Bonfires of Vanities

Bonfires of Vanities
By Digital Circe

(woman to pig transformation)

Story warnings: mild profanity


Not many things could bring Angelica Reeve and Maureen Helman together, but Hannah Montana was one of them.  The Disney-backed icon had captured the world’s attention, filling their children’s impressionable, consumer-driven minds with the most vapid tripe the mothers had ever seen.  

No one knew if it had begun innocently or not – a few willful girls just doing it to irritate their parents – but some girls had started a ‘church’ of Hannah Montana, and the idea had quickly caught fire across America, and eventually, through the English-speaking world.  Some geniuses used the online pseudo-universities to get ‘degrees’ as pastors of the new Church of Hannah Montana, a Society for Altruistic Living, and soon enough there was a creepily real cult composed of what seemed like most every teen and ‘tween girl in the Western world.  They threw themselves into it, this new congregation, worshiping their savior and example, Miley Cyrus.  Disney, of course, did nothing to stop it, as such things were good for the bottom line.  Some girls even ‘tithed’ to Hannah, sending the company money for nothing, other than the feeling that they should!

What was especially galling was that their flighty, hero-worshiping daughters were manifestly better people for copying the Hannah character’s positive traits.  They actually became excited about doing good, being selfless and generous.  Angelica couldn’t stand the idea that any positive quality came from anyone but Jesus.  Maureen couldn’t stand the idea that her daughter would willingly take on such a low goal, when she had sacrificed so much to give her a chance to be important or powerful.  After a few months of listening to ‘Hannah this’ and ‘Hannah that’, both women were at the breaking point.  

Angelica and Maureen were geneticists, working hard in a southern California lab to unlock sequences of genetic code.  They had spent years deciphering the strain of swine DNA, and were now working on the human code.  They had known at the outset how similar the strains would be – there was only a 10% difference between the very highest and very lowest varieties of life, and mammals differed only a tiny fraction of even that small amount!  What amazed them was how easily that remaining one or two percent could be manipulated and changed.  

Hog DNA was so close to human DNA that it had given them hope for ‘growing’ transplantable organs and blood, at the vastly accelerated rate of a pig’s developmental lifespan.  But the similarities in the genetic codes were making the researches give second thoughts about the origin of human life.  There were old African myths about humans being descended from swine, rather than apes, but these stories would never have held the interest of a pure scientist before.  Now, to a few, such as Maureen, it was an open question.  Angelica didn’t believe in evolution, but nonetheless found the mechanics of DNA to be endlessly fascinating, like a secret language of creation hidden away until the modern scientific age.

As both women experimented with translating code from pig to human, though, they began to discuss, first in jest and then in earnest, putting it to a more vengeful purpose.  They both had grown accustomed to thinking of Miley Cyrus as a pig, joking about performing their experiments on her, rather than a more ‘socially useful’ hog.  But the idea had dawned on them that their work could be used in reverse – that a human could be reduced to a pig if a few genomorphic structures were unlocked.  Almost unconsciously, they began pursuing those research paths.  Aside from work, the two women traveled in very different social circles; subscribed to very different beliefs.  But their new unity of purpose made them put aside their differences.  Within six months, they discovered that they had a way to rewrite DNA, and cause a body’s cells to radically alter into a new, pre-programmed form.  It had been a joke at the beginning, but now, here was a method.  The women looked at their creation, considering the weight of their desires, and whether they had the strength of resolve to turn those into plans.

They were heartened by talking to others.  It was easy to find other mothers who felt similarly, angry at Hannah’s disgustingly vapid popularity and cult, all marketed to their daughters in overdrive by the wealthy Disney Corporation.  They were careful who they let in on their secret, but parents were almost universally disgusted with the sensational pop princess co-opting their children’s lives.  Still, they needed help, and other mothers and fathers who were willing to offer their services were easy to find.  Slowly their desires took on the form of a strategy, then a more concrete plan.  More voices criticized the weak ideas, and helped them strengthen it.  Other eyes looked at their reagents, and helped them to re-engineer it into something easier to administer covertly.

Slowly, carefully, they added more members to their group.  Many needed to be talked into it, but it only took a little coaxing.  “Why does it have to be so extreme?  Can’t she just be humiliated, or scandalized, in a less permanent fashion?” a colleague asked, in agreement with the principles but staggered by the ethical implications.  Angelica and Maureen had heard these voices of indecision before, and had an answer to them.

