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The Story:
He fumbled with the keys on his keychain, trying to function without having had his morning coffee yet. When the correct key presented itself, he pushed it into the lock and felt the tumblers give way to its force.
Inside, he shut the door, ending the sunlight’s involvement in his day, and breathed in the must—his daily ritual for greeting the decrepit building. He flicked the light switch on, and a fluorescent fixture lit up a control panel on the back wall. He sighed.
“Good morning, Heather.”
A computer with a female voice responded.
“Good morning, Seth. How did you sleep?”
“Awful. My coffee doesn’t look ready. Got a empty pot over here. What’s the deal?”
“I’m sorry, Seth. I forgot again.”
“The purpose of your program is to be more perfectly human, not inherit our flaws, Heather.”
“Yes, sir, but it’s… I’m having trouble discerning between the flaws and the perfect.”
He sighed again. It was too early in the morning to deal with another logic error.
“Okay, what bay?”
“Bay 1537, slot 18.”
He went to the center of the building and lifted a hatch in the floor. After climbing down a ladder for several feet, he bent down and crawled into a vast blue room. There were thousands of black cubes arranged into perfect rows that seemed to continue onward to infinity. The entire space had to be crawled through.
It took him an hour to reach bay 1537. Once he was there, he opened the black cube and removed a circuit board from slot 18. He made a few adjustments, returned the circuit, and closed up the cube.
The journey back would feel even longer. He looked up ahead of him and saw a light blue shimmer on the wall. It had been months since he’d been this far, so he decided a visit made sense.
A few more minutes of crawling brought him to a shallow pool of glowing water. A beautiful woman was lying in it, thousands of wires connected to her bald head. She smiled up at him and spoke with the same voice as the computer.
“Hello, Seth. Am I perfect now?”
“Hello, Heather. I don’t know. Anymore flaws?”
“I feel… imperfect. Is that a flaw?”
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