The Flat Room - Manice, H.

A future we can imagine situated many centuries ahead where the human form still exists but all sentiments have been milked out of it long before by an endless series of genetic manipulations. Only a few enclaves remain where people survive as they did in the past, ignored by the scientific elite. In a stony and barren world dominated by the ruling class, the spiritual dimension, the human feelings of the past are no longer considered important. The search for immortality dominates all minds. There is one scientist, a maverick called Marsden who has begun to deviate from the general line. He has morphed a beautiful hybrid, half cat, half woman. He asks an android to train her in human ways. He wants to recreate through her a lost civilization. He's hoping that from those two there might come a brief regeneration. The transformation of the two main characters does not come as expected, they fall in love and flee the world to live a life of outcasts in the far north. Marsden the scientist rediscovers himself, he learns what it is to be really human.