When Trinia saw her for the first time, she knew she was a dead woman. She watched the android-ballerina come swooping from a pirouette into a graceful bow, dropping like the petals of a lotus. Tears streamed from her eyes as the curtain fell to Olympic applause, but her tears were of deep, deep grief. She would never be who she had been. She would never again take joy from dancing. The Android had taken it from her. She ran home after the ballet. Trinia was slight, underdeveloped, sway-toed, and beautiful as a work of art on the concert stage. She knew this not because of the mirrors she practiced within or the admiring men who seemed to find a trophy-like value in a glance in their direction, but from the way she felt when she went on point. She knew that when she stretched, twirled, split, curled, extended with her body, she flew with her heart. She had known she was born a divine work of art since she had begun dancing at the age of five. Even then she had been unlike the other ballerinas. It wasn’t her skill that set her apart, though no one except her husband ever seemed to get that. It was her passion! When she danced, she didn’t see herself, didn’t even feel herself…she simply felt the force of Life. But her husband, the one person in her life to whom she’d confided these revelations of purpose, had betrayed her. He had created this thing. Tearing into the house, the door slamming shakily on its hinges, she charged up into their bedroom, gasping for air. The old wooden stairs of the nostalgic Victorian dream house creaked in protest under her unusually heavy-footed stampede. Throwing the door open, she stood in the doorway, afraid, hysterical, transported by hate. She went to the mirror. “It’s true.” She said in a low, steady voice. In the mirror stood a wild woman. Eyes half-crazed, she could almost swear they had actually changed color from a dulcet green to a flaming, unstable amber…amber…like the tiger eyes of the ballerina…she closed them, shutting out the image of the pale, small demoness who filled the frame with her desolation. She’s perfect, Trinia. “It’s true!” she shrieked. Then, unable to bare it any longer, she abandoned the remaining shreds of sanity worming around in her brain, and smashed the mirror. Then she ran down, down, down into the basement, where her husband’s laboratory lay like an ancient birthing chamber. The crashing sounds of its demolition filled the house and echoed onto the street, where passing strangers privately shuddered in their steps, wondering what kind of people could possibly make such noise…