Jane is infected with a disease that will kill her in a matter of weeks. It is incurable, no matter how hard the medical world has tried, and it kills in all cases, shriveling the internal organs into useless husks, and putting all the energy gained from this atrophy into reconstructing the afflicted’s outward appearance.
Over the weeks leading to her death, Jane’s face rearranges itself to be a symmetrical, proportional and clear version of itself. The fat melts off her body and her proportions shift into what most would call beautiful, attractive, sexy. Her ‘beauty’ continues to increase until the point of her death.
Would these kinds of features–that generally are called beautiful–continue to be attractive, when they signal impending death? Would people who just happen to be very beautiful without the disease be shunned? How long would it take before our brains evolved to find ‘beauty’ repulsive? If this disease was sexually transmitted, it might happen very quickly…
At the start of it, though, perhaps people would intentionally catch the disease, as a way to experience being breathtakingly, painfully beautiful before they die.
Jonas David 