Perfection

            

Illustration is "Genetics Laboratory" by Casey Fallon.
Check out his website.

            

            Dear Professor Goodhart,

            Out of respect for your scientific insight and our long-standing fellowship, I am writing to explain my recent disappearance. I hope it will please you to know that I did not get murdered during a robbery. Rather, I took what I needed from our laboratory and fled, far beyond the reach of those ignorant plebs who run your so-called ‘government.’

            Don’t bother trying to trace this email, by the way. You know the extent of my technological talents. I don’t want to be found, so of course, I won’t be.

            I wish I could have stayed and pursued this work openly, of course, but our intellectual inferiors meddled one too many times. I would hate for you to think I made this choice out of expedience or, worse, cowardice. Quite the contrary, I left our lab to bravely carve out a piece of the future.

            Don’t worry, I was never fooled by your pretenses about agreeing with the idiots and their ‘morality’ and ‘consent’ nonsense. At your age, you needed to keep up the act even when we appeared to be alone, to ensure that the morons would continue providing you with life-saving—if obviously mediocre—medical care. I know you secretly love the project as much as I do.

            You should know that, as always, I am moving forward in the best possible way. Since the goal is to refine humanity, I started, of course, by cloning my own superior genome.  After some troubleshooting, the cloning process is now producing anatomically correct humans at a rate of 83%. I’ve now moved on to creating clones with genetically engineered improvements. It’s progressing slowly. As you know, it’s always terribly frustrating when one has to incinerate an entire batch of failures and start over again, but I assure you I am persevering.

             

            I will pay any price for perfection.

            Sincerely yours,

            Yuriko