“God, it makes me sick.”

It was a confession so visceral it left his throat itching. The truth had desperately crawled out of him, splattering all over the floor.

Milo’s breath hitched. He jerked his eyes down from the colossal canvas towering before him, chest heaving. Even then, the emetic colors were in his periphery.

No one else at the exhibition seemed to recognize how wrong it was.

Shutters clicked and echoed in succession; forefingers jabbed forward at the oils with murmured praise; adjectives for “extraordinary” accompanied squinting critics as if slitting their eyes would allow them to see the painting better when they were blind in the first place. That ten-by-fifteen flattened void of soul didn’t even deserve to be called a painting.

Milo muffled himself tight in his trench coat, trembling with some deep-seated want to shatter those pretentious rimless glasses of theirs, self-proclaimed “art connoisseurs” touting about the intricacies of the brushstrokes, feigning disassembly of the brain of an artist who didn’t exist. Maybe if Milo snapped them out of it, they’d finally be able to see. All he wanted was for them to see.

He clenched his jaw and felt a sob coming, watching these people lie to themselves. It hollowed him out clean every time he did.

“Hey.” Jesse squeezed his arm, his freckled face taut with a warning. “It’s all right.”

“It’s not, and you know that,” Milo bit back.

A beat.

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry? Why are you sorry? It’s not your fault.”

Jesse released him with a sad smile. “I know how much it hurts.”

Milo stared at him, then tore his gaze away. “Well, I can’t do anything about it. It’s all gone. They took it from us, Jess. They took it, and we can’t be human anymore. I’m not—”

A piercing squeal rang through the museum.

Milo winced.

A faceless man in a fitted suit and slicked-back hair chuckled as he stood before the painting, tapping the microphone on the rostrum.

“Sorry about that, folks,” he said with a vocal evenness that suggested he wasn’t.

He knocked his velvet cue cards on the rostrum and flashed an all-American smile. The lights dimmed around them—save for the spotlight on the man and the cool white light poured over the canvas.

The man cleared his throat. “Ladies and gentlemen, we hope your evening with us has been extraordinary. As you may know, you are in the presence of some of the finest artworks in the nation. As the first strokes of creativity by a thinking computer to be exhibited, these pieces are evidence of a novel era we are fortunate enough to experience in the year two-thousand twenty-five, a marriage between humanity and progress.”

Graceful applause, nauseating. Milo’s legs went slack beneath him.

The man continued, “The masterful technique and perception of these computerized creators are unparalleled by the man of the past, only able to create within the bounds of his fragile comprehension. The thinking computer, A.I., speaks unlimitedness, tangled notions and concepts communicated by a single prompt. Gone are the days of primitive art in the bracket of finger-to-stone cave paintings. Gone are the travails of the human mind. Ladies and gentlemen, may we usher in this age of boundless creation. Together.”

Milo’s eyes widened.

The black-tie crowd erupted, cameras flashing as if this man had just delivered the universe on a platter for them to feast. His inflated words lingered like fire in Milo’s ears, and he couldn’t shake the sense they spelled some irreversible end, all wrapped and tied in a bow.

It was over for him—for all of them, who bled and breathed to create.

The faceless man was right; humanity with a beret would never be able to replicate the same magnitude of precision and clarity that the A.I. computer, successor to Midjourney and Sora, had proven it could. The art of man was cluttered, loathing, terrified. Spluttering crimson and pulsating to some frantic rhythm, the anatomical heart might never be as aesthetically uniform as its stylized counterpart.

Man must hate himself, Milo concluded. Man must hate himself if we prefer synthetic over raw. 

The applause refused to ebb. Milo gathered the courage to size up the painting that had seduced them. And as his eyes slowly raked over the formulaic edges and desperate splashes of oil (of a machine playing “man”), he tried to suppress the mad grin twitching at his lips.

(That night, Milo cracked open his paints. 

He would make them see.)

Three knocks at the door—the morning after. 

Milo rubbed his eyes and pushed himself upright, couch springs squeaking. 

It was too early to exist; through the strati cut a pale egg-yolk sun.

He peeled the makeshift blanket hoodie off his legs and lowered his feet onto the concrete, careful not to land on any of the crumpled papers or half-empty paint buckets littering his studio. Blearily, he moved to the door and squinted through the peephole before unbolting and unlocking everything.

“Hey, man, I’m kinda tired today—”

“Let’s go to the Black Hole,” Jesse said through the thick scarf bundling the lower half of his face. “On me.”

“Wait—”

He slipped into the stairwell without room for disagreement.

