Hell Is Perfection

Fiction fragment by Clark Humphrey

2/10/98

He tired of his remote exile.Not that there was anything to complain about, at least not anything the authorities would recognize as a legitimate complaint.

His air supply never failed to provide a medically-approved proportion of oxygen, hydrogen and other nontoxic gases.

His water supply was never leaden, never harsh or bitter.

The lighting system in his compound used only the rare incandescents; not a single fluorescent was to be found.

Electricity, recirculation, even the plumbing never gave out.

The molecularly re-created foods were perfect. Uniformly perfect. They always tasted “fresh” and always had just the right temperatures, even the baked Alaska. The sauces were never too thin, the wines never too smoky.

And the women.

Because of the special conditions of his exile, he was assigned one of almost every type available.

Perfect breasts of all sizes. The most glamorous faces from every continent. Never tiring, never complaining. Always eager. Programmed in the erotic arts of Japanese courtesans, the spiritual sex rites of India, the power disciplines of Britain, the lush lovemaking of the Pacific islands, the stern yet tender maternalism of Mexico, the unbridled passion of Brazil, the smothering harem rites of certain parts of Africa, the unabashed sleaze of an old American massage parlor.

They could recite classical love poetry, sing soaring arias, talk trash talk, or chant hypnotic tribal trance songs. They never had periods, unless you asked them to as part of a fetish game. They never got pregnant.

They couldn’t give you STDs (even if there had been another human around to share one of his lovers, they all had built-in sterilization systems). They smelled just like real women and in the right places; or, depending on your preferences, they could instead give off a pheremone-based perfume scent.

But as the years wore on, just as the authorities predicted, he lost interest in what were essentially technologically-enhanced masturbation dolls. The more he bathed in perfection, the more he yearned for the one group of sensations his lovers could never provide–the sensations of imperfection.

He wanted to be argued with, yelled at in non-dominatrix ways.

He wanted to be disliked, disapproved of.

He wanted the touch and taste of skin that aged, got bruised.

He yearned, ached, for a woman who got tired as he did, who wasn’t always in the mood for it, who could tell him things he didn’t already know, even if they were wrong.

At the time of his initial capture, he was only five crucial tasks away from plunging the world into a regime of brutal predictability. Over the preceding years, his pusuers had become ardorous in their drive to stop him. Their rallying cries had come to revolve around passionate defenses of the flaws of existence.

So their vengeance upon capturing him would naturally entail a lifetime attempt to make him see the error of his wish for errorlessness. But having shut off all contact in either direction once the compound was completed and installed, his captors would never know the extent of their success.