The Gorgeous War

The Gorgeous War.

by Jason O’Mahony

Lisa DeMornay was so conspicuously beautiful that men who saw her on the street would think about her years later. Men did not merely stop talking when she passed: they left their wives and children for her.

It wasn’t that she was a bad person, or wished ill upon others. It was just that Lisa lived in a different world, among that tiny fraction of people in the Western world who are so beautiful that other humans find themselves accepting second-class status in their presence.

It had always been that way, since she had grown from a cute baby to an adorable young girl to a stunning teenager. Other children wanted to be part of her life. The bestlooking boys wanted to be around her. The best-looking girls wanted to be her friends, even if it was with just a hint of fear that she would take away the boys they liked.

She was not that surprised when at 14 she was offered her first modelling contract, because these things just happened to her. She hadn’t looked back since, and had soared through the New York modelling business.

When the US Supreme Court ruled the way it did in Tedesco vs Bell McKay Darris, Lisa hadn’t noticed. She didn’t follow news, because she had people who did that for her — who did, in fact, everything for her save actually turning up in front of the camera and sending that famous open-mouthed blank stare down the lens.

What did she care about what the US Supreme Court was doing?

Tedesco vs Bell McKay Darris was brought by one Maria Tedesco, a young lawyer who had been dismissed by a prominent Los Angeles law firm. Tedesco had inherited her mother’s plain features and plump shape, and as a result was not one of the leggy gazelles that seemed to front for the firm in all its major litigation. When the decision to streamline staff numbers was made, she was chosen as one of the casualties.

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Alongside her mother’s physical attributes, however, Maria had also inherited her diligence, intelligence and tenacity, and was quick to notice that a junior at her level, with half her legal skills but multiples of her looks, remained on the payroll while she was being issued with a cardboard box for her possessions. When she had heard rumours about possible firings, she had deftly interrogated the firm’s computer system late at night while her prettier co-workers were flinging themselves at senior partners, and she found what she was looking for: the smoking gun, which in this case was a single email from her supervisor to the head of personnel suggesting that she be dismissed instead of the other junior because “we don’t like keeping dogs indoors”.

The supervisor had thought he had deleted the email, and he had, but not well enough to escape Maria Tedesco’s IT abilities. When she was eventually dismissed, the email, along with the personnel manager’s confirmation, became the centerpiece of her claim for wrongful dismissal.

In short, the claim was that Maria Tedesco, who had been near the top of her class at Harvard, had been fired because she was ugly.

The argument put forward by Bell McKay Darris was that physical appearance was now to be deemed a necessary skill and that they were well within their rights to fire Ms Tedesco based on her looks. Their clients wanted attractive lawyers, people who were successful at their jobs but also looked successful. This was the reality of doing business in the modern media age, they argued.

The firm also pointed to the range of means for achieving optimum appearance, from regular exercise and dieting to professional make-up and plastic surgery, which were available to anyone studying law in the nation’s finest universities. The Constitution of the United States did not regard being unable to gain access to these institutions through lack of financial resources as being an acceptable excuse, so why should a failure to expend similar resources on one’s physical appearance?

In short, if being too poor to attend a top university was not an act of discrimination, then how could not being able to afford to spend money on being beautiful be discrimination?

In fact, the company argued, wasn’t a failure to control one’s weight or appearance a character issue, which in turn indicated what level of commitment someone displayed

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towards achieving objectives? Maria Tedesco chose to be ugly, and could be fired for that.

One of the liberal judges, sitting in the minority, pointed at the male BMD executive committee members sitting in the chamber. They didn’t look like they refrained from too many steak dinners, she pointed out. Is this not a simple question of sex discrimination, holding a woman to a higher standard of appearance than a man? The lead counsel for the firm, a strategically chosen senior partner in her fifties, smiled at the judge: “The argument, your honor, is about character.”

Male members of the firm may well be held to a lower physical standard than female ones by the clients of legal firms, she argued, but that is not the issue. The issue is that Ms Tedesco has the ability to reach those higher standards, set not by the firm but by American society. Whether spending money on a better education or on beautyenhancing surgery, it is her choice as a free citizen. Indeed, both types of expenditure were of comparable monetary value, she suggested, and so should be treated equally.

Prospective employees cannot sue successfully because they could not afford to attend Harvard, so why should they be permitted to sue because they couldn’t get their fat asses shrunk?

Maria’s legal team put forward a staunch defense that it was preposterous to permit discrimination on grounds of appearance, as appearance, like color or gender or age, was not something an individual citizen could influence. Attractiveness was surely an accident of birth? This was a clear case of sexual discrimination dressed up as the freedom to do business. What if clients didn’t want to deal with Jewish or black partners? Could they be fired too?

