The build was not supposed to be in his hands. It was an internal beta, one of those strange vanity projects the studio’s creative director liked to throw at the programmers after midnight, when everyone was too tired to argue. A character creator for a game that did not yet have a title attached to it. Upload a photograph, let the software generate a full-body avatar, adjust the sliders, export the model. That was the pitch. The next wave of interactive media - put yourself directly in the game. The first thing José changed was meant to be a joke. At least, that was how he would explain it later, if he ever explained it to anyone, which he knew he would not.
José had been testing it from his apartment in Madrid for hours, barefoot under his desk, wearing an old powder blue T-shirt and the same round glasses he had been meaning to replace for three years. His balcony door was open a crack. Somewhere below, a scooter whined through the narrow street. On his second monitor, a bug tracker waited with the patience of a priest hearing confession from a young unmarried man.
The first monitor showed him. Not a stylized version. Not a handsome approximation. Him. Bald head, dark brows, mustache, glasses, slightly tired eyes, ordinary shoulders, a patch of chest hair visible at the collar of his shirt. The avatar stood in a neutral pose, rotating slowly beneath cold digital light. José leaned back and grimaced.
“Ok,” he said to the empty room. “That’s a bit much.” The face and scalp shine were too accurate. The uncertain half-smile was unforgivable. He clicked through the sliders. Height, weight, muscle mass, age, hair, facial hair, posture, skin texture, body hair, voice profile. Most of it was absurdly detailed. There were fantasy presets too: elf, vampire, demon, wolf-man.
José snorted when he saw the last category. Then he grinned and he clicked wolf-man.
The avatar hunched forward. Its shoulders broadened. Dark hair crawled up its neck and across its cheeks. The mustache thickened into something feral. The nose pushed forward. The ears sharpened. Claws slid from the fingers. The creature on-screen still looked, horribly, like him. Like a version of José after being dragged through an old German fairy tale and then thrown into jeans and a t-shirt.
He laughed once, low in his throat. “Perfect,” he said. A warning appeared.
APPLY CHANGES TO ACTIVE MODEL? PRESS ANY KEY TO CONTINUE.
José rolled his eyes. “Yes, yes.” He hit Enter.
For half a second, nothing happened. Then his teeth hurt. It was not pain exactly. It was pressure. A deep, intimate pressure, as if invisible hands had reached into his gums and were pushing each tooth into a new place. José lurched upright so violently his chair rolled backward and hit the bookshelf behind him.
His glasses slid down his nose. The room seemed too bright. Too loud. He could hear his own breath catching, the hum of the computer fan, the traffic below, the click of pipes in the wall, a woman yelling at her husband somewhere across the courtyard, two men having sex a floor below.
Hair prickled along the backs of his hands. He looked down. Dark fur was blooming from his wrists - his fingers distorting and elongating.
“What?!” he whispered. The word came out rougher than it should have - almost more like a snarl.
He stumbled toward the bathroom, painfully knocking his hip against the desk in his haste. His shoulders strained against his T-shirt. His nails darkened, thickened. The sides of his scalp tingled, then burned as hair pushed from skin that had been bare for years. The mirror caught him mid-change: José's own frightened eyes behind thick glasses, José’s mustache spreading onto his cheeks and down his neck, José’s jaw widening under skin that seemed to ripple.
As the changes finished José made a sound he had never made before - somewhere between a howl and a bark. Back at the desk, the monitor waited, a little light flashing: CHANGES APPLIED.
After the pain passed, José stared at himself in the mirror, at his pointy wolf-like ears, at the fur matted across his entire body, at his impossibly thick neck and the bulge in his jeans that the fabric was barely able to contain - and he was too afraid to examine. "What the fuck...how is this possible - why is there hair everywhere but I’m still bald?!" was all that he could mumble out, barely intelligible with his reconstructed mouth, teeth and lupine anatomy.
Just then he remembered his avatar on the screen in the other room. He dashed back across the apartment on a mix of two and four limbs. He looked at the monitor and saw the same face and body from the bathroom mirror staring back at him. His hands were now too large for the keyboard. He jabbed at the mouse, missed, tried again. The cursor skittered over the screen. There. A button.
