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
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