Odie stroked his dark beard as he gazed at Sara on the way back from the restroom. He wondered if she could stand up without her oversized heels, which lied beside the opening of the bed area. She resembled a little girl's toy shoved into a cubby hole after play time. If he hadn't ever overheard her speaking, he would have thought she was some sort of toy. Perhaps an advanced plaything that had lost her owner. Despite that, there was a persevering independence he noticed growing in her. After four years of submissive silence, her avoidance began blossoming into casual greetings to him and other visitors in the hallway. Returning to his seat in the "quiet, soundproofed" work room, he stared at Sara. She walked back to the computer room and continued her earlier chat with Nan.

  Eavesdropping wasn't rude if the speech was impeding on his silence, he reckoned with himself as he packed his tea, keyboard, and tablet into his bag. A few words about whole-body skeletal reconstruction drew his ear closer to the door. Sara's case was starting to feel too interesting to listen in on, especially while Nan was toiling with the clues of her story in the computer room, aloud, with Jeeves.

  "Jeeves, look up CSF-H," he could hear them chattering in the other room. He rolled his eyes. That rat-girl-thing doesn't know what hybrid cerebral-spinal fluid is, he scoffed. Furfags should have compatibility aids on the top of their minds. Though she might not be a mechanical beast in any capacity. Nan's ignorance made him groan, but he found their excuses acceptable the more he thought about it.

  Odie's face twisted into a scowl as soon as Jeeves responded, "SCF-HS could refer to the hybrid solution of cerebral-spinal fluid, developed specifically for the health and wellbeing of grinders with spinal modifications. Would you like to know more?" the robot asked.

  "No. Jeeves, what is NCC reconstitution?" Nan asked. She really doesn't know! He strode to computer room.

  "Thinking..." Jeeves said, scanning the Internet. "NCC reconstitution might refer to many things. Most are related to biology, but other fields use similar terminology. Would you like me to list them?"

  "Obviously it's related to biology," Nan clicked and turned to look at the man.

  Basking in the sheen of the moment, Odie shouted, "Neural crest cell reconstitution!" and set his kit onto the desk beside Nan. "I'm sorry, but your library has become uncharacteristically loud, lately. And I couldn't help but overhear you talking about mods. Presumably your friend Sara's cybernetic and biological modifications. Am I correct?"

  Nan was dumbfounded. Sara came out from behind Nan and nodded.

  "If you want me to help you, tell me. But please, if you don't, keep quiet. I was here to focus in silence, but I don't want to move to the solitary rooms."

  "Um, yes, Odie," Nan almost blurted out like a question. "Wait, you could hear me?"

  "I sit by the door you insist stays open in the so-called quiet room," he growled. "So, do you want my help or not? Because I'm going home if you don't."

  Nan nodded. "Sure, but ask Sara first. This is about her."

  Sara frowned. His presence in her dream made her cautious, but he didn't seem malicious. "I'd like your help, Odie," she finally decided. "Thank you for your offer." She walked to the other side of the table to get a better look at him.

  "Oh, so you can stand without those cinderblocks glued to your feet," Odie grumbled. She started to regret her decision.

  Sara grabbed a thick stack of unstapled black sheets from the folder. Faint markings in the corner were her first clue. Page 1 of 4? She turned it back over. Figure 1. Each page was dovetailed on two perpendicular edges. Taking one of the sheets, she realized that there were many transparent, yet faintly colored sections between spots of darkness. "Nan, can you tell Jeeves to turn on his light?" Sara asked. Nan nodded, eager to assemble Sara's puzzle. Odie scanned the dark sheets for some sort of pattern. His eyes, untouched by cybernetics and sharp despite his age, flashed between Sara and the images discerningly.

  "Jeeves, backlight," Nan ordered and helped Sara put the puzzle together. "Is it an X-ray?" they asked.

  "CT scan," Odie was quick to correct.

  "It kind of looks like a lung, or a brain," they cringed. Each of the four top sheets fit as a corner in the whole image. "Should I make a digital copy of it with Jeeves?"

  "Um, I think yes," Sara said, trying to interpret the blobs and myriad colors. "This is incredibly familiar to me," she mumbled and focused on one color. "What if I use a filter?"

  "A filter?" Nan repeated, confused. "The borders say scans of Owlet, year 2122? But it hardly looks like you at all, does it?" Nan said, adjusting their glasses. "It looks like some kind of abstract watercolor. That whole cult operation must have been unprofessional."

