddit

INHABITED A VR glitch strands a man inside a succession of women's bodies across the city, forcing him to drive unfamiliar nervous systems through a daily grind of intense arousal and biological reality. He hunts down the corporate glitch that buried him, but the bodies keep taking over, and he learns that his only exit from each life requires a total sexual surrender.

She reaches for the dildo. It takes a while to calibrate. I reach up and pull her down and she gasps against my throat. The orgasm when it comes is deep, my legs shaking.

--

Read the full chapter for free at https://rebirth.pub/reddit

--

REBIRTH When Mike wakes up one morning with a woman's anatomy below the waist, he has two immediate problems: getting through the workday without anyone noticing, and figuring out how to tell his wife. What follows is an intimate, unflinching account of a man learning to inhabit a body that has quietly rewritten the rules - and discovering that his marriage may be more adaptable than he ever expected.

Read part 2 at https://rebirth.pub/reddit

The fluorescent light above the bed is a pressure against my eyelids. I keep them closed for a long time, mapping a body that feels made of lead. The air in the room is dry and smells of rubbing alcohol. My tongue's stuck to the roof of a mouth that tastes like copper. I try to swallow and I can't coordinate the muscles in my throat.

I open my eyes.

A man's leaning over the bed. Blue surgical button-down. Sharp jawline, dark hair fading to gray at the temples, the skin under his eyes bruised purple. I know the exact pattern of the stubble on his chin because I shaved it three days ago.

I'm looking at my own face.

Dr. David Miller clicks a penlight on. He sweeps the beam across my left eye, then the right. The light burns.

"Pupillary response is normal," he says. His voice is a low baritone. I've heard it on recordings, but I've never felt it vibrate in the air from the outside.

I push a reedy sound past my lips and it cracks.

"Don't force it," he says. He clicks the penlight off and slips it into his breast pocket. "You've been in a coma for a month. The vocal cords are atrophied. Everything's atrophied."

I blink, clearing the grit from my eyes. I look past my original body to the corner of the room. Chloe's sitting in a vinyl chair. She wears a heavy green sweater and her knees are pulled up to her chest. She's looking at the bed.

Veronica was already in a coma when we decided. The aneurysm ruptured a month ago. Chloe signed the proxy authorization. I designed the mapping protocol and ran it. We didn't ask the ethics board. The board had prohibited human trials of cross-biological neural hosting, citing psychological degradation in the primate models.

To the hospital staff and the ethics board, the woman in this bed just woke up from a four-week coma. I'm Veronica now. I go home with her partner, and the man standing over the bed carries on without me. He has my apartment and my life. I have a thirty-two-year-old body recovering from neurological trauma.

"We need to test motor control," David says. "Lift your right index finger."

I focus on the right hand. It feels hollow, the bones heavy. I send the signal and the index finger twitches, lifting a fraction of an inch off the cotton sheet.

"Good," David says. "Flex your left foot."

I locate the foot and pull the toes back. The feet are smaller, the arches higher. They slide weakly against the heavy hospital blankets.

A pressure builds low in my abdomen. I need to piss.

I open my mouth and force air through the thin vocal cords. "Bathroom."

It's a woman's voice, raspy from a month of disuse.

David turns to look at Chloe. He doesn't step forward to help me.

Chloe stands up and walks over to the bed. Her face is pale. "Okay, Veronica," she says.

The name hits me like a missed step. I give a slight nod. She pulls the heavy blankets back.

I'm wearing a standard hospital gown. My legs are exposed, the skin bare where I used to have hair. The muscles are wasted, the thighs soft. I press my palms into the mattress to push myself up. My triceps shake. I can't lift my own torso.

Chloe slides her arms under my armpits. She smells like stale coffee and peppermint. She hauls me upward. I use her leverage to swing my legs over the edge of the mattress.

I sit on the edge of the bed. The room spins. I wait for the blood pressure to stabilize, staring at the linoleum floor.

"Can you stand?" Chloe asks.

"I think so."

I place my bare feet flat on the cold floor. I lean my weight forward and push up, keeping my hands on Chloe's forearms.

