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>>...a woman in the mirror. [FEMC]

One hand rises to the glass. The reflection follows – narrowed eyes, lips trembling at their corners, a face that should be familiar, but feels stolen from someone else. You pinch lightly at your cheeks, tugging the flesh as though it were a mask, then comb unsteady fingers through a mop of hair cut short for a cryopod. Your fingertips hover along faint scar lines across your collarbones and hip, mapping a terrain without story, a body empties of its past.

You are utterly naked. Cryostsais requires it. Fabric might stiffen, bond and fuse to living tissue. Removal would cause tearing, necrosis and loss of function. The protocol is practical, efficient, and entirely rational.

And yet the absence of clothing leaves you utterly unmoored, as though your body were little more than a specimen on display – viable, animate, but stripped of identity. The reflection in the mirror is less a woman than a clinical subject, an anatomy model animated only by breath.

Your reflection’s eyes are gray, restless and clouded like a roiling storm. You search for familiarity, for some remnant of warmth or belonging. The glass only offers blank return. Desperate, you cycle through smiles, frowns, a flicker of laughter that feels like an imitation. Each gesture collapses into silence, a performance for nobody.

“…ah.”

The sound slips from your throat, ragged and raw. You flinch at the unfamiliarity of your own voice – then again as pain lances through your esophagus. Freezer burn is a common side effect of cryostasis. You don’t think you have any major damage, but the “thawing” process still leaves your body with aches and dull pain.

The facts arrive with certainty, though less violent than your earlier breakdown. But the certainty itself is what unsettles you most. You don’t remember learning this. You don’t remember anything.

Analysis without context.

Data without meaning.

Your hand brushes the workstation for balance, catching on something jutting out of a half-broken cubicle drawer. A plugsuit – standard issue, sealed for sterility. The fabric is cold and unyielding as you pull it over your skin, conforming to every contour with unforgiving precision. It reduces your body to function and outline, clinical and impersonal. It is still better than nothing, especially after the cold of the pod.

Then the mirror rattles.

A vibration shudders through the wall. Easily dismissed as a trick of your recovering balance. But the sensation builds – low, insistent, rhythmic, until the ground hums beneath your feet. A cold awareness rises in you. This isn’t a system quirk or machinery, but movement.

(cont.)