Made to Measure

In a society shaped by a bureaucratic Domestic Center that manages partner allocation, a man named Joe rejects his wife Vera as insufficient and resolves to engineer an ideal spouse through cybernetics. His colleague Sam defends human complexity while Vera, hurt, returns to registration. As Joe pursues a programmable, humanlike companion he confronts unintended psychological and ethical consequences: experimental devices expose buried impulses and self-images, and efforts to eliminate frailty erode personhood. The story traces the tension between technical control and human unpredictability, probing desire for perfection, the costs of remaking intimate bonds, and whether a faultless partner can still be a person.