The Mythic Dream

by Dominik Parisien

  wOOOOW LMAOOOO RIP

  uh I think this is porn. isn’t that against twitch rules?

  hes gonna get fired for this

  “Turn that off!”

  Diana backs away, grabbing her shirt off the floor and yanking it back over her head. “You can deny whatever you want. But I can guarantee that what you said, and what everyone else here saw and heard, will be all over Reddit by the time you make it out the door.”

  “I said, turn it off!” Tae thrashes on the bed, lunging for her, but he can’t get his hands free.

  reporting reporting reporting

  it was all true??? what a creep omfg

  lmao what are we watching

  guys got some weird habits lol

  how do I get @RealMoonDi to sit on me too

  “Diana, you fucking bitch—”

  “It’s funny. I didn’t know you knew my name,” Diana says. She picks up her keys and wallet from their spots on her desk. “You never asked for it. I didn’t think it mattered to you.”

  He calls her many things after that, none of which are her name. Ignoring him, Diana checks the comments in the livestream chat and smiles. Her followers are going wild.

  jfc this asshole

  gave 500 bits! thanksf or the exclusive content

  seriously they’d better fire him after this

  So is this an official collaboration stream or what

  In the upper right corner of the screen is a small image of what her webcam captures. This close, Diana takes up most of the picture. Her dark hair falls around her face, and her eyes are bright and calm. Tae is a small smudge in the background.

  “I’m going to leave the stream live so that if anything happens to me, you’ll know,” she says to the camera. “Thanks for watching, guys. Now you know the truth.”

  Tae is still screaming at her when she pockets her stuff and heads for the door. As she dials 911, she takes one last look at him, naked with his arms pulled up over his head, the knotted ribbon holding him fast and biting into his flesh. The antlers on his pale skin stand out in hard black lines.

  “You wanted it, you fucking liar,” he snarls.

  Diana steps out into the cold night air and closes the door behind her.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  * * *

  I’ve always been fascinated by the myth of Artemis and Actaeon. It’s not a long or particularly complicated myth: a hunter named Actaeon encounters the goddess Artemis bathing in the woods, and when she spots him, she turns him into a stag and his own dogs rip him to pieces. But it’s so stark, brutal, and vivid. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, you’re dog food. There’s something beautiful about that kind of efficiency.

  What interests me the most about this myth, aside from the visceral image of dog carnage, are the questions of voyeurism and consent. Artemis and Actaeon is about reaction to exposure. It’s about trespass, and how to deal with a personal violation. My mind immediately made the connection to Gamergate, revenge porn, and doxxing.

  At a certain point, I realized that this story didn’t need a speculative element to highlight what I wanted to say. The reality of the situation was brutal enough on its own. I’ve been on the receiving end of targeted harassment before, and sadly, I know more women active online who’ve been harassed than those who haven’t. I wanted to commit to the emotional brutality of that situation without shying away.

  But this retelling of Artemis and Actaeon isn’t about victimhood: it’s about survival and regaining your agency. As Diana struggles with the aftermath of Tae leaking her photos, she finds support from a group of women gamers, and she decides that she won’t let Tae’s repeated disregard for her consent, Temmie’s well-intentioned concern, or her own fear rob her of her career as a streamer. By the end, Diana comes into her own power and confidence, and she uses it to expose Tae so that his own followers eviscerate him.

  Artemis and Actaeon isn’t pretty. But to me, it’s about staring into the eye of the camera and saying to those who would try to shame, humiliate, or tear you down, “Fuck you. You’ve already lost.”

  * * *

  ALYSSA WONG

  CLOSE ENOUGH FOR JAZZ

  BY

  * * *

  JOHN CHU

  BEEP. CLICK. SILENCE. SWOOSH. THE door into Emily’s lab flung open. Booming footsteps rattled the raised tile floor. The few seconds of silence between the click and the swoosh officially made this the most warning she’d ever gotten that Hock or their angel investor would visit. From the way the footfalls thudded, it had to be Hock. Emily, still crouched underneath her workbench, continued sorting through and reconnecting cables. Until she was done maintaining the hardware, the hardware was not going to maintain his body.

