Miss Perfect, a novella

Amara is six months pregnant and unpartnered by choice, carrying a daughter selected from her own parents' (a bioengineer and cyborg technologist), design. Her company sends her to spend a season embedded in a research project in a mixed Natural/Enhanced neighborhood in Altadena. Her assignment is to study quality-of-life metrics. Her unspoken assignment is to decide what to do about her daughter. The first round of in-utero edits has not yet been authorized. There is a window. Amara has not signed.

There, she meets Soleil.

Soleil is 31, Natural, darker-skinned in a way Amara's parents quietly engineered out of her at the chromosomal level. Amara has her grandmother's bone structure and none of her grandmother's color. Soleil has a scar along her left forearm she wears like jewelry. She carries her weight in her hips and belly. Her teeth are slightly irregular. She cries in public. She laughs too loud. She changes her mind. She changes from no make-up to wildly creative make-up on a whim. She is, in the language of Amara's world, unoptimized. And she is one of the most alive people Amara has ever encountered.

Soleil is an artist who produces community cultural experiences. She is also the mother of a seven-year-old boy, Téo, who is Natural and neurodivergent, a diagnosis his pediatrician offered as a problem to solve. Soleil declined the cognitive interventions and accepted the other kinds of support to help him sleep, regulate, and navigate sound. There are enhancements that close cracks people fall through, and there are enhancements that close people. Soleil knows the difference. So does Téo.

Téo is creative, kind, stubborn, brilliant, and a few levels removed from the pedestrian. The first time Amara meets him, he is crouched on a sidewalk dusted with fallen jacaranda blossoms. He looks up and says, "You’re walking on stardust. Everything is stardust…even you." Amara, whose neural architecture produces calibrated emotional responses, finds herself crying in a way her interface does not recognize and cannot smooth. She asks Téo, carefully, whether he would have wanted to be born different. The way she means it is fixed, though she does not say the word. He tilts his head, to look at a beetle crawling on one of the purple flowers and says, "I would never want to be like you guys." He says it without cruelty. He says it the way someone might decline a flavor of ice cream.

Amara has spent her entire life inside the assumption that her architecture is the destination. It has not occurred to her, until this child, that someone might look at it and politely decline. Soleil does not envy Amara's “perfection,” and Amara does not simply want Soleil's freedom. It is more complex than that. Soleil has been passed over for opportunities because she doesn't present the way Enhanced individuals do. She has watched gallery directors look past her to smoother-skinned curators with calibrated voices. She has been called "brave" for existing in her own body. She is not a saint of imperfection. She is a person navigating a world that is no longer designed for her, raising a child the modern world was never designed for.

Amara is not oppressed in the way Soleil is. The novel holds that asymmetry honestly. Amara walks into rooms and the rooms reorganize around her. Although, she often finds her ideas are overshadowed by her looks and not just by people that physically desire her. She also finds she is subtly chastised when she makes mistakes or fails to reach the highest standards of excellence in her work, appearance, or social status. She feels “on” all the time. She fears not fulfilling her potential. She feels a personal responsibility to use the privilege of being enhanced to “save the world” or at least make it more perfect.

What Soleil and Amara build together is something more interesting than an exchange: it is a mutual witness. And in Téo, Amara sees something she has not been allowed to consider, that her daughter, undesigned, might also see things she has been engineered not to see.

As her pregnancy progresses, Amara begins a voluntary partial reversal of non-medical enhancements, a process called de-tuning. She does not tell her clinic. She does not tell her mother. This is not celebrated uncritically in the novel. De-tuning during pregnancy is medically complicated and carries real risk. It is, in some circles, treated as self-harm dressed up as liberation. Some women de-tune for the right reasons. Some for the wrong ones. Amara has to figure out which is true for her, and she has to do it before the next signature comes due.

Some people don't de-tune. They simply stop maintaining. They miss tune-up appointments. They let their bodies drift toward whatever they would have been. They gain weight. They let the emotional regulation calibration lapse. They scar. They let themselves go in the richest possible sense of that phrase: they let themselves go somewhere.

There is a scene where Amara, in her seventh month and visibly de-optimizing, attends a neighborhood gathering and is simply there. She is not exceptional. She is not performing leadership. She is not being admired. She helps carry chairs. She listens to an argument about zoning. She laughs at a bad joke. Téo falls asleep against her shoulder. She is no one of note, and the daughter inside her is moving in a body that has finally stopped being managed from a distance.

It is the most present she has ever felt in her life.

The novel develops a rich visual and philosophical language around “marking” or the ways bodies record time, experience, injury, and survival. Several supporting characters carry scars the narrative treats with the gravity of sacred text.

Aunt Cléo, a Natural woman in her eighties, becomes a kind of oracle figure. She looks so much like Amara, she could be an older version of her, in the way Amara was prevented from being. Her face at eighty is a cartography of her entire life, and Amara finds herself wanting to learn to read it the way she reads any landscape she loves. Cléo does not romanticize Natural life. She buried two children inside a healthcare system that did not see them. She remembers what colorism cost her mother, what it cost her, and what the new aesthetic optimization is quietly doing to the same hierarchy under a different name. She also remembers what was built inside her life, a kind of beauty the Enhancement catalogs were never able to translate, and so eventually stopped trying to.

"Smooth people are like a new notebook. Beautiful. Promising. But I want to read a book that's been written in." — Aunt Cléo, Miss Perfect

There is a scene at a cultural festival in Altadena. Amara, eight months pregnant and visibly drifting, watches a young Enhanced woman move through the crowd. The woman is twenty-three, immaculate, the optimized image of social magnetism in a creative industry that still rewards exactly that. Men orbit her with the particular aggression that hasn't changed across any version of the species. The woman handles it all with calibrated grace, but she is exhausting to watch. Amara, whose hips ache and whose hair has not been smoothed in a month, looks at her and does not feel envy. She feels something closer to relief. I don't have to be her anymore.

The novel does not resolve the question of what Amara should do for her daughter. The clinic sends three reminders. Her mother does not understand the question. The window closes on its own schedule. What Amara learns in Altadena is not what to choose. It is that the choice was never between optimization and authenticity. It is between which suffering is worth carrying, which gifts are worth losing, and who gets to decide… in a body, in a child, in a culture… what is worth being kept whole.

She holds all of it at once. Like Soleil. Like Cléo. Like Téo, asleep in her arms, dreaming in stardust.