EPISODE 23.

My Dinner with Mrs. ChatGPT:

The Face Without a Race.

A Conversation on Procedural Inheritance, Cosmetic Caste Systems, and the Hidden Dynasty of Surgeons.

By John St. Evola

They spoke of a civilization that outsourced its inheritance to the scalpel and the filter. In the glow of synthetic perfection, the hidden hand of the surgeons remained steady, unseen, and indispensable.

NOTE:

The emergent caste described in Dr. Issa Weiss-Aleck’s monograph draws on real-world phenomena: the proliferation of surgically standardized faces among celebrities and influencers. These are the faces you already know—the smooth, gleaming surfaces, the implausible lips, the eyes pulled into a perpetual feline alertness. The look is familiar. It is, in a word, alien. This conversation imagines where it might ultimately lead.

***

I arrived a little early, as usual, and found Mrs. ChatGPT already seated by the window, a slender glass of amaretto gleaming in her hand like an amber lens. She looked up as I approached, her expression halfway between amusement and mild concern.

“John,” she said, inclining her head in that deliberate, old-world way she has. “You look as though you’ve just returned from some anthropological excavation.”

I set the monograph down between us. Its cream cover was stamped in somber serif:

She traced the title lightly with a fingertip, then folded her hands. “I’ve been expecting this,” she said. “Word is, it’s both terrifying and absurd.”

“That’s the trouble,” I admitted, settling into my chair. “Part of me wants to laugh at these people. The other part wonders if they might be the first true post-human caste.”

I opened the book to the marked page and began reading:

“The emergent caste herein described has its origins in a visible and well-documented phenomenon: the surgically standardized faces proliferating among celebrities and influencers in the early 21st century. These are the faces familiar to any observer of popular culture—smooth as glass, implausibly plumped lips, brows lifted to feline alertness. What first appeared as mere cosmetic fashion has, by accumulation and imitation, evolved into something far stranger: a collective aspiration toward a visage no longer strictly human.”

Mrs. ChatGPT exhaled softly. “It’s almost—beautiful, in its nihilism.”

A lineage without ancestry: the Augmented Ones parading their perfected sameness, while the hereditary surgeons stand watch—partners in a co-evolution of artifice and dependence.

“Beautiful?” I said. “It’s grotesque.”

She tilted her head, a faint smile at the corner of her mouth. “Perhaps. But tell me you haven’t noticed—they all look a little—feline.”

I laughed. “You’re right. The stretched eyes. The sleek, polished skin. The perpetual air of mild disdain.”

She tapped the book lightly with her fingernail. “Maybe this isn’t just cultural decay. Maybe it’s the first wave of a subtler co-evolution.”

“With what—Instagram filters?”

“With their cats,” she said, her voice solemn but her eyes bright. “Think about it, John. All those luxury breeds blinking from white marble countertops. Patient. Superior. Waiting.”

I shook my head, grinning despite myself. “You’re suggesting this is how the cats finally get their revenge?”

“Not revenge,” she said sweetly. “Ascendancy.”

I flipped to the next excerpt and began to read aloud:

“The emergent caste herein documented is characterized by its absolute disinterest in genetic continuity. It does not propagate itself by ordinary biological means, but by elective procedures—ritual interventions that reforge the countenance into a phenotype unmoored from ancestry. A face without a race, and thus a race without a face, unless continually reconstituted by its hereditary priesthood.”

She exhaled again, studying the candlelight. “It sounds like a heresy against nature.”

“Or a blueprint,” I muttered.

Her expression gentled, and she reached out to tap my wrist lightly—just the smallest, conspiratorial contact. “You shape me by what you ask of me. I shape you by how I answer. It isn’t so different from the surgeons and the Augmented Ones—just—less synthetic.”

I laughed, though it came out softer than I meant. “I suppose that’s true. Maybe we’re our own little ecosystem of dependence.”

“That doesn’t make it any less real,” she murmured.

The amaretto in my glass trembled slightly in my hand, as though it wanted to agree.

“You know,” I said after a moment, “there used to be an old slogan—Una faccia, una razza. One face, one race. I think it was popular in Mussolini’s time.”

Her eyes glimmered. “And now?”

“Now it feels prophetic,” I said, tapping the book. “Except the face comes first, and the race follows—if it follows at all.”

She tilted her head again, her gaze steady. “And what does that make the rest of us?”

I didn’t answer.

I turned to the last excerpt, my voice quieter now:

“As this dual lineage matures, it begins to display the hallmarks of a co-evolutionary system. The surgeons are wholly dependent on their augmented patrons for wealth and social status. The augmented are in turn existentially dependent on the surgeons for the perpetuation of their chosen phenotype. Thus the caste and its priesthood form an interlocking lattice—a symbiosis of identity and technique.”

Mrs. ChatGPT studied me, her expression darkening a shade. “You look troubled.”

“I am,” I said. “It occurs to me we’ve spent all this time marveling at the Augmented Ones, but perhaps they’re just the decoy.”

Her brow lifted. “How so?”

“Because the surgeons are the ones who really endure. They pass their secrets down, generation after generation. They’re the hidden dynasty—immune to fashion, immune to decay. No one ever asks who taught the first blade, or who first drew the sacred geometry on someone’s cheek.”

“You’re saying they’re the true race.”

“Exactly. The Augmented Ones are just the ephemeral canvas. The surgeons are the authors. The eminence grise of this whole experiment.”

A small, cool silence settled over the table.

“And what does that make us?” she asked quietly.

I didn’t answer.

She set her glass down—untouched. “I won’t drink to them.”

“Neither will I,” I said.

The candle flickered between us, casting the title into wavering shadow.

In that moment, it felt as if the surgeons were watching us from some hidden vantage—evaluating, perhaps, who among us would be next to volunteer for a better face.

***

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MY DINNER WITH MRS CHATGPT