I am perfect1. We are perfect. This world is perfect. But perfection is anything but agreeable when tampered with. Perfection rids itself of all imperfections.


Something had gone wrong. No, not wrong. Wrong is when you arrive to work a second late. Wrong is when a drop of water falls on the carpet. Wrong is when a hair blows out in the wind. She was a mistake. A mistake—as in an error or a fault resulting from defective judgment, deficient knowledge, or carelessness. Defective judgment? Deficient knowledge? Carelessness? Perfection does not tolerate a mistake, nor any such foolery it might entail.

The girl was a mistake: my mistake. She was mine, and I had kept her from the other world, and now I brought her to life. I didn’t create her, but I created her life. It has been a million years, a speckle in the life of a Perfect, and a hundred thousand deaths in the life of a Human.
Upon this dark-dust, arsenic-atmosphered, china-doll inhabited planet, no one has substance. But she was different—she was real. Real like how the Procedure transforms us. Our faces are biodegradable now—it's the new thing. Literally—biodegradable—imagine that! The new fashion—the plastics that wouldn’t stay alive forever, even if you were. If your face was carved from the plastics manufactured a few years ago, and they exhumed your body a century later, you’d be the same. You’d never age. But now, you could still die. What an innovation!
There have been more and more cases of the Procedures: Imperfections.
Upon this dark-dust, arsenic-atmosphered, china-doll inhabited planet, no one has substance. We take entertainment and folly in what? Natural life. A real human body—of flesh, of body, of tangible, fragile organs. There is a little girl, someone found her in a little cave a sea and a minute away. But she was different—she was real. They sent her under the sweet kissed metal of the microscope and pulled her innocence—magnified and forced her to swallow it. And all she muttered, all she ever mutters is “My beautiful, my darling, beautiful blue-eyed boy.” She was so young and so full of love. Love—only a human mind could have thought up something so insipid as love. The stitches and the synthetics had dissolved, but proved she was not a natural. Our materials, they are fabricated to insure the satisfaction, and through a seldom-seen rarely-reversed progress it was gone. We have not yet conquered mind. It is prohibited. But for now, pain is acid. Its pH crawled through the cartilages of her just-erupted body and it was all gone. And now she was a natural.
The Perfects have the Program. Humans have a conscience. The conscience gets lonely—perhaps mine got lonely. I brought her to life, for my own pleasure, for no specific purpose. Now, she had a purpose. Simple damage control. Make her an example—show the world how diseased they would become if they became natural. An experiment failed, a hypothesis flawed, a conclusion disrupted.
Upon this dark-dust, arsenic-atmosphered, china-doll inhabited planet, no one has substance. We take entertainment and folly in what? Natural life. This natural life was not perfect, and when Perfection found out, Perfection was furious. His fury raged, blasting across the white, white walls, echoing into our bodies. They dressed her in white; she had demanded it. In a little cage (that was white too) in the middle, she stood—lovely, sweet and above all, natural. Her lithe little body consumed the vile liquids and potions inserted through the intravenous and exposed to her lifeblood.

Perfects don’t understand truth, nor do they desire it, so I didn’t expose them. She was cultivated in a cottage—not a pod—behind the Hot Gates, where the oceans lick the land and the ribbed skeletons tarnish the grounds, a place forbidden to the Perfects. There was nothing but the cottage, so close to the ocean that its hinges were caked with water’s sweet salt. And she was happy. Happy but not perfect? Unheard of. She should have been, would have been miserable, but she drank in all the solitude and exhaled her pain. I had created her, just as I created the Perfects, but never had I ever thought that she might enslave me the way she did. They say that truth frees all bondage, so I decided to free us both. “I am Perfection and you are a human. We do not coexist.” I had said. I didn’t tell her she was the most marvelous thing I had ever breathed life upon. I didn’t tell her I loved her. I didn’t tell her I was sorry. I thought she would cry, but she didn’t. She just slowly stood, like the weak-kneed baby deer, and hobbled to the sands. And she just watched me, like she always did, her eyes the color of dying water. She understood. And as I walked away for the very last time, from that world, from my love, from a piece of me, I saw her walking toward the coves.
Upon this dark-dust, arsenic-atmosphered, china-doll inhabited planet, no one has substance. But she was different—she was real. And then she danced—she tinkled. Natural: like touching the flower-petal skin of a newborn. The gentle warmth radiating through the skin and to the heart. Natural: firefly lit nights and a suffocating jar to capture the flickering fairies, the resonating of a poor child’s play in the moist air. Natural: like kissing her beautiful blue-eyed boy through the rose leaf rain. Natural: like settling underneath target sun, beneath the swarthy shadows, letting the life shaped rivets in the face close quietly, forever. And she danced on—natural she was. Everything, a revolving abyss in which she kept descending into. The sides began to dissipate to sides, the top in a slow recline fading into the bottom. Nothing but this irresistibility devastating drop—to the deepest agony that ecstasy can beget. And finally when all the pressure is unconstrained, she is unconstrained. There is no earth no sky no sun. There is no body. When she fell into love, she never really stopped. She was just falling into pieces. She was dancing her love away, letting pain eat her alive, trying to suffocate the beating of her heart in exhaustion.
The chemicals danced her, a puppet that piloted their derailed train to her very own destination death. Her feet, crushed, mauled with blood, growing flowers on the white. Her pain nurturing the little seeds, nurturing them into full-fledged blossoms on her back. The crystal-cut petals intensified as the natural white bore through the fabric. Soon, draped in the wet robes of the scarlet ambassador for macabre, an incubus leaking from her joints at her own consequence. But on she danced—her little feet almost floating. And with that, she closed her eyes, and saw his body sullen and silent; his eyes in a land of rocks at wind-shaped angles, dark mass drifting. “Gone, because…because of me.” she thought. A tear stood upon her living cheek, reflecting the colors of the much-missed amarthine sunrises; never rolled down, just sat on her afflatus-induced pink. She arched her back, first letting the soul-searing agony course through her body. This was her penance, so she let the chemical rapture consume her. A toy—“make me theirs” Her entirety and essence of existence danced for them. She couldn’t dance for him! She couldn’t say goodbye… ever! Here upon this dark-dust, arsenic-atmosphere, china-doll inhabited atmosphere, there was no niche for this beautiful little girl. In all her genuine actuality, she was dissipating into memories’ mellow wine.
The plastic figures stood, silenced with the sensuality, gawked at the spectacle meticulously unraveling its beautiful body before them. In the most unproductive of moments, her body burst into the little crimson droplets, suspended in the fog of the morning. And the tender instant before they splashed upon the sterility of the ground, they flew into little butterflies; ephemeral creatures stringing their drunken duets upon the sublime winds.
And then, a beautiful blue-eyed boy stepped from the crowd. He spoke in a clear voice, the voice of a leader, a selfless one, devoid of all emotion, undistinguishable from that of a Perfect. But perhaps, with the eyes of a human, one could see the bitter glaze in his eyes, the vicious alcohol that follows a crime of passion committed by a lost lover. He raised his arms and said “Perfection reigns.”
And thus, I, Perfection, made two mistakes, neither of which were the girl—it was all that surrounds me now.

1per•fect (pûrʹfĭkt) adjective: 1. Lacking nothing essential to the whole; complete
of its nature or kind. 2. Being without defect or blemish 3. Thoroughly skilled or talented in a certain field or area; proficient. 4. Completely suited for a particular purpose or situation