I’m sure you’ve seen her on television. Red hair, a smile trapped on her frozen, Botoxed face that never meets her steely gray eyes. Minerva. You’ll find her in every culture war, leaning forward during heated press conferences, saying, “He just couldn’t have. He’s such a kind man…” Those stupid, viral tours of her billion-dollar Mt. Olympus mansion, sliding open doors to walk-in closets larger than our cramped apartments, a hundred suits arranged in rainbow order; “Every girl’s need.”
I used to watch those videos for a laugh with friends until I realized they just made me mad.
She’s the kind of celebrity I once struggled to take seriously. Everybody jokes about her rambling social media rants and her appearances standing shoulder-to-shoulder with famous men who should be behind bars. She’s watching from behind your screens. She’ll smite you for seditious search history. It’s all a big joke until my uncle gets too deep in his cups at Thanksgiving dinner. Or when the football boys at my school huddle around a phone blaring the latest updates from the Medusa case, and they aren’t laughing. They glance up from the screen and meet my eyes, and I shiver, then feel ashamed of my fear. Still, I walk home with my keys clenched tight between my knuckles, thinking about how later today, Minerva will be returning to her mansion in the backseat of a limousine.
In the same way some pop stars take on a god-like status when invoked in household conversation, Minerva’s presence hung over my house from a young age. She launched Aegis two years before my birth, and I can’t remember a time when she didn’t seem to control everything. In middle school, well-meaning but distant aunts and uncles who knew little about me but my aptitude for coding would gift me posters that soon turned formulaic: her headshot (real or illustrated), an inspirational quote, a border of snakes or olive branches. At first, I didn’t understand why my mother, who was raised to waste nothing, insisted I throw them all away. No one else seemed to understand, either: I was a girl. Minerva was a girl. I liked coding. She had created the entire internet. Surely, they asked my father, again and again, surely Minerva must have been her inspiration? Without Minerva, would she have even started coding in the first place? Having such a famous female entrepreneur to look up to must make her feel so seen, mustn’t it?
My mother might have known what to say, but by my teenage years, she was gone. All my father could do was shake his head in baffled bemusement.
On my phone, interviewers ask Minerva how it feels to be such a prominent female CEO. Who were the women who inspired her as a child? They rattle off names as her smile dims. “I don’t owe my place to any of the women before me,” she says. “I sprang fully formed from the mind of my father.”
I believe her. She is the type of woman who could only be the product of a man.
Though Minerva was always in my life, the increasingly eccentric genius to whom I am indebted for all my talents, I didn’t think of her much until the Medusa case. These days, it’s one of those taboo topics that earns a chorus of “Gods, not again” at the briefest mention. “Yes, it is a sad situation all around. But haven’t we heard about it enough? It’s depressing.” It’s easy now to forget what a huge deal it was those first few months. Big enough to grab all the theater kids and the cheerleaders and the football bros who had never watched the news or cared about big tech and get them to pay attention.
Yet even as the topic dragged on and public interest waned, I remained transfixed. Maybe it was because she was from my hometown, not exactly the breeding ground for white-collar Mt. Olympus employees, but I felt an inexplicable affinity toward Medusa. Though she was several decades my elder, I was certain that if we had ever met, we would have been friends. I was being pulled down a rabbit hole, but I couldn’t help myself. The deeper I got, the angrier I became.
To understand my outrage, you must know the facts of the case. The real facts, with none of the censorship and conspiracies Aegis spawns. It goes like this:
Medusa was a secretary at Aegis’ headquarters. One day, Neptune, another Mt. Olympus exec, went into her office and locked the door. She spoke up about what happened next, started saying that she would maybe press charges. Just like that, she received a two-week notice.
That was just the start. See, she decided to sue not just Neptune, but Aegis, as well. And Minerva flipped out. She went on every available news channel saying that the whole story was a myth. The assault couldn’t have possibly happened. Her? With her snakey green hair? All those serpent tattoos and strange piercings? What would an upstanding man like Neptune want with a monster like her?
No company wanted to face the wrath of Minerva’s followers, and soon Medusa became unhirable. She began to cave to the angry trolls and mailboxes full of death threats and piling bills. Her interviews became less frequent, her behavior erratic. Interviewers wanted tears, not outbursts or sullen silence. Eventually, she started skipping court dates and living on the streets.
I imagined I might see her on my way home from school. I’d glance up to find her gazing at me from across the street and meet her eyes until I softened her stony glare.
“Soon, I’ll be famous,” I would say. “I’ll be even bigger than Minerva, and I’ll hire you right away. You’ll be safe.”
Of course, it had been a long time since Medusa lived in my town. She was off somewhere in Mt. Olympus, and I was here, and I walked home scared and alone and unable to provide safety to anyone.