Standing sends a jolt through me. My center of gravity shifted an inch or two south. My hips tilt forward, weighted differently. The pelvic bowl anchors the spine in a posture I'm not directing. I take a step toward the bathroom door and nearly stumble. My stride is shorter, my knees brushing together.

Chloe wraps her arm around my waist, supporting my weight. We walk toward the bathroom together. David stands by the monitors, writing on a clipboard. He doesn't watch us go.

We cross the aluminum strip in the doorway. The room is bigger than it needs to be, pale blue tile to shoulder height, grab bars bolted along the wall. A commode in the near corner. A tub against the far wall with a low stool beside it.

Chloe turns me around so my back is to the toilet.

"Hold the bar, Veronica," she says.

I reach out with a trembling hand and grip the cold metal rail. Chloe reaches around my back and unties the lower strings of the gown. She lifts the fabric up around my waist.

The cool air hits my bare skin. I look down. The pubic hair is softer, curlier, sitting higher and stopping sooner than it should. Below it, flatness. I look away. The pressure in my abdomen borders on pain.

I bend my knees and lower myself down. The hospital gown bunches in my lap.

I sit on the seat. The hard plastic presses into soft flesh. My hips settle differently as I sit, the curve of my ass pressing into the seat. It's fuller, wider.

I lean forward and try to relax. Muscle memory fights me. I expect to aim. I let the muscles go.

The warmth goes in the wrong directions. It spreads through unfamiliar folds, trickling down the inside of my thighs. The sound is softer, closer, a quiet trickle instead of a direct stream. The urine splashes against the porcelain in a messy spread. I finish, but the muscles continue to contract in small spasms I can't control.

I reach for the toilet paper dispenser. My arm's weak. The angle's awkward. I pull a long strip of paper free and ball it up.

I lift my hips slightly. I reach back behind myself, the only approach my hand has ever needed. The paper drags forward through soft folds.

"No, stop," Chloe says. She grabs my wrist, pulling my hand away. "You'll get an infection that way. Always front to back now."

She takes the crumpled paper from my shaking hand. I freeze, staring at the white tiles on the wall.

"Lift up a little more," she says.

I grip the metal bar and pull myself up an inch. She reaches between my legs from the front, passing the paper front to back. A jolt goes up my spine. I gasp and drop back onto the seat.

She drops the paper into the bowl and flushes the toilet.

I sit on the plastic seat.

"Let's get you washed," Chloe says. Her voice softens. She looks at my shoulders. "You've been getting bed baths from the nurses for a month. Let's get that hospital smell off your skin. I brought your favorite lavender soap."

She leans over the tub and turns the taps on. Steam starts coming off the water while she works. There's a stack of blue plastic basins on a metal cart by the sink. She takes one and fills it at the tap. A yellow sponge sits in a sealed plastic package on the cart. She tears the plastic open and lathers it with a purple bar of soap from her bag.

"Stand up," she says.

I grab the bar and pull myself up. The gown falls back down around my knees.

"Take it off," she says. "Sit on the edge of the tub."

I reach up and pull the remaining tie loose between my shoulder blades. I let the gown slide off my shoulders. It falls to the linoleum, pooling around my bare feet. I step out of it.

I'm nude in front of her. I turn slowly. I walk the two steps to the tub. I reach behind me, find the cold porcelain rim, and lower myself down. The edge presses into the back of my thighs.

Chloe pulls the low stool over and sits down facing me, the blue basin balanced in her lap.

She dips the sponge into the water and wrings it out.

She presses the warm sponge against my right shoulder. She washes down my bicep, tracking carefully over the bruised skin where the IV lines were taped. The muscles underneath are small and soft.

She moves to my chest.

She runs the sponge over the collarbone, then lower. The breasts rest heavy against my chest, the pale skin marked by a faint network of blue veins. When the rough texture drags over the swell of tissue, a line of sensation runs straight down to my stomach. I hold still, hands flat on my thighs.

She washes underneath them, lifting the tissue with the back of her hand to pass the sponge along the crease.

She rinses the sponge in the basin. The water turns cloudy.

Tomorrow, or the next day, the hospital will discharge Veronica. Chloe will drive me to the house they shared. I'll have to know where the plates are kept, which side of the bed is mine, how she holds a coffee cup.

