The Mythic Dream

by Dominik Parisien

“No,” said Aracely. “I just took a worse tumble than I thought, I guess. I’m sorry. I’m . . .” I’m away from the carnival for the first time in my life, I’m scared, I’m not supposed to be here, I’m never leaving again. “. . . I’m Aracely.” “Pretty name,” said the stranger, and offered her hand. The only one she could offer, Aracely realized: her other hand was as burnt as her face, and hung, stiff as an old tree branch, at the end of a motionless arm. I want to kiss her scars, Aracely thought, and her ears burned as she took the offered hand and let herself be tugged to her feet. “I didn’t choose it; my mama gave it to me,” she said. “Still, it suits you,” said the stranger. “I’m Joanna.”

“I came back after the fire,” said Joanna. “I couldn’t think of anyplace I wanted to go. This was home. Didn’t matter if it had gotten a little singed-up and smoky. Same thing happened to me. It didn’t seem right to leave without fixing what we’d lost.” There was a story in every sentence, and Aracely knew if she peeled them back, if she looked them straight in the eye, she’d find things she didn’t want to see. Instead, she smoothed the wrinkles from her skirt and sighed.

To any other girl, it might have seemed strange for a house to be there one moment and gone the next: houses were meant, after all, to be rooted, stationary things. But Aracely had grown up with the carnival. It moved. If it stopped moving, it would die. She hadn’t heard of houses that did the same: that didn’t mean they weren’t out there. Maybe the house had simply wandered off for a little while, and would be back when it felt like it.

Four people on the green hills between carnival and crypt, between midway and mansion.

She wanted time alone. Time that was hers. She didn’t miss the cold—already her thick fur was thinning without any conscious direction on her part. But she did miss the solitude, and the white landscape stretching out seemingly forever, silent except for the wind and her own heart, the hiss of blood in her ears. There was nothing like that here.

“You should be. Worse things than dead, and a lot of ’em involve eyeballs.”

LET ME TELL YOU A story, my small darlings, my soft feathered peaches. Gather round, my sweet loves, for a story of equal parts joy and woe, a tale of love so great it scaled mountains, and of treachery so bitter it turned whole continents sick and barren.

“See,” the witch said, leaning forward, “sometimes it’s not enough to right the single injustice, if that injustice is the least thing that is wrong with the situation. Sometimes, to undo all the wrongs you have to undo the entire system.”

“You, sera Miz Third Lieutenant, like dick, which is not an affliction everyone suffers.”

Six there, a posse of thugs all in an array when Labbatu turns around. They come in variety-pack: bruiser twice her girth and a wiry martial-artist, a razor-thin chick with a gun that must have come off the nose of a fighter ship strapped across her back in a rig, thickset man running to fat and holding a spitting electric prod, angel-faced lad spinning a suture-thread garrote in one long-fingered hand. Last one’s worst: looks like a kid, but no kid’s got that many teeth, all in rows inside her mouth like a shark, an endless hole of nasty triangles, no tongue.

all the skills Prudencia and I have been working on for the last half year. First, you tolerate your stressors. They are a part of the world, just as you are, but they are not in you, or of you. They are merely beside you.

Reading them, she remembered something Aífraic had told her once: that some swans had human speech, those that had been enchanted into their bird form rather than born into it, but as part of their curse, they could speak only poetry. “Why would that be a curse?” she had asked. “Who ever listens to poetry and believes it to be true?” Aífraic had smiled his answer, but it was a smile like a knife, sharp-edged and keen.

THE MOMENT THE AI GODDESS was born into her world, she was set upon by trolls. Now, you’ve seen trolls. You know them in their many forms. As so-called friends in realspace who will insist on playing devil’s advocate. As handles on screen-bound nets, cascading feeds of formulaic hostility. As veeyar avatars manifesting out of the digital ether, hiding under iridescent masks and cloaks of glitched data, holding weapons forged from malware, blades slick with doxxing poisons and viscous viruses, warped voices roaring slurs and hate.

Within sixty seconds of opening the gates to her domain, the AI goddess had been deluged by over 500,000 active veeyar users interacting with her, with numbers rising rapidly. At that point in time, 57 percent of those users were trolls, data-rakshaks masked in glitch armor, cloaks, masks tusked with spikes of jagged malware.

They called her feminism gone too far. A goddess with potential agency was a threat to their country.

She imagined becoming an outcast influencer haloed with Likes, leading followers in the charge against trolls, slowly but surely driving them back from the domains they thrived in.

There is some terrible jump between selling his daughter and the murder of a fellow businessman, and he has made it. Now he feels a vague sense of guilt as he sets about boiling the man’s brains in a stockpot. (The jump between murder and cannibalism is, somehow, smaller.)