  "How about these," Sara said, assembling the bottom four sheets into another image. "Owlet 2127."

  Odie pursed his lips. "That's her. The listed dimensions for her limbs and skull are exact, unless this composite imaging depicts a different person with the same build." Nan shook their head. "You see," Odie continued, "the proportions are unique. I've never seen anyone in town with these extensive mods. Hydraulic mechanisms especially." His concerns steeped into a deep sense of dread as he deciphered the scan. There was no way any normal person, much less a sanitation worker, could afford such extensive surgery over 5 years. And "cult operation"? Surely, this was done by a group with a lot of resources. Legal or mafia especially. He snapped his fingers. Homosexuals! he figured, but he dared not voice his speculation so early with Nan around.

  Sara took images of both scans through her left eye camera. She digitally altered the photos to hide all colors but red. A blob branched off into five sections, which branched off into many more smaller ones. The pattern in the 2127 scan became obvious to her: major arteries of the human circulatory system. It looked the veins had been untangled, snipped, and rearranged. But the 2122 scan revealed a more placental arrangement.

  "The red areas are for blood," she stated. Odie and Nan helped assemble the other three scans over Jeeves' light. Rapidly and systematically, Sara sorted each of the body's systems as represented by the colors. "Let me show you," she said, standing on top of the desk full of notes. She unraveled the overhead projector cord and inserted the loose end to a socket in her nape. It was never comfortable jacking in, but it was never intolerable either. She labeled each image as she waited. It only took seconds to assemble a slide show of the filtered images and a few of their combinations through her internal computing system.

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  Nan's jaw dropped in disbelief as Sara projected the changes in her circulatory system and the dates accompanying it. "Wait! Pause," Nan squeaked. "Can you make a composite of the 5 slides?"

  "I did that, here," Sara said, switching to the overlay of each snapshot of her circulatory system. "You can really see the height difference from before and after the metamorphosis."

  "Metamorphosis?!" Nan's jaw and whiskers lowered and receded in disgust, and Odie's hands trembled. The first slide chronologically displayed nothing more than a mass of undefined tissues. Sara examined her bones next. They watched as a skeleton of a tall Caucasian male was shaved, shattered to bits, and replaced with titanium cells. "Sara, I don't want to look at this right now—," Nan moaned queasily as she zoomed in on the fissures in her skull and reconstruction of her eye sockets. Lacrimal and orbital expansion. "I'm going to grab some water, tell me when you're done!" Nan shouted and ran back to the kitchen.

  Odie had no coherent explanation for the dizzying overlay of Sara's broken ribs, untangled guts, straightened arteries, an enlarged spleen, and half a liver. "Shit!" he gasped and whipped his head back to the original screens. "Where'd you even find this?"

  "I don't remember," Sara mumbled back to the bearded man. "Do you know what these images depict? I'm trying to figure out what it all means."

  Flabbergasted, Odie stepped closer to the projection. "Zoom out," he demanded. He did know. But did Sara? "Like you said, metamorphosis," he sputtered.

  Sara stammered, unsure of how to respond. A laugh escaped her lips. "I'm just a grinder like anyone else, I just didn't know it went this far," she said, turning off the projection and promptly unplugging herself. "I don't know where these documents are from, really, they were just at the bottom of my closet. I found them yesterday," she tried to explain. "I mean, I guess they were there a long time since they were dusty and—"

  Odie held up his hand to stop her talking, and exhaled sharply. "I need to think." He paced frantically, then put an unsteady finger on the scan. Whose signature is here he muttered to himself. Heart looked normal, brain was anomalous but not his expertise, proportions were a dead giveaway if he had cared to mentally catalog them all... but he didn't. "Where did you get this?" he growled. Sara frowned and stepped off of the table.

  "Nowhere," she whimpered, holding back tears.

  He was shocked that he could believe her, despite his better judgment telling him to leave town, maybe the planet, and never return. Odie figured that he might as well let his curiosity be the end of him, if he felt that way. He kept chattering to himself. "What time... 2122... Who was active then... That wasn't 20 years ago, docs likely censored." I still think it's the homosexuals and their mafia. But that doesn't sound right. I can't think in this state. Who am I kidding? He planted himself in Nan's seat before all the clues that they and Sara had laid out. "Sit down with me, Sara." His exhale was shallow. "Take a deep breath," he told himself calmly. "And exhale slowly." He fingered through the Owlet Files. "This is the accompanying text, isn't it?"