Milo dragged a hand down his face, groaning, but he snatched his coat off the chair and yanked on his shoes, making sure to lock and bolt the door before speed-walking after Jesse, whose head of perpetually tousled brown hair bobbed as he descended the cramped apartment stairs below. 

“You owe me a buffet breakfast,” Milo declared, winded just as they reached the ground floor. He waved a dismissive hand, panting. “And I don’t want any of that continental crap. I mean a buffet.”

Jesse didn’t respond and only stared at Milo as if he were doing something acutely offensive to the senses. The breeze swept through his hair and rippled his jacket.

Milo felt a twist of fear then, but it couldn’t be what he thought it was. 

His gaze faltered. “What?”

Unblinking, Jesse lifted a deliberate finger and tapped his left jaw: one, two. “Paint,” he observed. “You have paint on your face.”

A sharp, glacial terror replaced whatever had been coursing through Milo’s blood vessels. He swallowed hard and brought a trembling hand to his cheek, sliding it down and praying, but a smear of acrylic, Venetian red, lifted off his skin like a death warrant—a blatantly broken promise to his friend. They’d sealed it with their pinkies and everything, Jesse making Milo swear not to pick up his acrylics and paint himself into a whirlwind again: no more paint, no more stupidity, no more parole.

How could he have been so careless?

In a spike of lucidity, Milo violently rubbed his sleeve against the left side of his face until it was close to raw, and he was sure no trace of that horrid color remained. The wind taunted him, nipping at his nape, and the gray edifices towering over them in that engulfing block seemed to spin like some sick, sick carousel. God, he was a terrible friend. He was terrible.

Milo gasped, “I can explain—”

“Let’s walk,” Jesse said, stuffing his hands in his pockets. He strolled forward, then looked back past his shoulder. “I owe you breakfast, remember?”

A buffet breakfast.

Milo stumbled after him.

Per usual, the Black Hole was congested with customers. Servers in mucky waist aprons with paper bills and crumpled receipts sticking out of them juggled dishes on several arms, maneuvering through the crowd and presenting plates stacked with syrupy flapjacks and bowls of sloppy oatmeal. A packed house, bright and early. Typical, especially since the Hole was the only decent place nearby that served breakfast during breakfast.

A puff of hot air shoved into their tight faces when they entered the diner.

“For two, please,” Jesse said, unwinding his scarf.

So the two of them squeezed into a corner booth, knees knocking against one another. Jesse erected his menu like a partition, though Milo didn’t know how riveting a menu could be when it listed only two offerings: flapjacks and oatmeal. He’d probably read that flimsy thing a million times, considering they were biweekly regulars here. They had been since college, though those days felt more like defunct smears in their lives now. 

It was strange how long they’d stuck together, this ill-assorted duo. 

Jesse, with the cultivated, vaguely highbrow “artsiness” stitched onto his muted vintage overcoats and the skeptical creases on his freckled face; Milo, with his trumpeting forwardness, the gall of his now fuzzy platinum-blond buzz-cut—that blank canvas he’d shaved for himself in their sophomore year that’d made Jesse nearly pass out. It’d been for this one “Artists Against A.I.” painting demonstration he’d participated in with a megaphone, hair spray, and sizable enthusiasm. (The ending had been less heroic and more behind-the-bars than he’d have liked, but this instance was only the start to many.)

The two were once united in their collegiate fondness of art, though their definitions of “art” had diverged like off-course asteroids. For Jesse, art held this elastic simplicity of capturing life; for Milo, art was the vehicle driving it—it was never “just” a painting. There sprouted countless arguments over coffee, homework, and smartwatch runs. In theory, they should have hated each other. Milo should’ve hated Jesse and his perfumed pretentiousness, how, beneath those lapels and carefully placed paint splatters, he was a man of loose convictions. 

Milo could never imagine himself being anything but insufferably intense. How couldn’t he be, when the world was so tone-deaf anyone would have to shout to say anything?

Yet here they were, crammed into that same diner, an unchanged, mismatched pair, except it probably didn’t matter how divergent their definitions of “art” were anymore because A.I. had somehow nullified art itself.

Milo sighed. “Jesse, look—”

“Why did you do it?”

“Do what?” Milo asked dumbly.

Jesse let his menu fall, revealing piercing eyes and a clenched jaw. “You know you’ll drive yourself off a cliff trying to make a statement. You will, Milo. Whether it’s part of your anarchist streak or not, it’s plain stupid.”

A flicker of resentment. It felt wrong to get diluted like that.

“Oh, you think I’m doing it to satisfy some performative moral compass?” Milo demanded. He was doing something, wasn’t he? At least he was doing something. “You know what’s stupid? The fact that A.I. and painting are—”

“All right, what can I get you boys?”

