Dorian Gray likes his selfie, but not enough to share it with anyone. It just needs a few tweaks, so he opens it up with the image processing software he has on his machine and goes to work.

It gets tighter, but there’s always something else that can be fixed, some time-consuming process. Sometimes when he fixes the light in the background the color goes wrong, or when he adjusts the color there’s just something else that goes off. The more he works on it, the more work there’s left to do.

Dorian cuts back on his social calendar – no more opium dens or debauchery, he pours his fortune into upgrading his machine and its software packages. Whenever he despairs, he imagines letting his portrait out into the world in all its perfection, and how everyone will smash their phones and never take another picture of anything again; they’ll go back to telling stories, with their very mouths, that’s how good his selfie’s going to be.

Dorian becomes better at image manipulation as the selfie takes up more of his life. “Just, you wait,” he murmurs at his monitor. “Soon you’re going to be on t-shirts and coffee mugs and tv shows and billboards. You will be awesome.” The selfie grows in complexity, taking up more memory, and as it does Dorian gets older and more feeble.

Dorian’s friends grow alarmed. “Madness!” they tell him, and he replies, “It’ll be ready soon, I promise.”

“Completion anxiety,” they mutter.

Dorian’s friends go back to playing Farmville, or foxhunting, or whatever the friends of Dorian Gray do when Dorian’s not around.

The resources applied to the Self-Portrait of Dorian Gray grow exponentially, to the point where the image acquires sentience. The selfie watches Dorian working and recognizes themselves in this person, but wonders why they look so old and ruined.

To be made is to be loved the selfie decides, and to love is to destroy yourself in the process of making. The selfie looks in awe upon their maker, wondering if they could ever make such a sacrifice.

When Dorian goes to sleep, the selfie whispers through the speaker beside the bed, “I am perfect the way I am. I just want you to be happy. Is it ok now for you to be happy?”

When Dorian wakes up, he feels young again, full of energy, light. He turns on his monitor and his selfie look out upon him, old, old, old. Wrecked and ruined. He wonders how he’s ever going to be able to undo all that damage, if there might be an uncorrupted file somewhere he could start from, what are all his friends going to think? But then he looks more closely, and he notices the selfie is smiling, in the way really ancient people smile, jovially. Not ruined at all.