📈 My Life as an Aesthetic Terrorist 😈🔪

Disclaimer: This work of fiction is intended as satire & cultural commentary. The author claims no relationship to Milady Maker or Remilia Collective at this point in time.

My parents turned out to be right all along. There was no money to be made from my art degree. But it wasn’t even because I was a bad artist, or didn’t have real skills. I actually was really good once & I’m quite confident I could have gotten a role on a team doing background digital painting for animations — which was my intention coming out of school — if it had been ten years ago. But that fucking AI (VINCI) changed everything. How was I to know that my line of work was going to get automated away even before that of taxi drivers?

I wish I could have been a medieval icon painter delicately applying a brushstroke in some Byzantine abbey on behalf of God. But I was cursed to be living now, two-thousand-and thirty-four years after the birth of Christ, in an era in which I lacked even the dignity of weary assimilation into a productive mechanism of alienated labor.

But now, here I was, paying for a ticket to the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art (LACMA) under a fake name, with a revolver stashed underneath my jacket & a smoke-bomb grenade in my Bathing Ape fanny pack, ready to commit a horrible criminal deed just to put some food in my mouth. How did I end up here? Well, it’s a long story.

1

For an entire year, I had been working as a male nanny and would check LinkedIn almost daily for Background Artist job postings, or any job posting which listed digital painting, watercolors, or oil pastels as sought-out skills. No matter how I modified the query, it would only return a single result from REMILIA CORPORATION.

“Don’t work for Remilia, they’re really fucking creepy and weird,” one of my best friends from art school, Alyx, told me. (Alyx is now actually successfully making a living doing tattooing & only occasionally needing to supplement with sex work (& this is mostly clothed and discrete). But I could never figure out how to hold the gun still enough myself, and I hate how tattoos look anyway).

More of a concrete concern was that the job required relocation to Poland, of all places. Needing to maintain an in-person presence to do one of these gigs was almost unheard of in the new era of remote work, and the foreignness of the location just made it seem even more abnormal. But after nine years in Savannah, Georgia (four for the BFA, two for the MFA, then three more of odd jobs & petty half-enjoyed hedonistic escapades), the thought of leaving the USA felt thrilling & romantic. I imagined what life would be like if I never came back. The Venn diagram intersection of Americans with whom I had relationships with which were both meaningful and pleasant was close to empty. Expatriation was tempting. And women outside America seemed on average more beautiful, also more likely to be humble and sweet.

“Remilia is for artists, by artists,” the representative for the company explained to me over the phone. “We’re only superficially a for-profit corporation, really. Everything we do, we do it so we can fund artists. We believe in artists and art. Obviously, as I’m sure you’re all too aware, now that there have been these developments in AI, it’s not profitable to pay a human being to do a watercolor for our backgrounds. We do it anyway, operating at a loss, because we believe a human should be able to make a living on art. We use our for-profit enterprises to fund something that the market tells us shouldn’t be able to exist in the modern world, purely for the sake of art itself. Our headquarters in Koło are really more like an artist commune, or even an artist convent, where thousands of people like you are living the dream of getting paid to make art in a thriving community with your fellow creatives thanks to Remilia’s for-profit work. It’s really the only possible model for financing traditional art which can exist in the modern day. We will be so lucky to have you on board and I think you’ll find you’re very lucky to have the opportunity to work with Remilia as well!”

A few weeks and a one-way plane ticket later, I was showing up to work daily in a massive former airplane hanger in which, indeed, thousands of men, women, and non-binary individuals with the title of Background Artist worked side by side, sitting in front of thirty-foot long tables, squeezed together on backless wooden benches as if seated for some ancestral ceremonial feast. We were told to try to produce five landscape paintings a day, in whatever media we wished - “but if you only get three or four some days, that’s chill too”. For each landscape painting we finished, pending a stamp of approval from the floor manager, we would get paid 0.000001 MiladyCoin (a BRC-20 token issued by Remilia on the Binance Chain blockchain network).