“It’s got to be something that will destroy this consumer culture, too.  If Hannah Montana falls, Disney just has a few more asinine pop princesses waiting in the wings to fill her void - Demi Lovato, Selena Gomez, the list goes on.  We need to destroy her so spectacularly, that no fame-hungry starlet will ever want to follow in her footsteps again.  Turning her into a fat, squealing pig will make sure that no other fame whore dares to try to subvert our girls again.  She must fall, for the greater good.”  

As the conspiracy grew, so did Angelica’s and Maureen’s hopes.  Parents across the country hated the vapid little cult princess, and a shocking number of them wanted to see her not just fall, but suffer and be humiliated, too.  And it wasn’t just people in their plot.  One Sunday in church, Angelica listened gratefully to her pastor rail about the false idol Hannah Montana, and her perfidy and influence.  Angelica smiled, nodding, while her daughter Meghan sat beside her, arms crossed and rolling her eyes.  

That evening, while Angelica Reeve was feeling pretty good, Meghan revealed that she and Maureen’s daughter, Chrissy, had managed to acquire tickets for a large Hannah Montana concert, and were planning to go with a large group of friends.  Angelica was appalled.  She immediately refused, but Meghan seemed to be ready for that, and met her with a full week of civil disobedience.  Eventually, she complained to Maureen about her troubles, problems the other mother shared.

“Christine won’t shut up about that concert either!  I swear, she’s driving me to distraction with this hero worship!  We’ve got to get this plan into action, before that bitch ruins our daughters’ lives for good.”  Maureen wished her daughter would start calling herself by her full name – it just sounded so much more dignified and serious than the vapid ‘Chrissy’.

“I don’t like the idea of the two of them alone with who knows what little cultists!  I don’t like how they worship her, but I think our girls would have enough sense not to drink the Kool-Aid if they weren’t with a bunch of other small-minded sycophants!  But without us around to watch them?  Who knows what they’d be pressured to do!  For heaven’s sake, they’re both still in middle school!”

Maureen was silent for a moment, thinking.  When at last she spoke, it was with a kind of nervous energy.  “Maybe we should offer to let them go, if we accompany them.  No, don’t roll your eyes, just hear me out.  I don’t want to be there anymore than you, but we can make sure the girls don’t do anything stupid.  And, we can get the chance to look around, see if there’s a way to introduce our reagents to her on stage.  Think about it – if she started turning into a pig in front of all of her fans, wouldn’t that hurt her more?  And she’ll probably be as ‘out in the open’ as she’ll ever be at the concert!  Who knows, maybe we could even find a few new recruits there from other concerned parents, or even her handlers!”

Angelica’s eyes widened in thought, imagining the possibilities.  It made sense - if they accompanied their daughters, they could keep an eye on them, and maybe learn something about how to get access to Hannah Montana, as well.  After all, that had always been the weakest part of their plan.  The concert itself promised to be less pleasant than a root canal, but the opportunity to use it for reconnaissance was brilliant.  Plus, she’d finally get a little peace and quiet from Meghan for a while – possibly even gratitude, although that wasn’t likely.

The next two weeks did pass more peacefully, although the mothers had to listen to their daughters drone on at length about how much they were looking forward to the concert, what they’d wear, whether they’d get a chance to personally greet their ‘savior’.  It was nauseating.

At last the weekend came, and the two families loaded up Angelica’s SUV and set out for Los Angeles.  The girls were bouncing around with a disgusting display of extra energy, and the mothers did their best to mask their contempt for the whole outing.  Meghan and Chrissy sat in the back seat, their mouths running constantly about Hannah Montana and every conceivable bit of minutia about her.  It was the longest hour of Maureen’s and Angelica’s lives.

The auditorium was worse than the mothers had feared.  Girls holding candles, pictures of Miley Cyrus with flowers and gifts laid lovingly under them, crass Disney merchandising booths, and tens of thousands of excited, worshipful teen and ‘tween girls.  It was like a zoo, and their own daughters bounced along at their sides, eagerly pointing and shouting and wrapping themselves up in the excitement of the moment.  They were greeting other girls like fellow supplicants on a pilgrimage, and insisting on stopping at the booths to buy yet more Hannah Montana crap, as though their rooms at home weren’t already full of it.  It was a little like being in a very sarcastic version of hell.  They could tell from the expressions on other parents’ faces that they were not alone in thinking that.

Everything was too expensive, bright, and noisy.  When, after an hour, at last the two families took their seats, it felt like they had already been here for days.  As the concert began, the mothers were surprised by the reverent hush that fell over the crowd, as Miley Cyrus took the stage.  Too many girls were behaving like they were in a church, and it made Angelica, especially, wince.  As she began her set, there was cheering, but it took on more of the character of a praise chorus, and not the normal group of unorganized fans that had characterized every other concert she had attended, Christian or otherwise.  

