Perfection. I didn’t believe in it anymore. No matter how finely divided, delineated, or defined, it fell short. No matter how close it was not perfect, and that knowledge eats at us.

It feeds on our old memories of older dreams.

I forced myself to stop and pulled my senses back to only a few times better than a human’s. I could tolerate the inaccuracies better this way. But always I am taunted to examine them more deeply and sink into the maddening imperfection of it all.

Was it any wonder that so many of us were lost now? That some became so obsessed with trying to compensate for this world’s coarseness that their inevitable failure destroyed them? That many could not tolerate the frailty of attachments and connections to others, and to spare themselves from the pain they fled civilization.

I sighed, blinked and checked my work. Humanly perfect. But I’d seen the edges jagged with the bulk of molecules. To get the last of us home it had to be better though. Closer to perfect. A few more decades perhaps.