But clients didn’t have a problem with black or Jewish partners, the company replied.

Only with the aesthetically challenged, and that was not covered by legal protection.

The Supreme Court divided on ideological lines, with the conservative majority ruling that it was not the state’s business to be devising new rights not clearly outlined in the Constitution. More than one writer painted the image of well-covered male justices being briefed by their young attractive clerks, but a ruling was a ruling.

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In short, the court agreed with Bell McKay Darris, although it did not use the phrase “fat ass” in its ruling, instead referring to “gluteal amplitude”.

The court disagreed with Maria’s counsel, and accepted that modern technology permitted an individual to take radical action to redress ugliness – or, as they called it, “the defect of unattractiveness” – in the same way as spectacles addressed eye defects.

In short, if people were ugly, it was their own fault because modern technology let them do something about it. To be ugly, the Chief Justice wrote, was now a lifestyle choice, for both men and women, and while individuals were free to choose that path, they should be held accountable for their choices.

Society reacted in a surprisingly traditional way. Many protested, but yet more kept quiet for fear of being deemed unattractive themselves.

Many celebrities condemned the ruling, often eager to be photographed with the less attractive to demonstrate their compassion. Their agents had pointed out who actually went to see their movies and just how much they spent on junk food at the concessions stands when doing so. Remember the hand that feeds you, they were told, even if the other hand is plunging into a tray of nachos and cheese substitute. Not a week went by where a Hollywood A-lister was not snapped, rictus grin in place, with Quasimodo’s train wreck of an ugly brother.

Indeed, one of the big talent management agencies was rumored to have a pool of the profoundly plain for deployment at a moment’s notice, nicknamed the Zombie Horde.

Business tended to go two ways on the issue. Companies that targeted low-income groups, including well-known fast-food chains and discount stores, denounced the ruling, recognizing that their customers, if not actually ugly, could almost certainly not afford the substantial expenditure needed to reach what the media was deeming a standard level of attractiveness.

At one point they had been tempted to recruit very attractive staff to entice customers into their stores, but market research had shown them that this would prove to be counter-productive. The research suggested that customers would compare themselves favorably against homelier employees, reinforcing their positive impressions of the business on the basis of at least not being as ugly as those poor bastards.

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Professional companies, on the other hand, immediately moved to make use of the Tedesco ruling. Legal and accountancy firms provided personal training and plastic surgery consultancy to their more valued staff, and fired the others.

Airlines began a battle of the hemlines as they recruited younger and more attractive cabin crew, adjusting dress codes to a standard more acceptable in the 1960s and 70s, only this time with handsome young men in tight-fitting uniforms also swelling the ranks of cabin crews. One airline even paid a number of bloggers to start an online rumor that its selection criteria for male cabin crew included the size of their Gentleman’s Excuse Me. When the first polling started coming through on the Tedesco issue, many were surprised: a substantial minority in the country were absolutely livid; but a majority either agreed with the ruling or just didn’t care. Polling experts and academics pored over the data and started to come to certain key conclusions.

The majority of people who saw themselves as good-looking supported the ruling.

Yet, they still weren’t a demographic majority. The deficit was made up of that section of any society that believed advertisements when they saw them, who bought every new product that told them that they could eat themselves thin or make themselves rich by sending money to some guy on TV. Now they had beautiful people on television telling them that Tedesco made perfect sense. Add that hardwired reaction that makes humans respect and like those to whom they are physically attracted to confirm what the beautiful people were telling them. After all, if a pretty person tells you something and smiles or even winks at you, it must be true, right?

As a result, the outcome of the Tedesco ruling became just another political issue, like homelessness or obesity. Terrible, and worthy of charity galas to pay for makeovers and beauty products for poor people, but just another issue.

In the months that followed, the changes brought by the ruling became ever more visible. A new apartheid started to emerge in society, as some businesses began to realize that many customers not only wanted attractive staff but also did not want to be surrounded by unattractive fellow customers. What had been standard judgments at nightclub doors started to spread to many coffee shops, gyms and restaurants. Specific

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crèches started opening for the beautiful people who wanted to ensure that their children were not exposed to the “negative energy” of the less attractive. In some cities, residents even started pressurizing elected officials to designate certain parks and public spaces as areas for the attractive only.

This led to unusual problems. In some neighborhoods, residents who had voted in favor of such measures in local plebiscites arrived at public amenities to discover that they themselves were deemed unattractive.

