I was running my thumb along the gasket seal for probably the hundredth time when Lawrence walked back into Room 4-B with two coffees.
"Still here?" he asked, setting mine on the console. "Chen left an hour ago. Said his eyes were starting to hurt from looking at the sequencing logs so long."
I didn't look up. "Someone's gotta make sure this thing doesn't leak."
Behind me, the machine took up most of the back wall. Eight feet of brushed steel and tempered glass, with the watertight tube running vertical through the center like a coffin built for a giant. Or a cocoon. Seven years of schematics and blown fuses and arguments about gas mixtures, and now it was just… there. Finished. Real.
Lawrence leaned against the console, sipping his coffee. "You know what Chen told me? The board's decided on a name for the machine: Mosaic. Like we're making art instead of rewriting people's DNA."
I straightened up and took the cup. It was lukewarm. "They can call it whatever they want. As long as they keep paying us and keeping it out of the press."
That was the other thing. Helix Core had buried our team deep in their black budget. No papers, no conferences, no hints at symposiums. Just NDAs thick enough to stop a bullet.
I moved over to the other side of the machine and began to clean what we'd come to call the "sequencer."
The machine needed a complete genetic blueprint to work with, and after years of dead ends, Chen figured out that semen carried the right markers—something about motility patterns and epigenetic tagging that I still didn't fully understand despite writing half the code. A small sample, fed into the sequencer, and the machine rewrote every cell in your body to match the donor. Bone structure, muscle density, hairline, the whole thing.
But that meant we could only turn test subjects into males. That was the wall we'd hit. Blood, saliva, skin cells—none of them held the full pattern in a way the machine could read.
The early human trials still haunted us. Subject 3—Marcus Webb from security—wanted to look like his brother-in-law, some fitness model. We put him in the tube, ran the sequence, and when he stepped out, he was neither himself nor the target. His nose was crooked like the model's but wide like his own. His eyes were the right color but set at his original spacing. His hair came in patchy, two textures fighting on one scalp. Not deformed. Just merged. When we tried to reverse him using the sample we'd banked beforehand, we could not change him back. He took the payout and signed the extra NDA.
All I knew was that six months ago, Chen figured out the secondary phase. Two minutes at lower temperature, letting the new markers fully overwrite the old without residual expression. Since then, four alpha tests. All clean, complete transformations, and reversals that brought them back exactly as they were.
Lawrence had cried after the last one. Just stood there in the observation room, saying "We did it, Raf. We actually did it" while tears ran down his face.
Now the lab was quiet. Just the hum of the ventilation and the faint warmth radiating from the machine's standby lights.
I was calibrating the thermal sensors when Lawrence came back from his lunch break with a specimen cup in a brown paper bag, looking like he'd just won the lottery and committed a crime at the same time.
"You're not gonna believe this," he said, setting the bag on the counter like it was made of glass.
I turned from the console. "You got it?"
"Got it." He pulled out the cup—clear plastic, properly sealed, labeled with a sharpie that read M. Torres - 8/14 in Mike's looping handwriting. "Drove out to his apartment. Place was exactly what you'd expect. LED strips everywhere, a ring light in the living room, dirty cum-stained laundry everywhere, protein powder stacked in the kitchen."
I took the cup, holding it up to the light. "And he just… gave it to you? No questions asked?"
Lawrence leaned against the counter, running a hand through his thinning hair. We'd all been losing it lately—stress, probably, or just the years catching up. Chen was basically bald now. I kept mine cropped short to hide the retreat.
"Oh, he had questions," Lawrence said. "Mostly about what I'd look like. Whether I'd get his memories, his voice, the whole thing. I showed him the alpha test videos and he got this look in his eye. Like he was already seeing himself twice."
"And was he being serious about the other thing?"
Lawrence's cheeks flushed. I'd known him six years and I'd never seen him blush like that. "Yeah. That."
He'd told me over beers last week. Mike Torres, local OnlyFans creator, thirty-four years old, built like he'd been carved from stone, with a smile that made Lawrence's voice go tight when he described it. Half a million followers. A subscription base that probably paid more annually than our entire lab budget.
Mike's terms were simple: Lawrence could become a perfect copy of him. But once the transformation was complete, the real Mike wanted to be able to fuck his own duplicate. Wanted to know what his ass felt like from the inside, wanted to watch his own face contort when he came—not through a camera lens but in real time, face to face.
"What a conceited asshole," I'd said, and Lawrence had laughed, knocking his beer against mine.
"Total narcissist," he agreed. But his eyes were bright in a way I recognized.
Now, in the lab, I set Mike's sample in the intake chamber and sealed it. The machine hummed to life, running its preliminary scan. Green lights chased across the status panel.
"You stored your own sample to be able to transition back?" I asked.
"Yes, yesterday." Lawrence nodded toward the cryo-storage unit in the corner, where his sample sat in its vacuum flask, labeled and logged.
I pulled up the sequence on the main screen. Mike's genetic profile bloomed across the monitor.
Lawrence looked at the tube. The glass was clear, waiting. "I'm sixty-three, Raf. I have a dad bod and a receding hairline and I haven't been touched in ten years. Mike gets paid to be jerked off to. I'm not saying it's deep. I'm just saying…" He shrugged. "I want to know what that feels like. Even for a day."
I didn't have anything to say to that. I just entered the command sequence and opened the tube door.
