Brain Cell

John Dough was average in the way a pencil is average—functional, replaceable, and always within reach when something more exciting breaks down.

By day, he shelved books at a dilapidated branch library no one visited unless they mistook it for a pawn shop. By night, he filled out online personality quizzes, hoping one of them would finally tell him something interesting about himself. “Which Fungi Are You?” — Mold.

Again.

But then, one Thursday, John saw a flier stapled to a telephone pole with a single sentence:

“Ever wanted to lease your body to someone more interesting?”

He chuckled, assuming it was an art student’s prank. But curiosity, that dusty little worm in his brain, got the better of him.

The flier had a QR code. He scanned it:

Below the flier, a contract. Too long to read, so he didn’t.

John looked up and to his right—and there it was: VESLS headquarters. Funny he hadn’t noticed it a second before. It was just a crumbled, run down, converted dental office just two blocks away from a taxidermy studio he often browsed through when he was bored. It offered its paying customers “personality-infused poses” with creatures who’ve been murdered for money and mockery. John was not a paying customer.

John chuckled again as he shrugged his shoulders, turned and took the two steps, then buzzed the VESLS doorbell.

The receptionist, a woman named Clare with a shaved head and a t-shirt that read “I AM ALSO NOT MYSELF,” greeted him.

“You’re a good fit,” she said, eyes scanning his boots, not his face. “You’ve got that… borrowable vibe to ya.”

Before he could ask what that meant, Clare handed him a clipboard. “Sign here. You’ll be asleep for at least 24 hours.

You can receive a payment of $200, or you can receive a memory highlight reel of what the guest did in your body. Your choice.”

John hesitated. “Why would anyone want to be me?”

Clare shrugged. “Why does anyone wear a corduroy jacket in July? Some things aren’t about comfort.”

He signed. He lay down in a reclining dental chair. A soft hum filled the room, and something behind his eyes flickered off like a screen going black.

John woke up the next morning with sore calves and a lipstick stain on his collar.

“Welcome back!” Clare said, handing him a manila envelope.

Inside: a Polaroid of him in a velvet tuxedo, holding a cane. A receipt for a Polaroid of him in a velvet tuxedo, holding a cane, standing with two trained chimpanzees. And a napkin from an underground jazz bar signed, “You’ve got a hell of a falsetto, Mr.—Love, Rena.”

He stared at the napkin like it was an alien transmission.

“I didn’t… do this,” he said.

“Nope,” Clare replied. “But you did.”

He pocketed the Polaroid and took the cash, this time.

John immediately signed up again.

By his fifth lease, John’s life was a patchwork of memories he hadn’t made but now owned: ballroom lessons in Prague, sword-fighting a fag on a ferry, crying on a rooftop with a woman who claimed they were soulmates in six previous lifetimes.

None of it made sense. And all of it made more sense than his real life.

He began to crave the highlight reels.

“Who was it this time?” he asked Clare after one particularly bruised return.

“Client ID 369. They’re a chaos poet from the other side of the veil.”

“Veil?”

“Metaphysical,” Clare winked. “Mostly.”

Eventually, VESLS offered John an addendum contract.

“We’re short on compliant vessels,” said Clare with a new tattoo on the back of her neck that read, “DON’T FOLLOW ME.”

“Compliant?” John asked.

“You’re always extremely available,” Clare smiles. “Like a Tuesday in February,” she grins.

John signed. He stopped showing up on-time for his job at the library. He barely called his mother. He became a blank page for lease.

Each time he returned, he was heavier with memories, and yet lighter in presence—like someone had filled his soul with helium.

One morning, he woke up in his apartment.

Which was now pink.

There was a woman in his kitchen.

“You’re up early,” she said, as if she knew him. “Want your usual? Rye toast, no butter, bitter coffee, one existential sigh?”

John blinked. “Who are you?”

She stared at him. “Stop joking. You’re funnier as me, by the way.”

“What?”

She walked up, whispered, “I’m you. You’re me. We were swapped last night. They never swapped us back.”

Her name was Mirro—stage name only. Real name: Elsa Charm. Former cultist, accidental arsonist, jazz singer, dissociative escape artist. She had signed up for VESLS as “an act of shedding.”

“I wanted to get out of myself,” she said. “And into… nothing. You were the perfect fit.”

Mirro used to be a dentist. That was her first lie.

Not that she wasn’t good at it—she had steady hands and an encyclopedic recall of root canals. But she was never Mirro back then. She was Marie—a name that fit like someone else’s white coat.

She laughed too loud at the office parties and practiced her smile in the mirror before work. She once tried to write a novel but quit after five pages—terrified by how much of herself bled through.

It all changed in the hallway between her door and apartment 4G.

4G had been empty for months. But on that Wednesday, the door was ajar, and a paper sign was taped to it with childish scrawl:

“VESLS: The Freedom of Letting Go.”

She knocked. No answer.

Inside, a room that did not match the building. It was too large, unfolding into corners that shouldn’t exist. A receptionist with hips and lips like a muppet—and a name tag that read “Cass” greeted her with a wink.

“You’re early,” Cass said, though she hadn’t made an appointment.

“I think I’m in the wrong—”

“You’re Mirro now,” Cass interrupted with a strange look, sliding a clipboard across the desk.