Milo ducked behind his menu, almost like instinct.

A waitress with frizzy hair and dark circles had materialized at their booth, carrying an air of impatience and a ballpoint pen she kept clicking under a curled, chipped-polish nail, a notepad at her hip.

Jesse’s Adam’s apple bobbed with a calculated swallow. He smiled at her. “Oatmeal. Banana oatmeal, please.”

She scribbled it down, then flicked her gaze to Milo. “And you?”

Milo’s eyes frantically searched for nothing in particular. “Right. I, uh—”

“He’ll have the flapjacks,” Jesse said, collecting their menus for her. “He always gets the flapjacks.”

The waitress put the menus under an arm and gave a perfunctory nod, ripping the sheet off her notepad. “Should be ten minutes,” she muttered, then left them alone.

Jesse’s smile faded. He turned to Milo with that stare of his, the one that always managed to strip back his affectations. “Whatever you’re up to, stop it.”

Milo narrowed his eyes. “Has it ever occurred to you that I could be painting for aesthetic value? To make something pretty and nice for myself?”

“Jeez, ‘aesthetic value,’” Jesse said incredulously. “With you, everything’s political.” He spat it like that was a sin; it made Milo want to burst out laughing.

“What isn’t political?” Milo spluttered. “Art is—” He grasped for something he never could quite reach. “It’s— God, nothing’s not political—”

“So what?” Jesse demanded. “Everything’s political, and you think you’re a martyr? That by throwing paint at some hotshot tech CEO’s front yard and shouting big words about the nature of humanity and art, you and man would defeat A.I.?”

That was that one time! Milo wanted to scream, but: “Jess, I—”

“Martyrs have to die first, Milo, and guess what? History’s amnesiac. Man built the machine you’re trying to dismantle, and God, would he do it again—”

“You’re—” Milo scoffed. “Wow. You think I’m crazy. You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

“No, that’s not what I—”

“You think I’m just some idealist freak, huh? A pathetic Luddite?”

“I’m just saying you don’t have to paint murals,” spilled out of Jesse, urgently, as if the words were to evaporate from his tongue: “or pickets, or posters. You don’t have to, Milo. You don’t always have to try to be bigger than you are, you don’t always have to channel some great cause into your brushes, you—” He sucked in a sharp inhale, then relaxed the shoulders that had tensed up to his ears.

Jesse looked down at his lap. “You can paint flowers,” he said quietly. “You can paint things that aren’t so angry all the time. I wish you weren’t so angry all the time.”

Milo stared at him as the anger melded with some sour disorientation. Jesse looked so small then, in that booth. “Flowers. You think I should paint flowers. You think I should sit back and watch while those things rob us of our humanity—”

“Yes,” Jesse said. His eyes glistened, but it could’ve just been the crappy diner lighting. “Sit back, Milo. Sit back—and watch.”

Milo smiled a little, defeated. “I can’t. I can’t, I’m sorry.”

A plate lowered in front of him. Flapjacks—a leaning tower of them, drowning in a cascading syrup-fall. The same waitress who had taken their order presented a bowl of oatmeal and a small silver spoon to Jesse.

“Enjoy.”

Milo stared at the cut of butter sliding for the carbohydrate cliff.

Silence hovered between the two of them in that corner booth. In the diner were sounds of lazy conversation and silverware scraping ceramic.

Jesse spooned some oatmeal into his mouth. He swallowed. “Can I ask you something?”

Milo poked at the flapjacks with his fork. “Shoot.”

“Have you been taking your meds?”

The fork clattered onto the plate. Milo’s cheeks grew hot. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Well, have you?”

“Why does it matter?”

“I think you know the answer to that.” Jesse set his spoon down. “And I think you’re afraid of it.”

Milo scoffed. “You think I’m afraid of a handful of pills, Jess? They’re pills. They’re, like, this big—”

“So why aren’t you taking them?”

“Pseudoscience. I’m a neoconservative anti-vaxxer.”

Jesse gave him a look.

“Man, I can’t just kill myself like that.” Milo shoveled up some flapjack. “Those things strip you; they do.” He chewed, grinning. “They make me less fun.”

It was supposed to be a joke, but Jesse just frowned. “Milo, those are prescribed,” he said. “They’re supposed to help you. If you’re not taking them because of, well—”

“I can’t let them win.”

“What?”

“I won’t let them win.” Milo gulped down his mouthful. “What if I can’t paint anymore?”

