Replication - chapter 15 (with images) (Patreon)

I hold the image of the face in my mind. Leila was too warm, warm enough to make a man want to stay. I need a woman who looks like she belongs in a middle-management cubicle and occasionally forgets her network passwords. Someone visible enough to be accommodated, forgettable enough to be dismissed.

I smooth the jawline. I pull the cheekbones down, rounding the face, removing any edges that might read as a threat. I widen the eyes. I let the copper-brown bleed out of the skin, replacing it with a flat, beige-toned pale. A woman who spends fifty hours a week under fluorescent lights.

The heels are two and a half inches of black leather. They force the lumbar spine forward, grinding against the dull ache of menstrual cramps in my lower back. The calf muscles tighten to hold the angle, tilting the female pelvis down and pushing the chest out. The shoes throw the weight forward and the spine has to fight them for it, the calves locked against a posture the cramps are already working hard enough to fight on their own.

I stand at the bathroom mirror and look at what I’ve put together.

The skirt is a charcoal wool blend, cut narrow enough to restrict my stride to roughly fourteen inches. The pantyhose are sheer. The synthetic mesh pulls tight over the spread of the hips, anchoring a thick cotton pad against the labia. The friction is constant, worse with the slow seep of dark blood. It’s only the second time the body has done this, and every shift of weight is a wet reminder of where I am.

I apply a pale pink gloss to the lips. It tastes like chemicals and wax.

The bra is heavily structured. Underwire, rigid padding. It lifts the glandular tissue, pushing the mass up and together. The cleavage is visible through the unbuttoned collar of the cream silk blouse. It’s a blunt-force visual distraction. I’m building a decoy. I grab a generic blue lanyard from the counter. I printed the badge at a copy shop yesterday. Auditing Services. No photo. Just a barcode that won’t scan.

I take my car keys and walk to the door. The heels click against the hardwood floor. The sound announces a woman’s approach. Julian Reyes walked in soft-soled surgical clogs, silent, arriving in rooms without warning. This body broadcasts its presence ten yards in advance.

The hospital parking garage is gray and freezing in the early morning. Third level. I drive past my old assigned spot near the stairs. A silver Lexus is parked there now.

I park in the visitor section and step out of the car. The cold air cuts through the thin silk of the blouse. I don’t have a jacket. A jacket would cover the blouse, and I need the distraction functional the moment I walk through the glass doors.

I enter the main lobby. The smell hits me. Industrial cleaning fluid, stale coffee, the metallic tang of the HVAC system. Eight years of my life happened inside this smell.

Tomas is at the security desk, reading something on his phone.

I approach the turnstile and stop at the glass barrier. I sigh and shift my weight to one hip.

Tomas looks up. His eyes hit the cream silk blouse first. They drop to the charcoal skirt. They travel down the sheer hosiery to the leather heels. Then, they reach the harmless face.

“Badge reader is acting up again,” I say. I pitch the voice higher, injecting a note of tired, deferential frustration. The upward inflection of a woman asking for permission to exist in a space.

Tomas smiles. He hits the bypass button under the heavy wooden desk. The turnstile clicks open.

“Have a good one,” he says.

“You too.”

I walk through. He didn’t ask for my name. He didn’t look at the blank barcode on the lanyard. Whether it was the blouse, the confidence, simple institutional laziness, or some combination of all three, Tomas waved me through.

Eight years of work to earn the right to walk these halls. Eight years building a reputation out of nothing, fighting every assumption in the building to prove I belonged in the room. And I just walked the perimeter in ten seconds because my chest is pushed up and my skirt is tight.

I take the elevator to the administrative wing on the second floor.

The doors slide open. The blue-gray carpet stretches down the corridor. I pass a group of residents standing near a hydration station. Two men, one woman. The men stop talking as I walk by. Their eyes drag over me. The weight of their attention sits on my skin.

The body takes the attention. I like being looked at, and I hate that I like it. I grind my teeth and hold the jawline.

Room 214. Central Archives.

