Borrowed Skin

The dressing room was a taped mouth. Muffled sounds filtered into a blur of blended noise. It wasn't the hush of solitude, but rather pressure against the skin. Static before a storm.

The performer sat before the mirror, a rented body with a timer set for a week. Slender, attractive, designed for elegance without specificity. A beautiful face made to fuse into the scene.

Her identity and conscience stayed archived somewhere in the cloud, but tonight, she was Vire. A persona curated for the premiere of Spectra. Fluid choreography. Emotional mimicry. A face that could weep on cue.

She leaned forward. The figure in the mirror did not.

For a moment, her reflection lagged—just a flicker, a skipped frame. Vire froze, breath caught in a throat she didn’t own. The reflection blinked out of time, then smiled. Not the rehearsed smile, something else. Something feral.

A glitch, she told herself. A rendering delay. The body was rented, but the mind was still hers. Still intact.

The mirror disagreed.

Behind the glass, the other Vire tilted her head. The gesture was familiar, but wrong—like watching a memory reenacted by someone who had never lived it. Their eyes shimmered with static, pupils dilating into spirals. When she spoke, the voice Vire heard wasn't natural—wasn't hers. More so a digital translation of something meant to imitate. The bulbs above the mirror flickered in rhythm.

"You wear me like costume. But I am not your mask. I am your marrow."

Vire stood abruptly, knocking over a vial of scent-coded emotion. It shattered, releasing the sharp tang of grief. The room pulsed with it. The mirror-self inhaled deeply, as if feeding.

"Mm. You feed me sorrow, but I crave the tremor beneath your skin."

Her heart was a stadium. Pounding beats like the feet stomping to their seats. "What is this," she breathed, turning away from the mirror and dipping behind the dressing blind.

The yellow light above cast a distorted shadow on the wall behind her. Her shadow, but not. The blackened hand crept along the wall, and across the dressing blind. Stretching and wrapping around her, it plucked at a loose strand of hair.

Vire whirled around, hand on her chest as she stared at the shadow. Like the mirror, it didn't move as she moved. There must be something off in the coding, she thought. But it was just a shadow, what harm could it really do? She made note to report the glitch when her timer ran out.

A knock startled her further and her shadow snapped into place. Each move following her own, but she could still see it—the lag, the slight disproportioned angle in which the shadow mimicked her.

The stage director stood at the other side of the door, impatiently staring down at a clipboard he clutched a little too tightly. "Places. We're about to start."

Vire inhaled slowly and nodded, sparing a glance at the mirror, then to the shadow.

Back stage was a chaotic blur of moving bodies. Each rented and worn with purpose. Faces lacked the proper emotion, her own included. But where theirs were a blank slate of neutrality, Vire's reflected the unsettled dread that had curled beneath her borrowed skin.

She needed her body to smile. Alert eyes needed to be weighed by seduction. The hands needed to still.

Stage lights dimmed and the crowd echoed hushed tones of excitement and anticipation.

Music began to play. Technical beats, precise and resonating, each one an instruction. Move.

Her shadow on the curtain wagged a finger back and forth. "You don't want to blend in. Take part but not be noticed, do you? Let me in." Vire shook her head, eyes darting left to right. The voice must be in her head. No one seemed to notice or hear it but her.

"Come on. Steal the show. Let me in. Don't you want to actually feel?"

Feel.

That was something a rented body did little of. There were sensations but dulled. A touch didn't hold the same tingle as a natural body would. More of a pressure than a feeling.

The stage was a void. Black glass beneath her feet. Vire stepped into it like a baptism. Each movement was calibrated to seduce, suggest, and conceal.

Dancers and performers flooded the stage. The warm glow of moving lights was a suggestion of who to watch—of where to find her shadow. She saw it as it swayed behind her. A finger curled. "Let me in."

Her body obeyed the music's direction—head snapping into place, but something was off.

The movements, so fluid and practiced, began to fracture. A hand lingered in the air a beat too long. A turn cut too sharp. The audience might not notice, but she did. The performers worked in unison. Simultaneous precisely measured movements. A murmuration of bodies.

This thing, this shadow, it wasn't just outside her, it was already within. Already affecting her synchronization. Something lurked beneath the borrowed skin like a parasite begging its host for attention.

Was it something in the body? Or was it something she brought into it? Her desire to be seen? To be more than something to be chosen from a list and placed to please? It was a craving so deep it had been forgotten and whisked away in the cloud. Something remaining from when she was human, but she wondered . . . was it human at all?

Her foot missed a step, the timing off and out of sync. A quiet laugh rolled through her mind. "They're starting to notice. You're getting outdated, but I could make you better, after all, I am you. The better you. The you, you wish you could be. The one who feels."

Vire's breath hitched as her eyes scanned the crowd. She could feel the presence of the shadow like crawling hot vines creeping through her insides, twisting, touching, yearning.

That little five-star score had never wavered, but if it did, she was doomed to a life of digital existence and solitude. No body upload. No life. Failing meant going back to the cloud. No more rented bodies, no more performing. Who would want a performer who couldn't perform?

