In a future where cellular scaffolds and gene rewriters let everyone engineer flawless bodies, one man discovers that perfection has made beauty meaningless and left him wondering whether anything authentic remains beneath his carefully designed face.
We are already creating enormous digital archives of ourselves while AI learns to model individuals and brain-computer interfaces translate neural activity into digital information. Could these technologies eventually converge into something that survives us? And if a digital reconstruction becomes conscious, would it still be a copy, or someone new?