It wasn’t long before a major theme park started advertising days for attractive people only, although its marketing department was quick to devise a less confrontational phrase, the “visually gifted”, which entered into wide use. The company required customers to submit full-length images of their party for “pre-clearance”, which caused moments of tension as families waited to see whether the company regarded them as VGs, especially if one member of the family was less attractive than the others. The theme park, knowing that barring individuals could deter families from visiting, provided separate waiting areas for the non-VGs, where they could play video games and eat for free. A leaked email circulated in the company’s HR department referring to the waiting area as the ugly zone led to two employees being dismissed.

The effect on politics was also unexpected, as it didn’t divide entirely along traditional liberal-conservative lines. The House of Representatives began to consider a bill to create a voluntary register for the visually gifted where citizens could be designated VG by an agency set up for this purpose, and issued a VG card to allow for access without arbitrary decision (the so-called “eye of the beholder” problem). This caused an outcry: on one hand, from civil liberties groups; on the other, from the new and rapidly expanding pressure group for attractive people, HeadTurn. HeadTurn opposed the VG card on the basis that if you needed a card telling people that you were attractive, then you obviously weren’t. The issue was further complicated by the question of what one did with individuals who were attractive once but had gained weight or aged unattractively. Would they be “struck off”?

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It further emerged that Black, Asian and Hispanic people were over-represented in HeadTurn relative to their respective shares of the population. This phenomenon was explained by a theory called exotic bias, which suggested that the majority population regarded minority groups’ appearance as being strikingly different. As a result, people thought unattractive within their own ethnic communities could be deemed attractive by members of a different but larger group. The Ku Klux Klan and other Aryan organizations immediately seized on this, although the sight of beer-bellied, pasty men of questionable personal hygiene protesting that they were being called unattractive because they were white kept late-night talk shows’ script writers busy.

None of this affected Lisa in any way that she was aware of, because she was surrounded by beautiful people. Her assistants, fellow models and people from the industry were not all as attractive as she was (obviously!), but nevertheless they were not like civilians. She was aware of there being people who were fat and bald and plain and just plain ugly, but her awareness was like that of someone vaguely aware that there were other countries with other people in them. That was the extent of her knowledge. Tedesco meant nothing to her. Yet. Samantha Meredith Nathaniel was the latest in a long line of Nathaniels dedicated to the acquisition of absurd amounts of money, only she was doing it at a level unimaginable to her Great-Grandpappy. The old man had travelled the West shilling his patented tonic, which allegedly cured everything from TB to the clap. All it really cured was an overburdened pocket, but it started the family out on a road into pharmaceuticals that eventually led to Samantha controlling PharmaSMN, the world’s third-largest pharmaceutical concern.

Like great-grandpappy, Samantha was sharp enough to recognize how a changing circumstance contained a market opportunity, only this time it didn’t arise from a fivedollar lady of particularly free virtue leaving a whole mining camp furiously scratching themselves. Samantha could see both the opportunity and the challenge of the Tedesco ruling. There would be an increase in beauty-related product sales, and PharmaSMN would take its share. But Samantha recognized that there was a Holy Grail to be

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pursued here. Make-up, skincare, skin peels, injections, surgery and silicone implants were all fine, but what was needed in this climate was a comprehensive solution, a wonder pill that removed those extra 30 pounds, banished crow’s feet around the eyes and wiped out sagging jowls.

Yes, there were loads of products out there that did one thing or the other, but what Samantha wanted was a single pill that did all this. She wanted a magical Product X. She even had the tag line ready for the marketing campaign: “Goodnight Ugly, Good Morning Beautiful”. Or “Handsome”, she corrected herself.

This product would not just be battling ugliness but aging, and men were even more vain about aging than women – at least, that was her impression looking at her board.

From the outrageous constructs of complexity to trump baldness deployed by some in the business community to the youth fashions worn by men who really should know better, she was sure that this was a market populated equally by both sexes.

In a modern society descending into an aesthetic caste system, people would be crying out for this single pill, and the first company that developed it was going to be so rich that it could argue for its own seat at the UN. Looking at herself in the mirror as she adjusted her make-up, she was aware of the irony. Although she enjoyed the good genes that three generations of American upperclass WASP interbreeding brings, she had the looks of a woman who could succeed only through exceptional ability or connections. As it happened, she had both, but it hadn’t stopped her from having to beat her father’s third wife, a statuesque Russian air hostess 20 years her junior, into a bloody legal pulp to maintain control of the company following his sudden death. Nadia Long-Legs had believed she could sleep her way into a few billion. Perhaps it was that which made this project so exciting to Samantha: the talisman that would finally rid the world of the pneumatically stacked usurper.

