New Job, New Look

Ethan accepted the job at 8:47 on Monday morning.

He was standing shirtless beside the windows of his apartment, still wearing the jeans he had pulled on after his shower. Morning sunlight flooded the room and sharpened every youthful line of his body: narrow waist, flat stomach, smooth chest, and lean arms built by years of swimming.

At twenty-three, he looked even younger. His thick brown hair stood in its usual careless spikes, and his face was almost entirely untouched by stubble.

His laptop remained open on the kitchen counter.

Congratulations. We are pleased to offer you the position of Senior Compliance Director.

The title was absurd.

Ethan had applied for a junior administrative role at the financial firm. He had expected data entry, document checks, and a desk somewhere near the photocopier. Yet the contract identified him as a senior executive, offered a salary nearly four times what he had anticipated, and instructed him to report to the forty-second floor at nine the next morning.

He had read it three times before clicking ACCEPT.

A final message appeared:

Your employment profile is now being updated. Please remain available while all necessary adjustments are completed.

Ethan frowned.

“Adjustments?”

His phone vibrated on the counter.

The screen displayed a photograph of his new employee identity card. His name was correct, but the picture had not loaded. Beneath the empty frame appeared a line of text:

Appearance synchronization in progress.

A tingling sensation moved across his scalp.

Ethan scratched the side of his head. Several short brown hairs clung to his fingers.

He stared at them.

More fell when he touched his hair again.

“What the hell?”

A sudden tightness spread across his shoulders and arms. His lean swimmer’s physique thickened beneath his gaze. His shoulders broadened, his upper arms grew heavier, and his chest filled out. For a moment, he appeared stronger—more mature, like the body of a man several years older.

He raised one hand to his hair and held the other in front of his face, silently asking his own body what it was doing.

The phone vibrated again.

Physical authority: 18%

The muscles around his stomach cramped.

Ethan bent forward. His sharp abdominal lines began to blur, vanishing beneath a subtle softness. The change was slight at first, no more than the consequence of missing the gym for a few months.

Then his waist pushed outward.

“No. Stop.”

He seized the phone, but the employment application would not close. A diagram of a human figure rotated on the screen while numbers recalculated beside it.

Target professional age: 54

Ethan’s breath caught.

“I’m twenty-three.”

The number did not change.

Hair continued to release from his scalp. It collected in the palm of his hand as his hairline receded across his temples. At the same time, faint lines appeared around his eyes. His cheeks grew heavier, his jaw wider, and rough body hair spread over his chest, stomach, shoulders, and arms.

His reflection in the dark phone screen was no longer quite his.

He looked thirty-five.

Perhaps forty.

His stomach expanded further, rounding over the waistband of his jeans. It was not enormous, but it was undeniably the substantial belly of a middle-aged man who spent long hours behind a desk and entertained clients over heavy dinners.

Ethan pressed both hands against it.

The new flesh was warm and real.

“No, no—undo it. Cancel the contract.”

He found the acceptance page and struck the withdrawal button.

A warning appeared:

Senior appointments are permanent.

Another wave passed through him.

His hairline rushed backward. The thick hair on top thinned until individual strands lay weakly across an increasingly exposed scalp. His forehead expanded. His face aged rapidly, acquiring deep horizontal lines and pronounced creases beside his mouth.

His chest softened. His belly became fuller and heavier. The muscles remained beneath the accumulating weight, giving him the sturdy build of a once-athletic man who had gradually surrendered to work, cigarettes, catered meetings, and too many late dinners.

Loose hairs covered his trembling hands.

The phone reported:

Physical authority: 76%

His crown cleared completely.

Ethan stumbled towards the bathroom, but his balance felt different. His body was heavier, his knees less flexible. When he reached the mirror, a balding man in his early fifties stared back at him.

Only a thin horseshoe of short brown-grey hair remained around the sides and back of his head. The top was bare from his forehead to his crown. His young, smooth features had become weathered and stern.

Ethan raised a hand.

The stranger did the same.

“This isn’t me.”

The voice that emerged was deeper, roughened by years he had never lived.

His phone vibrated once more.

Facial distinction required.

Pressure gathered beneath his nose.

Dark bristles pushed through the skin of his upper lip. They lengthened and thickened in seconds, spreading outward into a heavy brown moustache. Ethan pinched it between his fingers and pulled.

Pain shot through his face.

It was genuine.

It belonged to him.

His eyes widened until the whites showed around them. The dark moustache made the transformation complete. The young man who had accepted the job had vanished, replaced by a balding, thick-bodied executive in his mid-fifties.

The empty photograph on his employee card refreshed.

The older man stared severely from the screen.

ETHAN HARPER
SENIOR COMPLIANCE DIRECTOR
EMPLOYEE SINCE 1997

“Since 1997? I wasn’t even—”

The sentence faded.

A memory appeared.

A crowded office in 1997. Cigarette smoke trapped beneath fluorescent lights. Ethan, newly promoted, arguing with an auditor beside a fax machine.

It had never happened.

He remembered it anyway.

Other memories followed.

