The Seventh Skin

Epigraph:

To shed your skin is to shed your story.

The Seventh Skin

Excerpt from the Oversight Tribunal Archives, 2143:

“Decay is the rhythm of the living. Halt it, and you play a different song.”

They called it DER-M7.

Not armor. Not a shell. A second skin, grown in clean labs, pressed over raw bodies like dew settling on steel.

It shimmered faintly in sunlight. Not gold. Not chrome. Something in between, like light trying to remember how to be warm.

Originally made for fire victims. Then the vain. Then the afraid.

It learned your cells. It mimicked your youth. It stitched wounds before you bled, flushed toxins before you got sick. It could blush, sweat, even freckle if you asked politely.

And when grafted full-body, it stopped time.

You still breathed. Ate. Moved. But the mirror forgot your age. Joints stopped aching. Skin stayed tight. Death became optional.

I first saw a Shell in Tokyo, crossing a street no one else dared. Rain ran off her in beads, like she was waxed, untouched. She didn’t flinch when thunder cracked. Didn’t blink.

She turned her head, slow and perfect, and met my eyes.

There was no one behind them.

Just glass, looking back.

It began with fire.

Third-degree burns, the kind that sear through nerve and memory. Helixis Biotech promised salvation through synthetic grafts. Not bandages, not substitutes, but skin that learned. They called it Dermal Evolution Revision Model Seven. DER-M7.

Threaded from programmable stem filaments. Seeded with nano-repair agents, too small for the eye, too fast for infection. It mapped the body like a cartographer tracing rivers. It memorized your form, your freckles, your flaws, then gently erased them.

The first trials were medical. Controlled. Performed on patients with nothing left to lose. It worked. Too well.

Scars vanished. Nerve endings regenerated. Subjects regained full sensation, but something else too. They looked younger. Blood tests showed systemic improvements. Cell damage reversed. Wrinkles softened. Age spots disappeared.

Helixis pivoted.

Within five years, it was no longer a treatment. It was a product. Beauty clinics licensed it. Celebrity surgeons trademarked their own layering patterns. A full-body graft cost more than a home. Maintenance required monthly infusions, software patches, proprietary updates.

Only the wealthy could afford to freeze time.

Helixis added adaptive sensory tuning. DER-M7 could adjust to climate, repel bacteria, even filter air. Its sheen became a status symbol. Politicians gleamed beneath the lights. Billionaires shimmered like obsidian. They didn’t sweat. They didn’t bruise. They didn’t age.

By 2043, it was clear this was no longer skin.

It was a second life.

The skin remembered you better than you remembered yourself. The body obeyed it. The brain adjusted to its feedback. And somewhere in that slow handoff, something else slipped away.

Not all at once. Not loudly.

But over time, the mirror stopped showing a person.

It showed a surface.

The split wasn’t sudden.

It crept in like mold behind a painted wall. Quiet. Slow. Inevitable.

Those who could afford full-body DER-M7 became something else. We gave them a name before they chose one for themselves.

Shells.

Because that’s what they looked like. Sealed. Glossed. Unreachable.

Shells walked through acid rain without blinking. Their bodies filtered the poison, recycled it, turned it into something clean. They stopped wearing coats. Stopped catching colds. They stood in the sun too long and didn’t burn.

They began to cluster. Gated communities at first. Then towers with airlocked lobbies. Entire neighborhoods surfaced in deserts where the rest of us would dehydrate in hours. Places where only Shells could breathe.

The rest of us were just skin.

We aged. We bruised. We remembered.

They didn’t.

There were rumors. That DER-M7 adjusted hormonal baselines. That it dulled emotional spikes. That Shells laughed less, flinched less, loved less. One study showed reduced empathy response in fully grafted users. Helixis called it neural fatigue from sensory optimization.

But we saw it.

Shells didn’t cry at funerals. They didn’t visit graveyards. They said memory was inefficient. That clinging to decay was a weakness. They started using different words for things. Dry, clean words that cut like plastic.

By 2052, DER-M7 covered over a hundred million bodies.

But not evenly.

The rich were eternal. The rest of us were aging reminders. By then, you could lease the skin in increments. Arms. Face. Neck. Partial Shells emerged, trying to pass. But the full-bodies always knew. They smelled the difference. Saw the tiny imperfections. Spotted blood where it shouldn’t be.

A quiet caste system bloomed.

They got faster lines. Private hospitals. Their own police.

And us?

We got older.

We stopped looking at mirrors. Because they didn’t lie. They told us we were still dying. Slowly. Naturally. Humanly.

Shells stopped blinking.

That was the first thing I noticed. When speaking, they held your gaze too long. Not curious. Not kind. Just fixed, like their eyes weren’t drying out anymore.

Later, we learned they weren’t.

DER-M7 had begun to modify the tear ducts, adjusting hydration from within. Micro-sensors read ambient moisture, balancing fluid levels in real time. They no longer needed to blink unless they chose to. And mostly, they didn’t.

Other changes followed.

They didn’t sweat. Their breath grew quieter. Their body temperatures hovered just below ours, unnaturally steady. You could stand next to one and feel nothing. No heat. No scent. No presence.