He clicked it. The second transformation was worse because he knew it was real. His body folded back into itself. Fur retreated. Bones softened. Teeth shrank. His body went cold and bare again. When it was over, José was on the floor under his desk, shaking, his stretched out T-shirt damp against his chest, his glasses hanging on the bottom of his nose.
He did not move for a long time. Then, because he was a programmer, because terror and curiosity lived closer together in him than he liked to admit, he pulled himself back into the chair and looked at the screen. The avatar had returned to its original shape. Bald. Mustached. Middle-aged. Familiar. José stared at himself... Then he had an idea.
For three days, he told himself he would report the bug. He wrote the email in his head several times.
“There appears to be an unexpected physiological feedback loop with the avatar editor.”
“The build is interacting with the user in a way that may pose health and safety concerns.”
“I turned into a wolf-man in my bathroom at 1:17 a.m. Please advise.”
He deleted that thought before it could become language. Instead, José did what he did best - he tested. Carefully, at first. Scientifically, he told himself, though he did not write anything down because writing it down would make it evidence.
He adjusted his mustache by twenty percent. Thicker, longer, cleaner, more deliberate, a handlebar. When he hit Enter, his upper lip warmed. The hair shifted under his fingers, filling in at the corners, becoming heavier and better shaped. He stared in the mirror for ten minutes afterward, turning his face left and right.
It looked good. Not young. Not fake. Hot. The next night, he tried the hair slider. He did not give himself teenage hair. That would be ridiculous. He chose “mature density,” then “temple restoration,” then lowered the hairline only a little. He selected dark brown, with a touch of natural variation. When he hit Enter, he gripped the sides of the desk until his knuckles went white.
The sensation was almost sensual this time - like a head massage. A warm pressure under the scalp. A spreading fullness. Thousands of tiny awakenings. In the bathroom mirror, a man he recognized and did not recognize looked back at him. Not bald - still José. Still forty-something. Still the same nose, the same eyes behind the glasses, the same thick mustache. But his head was framed now by short, dark hair that made his face look less exposed, less apologetic. He quickly hit revert - it would be too noticeable…
After that came posture. A slight correction to his shoulders. A little muscle through the chest and arms. Not a model’s body, not a fantasy warrior from Street Fighter 6, just the version of himself he might have had if he had slept better, eaten better, gone swimming more, walked into rooms as if he belonged there. The changes were addictive precisely because they were reasonable - believable.
No one on the studio call noticed except Marta, who squinted at him through Zoom and said, “You look rested.”
“I slept,” José lied.
“You never sleep" she retorted so quickly it gave José pause.
José touched his mustache. “Being less melancholistic.”
Marta laughed and moved on.
That night, José updated his dating profile. He used a new photo taken on his balcony at golden hour. Same glasses, same smile, improved mustache, stronger neck, shirt open one button farther than usual. He stared at the picture too long before posting it. For years, apps had felt like standing under fluorescent lights while strangers silently decided what parts of him were worth loving. He had come out later in life, at thirty-eight, and though no one had said the words directly, José had carried the private conviction that he had arrived late to a party where all the best rooms were already full.
The first message was about a video game José mentioned in his profile. Not his body. Not his age. A game.
You have suspiciously good taste in RPGs for someone who also lists debugging as a hobby.
José smiled despite himself and responded:
And you have a suspiciously good mustache for someone in their twenties.
Pedro was twenty-six, a sweet-looking redhead with a messy auburn mustache, broad shoulders, and the sort of hairy, muscular body that made José immediately distrust the possibility of sincerity. But Pedro wrote like someone who listened. He sent long messages, funny ones, slightly awkward ones. He liked old video games, bad horror movies, tortilla with extra onion, and arguing about whether Roegadyn or Midlander Hyur were the hotter race selection in Final Fantasy XIV.
José tried to be normal. He failed miserably. He waited too long between replies so he would not seem desperate. Then he reread Pedro’s messages until they became scripture. When Pedro sent a selfie from bed, shirtless and smiling sleepily, José put the phone face down on the table and walked around his apartment twice.
“You are a grown man,” he told himself, "get a hold of yourself."
Coffee this weekend? No pressure. But maybe a little pressure.
José stared at it. His first instinct was delight. His second was suspicion. His third was arithmetic.