Twenty-nine years of regulations, quarterly reports, mergers, restructurings, investigations, expense accounts, business-class flights, and discreet conversations with anxious executives. He remembered younger employees falling silent when he entered a conference room. He remembered the heavy dark suits he preferred, the brand of cigarettes he kept in his desk, and the precise knot he always used for his tie.

Ethan gripped the edge of the sink.

“I just graduated.”

The words sounded childish.

His diploma became difficult to picture. The university name slipped from his mind, replaced by details from a career that had never been his. Entire decades settled into his consciousness with the weight of genuine experience.

A final notification appeared.

Employment profile synchronized. Report tomorrow at 09:00. Appropriate attire is required.

The application closed.

Ethan stood silently in the bright apartment, one hand resting on the bare top of his head and the other holding his new moustache.

He remained there for several minutes.

Then he became aware that he was late.

Late for what, he could not say.

He left the bathroom and crossed the apartment, moving through rooms that now felt oddly youthful. The pale wood, modern furniture, and abstract art seemed appropriate for some young tenant—not for a senior director with nearly three decades at the firm.

His own shirtless reflection followed him in the windows: older, balding, broad through the shoulders, soft around the middle.

He entered the walk-in wardrobe.

One side still contained Ethan’s clothes: T-shirts, hoodies, faded jeans, trainers, and swimming gear. He stared at them with mounting disbelief.

On the other side hung rows of dark suits.

They had not been there that morning.

Charcoal wool. Navy pinstripe. Heavy grey flannel. Crisp white and pale-blue shirts occupied a separate rail. Conservative silk ties hung in perfect order. Polished black shoes waited on illuminated shelves.

Ethan lifted a white shirt in one hand and a navy striped tie in the other.

They looked familiar.

More than familiar.

They looked correct.

He glanced down at his hairy chest and rounded stomach. His jeans now seemed offensively casual. The low waistband cut into his new belly, and the faded denim belonged to a body that no longer existed.

“Apparently this is what you want,” he muttered.

Yet he could not remember who he was addressing.

He selected the charcoal three-piece suit.

The shirt fitted his thicker neck perfectly. The trousers settled around his expanded waist as though they had been tailored that week. The waistcoat contained his belly without concealing it, while the jacket gave his broad, mature frame an imposing silhouette.

His hands tied the knot automatically.

He had never worn a three-piece suit before.

He had tied thousands of ties.

Both facts existed in his mind simultaneously, but only one continued to feel important.

By the time darkness fell, Ethan sat on the sofa beside the apartment’s floor-to-ceiling windows. City lights glittered far below. His reflection floated over them: bald crown, deep-set eyes, thick moustache, white collar, striped tie, and dark tailored suit.

He held a cigarette between his lips.

He could not remember buying the packet.

He flicked open a metal lighter and brought the flame towards its end. His hand paused.

A last clear memory surfaced.

That morning, he had been twenty-three. He had hated cigarette smoke. His boyfriend, Noah, had kissed him goodbye before leaving for work and laughed about Ethan’s nervousness over the interview.

Noah would be home soon.

Ethan pictured the door opening. Noah would expect the young man with thick brown hair and a smooth athletic body.

Instead, he would find this.

Ethan almost dropped the lighter.

His phone illuminated on the marble table.

NOAH: On my way home. How did the job thing go?

Ethan stared at the message.

He began typing:

Something happened to me. I need help.

Before he could send it, the employee application opened by itself.

Personal relationships may conflict with executive responsibilities. Update domestic profile?

Two options appeared.

RETAIN
REVISE

His thumb hovered over RETAIN.

Memories of Noah fought through the newly implanted decades: shared breakfasts, weekends in bed, careless kisses in the kitchen, fingers running through Ethan’s thick hair.

Then Ethan looked at the older man reflected in the window.

Noah seemed impossibly young.

The life they shared felt like an embarrassing lapse in judgment by someone Ethan no longer quite understood.

His thumb moved.

REVISE.

Noah’s message disappeared.

The contact vanished.

Ethan tried to recall his boyfriend’s face and found only a vague impression of youth and disappointment.

The cigarette remained between his lips.

He struck the lighter.

The flame caught.

Ethan inhaled cautiously, expecting to cough. Instead, his lungs accepted the smoke with the deep familiarity of a habit maintained for thirty years.

He leaned back against the sofa and exhaled towards the dark window.

The transformation was over.

The confusion remained, but it no longer felt urgent. Tomorrow he would enter the firm’s headquarters, ride the executive elevator to the forty-second floor, and take possession of an office whose every detail he already remembered.

His young body had not suited the position.

His casual clothes had not suited the authority.

His old life had not suited the man the company required.

Ethan adjusted the cuff of his charcoal jacket and watched the severe older executive repeat the gesture in the glass.

On the table, his new employee card finished updating.

Beneath the photograph appeared a corporate slogan he had not noticed before:

NEW JOB. NEW LOOK. NEW LIFE.

Ethan touched his moustache, took another slow drag from the cigarette, and smiled grimly at his reflection.

By morning, he would no longer remember that any of it was new.