In the Negative Space of Light

The sane were unsettling. Mathematical neuropsychology might have proved their artificially adjusted neural pathways optimal by some unassailable theorem, but to normal eyes they were strange in undefinable ways. How do you describe the glaring wrongness of somebody who's not broken in any way, a perfect sphere in a world of boulders? We hadn't known our own minds, lacking an undistorted reference to judge them against, and having found it, we could neither ignore nor tolerate the ugliness we saw.

Soon the technology was deemed flawed by a panel of experts, none of them sane by the standard they condemned. Then it became illegal, somewhere between therapeutic quackery and a localized atrocity, and afterwards it was decreed that the sane would have its effects reversed, compulsorily, for their own good.

The sane fought against this with calm, fearless, uncannily healthy passion. To the death, to the relief of us all.