A Change Undisclosed

Katiya opened the blinds to the bay windows revealing Central Park below her. Her naked reflection stood in the window as she gazed outside at the impeccably sunny afternoon. She turned around and made her way across the spacious living room of her condo. She stopped at the mirror that ran from the ground to the ceiling, several meters up, to look at herself again with the additional light from the window.

Shoulder-length blonde hair. An envy-inducing hourglass figure. Supple breasts. Long, slender legs. A face that made people turn as she walked by. She had always been “perfect,” and now she understood why.

In her hand she held a tablet that she brought up and looked at again, her mouth still agape in disbelief. Her disbelief turned to a scowl as her eyebrows scrunched and contorted her otherwise beautiful face. It was a sharp contrast to her otherwise perfect body—a body that her parents had painstakingly designed, she learned, as she read through her file. She was a designer baby. Something that was illegal in the United States and most countries for that matter.

CRISPR had been a controversial topic for a few decades. A new technology, it allowed for the analysis of genes and chromosomes and to even alter them. Katiya’s parents had admitted to her that they had employed CRISPR to ensure that she would not be born with any major physical defects or diseases, but upon reading the extent of how many specifications they had decided on, every entry eroded their claim to having been unobtrusive until there were no grounds for them to stand on anymore.

This was far beyond just ensuring she had a healthy body. This was completely customizing their daughter. Her stomach slowly curled itself into a knot, and she had to fight a rising nausea as she stared at her own body in the mirror—a reaction she had never had before. Like hearing a recording of your own voice, it didn’t even feel like her body anymore. It was what her parents had wanted, down to her last hair.

She wrapped a bathrobe around herself. Clean and feather-soft, it comforted her as it hid her own body from her sky-blue eyes. She sat down and let her thoughts wander for a few minutes. At this time of the year, her parents would be at their summer home in the Swiss Alps, so it was already late in the evening for them. Katiya didn’t care and grabbed her phone from the table in the center of the room.

Katiya’s mother appeared as she accepted the video call. “There’s my beautiful daughter. What a pleasant surprise.”

“Hello, Mother.” Katiya took a deep breath and composed herself. “You told me that you guys only screened my DNA before I was born to make sure I wouldn’t have any issues. Right?”

“Oh Katiya, let’s not bring up that old story again. Let us talk about a more interesting topic. The weather outside has been absolutely gorgeous. I sat in the sun for a while and got a nice tan. How is it in New York?

“Mother, you’re not listening!” Katiya brought the tablet into view of the camera and showed her mom the file on herself. “What is this?” she demanded.

“What are you going on about?” She peered into the screen and shook her head. “Katiya, that is far too small on my screen.”

“It’s the info about my DNA. About all the changes that you and Father did to me before I was born!”

“How did you get that? Is it from that leak?”

“It doesn’t matter.What matters is you guys completely made your little customized daughter! Why would you do that?”

“Be reasonable, Katiya! If we hadn’t done that, you would not have been the beautiful woman that you are today.”

“Reasonable?! How is it even important what I look like?”

“Do you even know how troubling it is to not be beautiful?”

“Mother, I don’t work in fashion like you. I never asked to be your ‘perfect ideal!'”

“Well, I tried to get you into the industry. You would make a fine model.” She smiled, but there was no warmth behind it.
“You are so incredibly shallow!”

“Do you know how much we have done for you, your father and I? We have p–”

Katiya ended the call. Her body was shaking, and she had to stand up and pace around to calm down. She looked down. She still had her phone in one hand and the tablet in the other. She let out a short screech and threw them against the wall.

Her phone vibrated on the floor, echoing in the cavernous room. Katiya only glared at it. The vibrating stopped. It started vibrating again, and she walked over to it, picking it up.

Her father’s face, tight and with pursed lips under his thin mustache, was on the phone with Katiya’s mother standing slightly to the side.

“Katiya, what is the meaning of this?”

