Tiddies (a short story)

When biosculpting became available to the general public, artists discovered a radical new medium to play with. Visionaries could now create anything they wanted. Most made tits. Sometimes a gay artist built an ass or a dick. In the first year of her MFA program, Maxine watched a feminist classmate biosculpt a menstruating vagina and title it Cunt with Teeth (A. Slansky, 2106, aminos and calcium).

But overwhelmingly the North Front Living Arts Gallery displayed tits. There were 1950s bullet bra conical tits pointed heavenward like obelisks, melonious tits swinging heavy from engineered trees, tits with archaic saline implants as a meta commentary on artificiality, supersized dome-like tits you could sit on like a beanbag chair, dewdrop tits sprouting from umbrellas, adolescent tits that skirted the bounds of child pornography laws, saggy old woman tits, individual tits, tits in pairs, tits in clusters like grapes, modest neoclassical tits, pancake flapper girl tits, tits of every permutation imaginable.

Whether this represented the choice of the curator or the preference of the artist, or whether it was biosculptors kowtowing to market forces to increase their chances of getting into a gallery, Maxine did not know. She did not select the pieces. She was only the gallery attendant. As the other employees quit, the duties of the attendant bloated from manning the reception desk to responding to all communications to feeding and watering the art to proofreading the promotional materials to sweeping and dusting to buying the wine and cubing the cheese for the opening reception. Thankfully, the burden of selecting the sculptures and balancing the books fell to the owner, Mike, which meant Maxine could not know for sure whether there was conscious bias at play, nor whether her biweekly salary always hit her bank account late due to problems with the third-party payment app like Mike said or whether the gallery was in financial trouble.

“You could do asses,” she said once as she refilled the nutrient vat of a piece called The Three Goddesses, a triptych growing a luminous virginal teenage tit, a fat stretchmarked matronly tit, and a droopy postmenopausal tit. “They’re gender-neutral.”

“What, and have a gallery full of farts and shit?” Mike’s eyes were hidden behind the fog of an active Vis-R, but somehow Maxine knew he was rolling them. Mike’s Vis-R was usually cloudy. Maxine didn’t know what he was looking at, but sometimes she caught a sideways glimpse of him and saw flesh-pink light.

“It’s only ever women’s bodies on display.”

“They’re not women. They’re proteins. Look.” Mike flicked the nipple of a rather hackneyed piece called Helen. It hardened with startling verisimilitude. “No sexual harassment suit. No therapy session to process the trauma. It’s hooked up to a bunch of fucking tubes.”

“So’s your grandma.”

The benefit of being the gallery’s sole surviving employee was that Maxine was un-fireable. Replacing her would cost too much. Proper care of biosculpture required painstaking precision, and no one else stuck around long enough to learn it. So All Mike could do to her was say, “Fuck you.”

The crowning jewel of the show was Regnet’s The Rape of Lucrece, an enormous mural of tits—all perky and fair, unremarkable in their pleasant appearance but astonishing for their interactivity. Each breast could be plucked like a tomato, taken home, and cultivated under proper conditions, thus implicating the viewer in the act of violence. The piece was a startling achievement in scale and skill. No other biosculptor had ever produced such a large and complicated work, much less one whose components could survive on their own. Even Maxine could not deny the artist’s talent, though she questioned their taste.

But the piece frustrated her most of all for its temperamental nature. Every work of art in a living gallery required care and feeding—mostly refilling the nutrient sac hidden in the pedestal or frame once a week, minding the temperature, keeping it moist. The Rape of Lucrece demanded attention like a rare orchid. Maxine had to feed it thrice daily at precise times, interrupting her concentration on other tasks. She had to spray it with an amino mist that always made a mess and necessitated a self-contained breathing apparatus to protect her lungs. She had to administer frequent massages and check for tumors.

Mike didn’t make it easy. He neglected to feed it after hours, and he mixed its food poorly, causing some of the tits to wilt, for which he blamed Maxine. And he always kept the gallery a couple of degrees too cold.