  “Emily.” Hock’s whisper reverberated through the lab. “You here?”

  The rack enclosures and file cabinets in the lab rang in harmony with his voice. It’d taken her months to figure out how to rework his larynx, not to mention the resonance chambers in his head and chest. The result was the sort of deep, resonant voice that made license agreements sound like profound statements of truth and beauty. The vocal work wouldn’t be a complete waste, she’d rationalized at the time. The change lasted, and lots of people who weren’t gym bro wannabes might want to alter their voice, too.

  “In a minute.” She unworked a tangle to trace a cable from one end to another. “You could have warned me.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” The room was uncomfortably silent for a minute. “We’re in a hurry. I pitch Jazz for Series B funding in an hour. My pitches are more effective when I’m in my peak shape.”

  “In a minute.” When Emily finished the maintenance work, she poked her head out from beneath her workbench. “That’s not your peak shape?”

  His T-shirt and jeans cost in the low four figures. They fitted him as perfectly as anything that expensive should have. The fabric caressed him, highlighting every bulge of every muscle of his action-hero body. He deployed all of that might at Emily.

  “No.” The word was barely audible, but slow and precise, it struck Emily as hard as a slap across the face. “You know what I’m supposed to look like.”

  “Sure.” Her heart pounding, she latched onto the workbench and swung herself into her chair in front of her computer. “The apples are in the bin.”

  He peered into a small plastic bucket sitting on the file cabinet next to the door. The glow cast shadows across his face. His foot tapped against a loose tile. A grimace twisted his face.

  “There are only two apples in here.”

  “You only need one . . . right?”

  “Well . . .” His grimace untwisted into a sly smile. “It depends how many Series B investors I get.”

  When Emily had finally worked out some demonstrable transformations, Hock had not only insisted on trying them out on himself but couldn’t help offering their angel investor a jacked-up body, too. That the apples weren’t approved yet for animal testing, much less human use, was beside the point. The angel, of course, had already committed money and signed a nondisclosure agreement long before Hock had even implied to him that Jazz had apples at all, much less any mature ones ready to demonstrate.

  As it turned out, the angel was a hardcore marathoner. Rather than more muscle, he had wanted something simple and permanent: longer legs and a shorter torso. Thankfully, he hadn’t asked for anything since. Ethical issues aside, it was already hard enough to keep apples around for research.

  “A new batch is ready.” She pointed at a vat sitting on a table against the back wall. “I just need to take them out.”

  The apple from the bin seemed tiny in his grasp. Its glow pierced his hand, and shards of sunshine leaked through the cracks between his fingers. As he ate the apple, core and all, its glow spread through his body. His bones were long incandescent bulbs saturating his flesh with light that his shirt and jeans barely muffled. It hurt to look at him.

  Emily pushed the headset on the table toward Hock and pulled the keyboard to her. She
stifled a sigh as she tapped out the commands that would tune Hock’s body back up to his standards. This was not how she wanted her work to go. Their funding should have gone into researching how to repair damage, reversing degenerative diseases, designing cheaper, more convenient alternatives to gender confirmation surgery. Instead of mapping out how to transform and repurpose organs, she’d spent her time designing ways to turn tech bros into the sort of guys who star in superhero movies.

  Hock stood next to Emily’s workbench. The headset, a chain of mechanical spiders, ringed his head. Their segmented legs splayed out and attached themselves to his scalp.

  The headset injected the thoughts into the wearer’s brain that caused their body to transform. Each spider leg flashed as Hock’s brain dreamed those thoughts. Lights danced over his head, evolving from one intricate pattern to another. Mostly, this was to give any investor who’d already committed money and sworn to secrecy something cool to look at, just in case a glowing man growing visibly leaner and more muscular wasn’t enough. By now, though, Emily could read the patterns and see the thoughts that transformed him.