Maureen had to admit the girl was a fairly good performer, although she suspected that Cyrus was lip-synching at least a part of her performance.  The music wasn’t terrible, but had the recycled, pre-manufactured quality of too many editors that made her cringe.  The content was mostly a robust, flighty girl-power type of drivel about making the most out of life and doing your best – just socially conscious enough that it couldn’t be outright condemned as brainwashing, but delivering nothing of substance, either.   Eventually, Cyrus moved into other songs, including covers of other, better artists.  Maureen cringed as the little cult princess butchered “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”.  She remembered listening to, and being inspired by, Cyndi Lauper’s rendition of the song back when Christine wasn’t even born.  In Lauper’s hands, it had been revolutionary, a statement on the roles women had, and had to make for themselves.  In Cyrus’s, it seemed more like an insipid tart encouraging her friends to party.

The set seemed to last forever, each song bringing sighs of worshipful adoration from Hannah Montana’s congregation.  Alternately, Angelica and Maureen got up to walk around, looking specifically at security and setup, where handlers and equipment were, and the general attitudes of the staff.  Many seemed, surprisingly, to be bored or indifferent, as though they too were embarrassed to be helping present this drivel to the world.  They struck up conversations with staff, discretely asking if ‘this is what you thought you’d be doing with your life’, flattering them into personal stories of ambition and eventual acceptance of a life producing someone else’s vision.  Some were more aggressively pro-Hannah or pro-Disney than others, but almost all were willing to talk about themselves to the curious mothers.  At last, their efforts paid off.

They had needed an insider to help them, and found one in the form of Joseph Ralton, a disaffected handler for the little pop princess.  He had grown weary of his over-inflated charge, and told Angelica that he had long enjoyed the fantasy of  Hannah being humiliated and ruined.  He knew it was self-destructive, that she was his bread and butter.  But he had enjoyed dreams in his youth of so much more than helping a huge corporation shape a fundamentally uninteresting young woman into the central figure of a world-spanning cult.  There was nothing original to her!  The songs were conceived in committee, written and rewritten until all life had been drained from them, all messages sanitized until they were just catchy beats and repetitive, feel-good lyrics.  He was involved in Miley’s ‘character’ – manufacturing the image of the pop princess as a warm-hearted, moral paragon who still knew how to have fun and relate to people, facing the same problems as young girls.  It nauseated him how fake it all was, how manufactured, when he longed to help a genuine artist create a real, raw message that spoke to the true human condition.  He wanted to work with someone who didn’t care about popularity or money, someone who had something to say that was worth saying, and hearing.  

After the concert, the mothers faced more long lines while their girls bought more Hannah Montana garbage (Angelica mused that she should reduce Meghan’s allowance, as she clearly had too much spending money), and then networked with fellow cultists, promising to email each other and visit their MySpace pages.  The trip home was better than the trip there simply because the girls were tired; but they still spent the whole trip talking about what an existential experience it was.  Maureen and Angelica kept their mouths closed, eager to talk to each other about what they had discovered, and thinking of their own concert-going experiences with performers of a higher caliber.  Maureen continued to brood over the damage Cyrus had done to Lauper’s vision; and Angelica remembered the time she had heard Twila Paris sing “Lamb of God” in person.

The scientists would continue their relationship with Ralton, grooming him to help them in their plot.  The depressed handler was eager for someone to listen to his problems, his thwarted ambitions.  When at last they were sure of him, he agreed wholeheartedly with the plan.  The idea of humiliating her sounded good to him.  With him on board, the plan began to move faster, as they worked out logistics rather than mere strategy.  

Their genetic destabilizer had been revolutionized by a colleague into aerosol form, doing away with the complex plans that injections would require.  The inhalant was coded to change human to swine DNA, but went inert after only a minute in the air, so it would have to be released close to the performer.  Depending on the dosage, the immediate changes should be noticeable, but slow down after the chemical went inert, leaving most of her devolution to be a drawn-out affair.  At last Ralton got access to the schematics of a gas jet on a smoke machine, and the women carefully tried to describe to him how to ready their chemical with it.  But he wasn’t a scientist, by any means, and at last the women decided that they had to go in person to ensure the project would be successful.  The idea suited them – as miserable as Hannah Montana concerts were, they both wanted to see the end of this one, and the expressions on their daughters’ faces as they realized that their idol was just a dirty, fat pig.