The heavy door is propped open. The room is heavily air-conditioned, a freezing, windowless vault of humming servers and beige workstations.

A man is sitting at the primary terminal. Mid-thirties. Khaki slacks, a blue polo shirt. The nameplate on the desk reads David.

I step into the doorway and knock on the metal frame.

David looks up. He runs the same visual inventory Tomas ran in the lobby. The blink rate slows. He sits up straighter in his ergonomic chair.

“Hi,” I say. I step inside. I let my shoulders slump a fraction. “I’m so sorry to bother you. I’m Lauren, from the external audit team.”

“Hey, Lauren.” David smiles. He rests his hands on his keyboard. “What can I do for you?”

“My vendor login is locked out of the 2021 to 2023 administrative files.” I walk closer to the desk. I lean forward slightly. The silk blouse drapes away from my chest. “My manager is going to kill me if I don’t get these compliance sheets pulled by noon. Is there any way you can let me use an overflow terminal?”

David looks at the cleavage. He looks back at my eyes. He is already reaching for his mouse.

“Yeah, the vendor accounts are always messing up,” he says. He stands up. He’s taller than I am, and he uses the height to loom slightly. “Take terminal three. I’ll log you in with my admin credentials. Just don’t go deleting the mainframe.”

“I promise.” I give him a wide, grateful smile.

I walk to terminal three and sit down. The office chair is cold through the wool skirt.

David leans over me to type his password. I smell his deodorant. Old Spice and nervous sweat. His arm brushes my shoulder.

The body answers it, low and unwanted. I stare at the monitor and wait for it to pass.

“There you go,” David says. He hits the enter key. The administrative portal opens, unlocked. “Let me know if you need anything else.”

“You’re a lifesaver, David. Thank you.”

He walks back to his desk. He turns his monitor slightly so he can keep me in his peripheral vision.

I put my hands on the keyboard.

The nails are painted a sheer nude. The fingers are slender, the joints narrow. I know this system. I spent hours in it as Julian, pulling my own department’s metrics, fighting for equipment budgets against the men who built the interface.

I slow my typing speed. Lauren doesn’t fly through command prompts. She hunts and pecks.

I open the executive files and type Calloway, Mark.

The directory populates. Thousands of documents.

I start with the clinical years. Cardiology. 2014 to 2018.

I open the morbidity and mortality reports.

Mark wasn’t a terrible doctor. He was just aggressively mediocre and risk-averse. I scan the surgical logs, tracing the outcomes. The pattern emerges quickly. Whenever a case presented a high probability of failure, Mark turfed it. He transferred the complex, dying patients to younger attendings or pushed them to the surgical ICU. He kept his own success rates pristine by refusing to touch anyone who might ruin the math.

He didn’t save lives. He managed statistics.

I insert the small black flash drive I brought in my pocket into the USB port under the desk. I copy the clinical logs.

I move to the administrative years. 2019 to present.

Budget reallocations. Committee minutes. Structural changes.

Mark built his empire on institutional goodwill. He handed out favors and shielded the revenue generators. I read through the files, searching for the fracture point.

I open the 2022 grievance reports. The files are sealed under an HR lock, but David’s admin credential bypasses the wall.

I scroll through the settled complaints.

I find a file from orthopedic surgery. A prominent, high-earning surgeon. Three scrub nurses filed formal harassment complaints over a six-month period.

Mark chaired the review committee.

I read the committee notes. The dates, the testimonies, the final decision. Mark didn’t fire the surgeon. He didn’t suspend him. He recommended sensitivity training and transferred the three nurses to different floors, disrupting their careers to protect the hospital’s surgical revenue.

It’s the bureaucratic cowardice Kate despises. She left me because she thought I was cold. She thinks Mark is a decent, reliable man who offers security.

Mark is a coward in a suit.

I copy the grievance file and the budget transfers. I copy the minutes.

The records room is freezing. The industrial air conditioning blasts down from a ceiling vent above terminal three.