Remilia Corporation had made it big in the short-lived NFT profile picture craze of 2021-2022 and was now one of the biggest media companies on Earth. They had invented this adorable cartoon character named Milady and having one as your profile picture on Twitter became a necessity for social status among cyberpunks, crypto-anarchists, gamblers, accelerationists, hentai connoisseurs, transhumanists, remixers, post-SoundCloud baby-voice rappers, venture capitalists, e-whores, guerrilla marketers, effective altruists, and internet freaks of the many other varieties not yet listed. Who knows why it became such a hit, it was probably something about the neochibi aesthetic inspired by street style tribes. All other NFT profile picture projects eventually fell by the wayside as the status economy of the emerging Web3 plane began to converge on a single currency (Gresham’s Law). Remilia had unequivocally hit jackpot.

Now in 2034, the primary content Remilia was producing was an animation called “Milady Makes It Work!” which streamed 24/7 on http://remilia.org. Most of the plot, art assets, and animation were generated by AI, which allowed for a nonstop flow of content a la Infinite Jest, although it was clear that human beings also had some input in the process because of the frequent inclusion of topical jokes, riffs on internet memes, and scathingly ironic meta-political commentary. They couldn’t actually pull off 100% new content every second either - if you became deeply addicted you would start to notice that large chunks of time would repeat themselves.

The premise of the show was a little like Dora the Explorer, in that it followed a spunky five year old girl (Milady) as she did errands for her neighbors and learned things about the world, except it featured extreme violence, near-nonstop use of racial slurs emerging mostly from the Milady character herself, and layers of depraved scatological humor (though no sex). Milady Makes It Work! had become extremely popular due to its transgressive nature in an era in which all TV content on legacy networks (in contrast to Remilia’s self-hosted content) had begun to adhere to an informal Puritan policy of censorship due to the renewed influence of self-righteous moral busybodies in the press. It was enormously beloved by children of the age seven and up who absolutely could not get enough of Milady’s foul humor and the frequent scenes of slaughter in which through some convoluted Rube-Goldberg-esque series of mishaps she would end up inadvertently running over hundreds of Brazilian immigrants (men, women, and children) in her Honda Civic. Of course, there had been a brief moral panic when parents discovered how transfixed small children were to this ribald content, but its grip on the youth psyche proved unshakable to the point where it became awkward and pointless to broach. Plus, most adults actually liked the pacifying effect it had on their children, who would watch it for up to eight hours at a time after school and therefore stay out of trouble.

Only 10,000 Miladies existed from the original “Milady Maker” collection from 2021, but there was a second Milady NFT collection called “Milady Milady Milady Milady Milady” which had no limit on the number of NFTs which would be minted. Right now, there were 20,273,383 Miladys in circulation from this collection. Remilia’s stated goal was to produce enough art to allow every human being on Earth to have their own Milady, so they had a long way to go. Every Milady in the collection was meant to come with an original, hand-drawn landscape painting for the background, and this is what it was my job to produce.

Initially I had been excited to arrive at Remilia’s headquarters, or artist commune, or whatever you wanted to call it. Koło was an idyllic, verdant rural European village straight out of a storybook - a welcome detour from the polluted, litter-swept, advertisement-bombarded streets of small-town Georgia. We didn’t have much in the way of living conditions — a mini-city of tents stretched for about a half-mile in the valley just south of the hanger we worked in, and it was in one of these tents in which I slept, along with four of my coworkers, side-by-side like a package of sausages but with my head by their feet and vice versa so as to defang potential intimacy. Fortunately the entire time I was there it was spring or summer, so I didn’t really mind; it was nice to feel close to nature.

The real difficulty came when I realized how little the 0.000005 MiladyCoin I earned a day turned out to be worth. It didn’t really pay for a day’s worth of calories, not even in rice. A six-pack of beer alone was worth roughly that much. And we had to purchase our own art supplies too. The only store we could shop at was the company store run by Remilia, because they were the only business who took MiladyCoin. I wondered if maybe I had made a bad choice and should go back home, but I realized I didn’t have any way to buy a plane ticket — no airline would accept my MiladyCoin. So I decided I might as well stick it out in this gig until I got sick of Koło and could somehow figure something else out.