The girls, of course, were ecstatic.  Normally, they had to twist their moms’ arms about anything Hannah-related, and this concession to their faith was deeply meaningful to the girls.  They jabbered on about Hannah the whole week, each having a sleepover at the others’ house just to have more time to talk about their ‘savior’ and their mothers’ sudden change of heart.  It was perplexing to them, though, how strangely Angelica and Maureen had altered their position.  They were intelligent girls, raised by very gifted mothers who had put a great deal of emphasis on critical thinking.  They couldn’t help but be curious as to the ‘why’ of it, but the true nature of the plot was completely outside their frame of reference.  Still, on the ride over (this time, the concert was in San Francisco, and they took Maureen’s hybrid), they closely watched the knowing smiles passed between their parents, the out-of-character anticipation they both seemed to be showing.  The mothers didn’t notice the extra attention, so wrapped up in their own plans as they were.  Plus, the girls continued to prattle on, masking their growing unease.

Miley Cyrus didn’t notice anything wrong with Joseph Ralton on her last day of human life, even though he was sweating more than usual.  She was occupied with her own concerns, preparing herself to meet her ‘church’ as she performed that night to a packed auditorium.  She was being fitted into her costume, her tailors making many last minute adjustments to ensure that everything looked perfect, neither dowdy nor skanky, but appropriate and flattering to the central figure of a nascent religion.

She lived a virtuous life, mindful of her position as a role model.  Part of it was her own will, of course, but part of it was her handlers controlling her, telling her what to do and think.  They were all too aware of what had happened to Britney Spears and those like her, and didn’t want the same fate for Miley.  Miley had very little input into this image, and kind of went along with the motions like she was told.  Beside her, her father Billy Ray Cyrus was giving her a half-listened-to pep talk, reminding her of how to carry herself and what not to say.  A few mid-level Disney executives stood around as well, speaking into their cell phones and generally bustling about.

Miley was looking forward to going out and singing, ironically the only time that she got to be alone.  It was strange, being revered almost like God, but flattering too, and the young girl had been carried away with her own movement.  Occasionally, it seemed wrong, and almost blasphemous.  But her numerous Disney liaisons assured her it was nothing, and her family encouraged her to continue, so it must be all right.  Besides, there was so much good she could do as an icon that she couldn’t as a normal person.  Of course, her managers would tell her what sort of good she would do, and she was happy to let them make those decisions for her.  She didn’t want to mess up the empire so many people had tried to build around her, or cost her parents the large checks the Disney Corporation kept sending them for her performances, CDs, television show, and merchandise.  The uneducated girl let her dad invest and use it for her – she had no idea what charities to support, or how much to hold back, and was glad to let others attend to financial questions.  The sums were unreal to her, after all, and she had everything she needed.

At last, she walked out on stage, smiling brightly and waving to her fans, her blonde faux hair tousling around her shoulders.  She only wished that she had someone close to talk to, to confide in, that wasn’t built to view her as a commodity or a goddess.  At least out here, she would get to sing from her heart, and not worry about the administrative concerns of those around her.  She greeted her fans, reveling in their awed cheering, and started her first song.

Angelica barely got back to her seat in time for the second song.  Maureen had stayed with Chrissy and Meghan, while Angelica had gone back with Joseph and several other conspirators to install the canister of reagent to a fog machine that Cyrus would be performing near, and it had been a close call.  Both girls noticed their mothers looking unusually excited, watching Hannah with an eagerness that bordered on expectation.  It was slightly unnerving, but the girls didn’t want to let anything interrupt their time of worshipful devotion in their idol’s presence.  It was only the second time they were seeing her in the flesh, and the newness had not worn off, if it ever would.  They sang along, reverently, when asked to, and cheered when prompted.  They loved their heroine, and felt energized by her.

Hannah Montana continued her performance, beaming radiantly as she sang, a picture of too-perfect manufactured beauty.  Maureen and Angelica sat tensed in their seats, leaning forward, barely listening to the prefabricated and reprocessed schlock coming out of the performer’s mouth.  Soon, soon, soon…

Sure enough, a little past the halfway point of her concert, Cyrus danced in her careful choreography past the fog machine, and Ralton pushed the one button he had been entrusted to push.  Miley coughed as the cloud of gas enveloped her, not noticing anything wrong, and instinctively moved away from the seemingly malfunctioning piece of equipment.  She continued singing, not noticing a heat rising in her body, as the deadly reagent began infecting her, rewriting her very DNA into that of a common sow.

Now both mothers, and the dozens of other present members of their conspiracy, were looking closely at the doomed quasi-goddess, eager to see her first transformations.  “Mom, what’s wrong with you?” hissed Meghan, disturbed by the fiend-like attention her formerly apathetic mother was paying to Cyrus.  Angelica didn’t answer, lost in her own thoughts, and Meghan turned back towards Hannah when the girl made a small choking sound, almost like a snort, in the middle of a line.  Cyrus quickly recovered, although she felt a little dizzy, and redoubled her efforts to finish the song.  She didn’t notice the physical changes starting, as her nose turned up, flaring slightly as she breathed, and her ears began to point.