The cold cuts through the thin silk of the blouse.

My nipples contract into hard knots against the lace of the bra. The friction of the rough synthetic lace against the tightened tissue is sharp. I shiver. The movement causes the breast tissue to shift, rubbing the raw nerves further.

I cross my arms under my chest, trying to generate warmth. I can’t put a jacket on. The visual of the blouse is my only cover, the only thing keeping David compliant at his desk.

The effort of holding the face is starting to slip. The jaw wants to relax. The cheekbones feel heavy, the cartilage aching from the forced shape. The sustained pressure of the mask drains the glucose from my brain. A dull headache pulses behind my right eye.

I check the clock on the bottom corner of the screen. I have been in the room for forty minutes.

David clears his throat. “You getting what you need over there?”

I look over my shoulder and force the wide eyes. I soften the mouth.

“Almost done,” I say. “Just a few more sheets.”

“No rush.”

I turn back to the monitor.

I have what I need on Mark. The flash drive is loaded. I have the structural history of a fraud.

I move the mouse toward the eject icon.

I should log out. I should stand up, smooth the charcoal skirt, thank David, and walk out of the building.

My hand stops.

The cursor hovers over the main search bar.

The access is broad. David’s credential doesn’t just open the administrative vault. It opens the entire patient database. The system is unpartitioned at this level.

Kate’s gynecologist is in the east wing.

I stare at the blinking cursor.

I’m rationalizing a violation, and I know it, and I don’t care.

I type her name.

The keyboard clatters under my hands. The keys are slightly greasy from someone else’s fingers.

I type her last name, hit the space bar and type her first name.

I hit enter.

The hospital’s patient database is a sprawling architecture I’ve navigated a thousand times. The interface is an institutional gray with bright blue hyperlinks. The system takes two seconds to query the master index. The small loading wheel spins in the center of the monitor.

The server racks behind me hum a constant drone. David clicks his mouse twice at the main desk. The cold air from the ceiling vent blows over the nape of my neck, chilling the sweat that has begun to gather at the hairline I lowered this morning.

The screen populates.

Her file appears at the top of the list. Her date of birth. Her medical record number. The address field has been updated. It lists the apartment building I drove to last night.

I click the blue link.

The encounter history loads. A cascading list of dates and attending physicians. I scroll past a flu visit from last winter. I scroll past a dermatology check from eighteen months ago.

The most recent encounter is dated three days ago.

Department: Obstetrics and Gynecology. East Wing. Attending: Thorne, Jim. My hand stops on the mouse. The nude polish on my thumbnail catches the fluorescent glare from the monitor.

I stare at the department name. The letters sit black on the gray background.

I click the encounter date. The clinical notes open.

I read the chart. I read it with the speed of a physician who has absorbed tens of thousands of these pages. The medical shorthand is my native language.

Chief Complaint: Amenorrhea, nausea, fatigue. The vitals are listed on the right side of the screen. Blood pressure slightly low. Heart rate normal. Weight unchanged.

I scroll down to the laboratory results.

hCG Quantitative. The value is in the tens of thousands.

I stop breathing. The underwire bites into the ribs, the whole rig trapping the chest.

I drag the cursor down to the imaging tab.

Transvaginal Ultrasound. First Trimester. The radiologist’s read is brief. Standard. It details the dimensions of the uterus. It notes the absence of adnexal masses. The ovaries are unremarkable.

Single intrauterine gestation. Gestational sac present. Yolk sac present. Fetus measuring 3.5 centimeters. Cardiac activity documented. FHR 152 bpm. The final line sits at the bottom of the report.

Estimated Gestational Age: 10 weeks, 5 days. I let go of the mouse. My hand drops to my lap. The wool skirt is rough against my palm.

Ten weeks, five days. I back the two weeks off it without having to think about it, dating from conception instead of the last period, and land on eight weeks, five days ago. The week before the tank. The last week I had the body to do it with.

I was a man, then. For the last time.