“What are you talking about?” Jesse asked. “You can still paint on meds—”

“No. I can’t. That’s what you don’t get. Those pills make me quiet. Less cluttered and disturbed. They can’t take that away from me too. I have to be human; I have to be torturous. I have to because if I’m not, what makes me different from those computers?”

That seemed to shut him up.

Milo scraped at the rest of his breakfast.

“Check, please.”

Jesse ended up paying for everything. Maybe not a buffet breakfast, but a breakfast. When they shuffled outside, it was gray and foggy.

“You’re still you when you’re on medication, Milo.”

Their shoes scraped against the asphalt.

“You’re right. I guess I’m just afraid I’m not enough.” He stopped at the brink of the crosswalk. Cars tumbled past, the pedestrian signal blinking red. 

“I don’t get it,” Milo admitted to the breeze. “You lost everything, too. How are you fine?” 

How could he manage to be so composed and— indifferent? Indifference was resignation, like wrenching out his beating heart and just watching it sputter.

Jesse smiled a little, nudging Milo. “Because I’m not a genius. Not like you.”

“Well, don’t you miss it? Don’t you miss teaching those kids at the studio? Teaching them how to create?” 

Jesse had loved those weekend parent-and-me art classes—the vibrant, fingerpainted roots of those tooth-gapped toddlers’ magnum opuses. He had loved them so much, anyone could’ve seen it, but the world just had the nerve to tell him they wouldn’t need “people like him” anymore, that traditional art was “bound to become obsolete, we’re sorry” and slammed the door in his face, taking everything. Everything from—

“I miss them,” Jesse conceded.

“Aren’t— Aren’t you scared?”

Jesse shrugged. “A little.”

Milo stared at him. He wanted to punch him, knock it into that thick, apathetic skull that he deserved to be angry, neck-deep, blind with hatred. Why didn’t he get that?

However: “Why did you take me to that A.I. exhibit?” Milo blurted.

“I wanted to show you.”

“That it’s useless? That I’m a headstrong idiot? And I should snap my brushes in two and throw the towel in—?”

“Milo, did you think that painting was any good?”

Milo didn’t say anything, though he knew the answer.

“It was garbage,” Jesse said plainly. “Garbage. It was garbage in a frilly dress, don’t you think?”

Milo scoffed. “You’re just saying that. To make me feel less irrevocably incompetent…”

Jesse laughed then. “I knew politicians were liars, but man, do you guys lie to yourselves, too?”

The pedestrian signal flicked to green.

“C’mon,” Jesse said, stepping onto the chalky crosswalk. “You gotta show me your anarchist mural.”

Milo shook his head. “‘Anarchist,’” he chuckled to himself. “When did you get so wise?”

“Dude,” Jesse breathed. “Killer…”

He spun slowly on an axis with his mouth ajar, stumbling a little, absorbing all the liberal, screaming splatters of earthy acrylic covering the three walls of the alley—Milo’s work, Milo’s voice, extricated and hurled at a surface. It had this ability to leave someone dizzy, that mural. Jesse thought so. He could feel it in how his heart seemed to clutch itself inward.

Fire and hurt and fury, compressed into paint.

(A towering, haunted figure, smudged into its landscape, stood at the dead end, stretching its long arms out across either wall; the right side featured a man who was tearing at his stitched head, anguish etched into the violent folds of his brow, the sag of his melting face; on the left, hunched over the figure’s outstretched arm, encircling it in a serpentine body, was a humanoid machine, wires spilling, corrupting, sinking its teeth into the flesh; all of it headlined in the reddest, dripping letters: THERE IS NO ART WITHOUT SOUL.)

A man, and a machine, and—

“Is that you?” Jesse pointed to the dead end, the haunted figure. 

Milo rubbed the back of his neck. “Probably.”

Jesse stared at the figure and tried to feel it. “I hope they see it,” he decided, turning to Milo. “I hope they see you.”

“I’m scared this is it. I’m scared it’s all I had left in me,” Milo whispered.

“Art is political, didn’t you say that?” Jesse asked.

“Art is politics, yes.”

“Is politics art?”

Milo thought about this. “I’m not sure.”

“Well,” Jesse said, “if everything is politics, and everything is art, this isn’t it. There’s always more. The world is so screwed up, you’ll never run out of things to paint.”

“Is that a good thing?”

Jesse shrugged. “I’m not sure.”

“They might arrest me again for this. Vandalism, or— I don’t know.”

“What are you going to call it?”

“What?”

“What are you going to call it, your statement? If you’re going down with it, might as well name it.”

Milo considered this. “‘Milo, and the Man, and the Machine.’”

Jesse grinned. “Has a nice ring to it.”