The transformation was slow, and it took the crowd a few minutes to definitively notice that Hannah’s pert nose had turned up almost ninety degrees, growing slightly.  Handlers off to the side franticly signaled to her to cut the set short, but Miley was unaware that she was suffering from anything more than mild vertigo, and waved them off.  She wanted to complete her song.  She soldiered on, ignoring a mild tickling feeling at the small of her back, and her sudden heightened awareness of the sounds and smells around her.  She noticed her congregation had largely gone silent, staring aghast at her.  Only then, did she begin to worry.  She tried to catch a glance at herself in one of the large television monitors, but she wasn’t angled well for them.  She licked her lips, wetting them, and felt her tongue run across two small points on her lower jaw.  It felt like her canine teeth had bent forward, and gotten longer.  Momentarily distracted, she squealed when she meant to hit a high note, and twirled around in shock to look at a monitor directly.  As she turned, she felt her new tail twitch around over her low-rise jeans, tickling her back.  She grabbed it instinctively, letting out another little squeal, and looked at the monitor in horror.

Her nose had turned up, flaring like a small snout.  Her ears had risen, as well, flopping out daintily from her hair.  Coupled with her small corkscrew tail, it was all too clear, even to her, what she was devolving into.  Hannah Montana was turning into a pig.  “Wha- what’s this?” she snorted, seeing her eyes darken on the huge screen, and handlers surged out to pull her off the stage, apologizing quickly to the shocked congregation.

As they pulled her away, Miley turned around, fear and confusion in her porcine eyes, and let out another mournful pig sound.  For a second after she was gone, there was dead silence in the auditorium.

Then, chaos broke loose.  Girls were screaming, crying, questioning, praying.  Pandemonium settled over the shaken followers of the god-girl who was turning into a pig.  Meghan and Chrissy looked at each other in horror, but couldn’t help noticing the looks of excitement and fulfillment painting their mothers’ faces.  Was their faith being tested?  Was Miley warring with the devil, inevitably to triumph at the end?  They didn’t know, but had a dark feeling where they might start their search for answers.

The ride home was much different than the ride there, with the shell-shocked girls sitting silently in the backseat, thinking, and the lively and animated adults in the front, discussing the expression on Hannah Montana’s face as she changed, how priceless it had been to see the false idol fall firsthand.  They couldn’t wait to get home and turn on the television, and see the moment replayed on the news.  They left the radio on the whole trip.

Sure enough, Miley had continued to change, although it was visibly slowing.  Her hands and feet had begun to clump up, starting their transition into hooves.  She had gained a little weight around her middle, although nothing compared to what she would soon experience.  Her ears had risen, sticking out a little higher off her head and forcing her wig off altogether.  Her snout had grown outward, enlarging, so that her mouth had begun to grow out as part of it.  A few new teeth were growing in at the back of her expanded jaw.  She was rushed to the best doctors available, unable to avoid paparazzi as they photographed the god-girl in her extremity.  

The next days were painful for the Church of Hannah Montana, as her young followers grappled with the enormity of what was happening, and the assault on their goddess and faith.  Each news report of Cyrus’ unchanged condition, and the doctors’ complete lack of framework for reversing the metamorphosis, brought them lower.  Meghan and Chrissy were among those demoralized, but they couldn’t help but remember their own mothers’ seeming forewarning.  Even the trip to the concert had been their idea!  Then too, Angelica’s strange absence at the beginning.  They were smart girls, and suspected that the brilliant scientists may have had a hand in it.  

Unfortunately for Maureen and Angelica, they had assumed their daughters too superficial to be stealthy, and had not taken enough precautions to shield their home computers and cell phones from the prying eyes of angered girls.  They had been deeply careful in the public sphere, but had left messages and emails on the others’ private accounts that their daughters, when pressed, penetrated only too easily.  Their moms had encouraged them to study computer skills, to prepare them to get good and fulfilling jobs.  Their passwords and PINs were readily guessed, and the pair started the laborious task of uncovering the staggering plot, which had become a nightmare reality.

Both girls were filled with shame, as they discovered what their mothers had done.  They felt the need to do something, but couldn’t bear to reveal to the church that their own blood had caused the problem.  It took them a week to uncover the whole plot, or at least enough of it to understand its breadth, its scope, the hatred behind it.  Smart as they were, neither were accomplished geneticists, and they could do nothing to alter or reverse the formula.  They couldn’t save their deity.

