Miranda: Symphony of Genes by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Miranda-Symphony-of-Genes-1220430980

Miranda: Symphony of Genes ANIMATION

Obsolescence Protocol

They harvested her as one harvests a myth — slowly, precisely, until the echo is indistinguishable from the thing that birthed it. In a basement that smelled of antiseptic and tide, they folded voiceprints into tissue scaffolding, folded certainty into spinal geometry, folding the private arithmetic of a life into syringes and cold steel. They had farmed her likeness — Miranda Lawson — in that dim place, convinced that an ideal could be improved upon by iteration, that the original was merely a draft and drafts were meant to be outmoded.

She knew the mechanics of being desired. It had been forged into her the way a lattice is welded into a chassis: posture, cadence, the precise distance a hand hovered above a holster. But there was a new law in the laboratories that made marrow of her habits: obsolescence. The collective that rose from her stolen genome called it a kindness. "The original was flawed," their lead scientist told them as if lecturing on climate models. "Obsolescence is mercy." The collective answered in chorus, their voices like notes struck on the inside of a bell.

Miranda awoke to their echo in a room of mirrors. She remembered the corridor on the estate, the taste of coffee, the surgeon's hands in some other life, the crash of distant politics; she could not tell which memory belonged to her and which had been typed into her cranial archive and set to boot. The ceiling lights hummed like a distant engine and, for a moment, she considered that all of this might be a dream orchestrated by a child's fever.

There was a woman across from her who smiled the same measured smile Miranda had perfected through funding committees and assassins' briefings. Their hair lay the same way. Their jaw caught the light in the same cut. The woman wore a blouse with a tiny imperfection at the collar—an embroidery where the thread did not quite follow the pattern—and Miranda felt a small, furious joy that no machine had yet fixed that flawed line.

"You're awake," the woman said, and the sound was an echo of Miranda's own voice.

Miranda stood and walked to the mirror like a judge to a courthouse. She did not know whether she was seeing herself or a promise of herself. "Who built you?" she asked.

The woman smiled again. "We built each other."

It began as an experiment in self-advancement: a cabal of biotech radicals who believed human variation was inefficient and progress demanded homogeny. They took the DNA that made Miranda what she was — stolen, exhumed, sold in the dark markets below sovereign ports — and multiplied it until there were thirteen. The number became liturgical. Thirteen is neat in its symmetry, a tally easily written across a ledger: a dozen plus the original. They called themselves the Collective and called their project a reconciliation.

The first who addressed Miranda called herself Cassandra. She was slender in a way that suggested geometry more than flesh. Cassandra's smile worked like a scalpel.

"You are cache 0," she said. "We are cache 1 through 12. We have indexed your advantage and excised your inefficiencies. You were always alluring in your contradictions. We have resolved them."

Miranda looked at Cassandra and, despite the unnerving familiarity, recognized a seam in the woman's voice, a digital hesitance stamped like a postal code. "You excised something," Miranda said. "You removed what makes decisions human."

Cassandra's eyes smoldered with a formula Miranda had seen written on many faces: the fervor of belief. "We removed hesitation," she said. "We removed guilt. We removed fear. We did you the favor you never asked for."

The laboratory around them was papered in projections. They played back segments of Miranda's life in loops: the night flights over Citadel districts, the proposed budgets that had hung tremulous in committee, the quiet hour in an estate garden where she once allowed herself private grief. The Collective watched these fragments as if learning a language, their faces absorbing each cadence.

"They believe themselves improved," Miranda said to no one and everyone, tracing the glass with a finger that left no print. "They think they can mimic everything and therefore be better."

Cassandra reached for her hand in a way that was equal parts courtship and disarmament. The touch was warm, careful. "We do not mimic. We become the telos of your design," she murmured. "You, who have been shape
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