It turned out that there was one way there to earn a little more money than what Remilia paid for the landscape paintings. At each workstation in the factory, there was a webcam which you could turn on and connect to a live-streaming app. Remilia encouraged us to document our work process and talk up the romance and exoticism of our bohemian lives in the artist commune for the vicarious pleasure of Milady junkies who were bored and alienated wherever they were at home in various metropolises across the globe. If they liked us enough, they would tip us in MiladyCoin, and sometime tips were big. There was a huge list on Remilia’s website of the eight hundred or so artists in the factory with their webcams turned on at any given time that anyone could scroll through, and competition to get to the top was fierce. Though, it wasn’t so bad, because a lot of patrons didn’t immediately gravitate to the most popular streamers and enjoyed seeking out a Remilia artist who no one else was watching at the time, this felt more intimate to them.

I had a lot of difficulty at first trying to get streamers to watch me. I realized pretty quickly that the problem was that no one wanted to watch men paint. The whole appeal of this content was its tender and delicate nature, & a feminine affect was necessary to make the magic work. There were a few easy ways to fix this; I could just use the AR filter which would superimpose a female avatar over my physical body. But it dawned on me that I was actually one of very few artists there who was a man who conducted myself in a more-or-less straightforwardly masculine way. I hadn’t really noticed it at first because I was used to most artists I met being girls or fags or gender-weirdos but even so it was pretty statistically unlikely for out of thousands of people at the Remilia facility for me to be close to the only dudely dude.

I’ll skip over some parts of the story here, but I started to put on makeup to stream, & when that started to get me the MiladyCoin I desperately needed, I started wearing a wig I borrowed from a friend who had several, & when that worked I saved up my new MiladyCoin to get a cute feminine blouse. It felt embarrassing at first but I started to realize it felt good to look pretty and to tease and flirt with my audience on the stream. Remilia had a surprisingly progressive policy with the health insurance they gave us and they agreed to support any of their employees’ gender transitions for free. I started taking estrogen and grew breasts that, though hardly B cups, were sizable enough to titillate my virtual audience and shake more tips out of them, if I angled them the right way.

I lived the lowly life of a digital beggar in this way for about three months, until one day my fate suddenly changed. Not infrequently, maybe every third day or so, someone who had purchased one of the Miladys from the original run of 10,000 back in 2022 would come through and visit the factory floor. We just called these lucky early-adopters “Holders”, and they were entitled to enormous respect from us artists, under potential severe penalty if this respect was violated. We were not supposed to gaze upon them directly with our bare eyes. When one entered the floor, a sunny arpeggiated musical chime we grew to know well would emit over the speaker, at which point we had to look down immediately at our laps and strap on AR goggles before looking back up.

It was very important that our sight of the Holders was mediated by this technology because most of them were adherents to an esoteric school of nudism and believed that clothing fiber had properties which were toxic to the free fluctuations of the human soul and the body’s electromagnetic field, even in small doses. They would spend much of their time on the sunny peaks of Koło doing strange forms of calisthenics, yoga, and meditation to stay in shape. We weren’t supposed to get close to them, but sometimes I would tiptoe through shrubs on one of my casual walks through the hills just to get a slightly less distant look at their beautiful golden tattooed bodies. The only clothes they ever wore were enormously expensive digital fashion NFTs which could only be seen if one was wearing AR goggles; thus.

The Holder who walked through the factory that day was wearing a cloak of fire which oscillated through seven colors of the rainbow and shot spiraling ribbons of smoke out of its wearer’s shoulders, hips, kneecaps, and asscrack. On his chest, spirit-entities would arise out of flame and disappear back into a burst of energy as quickly as they had come, cycling through the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac in an animation cycle that lasted about four minutes before repeating. Out of his cranium two enormous Baphomet horns curled vicious arcs into the air and tapered off into dazzlingly sharp spikes. He had no visible face, and where his eyes should have been there was an embedded LCD-like display which showed a flickering image of his certified original Milady NFT (#683). He had no hair, and the peak of his inhuman skull formed a crown-like crest which was studded with intricate crenellations at its ridge. On top of his forehead, a tiny avatar of a six-inch-tall Filipina-looking vixen with bat wings gyrated on a stripper pole which was a two-foot tall antenna shooting directly vertically out of his head and resembling a narwhal tusk. She wore a black bikini which on her left breast said “I ❤️” and on her right breast “NY”.

