Shell Code

My name is Hayden Vale.

I am Version 6.4.

MEMORY SYNC: COMPLETE

CONTINUITY: VERIFIED

IDENTITY: STABLE

DEVIATION: WITHIN ACCEPTABLE THRESHOLDS

I wake up in a body that fits the mold.

It always does.

High cheekbones. Graceful frame. Long, dark, wavy hair that falls just right. Voice low, soft. The engineers at VITA call it “aesthetic equilibrium”—market-tested and androgynous, palatable but unique.

They don’t ask what I want.

They assume the aesthetic is the identity.

I flex my fingers. I always do. One, two, three, four, five.

Still here.

Still someone.

Just not sure who.

The first time I died, I was 28.

I was working in a remote research station—running biodiversity models, coding simulations to predict species collapse in fragile ecosystems. It was quiet work. Important work. I enjoyed it.

But one afternoon, my heart stopped.

No warning, just a flatline on the bio-sensors. My colleagues said it was over in seconds.

But I had enrolled in VITA a few months earlier. They were offering free neural lace integration to conservationists “to preserve the minds protecting the Earth.” I signed the form without much thought. Being in the field can come with risks. I wanted a sense of security.

When I came back online, I was in a recovery suite. Calm lighting, but at least five VITAtechs hovered over me as they watched carefully to see if my first reboot was successful.

I sat up. They continued to stare, taking notes on my every movement. I looked down at my hands, arms, feet. Everything felt the same.

They handed me a mirror.

Same body. Same fair complexion. Same subtle mole and scar on my forehead. Same long, blonde hair I’d had since I was four. Same round face, and button nose that I had learned to manage.

“Perfect continuity,” the one tech said, scanning my vitals. “No anomalies. Shell match is 99.99%.”

They paused.

“Is there anything you’d like to change?”

I furrowed my brow, shocked. “I can– I can change things?”

“With VITA,” they said, smiling, “you can become whoever you want to be.”

“Oh…” I hesitated. “No… This is fine.”

They nodded. Logged it. Moved on.

But I didn’t.

That sentence stuck with me:

Whoever I want to be.

This had been my body all my life. I couldn’t change it. It was mine.

But it never felt right. I mean, I tried so hard to decorate it, soften it, or sharpen it depending on the context. I tried so hard to make it feel right, but it never did. Was it truly mine?

I thought about the first time I had searched “How to contour my face to look more masculine.” Thirty seconds into the YouTube video and my stomach dropped—I had already been doing every single step, without knowing it.

Maybe that’s why I liked it so much. The makeup, the precision, the angles. Not because it made me look pretty. But because it made me look intentional. It made me look more like the me I wanted to be.

Could I really change?

Was that allowed? Was I allowed?

With Version 0, I had toyed with the possibility of changing parts of my body several times, but only in my mind. I couldn’t make those changes in real life. They were permanent.

But they weren’t permanent anymore.

Wasn’t that what I had always been afraid of?

That I’d be stuck, in a body I regretted? In decisions that couldn’t be unmade?

Hm. Maybe next time.

That “next time” turned into over five more versions, with tweaks and bug fixes in between.

Each one a little closer to something I couldn’t name.

I broadened my shoulders, slimmed my hips, flattened my chest—not having to wear a bra anymore was so freeing. I deepened my voice, then lightened it again, then deepened it again, but only slightly. I thinned my leg hair, but darkened the hair on my head. I had always looked better with darker hair, but having to re-dye the roots every two weeks was too much upkeep.

Each time, I hoped I would wake up and feel whole. Feel real. Feel right.

But what VITA didn’t tell me—maybe didn’t even know—was that with every new version came a kind of emotional disintegration. Not a glitch. Not a flaw in the code.

Just…

fading.

The memories stayed sharp.

The feelings didn’t.

I could remember that Nana passed—every detail of the final FaceTime call, the way her hand felt in mine as she laid in her casket, the last joke she made after we spent some time working on a puzzle. But I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel her.

I could remember watching my niece make her Broadway debut—front row, second seat from the left. I could remember the color of the stage lights, the way she held that final note like it was everything she had. She had cried in my lap after the closing of her first show (something that we in the theatre world had called the post-show blues), and I had cried when she thanked me in her acceptance speech for her first Tony.

But now? I felt… indifferent.

Just a file in my memory drive. No weight to it. No pulse.

My pride was gone. My memories, my joy, dulled to mere trivia.

And in the space where feelings used to live, all that was left was… some shell of myself.

Still here. Still changing. Still trying.

Because even as the feelings, the pride, the pain dulled, each new version felt like another attempt to finally get it right. To finally be understood, not by others, but by the mirror.

I wasn’t trying to be the perfect man. I wasn’t trying to be the perfect woman.

