I had a job once working on a database. I probably shouldn’t say too much about it because it was a third-party, confidential thing for a big company and involved a lot of proprietary information, but it was stuff that I didn’t really understand anyway. I just moved it around.

We called it the product tree. The stem was “these are our products”, and then it branched off into this kind of product and that kind of product and what did they do and what were they made for etc. etc.

But the owners of the information had changed their minds about what they wanted. I can’t remember what it was, something about whether they wanted to group products by what they were, what they did, or how they were marketing it and who it was for. My job was to move the information from the one tree, the one where all the products had been, to the next one, which was already set up when I got there, it was just a matter of moving things from one tree to the other.

Now, I don’t know much about computers as far as software or anything. I learned a lot on the job about ways of thinking about moving things around within a database, but without knowing how to program the databases themselves, I learned just enough to be terribly frustrated any time I use any database where I can’t, for example, copy documents in such a way that changes are made to them in every place that they’re copied to. Now, maybe there is a way to program any database to do that, but I’ve never been able to figure it out.

I don’t know why—maybe just because of the way that my brain works—but I always had a tendency to try to turn everything into Fantasy. In this case, what I came up with was what if there was a central database of every object in existence. It’s essentially Plato’s Cave, but using a Tree instead, a universal product tree that has the specs for creating any kind of object, and then branches down into infinite fractals that get more and more specific, down to the information on every individual copy of specific genetic information.

What if you could go onto that product tree and make changes? I had probably been able to make changes to products. Granted, when I did it, I was doing it under orders and purely for marketing purposes—I didn’t know what I was doing. But what if someone who did know what they were doing was able to access the Universal Product Tree—The Tree of Life, if you will—and make changes that could actually affect the objects themselves?

What if that was how magic worked?

These are the things that I thought about as I wielded my keyboard and (to be honest) my mouse as twin axes, chopping down that old product tree in the client company’s back yard: that a whole world was being broken down into its constituent rules and processes, piece by piece, perhaps not even realizing that changes were being made, that there was less matter in their little universe, or at least fewer things that could be done with it, until each individual possibility sucked through the binding Void reawoke in a brave new world that wasn’t different, quite, but just maybe presented in a different way, to different people.

What are you doing? Seriously? Is this any way to write a story? Next thing you know, next thing you’re telling me, Pandora opens the box and out comes Zeus or Bacchus or Gods know what and straightens the whole thing out. Have you ever even read a story? Jeez, and you call yourself a writer.

Listen up, let me tell you how it really happened, right? You can trust me–I was there, remember? I know how it all went down, and there wasn’t any of this frou-frou, none of this namby-pamby stuff, none of this florid Shakespearean bullshit.

But it wasn’t like in the movies, either, where every little word they say is all straight to the point ‘cause they gotta get on with the story. You can’t skip stuff, it isn’t fair to me. You gotta take your time, dammit–this is my life!

Yeah, that’s better, take your time, show me everything, every little detail–I don’t care if it’s boring–you’re not writing for them, smarty-pants, this isn’t their story, this is my story, means you’re writing for me. So what you think about that?

That’s right, yeah, he didn’t hit me, I hit him, and then we made out. It was hot. That’s right. That’s how it happened. To the letter. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. You can trust me. I was there. And then there was bunt-cake, followed by an orgy and the fat kid wasn’t invited.

No, he didn’t leave me. We’re still together. No, seriously. How can you remember all this shit “better than I do”? I’m the one living it, right? I’m in charge of my own destiny? I’m the one writing the story?

What do you mean, cancer? No, but–

What do you mean, cancer? This is not how it’s supposed to go!

But it’s how it is, isn’t it? Because I’m not the one writing my own story. How can you know what it’s like? How can you know, if you’re all the way out there and I’m stuck down here in this awful, horrible, depressing story? You know what, fuck you! I don’t have to take this shit!

I’ll write my own damn stories.