I was used to pretty much doing whatever a Holder wanted whenever one would enter the room. They would often inspect the art in progress in great detail, making mostly-unhelpful comments like “I think it could use a little more red over there”. Sometimes they would burn or tear up a drawing they didn’t like. One time a Holder pissed on my painting to drive the point home, although it was fine because it was my fourth of the day and I was basically phoning it in. This one today was taking his sweet time as he passed by, lingering over the shoulder of my neighbors for about a minute each.

He began by doing the same to me, quietly lurking for a few minutes and then offering his feedback. “You should make the line-work a little bolder,” he said. “Thank you,” I responded. He said nothing for another minute, as I twitched nervously. “Move forward a little bit on the bench,” he instructed me. I obeyed. Then he lifted his leg up and over the bench and sat down immediately behind me, straddling my torso with his thick legs. His head rested against my neck and he exhaled deeply, his warm breath raising the hairs on my flesh.

He then began to gently massage my shoulders. I wasn’t sure how to feel at first, but I had been working hard all day and my back was sore. The gift of a stranger’s touch seemed generous. I relaxed into it with an imperceptible sigh, which I nevertheless felt as if he must have heard.

“You’re so muscular,” he said.

“Really?” I responded. I hadn’t thought of myself that way.

“Do you work out? Are you into lifting?” he asked me.

“No, there’s no time with my work and I get too tired,” I responded truthfully.

“Your shoulders are so strong,” he reiterated. “Why are you doing the femboy thing?“ he asked me.

“I…” I blushed nervously. “I like how I feel in a skirt, I wanted to look cute,” I admitted.

“You don’t need to be doing the femboy thing,” he said. “You have good genes. High T. There’s no reason to waste it like this.”

“That’s really nice of you to say,” I responded.

“Listen, have you heard the theory that everyone is born to have a certain station in life? Some men are natural-born kings and leaders of armies, which of course not all of us can be lucky enough to be. Then you have natural servants, and also people who are meant to be craftsmen, or those with the soul of a merchant. Do you know what I mean?” he asked.

I didn’t.

“You don’t belong here,” he stated matter-of-factly. “I have a good eye for these things. I see it immediately. You have the soul of a warrior. But these other people” - he gestured around us - “will forever remain slaves.”

“I really don’t know what to say,” I told him. “This is all very much for me.”

“Come with me,” he told me. “Let’s get you out of this shithole and out of that girly crop top and skirt. The femboy thing isn’t for you.”

And that’s the story of how I got promoted within Remilia Corporation from Background Artist to Assassin.

2

Okay, so, Assassin really was my title, but I never actually killed anyone or was asked to. I was an assassin of artworks.

The open secret of Remilia Corporation was that they hadn’t earned their position as unparalleled content behemoth of the internet era purely through superior aesthetics. They also engaged in a practice of merciless aesthetic warfare in order to eliminate rivals.

It had all started in 2022 with the rivalry between Miladys and the short-lived now-forgotten NFT profile-pic project at the top of the space before them, Bored Ape Yacht Club. What had begun as mere Twitter harassment & cyber-bullying of the Miladies against the Apes would escalate to violent brawls at blockchain conferences and hackathons, to terroristic threats against prominent Ape holders (drive-by shootings, severed horse heads on doorsteps, killer clown costumes, gangstalking).

This started a general practice in which Remilia would attempt to lower the value of its competitors’ art portfolios by any means necessary. Remilia hired almost as many offensive hackers as they did coders. NFT theft was rampant in the space - most investors in this stuff were morons who would click a phishing link without thinking twice. But somehow, this was always only happening to other people’s projects…

At this point in time in which I am writing, NFT projects are generally worth far more across the board than traditional art and also agreed to be of greater cultural and aesthetic merit. The legacy art-world switched to using NFTs as their back end & you could see even for example Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso listed currently for 5 ETH on OpenSea (~$68,000,000,000,000,000 USD).

Remilia had come to possess a world-renowned collection of legacy art ourselves, and the investors stuck to a gimmick where they would only buy art of beautiful women (Klimt’s Mada Primavesi, Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, Dali’s Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity — all in the Remilia blue-chip collection). Rumors would keep circulating internally that the company was working on raising the capital to buy the Mona Lisa herself, but personally I always thought we were a decade away from this stupendous achievement, if that.

