99.9% Human

I.

The 23andMe kit squats on my kitchen counter like a plastic oracle, three days unopened. Morning light cuts through blinds, striping it with shadow bars. Prison or prophecy. Then the envelope arrives. Government white, my name typed dead center. The paper feels too thick between my fingers, expensive. Wrong.

Inside, Helvetica Bold punches straight:

"Contact us immediately. Your results contain an anomaly requiring urgent discussion."

No signature. Just a number with too many digits.

I dial because the alternative is not knowing. The line clicks twice. Breathing on the other end, controlled and measured, like someone counting down from ten.

"Mr. Kyle Reeves?" Female voice, pharmaceutical smooth.

"Speaking." My thumb finds the old scar on my palm. Twenty-three stitches from a broken bottle at Jimmy's bachelor party.

"We need you at our headquarters. Tomorrow. There's an irregularity in your genetic profile that we cannot—" A pause. Papers shuffling or maybe just static. "—that requires in-person consultation."

"What kind of irregularity?"

Silence stretches like skin over bone.

"You're 99.9% human, Mr. Reeves."

The words hang there. I can taste copper in my mouth, that specific flavor of adrenaline hitting your system too fast. My reflection warps in the microwave door, face pulled long, features smeared.

"The other point-one percent?"

"That's what we need to discuss."

Click.

II.

Private jet. Black car. No logos anywhere. The pilot's eyes never meet mine.

Their facility erupts from the Nevada desert, a chrome and glass cathedral to something that shouldn't be worshipped. Inside, everything gleams antiseptic white, the kind of clean that makes you realize how dirty you really are. The walls hum at a frequency just below hearing. My molars ache.

They seat me in Conference Room Seven. Lucky number. Three people enter, two men built like insurance adjusters, one woman with cheekbones sharp enough to split atoms. She does the talking.

"I'm Dr. Vance." No first name. Her lab coat looks like it could stop bullets. "Your genetic markers contain sequences we've never encountered in nature."

She slides a tablet across the table. Double helixes twist on the screen, sections highlighted in violent red.

"These segments here—" Her finger hovers, careful not to touch. "—they're synthetic. Engineered. You're looking at yourself, Mr. Reeves. You're looking at something we made."

The room tilts fifteen degrees. I grip the table edge until my knuckles go bloodless.

"Bullshit." The word comes out raw. "I'm thirty-three years old. I remember my first day of kindergarten. Mrs. Patterson. Room 104. She had a lazy eye."

"Memory implantation technology has existed since 2019." She pulls up another screen. Brain scans, synaptic patterns, chemical signatures. "Every memory you have was installed three years ago. You're a prototype. Subject Omega. Part of a limited trial."

My throat closes. The scar on my palm throbs, phantom pain from a wound that never happened.

"Limited trial of what?"

Dr. Vance's smile doesn't touch her eyes. "Human enhancement. You were designed to integrate seamlessly, to test the boundaries of artificial consciousness housed in biological architecture. Most subjects self-terminated after twenty-four months. You're... an outlier."

She produces a photograph. My face, but wrong: smoother, emptier, staring at nothing with the flat affect of a corpse. Behind it, eleven others. Same bone structure, different angles. A dozen variations on a theme.

"Your brothers," she says. "Or your iterations. Depends on perspective."

The fluorescent lights buzz like trapped wasps. One flickers, barely perceptible, but there. A flaw in their perfect white world.

"Who authorized this?"

"Above my clearance." She collects the tablet, the photo. "You have two options. Stay for observation. Comfortable quarters, full amenities. Or leave. Live your programmed life. Your choice."

"Some choice." I stand. My legs hold, barely. "What happens at year four?"

Her silence says everything.

III.

Back in my apartment, if it's even mine, I pour three fingers of bourbon and stare at it. The amber catches streetlight, turns it gold. Real whiskey. Real burn going down. Real, real, real.

My phone vibrates against the granite counter. Unknown number. I almost don't check.

"Subject Omega. We need to meet. The others are waiting."

Attached: GPS coordinates. Warehouse district. Of course.

I study my reflection in the bathroom mirror. Every pore, every imperfection exactly where it should be. The crooked nose from a bar fight in college, except there was no bar, no fight, no college. Just code pretending to be calcium.

The mirror fogs from my breath. I write "REAL" with my finger. The letters fade immediately.

My reflection doesn't move when I do.

Just for a second, maybe less, it holds position. Then snaps back into sync like a video buffering. But in that fraction, that hiccup, I see it clearly.

It's smiling.

Not my smile. Something else wearing my face, looking out from behind my eyes. Waiting.

I smile back. Show teeth.

"Okay," I tell it. Tell me. Tell whatever's listening. "Let's wake up."

The thing in the mirror nods once.

Crack.

The glass splits down the middle. From inside out. The fracture spreads like neural pathways, like circuitry, like something alive.

In the spider web of breaks, I see them. Twelve faces. All mine. All different. All watching.

My phone buzzes again. This time, just two words:

"Welcome home."

I grab my keys, leave the bourbon untouched. The door closes behind me.

Outside, the city looks exactly the same.

Exactly too same.

Every light burns at perfect voltage. Every shadow falls at the optimal angle. Even the homeless guy on the corner, Jerry, feeds pigeons every morning, sits in the exact spot he always does. Except tonight, when our eyes meet, his pupils dilate wrong. Mechanical. Like apertures adjusting.

He nods once. Points west.

Toward the coordinates.

Toward whatever comes next when you're only 99.9% of what you thought you were.

The other 0.1%?

That's what's driving now.