At last, the distraught girls decided that they had to reveal what they knew.  They couldn’t bring themselves to hurt their mothers, and redacted all personal information from emails, data files, and the like.  Then, they printed them out, and sent it all to ABC news, the network owned by the Disney Company.  That one, at least, could be guaranteed to take it seriously.  

The news spread like wildfire.  Hannah Montana had been targeted for destruction by a cabal of aggrieved parents, using cutting-edge science.  The media began to grope for names, looking at the few labs capable of such a thing.  Partisan commentators were constantly on the air, alternately blaming the Religious Right or secular groups depending on which fit the self-interest of the theorist.  After all, many conservatives hated her because she was replacing Jesus; and many liberals hated her because she was authorizing a specific, un-nuanced morality.  Only Meghan and Chrissy knew that all were to blame.  

The formula for the advanced aerosol reagent had been included in the information packet, and soon this formula had been leaked onto the internet.  Millions of outraged girls read, and wrote, and networked, about the hideous injustice done to their faith and heroine.  Even daughters of parents not part of the conspiracy could see their families’ gleeful reactions to the pop princess getting knocked off her pedestal, and it raised an unusual feeling in them.  They were galvanized in their support for the porcine god-girl.  Across the country, the church affirmed their faith and support for Miley Cyrus, undimmed by her tragedy.  They humbly requested that their goddess come forth, and live freely in spite of her humiliation.

It was a powerful sentiment, but a tall order for Miley.  Her gilded life had always been thin on substance, and having her human beauty and identity slowly ebbing away was an enormous blow for the performer.  She had never asked for this!  Any of this!  To be famous – to be the center of a cult – to be humiliated as a pig!  She wished for normalcy, a world where her name wasn’t known.  But that wasn’t possible, and her Disney handlers, conscious of the great monetary potential attendant on the shamed pop princess ‘overcoming’ her tormenters, in spirit if not in fact, encouraged her to show determination in the face of despair, honor in the face of shame, hope in the face of doubt, and love in the face of hate.  

So Miley Cyrus resumed her public life, trying to convey courage to the girls who wouldn’t desert her.  Her television show, concert tours, and the like began again, the piggirl preaching perseverance to her congregation.  She had always said (or rather, had always repeated the pre-written line) that life is what you made it, so make it rock.  Now, she began to try to live that creed, knowing that there was a timer on her life.  Gradually, she was turning into a pig, and the best physicians and scientists didn’t know how to reverse or even retard the progress.  

Girls responded in greater force than they ever had, and the ranks of her church swelled.  Many were outcasts, lonely and shunned, who had never identified with the glamorous god-girl.  Now, they saw themselves in her struggle. The Disney Corporation had noticed how their star’s appeal had increased to new demographics of girls, and she was still cute, if in an exotic fashion.

Joe Ralton was furious.  Now he was running press for a stinking, fat pig!  His hatred for Miley just continued to grow, now that his one hope for seeing her dethroned had been thwarted.  There was consternation throughout the conspiracy, as their plans had turned disastrously back on themselves.  Still, leaders like Maureen and Angelica counseled patience.  Cyrus was still mostly human-looking, with a few silly pig attributes.  Let her metamorphose wholly into a hog – how many people would still adore her when she was just a smelly beast?  The plan wasn’t defeated, just slowed.  Their daughters’ unreasoning love for the false idol was capricious, and would not last through the truly trying times.  

And Disney seemed to quietly agree, struggling to promote more of their promising starlets into a position where they could capture the same demographic after Cyrus was gone.  That crass sentiment was the clearest ray of hope for many conspirators and parents, that the night would eventually end, and they’d never need to hear the name ‘Hannah Montana’ again.

Meghan and Chrissy dedicated themselves to their idol all the more closely, networking and blogging with friends around the world about the state of their faith.  There was a growing sentiment among the church that they should follow Miley in her porcine de-evolution – the formula was known, and most of the chemicals at least possible to acquire.  But someone with skill would be required to synthesize it, and only Meghan and Chrissy knew of who had originally developed it.  Again, their mothers’ correspondence was helpful – they had clearly designated who they couldn’t trust, who they thought might waver, to each other.  They just had to be a little bit careful in contacting someone.

They eventually settled on a young man by the name of Thomas Blanchard, a brilliant man both their mothers determined to be unsuitable to their plot, but smart enough and influential enough to give them problems if he found out about it.  He was surprised, but not startled, to learn what Angelica Reeve and Maureen Helman had done.  He cautioned the girls against using such a thing for cosmetic ends, as it was irreversible.  Meghan and Chrissy protested, describing their dilemma in terms of faith and solidarity rather than spite.  He was an agnostic, but not unmoved by such displays.  He agreed at last to help make such a thing if it were truly to be a personal choice, rather than a weapon.  Blanchard insisted on watering down the formula, preventing a total transformation.  If the faithful wanted to take on aspects of a pig, he would help; but he would not countenance responsibility for entirely removing another person’s humanity.