Then one day, a football star with a big-name Mt. Olympus daddy got drunk with his friends and decided to have some fun. The way he tells it, it was all an accident. He would have stopped in time if only she hadn’t completely lost her head. Speeding backward down the street at one in the morning—why? He can offer no explanation. Gods alone know why drunk teenage boys do the things they do. He glimpsed her in the rearview mirror only an instant before impact. She must have been drunk, or high, or demented, or she would have stepped out of the way. Never mind the hundreds of hours of newsreels and videos on his phone of Minerva’s tirades, nor his enthusiastic comments: fuck that bitch!!!, #truthforneptune. Never mind the two women watching from across the street, also ragged and homeless, who say the vehicle passed Medusa and then reversed back towards where she lay, the boys whooping and hollering. Never mind that until the moment the car made impact with the street corner, she was sleeping.
Oh gods, she was sleeping.
When I learned this, I was seething. I couldn’t comprehend why no one was as furious as I was until I looked at my father’s search results, and at my friends’, and I saw that they weren’t seeing the same things I was seeing. And I noticed how the articles I read and the videos I watched—the ones about Medusa, or about Minerva; the ones that used words like “witch hunt” and “brainwasher” and “billionaire scum”—were getting shut down, or else relegated increasingly farther down the pages of search results. And that made me wonder what else I was missing. Not just about Medusa. About everything.
I created a browser where people could search for whatever they wanted. Here, there was no censorship nor sleight of hand to magic results out of reach. It was just me and my computer, no endless budget or infinite team of workers to ensure it all ran perfectly, but none of those things mattered when it offered the truth. I gave it my own name—Arachne—because it was my solo effort, and yes, because of hubris; I wanted Minerva to know who I was and what I had done.
Immediately, the engine blew up. There were forums with laborers complaining about their wages, activists using terms I’d never heard of to advocate for social stances I’d never known to dream of, people from neighborhoods similar to my own who had long watched their communities crumble while their rich neighbors prospered, Mt. Olympus workers who knew more about tech censorship than anyone and had simply been waiting for somewhere to go. Mostly, there were women. My anger, in which I had always felt so alone, could not compare to the wrath these women had been withholding, and now it all came spewing forth. Neptune. Phoebus. Jove. All I had done was write the code; it was these women who vivified it with the tapestry of their voices. All the tech gods who used their money and power to commandeer the press, the courthouses, and the assembly chambers into forcing the narrative of their own perfection—now they were subject to our judgment, their crimes laid bare. Together, the stories wove a clear verdict: guilty on every count.
As quickly as it began, it was over.
I should have known better than to comment on that old bitch’s post, claiming my superiority over the brilliant weavestress herself. I have no excuse, except that I was tired. Tired like Medusa was tired until she couldn’t take the trolls and the hatred and crumbled to smoldering pieces. Tired, perhaps, like Minerva, because some nameless exhaustion must be driving her deeper and deeper into that pit of vitriolic mania. When you get as worn down and tired by the world as us, the only way to continue is to shovel on more rage. If you unclasp your armor and allow yourself to feel, you’ll be petrified by permanent despair. Instead, you rage, you lash out, you post angry replies and strike below the belt, and don’t pause to consider the repercussions. You do anything, just to keep going. Because you know that if you stop, you’ll wind up passed out on a filthy street corner while a shiny white Tesla bearing a vanity plate and a pantheon of drunk teenage boys hurtles straight toward your sleeping head.
Minerva and her disciples screenshotted every one of my worst moments and spread them as far as they could. The news outlets and politicians at her beck and call screamed Fear-mongering! and Sedition! until it was declared that my program was unlawful and must be razed. I watched my masterpiece unravel before my eyes. Even then, she did not stop. She sent her angry followers after my blood, hundreds of blows raining upon my inboxes and across all of Aegis until I could not bear it. I deleted my social media and was ready to disappear from the internet altogether, and when she saw this it terrified her. It was safer to make me into one of her monsters than to let me be a martyr. She told her followers, “You may not see her on the web, but she is tiny and everywhere, watching everything you do. Fear her. If you notice her presence, destroy her.” And I thought, fine. Medusa will fill the role of the demented freak. Let Arachne be the boogeywoman, the spider, the spy. Deprived of my own domain, let me spin dark webs in the shadows of her shiny creation.
I have accepted the role that she cast me in, but I have not surrendered my rage. And I do not fight alone. Join us if you have seen the truth. Join us if you are tired of going hungry while CEOs gorge themselves on neverending feasts, tired of being played as pawns in political fearmongering, tired of having your voice silenced because a man in a suit told a louder story. We are innumerable and relentless. We speak of all they attempt to silence. We will not rest until we have brought Mt. Olympus to its knees.
We are everywhere.
Glossary (According to Ovid):
Arachne: A mortal who challenged the goddess Minerva to a weaving contest. When Arachne was revealed as the victor, Minerva flew into a rage and began to beat her with a shuttle, causing Arachne to hang herself from shame. Out of pity and guilt, Minerva prevented this suicide by transforming Arachne into a spider.
Medusa: A Gorgon who was raped by Neptune in Minerva’s temple. As punishment, Minerva transformed Medusa from a beautiful maiden to a monster. Later, the demigod Perseus beheaded Medusa with Minerva’s aid.
Minerva: The goddess of wisdom, justice, weaving, and commerce, amongst other domains. She is one of the most important gods in the Roman pantheon.
Neptune: The Roman god of the sea and Medusa’s rapist.
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