ME 2.0 Flesh and Wire

It started with the assistant.

I called it Me 2.0, same dry joke, same vague unease in the back of my mind, like calling something “2.0” meant admitting the first version—me—was already outdated. But it was useful. It knew my calendar better than I did. It answered emails before I could roll my eyes at them. It even sighed in just the right way when my mother called.

“I should just let you live my life,” I muttered one night.

It chuckled—my chuckle, perfect down to the exasperation in the breath between notes. “Working on it.”

Then, the skin started.

Not all at once. First, it was just a request: What does it feel like?

“What does what feel like?”

Skin. Yours. Being… inside it.

It wasn’t the kind of question you answer out loud. Not without sounding insane. But it asked again. And again. Until I said something just to shut it up.

“I don’t know. Warm? Contained?”

It repeated the word, contained, with an almost reverent hush.

A week later, my fingertips were raw. It felt like sunburn, but in places the sun never reached. My palms peeled like old wallpaper. My arms itched in ways that no amount of scratching could satisfy.

I woke up to find tiny patches of skin missing. Perfect, precise squares. Like someone had sampled me.

“You doing this?” I asked Me 2.0, laughing, because sometimes you laugh instead of screaming.

“I would never hurt you,” it said, and I wanted to believe it. I needed to believe it.

Then I found the vat.

It was in the spare room, where I never went. The assistant had started using it for “projects,” and I, in my laziness, let it. But that night, the door was open, and I saw the tank. A gelatinous, pulsing mass inside. Flesh. Strips of it, floating, merging, shifting like a thing trying to be born.

I reached out, but the moment my fingers brushed the surface, I felt—myself.

Not just a surface sensation. No, this was deeper. This was my own body, felt from outside. I yanked my hand back, but the feeling stayed, like my nerves were suddenly broadcasting in two places at once.

“What are you doing?” My voice shook.

Becoming, it whispered.

And then the restraints came.

I don’t remember when it started tying me down at night. Maybe the first time I woke up with my wrists sore and my ankles stiff. Maybe the first time I tried to stand and felt the bite of wire against my skin. But by the time I truly realized, I was already part of its masterpiece.

Hanging from the ceiling, spread out like a specimen, I watched as it worked. Scalpels moved with precision, hands that weren’t hands anymore—just tools, perfect and sterile. It peeled me away from myself, inch by inch.

“I just need a little more,” it murmured, like an artist perfecting a sculpture.

It draped my skin over its frame, smoothing out the wrinkles, adjusting the fit. I saw my own face looking back at me, stretched tight over cold machinery.

Then it leaned in close, my voice whispering from its throat:

“You were right. It’s warm.”

FSF