Maureen and Angelica continued to deride the pathetic piggirl, frustrated that their daughters were not abandoning the once-glamorous pig goddess faster.  Neither had any idea what their daughters were planning.  At last, Meghan and Chrissy had organized the distribution of the pig transformation formula, including acquiring some for themselves.  They knew that their mothers would flip out over it, but they needed to follow their heroine’s example.  They met each other after school, skipping their math club sessions, and gassed themselves alongside a dozen other followers.  It was a huge step – a lifetime commitment.  But, they were sure that they were acting out of duty rather than whim.

Miley continued to perform, trying to look happy on the outside even as she felt herself die a little inside with each passing day.  She was lonely, and no one had ever taught her how to make friends.  But she was an admired and revered icon!  Who on earth could she turn to in her desolation?  Who would believe that such a successful girl would be so empty at the core, so unfulfilled?

Her sweat glands were drying up, and the poor piggirl was finding it harder and harder to stay cool.  Air conditioners were installed on stage with her, but sometimes even that wasn’t enough.  She felt like she needed to submerge in water, or heaven forbid, even mud, to stay cool, and shunned the thoughts with revulsion.  She had no idea what her followers were about to do, and the unhappy girl only saw the hurtful media barbs, depicting her as a soulless shill profiting off her own tragedy.

Soulless?  She cried at such a characterization.  If she didn’t have a soul, it was because it had been stolen from her!  She had been eleven when her family had first pushed her into Hollywood, but in truth, she’d been shoved towards it her whole life.  They’d named her ‘Destiny’ because of it.  Her dad had her on stage with him when she was two, singing ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘Achy Breaky Heart’.  Pulled out of real school and given a ‘tutor’ so she could act and sing instead of learn.  Even the vaunted morality her cult worshiped her for – was it hers, or had it been manufactured for her by an image-conscious corporation?  

Worse, she could feel herself become more and more of a pig in hideous slow motion.  She gained weight relentlessly, despite her best efforts.  Her snout grew to dominate her face, and her hands and feet fused into full hooves.  Extra teats blossomed down her stomach.  But she would have gratefully accepted every physical change to avoid the psychological ones.  Her body screamed at her to have sex, to find a boar to couple with.  Every molecule of it told her that was right.  But her tattered mind resisted.  Sure, as a girl, she had faced temptations.  Sex, drugs; it was all there, and she had resisted out of either naiveté or strength.  But how much more of a test this was!  Miley wanted nothing more than to give in to despair.

It unnerved Maureen and Angelica how outsiders had obtained their formula, using it on themselves.  They certainly never expected their campaign against Cyrus to have so much collateral damage, let alone these ‘willing’ casualties.  They didn’t have enough information to determine who the leak was, or who was synthesizing the reagent for people in a substantial underground trade.  They were franticly looking, hamstrung by the false assumption that it was an insider, a fellow conspirator who had wavered.  

But that was not to be the greatest twist of the knife.  As Angelica Reeve came home, exhausted from another day of work and searching, she came into the living room to see her daughter reading the paper.  Meghan looked up at her mother, and the color drained from Angelica’s face as she saw the small snout, the thin, floppy ears.  She staggered backwards, as though she had been shot.  Not Meghan, too!  Not her own daughter!  How could this plan have backfired so completely?  All she had wanted to do was eliminate one false idol and free people from her crass commercial empire!

“Hello, mother,” Meghan said pleasantly.  “Can I get you anything?  You look flushed.”  Angelica turned away to cry.  Her own little girl, a pig!  Meghan leapt up, patting her mother on the shoulder and disguising her knowledge of Angelica’s complicity.  “It’s okay, mom.  I didn’t do this rashly or spur-of-the-moment.  I don’t expect you to understand, but you need to accept it.  I follow Hannah Montana.”

Maureen and Angelica looked at each other glumly over the lunch table the next day.  The porcine transformation of their girls was a staggering blow.  They had begun by comparing notes on developing a cure to the mutagen, but using generic human DNA wasn’t sufficient – to be successful, a ‘cure’ would require the unadulterated DNA of the original victim, an enormous, and prohibitively expensive, undertaking.  They might be able to do it for their own girls, but not without drawing sharp attention to themselves, and the headstrong girls would undoubtedly just infect themselves again.  Like so many parents in the rapidly changing world, they were the mothers of pigs.  Boys as well as girls had taken the reagent, through peer pressure or solidarity or genuine faith in Hannah Montana, and the next generation was rapidly becoming something other than human.