And so Maxine was dismayed, but not surprised, to see the tits growing uneven a mere six days before opening. She was angry, but again not at all surprised, when Mike blamed her and bellowed at her to get her shit together and fucking fix it before they get fucking sued.

Maxine emptied and cleaned the tanks and refilled them with a fresh batch of food. She sprayed the tits with distilled water and sponged them clean, carefully scrubbing all the grease gathered in the cleavage and underboob. She re-misted them with amino solution. She checked hydration levels and pH balance. She reset the gallery’s climate controls to the right temperature and humidity. And lastly she discreetly pricked the underside of one of The Rape of Lucrece’s breasts for a tissue sample, which she dropped off at a lab on her way home that night.

Mike, eyes clouded through the Vis-R, remained at his desk in the storage room, saying, “I’ll close up tonight since you apparently can’t handle it.”

The rape mural looked even worse the next morning. Some tits swelled with angry red stretch marks; others withered and gently sagged; a few dripped with white fluid that Maxine suspected was milk.

Again, she purged and cleaned and fed and misted the art. Again, she took tissue samples. Again, Mike hurled a litany of curses upon her and threatened her and told her she’d better fucking fix it or he’d cut her fucking tits off and nail them to a canvas. He was extra irritable today, red-faced and fidgety, possibly suffering from too much or too little of whatever quasi-legal stimulants he spent his embezzled funds on.

“Maybe it’s an allergic reaction to the air fresheners,” Maxine said. The gallery used sandalwood-scented perfume to cover the nauseating smell of bio-art. “Or the fumes from the floor cleaner or something. Maybe the mist I’m using on the other pieces is contaminating it.”

So she stuffed the air freshener into an airtight plastic bag and swapped the bleach-based cleaner for a gentler, less-effective eco-friendly solution, and she dragged an impermeable partition with her when she misted the other pieces with amino miasma to avoid polluting The Rape of Lucrece. And when at last the day was done Mike stayed behind to close because, he said, someone had to handle the business end of things since Maxine was too goddamn busy cleaning up her own goddamn mess.

Four days before opening and the problem was worse. The tits grew like corn smut, grotesquely oversized, squashed together, cracked nipples dripping into a white puddle on the floor. Two of the tits had fallen off during the night and lay rotting like late season apples.

Mike was out, thankfully, citing a doctor’s appointment, so Maxine cleaned and fed everything again and reset the climate controls again. She replaced the filters in the air purification system as well. Mike was supposed to hire a professional crew to handle this task every three months, but Maxine had never seen any appointment for maintenance in the schedule the entire time she’d worked there. So she threw on a hazmat suit, carefully taping over the holes in the knees and gloves, and crawled into the vent to do it herself.

She was grateful for the self-contained breathing apparatus. It spared her from what must have been an awful smell. She found the filter choked with cell pulp that throbbed like a beating heart. The tissue was so overgrown she couldn’t find a place to grab it. She had to slice the sides with a box cutter, plunge her fingers into the gash, feel blindly for the metal frame, then yank with all her might until it tore off like a scab. There were growths on the underside, little round cysts sprouting like mushrooms. Maxine double-bagged it in plastic before cramming it into the biohazard bin, then replaced it with a clean filter and slammed the vent cover and bathed in the chemical shower and returned all the calls and ordered the wine and cheese and updated the social media accounts. When she finally locked up after two hours of unpaid overtime, she dropped the fallen tits off at the lab again and asked if there was a way to expedite the process.

“It should be finished soon,” the receptionist said. “We had a software issue, but it’s settled now. We’re working through the backlog.”

The Rape of Lucrece calmed down overnight. New tits blossomed in the gaps left by the fallen ones, and the swollen breasts had deflated a little, and the lactation had slowed to a modest dew. Maxine hoped they would go back to normal before the opening reception, but with just three days remaining she doubted her chances.

