I woke to the scrape of fabric and the bright, tight pressure of a suit I never owned. One blink and the room flipped: mirrors reflected my same stubborn face, but below the jaw a body I didn’t recognize filled the glossy spider-patterned suit — long hair, a different weight, limbs that moved with other people’s muscle memory. The last thing I remembered was the con’s prankster booth and a grinning stranger offering a “swap demo.” This wasn’t a demo. The swap was real, sudden, and unwanted — my life snatched and rewritten without consent.

Panic came first: the shock of learning someone else’s gait, the small humiliations of tripping in heels that weren’t mine (or, in this case, a skin-tight cosplay), and the frantic search for the device that had stolen me. But under the fear there was something sharper — curiosity about what living in this shape would feel like, and a hard, private choice: spend my days clawing for the old me, or try to steer this new life where I could. For now I stayed put, forehead pressed to the mirror, my face the only stubborn proof that the person I was hadn’t completely vanished.