Once upon a time, many years from now, technology had continued its
remarkable progress to the point that the construction of artificial
people had finally become possible. These humakins, as they were
called, were made so carefully and with such art that no one could
tell the difference between a real human and an artificial
one--except that the artificial ones were flawless. Physically the
humakins were always young, always beautiful, always fresh; they
never had a hair out of place, never a pimple, never a wrinkle,
never a gray hair. Mentally they were always bright, alert, and
smiling; they always got their facts right, and never took a wrong
turn or got lost.
At first the appeal of the humakins was irresistible, and most
humans chose them over other humans for spouses. What human female
could compete with an always slim, beautiful, and lively imitation?
And what human male could compete with an always confident, correct,
and handsome construction? In fact, the word "humakin" quickly
became a synonym for "perfect," as in, "That's a really humakin
car," or "This pie tastes just humakin." At the same time the word
"human" became a term of opprobrium, indicating something defective
or of low quality, as in, "I never shop there because it's such a
human store with human-quality merchandise."
To the consternation of many, however, while the humakins could
construct more of themselves in a factory, the humans could produce
more of themselves only by following the ancient method of their
ancestors, so that the result of the marriages between flesh and
plastic was the eventual decline of the human race.
When about nine tenths of the persons on the planet consisted of the
precisely fabricated humakins and only one tenth of the really
human, quite an odd and unexpected situation arose. It had become
so unusual to see, for example, a woman wearing glasses or a man
with wind-blown hair that such a detail now took on a natural appeal
to some of the other humans.
One bright morning at breakfast in a fancy resort dining room, a
human female, almost as lovely as a humakin, sat chatting with a
humakin male who had condescended to sit with her. Suddenly she
inadvertently spilled a glass of tomato juice onto her white tennis
dress. While her humakin companion predictably stood up and stared
at her with horror, across the room a human male who had just
witnessed the event was so filled with ardor and longing that he
almost broke the table in his rush to get over to her and make her
acquaintance. His excitement to declare his affection left him
without the capacity for coherent speech, so that only tentative and
confused phrases stumbled from his mouth. In the midst of his
babbling, though, he could see, in the welling dew of the woman's
eyes, the tenderness of regard he had inspired.
As other humans, too, began to grow weary of the expectation of
constant perfection in their relationships, scenes similar to this
one began to be repeated with increasing frequency. A loose shoe
lace, a chipped fingernail, a shiny nose--all gradually became
sources of romantic and emotional attraction, and those very
characteristics that had before been viewed as defects soon came to
be seen as emblems of the truly and desirably human, as guarantees
of that unique inner fire that no amount of perfectly crafted
plastic could equal.
The word "human" now began to be associated with the genuine, the
natural--and the beautiful. It became not uncommon to hear a young
lady remark to her admirer as he gently put a flower in her hair,
"Oh, what a human thing of you to do." The word "humakin," on the
other hand, began to imply something slickly unrealistic or
laughably fake and was often pronounced with a sneer.
At length, having rediscovered the amorous appeal of their
distinctives like freckles and missing buttons and the inability to
refold road maps, the humans began to marry each other again. It
wasn't many years before a young pledge of one of these new
relationships was heard to ask in a tone of frustration, "But Mommy,
why must I have a crooked tooth?" To which the mother replied,
"That's so I'll always remember how truly beautiful you really are."