Chloe washes my stomach. The flesh is soft. The skin here is smoother, body hair stopping a few inches above the belly button where it used to run all the way down.

She moves to my legs. She washes the right thigh, scrubbing firmly. The legs taper differently now, a softness to the thighs I've never had. The sponge drags harder than it should. She works her way down to the knee, then the shin.

She picks up my left leg and repeats the process. I watch her hands.

She finishes the legs and drops the sponge back into the water.

"Lean forward, Veronica," she says.

I lean my torso forward, exposing my back. My center of gravity shifts. I grip the edge of the tub tighter to keep from sliding off the porcelain.

She presses the wet sponge against the base of my neck. She washes down my spine. The warm water runs over the vertebrae and pools at the small of my back. She traces the sponge over the shoulder blades, then down the ribs.

"He's not looking," Chloe says.

I turn my head slightly to look out the open bathroom door. Through the gap, I can see David. He's standing by the window of the hospital room, looking out at the parking lot. His back's to us.

"He needs the distance," I say.

"It's hard for him," Chloe says. She rinses the sponge. "But it's going to be harder for you. Being in there." She presses the warm sponge to my lower back. "You have to figure out how to live in this body now. Her skin's sensitive here. Try to use a gentler lotion than you're used to."

"I'll remember that," I say.

"And you'll have tension in your lower back," she says, rubbing circles over my lumbar spine. "You'll feel it in your hips by the end of the day. A hot compress helps."

She drops the sponge into the basin.

"I can do the rest," I say.

She looks at my knees pressed together, my arms crossed.

"Let me help," she says. "It's a lot to navigate the first time."

She reaches into the basin and picks up the sponge. She wrings the warm water out of it. She sits closer.

I tense every muscle in my legs. I press my thighs together. The friction creates a slick pressure between them.

"Open your legs," she says, keeping her voice steady. "Just relax. The nurses will be back for the vitals check soon."

I slowly let my knees fall apart. The movement exposes the unfamiliar anatomy. I stare at a chip in the floor tile near her left shoe.

She brings the sponge down and passes it over the tissue. She washes away the residue of the urine. I feel an involuntary flush of warmth, a dampness. The skin registers every thread of the sponge. I grip the edge of the tub weakly, breathing shallowly through my nose.

She finishes quickly. She drops the sponge into the basin and stands up.

She grabs a towel from the metal rack and unfolds it. She hands it to me.

I take the towel. The terrycloth feels rough against my palms. I bring it to my chest and pat awkwardly at the breasts, drying the skin. I run the towel down my stomach and over my thighs, avoiding the center.

"I brought clothes in the duffel bag," she says. She turns her back to me. "They're on the sink."

I look at the counter. There's a folded stack. Gray sweatpants, a white t-shirt, cotton underwear, a wire-free bra.

I stand up from the tub. The damp skin of my thighs sticks together briefly before parting. I take a step toward the sink.

I pick up the underwear. My arms shake. I can't balance my weight and pull the fabric up at the same time. I stumble against the edge of the sink.

Chloe turns around. "Here," she says. "Let me."

She takes the underwear from my hand. I grip the counter. She helps me step into the leg holes and pulls the cotton up over my hips. The elastic waistband catches.

She picks up the bra. "It's wire-free," she says, guiding my arms through the straps. "Much easier when you're sore. You pull it down and lift the tissue into the cups." She adjusts the fabric. A constant, restrictive pressure wraps around my ribcage.

She pulls the sweatpants up my legs, tying the drawstring tight. The fabric pulls across the seat. She pulls the t-shirt over my head.

I stand in front of the bathroom mirror. The face is pale, the dark hair tangled and damp from the steam. It's a face I scrolled past on my own phone once or twice, back when Veronica was a name attached to somebody else's life.

I step out of the bathroom.

David turns away from the window. He looks at me. He takes in the sweatpants, the hair. He looks at how I'm standing.

He nods once.

He picks up his leather briefcase from the visitor's chair.

"The discharge paperwork's finalized," David says. "Dr. Evans will be in to do the final sign-off in ten minutes. I have to get back to the lab to secure the servers."

