Miranda: Beauty Engineered by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Miranda-Beauty-Engineered-1220429914

Miranda: Beauty Engineered ANIMATION
Glass Orchid Zero

Miranda Lawson did not believe in ghosts. She believed in design flaws, bad decisions, and the malignant persistence of men who mistook control for wisdom.

So when the alarms aboard the Cerberus black site below Ganymede Station began to sing in their thin, silver voices, she did not think of curses. She thought of locks. She thought of protocols. She thought of the long, humiliating habit laboratories had of betraying their own lies.

She stood before the observation window in a tailored white coat that had once been meant for a woman who needed to look like a saint while committing sins. Beyond the glass, in the containment chamber, a shape waited in the dark like a thought one was ashamed to finish.

It had once been a person.

Or perhaps several people.

The file had been scrubbed so many times that even its omissions seemed intentional. Subject GL-9. Bioadaptive candidate. Neural integration success. Identity fracture. Appetite escalation. Immune rewriting. The final note, written by an unseen hand, was maddeningly neat:

Do not allow it to hear its name.

Miranda folded her arms. “That’s an inconvenient instruction.”

A voice behind her answered with a faint, amused drawl. “You always did prefer inconvenient truths.”

She did not turn immediately. “You’re late, Dr. Kheir.”

Jalen Kheir, the facility’s chief xenogeneticist, drifted into the light with the reluctant grace of a man who had spent too many years discussing catastrophe in measured tones. His spectacles flashed. His smile did not reach his eyes.

“I was delayed by a locked bulkhead, a ruptured camera line, and the charming sensation that something in this building was learning my habits.”

Miranda finally looked at him. “And?”

“And I dislike being correct.” He slipped a data wafer from his pocket. “The creature is awake.”

“It was never asleep.”

Kheir’s mouth tightened. “No. But it was quiet.”

From the chamber came a soft impact. Once. Twice. Not a crash. A tap, almost polite.

Miranda’s reflection stared back at her from the glass: elegant, composed, and, beneath the discipline, a woman assembled with the same merciless care as the thing in the chamber. Cerberus had made her beautiful the way a blade is beautiful. Efficiently. Deliberately. With no regard for the blood it would later draw.

She touched the side of her throat where a pulse beat under skin engineered to lie convincingly.

“What did you make?” she asked.

Kheir laughed once, without humor. “We did not make it. We invited it.”

The lights dimmed.

Somewhere far down the corridor, a door tried to open and failed with a shriek of metal.

Miranda turned toward the control console. “Seal the inner ring.”

“I already did.”

“Then seal it again.”

He obeyed. His fingers moved over the panel, but the display returned only a string of symbols that flickered and rearranged themselves into nonsense. Miranda watched, expression unreadable.

“What have you done?” she asked.

Kheir went pale. “Not me.”

The glass before them darkened from the inside.

Something had stood up in the chamber.

It was tall, but not because its body was large. It was tall because it had learned how to arrange itself so that every angle seemed wrong. Limbs too long. Spine too elegant. Skin that shone as if wet, though no moisture could survive in that sealed air. Its face was hidden beneath a fold of shadow, except for the glimmer of one eye, then another, each reflecting the observation room with a cold and appraising intelligence.

Miranda felt, absurdly, that she was being measured for a dress.

A voice came through the intercom, soft as silk pulled across a knife.

“Miranda.”

Kheir recoiled. “It learned the access path.”

Miranda’s shoulders became very still.

The creature had spoken her name with an intimacy that unsettled the spine. Not a growl, not a mimicry. A caress.

She stepped closer to the glass. “That is impossible.”

The thing tilted its head. In the chamber, the motion was almost elegant.

“No,” it said. “It is familiar.”

A silence followed that was not empty but crowded. Miranda’s pulse sharpened. The creature watched her with an intelligence that seemed less manufactured than remembered.

Kheir whispered, “Why would it know her?”

Miranda did not answer. She was remembering a sealed archive she had never fully opened, a private corner in Cerberus records that contained her own genes arranged in branching towers of data. The Prodigy Program. Itera
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