BEHOLD: the most expensive person in the entire world.

The cost of keeping this man alive exceeds the GDP of Luxembourg. Yes, the country. If Chad Bim’s (born in 1905) life had been allowed to run its natural course, he would be a skeleton by now. Instead, he is something resembling a man: a pale, emaciated monstrosity, with a face so full of botox that expression is literally impossible. How did he end up like this?

About a century back, members of a huge anti-tobacco campaign chose Bim from a pool of incarcerated criminals to serve as a living poster child for their cause, someone so disgusting and supernaturally ugly that his appearance in anti-smoking media would be enough to make people “SAY NO.” Their plan was essentially to make Bim into a universal image of “Someone You Absolutely Do Not Want to Be” and, backed by the FDA and assisted by government psychologists, they poured huge amounts of money into destroying Bim’s body, optimizing his appearance in such a way that simply perceiving him would induce a hypnotic aversion from the given unhealthy/risky thing. The campaign was so effective that Bim’s likeness was used to campaign against every risky or unhealthy thing you can possibly imagine, so effective that—when the systematic teardown of Bim’s body brought him to death's door—the FDA decided they simply couldn’t afford to lose him. Since his Bim’s first media appearance, the rate of crime and substance addiction/dependence plummeted exponentially, making the country the healthiest it had been since like the early nineteenth century. So they kept him alive by strapping him to a complex, multi-billion dollar network of tubes and machines and confining him for the rest of his artificially prolonged life in his similarly expensive estate, surrounded by bodyguards who have been hired to provide Bim some company and, occasionally, wound him in preparation for a public appearance. Later today, the guy in the hot tub will punch him in the face a few times in preparation for a visit from representatives of an anti-violence campaign.