“What do you mean ‘what is the meaning of this?'” she shot back. “I have proof that guys did a hell of a lot of tinkering with my body before I was born!”

He shot a glance at his wife before looking back at the camera. “So what?”

“SO WHAT?!” Katiya couldn’t help the spit from flying off her lips. “This is far beyond just checking for something wrong! You completely changed me!”

He took a deep breath.”Katiya, imagine how far you have gotten because you are beautiful! You wouldn’t have gotten nearly as far in life without how you now look! Do you think as many people would have given you interviews if–”

Disgusted, she hung up the phone. It started vibrating again, but she refused to answer.

***

Katiya was sitting on the edge of her girlfriend’s bed. The room was considerably smaller compared to Katiya’s place, but still lofty for a New York apartment. The reddish-orange light of the setting sun cast a comforting glow across the room. Dariell reached out and wrapped her hands around Katiya’s.

She waited for Katiya’s sobbing to subside before speaking up. “I still don’t quite understand…”

Katiya lookup up into her eyes. “It’s just…” She broke eye contact and resumed looking at the floor between her feet. “It’s just so weird that my parent’s had the gall to completely make me as they wished.” She took a deep breath and her head fell even further between her shoulders. “I feel like I’m the result of one of those character creators at the beginning of a video game.”

“No matter what happened in the past, I still think you’re amazing.” She attempted a feeble smile.

“Of course you do! I am preprogrammed to be beautiful!”

Dariell’s smile was replace with an annoyed frown. “I don’t love you because you’re body is perfect. I love you for who you are. On the inside. We even first met online without me having ever seen your face.”

“I know… I’m sorry.”

Dariell got up from her computer chair and sat next to Katiya on the bed. She wrapped her arm around Katiya and pulled them both down to a reclining position with their feet still touching the floor. They lay in silence for a while and searched the motley white ceiling for answers.

Katiya broke the silence. “It all makes sense.”

“What does?”

“How my parents have acted my whole life. How they have treated me.”

“Hmm.” She pulled Katiya closer.

“Why my mom always wanted me to go into fashion. Why they were so distraught when I came out of the closet–they wanted me to have a child. Probably to pass along my ‘perfect’ genes. They were always trying to push me so much to use my good looks.”

“Good thing you were always kind of rebellious then.”

“Yeah, when someone pushes you so much to go in the direction they want, you either become a blind follower or despise what it is they wanted. I never wanted to flaunt my body in front of a camera.”

“And instead you are behind the camera.”

“It just kind of worked out when I became a reporter. Luckily too, otherwise I wouldn’t have known Steffan and I wouldn’t have been able to get the full file from the leak.”

A few weeks prior, a disgruntled member of an underground organization that connected rich clients to doctors who were willing to do questionable operations had released a large amount of data about the clients and doctors to a German newspaper for them publish and bring light to their operations. Among the list of clients were Katiya’s parents. Due to privacy issues, the newspaper didn’t publish everything, and when the newspaper had released a database to allow people to peruse through the information, Katiya had, out of a bored curiosity, searched for many people she knew and was shocked to find that her parents were implicit in something.

As a reporter, Katiya knew some people in the industry, and by pulling a couple very resistant strings, she managed to get the uncensored file. She had not anticipated that it would have more to do with her than her parents. The file contained information about her original DNA sequence, and how they had used the latest generation of CRISPR to change almost every detail of her. Checking for diseases and fixing them was legal in most countries, but anything more was not allowed, which is why Katiya’s parents had used an underground broker.

“I imagine they did it because they wanted you to have the best life possible,” Dariell ventured, “even if the reasoning is questionable at best.”

“They never showed me love, though. They just showered me with money and tried to push me on the path they wanted me to take. My mom was always going on about how beautiful I was.”

“For your typical beauty standards, she’s up there. I suppose she wanted to make sure you also got that because she feels it’s important.”