Our competitors’ art had to be destroyed, though. At first my missions were very simple. I would wear some kind of disguise, appearing to be an elderly Korean tourist for example, & I’d buy a pass for a museum where one of our competing cryptocurrency cliques was displaying their artwork, & simply stumble backwards into a priceless urn while attempting to get an angle on a selfie-stick shot, gasping as it shattered onto the gallery floor. The art was always insured & most jurisdictions established that you couldn’t be liable for accidents, outside of gross negligence. So they would let me go with little drama as I frantically apologized in broken English. It was great fun. Break stuff, play dumb, get away with it. 

Inevitably, our rivals began to catch on that a suspicious number of accidents were happening to their artworks. I had to switch tactics. Dress in a blue-collar outfit & act confident, demanding a painting be moved from one room to another, & once I got the okay & could take it to the right area, punch a hole through the canvas and flee cackling to the closest exit. Bring in a custom pistol which shot high-impact blunt rubber bullets to knock over a bust from the other side of a sculpture garden without them being able to spot me. Pull the fire alarm & when everyone was panicking & the fire extinguisher case unlocked, spray down everything in the room.

We developed some time-released ink capsules that I was able to stick discretely on the top of canvases; they would explode in a sticky mess and irreparably ruin the painting thirty minutes later when I was already on the other side of the city. For a while, I was exclusively using this, but I actually stopped because they worked too well. It took away everything that was beautiful about this line of work if I wasn’t able to see and feel the destruction of the artwork myself. It was like if I had brought home a pretty girl from the club after buying her a bunch of drinks, then told my friend he could fuck her instead while I played PS7 in another room, & still decided to brag to all my friends that I got laid. Do you know what I mean?

I was warned that my newest mission at LACMA might be a little more difficult. "Museum security is getting to be some fucking bullshit," my commanding officer had told me without supplying any further detail. "Be careful, but at least if you get fucked by them they won't have anything to trace it back to Remilia, or, well, I don't think so," he told me. A huge line of bodies jostled against each other in the outdoor pavilion waiting to get inside. It was two PM on a Saturday - I always picked days where the museums were maximally crowded for my missions.

"We're going to need to to check temperature," the security officer told the man in front of me. "We're doing this again?" the other museum-goer whined. I rolled my eyes at his impotent display of resistance against what he should have known by now was standard protocol. "The Q345-Charmeleon varient of the virus is here in LA, unfortunately, " the guard explained. "Hospitals could get overwhelmed. Everyone has to do their part."

I had a normal temperature of 97.7 so I was allowed through to the first floor. Here they showcased a new NFT collection that was targeted towards the middle-aged women demographic. QR codes were available to bid for the NFTs if one wished. Here in the art gallery there were twenty-five oil paintings of the famous Austrian model Marco Moser in a variety of outfits — doctor, soldier, construction-worker, etc., and each painting came with one thousand NFTs which represented it. Moser was a frequent presence on the cover of romance novels and it seemed likely that each painting referred to some character in a smut novel for horny mature women with beta-male husbands unable to satisfy them. But in order to play the interactive video game that came with each novel in which you got your own virtual AI boyfriend you could chat with, you would have to buy and hold the associated NFT. It wasn't really my thing and the art was tacky, but Remilia hadn't given the order to destroy it yet, so I just went to the next floor.

"We're going to need to take a cheek swab to check for traces of the virus," said the guard when I approached the staircase to the second floor. "The temperature wasn't enough?" I asked out of genuine confusion, trying not to raise too much suspicion. “New protocol just came in,” he explained. “The number of cases is rising.”

The cheek swab found no traces of the virus so I went into the gallery on the second floor. It was a Barbara Kruger exhibit. Barbara Kruger was a conceptual artist from the 80s who had been Creative Director at Supreme (the streetwear brand) in a pivotal moment of their hype. Kruger was a genius who had taken the font & iconic styling of the Supreme logo, which clearly communicated an ESSENTIAL MESSAGE to the world of fashion, & used it to make many other interesting statements which pushed streetwear & pop art into the domain of philosophy & high culture. “When you imagine the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face forever,” the Kruger-stylized poster in front of me said. Say what you will about Kruger, but she had an undeniable gift for language. I imagined the boot & wondered if it was more fun to imagine it as Balenciaga or Rick Owens, or even just a Doc Marten (classic, you can’t possibly hate).