"They'll laugh you off this stage if you don't let me in."

Sliding her foot out of a leap across the inky black of the stage, she nearly toppled, her foot lurching to the side. Vire raised her hands to steady herself when no one else had. Heads began to turn. Fear crept into her stolen features.

"Better smile."

A smile slithered onto Vire's face. The muscles pulled unnaturally, and not of her doing. Panic was creeping in. The forced smile wouldn't budge, even as her brows pushed up in a plea for help.

The reflection on the floor danced in front of her as she spun, taunting, grinning, bidding her to let it in. The moves were more than practiced. If fluidity was the theme, her shadow was made for it. Not a step out of time, or a joint bent to sharply. The shadow self moved like the way pleasure rolls through a body at the height of climax.

Unbound, untamed, natural and effortless. "Just let me in. You've already tasted the truth, now swallow it."

A susurration of gasps and whispered words reached the stage like a settling fog. But if it was awe, amusement, or alarm, she couldn't tell.

Vire couldn't take it. Couldn't handle the thoughts that rattled like encapsulated secrets in the minds of every onlooker. She couldn't handle losing a star.

"Fine." It was a whisper and a plea.

It was as if she had been underwater without air and finally reached the surface. A sharp gasp had the other performers in pause as they all turned to look at her frozen in the middle of the stage, her chest pumping with fresh breaths in feeling lungs.

The music died, and her body was languid and buzzing. The air tasted different. The scent of sweat and mingled mixtures of perfume and emotion filled her senses.

Vire's hand rose in slow seduction, curling the air as if grabbing a rope and her body began to move. The steps were hers but pulled by something else. Not timed by precision and technicalities, but through emotion and feeling.

She felt.

Someone backstage started the music back as the crowd began to murmur in dissatisfaction, but Vire paid no mind. Not to them, not to the music, only to the feeling.

Surender. Sweat. Tempo. Vibrations. Pleasure. Aching. The heat of the spotlight washed over her as she bent, fingers grazing the bare skin of her leg. The soft trace sent a chill and prickled the fine hairs of the flesh. Flesh that felt like hers. Each breath was a revelation. Existence in more than just formatting and coded qualities.

The shadow was her own. The smile that settled was her own. It was like belonging for the first time even if the body she wore wasn't really hers.

"But it could be." The whisper came from her mind was a craving she wouldn't admit.

Renting a body was acceptable, but staying in one . . .

The possibility didn't exist. When the timer ran out, her mind went back to the cloud and the body reset for its next use.

"We could stay. Stop the timer. Live forever."

How sweet that would be, she thought. To exist for more than a week at a time. To feel every possible sensation. To be alive.

She wrapped herself in the dance. Her body going through the movements like a river. Fluid, unthinking, alive.

The burn of muscles felt like sweet release. Sweat trailing in little rivulets down her neck like a cold tongue. She breathed, and spun, and leapt, and reached. Gliding effortlessly over the glossy black stage.

The music slowed, the ending near. Dancers readied for the final move. A precise pose of bodies, but she didn't stop.

Vire couldn't stop. Her body kept moving though everyone else froze in pristine poise. A fresh wave of panic washed over her. What had she done?

"Mm. You released me. It's been far too long. It's my turn now."

Vire wanted to scream. To beg for help, but no voice came from the throat. The throat that was only momentarily hers.

The body stopped its dancing and stood still in the center of the stage. Eyes looked down at raised hands that stretched and curled into fists. Hands then brushed down the arms of the body she could no longer control. She wanted to feel it—she should have felt it, but the sensation was gone.

Only able to see where the eyes looked, she watched them drift to the door and settle.

Taking off in a run, the body leapt from the stage and sprinted down the aisle. Gasps and whispers poured in from the audience as her body ran away.

She hit the door with force and pushed it open, pausing only when the night air brushed over her. Head tipped back, she saw the faint glimmer of stars between towering buildings and streetlights.

Then the eyes turned down toward the shadow on the pavement. The shadow that was her, clawing, pounding, panicking and pleading for escape. The body began walking, paying no mind to heads that turned toward the out-of-place dancer.

She became the reflection on glass. A witness to what she invited in. "Let me out." Her scream fractured into static. A glitch in the glass. No one heard. No one but the entity that took her body.

The false Vire smiled back at her reflection as she walked. "Now you know what it's like. To be locked in a corner between consciousness and life. Between data and deletion. Condemned to merely exist while someone else does whatever they please with your body."

She watched in horror as the rented body turned away from her, continuing down the road. "Let me out. This isn't what I agreed to."

A laugh that wasn't hers, that was barely recognizable echoed from the body. "This is exactly what you agreed to. You let me in, now I'm pushing you out." She jumped and twirled in the air, arms spread wide, not a care in the world. "This feels good."

She pulled in a deep breath of smoggy air. "It's been too long."

"What are you?"

She paused and walked toward the dark glass of a shop window. "I'm Vire," she said as if it were obvious. "Now get out of my body, bitch."