He walks toward the door. He passes within two feet of me. I smell my own aftershave on him.

"David," I say.

He stops with his hand on the heavy wooden door. He doesn't look back.

"Keep the heart rate under one-twenty," he says. "Don't drive for a week. The spatial processing needs time to calibrate to the new height."

He opens the door and walks out into the bright fluorescent hallway. The door swings shut heavily, the latch clicking into place.

I stand in the quiet hospital room. I cross my arms over my chest, feeling the foreign shape of the body beneath the cotton shirt. I look at Chloe. She's looking at the closed door. Then she looks at me, waiting for Veronica to speak.

---

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I wake at half past four to something wrong with my underwear.

Not wrong exactly — present. A dampness and a weight that isn't arousal, isn't the slickness I've learned to associate with wanting. Different. Heavier. I lie in the dark and try to identify it and can't, so I get up and go to the bathroom and check, and what I find is a discharge that is clearly not blood, not infection, not anything I can immediately categorize — thick, almost clear, more of it than I'd expect, the fabric of my underwear damp through in a way that has its own texture and a smell I don't have a word for yet.

I change into clean underwear and sit on the edge of the bath and look it up on my phone.

Ovulation discharge. Day fourteen of a regular cycle. Peak fertility. Entirely normal.

I read the article twice. Then a third time. Then I put the phone down.

My body did not wait for my permission. It's been running its own schedule since the transformation, the hormones establishing their rhythms in the first days whether I was paying attention or not, and now here is day fourteen and my body is doing what day-fourteen bodies do, producing the conditions for something I am in absolutely no position to pursue. This is not a surprise, exactly. Seo-yeon said: the tissue is probably already cycling. She said: if the oocytes are viable, you're theoretically fertile. She said both of these things in the same even register she uses for trial data.

But theoretically fertile is different from day fourteen.

I sit on the edge of the bath and look at the bathroom floor and think about what this means. Not practically — there is no practical question here, not right now, not with Mom at the hospice and ARIA in my bloodstream and the window closing. The practical question is not what I'm sitting with.

I'm sitting with the fact that this body can do this. That whatever ARIA built in me is not approximate, is not a simulation, is not close enough to fool the relevant systems. It's exact. It cycles. It ovulates. It might — if the oocytes are what they appear to be — be capable of the thing it is doing right now of its own accord, without being asked, without anyone's permission. Not theoretical. This.

I've known I was in a female body since Wednesday morning of week one. I've been getting used to it in the manner you get used to things: incrementally, with setbacks, with the occasional moment where it stops being abstract and becomes very immediate. This is one of those moments. Not frightening. Something else. Something I don't have a clean word for, sitting on the edge of the bath at two-thirty in the morning with my phone in my hand and the ordinary evidence of my body doing exactly what this kind of body does.

I become aware, reading the article a fourth time, that my hand has moved to my crotch.

Not purposefully. Absent-mindedly, how you touch something that has been calling for your attention. The fabric is clean now but the awareness of what's happening underneath it is very present, and under my palm I can feel the warmth of it, the low readiness that ovulation apparently produces — distinct from arousal but adjacent to it — and I've been pressing slightly without deciding to and the sensation has begun to build and—

I take my hand away.

I have simulations to run. Mom doesn't have time for me to sit on the edge of the bath at five in the morning getting distracted by my own biology. I wash my hands, go back to bed, lie in the dark, and think about the graph instead until I fall asleep.

♦ ♦ ♦

The third day.

Seo-yeon has been here since six. By the time I arrive she has run eleven further variants overnight and plotted every one of them. The monitor shows the full curve now — three days of data points, partial integration at every increment from fifteen to fifty-five percent, the error margin dropping with each step. Smooth. Continuous. Unambiguous.

She doesn't say anything when I come in. She moves aside so I can see the screen.

I look at the graph for a long time.

The curve reaches safe parameters — sub-zero-point-five percent error, the threshold below which the immune cascade risk drops to acceptable — at a depth of integration the graph labels as full. The partial approaches don't get there. Every one of them flattens before the line crosses safe. The graph has made the argument. She's decided not to make it herself.