I look at the white screen. The numbers burn into the retinas. 3.5 centimeters. 152 beats per minute.

The memory surfaces without warning. A Thursday night, early in the month. Kate had come home late from a dinner with her sister. I’d been reading a journal article on the couch. We hadn’t argued that week. The silence in the apartment hadn’t been the heavy, managed silence she hated. It had just been quiet. She dropped her bag on the counter, walked into the living room, and sat next to me. We hadn’t spoken. I’d put the journal down.

The ordinary sequence of two people who lived in the same space. The weight of my body over hers. The solid architecture of the male anatomy. The biology functioning as it was designed to function.

It’s mine. The child is mine.

The cubicle walls tilt. The chair feels like it’s going out from under me. I grip the edge of the desk with both hands. The plastic veneer digs into the pale skin of my palms.

I’m sitting in a freezing server room, wearing sheer pantyhose and two and a half inches of black leather heels. My breasts are hoisted up by a foam harness. I’m wearing a counterfeit face built to look like an invisible secretary. I’m bleeding into a cotton pad, my body executing a twenty-eight-day cycle I never asked for.

And the woman who threw me out of her apartment weeks ago is carrying my child.

My heartbeat is fast and wrong against the sternum, the blood loud enough in my ears to bury the hum of the servers.

I can’t be a father. The mesh erased the male reproductive floor. The genetic material exists only in the cells multiplying inside Kate’s uterus.

Mark.

Mark goes to the appointments. Mark sits in the room in the East Wing and watches the gray static resolve into the shape of my child. He paints the nursery and assembles the crib and stands in the delivery room.

He raises my kid and I’m nothing.

A sound starts in my throat and I shut my jaw on it. I have to get out of the chair. I have to move.

I reach for the mouse. My hand is shaking so hard the cursor stutters across the screen. I manage to click the ‘X’ in the top right corner of the window. The patient portal closes.

I drag the mouse to the vendor application. I log out of David’s admin account.

I reach under the desk. My fingers fumble against the metal casing of the hard drive. I pull the black flash drive free. The plastic is warm from the machine. I drop it into the pocket of the wool skirt.

“You good over there?”

David’s voice cuts through the ringing in my ears.

I look up. He’s leaning around his monitor, looking at me. His brow is furrowed. The appreciative gaze is gone, replaced by mild alarm.

He sees a woman gripping the desk, her knuckles white, her face drained of color.

The face.

The shock broke my concentration. The hold is slipping. The rounded cheekbones are melting. The jawline is reforming.

I squeeze my eyes shut for a fraction of a second. I force the cartilage back into place. I drag the corners of the mouth up. I lock Lauren back into the tissue, a hot bolt spiking from the effort at the base of the neck.

I open my eyes. I force the lungs to draw air against the underwire as a deep, contracting spasm rips through my uterus. The pain is visceral, grounding me in the anatomy. I use it.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. The voice pitches up, breathless and thin. “Just a terrible cramp. Hit me out of nowhere.”

David nods quickly. He turns back to his screen, the awkward retreat of a man confronted with female biology.

“Oh. Yeah. No worries. You need some water or something?”

“No, I’m okay. I got the files. I should get back before my boss starts asking questions.”

I stand up.

The room spins. The leather heels offer no stability. The female pelvis, with its wider structure and lower center of gravity, has to overcompensate to keep me upright on the narrow spikes. My calves burn.

I grab the fake blue lanyard from the desk.

“Thanks again, David.”

“Sure thing, Lauren.” He is already looking back at his screen, eager to end the interaction.

I turn and walk toward the door.

Every step is an exercise in precision. Put the foot down. Lock the ankle. Shift the hip. Move forward.

The wool skirt binds the thighs together. I make it through the metal door. I step out into the blue-gray corridor of the second floor.

I walk toward the elevators. The distance feels like miles. The fluorescent lights overhead strobe in my peripheral vision. The air is too thin.