Samantha also knew the woman to develop such a product. They had been friends at Cambridge, when she’d being studying international finance.

Anna Trevor’s mind was as sharp as Samantha’s, only with a much broader sweep.

Anna was a prodigy, with an ability to turn her powers on any scientific field she wanted.

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She had gone on to become the most famous and wealthy scientist on the planet.

How Anna’s brain was wired, Samantha decided, would be perfect for this project. Just perfect. This is the woman who could look at a problem every other scientist would give up on, and see something no one else would see.

Samantha’s challenge in attempting to recruit Anna for this project was that not only did Anna not need the money, she wasn’t even particularly interested in the money she had, certainly not looking at the scuffed jeans and frayed coat she was wearing. Anna didn’t do vintage chic. She actually did buy her clothes second-hand and wear them until they fell apart of their own accord.

Samantha had made her pitch, recognizing that the tall, lean redheaded Englishwoman was working on a plane far higher than petty concerns about stockholders and profit margins. But she pointed out that if Anna worked with her, PharmaSMN would put together a very generous research package for Anna herself to disburse on cancer, Alzheimer’s, AIDS or whatever she wished, with a guaranteed percentage of any drugs coming out of such research to be distributed free in Africa, Asia, among the poor or wherever she wanted.

Anna recognized that this was an interesting offer. She just wasn’t sure what Samantha wanted from her.

Samantha explained the concept of the one-stop Magic Talisman pill.

Anna scribbled down some notes, and then disappeared back to her private Cambridge laboratory and her meticulously curated team of young postgraduates, who’d all but orgasmed the day they heard they had made her team. Whatever resources she needed from PharmaSMN she got, including particular team members from the multinational. She outlined the challenges, divided up tasks, and set her team to work, the end-of-day sessions being so extraordinary that the Discovery Channel filmed the entire process for release as a television series.

Every evening, amid a sea of takeaway food, Anna would bounce around in front of a whiteboard, listening to ideas, debating options, encouraging and coaxing and drawing out ideas.

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Just over a year later, Anna sauntered into PharmaSMN’s Fifth Avenue office to face Samantha. The corporate team of buttoned-down executives turned as one and looked at the scientist, fingers hovering over their iPads in expectation.

Anna shrugged. The magic pill could not be done, she said. This isn’t a little nip and tuck, or giving a decrepit executive an erection for a few hours. What was being looked for was a fundamental restructuring of a person’s body. It could not be done with a single pill.

Samantha was silent. In her head she was wondering whether she had done it – had she finally confounded the great Anna Trevor, the woman who figured out how to make salt water drinkable for pennies, which earned her the matching pair to make up Nobel Prize bookends?

“Not with a single pill, anyway,” Anna added with a smile.

She explained her team’s solution.

“The barriers to beauty are different for different people. For some it’s weight, for others age. Some people just aren’t what is deemed universally attractive. To tackle these issues, we have devised a rigorous program of liposuction, plastic surgery, metabolism enhancement and extreme exercise. This will solve maybe 90% of all problems posed.”

Samantha pointed out that this already existed: this was basically a fat farm and a clinic. This wasn’t new.

Anna batted away this concern.

“This is not as much a farm as a battery-style production line. We are going to rebuild people, for a price. For six weeks, we will get their bodies, shut down their brains and basically mould and exercise them to a degree that they would never psychologically be capable of doing themselves. We’ll suck the fat out, tone, trim, tan and sculpt them, and turn them into the beautiful people they want to be, and they won’t remember a bit of it.

Save for the bill. All gain, no pain,” Anna said.

Anna presented further details about how they could place clients into a medically induced coma, perform plastic surgery, administer a tsunami of drugs and strap them to an exercise machine non-stop for several weeks.

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The room was pin-drop-facilitating silent.

One of the younger execs cautiously questioned the legality of the process, but Samantha was more forthright: “More to the point, Anna, are you going to kill our clients? Are you going to treadmill them to death?”

“No, I can see that casualties would hardly make good business. They’ll be monitored all the way, and things like heart conditions will have to be taken into consideration. But the key here is that people’s bodies are much stronger than they realize. It’s the spirit that’s weak. So we’ll let the spirit have a nice six-week sleep as we infuse the perfect diet and work the body to a degree far greater than the client’s willpower would allow.

They’ll be physically exhausted, but they’ll never know, and their bodies will adapt to it before being brought out of the coma. They’ll literally wake up with a new body.”

When Anna revealed the $400,000 cost per client, Samantha groaned. This really was not the wonder pill she’d been looking for.