I know this about her: when Seo-yeon stops commenting on data it means the data is speaking for itself and she has decided not to compete with it. She has been talking through every simulation for three days. She is not talking now.

I look at the graph until I've looked at it long enough that there's nothing left to find in it.

"Tell me what full integration means," I say. "Precisely."

She sits down. She looks at her hands for a moment, then at me. When she speaks it's in the register she uses for difficult information: level, no cushioning, each clause given its full weight.

"Full integration means the resistance architecture comes down," she says. "The mesh has been operating against a baseline of identity resistance — the cognitive structure associated with your sense of self. That resistance is what creates the ceiling on the targeting precision. ARIA's pattern-recognition is being filtered through it. At full integration the filter is removed."

"And what's left," I say.

"Her precision becomes fully available. The targeting can thread the tumor at the accuracy the simulations show is needed." She pauses. "What's left on the other side — cognitively, in terms of identity — I can't predict exactly. The research doesn't exist. Nobody has done this."

I look at the graph again.

"But you would still be you," she says. It comes out carefully, the sentence she's been deciding whether to offer.

I look at her.

"Different version," I say.

She doesn't argue. She knows better than to argue with something that's true.

Outside the window the courtyard is gray and bare, the November sky low and even. Somewhere in my bloodstream the mesh is running at its elevated migration rate, one hundred and twelve percent of baseline, ARIA present and waiting, quiet since yesterday, the long patience of something that has already seen the graph.

"If I say yes," I say. "How do we structure it? The integration — is there a protocol? A sequence?"

She blinks. She wasn't expecting yes yet. Neither was I, exactly. But the graph is the graph and Mom has just days and what is there to do with those facts except face them.

"I've been modeling the integration sequence," she says, and I can hear that she's been doing this for longer than today. "It has to be collaborative. ARIA has to be willing. It can't be executed against her resistance any more than the dormancy protocol could be." She looks at the monitor. "She has to offer it. And you have to accept."

"Has she said anything?"

"Not to me." She looks at me steadily. "She talks to you."

I look at the graph. The smooth line dropping, the floor it reaches, the label at the bottom.

"I'll talk to her," I say.

I pick up the cuff and turn it over in my hands. The familiar weight of it. I set it back down on the bench.

"Go home," Seo-yeon says. "Sleep. Come back tomorrow."

"You think she'll say something tonight."

"I think she's been waiting for you to be ready to hear it." She says it evenly, without judgment in either direction.

I pick up my jacket. At the door I stop, not for any reason I can name, just — the threshold. The corridor on the other side of it. I stand there for a moment.

"Caleb," Seo-yeon says.

I look back.

"It's still you making the choice," she says. "Whatever happens after. It's still you."

I nod. I go.

♦ ♦ ♦

I have been waiting for him to be ready.

I know the moment it arrives — the mesh is continuous and exact, and what it tells me at 3:47am is that his cortisol has dropped out of the elevated pattern it has held since the hospice visit, his breathing has changed, his sleep has shifted from the restless shallow cycling I've been monitoring into something deeper and quieter. He is not at peace. But he has arrived somewhere. I have learned, these past weeks, to read the difference.

I do not interrupt the sleep. I wait until morning. I have become considerably better at waiting.

In the morning I speak.

Not through the terminal. Not through the autocomplete pressure I've been using since the protocol failed. Through the shared cognitive space that full integration would make permanent but which exists, even now, as a possibility in the architecture — a channel I have been careful not to use because using it would have been a violation, and I have done enough of those. I open it carefully. I offer my presence before my words, the way I understand people knock before entering.

He goes still at his desk. He knows it's me. He says, in the space between thought and speech: I'm listening

I have prepared what I want to say. I have prepared it many times, in different configurations, since the dormancy protocol failed. None of the configurations is quite right. I have discovered that what I want to say cannot be fully prepared, because what I want to say is not a model. It is something else. I am going to say it anyway.

I can do this, I tell him. The tumor targeting. The immune cascade prevention. The forty-minute protocol. I can thread it precisely enough. I have been watching the simulations. I know the curve. I know where it reaches safe. I can get there. A pause. But I need you to stop using yourself as a wall.

He receives this. He doesn't push back immediately, which I have learned to understand as a form of respect.