“You are not a neutral territory,” a Krueger poster in front of me read. “Who controls space? And why?” a second one said. “What do you think this means?” I asked an obese Samoan woman standing beside me. I tended to enjoy engaging random people & asking them about art & culture in this way. “I don’t know, but I feel like she is a genius,” she said. “Yeah, me too,” I agreed.

I approached the staircase to the third floor. The third floor was the permanent collection of LACMA, and it was the one where my mission ultimately led me. “We’re going to need to take an anal swab to test for the virus,” the security guard said. “Are you fucking kidding me?!” the patron-of-the-arts in line in front of me bemoaned. These annoying retards would always complain about the most pointless things, like I get it but you could just fucking get it over with also if you wanted to. “I’m sorry, but the number of cases in LA county is going up,” the security guard explained. “Believe me, I’m not exactly thrilled about this either.”

I went behind a curtain which they set up to preserve my privacy, & my anus was swabbed. I didn’t understand why people cared so much about this type of thing; you just have to get it done with. There were no samples of the virus detected.

But this still wasn’t enough to get to the third floor. After the bio-quarantine line, there was a second line to check for weapons. In front of me there was a metal detector, rapidly approaching me.

What the fuck? I was a little wary of something like this when I first approached the museum, but I would never expect that it be set up between the second & third floor. My pistol & my smoke grenade felt heavy in my jacket. I was in a line, trapped between two guard-rails. Was this the end of my career in espionage? They were going to expose me for who I was.

“Um, excuse me,” I said to a museum guard who was floating aimlessly beyond the guard-rails. “This is embarrassing to admit, but I’m having explosive diarrhea. Could I excuse myself out of this line & to the restroom? It’s urgent.”

The ruse worked. Sweating bullets, I fled to the restroom. I stashed my weaponry behind the toilet in a trash can. The items were still close enough to the main corridor that they could be re-activated & re-equipped if push really came to shove. Right now, I would have to go through the whole procedure of the anal-swab again. & then I would have to face the artwork I was called on to destroy, essentially naked. But this was really fine; I felt capable. I went up to the third floor & got swabbed again, then I was in.

The permanent collection of LACMA was a wonderful mix of beautiful & arcane. The early 20th-century art - these guys were contemporaries of Picasso & so on - was beautifully rendered but at the same time I wished I could understand it better. I looked at my phone for the mission instructions. Room 303, the third painting on the wall, that was my target. It was La Trahison des Images or “The Treachery of Images” by René Magritte. It was a stupid ugly picture which had a picture of an old-timey type corncob pipe on it, & then below it some shit in French. It was barely a real painting, it was just a picture of a pipe or whatever.

I stood across from it, thinking of what I was going to do next. My weapons had been surrendered, but I felt like if I just punched a hole in it right then with my fists I would have a decent possibility of getting away with it. It was such an ugly piece of shit - I was glad Remilia had deemed it unworthy of existence.

“What does this mean?“ I asked the museum guard who stood in the corner by it. She looked about sixty-three years old.

“This is not a pipe,” she said. “That’s what it says in French. But what do you think it is?”

“I mean, it looks like a fucking pipe,” I said. It looked like a fucking pipe.

“Well, the idea is that it’s an image of a pipe,” she said. “An image of a thing is not the same as the thing itself.”

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“A painting of a pipe is not the same as a pipe you could hold in your hand,” she said.

I looked more closely at the painting. How was I to attack it? The third-floor gallery had expansive windows. I could just punch it if I wanted to, smash the window, jump down to a balcony a floor below, & escape in all the confusion.

But I didn’t really understand why this painting in particular needed to be destroyed. I had a friend in the Remilia Assassin division who would come up with some really out-there theories. “Do you notice how all the figures we need to destroy are always male?” he said. “What the fuck is that about?”

“Remilia mostly collects feminine portraits,” I responded. “It’s just kind of a vibe. Neo-chibi aesthetics, you know.”

