And survival, Reika realized, staring at her reflection in the dark window of her bedroom, is not the same as living.
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.
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. Mdg 115 Reika 12
She was also empty.
In the glossy brochures pinned to the waiting room walls, “MDG” stood for Mono-Dermal Genesis . It sounded like poetry, or the name of a new shade of lipstick. In reality, it was the slow, quiet calcification of a soul. And survival, Reika realized, staring at her reflection
They had fixed the broken chromosome—the one that would have turned her muscles to stone by age ten. They had spliced in the corrective sequence, flushed her little body with nanites that rebuilt her from the inside out. The MDG-115 procedure was a success. The first of its kind.
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 rewired the brain’s reward pathways
But Reika remembered.
