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None of the memories given to him by the September Institute specifically say that Mako is a young man. He is a copy of a copy of the parts of Maryland September which make him a highly competent stratus; that’s all they care about. If something in the subtext of his fabricated history, or something in structure of his brain, or something in the way those things interact, means that he is not what he is, then the school which owns him will not stop it and may even study it, but it was never more than a side effect. This is his body, and this is his mind, and this is the world of the machine which is as real as the material, and this is the line of Divine code which keeps an eye on him. This is where he thinks he grew up, and these are the friends he thinks he has – but that’s okay because they all think he’s their friend too – and this is where he thinks he got the scar on the back of his neck. Here is his dorm room, and here is his closet filled with clothes he wasn’t designed to hate but does, and here is his laptop with one tab for homework and five tabs for the Wikipedia and cracked.com rabbit hole he’s been falling down instead. And this: this is the body of Mako Trig lying on Mako Trig’s bed for the first time, now that it has acclimated to being out of the tank where he was grown. When Mako wakes up, he doesn’t know he’s waking up because he’s had a decade and a half of life filtered into him over the past year. He starts out quiet and eager to avoid too much attention, basically a good kid, because that is how he has been written. He fills in the gaps with an arm crossed over his chest, with eyes darting anywhere but the mirror, with letting someone else handle the group presentation even though he knows the material better than anybody because he wouldn’t be able to stand the sound of his own voice for fifteen minutes straight. He makes himself the stranger everyone seems to expect, and then he keeps himself small because the person he expects to be has never ever been there. But something has been changing slowly – or perhaps not so slowly, time is a funny thing – under the surface. The first time he becomes aware that he is aware of it is when he realizes that bodies are impermanent but data lasts forever, or close enough. For as long as he can remember, his avatar in the Mesh has been basically him, but with shoulders a little broader, chin a little firmer, chest a lot flatter, and a shark fin coming out of his back. The fin is a representation of an idea, but he wants the rest of it, oh he wants it so bad that after logging off he tends to forget that it’s not already the state of things until something reminds him. He looks at the past in a new light now. He turns over old memories and finds little clues, and maybe creates some new ones to fit into the places where he was given nothing but a gap. It may only be real for a very broad definition of the term, but they are now the truths that formed him. He needs to sit with this revelation to be sure he believes it, but what’s a little more time when he’s gone this long believing something different? And the thing which has been steadily shifting inside him swiftly snaps. If he has to live here – in this body, in this school – then he will do everything he damn well can to make it a home. Halfway through slashing a skirt to pieces he thinks that just because these are not for him does not mean they are for nobody. From then on, he and Malice Badinage switch clothes. She is beautiful in a way he never could be. Once he gets used to wearing what he wants, it is not too far of a stretch for Mako to wear whatever he wants. Nothing is too outlandish now that he’s cut his hair and gotten himself a proper binder – he’ll get top surgery the moment he’s off this terrible boring planet, but in the meantime Lazer Ted has hooked him up with a crop top binder covered in rose gold scales to offset his slightly blue skin. Mako wears capes, Mako wears flannel, Mako wears flarecut polyester pants, Mako wears booty shorts and thigh high boots and every tacky pattern he can find. He usually doesn’t wear all of those at once, but sometimes it’s a special occasion. He submits a skin to make the Mesh look like a post-apocalyptic wasteland and it’s rejected. When the next student competition rolls around he dials it back a little and makes one that’s just so much graffiti. That one is accepted, probably because the administration considers it a safe outlet for teen angst. They don’t know the half of it. But it becomes one of the most popular mods among the student body, and from his minor celebrity status, Mako teaches himself the value of being loud. Mako gets out. He does not yet know that in this he is an exception. He is being allowed to leave, the first in his series to do so. It’s yet another experiment to see how strati respond to various conditions, just like everything else in this half-life of his. But it feels like free will even if it’s not, and Mako laughs with the joy of knowing that he can do anything at all now. Many years later, not much wiser, but quite a bit less reckless and furious than before, he returns to September, which he certainly never planned to do. It’s trippy to be back looking at his old life now that he’s practically a whole new person, and it only gets weirder from there. The newest people, it turns out, are copies of him, all floating in a row of tanks. Technically they’re all copies of something earlier, but he insists on thinking of himself as the first, despite the whisper in his head that there may have been many who came before. He finds himself embarrassed for all the other Makos and wanting to cover them up. He doesn’t know how they feel or if they feel, but he remembers being that age with no idea what was going on with him, and his skin prickles in sympathy. The existential terror of not being his own person almost takes a back seat to dysphoria by proxy, and then Rigor displaces a mountain in the distance and shoves everything else into perspective. Mako rushes forward, then pauses and sends Larry back the way they came to save whoever can be saved. When it’s all over, the planet is falling into the sun, and Rigor with it. Good riddance, he thinks, except AuDy opened the door to shut Rigor inside, so now they’re gone too. But he focuses on the ones who did make it out, because that is a place where he knows how to do something good. As the six clones emerge from their suspension he feels them each out to see what next steps they want or need to take. He never pushes a decision, but he stands there as living proof that whatever they feel themselves to be is both allowed and something they can act upon. Some Makos make all the changes there are, some only choose a few that feel right, or use hormones for a while and then stop, having reached a good midway point, and one Mako transitions only socially. And Mako loves them all, even when they drive him nuts. He never misses an opportunity to say how proud he is of all of them, and they’re probably right to say how incredibly cheesy he is, but he really doesn’t care, because it’s the truth.