Maybe it was the dirty vent; all those contaminants circulating in the air must have upset the biosculpture’s delicate hormonal balance. Maybe that’s why Maxine’s allergies had gotten so bad recently. She tried not to think about it. Anxiety made her wheeze.

Mike, still recovering at home from what he called “a minor procedure,” issued orders remotely, watching the security camera feed through his Vis-R. His contributions did not help. Sometimes he shouted curses at her. Other times he calmed down but slurred his words until he became incoherent. More than once, he fell asleep, which made Maxine’s job much easier. They worked like this the next day, and the day after.

The test results came back all at once. Maxine squinted through a series of codes and percentages and abbreviations and decimals. She knew the numbers were off—helpful red up and down arrows by each line told her that—but she did not understand what it meant. She asked the lab for clarification, but they refused to discuss it with anyone besides the gallery owner or the artist. Maxine forwarded the information to Mike. He told her not to worry about it.

Maxine worried about it. She contacted her friend Lin, a medical student. He was busy cramming for an exam the next day but promised to get back to her after the test.

Opening night arrived, and The Rape of Lucrece was almost back to normal. A casual viewer would not know the difference; those imperfections could spring from deliberate choices. But the artist would know. And the artist, a petite person of indeterminate sex who wore an antique diving helmet and black shrouds and answered only to the name Regnet, absolutely did notice while peering at the mural during the calm before the storm of opening reception.

“You touched it.” Regnet reached out a stubby gloved finger and plucked a pearl of milk from one of the tits.

In that moment the stress and exhaustion of the past week finally broke Maxine. “I’m sorry,” she wailed. “I did everything you said. I swear to God. I don’t know what happened. I swear to God I followed all your instructions. I don’t know what’s wrong. No one will tell me what’s wrong.”

Regnet did not shout or scowl. Their face, through the transparent window of the diving helmet, was an opaque mask of calm. That made it worse, somehow. “When we finish a work of art,” they said, “we relinquish control over how it is received. It is in conversation with the world.”

Maxine could not place Regnet’s accent, nor determine whether it was real or an affectation.

“Go wash your face.” Regnet carefully donned a layer of latex gloves over their preexisting black costume gloves. “I will cut the cheeses.”

Maxine retreated to the bathroom and waited until the sobbing stopped to contact Mike. He did not respond. He should be here by now. He never missed an opening, irresponsible as he was—he loved to look important and shake hands and flatter and be flattered.

But the hour came and the people arrived and Maxine was on her own. Maxine had no talent for schmoozing. She struggled with eye contact. She stuttered. Her handshakes limply flopped. She apologized too much for her boss’s absence and did so in a way that made others suspect that it was all her fault.

When Mike finally rolled in forty-seven minutes late, Maxine was relieved. But she could tell, immediately, that he had not recovered from his unspecified illness. He swayed as though drunk, or else he twitched and fidgeted. He sweated in a turtleneck much too warm for the season. His eyes, no longer hidden by the Vis-R, focused on nothing. He barely spoke. Maxine couldn’t tell whether he’d taken opiates for pain or amphetamines for fatigue or both.

“You give the speech yet?” His voice came out clumsy, like he’d just come from the dentist’s.

“No.”

“We’re behind. Go do it.”

“I don’t have one prepared.”

“Fucking improvise. Like I do.”

Then he slouched to his office in the storeroom and shut the door.

Maxine shuddered to the dais where Mike always delivered his opening address—the dais that held the showpiece of every exhibition, which, in this case, was The Rape of Lucrece. She had no idea what to say. She had written the press releases and reviewed all the artists’ statements but could remember not one word of it.

When she stood on that little platform before the wall of breasts, all eyes turned to her. She opened her mouth. She tried to breathe deep but her lungs would not stretch. A sudden blister on her tongue made her lisp. Her voice squeaked like a clarinet with a cracked reed. “Thank you for coming,” she tremored, “to this, uh, reception, at the, uh, North Front Living Arts Gallery. Uh, it’s a great show. Lots, uh, lots of great artists. Thank–thank you for coming.”

