Professor Looyd ran his fingers through his thinning hair. Cool blue tufts specked with peppery gray coming out of a mauve head—the sign of an intellectual, and quite the intellectual. He smiled as his fingertips felt more scalp than they had even just a week ago. His last talk had gone well, but Looyd felt his reception could have been improved had he been able to project a more distinguished air about him. He had bought a pair of glasses, which he now took off the bridge of his nose in order to rub his temples, and he set his Hud to reduce his hair thickness by nine-and-a-half percent.

Things would be ready by the time of the big unveiling next month. The Authority had shown a lot of faith in Morry Looyd throughout his career. Of course, that was due mostly to what Looyd would regard as his own, unignorable brilliance, but Looyd had seen many people—as or more brilliant and using fewer resources to chase more realistic innovations—fall out of favor with the Auth. In a month’s time, he was hoping he’d unveil something that would change the course of human history, change the way we understand human nature. Well, not change the way we understand human nature as much as change human nature itself.

The more you get to know people in Looyd’s position, people who obsess over a problem until, through the sheer brute force of thought, until they are able to forge a solution, the more you see how—whatever external circumstances motivate their search for truth—they are driven by a deep, incurable and personal insecurity, an irreconcilable and nearly-permanent feeling of loss and confusion, a hole-in-their-self. Each morning, they awake from dreams of some long-ago lover, eyes opening groggily and still feeling a tender caress, still hearing echoes of “I love you”s never actually spoken, a sense of perfection unattainable, hope.

These phantom sensations linger throughout the day, somatized much in the way that general anxiety would have years and years ago. Of course, Hud—the skin-tight, full-body suit designed to offer the human race infinite protection from an increasingly-inhospitable world—was programmed to trigger the body’s release of the appropriate hormones to prevent those unpleasant sensations from being felt. But still, for Looyd, that feeling made itself known, in the form of a tightness in the lower back and a gentle—but unignorable—pressure on the spine between the shoulders. It was the thing that kept him up at night, the thing that kept him dreaming in the morning. Some of you have felt it, and some of you have felt someone feeling it—limp resignation in response to a squeeze of the hand, distracted half-glances from the other side of the bed after a series of awkward thrusts, a narrowing of the eyebrows in response to words of affirmation, signs of wondering, a perpetual wondering.

So, Looyd was going to solve the problem that had dogged civilization since before its inception, a problem that (Looyd would argue) caused every problem civilization had faced, a problem that led to the development of it all to begin with.

Why?

Not a brash, rebellious question, but a scared and whimpering inquiry. No chest-out, breast-thumping nihilism, but a cowering, head-in-hands sense of everlasting absurdity. Why?

Now, Looyd was not going to—could not even pretend to—give an answer to the question. All he was trying to do was prevent it from ever being asked. The Hud had been developed into the ultimate in body augmentation mechanics. Essentially a supercomputer woven into layers of tear-resistant, antimicrobial nanofibers, Hud was a skin-tight personal assistant and so much more. It could do anything and everything. Communicate nonverbally with the user and anyone else on the Network, exchange information with a cloud of servers, monitor and interact with the body’s biological systems through a set of precisely-tuned electromagnetic fields, supplement a body’s motion by flexing and relaxing à la skeletal muscle.

Of course, there were many marvelous things that this new piece of technology allowed the world to do. A body and mind could now be finely tuned like an engine. Just stimulate the right parts of the endocrine system, get the right neurochemicals flowing in the right amounts, and everyone’s in tip-top shape. Diseases—whether caused by external agents or internal mutations—could be eradicated in an instant. Reality could now be perpetually augmented, superimposed with various virtual images and sensations. Accidental injuries are long-forgotten because of Hud’s ability to automatically flex, harden, adapt to impacts, stabs, slashes.

And, of course, this meant that the possibilities for the consumer were endless. Everything about the body could now be customized on demand. Eye color, skin tone, length of the nose, breadth of the brow—even the pattern of how hair grows from the scalp—could all be adjusted at will. You want your hair to grow in a single stripe extending from the top of your head down to your but crack? You got it. Grow your right ear out to the size of one of Dumbo’s and shrink the left to be smaller than a mouse’s? You got it. Or shape your pupils into tiny stars surrounded by neon yellow, diamond-shaped irises? You got that too.

But, of course, of course, of course, of course, these features—all of these features—could only be implemented by select, licensed technicians who were available for a fair—certainly deserved—fee. And that’s not to say that all this body modification wasn’t influenced by a certain prejudicial sense of social decency.

But there was, Looyd felt at least, something that Hud could not, did not provide, and that was a sense of certainty. Well, he wasn’t sure that Hud didn’t provide it, but he was fairly certain that somewhere, at some point in time, this particular uncertainty was felt. Even just for a second, a moment on one’s deathbed, or on the stage at graduation or while holding an infant in your arms, a moment of silent, solitary unhappiness. Because, Looyd reasoned, how could he feel so persistently a feeling that was never felt by anyone else, not even for a moment.

Why?

At that moment there was a knock at his office entrance. Through the half-cracked door, Looyd could see his visitor. Forest green hair cropped just above the shoulders, wide eyes with cat-like, slitted pupils, wearing a dark brown, one-piece jumpsuit that complemented her rust-colored skin.

“Oh, hello Delphi,” Looyd said to the woman standing at the door, who then walked in and sat in the chair across from his desk.

They began a conversation.