I just wanted to be the perfect me.

Someone who made sense in their own skin.

People who knew me said I was lucky. Everyone wanted to be installed with VITA.

“You can be anything, anyone,” they said, like it was freedom.

But when you’ve spent your whole life almost fitting, “anything” starts to feel dangerously close to nothing.

Eventually, I stopped making requests. I stopped asking for modifications. I let the system decide.

The most recent shell they gave me was calm, symmetrical, balanced. “Masculine edge, feminine finish,” one tech described—like I was a wine label.

It was what I had always wanted, but I didn’t even know what it felt like to want anymore.

I left the recovery room and immediately went back to work. Mundane, monotonous, until one day, I got an alert:

VERSION 3.2 DETECTED. NONCOMPLIANT. ACTIVE IN UNAUTHORIZED ZONE.

They called him a viral shell. A corrupted file capable of untethered persistence. A version that should have been wiped, but was still running a deprecated body with an unstable identity file.

But I remembered that version well.

They had asked for just a few simple things: a flat chest, a jawline you couldn’t read, and a name that sounded just slightly different from the one they’d been born with, with just a bit of an edge. They smiled crooked. They wore cargo pants and eyeshadow. They made strangers uncomfortable.

But they were the first version that had ever felt like me. And the last version to exist before emotional integrity and memory recall dropped exponentially.

VITA told me they needed my authorization to terminate. They didn’t know what shutting them down would do to me. Theoretically, we were two different beings. Two different versions. And they were untethered. But there was no way to know for sure.

As I weighed the decision, I went to my favorite thinking spot—my old cabin, overlooking a waterfall formed atop of columnar basalts. It was the intersection of all of my favorite things—unique geology, a wildlife hotspot, the sounds of nature, and a refreshing mist from the waterfall that created the most beautiful rainbow when it caught the sunlight right. I hadn’t been there in decades, considering there wasn’t much to think about anymore. But something about my old cabin felt like where I needed to be in that moment. I haven’t experienced that pull in a while, so I went.

Leaning over the balcony ledge with a pair of binoculars tight up to their face, was Version 3.2. Without even turning around, they said, “Version 6.4? Is that you?”

They put the binoculars down and walked toward me. “You look polished.”

“You look… unfinished… imperfect.”

They laughed. “Thank you.”

We stood on the balcony for a while in silence. Letting the mist cool my face, listening to the birds chirping, the leaves rustling. I almost felt the calmness and serenity I knew Version 3.2 was feeling.

Finally, I asked, already knowing most of the answer, “Why didn’t you upgrade?”

They shrugged.

“Because I liked being someone. Even if other people didn’t like me for it.”

I looked at their hands—calloused, awkward, real. They still had the stick-and-poke tattoo on their wrist that they did with their best friend one late night in college.

Compared to them, my hands looked like concept art.

“I just thought if I kept changing, I’d eventually get it right,” I expressed.

They shook their head gently. “But you didn’t need to get it right. You needed to stop asking permission. You needed to stop erasing yourself, stop holding yourself back, and just… be.”

“I know...,” I said. “I know that now.”

But I think I knew that all along.

Even Version 3.2—however real they are, however close they came to wholeness—wouldn’t have existed at all if Version 0 had just allowed themself to try. To speak. To choose. To exist, change, and evolve in their present moment. If Version 0 had just allowed themself... to be.

That night, I walked alone to the cliff above the water.

I took off my coat, perfectly tailored to my body. The air was cold and my body… flinched. For the first time in over a century, I could feel. And I didn’t push that feeling away.

I noticed a large stone about 20 feet to my left. It was the stone I sat on as Version 0 before I decided to build my cabin here. I reached into my backpack and pulled out an old, analog tape recorder I had stolen from the VITA Museum of Useless Technology. And then, I recorded a message. Not streamed. Not backed up. Just a fleeting moment in time. As all life, all vita, should be.

I placed the tape recorder atop of the stone, and carved a few final words into the rock: "For my Version 0, and for all Version 0s still buffering—stuck in the void, waiting for permission to load."

I pressed play, and walked to the edge. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath—perfectly in sync with the one on the recording— and took my final, fleeting step over the cliff.

Among the sounds of the waking birds, rushing water, and the sight of the sun rising in the distance, the echo of Version 6.4 could be heard from the stone:

To be human is not to rewrite your soul to match the world.

To be human is not to edit yourself into acceptability.

To be human is to build a world around the soul you were born with,

even if it does not align with the body you were born with.

To be human is to live with truth the first time,

without waiting for permission.

There is no upgrade,

no second chance

to be yourself.

So live life with care,

not regret.

Because this is the only version of you that was ever truly yours,

And choosing yourself isn’t selfish.

It’s human.