Regnet, waiting in the wings, glided to the dais. With a hand invisible under the black shrouds, they swept Maxine out into the pit with the rest of the crowd. Regnet had such a presence that Maxine always forgot that the artist, even in a bulky diving helmet, only came up to her shoulder; every time the two of them stood face to face Maxine was startled anew by how short they were.

“Signifier. Signified.” Regnet held up both hands as though cradling each word in separate gloves. “Since we first scribbled on the walls of our caves, artists have always cursed this terrible divorce between concept and representation. But we bioscultpors are extraordinarily lucky. Today we have the tools to paint on the canvas of life itself, to tear down the barrier between art and model, art and audience. Signifier, signified.” Here they clasped hands, gloved fingers interwoven.

Maxine’s phone vibrated against her thigh. It was Lin, the medical student. Maxine ducked into the storeroom to answer.

“I looked at the results,” he said. “You know how the sculptures use stem cells, right?”

“Yeah.”

“The Rape of Lucrece is a little different. It’s a really special piece. It’s spliced with plant DNA from an angiosperm. A flower. That’s how it can bud off like that. It’s like a rose bush that fertilizes itself, given the right conditions.”

“So what went wrong?”

“It looks like it got fertilized by a human with a Y-chromosome.”

“Fertilized?” Maxine remembered all those nights Mike had insisted on closing up the gallery alone. “Oh my God.”

“They’re going through an unpredictable reproductive cycle.”

Something rustled on the floor from behind a crate. A mouse? Mike had recently switched to a cheaper brand of pest repellant. An unwanted creature in a living gallery could wreak havoc.

“I’ll take care of it.” Maxine set her phone on speaker, placed it on Mike’s desk, and picked up a crowbar. “It won’t happen again. It’s okay now.” She stalked toward the source of the noise. If it was a mouse, she had to smash it before it gnawed on any of the tits. There. She heard it again, between a couple of shelves. Maxine leapt round the corner, weapon raised, and discovered, to her horror, that the mouse was Mike, slumped on the floor. The fly of his trousers was open, and his undergarments were down, and his bare buttocks pooled pale against the concrete. Before Maxine could avert her gaze, she saw his penis flopped out like a slug, an island arc of blemishes erupting down his shaft.

“Jesus Christ, Mike!” Maxine backed away from the hideous figure.

Mike did not move, did not even curse. Maxine thought he might be dead, but in the silence between her voice and that of Lin’s over the speaker, she heard labored breathing. Mike must have passed out. She wanted to leave him there, but the threat of an inebriated guest or a fussy artist stumbling into the back and seeing him like this was too great.

“Mike,” she hissed. “Wake up, you idiot.”

When he didn’t, she poked him with the crowbar. He did not react. She jabbed him in the shoulder. His head lolled to one side. She saw that his eyes were open, raw and wet and red. He looked at her sadly and said nothing.

“Max!” Lin shouted over the phone. “It is very much not okay! The tests show aggressive growth. It might be contagious.”

Maxine felt dizzy. She reminded herself to breathe again, and dragged air in, thick and laborious.

“Did you touch it?”

“Oh God. I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

Maxine rummaged through her memories. She was pretty sure she wore gloves. Pretty sure. But there could have been a momentary lapse, just a second, in which she handled one of the breasts without protective gear. She could not remember it, but that did not mean it never happened.

She looked again at the angry blemishes on Mike’s penis. Cysts and zits and warts, particularly inflamed ones, are usually red, sometimes with white tips when they’re ready to burst. But these were pearl-white with pink tips. Tits. Tiny tits sprouting from the shaft of Mike’s penis like weeds.

Mike could have—should have—had them sliced off, or frozen, or dissolved in salicylic acid. If it got really bad, he could have amputated the whole appendage and replaced it with a fresh clone. He’d done it before; this was not his natural girth.

