I'm not experienced enough with Perl to be sure I'd be answering your question thoroughly, and it deserves a thorough answer so I'll withhold for the moment and let those who can, do.

I will address what seems the obvious issue to me -- you are going to be running this Perl script on all those remote machines, so something is going to be copying it out there -- Can it not also copy the modules you need?

I don't understand why you think you are limited to one script's worth of code.