Twenty-six. Forty-five. Nineteen years difference.
He typed, deleted, typed again.
Pedro answered with a string of victorious emojis so earnest that José laughed alone in his kitchen. For the rest of the week, José did not touch the game. Almost. On Friday night, he opened it just to look. The avatar stood waiting. It had become his secret twin: the man who did not hesitate, the man who walked through Madrid with his shoulders back, the man whose mustache curled at the edges in that special way that made José feel hot. José rotated the model slowly.
There was an age slider. He had avoided it. Not because he lacked curiosity, but because he had too much. He slid it down bit by bit. 40 - the avatar softened and its skin brightened. 35 - the jaw sharpened in that unfair way youth sharpened everything and hair reappeared on his scalp. 30 - the eyes looked clearer. Then 25 appeared in the box beside the slider - younger than Pedro even.
José felt something open in him. Not desire, exactly. Grief. There he was: the man he might have been if fear and confusion had not eaten fifteen years from the center of his life.
He imagined meeting Pedro like that. No arithmetic. No apology hidden in the first hello. No waiting for the younger man’s expression to flicker with disappointment when he realized what 45 year old men actually look like outside of carefully considered lighting and camera positioning. Just two men in the same decade, laughing over coffee, and nerding-out over Zelda or the next season of the anime "Delicious in Dungeon." He looked at the prompt on the screen:
APPLY CHANGES TO ACTIVE MODEL? PRESS ANY KEY TO CONTINUE.
He shook his head and closed the program.
Pedro chose a cafĂ© near AntĂłn MartĂn, bright and narrow, with plants in the window and little tables too close together. JosĂ© arrived early and stood outside sweating through a clean shirt, then cursed himself for arriving early, then cursed himself for sweating.
His mustache was perfect, thick and dark and shaped with care. His body felt quietly stronger under his clothes. He had even taken his glasses off and put them back on three times before leaving, finally deciding they were part of him and he should stop acting like his own face was a negotiation.
Pedro came around the corner in a green jacket, red hair messy from the wind, smiling before he reached him.
The sound of his name in Pedro’s voice did something unreasonable to his chest.
“Yes,” José said, and then, because his brain had become a useless decorative object, “Your hair is redder in person.”
Pedro blinked, then laughed. “Good red or traffic cone red?”
“Good red. I like red heads...I mean, I like it!” José said embarrassed at himself.
“Strong start.” Pedro said with a grin.
The date was not perfect. That was why José trusted it later. There were awkward pauses. José talked too much about procedural animation in gaming and mustache grooming. Pedro admitted he had stalked José’s profile twice before sending a hello. José spilled coffee on the saucer, not on himself, which he considered a small triumph.
But Pedro watched him with open interest. Not politeness. Legitimate interest. When they walked afterward, their shoulders brushed once. Pedro did not move away. José’s whole body registered the contact like a system alert.
At the Metro entrance, Pedro looked at him with a softness that made José afraid.
“I’d like to see you again,” Pedro said as he stepped closer to José.
José heard himself answer, “Me too.”
Pedro smiled. “Good. Because I already planned three possible second dates.”
“I didn’t want to scare you off.”
José could have kissed him then. He wanted to. Pedro looked as if he would allow it. Instead José nodded, smiled, and let the moment pass like so many others.
That night, happiness curdled into panic. He replayed every second, searching for the hidden mistakes. Pedro’s smile. Pedro’s hand brushing his arm. Pedro’s eyes dropping once to José’s mustache-covered mouth. It had been real. It had been real, and that made it exciting but also disturbing. Because now there was something to lose.
At 2:03 a.m., José opened the game. The apartment was dark except for the monitor. The avatar waited, patient and merciless.
José clicked the age slider. “This is just to see,” he said. Twenty-five. The body on-screen became youthful, beautiful to José's eyes, in a way he hadn't felt in years.
APPLY CHANGES TO ACTIVE MODEL? PRESS ANY KEY TO CONTINUE.
José paused for a second...then he hit Enter before he could stop himself. Youth returned to him like a theft in reverse.
His skin tightened. His back straightened beyond the posture correction. The small aches in his knees vanished. The hair on his head erupted and thickened into a dark, careless fullness. His beard shadow lightened. His chest and arms firmed, his waist narrowing, his face smoothing until the man in the black mirror of the monitor was not older or younger but alternate.
