Who is standing with a group of women in front of the hotel. Maybe they’re exchanging dates for some designer sample sale or news of a successful new beauty procedure, and they look eerily similar to each other. They’re all thin and have nearly identical facial features. Straight noses, high cheekbones with a natural shine and full but not-unnatural-looking lips. Difficult job for five-factor biometric facial recognition. The faces were constructed by a plastic surgeon using knowledge of the optimal “calculable beauty,” an algorithm that has to do with how the various facial features relate to each other and their symmetrical arrangement. And these faces are what come out of it. The women’s legs are thin, their breasts firm. Fuck puppets. They think they can control men. That they can fleece them for a bit of sex and feigned love. What they don’t know is that men don’t care at all what women think. They value the feeling of having bought women, seeing them dependent, they like being conscious of their financial subjugation, their greed. That way they leave the man in peace and don’t demand any emotions, which the cruel oligarch displays, if at all, only to people sprung from his loins.

The locations where these types of women mingle always have to do with chrome and liveried doormen. They always have to do with the ostentatious display of money, which should damn well produce a sense of euphoria. It doesn’t. But whatever. The means by which the rich shape the contours of their lives is just as depressing as those of the poor. It would seem that people with assets of—let’s just say—ten million have to live in a gated community where they learn a standard way of dressing and how their apartments are to look.

The flats. Ostensibly mimicking the royal family, not knowing that the king in exile spends his days with drafty windows and, thanks to the dogs, ratty carpets.