A group of administrators walks past me, holding coffee cups and folders. One of them laughs at something. The sound is sharp and meaningless. They don’t look at me. I’m just a woman in a skirt walking down a hall.

I reach the elevator bank and press the down button.

The metal doors reflect my shape. The cream silk blouse. The dark skirt. The pale legs ending in black leather.

I’m carrying the evidence that can end Mark’s career in my pocket. I have the flash drive. I spent weeks plotting this sequence. I engineered the disguise, bypassed the security. I stole the records.

None of it matters.

I have the drive in my pocket and it does nothing. None of it gets me the child.

The elevator arrives. A chime sounds. The doors slide open.

The car is empty. I step inside and hit the button for the lobby. The doors close, sealing me in the mirrored box.

The elevator descends. The motion drops my stomach.

I lean against the back wall of the car. The cold metal seeps through the silk blouse. I stare at the floor.

Ten weeks, five days.

Kate is pregnant. She’s carrying a piece of the man who died in the Somatics lab. The boy or girl growing inside her carries my father’s hands, my mother’s eyes, the bloodline stretching back to Oaxaca.

I will never hold that child as its father. I will never hear it call my name.

The doors open at the lobby.

I push myself off the back wall and walk out into the cavernous atrium.

Tomas is still at the security desk, talking to a nurse. He doesn’t look up as I walk past the turnstiles toward the main exit.

The automatic glass doors slide apart.

The winter air hits me. The cold sweeps off the concrete of the drop-off lane. It slices through the silk and the thin nylon on my legs.

I cross the lane toward the visitor parking garage.

I walk fast. The heels clack a frantic rhythm on the asphalt. My ankles roll. I don’t care. I just need to get to the car.

I reach the concrete structure, find the stairwell. I climb to the third level.

My car is parked near a concrete pillar. The metal is freezing. I hit the unlock button on the fob.

I open the door and fall into the driver’s seat.

I slam the door shut.

I reach down and unbuckle the straps of the leather heels. I kick them off. They hit the passenger floorboard.

I reach behind my back, my fingers finding the tiny metal hooks through the thin silk. I pinch the clasp and slide it open. The pressure across my ribs instantly releases. The hoisted shape collapses, dropping my breasts back into their natural weight against my chest. I unbutton the front of my shirt, slip my arms out of the sleeves, and pull the bra free.

Arms back in, buttons redone, I grab the steering wheel with both hands.

The breath shudders in my lungs. I suck in the freezing air of the car.

Then it goes.

A sound tears out of my throat, raw and scraped, and fills the small cabin.

I hit the wheel with the side of my fist, and again, hard enough that it should hurt, and somewhere up the wrist it does, and I keep doing it anyway.

Tears flood my eyes, spilling over the pale cheeks, ruining the cheap pink gloss on my lips.

I’m crying. I haven’t cried since I was twelve. It comes up out of the chest in spasms.

I press my forehead against the top of the steering wheel. The flash drive sits heavy in the pocket of the wool skirt.

I can take his job. I can burn his reputation to ash, and none of it gets the child back. Mark will be there regardless, decent and safe and a coward in all the ways that won’t show, and he never lied to her about his own biology. He’ll protect her from me without even having to try.

I sit in the freezing car and weep.

The tears run down my face and drip onto the steering column. The chest spasms and won’t stop.

I button my blouse, then lift my head and look at my face in the rearview mirror.

The mascara is smeared under the brown eyes. The skin is blotchy and red from crying. The dark hair is plastered to my wet cheeks.

The world goes on outside the concrete walls of the parking garage. Doctors examine patients. Nurses push carts down the blue-gray corridors. The hospital processes the living and the dead.

And somewhere in the East Wing, an electronic file holds the record of a 3.5-centimeter fetus with a heartbeat.

I wipe my face with the sleeve of the silk blouse. The fabric comes away stained with black makeup. I reach down to the floorboard and leave the heels there. I turn the key in the ignition. The engine coughs and settles into a steady idle.

I put the car in gear and press the accelerator with my bare, stockinged foot.