José stumbled to the bathroom. A handsome young man stared back at him with José’s eyes. He touched his face. His throat. His hair. Then he smiled. “Surely Pedro would prefer this version of me.” The thought frightened him before he finished putting words to it.
A few days passed before their second date. JosĂ© had called in sick to work to avoid explaining his new impossible appearance. Pedro decided a museum trip in central Madrid would be the perfect spot. JosĂ© was eager and nervous. When he arrived he saw Pedro waiting - Pedro did not recognize him at first. That was the part JosĂ© had not allowed into the fantasy. He had imagined surprise, desire, laughter, maybe disbelief followed by wonder. He imagined a delighted Pedro instantly drawn to a version of himself he thought was better. He had not imagined Pedro standing outside the Reina SofĂa with his brow furrowed, looking past him for the middle-aged man he was supposed to meet.
Pedro turned politely. “Yes?”
A cautious smile. “Sorry?”
“José, this is our second date.”
The name landed badly. Pedro’s expression changed, first into disbelief, then into recognition that the 40-something year old nerdy goofball he had been messaging and who he had met just a few days ago was replaced by someone his own age, someone familiar yet not. Pedro’s face shifted - not into recognition but into guardedness.
José rushed. “I know how this looks. I can explain. Something happened. The game I told you about, the beta—”
“Is this a joke? Are you José’s younger brother?”
“No. I swear. It’s me.”
Pedro looked him up and down. Young face. Young body. Same glasses…same eyes. Impossible - yet there was too much proof and none of it usable.
“Who are you really?” Pedro asked, sounding increasingly annoyed and embarrassed. “Why would José put you up to this?”
The hurt in his voice stopped José cold.
“I’m José...we met a few days ago for coffee. We talked about video games and mustache grooming, I almost kissed you in front of the metro but chickened out…”
Pedro shook his head in disbelief. “No. You’re some guy who knows things José told you.”
“I can prove it!” José yelped.
“That’s not the point.” Pedro stepped back. His red brows drew together. “The point is I was meeting him.”
Him. José felt the word strike harder than rejection. Pedro looked angry now, but under it, embarrassed. Maybe frightened. “Tell José that this was cruel.” And with that Pedro walked away.
José followed two steps and stopped. People moved around him. Couples, tourists, students, old women with shopping bags. The city continued with offensive ease while Jose’s fantasy came crumbling down all around him.
Just then his phone buzzed. A message from Pedro.
I don’t know what this was, but please don’t contact me again.
José stood there, dejected, until the screen went dark.
Then José did what men have done for hundreds of years when handed the exact lesson they asked for - and refused to understand. He went out looking for a release.
José’s young body knew how to be wanted and he had a missed youth to make up for. That was the worst and best part. At the first bar, men looked at him before he reached the counter. At the second, someone bought him a drink. At the third, in Chueca, a handsome man with silver in his beard touched Jose’s arm and asked if he was waiting for someone.
The man’s name was Luis. His husband was Andrés. They were both in their late forties, both confident in a way José never felt he was and had always mistaken for arrogance until he saw the kindness underneath it. Luis had a thick head of hair and a salt-and-pepper beard. Andrés had soft eyes, a heavy mustache, and the calm smile of someone who had survived himself.
They flirted with José shamelessly, but not carelessly. They made him laugh. They made him feel seen. Even though he knew they were seeing the wrong body, and with Pedro’s hurt still buzzing in his head, Jose latched onto the moment - at the opportunity to be young and the object of desire.
Later, in their apartment, the night became warm and blurred at the edges: they sat for a while in the living room with José in the middle, moonlight leaking through curtains, the rough familiar comfort of older hands caressing the cheek and thighs of a younger body, laughter against young soft skin, the strange ache of being desired while feeling absent from oneself. Making up for missed opportunities of a youth Jose never openly acknowledged to anyone, let alone himself.
It didn’t take long before Luis seized the opportunity and leaned in for a forceful kiss which lead to shirts and pants scattered on the apartment floor.
The older men were more than happy to take the lead and José was more than happy to let them. Andrés rose to his feet and took Jose’s hand and led him towards the bedroom.
