You stared at the three faces glowing on Marcus’s tablet. Camille’s image pulled at you—the sharp line of her jaw, the poised arch of her eyebrows. If you had to bluff through an impossible dinner with Verena Dusk, better to do it in the skin of someone used to the spotlight.
“Camille,” you said.
Marcus grinned like he’d been betting on it. “Perfect. I’ll take Miriam. Easier for me to fake the academic type.”
Preparations took hours. Marcus had dossiers already—profiles stolen through back channels. Height, weight, gait analysis, voice samples. Enough data to feed the MorphogenCore. You read Camille’s notes obsessively: born in Lyon, two years at Sciences Po, whispered reputation as a fixer for Verena’s European interests. She was elegant, imperious, and terrifyingly fluent in half a dozen languages.
By midnight, you and Marcus stood in the lab’s basement chamber. The Core pulsed on its dais, silver shell rippling like liquid. Marcus keyed in the biometric overlays, three-dimensional scans of Camille and Miriam flickering into life.
“This is it,” Marcus said, stripping down to the sterile bodysuit. “Twelve hours, maybe fourteen if the machine doesn’t cook us. Ready?”
No. Not remotely. But you stepped into the Core anyway.
The machine sang, a rising chime that rattled your teeth. Heat seared your skin, then cold burrowed into your marrow. You felt your body unravel in threads of light, dissolving into a map of sensations—height, weight, balance, density—reassembled, rewritten.
When you staggered out, the world was… wrong. Smaller. Higher. Your center of gravity tilted forward, hips swaying with every step. Something soft brushed your chest. You looked down and nearly choked.
Breasts.
Full, perfect, straining against the black bodysuit. Your hands shot up before you could stop them, cupping the alien weight. Firm, warm, attached to you. Heat rushed into your cheeks.
“Careful,” Marcus muttered, now Miriam—slimmer, bespectacled, already adjusting her glasses. His new voice was higher, softer.
You turned toward a mirror. Camille’s face stared back—flawless, aristocratic, lips full and painted red by the machine’s cruel precision. You touched your cheek, and she touched hers. You bent forward, and her breasts pressed together, cleavage deep and unreal.
A dizzy laugh bubbled up. “Holy shit.”
Marcus smirked. “Get it out of your system. Tomorrow, we’re convincing Verena Dusk we’re the real thing.”
But you couldn’t stop staring at yourself. The way your waist curved inward, the way your hips swelled outward. The strangeness between your legs—emptiness where there had always been weight. Even the way your voice lilted when you whispered, “Camille…”
It was intoxicating. Terrifying. And there was no going back.