They called her Rapunzel. Everyone did. It was the obvious thing to say to a girl with hair that reached literally down to her ankles, if not farther. Even though when most people make drawings of Rapunzel or even just picture her in their heads, she’s blonde, like blonder than blonde, right? Not Lauren Graves, though. Lauren Graves’s ankle-length hair was as dark as her name and as straight as the fall off a building.

“I wish I had hair like yours,” girls were always telling her. “But I can never get mine to grow that long.” As if she’d wanted this. As if it was her choice. “You’re so lucky,” they would say, “to be able to grow your hair like that.” As if the luck was on her side.

Her parents had always really liked her hair, too. When she was younger. Some of her earliest memories were of her mother brushing it out for her and whispering love in the night-time. But it wasn’t love that made her whisper anymore.

When she was four, her father had finally said something to the effect that maybe it was time after all to take it in for a trim, but by then it was too late. Lauren’s Rapunzel-hair cascaded wet down the back of the barber’s chair, but the second the clippers were out, every strand turned into a viper.

Bundles of straight, black hair lifted up of their own accord, twisted and coiled round each other into thin prehensile limbs like tentacle-arms, and they found the shears, twisted them out of the poor apprentice hairdresser’s hands and cracked across her face like a whip. Fortunately, the hair was wet and still too young and unskilled to be very effective, so the apprentice survived with only a small scar by her eyebrow, but Lauren and the Graves family still weren’t ever invited back to that shop.

When she was at school, the hair tended to behave itself. Like it knew what was good for it after all. At home, though, its reign of terror was unceasing. It controlled the remote, it picked out all Lauren’s clothes, carefully calculating what would make her most odd and least popular as a result. And any time she did try to talk about it, at school or anywhere with authority, the bottom hairs hidden under the surface would twist into each other and pull most painfully at the back of her scalp, that sharp persistent kind of pain that makes any resistance just not worth the effort.

Even her parents could talk to her. Not really. Not in any meaningful way. They couldn’t tell her how they really felt about certain things, certain practices, without her hair acting out. Sometimes it coiled up and tripped them, tied around their feet and flung them about the room. Sometimes it wrapped itself down into sharp points and hovered threateningly in front of their eyeballs, but the worst, which the hair reserved for when it was especially displeased with either Mr. or Mrs. Graves, was when it wrapped tightly around the neck of the little girl upon whose head it lived and squeezed.

“You don’t think it really would, do you?” Mrs. Graves asked her husband. “It wouldn’t kill her—it needs her, doesn’t it?”

“I would assume so,” said Mr. Graves. “But do we really want to risk it?”

One day at school, finally, things got very bad. For twelve years, she’d been afraid to talk about it, the hair had been dormant and nobody had known. Boys—ones who “liked her” according to her teachers—had even pulled on it—as had girls who didn’t. But pulling at her hair didn’t seem to hurt the hair, as it turned out—only her scalp.

Until one day, Tim Brandanowicz got bored and decided to see how it would react with a bunsen burner.

Was he jealous? Did he like her? Had she turned him down for something? We may never know and it’s questionable whether we should care. Little Timmy held the coil out with just enough slack that he thought Lauren wouldn’t feel it—but even if she had, wouldn’t she have been curious to see what he would do? What her hair would do? Whether it would come awake in public, as it never had before? Worst case scenario, the hair would go wild and at least she’d never have to hear again how lucky she was to be such a Rapunzel.

Sure enough, no one called her Rapunzel again after that day. She would hear whispers in the hall now, people muttering about Medusa, and she was actually relieved. She was a freak, after all, and people deserved to know that, to be warned.

It was still a surprise, though, to everyone in town, when her house burned down three weeks later. Both she and her parents survived (though her gerbil Crunchkin, sadly, didn’t), but somehow, all of the hair had been burned off her scalp. It had done so, inexplicably, in a way that kept the scalp itself pretty much intact. So once the burn wounds healed, there was nothing to stop Medusa’s hair from starting to grow again.

Nothing, that is, except for the lifetime supply of razors she had just invested in. At less than a quarter of an inch in length, she found it no longer had as much power over her.