  Since Hock’s first transformation, the physical changes always took Emily by surprise. He’d always been tall, and like his height, the broadened shoulders and slimmed hips from the first transformation were permanent. Muscle, however, came and went and came and went and came and went. Hock would stomp in whenever he was feeling insecure about his beefiness, even though he still looked like a man who’d pounded back one too many protein shakes. Then his face grew even harder, and his upper torso pushed out even farther against his T-shirt and jeans while lights danced around his head. He hadn’t been in his peak shape, after all. In her defense, the added muscle was unmistakable but subtle. He wanted to be muscular enough that he “bagged the ladies,” not so muscular that he turned them off.

  The glow faded. Hock stood. The mechanical spiders detached their legs from his scalp. As usual, he tossed the headset onto the workbench. It tumbled into a pile of papers.

  “Yeah.” Hock pulled off his T-shirt and flexed his pecs and biceps. “That’s more like it.”

  With unearthly restraint, Emily kept her eyes from rolling. The thud of Hock’s hands slapping his arms, chest, and thighs was wet cement splatting against the ground. He turned to face the mirror set on the lab door.

  “Hm. I’d never noticed before.” He flared his lats again and again, like a flailing turkey whose chest was too heavy for it to take flight. “I mean, I’m buff and all, but I’m not . . . taut the way a guy who’s been lifting for years is. The muscle should pop even harder off my frame.”

  “You could just go lift. Do you want me to show you what to do? Honestly, the straightforward way to look like the guy who spends too much time at the gym is to be the guy who spends too much time at the gym.”

  Hock’s glare and frown in the mirror was a smile on his face by the time he turned around. He slipped on his T-shirt.

  “Why would I waste my time doing that? I should just have the body I deserve. Besides, there isn’t enough exercise in the world to keep anyone in this shape.” He tucked in his T-shirt, then pointed a thick index finger at her. “Muscles that practically burst out of my skin. That’s your top priority now.”

  “What?” She forced the word out.

  Sketches too clinical to be pornographic littered her workbench. Papers on physiology and the development of body organs poked out of file cabinets and squatted in messy piles on the ground. Not that restoring atrophied muscles couldn’t also be useful for, say, someone rehabilitating from an injury. Muscles atrophying from disuse was inevitable. They’d agreed, however, to branch out from anything temporary and purely cosmetic.

  “Or you could figure out how to make yourself hot. Then maybe investors might pay attention to you.” He smiled, shrugged, then showed her his palms again, as if his insult were a joke. “It’s up to you. If you want me to drum up investors for Jazz and get funding for the research to make the apples do what you want, make my muscles bulge like mountains even when I’m not flexing.”

  Hock flexed his biceps and his pecs a few more times for good measure. His T-shirt writhed its way out of his jeans, and he had to tuck it back in again as he left the lab. She might have enjoyed the chagrin on his face as he turned to leave a little too much.

  Apples taunted her from opposite sides of the room. It wasn’t as if she’d never considered tasting one. She even had the thoughts for how she wanted to look all mapped out. Her body wouldn’t be “hot” by Hock’s standards or anyone else’s. It’d be thick and full like an Olympic weightlifter’s, chiseled out of rock and at least as solid. She’d tried in grad school, but she’d never managed to push her body there, much less stay there. With an apple, she’d certainly manage to get that body, and unlike Hock, she bet she could keep it.

  She took the bin over to the vat. One by one, she lifted out each apple. Slick liquid sparkled off the apples’ glinting transparent skin in sheets. She shook them dry, then placed them in the bin.

  Normally, this was when she’d set new seeds into the solution. Hock’s appetite made it difficult to keep mature apples on hand for her own work, especially when they took months to mature. Instead, she shoved the bin into her backpack along with the headset. Through the bin and several layers of fabric, the glow wasn’t that visible, not if you weren’t looking for it.

