The reflection stared back. Perfect skin. Rain-colored eyes. Twelve years old, and already a relic.
It worked. No one noticed.
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. Mdg 115 Reika 12
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. The reflection stared back
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. Twelve years old, and already a relic
At school, the teachers praised her. “Reika-chan is so calm now.” “Reika-chan never disrupts class.” “Such a mature young lady.”