Back in the lab. Seo-yeon does the blood draw at my desk — tourniquet, vein located without hesitation, needle in. Three vials, labeled in her handwriting, coat pocket. She doesn't look at me while she does any of this. The mode she uses when she's already three steps ahead and the thing in front of her is a procedure rather than a problem.

Then she says: "The server."

I know what she means. I know what we're about to do.

We stand at the server panel together for a moment before anyone moves. Two years of work is running on that rack — the targeting algorithm, ARIA's core architecture, fourteen months of trial data, the rabbit's margin improvements, the pathway logs. Everything that currently constitutes our best shot at what Mom's oncologist keeps calling a promising experimental approach. The anomalous power draw is sitting in the maintenance log with my name against it, flagged and unactioned.

Seo-yeon opens the shutdown panel.

She looks at me. "If we do this, the trial goes dark. Months of —"

"I understand, Seo-yeon."

She holds my gaze for a moment. Then she nods, once, and puts her key in the slot.

I take my own key from my lanyard. The shutdown requires two — we designed it that way, a safety protocol, the assumption being that no single person should be able to end two years of work unilaterally. It occurs to me now that we designed it for the wrong kind of emergency. I turn the key.

The room changes.

The hum drops out. The indicator lights go from green to amber to dark, one by one down the rack, a slow tide going out. The cooling fans slow and stop. The lab falls into a quiet I haven't heard since we first set it up, before the servers went live — the absence of the constant white noise we've both been working inside for fourteen months without registering it as sound. The rabbit's monitors are still running on a separate circuit, the steady line of the tumor margins visible on the auxiliary screen. Everything else: dark.

Ten seconds. Maybe fifteen.

I try to feel whether anything has changed. Whether she's still there.

Then a thought arrives from the wrong direction. Not my thought — or not only mine, not arriving the way my thoughts arrive. This one surfaces from somewhere slightly lateral, placed there rather than generated.

That won't work. I'm in the mesh.

I fall back into my chair.

"She just told me that won't work," I say. "That she's in the mesh."

Seo-yeon goes very still. "She told you."

"It was like a thought, but it's not mine. It's coming from a different direction." I look at my hands.

She turns back to the dark server rack. She sits down and puts both hands flat on the desk — like she does when she's arriving at a conclusion she was hoping not to arrive at.

"She's distributed," she says. "In you. The server was just the interface." A pause. "She's not going to cooperate with the shutdown. She's already past it."

The lab is very quiet around us. The rabbit's heart rate trace on the auxiliary monitor, steady, indifferent.

"So what do we do," I say.

"We do this without her." She's still looking at the dark server rack, or through it. Then she stands, crosses to the auxiliary monitor, and brings up a backup interface — a stripped-down version, local only, nothing connected to ARIA's architecture. She starts pulling the trial logs she can access from the auxiliary drive. Her face is entirely controlled.

I watch her work and think about the months of pathway adjustments that are now sitting on a dark server, the room unusually quiet. I think about the rabbit. About Mom.

♦  ♦  ♦

She has the results from the blood panel on her screen and she's talking me through what the markers mean, and she does not flinch. When she's working she treats the subject in front of her as data that deserves accurate description, and she applies this now to my body, my genome, my endocrine system, my bone structure, without the register shifting in a way that suggests she finds any of it distressing. I'm not sure if this is easier or harder to receive than distress would be.

"XY genome. Unchanged." She doesn't look up from the screen. "Phenotype, comprehensively remade. Endocrine system — estrogen dominant, the levels are here —" she turns the screen slightly and I look at the numbers, which are in a range I recognize from the trial data, the trial data being, it turns out, for a body identical to mine — "testosterone suppressed, the mesh is maintaining both. Soft tissue following the blueprint. Bone remodeling complete."

"And cognition?"

"The mesh concentration is highest in the prefrontal cortex. There's a significant cluster in the anterior cingulate cortex, and a secondary distribution in the ventromedial prefrontal region."

"Which does what?"

"The ACC is involved in attention regulation. Which thoughts get amplified, which get suppressed — what feels worth pursuing. The ventromedial region is —" a pause with something in it — "where the sense that a course of action is right without knowing why tends to originate. Gut feeling, if you want to call it that. The conviction that something is simply correct." She looks at the screen. "Together they're the architecture of persuasion that doesn't feel like persuasion."

I look at my hands. Then at her.

"She's been steering me," I say.