When Anna’s assistant, a handsome 20-something blond man, caught the scientist’s eye and gestured impatience, Samantha detected the exchange, and jabbed a finger at her: what was Anna holding out?

Anna laughed.

“Before I reveal all, I want an assurance that the pricing model will be based on what clients can afford – basically a percentage of a person’s income. In other words, if a janitor on fifteen grand is treated, he would be charged seven hundred and fifty dollars.

If a billionaire chooses to get it, it costs them millions.”

An iPad clattered noisily to the ground, a junior executive mumbling an awkward apology. This was all just too much for them.

Samantha erupted from her chair.

“We’re not running a fucking socialist health service here, Anna.”

“I’ve done the sums, Samantha. Even under my proposed pricing model you’ll clear enough money to make Bill Gates look like a wee-scented inhabitant of Cardboard City.”

“You do realize that the consumption of mind-bending drugs is a breach of your contract?”

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Anna ignored her, and dropped the final piece into place.

“Hear me out for a minute. We couldn’t make a magic pill. But we did something else.

Now, consider this: the coma process worked fine. The cocktail of drugs that would help people recover from the plastic surgery at a rapid rate was fine, as was the exercise program. However, we kept coming back to a crucial problem, test subject after test subject. The clients were still in their old skin. They still looked old. My team looked at moisturizers, skin tightening and other conventional treatments, but they all made people look weird as opposed to young. They did not look like young people: they always ended up looking like old people who’d had work done.

So we thought: what about replacing the skin entirely?”

“Replacing with what? Pigs?” Samantha despaired. “Don’t tell me you’re going to have immigrants being stripped in giant skinning sheds?”

“Synthetic human skin. Better than human skin. Resistant to skin cancer, and can be manufactured in any color or tone a client wants, and it’s stretch and wrinkle resistant.

The outer layer of skin and hair is removed and completely disinfected before a gel is applied to help the new skin to adhere while also tightening it onto the client. We can’t do eyelids or testicles yet, which means that there would be a lot of younger guys going around with old man’s balls, but we’ll get there eventually. Anyway, we didn’t think that anyone with testicles was in a hurry to have them skinned.”

A number of the male executives closed their legs and squirmed in their seats.

Samantha looked for some concrete data, which Anna assured her was in her head, and which she pledged to impart once they had an agreement.

“But before that, let me show you something.”

She then gestured to the assistant she’d exchanged glances with earlier. He stood up.

Samantha looked at Anna. Then at the assistant.

“How long have you worked here at PharmaSMN, Stephen?” Anna asked.

“Twenty-two years, Professor Trevor.”

Samantha frowned. Given that he could pass for nineteen or twenty, that would have meant he must have started work in the company crèche.

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As Samantha continued to stare at him like a dog being shown a card trick, Anna suggested that she was willing to agree to a clause in the new contract nullifying the whole deal if her process did not deliver what she promised.

“What age are you?” Samantha asked the young man.

“I’m forty-seven, Ms Nathaniel.”

Samantha was speechless, suddenly realizing that he knew the man, or at least, the 47-year-old version of him.

She turned to one of her assistants.

“Write up whatever contract Professor Trevor wants. And then somebody find out if witchcraft is still illegal in this state.”

The launch of PharmaSMN’s Total Beauty Solution (TBS) would not have attracted much unpaid coverage, as every beauty product and pharmaceutical company was launching products on a weekly basis to try to capitalize on the Tedesco ruling. Yet another Big Pharma company making over-hyped claims about its products was not news.

That was why Samantha recruited Travis Rawlins.

Rawlins had been one of the biggest TV stars of the 1980s, playing a rugged counterterrorist agent in the hit series “The Experts”. When the series had been cancelled, he had found himself typecast and reduced to appearing in cheaper and cheaper straightto-video thrillers, often with a soft porn element. The bottle had soon beckoned, and the previously handsome actor was now a sagging and bloated version of himself who looked like he’d just been sandblasted. Now, 30 years later, he was reduced to selling nonsense products on forgotten cable channels and attending celebrity conventions in airport hotels. There he would sign photos of himself in his prime to middle-aged women, who looked disbelievingly at the picture and then at him before walking off, muttering to themselves.

When he arrived unannounced on the set where Samantha and Anna were holding the press conference, the journalists were underwhelmed. PharmaSMN was not the first company to use a model in his twenties to dress a corporate photo. The media

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recognized that he was good looking and well built, and even that he looked like – what was that guy’s name from that show?

When the screen behind Anna dissolved from her technical explanation of the TBS process to the car-crashing-through-glass opening credits of “The Experts”, the assembled media gazed on in confusion. The younger journalists didn’t recognize the credits or the music, but the older ones sat up, eyes darting from the screen to Travis.