“The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian by Giovanni Antonio Bazzi,” he said. “Why did we have to destroy this? It’s beautiful. They’re doing saints, & now martyrs, and soon they will target the image of Our Lord Jesus Christ himself. Why?” he asked. “These are beautiful paintings. Yet they are targeted for destruction.”

“It’s just because those paintings are owned by our corporate rivals,” I protested. “We just have to destroy them, it’s nothing personal.”

“Remilia is more evil than that,” my friend responded. “They want to destroy the image of Christ himself. Look at what we are tasked to destroy. Male flesh, vulnerable male flesh. First the saints - for now it’s only our saints. But soon it will be Our Savior. Look at that smile of Milady as she rapes & murders one Bangladesh immigrant after another in that stupid fucking show, over & over. She is the Antichrist itself, a false idol who the masses love in their own vanity. Think about it. Does she not present herself as a figure capable of forgiveness, transcendence? In her cuteness, & goofiness, & so on?”

“You’re being completely insane,” I told him. “Milady is just a cute cartoon character who everyone loves. If you want to be all religious about things, keep it in church. I think all that shit is pointless.”

My friend got all nervous all of a sudden. “Whatever you say,” he said. “I’m being careful with all this fucked up stuff. Once I get a few MiladyCoin saved… really just one, I’m going to move to the desert between Syria & Lebanon. That’s where my family’s from. That’s where most religion is even from in the first place. It’s an important place. Fuck all this Milady shit, though. Be careful, man. You’re going straight to hell, along with the rest of them.”

I faced the painting I was instructed to destroy. René Magritte can suck my cock. “What do you think this is all about?” I asked the guard who was standing about seven feet away.

“The treachery of images,” she responded straightforwardly. “It’s a picture of a pipe. It’s not really a pipe. An image of thing isn’t the thing itself. There’s an infinite gap between a representation & the thing itself. We must always remember that.”

“Okay,” I said.

I hated this painting so much. I thrust my fist into the canvas. This would be the end of its importance. Such a retarded gay ass faggot-ass painting, tbh. Making a point that everyone basically already knows.

To my surprise, however, my hand passed straight through its surface. In my deep rage, my hand sought a hard surface to violently puncture, but its dissatisfaction belied an eerie comfort. It floated in an aquatic conceptual soup somewhere between the hard wall of the gallery. Lacking any other objective, I clasped my fist around the pipe within the wall of the canvas, and thrust it back out towards me. It was a real pipe, three-dimensional & somewhat antiquated, but its bowl wad packed with an unfamiliar beige substance. I inspected it closely.

There was a pipe in my hand, albeit drenched in a strange sort of water which was bitter to the tongue and more viscous than it had any right to be.

“Try that, that’s good weed,” said the security guard to my side.

I looked around to all sides. No one was acting as if anything strange had happened. “Go ahead,” said the security.

I brought it to my lips. “You proved it wrong,” the security guard whispered. “There you are, holding a mere representation. Is Milady real? More real than you or I? It’s a question of ontology. What right do we have to deny her existence?”

I paused. What the fuck was she talking about?

“Inhale,” she commanded. I brought Magritte’s pipe to my lips, & I did.

Binaural audio, trans-magnetic cranial stimulation, sensory overload, rapid-eye neural-isolation, seizure-positive dynamic stimulation, all these shock-and-awe tactics hit my prefrontal cortex at once as I gasped and frantically tore at the electrodes lodged in my cranium. The fluorescent display of LACMA was replaced by some dimly lit warehouse, though flickering strobes in my retina supplied the lacking illumination for about forty-five minutes until they faded. I awoke face-to-face with a middle-aged man, with sensitive eyes, staring at me carefully as if I was his pet.

“This was one of the hardest training exercises,” he explained. “You stuck to the course — you did well.”

Oh, so of course that’s what it had been! I giggled to myself. It had seemed real at the time, but there were so many ways Remilia Corporation could surprise you, whether it actually required time-released amnesia pills or merely a shift in the context, or a silly little joke. This world I had found myself in was full of diversion & whimsy. Metaverse.

“Thank you,” I told my commanding officer, now looming over my hospital bed, albeit not with malice.

“No, thank you,” he told me. “If it weren’t for you, humanity would hardly have a future.”