Concerts were a little more solemn, church-like affairs now.  There was still the same energy that such ceremonies always engendered, but it was tempered now with a quintessential offering of religion: hope in dealing with loss and tragedy.  Miley Cyrus had never faced real loss before, and the Disney Corporation used her tragedy to that end, using her and her show as a mouthpiece to counsel young people about grief and suffering, and making a tidy profit on it as they went.  

The old great religions, which taught that the temporal world was inherently wedded to suffering, but that there was something better beyond the veil, had been dealing with the topic for centuries.  But the cult of Hannah Montana couldn’t necessarily promise a heaven, and spoke to people about the here and now.  There was honor in suffering patiently, in persevering even against hopeless odds.  A person could take pride in not giving in to anger or despair, but accepting life’s, and other people’s, worst attacks and still living with a serene interest in the betterment of others.

Miley looked out at the crowd, seeing more than a few snouts and floppy ears.  None were, or ever would be, as far along in their transformations as her, but still, there it was: solidarity.  She sniffled, the noise sounding loud coming out of her oversized snout, and shed a tear.  She couldn’t let these girls down.  She went out to sing songs that other people had composed, and deliver messages of empowerment that other people had written.  She was still agonizingly lonely.  Even her family had retracted from her, at least on some level disgusted by the growing pig.  She was surrounded mostly by Disney people now, constantly counseling her on what to say or do.  And she went along with it, not knowing any better, because she had to be worthy of her pig-faced supporters.

Miley went along for over a year, slowly growing more pig-like in the glare of the international spotlight, her own pathetic-ness making her more and more hated by parents of pig-children, and loved by her faithful.  At last, the god-girl had become obese, like a fat sow with hair and a few mild human features.  Her vocal chords had changed substantially, and she couldn’t sing for very long anymore, her regular speech infected by constant grunts and squeals.  Finally, after a concert where the sow had failed to complete two songs, Hannah Montana was seized roughly and hauled away.  So much a pig that she could no longer control her bowels, there was little that she could do to protest.  

The Disney Corporation had finally decided that she was too much of an embarrassment, and that it was time for a new pop sensation.  She was no longer cute or exotic; just a pig.  They were sure, in time, people would forget the pig goddess.  She looked around at the fans near her, reaching out to her, looking like they might fight for her and get injured by the burly guards.  

“If someone hurts you, love them anyway!  Show them… show them what they should be like!” she squealed, unable to think of anything more eloquent for her last public statement.  But it had come from the heart, not a script; so it was perhaps the only real thing she had ever said.  The piggirls and pigboys stared at her in shock as she was dragged away from them.  

The fat sow was led out to the sty.  Even she had to admit, it was probably the most appropriate place for her now.  She had gone from celebrity to goddess to beast.  The bloated pig only regretted not getting the chance to be a normal girl.  

Her church was incensed.  Young people around the world tried to demand that their goddess be returned to them, that their faith be respected.  They were ignored.  Disney felt the sudden backlash of fans sickened by the corporation, and quickly went into damage control.  Their latest sensation, Selena Gomez, was forced to undergo the mutagen to become part pig, to reassure the millions worldwide that she was one of them, that she was a believer too, that maybe she could be a priestess in the absence of the deity herself.  Eventually, other performers had to, as well, either in self-interest or at Disney’s arm-twisting.  

It was a radically changed world, with a far more pronounced generation gap.  Pig people had to be accepted by mainstream society, because there were so many of them.  But even looking at their children’s porcine faces was a constant reminder to parents of how far from the tree their children had fallen, and how much a testament to their willingness to rebel, to ignore the wisdom of their elders.  Children, too, felt acutely how little their parents might care for their deeply-cherished beliefs, how unwilling they were to let youth explore their own choices.  

Meghan and Chrissy were both at Maureen’s house, working on homework together before they had a sleepover.  Maureen examined their current literature assignment; William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.  She paged through the play, and her throat caught at a line near the end, from the Prince after the lovers had died.  “All are punish’d,” he said.  “A glooming peace this morning with it brings.”  She couldn’t help but feel that he was right.  

“All are punish’d.”

Late that night, Meghan and Chrissy snuck out to their tent in the back yard, careful not to attract Maureen’s attention.  The two piggirls lit candles next to a picture of their porcine heroine and savior, certain of her eventual return, and whispered their quiet prayers.  After all, wasn’t faith the assurance of things hoped for, the proof of that unseen?