But he had tried. Maxine spied faint scars where old tits had been shaved off and grew back. Carefully, she pulled down the cowl of Mike’s turtleneck with the claw of her crowbar. A constellation of tits clung to his Adam’s apple. They jiggled when he swallowed. Maxine poked him with the crowbar again. She tapped him on the side of the head. No reaction. Not even a sneer. He no longer controlled his own movements. Maybe he had tits in his motor neurons. Maxine’s hands shook. Her fingers felt numb. Was it fear, or had the infection spread to her, too? She yanked hard. Mike’s cheap turtleneck tore open, exposing his chest. He was covered in thumb-sized breast buds.

“Don’t touch it. Be unbelievably careful.”

“Is it airborne?” Maxine found it increasingly difficult to breathe.

“I don’t know. Just don’t touch it. Don’t let anyone touch it. I’m calling a haz team. They’re on their way, okay? Right now you’ve got to bag it and don’t let anyone touch it.”

Maxine flung open the storage room door to the main gallery space. The Rape of Lucrece showed great bald patches, empty cups in the nutrient bed that fed it. Nearly everyone had plucked a tit and was carrying it in one hand, cramming it into a pocket or purse, or wearing it. One woman stuck it jocularly into her own cleavage and now sported a third breast. A bald man had grabbed two and affixed them to his head like Mickey Mouse ears. A skinny teenager had taken three of them and was amusing his friends with a juggling act. A lesbian couple was walking out the door with arms linked, each clutching a tit in her free hand.

The haz team arrived too late to stop them from leaving, too late to spare the many servers and bartenders and valets and maids and wives and husbands and mistresses and escorts and children and nannies and personal trainers and beauticians the patrons shared cells with during the sliver of time before the Department of Health could reach them.

In the weeks that followed, as the plague metastasized down the East Coast, two debates roiled across the nation. The first was Who Should Be Blamed. Mike (known only as Patient Zero to the general public) bore much of the responsibility for interfering with the artwork. Maxine was also culpable for her failure to contain the outbreak; initial tissue samples showed that the tits knotting her vocal cords were not large enough to have completely prevented her from warning the patrons of the danger. No consensus could be reached as to whether Regnet had deliberately engaged in bioterrorism or whether it was all an unfortunate accident. The artist’s only statement, handwritten in calligraphy on an origami swan tossed to a reporter in a hazmat suit, read: “It is in conversation with the world.”

But Regnet redeemed themselves in the eyes of the authorities with regards to the more important public debate of What Must Be Done. Their attorneys worked out a deal with prosecutors: reduce the artist’s life sentence from federal prison to house arrest, to be served in Regnet’s studio/laboratory/zeppelin floating above the quarantine zone once known as Albany, in exchange for full cooperation with the Center for Disease Control in researching potential treatments, vaccines, or cures for the plague.

Among the many test subjects supplied to Regnet by the CDC was a gallery attendant the artist had grown fond of just before the unfortunate girl succumbed to the illness. By the time Maxine’s hibernation cask was airlifted to the zeppelin, too much of her musculature had mutated into mammary tissue to allow her to explicitly grant or deny consent. The waiver she’d signed upon admission to the ICU rendered the issue moot anyway.

This collaboration proved fruitful. Despite only minoring in biochemistry (Regnet’s doctorate was in fine arts), the sculptor discovered how to halt the disease’s progression before the test subject reached its terminal stage. Unlike most victims of the plague, this piece retained a generally human shape (bulbous though it was), as well as a measurable degree of cognitive activity. Most importantly, it was sterile; a battery of tests proved it did not transmit mutagenic cells, not even by direct contact.

Out of respect to Maxine’s privacy, all published material referred to the lone surviving test subject by the title Regnet bestowed upon it: Artemis of Ephesus. The biosculptor considered it their magnum opus. They announced their retirement from the arts shortly after its completion.

Years later, once the plague was quelled and the piece no longer deemed useful for research purposes, Artemis of Ephesus was purchased by a private collector. After he died, his children donated it to the Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians in Philadelphia. It lives there still.

This story first appeared in Issue #4 of Typebar Magazine.