  "Yes," she nodded, ruminating over the handler's words about dolls and the makeup of her body. Why was Odie in my dream? The churning of her stomach was dampened by a regulatory chip lodged in her upper small intestine. Her awareness of its presence offered a new level of discomfort that seemed leagues worse. She watched Odie's eyes scan the files like a machine. Every divot of her skull, facet of her iris, and crease of her skin was recorded meticulously. But the machinations of its design were covert. A genetic test and keen eye would be the only way to decode her being.

  "Sara, how old are you?" he asked in as candid and gentle of a voice as he could manage.

  "Forty-four," she answered, matching his tone.

  "Can you tell me about your last job?"

  "I'm currently working in garbage disposal," she murmured. "Before that, I'm not sure. I might have been an escort."

  He figured that her memory was shot from the operation. Perhaps cyber-amnesia. Psychedelics, improper cerebral-spinal fluid injection, or a total restructuring of her neurons and their arrangement could have been the cause too. Whoever designed her had detailed knowledge of the etheric and epigenetics beyond what was currently accepted by the greater scientific community. They were toying with the morphics of Terran humanity. "Can you tell me your earliest memory?"

  Sara shifted in her seat. "I'm not sure which is my earliest... I guess in 2121 or so, looking out the window of my old apartment. I was—well, I was a man—tall, with brown hair. Like in that card," she gestured to her old ID. "I lived at the address there. The room still exists. I remember having plants, a little bit about my boyfriend at the time, my old cat, that's all." Odie excused her for the shoddy recollection and delivery. He realized that folks who'd been through less would have cracked under the pressure long ago.

  Careful to repeat her language, he asked, "When did you undergo metamorphosis?"

  "It was 2122. From then to 2127."

  "So you were about 26 when this started. Can you tell me how you know that?" If she underwent total brain restructuring, her newest memories should be the ones that are gone, unless something more insidious is happening. Odie's mind jumped from gay mafia to supposedly defunct intelligence agencies.

  Sara felt trapped. It made sense for the memories to have occurred in 2121, but how could she be certain? All she had to go off of were images. A deep sense of dread and doubt set into her bones. "Um, I guess I don't know for sure, but it just makes sense. It was all before I met Plume and Witch and all those other people from that cult I was in... I remember that I wasn't thinking of them, then."

  "Right," Odie bit his tongue, resisting harsher words as Nan returned. "You're incredibly unique. Do you have any idea who designed you?"

  "That cult, I guess. But I don't remember who ran it. Everyone was in frilly costumes and had these code names. My 'sisters' looked a lot like me. Not exactly, but very similar. Large eyes, permanent lip color, slender, moé build. A while back, after 2127, men would call me a doll. I wasn't entirely sure what it meant. It feels too layered."

  "That is a layered word. I appreciate you sharing all this. It's difficult, no doubt." Odie snapped his fingers as he thought. Sara was some sort of fetish. Fetish, a fetish doll? A thing of worship, or embodying a thing to be lusted after. He anxiously ran a couple of fingers through his gray and silver hair before glancing at the scans again. Metamorphosis, doll... This reeks!

  Nan offered her friend tissues. They glared at Odie, unimpressed with his shameless curiosity.

  Though conscious of the effect he had on the two, he knew he couldn't live with himself if he kept his mouth shut. "I'd try to figure out who designed you based on the stylistic choices they made," he advised. "Anime face, your whole entire skull quite frankly, hip and femur angle, hair, lips, nails, anything that stands out. Hell, visit a doctor or talk to a grinder. Pro-grinder if you know any. Test the spinal fluid, look for genetic signatures and tags. Maybe your sequence is on the black, or even clear market with that missing liver of yours. Look for print and patent numbers on your titanium, hydraulics, muscles, and guts." He shrugged, at a loss for comforting words. "I'm sorry. I wish you the best."

  "Thank you." Sara sniffled. She was doing her damndest to remember what happened, and what to do during these occasions. Maybe there was no answer for what could be done.

  "I'll be in tomorrow and Thursday, eight to four," he offered, then looked at his square-faced analog watch. It was already 4:30 p.m.

  "Goodbye, Odie," Nan hissed through their incisors.

  "Nan, Sara," he dismissed himself as unceremoniously as he arrived.