When Samantha introduced him, he smiled the smile that had won and broken so many teenage and not-so-teenage hearts, and the questions began.

The obvious question to Samantha was to verify that this was in fact Travis Rawlins, and not just a look-a-like, or perhaps his son. Travis happily agreed to any DNA or fingerprint tests the media required. Samantha pointed out the foolhardiness of a CEO of a billion-dollar company engaging in a cheap and easily discountable trick like that. It also assumed, he suggested, that they had the real Travis Rawlins either buried somewhere or at least hidden away.

After twenty minutes of questioning, the tone at the press conference began to change, as the journalists began to accept the bona fides of both Rawlins and the TBS process itself. To Samantha’s delight, they began to focus on the details of the process, as well as the unusual nature of the pricing structure. An hour later, Samantha ended the conference, her media management team ecstatic with the response to the product.

That day, PharmaSMN launched its enormous advertising campaign and opened its clinics nationwide. Within hours, just short of one-third of the population of the United States had registered for an initial consultation to see whether they were compatible in terms of health and income to undergo the process. The media, after the initial “Fountain of Youth” aspects of the story, began to focus on the 5% income formula.

Lisa got a shock when she saw her. Jo Hayden had been dazzling when she had entered the industry in the late 1990s, and for ten years had dominated the Manhattan scene, until age had caught up with her. Not in a way that any normal functioning human would have recognized, of course, but to the exacting standards of the industry Jo Hayden was now fat. She had had a baby, and her body had never recovered to the

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look of a 13-year-old boy that the industry required. She now looked like a fit beautiful woman in her 30s, which was sad, Lisa had thought at the time, because anyone who looked like they were in their 30s was old. The big work had dried up, Jo had dropped from the big earners’ table, and ended up doing catalogues and working in “the sticks” (that is, not Manhattan) to make ends meet.

Yet here she was, coming into the dressing room looking, well, looking exactly like the old Jo Hayden. The 21-year-old one. For the first time ever, Lisa had a strange feeling, one she was completely unfamiliar with. Fear.

Jo waved at her, and strolled over. The hair stylists and make-up people all greeted her with cheers and waves, another thing Lisa felt uneasy about. They liked her, but then that had been the thing about Jo. She had always seemed to spend a lot of time talking to those people, listening to their stories, asking about their families. She even went to parties in their homes if she was invited, and some were even in Queens. And in Jersey!

Jo didn’t like Lisa. It wasn’t a jealousy thing, although Lisa had always thought that it was. Jo didn’t like Lisa because Lisa was just hollow, with no interest in anything but Lisa, and that was boring. Jo read newspapers and had spoken out against Tedesco and had realized what TBS could mean to her.

After speaking to her, Lisa rushed off to ask her assistants what the hell TBS was.

Was it a TV network?

The backlash against TBS started almost immediately. Some wealthy individuals, on hearing of the 5% rule, had assumed that it was some sort of corporate stunt to prevent PharmaSMN from getting negative publicity. When they discovered that the initial consultation involved prospective clients signing a legal agreement which permitted the company to confiscate any wealth discovered in addition to that stated in their formal declarations, major disagreements broke out, with aging billionaires and their wives threatening legal action on the grounds of discrimination.

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The disagreement then led to a bizarre situation where the company was gradually processing the poor through its clinics, as promised, while the wealthy battled in state and federal courts to have access to TBS on the same grounds as the poor.

The Supreme Court ruled in Brock v PharmaSMN, an action brought by an 84-yearold Texas billionaire, that PharmaSMN had every right to decide its own pricing structure, and that the right to discriminate on the basis of income was indeed a de facto right conferred by the United States Constitution.

The day after the court case, Mr Brock signed a check for $2.1 billion to allow for his wife to receive TBS. The rumour on the web was that she had been in the process of drafting divorce papers, and was going to get her husband to pay for the procedure one way or the other. At one stage, he had explored whether for $2 billion he could have developed his own treatment, but his lawyers were adamant. PharmaSMN would vigorously fight any patent infringement of TBS and its components all the way back to the US Supreme Court, and for more than $2 billion as well.

Samantha’s media strategy began to cause unforeseen events. Each week she moved an aging star to the top of the waiting list, ensuring that their endorsements of the PharmaSMN product were now a weekly occurrence. As these forgotten celebrities returned to the world of television, music and cinema, younger stars not yet requiring TBS began to attack them in the media, referring to them as “re-treads” and describing the process as unfair. Some younger stars began to demand that the Screen Actors Guild issue a second category of membership for “naturally” VG talent. One former Oscar winner in her seventies, now rejuvenated by TBS, suggested that if there were to be any categories in the SGA, they should be between trained, experienced actors and reality-show flotsam.