Andrés took his turn kissing José before pushing him back on the bed and removing his underwear while Luis watched. Andrés crawled up the bed kissing Jose’s body. His mustache tickling José while he slid up from his inner thigh, around his engorging member, across his stomach to his neck - where he lingered. Andrés lifted his body to the side and laid beside José, nibbling at his ear and running his hand through his hair while Luis approached from the front and lifted Jose’s legs, wrapping them around his neck.
Luis began to suck on José’s perky young cock and licked his testicles making his way down to his ass. He licked around the hole then put two fingers in his mouth before shoving them deep in Jose’s throbbing ass. This sent a little jolt through his young body and the two older men shared a knowing glance.
Luis flipped José onto his stomach and pulled him towards the edge of the bed. José responded by rising to all fours and arching his back - exactly what Luis was hoping for. Luis then spit on his dick, and pressed it against Jose’s tight hole - teasing the opening while Andrés slid in front of José and presented his engorged 8” hairy uncut dick sporting a large metal cock ring to José’s mouth.
José responded by leaning into the moment and taking the entirety of Andrés into his mouth just as Luis pushed into him from behind - slowly at first, then with increasing force. José’s skin crawled with energy at the sight and sensation of the two older men lusting after what José had become - what the game had let him be - even if only for a while.
Within a few minutes Luis’s pace quickened and his grunting intensified as he edged closer - José still found the wherewithal to suck on Andrés’s dick as he was being plowed from behind - his prostate overstimulated. Then, from behind Jose heard Luis say to Andrés “Are you ready? I’m going to cum!” to which Andrés replied “whenever you are!” and both men suddenly pulled out of José. Andrés released thick ropes of cum on José’s arched back while Andrés came all over José’s face - cum splattering and sticking to his mustache.
After cuming, Luis flipped José onto his stomach and stuck his dick back into his ass. Andrés approached from the side and deep throated Jose’s dick. It didn’t take long for his youthful hormones and sensitive young dick to respond to the stimuli and José came deep down Andrés mouth. Fully spent and satisfied, José sat up briefly before excusing himself to the bathroom to shower and clean himself up.
As he turned on the shower and stepped in, José reflected on how he spent his evening dealing with his mix of grief and lust. Not with Pedro at the Reina Sofia. Not talking about video games or Star Wars. Not looking into Pedro’s soft eyes or pinning for how his thick auburn mustache twitched when he cracked a small smile. But instead by being skewered and sucked-off by two daddies in a random apartment in central Madrid.
As the warm water ran across his skin, José was overcome with a flood of emotions:
At the excitement of meeting Pedro and the disappointment of ruining it all by not being himself.
At the relief of avoiding being overly attached to a young man that surely wouldn’t really love the forty-five year old version of himself and the grief of never really giving it a chance.
At the thrill of being young again and at the simultaneous anxiety of being middle-aged with the accompanying fear of wondering how much longer he had to find love.
At the overwhelming desire to just be seen by other people - to be known and understood.
It was all more than José could bear and he collapsed into a ball of tears under the warm running water before regaining his composure and rejoining the men in their bedroom.
José sat on the edge of the couples’ bed wearing one of Andrés’s shirts, too large for his younger frame. Luis was already asleep. Andrés came back from the kitchen with water and handed him a glass.
“You look like a man who has successfully made himself miserable,” Andrés said.
José laughed because it was easier than answering. Andrés sat beside him. “Bad breakup?”
“Those are more common.”
José drank the water and paused a few seconds. “Would you go back?”
“To what?” Andrés said.
Andrés looked the young man over and considered the question. “For a weekend? Maybe. Permanently? God, no.”
“You say that because you were probably happy at twenty-five. You seem so confident, so sure of yourself and your decisions.”
Andrés laughed “I was an idiot at twenty-five. Beautiful, dramatic, and completely convinced every closed door was the end of my life.”
José looked down at his hands. Young hands. Smooth hands. A stranger’s hands. “I came out late,” he said.
Andrés did not answer too quickly. So José kept talking. “I spent years thinking there would be time later. Then later came, and everyone already knew the rules. Everyone had stories. Exes. Confidence. Bodies they understood. I felt like I had arrived at my own life after the credits.”