  No one would realize she was gone. It might be a month or even two before Hock felt the need to beef himself up again and deigned to show up at the lab. Everything else happened over email. She could be replaced with an acorn and no one would notice until Hock needed to eat another apple.

  In the meantime, she needed her own source of funding. Without money, there was no lab space, no equipment, no chance to design transformations that lasted, ones that had nothing to do with male power-trip fantasies. By the time Hock walked in the lab and discovered she wasn’t there, she’d have an angel investor who’d fund her work, she hoped.

  * * *

  Mechanical spiders skittered across Emily’s scalp. Servos hummed as spider legs stabbed through her hair. They pricked her, tiny instants of pain scattering around her head. Once she had funding, she’d scrap this headset and hire someone to design something less flashy and more comfortable. For now, she lay on her sofa and waited for the spiders to find the right places to attach to her.

  Once they had all settled down, she pointed her cell phone at her scalp and started recording. The headset filled the cell phone’s display. The sequence of lights blinking had to be perfect before she’d even consider eating an apple. Emily made herself become the proverbial twig in the river or leaf on the wind and let thoughts flow through her. Points of light danced in ever-shifting, complex patterns around Emily’s head. Without the sheer amount of computational machinery she had at the lab, the headset had to be driven by her laptop instead. Its fan whined under the stress.

  The coffee table shimmered as it reflected the apples’ glow. By now, ignoring the shimmer had become second nature. She was still hunched over reviewing the video on her cell phone when Shereen came home from university. As usual, Shereen’s gaze swept across the coffee table. It paused at the headset and the bin of apples before it finally landed on Emily.

  “You still don’t look any different to me.” Shereen unslung her laptop bag.

  Emily’s wife had been simultaneously chill and wary about all of this. It wasn’t every day that the love of your life burst through the door with a bin of glowing apples and announced that she needed to lie low and disguise herself. Emily had sworn Shereen to secrecy about the apples even before Emily had taken off her shoes. Until then, she hadn’t even hinted at her work to Shereen beyond the vision that Hock had pitched. That night, she was forced to explain what had happened in the lab with Hock. By the time she’d finally set the apples down, her confession had probably made Shereen an accessory to her crime.

  Shereen, for her part, hadn’t so much as blinked. She’d merely pointed
out that as a professor of religious studies, she was now obliged to ask whether the apples kept the eater young and whether Hock was now built like a giant or a Norse god. Emily had rolled her eyes.

  It did seem to be every day since that Shereen would remind Emily that she didn’t need to look like anyone besides herself. Truth be told, Emily wasn’t sure she needed to disguise herself as much as she needed to try the merchandise. Just once, she told herself, to show Hock that if she could maintain her muscular transformations, he could maintain his.

  “Actually, I’m finally prepared to eat an apple.” Emily pulled the bin to her. “You want to watch?”

  Shereen put her hands on her waist. Her brow furrowed with concern.

  Emily spread herself across the sofa. Shereen slid the glowing bin and the headset out of the way and sat across from her on the coffee table.

  The apple was firm in Emily’s grasp. Rays of light sneaked out between her fingers. Her body seemed to thrum and she hadn’t even taken a bite yet. She wanted to do this, she realized. Not only that, but she looked forward to how her body would change.

  Emily bit into the apple with a crunch. Each bite evaporated in her mouth, leaving only a gently sweet taste on her tongue. She didn’t need to swallow. The apple’s perfume was both subtly spicy and the only thing she could smell. Hock had blazed with the color of blood piercing through pale skin, every capillary distinct and pulsing to the beat of his heart. Emily exuded a warmer, subtler radiance. She was a being of living bronze rather than a shocking chart of bone and blood vessels.

  The effect left Shereen speechless. Awe warred with concern on her face. Her jaw hung even as her brow furrowed.

  Heat spread from Emily’s head down through her body to the tips of her fingers and toes. She sunk into the sofa. Her body felt malleable, molten, a wire frame larded with clay that an artisan could mold and sculpt. It vibrated with the possibilities of how she could present.