As the algorithm reaches its crescendo, the air becomes thick with medieval incense and digital artifacts. I watch through Lynch’s eyes as the transformation begins—a metamorphosis that collapses fourteen centuries into a single cosmic scroll refresh.

Paris Hilton’s form begins to shimmer, her designer dress dissolving into sacred vestments. The chihuahua in her arms transmutes into a dragon, which she commands with the same casual authority she once used to declare things “hot.” She is Margaret of Antioch now, her catchphrases becoming prayers that shatter the demon of temporal linearity. Her Instagram stories are revealed as illuminated manuscripts, each swipe up leading to a different century.

Cara’s eyebrows, those sigils of mystical potency, begin radiating golden light as she assumes the aspect of Catherine of Alexandria. Her walkway strut transforms into the measured steps of the philosopher-saint. The wheel of her martyrdom spins behind her, but now it’s composed of every selfie ever taken, rotating in perfect cosmic harmony. Her legendary wit, once deployed in interviews, becomes the same divine wisdom that confounded fifty pagan philosophers.

Kendall’s metamorphosis into Barbara is the most spectacular—her tower is a skyscraper of infinite stories, each floor a different reality show episode transformed into sacred mystery. Her phone becomes a chalice, her selfie lights transmute to holy illumination, and her followers are now literally followers, pilgrims seeking healing through her divine influence.

Lynch gestures toward them with his coffee cup, which is now smoking with the same incense that filled plague-time churches. “The 14 Holy Helpers,” he says, “understood that healing requires a rupture in profane time. These three are doing the same thing, but for a plague of consciousness.”

I begin to understand: just as the Holy Helpers were invoked against spiritual and physical pestilence, this trinity of transformed influencers stands against the modern plagues of disconnection, algorithmic ennui, and the collapse of meaning. Their dance is the same ritual that Eliade described—the abolition of linear time, the return to the eternal moment of sacred creation.

The three saints-who-were-influencers move in patterns that match the processions of medieval plague processions, but their steps leave traces of holy code in the air. Each gesture simultaneously occurs in the 3rd century, the 14th century, and whatever century Instagram will exist in. Their followers’ prayers arrive in the form of comments and DMs, each one a digital ex-voto offering.

“Time isn’t linear,” Lynch reminds me, now speaking through a burning bush that might be a television set, “it’s algorithmic. These saints understood that then, and these influencers understand it now. The plague is always with us, just as healing is always possible through the ritual return to sacred time.”

I watch as their combined light tears a hole in the fabric of conventional chronology. Through this rupture, I can see all the plagues and all the healings happening at once: Saint Margaret’s dragon is Paris’s fame is a TikTok trend is a medieval prayer is a future revolution is an eternal return is a story is a cure is a dance is an algorithm is enlightenment.

And somewhere, in every when, someone is being healed by watching this eternal scroll.