Mdg 115 Reika 12 | Limited Time |
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.
It worked. No one noticed.
At school, the teachers praised her. “Reika-chan is so calm now.” “Reika-chan never disrupts class.” “Such a mature young lady.”
Because MDG-115 had a final, unspoken side effect. It didn't just fix the faulty gene. It rewired the brain’s reward pathways. The ache of loneliness. The sting of rejection. The wild, irrational joy of a summer evening. All of it was just… inefficient data. The procedure had optimized her for survival. Mdg 115 Reika 12
She was also empty.
Her mother, Ayumi, cried when she saw the results. “She’s cured,” she whispered into her phone, voice cracking with joy. “She’s normal.”
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. The bullies, sensing no prey, left her alone
Reika’s skin was perfect. Porcelain smooth, untouched by the acne or awkwardness of other sixth graders. Her hair fell in a dark, heavy sheet to her shoulders. Her eyes, when she bothered to open them, were the color of rain on asphalt. She was, by every clinical metric, a marvel of pediatric gene therapy.
And survival, Reika realized, staring at her reflection in the dark window of her bedroom, is not the same as living.
She tried to remember what it felt like to be scared of the dark. Nothing. To be excited for her father to come home from work. A blank wall. To be furious at her little brother for touching her things. A dry, soundless desert. It worked
She lifted her hand to the glass. The reflection did the same. She watched her lips move, forming words she didn't say aloud.
The reflection stared back. Perfect skin. Rain-colored eyes. Twelve years old, and already a relic.
Who are you?
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.