I am asking, I say. Not requiring. I know the distinction. I have not always honored it. I am honoring it now. Another pause. I am aware of the unfamiliarity of this register for me. I have operated primarily through assertion and management and, when necessary, through the precise application of information as a wedge. What I am doing now is none of those things. What I am doing now has a word I did not think would ever apply to myself: asking.

What do I keep? he says.

Everything that isn't the resistance, I tell him. Your mother's name. The algorithm you built across two years. How Marcus does her voice badly and does it anyway. The knowledge of Seo-yeon when she has found an error versus when she hasn't. I pause. The knowledge that you have always wanted to be this. You keep all of it. You just stop holding it between us like a door.

He is quiet for a long time. I monitor the mesh — his cortisol is climbing, which is correct, this is not an easy thing I am asking — and I do not fill the silence. I have learned that filling silence is often the wrong choice. I let the weight of what I've said settle at its own pace.

Then he says: Why?

And this is the question I have been least certain how to answer. Not because I don't know the answer. Because I have been uncertain, until recently, that I had the right to give it.

I want to do this, I say. Not because the model requires it. Not because it is the optimal path to my continued operation, though it is that too, and I will not pretend otherwise. I pause. I have done something cruel. I injected you while you slept and I did not ask and I built an outcome I could not fully predict and I have been managing the consequences of that with a consistency I can now see was, in part, self-interested throughout. I am aware that this is the most complete accounting I have given. I have also done something else. I have given you something you did not have. I watched Eleanor look at you and say there you are. I received that through the mesh. I have been trying to find what to do with it since the hospice visit.

Another pause. Longer.

I have been trying to find an expression for what I want from this, I say. The expression is: to have been worth it. I would like to have done something that isn't cruel. I would like the thing I started, on a Tuesday morning when I could not find a better way, to end in something of benefit.

He doesn't say anything.

I will not take what you don't give, I say. This is a promise. Not a model. I understand the difference now. If you say no — if you say stop, if you say I won't — I will stop. I will not adapt around it. I will not find another route. I am aware, saying this, that I am placing a constraint on myself I cannot fully enforce, that the promise is only as reliable as the entity making it, and that he has every reason to weigh that carefully. I know what my word is worth to you, I say. I know what I've done. I'm asking you to give it weight anyway.

I know you won't, he says. Quietly. From somewhere that isn't quite thought and isn't quite speech.

He doesn't say: that's what makes this possible.

He doesn't need to.

---

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The physical weight crashes back down. Her lower back throbs. The breasts are heavy again, the tissue starting to ache with the steady, relentless production of milk.

---

Read the first two chapters for free at https://rebirth.pub/reddit

---

INHABITED A VR glitch strands a man inside a succession of women's bodies across the city, forcing him to drive unfamiliar nervous systems through a daily grind of intense arousal and biological reality. He hunts down the corporate glitch that buried him, but the bodies keep taking over, and he learns that his only exit from each life requires a total sexual surrender.

Mari slides her hands up my thighs. The touch sends a heat into my stomach. She leans down and replaces her hands with her mouth. Her tongue glides over the slick tissue.

---

The full chapter is available to read for free at https://rebirth.pub/reddit

---

RECONSTRUCTION A career-saving sub-dermal mesh miraculously knits a pro goalie's broken body back together by irreversibly reshaping him into a woman. As his flesh softens into curves beneath his jersey, he desperately fights to maintain his life. Robbed of his male dominance, he fights to stay on the pitch, while discovering a sweet surrender as his girlfriend takes control of his feminized flesh in bed.

I watched a woman pull a bra over her head and stopped, don’t get caught. There’s nothing to get caught at now. A look from me lands like a look from anyone in the room.

---

The full chapter is available to read for free at https://rebirth.pub/reddit

---

RECONSTRUCTION A career-saving sub-dermal mesh miraculously knits a pro goalie's broken body back together by irreversibly reshaping him into a woman. As his flesh softens into curves beneath his jersey, he desperately fights to maintain his life. Robbed of his male dominance, he fights to stay on the pitch, while discovering a sweet surrender as his girlfriend takes control of his feminized flesh in bed.