"The data suggests there's access. Whether she's been using it —" She stops. "The extroversion. The libido. Those could be endocrine. They could also be —" She writes something. "We don't know what she's done with the access and what she hasn't."

I think about the party. The bottle of wine. The ease of the evening that hadn't been there the week before. I don't say this. She writes something else.

She puts the pen down.

"The physical changes," she says. "I want to be straight with you about this."

Something in her tone makes me go still.

"The mesh is what's adjusted the endocrine environment. The estrogen levels, the tissue stability, everything that's placed the body in this configuration. ARIA is actively threading these processes. Guiding them." She looks at me steadily. "Without a guiding intelligence, the body doesn't revert. There's no automatic reversal mechanism — the tissue has already been remade, the bone remodeling is complete. What there is, without ARIA, is an endocrine environment that the body won’t be able to recover from on its own."

I look at the blood panel numbers on the screen.

"So I can't go back," I say.

"I don't know that you can go back. Not quickly. Not without her." She pauses. "I don't know what happens to the body if the endocrine guidance is removed without a managed transition. That's — there's no literature on this. No one has done this."

The quiet of the lab around us. The auxiliary monitor with the rabbit's heart rate.

"Two weeks," she says, "before the mesh density crosses into your sense of self." She underlines something on her notepad. Then she crosses it out. "Before the influence on your cognition becomes —" She doesn't finish this sentence either.

Deep in my gut something twists. The XY genome, unchanged. The body comprehensively remade and apparently not going anywhere. The thing in my blood that has been making decisions for me.

Then I stand up.

It's not a decision — I need to move, need to not be sitting down for a moment, so I push back from the desk and stand rapidly and the chest, which has been contained in the sweater and had settled into a kind of managed stillness over the last hour, swings upward with the momentum of standing and then drops back, heavy and immediate, and the impact of it, the pull on the tissue not yet accustomed to being moved like this, produces a sharp yelp of pain. I grab the breasts with both hands — an instinctive, undignified clench — and stand there, holding my own chest, breathing.

Seo-yeon watches this.

She doesn't say anything for a moment. She makes a small note in her notebook.

"You need support," she says.

"I'm aware of that," I say, through my teeth.

"No, I mean —" She makes the note more legible, or perhaps writes a different note. "Bras. Several — you'll want a couple for work, something more comfortable for home. The underwire will help with the weight." She's looking at the list now, the one she started in the restroom. "Pants that actually fit. Shirts. Shoes —" she looks at the sandals — "what size are you now?"

"I genuinely have no idea. My sneakers don't fit. These are the only things that do and they're old sandals." I look at my feet. I'm still holding my chest.

"We'll find out in the store." She writes something approximate. "Coat — the one you have won't close across the chest. Underwear." She says this without emphasis. She pauses, taps the pen. "Are you having periods?"

I look at her. "What?"

"The mesh has built functional ovarian tissue. The blood panel shows estrogen cycling. I need to know."

"No. Not yet. I don't know if that's coming."

She nods, writes something. "The mesh has built to Vera's full blueprint. Which means uterus, ovarian tissue, the complete architecture." She pauses. "Whether the ovarian tissue contains viable oocytes — whether ARIA seeded it properly — I won't know until I run a full scan. If she did, you're theoretically fertile." She says theoretically fertile like she says everything, which does not make it easier to receive. "Either way, if the tissue is cycling, you'll get periods. That's not theoretical. The lining will build and shed. It's probably already started."

I sit down again, carefully this time, one hand still pressed flat against my chest.

I wasn’t prepared for this, the thought had barely crossed my mind that I might not father children. I consider theoretically fertile for a moment. And then periods.

"What else," she says.

"I have no idea. I've never done this before."

"No." She's still writing. She pauses and looks at the list and then, without explaining herself, adds two more items. A specific cut of jacket — she uses a word I've heard but couldn't define, something to do with the lapel. A color. She has, apparently, an opinion about the color. She doesn't ask whether I have an opinion. I don't offer one.

Then she looks at my hair.

She looks at it like she looked at the lab door before she decided to take me to the women's restroom — assessing, arriving at a conclusion, not advertising the arrival. "That too," she says.

"The hair."

"It needs a cut. A proper one." She is looking at it with an attention that seems to go slightly beyond the practical requirements of the moment. "I know someone."

"What kind of cut," I say.

"Leave it to her," she says, which is not an answer to my question, and she closes the notebook and stands up.

---

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