The interior was narrow, built for one body standing upright. Lawrence stripped down to his boxers—modesty, even now—and stepped inside. The restraints were soft, magnetic, clicking into place around his wrists and ankles. He'd watched this a dozen times from the observation room. Now he was the view.
I sealed the door and returned to the console. "Initiating sequence. Subject: Lawrence Voss. Target: Michael Torres. Sample verified."
"Here we go," Lawrence said, his voice slightly muffled through the glass.
The base of the tube pressurized with a hiss. Then the liquid began pumping in from the reservoir below—cloudy, white, thick with suspended enzymes. CRISPR-Cas complexes and RNA transcripts copied directly from Mike's semen, billions of molecular editors waiting for a body to rebuild. It rose fast, covering Lawrence's feet, his calves, his knees. He shivered as it hit his waist.
"Temperature's good," I called out, watching the readouts. "You're doing fine."
"Feels like…" Lawrence's voice was strange, distant. "Like static. Everywhere."
The liquid kept rising. Thirty-six inches. Forty. It lapped at his chest, then his shoulders, and finally submerged his chin. I watched him take a final breath and close his mouth as the surface closed over his head. For a moment he was just a shape in the white, limbs faint and ghostly behind the clouded glass.
Then the sequencing lights kicked in—blue, pulsing in waves through the fluid—and Lawrence's body began to change.
The process took about two hours. I sat in the hard plastic chair by the observation window and watched Lawrence's silhouette shift behind the clouded glass.
You could see it happening—subtle at first, then impossible to miss. His shoulders broadening, pressing against the restraints until the magnets adjusted. His torso lengthening slightly, the spine realigning with soft pops I could hear even through the seal. The hair on his head darkening, thickening, creeping down to frame a jawline that was cutting itself sharper with every pulse of the blue lights. His hands twitched at his sides, fingers spasming as the bones restructured themselves, growing longer, more elegant.
I checked the vitals every ten minutes. Heart rate elevated but stable. Brain activity showing the semi-conscious state we'd observed in the alphas—aware enough to breathe, to stay upright, but deep enough not to panic as his body dissolved and rebuilt itself cell by cell.
The solution stayed cloudy, thick enough with suspended enzymes that you caught impressions rather than details. A flash of abdominal muscle tightening. The shadow of a hip bone rising. The vague outline of a cock thickening, reshaping, settling into new proportions.
I got up to piss and then refill my coffee, though it sat cold and untouched on the console. Mostly I just watched.
Around the ninety-minute mark, the pulsing stopped. The blue lights held steady, then faded to a soft amber. The machine was running its final verification, checking every marker against the source sample. I pulled up the readout. Genetic match: 99.7%. Expression fidelity: 98.9%. The remaining variance was within acceptable parameters—environmental factors, epigenetic drift, the stuff that made a clone a person rather than a puppet.
Then the drain cycle started. The cloudy liquid receded, revealing Lawrence inch by inch.
It was Mike. Undeniably, completely Mike. The thick dark hair across his pecs, trimmed and styled exactly the way it appeared in his videos. The abs, six distinct ridges with that perfect shadowed valley down the center. The shoulders, broad and capped with muscle that flexed as he stirred back to consciousness. His face—sharper than Lawrence's had ever been, younger by a solid twenty-five years.
The tube chimed. The door unlocked with a hiss of equalizing pressure.
Lawrence—Mike—whoever he was now—stumbled forward. I caught him by the shoulders. His skin was warm, slightly tacky from the residual solution, and I felt the muscle beneath my palms shift as he found his balance. He was the same height Lawrence had been, but maybe just built differently—denser. The body of a man who worked out for a living rather than one who sat at consoles.
"Raf?" His voice was wrong. Deeper than Lawrence's, with a slight rasp that caught in his throat. He touched his own face, fingers tracing the unfamiliar planes. "Holy shit. Holy shit."
I handed him a towel. He dried himself automatically, still staring at his hands, his arms, the dark hair trailing down his stomach to where his boxers clung wet and transparent. He was hard—half-hard, anyway, the outline of Mike's cock pressing against the fabric in a shape that made me look away fast.
"How do you feel?" I asked.
He laughed, and it was Mike's laugh too. Confident, slightly mocking. "Like I could bench press you. Like I need to eat about four thousand calories immediately." He ran his hands down his torso, palms flat against the abs, the pecs, the trail of hair I'd admired from the observation screen. "This is insane. This is actually insane."
I pulled up the full-body scan on the tablet. "No anomalies. Genetic markers match the sample within parameters. You're… you're him, Lawrence. You're Mike Torres."
He looked at me then, and something flickered in his eyes—Mike's eyes, dark and long-lashed, but with Lawrence's expression behind them. Wonder. Fear. Hunger.
After he left to shower and change—moving with a new swagger in his hips, unconsciously adjusting to a center of gravity that wasn't his—I sat alone in the lab.
The machine stood behind me, silent and ready.
I pulled up the secure directory on my personal tablet. Scrolled past Mike's file, past the alpha subjects, past Lawrence's logged sample waiting in cryo-storage.
Found the folder I'd created three years ago. Untouched since. Labeled only with initials.
I'd been thinking about it since the first successful rat trial. Since I understood what this machine could really do. Not transformation as novelty. Not copying some OnlyFans guy. But becoming someone I'd always longed to be.
The folder opened. A photo filled the screen.
I'd been patient. Professional. Waiting for the machine to be ready.
I closed the folder and powered down the tablet. The lab was quiet except for the ventilation and the faint residual warmth from Lawrence's transformation.
Soon, I thought. My turn.
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