“But I’m not even the true me.” Dariell tried to interrupt, but Katiya just kept talking. “Neither is she for that matter. She’s had a ton of plastic surgery. I don’t even know what she really looks like.”

Neither said anything for a minute.

Dariell could barely hear Katiya’s voice. “I don’t even know what I really look like…”

“Katiya, stop being ridiculous!”

“But really! I wonder what I would have looked like today if they hadn’t changed anything.”

“I would still love you either way.”

Katiya smiled and squeezed her hand. “Still, I wonder what I would have been like. I have the blueprint of my original DNA right here. I could have my original self as my own child.”

Dariell laughed. “That would surely be an interesting way to get back to your parents.”

Katiya wasn’t laughing.

“Wait.” Dariell propped herself up in half-sitting position with her hands on the bed behind her. “Are you… being serious?”

Katiya continued lying on her back, staring up at Dariell. “We would just need someone to create an embryo based on the original template and get it inserted like an IVF. We always joked about having our own child. Why not this one?”

“But that’s just it. We were joking…”

Katiya remained silent with her mouth open like she wanted to say something but couldn’t form the words.

Dariell nervously chuckled. “This is crazy!”

“I want to do this,” Katiya whispered. “I was already thinking about it on my way over here.”

“So you decided this without me?”

Katiya looked out the window. “I don’t know. I would want us to go through it together.”

“Well I sure as hell am not going to be the one who gets pregnant!”

Laughter filled the room.

Dariell sat fully upright and looked over her shoulder at Katiya. “Even if you were going to do this, you can’t just go down to the local hospital and get it done. It’s illegal.”

“You’re a doctor.”
“Katiya, I am a podiatrist, not a DNA-editing black market doctor.”

“Yeah, I know, but surely you must know someone who could do this?”

“It’s illegal, and this scandal is all over the news. Do you think anyone would even be willing to risk things now?”

“As much as I dislike my parents and what they did, I do have access to their money, a lot of which can be transfered via untraceable methods.”

Dariell pulled her phone out and started looking at it. Katiya glared at Dariell, thinking that she was just getting ignored. She sat up as well and looked down at what Dariell was doing on her phone.

She was scrolling through some contacts she had. She stopped and scrolled back up to someone she had just passed. “Hmm,” Dariell cleared her throat and looked into Katiya’s eyes. “I doubt I could even get him to consider it until the dust settles, but I’ll see what I can do.”

Katiya nodded and rested her head on Dariell’s shoulder.

***

Katiya opened her eyes. She was leaning her head back while sitting on the park bench and was enjoying the warm sunlight on her face. The sun was right overhead and her eyes teared up when she looked right at it. She brought her head forward and started rubbing the tears from her eyes.

She heard a voice next to her elbow. “Everything okay?”

Katiya opened her eyes. A child stood before her with furrowed eyebrows.

“Yes, yes. I’m fine. It’s just the sun.” She smiled at a face that was uncannily similar to her own. “Go on and play!”

She ran off and joined the other kids at the playground while Katiya continued watching her for a few minutes. Katiya jumped when Dariell plopped down on the bench next to her.

“What’s wrong with you?” she teased when she saw how she startled Katiya.

“You just surprised me.”

“Where’s Allison?”

“She’s right there waiting to go down the slide.” Katiya pointed and then brought her hand down to clasp Dariell’s.

They sat in silence watching the daughter that they were raising. The daughter that Katiya had bore. The one Katiya should have originally been.

It was Allison’s turn to go down the slide. Right before starting, she stopped and briefly smiled at her parents. She was young and healthy. Shoulder-length blonde hair. Average height amongst the other children. A slightly lopsided smile that was dazzling in its sincerity.

Katiya found Allison to be wonderful and in absolutely no need of a vanity procedure to change her to meet the beauty expectations of anyone else. Katiya would raise her child with love and let her lead her own life.

Katiya found in her daughter a natural beauty that she felt should never have been tampered with, and she never would.