Andrés nodded. “And now?”
José gave a small, bitter smile. “Now I look like someone who didn’t.”
“But you still feel like someone who did.”
The sentence settled between them.
From the bed, Luis murmured something in his sleep and rolled over. Andrés smiled at him with such ordinary affection that José had to look away.
“Younger men are not free of shame,” Andrés said. “They just have smoother skin while they learn it.”
“And older men are not expired,” Andrés continued. “Some of us are just finally ripe enough to stop apologizing for being touched.”
Andrés nudged his shoulder. “Whatever you’re running from, cariño, don’t run so far you leave yourself behind.”
In the morning, José kissed them both goodbye at the door. Luis gave him a look so knowing it felt almost indecent.
“You’re welcome back,” Luis said, “but only if you arrive as the person you actually are.”
José stared at him half wandering if Luis had figured out his secret.
Later that morning the beta build was still open when José came home.
Of course it was. He had not closed it. Some part of him must have known he would return like this: exhausted, ashamed, smelling faintly of another apartment, carrying his shoes in one hand because his young feet had developed a blister anyway.
On the screen, the twenty-five-year-old avatar stood under perfect light. José sat down. For a long time, he did not touch the mouse. Then he clicked Revert to Original Scan. The avatar changed back.
Bald head. Glasses. Thick mustache, though less shaped than he now preferred. Average shoulders. Softness at the middle. Chest hair at the collar. A man in his forties who looked tired and kind and uncertain.
José looked at him and felt no lightning of acceptance, no internal music, no sudden healing from his conversation with Andrés.
He felt grief. Then fondness for his old body. Then, unexpectedly, amusement. “Oh, come on,” he told the screen. “We can do better than that.” He opened the settings.
Hair: restored, but with a mature density.
Yes. He was keeping that. He had suffered enough.
Mustache: improved, full, deliberate.
Muscle: plus twelve percent.
He reduced it to eight, then raised it to ten.
“Don’t be a coward,” he muttered.
He selected the final avatar.
It was him. Not the boy he had tried to become. Not the man he had feared was unlovable. A mid-forties José with dark hair, a thick confident mustache, stronger shoulders, soft eyes behind round glasses, and a face that had lived long enough to know what it wanted, even if sometimes he felt like he didn't.
PRESS ANY KEY TO APPLY CHANGES TO ACTIVE MODEL?
José hovered over Enter.
For one wild second José thought it might be forgiveness, but the message was shorter than that.
I’m still angry. But I keep thinking about you. Was that really you yesterday? I don’t understand what happened. I don’t know if I want to. But if there is something honest to say, say it tomorrow. In person. As yourself.
José read it three times. Then he typed:
I’m sorry. You were right. You came to meet me, and I didn’t trust that I was enough, so I made myself into what I thought you’d want. Tomorrow, I’ll come as myself.
He stared at the words. Then he added:
Possibly with better hair. It’s a long story.
For almost a minute, nothing. Then Pedro replied:
José laughed so hard he had to take off his glasses and wipe away a tear. When he put them back on, the screen was still waiting.
The change moved through him not like invasion this time, not like escape, but like tailoring. His body warmed, adjusted, settled. Hair returned to his scalp in soft dark thickness. His mustache filled and shaped itself. His shoulders strengthened under his shirt. His face remained lined where it should be lined. His eyes stayed his own.
When it was over, José went to the bathroom. The man in the mirror was forty-five - smoother around the edges but obviously him.
He looked nervous. He looked ridiculous. He looked handsome. Most importantly, he looked present.
José touched his hair, then his mustache, then laughed at himself because of course he had kept both. Self-acceptance, he decided, did not require theatrical suffering. If the universe handed you a miracle beta build, you were allowed to fix a few things just as much as you were allowed to work out to improve your fitness, take a GLP-1 to lose weight or fly to Turkey if you wanted hair.
He returned to the computer and closed the program. For the first time all week, the room went dark. Outside, Madrid was beginning to brighten toward noon. Somewhere below, a delivery truck rattled over the stones. Jose stood at the balcony door in his bare feet, older than he had wanted to be, younger than he had feared he was, and very much alive.
Tomorrow he would meet Pedro again. As José - more or less.
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