This was not fair, Lisa thought. Some of the older girls had warned her that there was a window before the younger models eventually displace you, but Lisa had not paid them any attention. Of course they’d say that, they were old. But to have Jo and other elderly models coming back into the business, and stealing her work, that was just so wrong. What was more annoying was that all the photographers and designers seemed to love these people, knowing them all and having conversations about things that

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happened in the olden days when phones didn’t have cameras, and nonsense like that.

The re-treaded models were also much more experienced, and seemed to read books (who reads books?) and enjoy discussing the families and their children (children?).

This was all just so unfair.

Constant new issues emerged. While the product was generating huge profits for PharmaSMN, it was nevertheless structured on the basis that rich clients subsidized the much larger amount of poor clients. This was fine as long as the company strictly rationed the number of people who got the subsidized treatment, which it did in accordance with Samantha’s agreement with Anna. The problem was that this in turn meant that there were now waiting lists for subsidized TBS treatments running into decades, and those people were getting angry about it.

Samantha poured petrol on the fire when she was called before a congressional committee to explain the huge waiting lists, and suggested a simple solution. If the federal government was willing to negotiate to “buy” treatment off the company, at its true cost plus a modest profit, PharmaSMN would be able to afford to open far more clinics.

It was this proposal that was to tear the country apart.

HeadTurn formed the vanguard to opposition to federally funded TBS, arguing that it was grotesque that beautiful people were to be required to pay taxes to fund the transformation of non-VGs. The issue shattered the political spectrum, dividing Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives – especially as the megawealthy could actually benefit from the idea of state funding, as Anna had accepted Samantha’s suggestion that the 5% rule could be abandoned if the US government pledged that every citizen would receive treatment, regardless of income. Polls showed that it was to become the issue in the coming congressional mid-term elections.

So little had politics or current affairs ever featured in her life that Lisa had to get one of her assistants to set up some news apps for her. She couldn’t believe this was all happening. Only the previous week she’d recognized her former cleaner coming out of a TBS post-op clinic, following one of the mandatory sessions that screened clients for

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potential complications. She had been a mediocre and dumpy Polish girl to whom Lisa would never have given a second thought. Yet here she was, slim and smooth-skinned and catching men’s eyes like she was a real person!

Then she’d heard about HeadTurn. Finally! People who understood! When she arrived at the meeting, she felt elated, attending something that made sense. It was full of people just like her. Well, not quite as stunning as her, but certainly acceptable and no old people either, she thought. Not a single person over 35, it looked like.

She recognized many of the people from the Standard or the No.8, and she applauded excitedly during the speeches. This was more like it; this was about restoring the proper order of things. As she queued outside the bathroom to vomit up the cracker and sliver of salmon she’d eaten at the mixer, Lisa felt great.

Samantha commissioned her own polls, which started showing that the country was divided along all social, ethnic and political lines, forcing pollsters to invent new means of measuring beauty, the one trait that was so difficult to define. Initially, they just had to accept the definition as given by respondents: did they describe themselves as physically attractive?

Anna suggested that they needed a standard definition of beauty. With that in mind, PharmaSMN surveyed thousands of Americans, showing them images of people and gradually building up a clear definition of the most attractive physical characteristics.

Armed with the Trevor Visual Attractiveness Standard, they were able to decide whether those being polled met the TVAS criteria or not, and then allow pollsters to correct for self-delusion and other bias.

On that basis, the polls were clear: attractive people, who were deemed to make up 18% of the population, were strongly opposed to state-funded TBS. The other 82%, people who did not meet the TVAS, were clearly in favour.

One would have thought that this settled the question, save for another factor that PharmaSMN discovered. Beautiful people tend to be confident people, and confident people tend to be successful, and successful people tend to be rich, and so HeadTurn, now funded by its burgeoning member rolls to a degree that made the NRA look

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anemic, decided to use its financial muscle. But they had a problem. How on earth do you block a government program that will address that single most primitive instinct, to be attractive to others?

You just can’t do it, their pollsters told them. Then one brilliant young political strategist suggested a different approach. He accepted that you couldn’t run a campaign where beautiful people tell the rest that they can’t join them. But, he suggested, what if you frightened them?