Mirro blinked. “I’m—sorry?”

Cass leaned in, whispering like it was a bedtime story:

“Don’t you want to be someone who doesn’t flinch when she speaks? Someone whose voice doesn’t crack when she tells a lover what she wants? Someone who doesn’t think her own shadow looks better than she does?”

It wasn’t hypnosis, but it might as well have been.

Mirro signed. In her real handwriting this time. It would be the last.

And just like that, VESLS leased her out.

The first time she woke up in someone else’s body, she cried. But not out of fear.

She cried because for once, her reflection didn’t look like an apology.

Now she was stuck in him, John. And he in her.

VESLS had glitched.

They returned to the office.

It was gone.

The flier pole was bare.

Even Clare was missing, her t-shirt folded neatly in the alley beside a note: You’re on your own now. But maybe you always were.

They both tried to adapt.

She—as John—took over shelving books, delightfully misfiling self-help books under fiction.

He—as her—stepped onto her stage in a shadowy jazz club called The Sunken Voice and sang a song he didn’t know he knew.

“You’re better at being me than I ever was,” she whispered after the show.

“Same,” he said.

They created a new identity—a shared one. She read. He painted. Together, they hosted surreal dinner parties for guests who never asked who they really were.

Then as suddenly as she appeared, Mirro was gone.

No trace. No note. No highlight reel.

John checked in the mirror.

His old face.

Back again.

VESLS had returned him.

But only him.

He was alone. Again. Trapped in himself.

Desperate for answers, he traced the original flier to a half-defunct web forum: VESLS Pilots Anonymous. There, he found one post that chilled him:

Some swaps don’t get reversed. Not every soul gets to leave. If you don’t read the fine print, “the return clause” in your contract, you might just become the vessel permanently, and your guest becomes the ghost in the machine.

John hadn’t read the contract.

He screamed in frustration into the mirror.

For a split second he thought he saw something staring back. He looked closely but it was gone. He quickly shrugged it off as lack of sleep and anxiety.

So John continued on with his life.

Doing the only thing he could.

He would honor her life by doing the things she loved to do.

He painted like she did. He sang her songs. Stood in front of crowds and told her stories, so the world wouldn’t forget her.

He even hosted a one-person off Broadway play called The Borrowed Body—a surreal love story about two people swapping places and never finding their way back.

It was a huge hit.

One critic called it “haunting, but impossibly real.”

Then, one night, he returned home to find Clare—the receptionist, from VESLS—sitting on his back fire escape.

She wore the same shirt: I AM ALSO NOT MYSELF.

“How are you here?” he asked as he invited her into his apartment.

“We never really leave,” she said. “VESLS was never a company. It was a filter. To see who really wanted to live.”

John laughed, but it came out hollow.

“And you think VESLS is qualified to make that assessment?”

Clare didn’t smile. “No. But it started from something else...”

She turned her gaze to the skyline, where the moon hung low and orange, like a rustic, leering eye watching the city sleep.

“VESLS wasn’t meant to be a service. It started as a theory, buried in a forgotten dissertation by a neuro-metaphysicist, Dr. Pavloff Sketcher. His question was simple: What if consciousness wasn’t housed in the brain, but merely flowed through it?

“He built a crude prototype—something like a bio-inductive chair crossed with a séance booth—and claimed he’d projected his sense of self into a paralyzed dog named Drags. Although the dog’s name had been Scrappy before the accident. No one would have believed him, so he thought, so just he disappeared.

“But not before someone copied his notes.”

John looked at her, suddenly aware of the weight in the air, like reality had hiccuped and hadn’t quite settled back into place.

Clare continued. “That concept got passed around. Cultists, startups, post-quantum hobbyists. Someone cracked it—no one knows who. VESLS was the result. Born to a refinement from a metaphysical accident turned euphoria.”

She reached into her coat and pulled out a cigarette, even though John had never seen her smoke before.

“No one runs VESLS, John. Not really. There’s no CEO. No building. The interface just appears—where it needs to. It finds the right people. Or maybe...they find us.”

John swallowed. The air was drier now, but still heavy.

“Then what is it?” he asked.

Clare lit the cigarette, watched the smoke curl into a symbol that wasn’t quite a letter.

“It’s a mirror,” she said. “For people who don’t want to see themselves.”

“Why didn’t you bring her back?”

Clare reached into her coat. The same place where she pulled her cigarette from but this time pulled out a single business card.

On it: VESLS—Co-Op Mode: “Deactivated”.

“Your time’s almost up John,” she said. “Are you ready to start living again? Are you ready to go back? The real question is - have you finally become something… real?”

He looked into the mirror.

Not at himself, but someone else inside the mirror.

Then he blinked—and for a split second, the mirror glitched her eyes.

Deep inside, he saw her.

Mirro.

She had been trapped all this time.

Inside of him.

She had been a passenger—co-watching him live his life. Now Clare was here to fix the glitch.

Mirro smiled at John, from behind his eyes before she and he were gone forever. Like last night's dream.

John Dough’s VESLS metaphysical journey ended at that exact moment with a jolt of the reclined dental chair snapping him forward, upright and awake. It marked his return to this reality and the end of his first and last ever VESLS session.

So he thought...