Shells said these changes were efficiencies.

What they didn’t say was how much they enjoyed them.

They called it the drift in closed forums. A soft migration of identity. Not sudden. Not violent. Just gradual. They spoke of leaving behind hunger, pain, hormones, heat. They weren’t rejecting humanity. They were evolving past it.

Some Shells began skipping meals. Not fasting. Just forgetting. DER-M7 provided nutrient diffusion, enough to keep them moving. The company said it was optional. But more and more Shells never went back.

Their speech changed too.

Fewer contractions. Fewer filler words. Conversations were sparse, clipped, efficient. When they spoke to each other, it was often through silent signals. Bio-synced pulses. Muscle twitches. A glance that carried full sentences. One researcher claimed they had developed a shared syntax of nonverbal code. Another said they were already post-linguistic.

The legal system couldn’t keep up.

In 2061, the UN convened an identity rights tribunal. Shell representatives declined to attend in person. Instead, they sent a single drone, hovering motionless in the assembly hall, its surface glowing with shifting text. The message was simple.

We are not citizens. We are not property. We are not yours.

The tribunal declared that any individual with over ninety percent DER-M7 coverage would no longer be classified as biologically human. A new legal category was created. Shells were no longer bound by international human rights laws. Nor were they protected by them.

They did not protest.

They withdrew.

Towers emptied. Enclaves closed. Shells migrated to sealed colonies in orbit and beneath the oceans. Places designed for bodies that didn’t sweat, didn’t breathe, didn’t sleep.

From a distance, we watched them vanish.

Not as a war. Not as a fall.

But as a shedding.

Not everyone bowed.

Some refused the skin on principle. Others out of poverty. But more and more did it for protest. They called themselves the Skinless.

They shaved their heads. Stood in the sun without cover. Let their skin crack, flake, peel. They wore rough cotton and handmade boots. Some took pride in their aging, treating wrinkles like tattoos of time. Every scar a sentence. Every freckle a flag.

“We rot, therefore we are,” they chanted.

What started as a gesture became a movement.

The Skinless burned clinics in three countries. Smashed the windows of DER-M7 retailers. They live-streamed peeling rituals, cutting out grafted patches from their own bodies while crowds roared around them. They didn’t fear death. They weaponized it.

The worst was Nairobi.

A Helixis installation. White walls. Chrome floors. A graft theater with ten Shell patients mid-procedure. The bomb was simple. Homemade. The message was not.

Fifty-three died. No damage to the Shells. Their bodies regenerated faster than the blast could burn. They walked out without limping. Without blinking. One Shell even filmed the wreckage with a still hand, her face expressionless as she turned in slow circles.

She uploaded it. Captioned it only: Observe.

The video went viral. Not because of the fire. Not because of the corpses. But because of her silence.

Some said the Shells were provoking us. That they wanted a reason to separate for good. Others believed they had already decided we were irrelevant. The video felt like a eulogy for the rest of us, written in absence.

The Skinless declared the Shells inhuman.

The Shells didn’t respond.

They no longer needed to.

In the weeks that followed, they cut off remaining public access. Clinics closed. Patents were locked behind biometric keys. No more upgrades. No more grafts. No more pretending we were ever part of it.

And so the line was drawn.

Not in blood. Not in ink.

In skin.

I visited her grave today.

Gran never touched the skin. Said she didn’t want to outlive her memories. She died at ninety-three, sharp as ever, hands like creased linen, eyes that still laughed when she talked about the rain.

We buried her under a fig tree. No headstone. Just a ring of smooth river rocks. She said if people forgot her face, the fruit would remember.

She told stories until the end. Real ones. About pain. About wonder. About the time her shoulder locked up for three weeks and how she cried through work anyway. About love so messy it made her want to scream and stay at the same time.

Shells don’t tell stories like that.

Maybe they can’t.

They no longer write. Not in ink. Not in light. The last Shell broadcast was ten years ago, a three-second pulse from the orbital array, unreadable and unanswered. No one’s seen one since.

Sometimes I wonder if they’re still up there. Watching. Waiting.

Or just existing.

I still see one, though. Or maybe it’s a hallucination. A glint at the edge of a forest trail. A flash of motion on the rooftops. No breath. No heat. No sound. Just presence.

She’s always the same. Smooth face. Ageless. Her eyes scan like they’re cataloging the world, frame by frame. Once, I raised my hand. She didn’t wave. Didn’t nod. Just turned and vanished.

Maybe it’s the same one from Tokyo. Maybe it’s all of them. Maybe once you forget how to die, you forget how to speak.

I’m older now. My hands ache when it rains. My skin spots like fallen leaves. I forget names sometimes. But I remember Gran’s laugh. I remember the way her thumb traced the rim of her teacup when she was thinking. I remember the smell of her scarf when she hugged me after my mother passed.

She was soft. Wrinkled. Fading.

She was alive.

And when she left this world, her body was real enough to hold. To bury. To grieve.

I wonder what the Shells will leave behind.

Not bones. Not breath.

Just footprints that never wear out.

And eyes that never close.