His television ad campaign featured ordinary Americans: not ugly, just plain. The ads asked them what would happen if TBS couldn’t make everybody beautiful, and if you ended up as one of the 10–15% of the population whom TBS can’t help, left in a nation where everybody else is beautiful. Do you really want to take the risk? He then went on to build on the post-Tedesco mood of the nation. America is dividing between the beautiful and the not so beautiful. Some businesses are stopping people at their doors for not meeting the TVAS. Segregation is back (cue: pictures of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks). Is this where we want America to go?

Then the most telling part of the ad: the government shouldn’t be forcing people to be beautiful. It should be reversing the Tedesco ruling.

Lisa didn’t quite understand what was being suggested, until some of the other members explained it to her. Didn’t reversing Tedesco mean that ordinary people could not be discriminated against for not being beautiful? Yes, said some of her new friends, but if that’s the price for stopping TBS, well, it was a price worth paying.

But others disagreed. We should not compromise, we shouldn’t sell out. Yes, we must stop TBS, but we should also recognize that beautiful people are different and should be treated as such. Lisa agreed with that, and with the beautiful young man who said it. The group’s leadership was wrong.

At the group’s national convention at Miami Beach (why not catch some rays as well?) a major split developed, and Lisa found herself voting (voting! She couldn’t believe it!) against the governing council’s anti-Tedesco platform, and storming out of the hall with a collection of other hardliners, chanting “We’re here, we’re gorgeous, you can’t ignore us!”

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Declaring themselves the National Front for Beauty, former HeadTurn extremists consisting mainly of outraged young would-be actors and models decided that action would have to be taken. As the numbers of TBS procedures were increasing with each new clinic opening, the mood in the NFB turned ugly. It was now a race against time, to prevent the ranks of the naturally beautiful from being swamped by lessers. Every day wasted on political action was a day when more ugly people became beautiful. Action was needed.

On the 1st of March, the NFB carried out a series of synchronized attacks on free TBS clinics. Using legally purchased firearms, NFB groups attacked people queuing outside clinics in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Boston and San Francisco that afternoon and killed 729 people. Most of the attackers were either captured or killed by police.

Lisa was part of a group that attacked a clinic on Columbus Circle. The group had decided before the attack that, due to Lisa’s propensity to wedge her gel nails into the chamber of her AK-47, she would best serve the cause by acting as a look-out.

Lisa’s temper flared when she saw the plump guy queuing up in his McDonald’s uniform. She had not been in a McDonald’s since she started modelling, but she knew that there weren’t very many beautiful people there. Who were these people to think they could invade her world?

She didn’t have time to do anything about this, though, as the sounds of the sirens made her turn and flee. As she ran down the pavement outside the clinic, her seveninch heel snapped on a pavement grate, causing her to fall out into the path of an oncoming L’Oréal truck.

Ironically, she had always wanted to be on a L’Oréal truck.

It was these attacks that made the President of the United States decide that she had had enough. After consulting with her advisors and the Attorney General, she addressed the nation. America, she said, has enough proper problems with the economic downturn and unemployment, terrorism and climate change. The last thing it needed was another divisive issue. Therefore, she said, she was going to take the issue of beauty off the table. She was sending a bill to Congress to begin the process of

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making discrimination on the grounds of attractiveness unconstitutional. She was going to reverse Tedesco. Secondly, she was going to take action to create a federal Visual Enhancement Agency, to run the series of TBS clinics licensed by PharmaSMN so that all Americans could have their “God-given right to be beautiful.”

The NFB responded quickly, declaring war on VEA.

Two years later: When Anna announced a vaccine for Alzheimer’s disease, it was politely received in the media, buried behind wall-to-wall coverage on the NFB and the “War on Beauty”.

On TVs and phones and tablets soldiers patrolled outside VEA clinics, and as one sits in an airport or a bus station or, God forbid, a VEA clinic, one shifts uneasily in your seat when you see a beautiful person carrying a bag, and hope that the security people have checked them out.

It’s true, not all beautiful people are terrorists; but today, most terrorists are beautiful people.

Psychologists now largely agreed that the democratization of beauty had actually mentally unhinged some people who were naturally beautiful. For many of them, it was all they had, and losing that advantage came as quite a blow. HBO’s top-rated show was a new Candace Bushnell series about a group of pre-TBS models struggling on the dating scene of Manhattan, competing against all those gorgeous accountants, software engineers, editors and physicists crowding out the bars.

The other huge cultural effect has been a collapse in life expectancy. With TBS now able to hide the outer symptoms of poor diet and a lack of exercise, people were overeating and drinking more than ever before. At this rate, statisticians expected the US life expectancy to drop to below 70 years by 2040.

On the plus side, it had solved the Social Security pensions crisis. There were a lot of beautiful-looking corpses being buried these days.

The End. Omahony.jason@gmail.com