Replication

A male urologist is remade into a woman by a lab accident, then learns he can reshape himself into any woman alive but not the one man he used to be.

Julian Reyes is the best surgeon in his department and the worst person in it to be close to. He puts an arm into an open tank in the Somatics lab on a Tuesday, reaching for his phone, and neither he nor the tech who fishes him out treats it as anything. Three days later there is nothing of him left above or below the neck. Brown skin gone pale with a stranger's face.

Kate leaves. The hospital offers him a reassignment written in the language of accommodation and he signs a resignation instead. Alone in an apartment with a body twenty years of clinical training told him everything about and nothing useful, he discovers that the mesh under his skin will do almost anything he asks.

Almost. It will build him any woman he can picture, at any age, in any coloring. It will never build him a man. He can approximate his own face, brown and near-familiar, but only as a mask he has to hold.

So he goes back to Kate wearing the closest thing to himself the machine allows, and the body takes her back from him on the second date.

Months later he reaches her again as someone with no history at all, a woman from a yoga class who is easy to talk to and asks the right questions at the right time. Kate is pregnant, isolated, and starved for a friend. It works. It works better than the marriage ever did.

He gets tenderness, ordinary afternoons, a crib assembled on a Saturday, and a woman who tends to him during a bad moment without any idea who she's tending.

Replication is an explicit transformation novel about a man who can be anyone his ex could love, and one thing she can't.