Chapter 2: Digital Temptation
The ghost of Mark’s two-hundred-dollar repayment still glowed on Jason’s phone screen. The digital transaction had been seamless, a trickle of altered causality that he found far more fascinating than the money itself. It was one thing to adjust a number in a private note. It was another to witness the entire financial and social ecosystem bend to accommodate it, no questions asked.
Mark had even looked vaguely guilty when he’d handed over the crisp bills, mumbling something about forgetting. The memory of the debt was now real for him, woven into his personal history.
That complacency, that total lack of pushback from the universe, was what occupied Jason’s mind as he lay in his dorm room later that night. The ceiling tiles were a grid of pockmarked white, a blank canvas his imagination kept trying to fill. The pencil—now locked in the small steel cash box where he kept his passport—felt less like a tool and more like a nerve ending, a conduit to the raw code of everything. He’d proven it worked on text, on numbers.On reality.
But what about… imagery? Not the text describing an image, but the narrative around it? The story it told?
His hand, moving almost of its own volition, reached for his laptop. The blue light washed over his face in the dark room. He knew exactly where he was going. He’d been there a thousand times before, in a dozen other late-night sessions of idle, powerless scrolling.
@AvaRoseFit. Ava Rose. British, mid-twenties, a fitness influencer whose entire online persona was a masterclass in curated desire. She wasn’t just attractive; she was a sculpture, a monument to a very specific kind of effort. Her platform was built on the gospel of glutes and hamstrings, her videos a hypnotic series of squats, hip thrusts, and lunges performed with a grin that was equal parts encouraging and smug. He’d watched her for years, a silent member of her army of admirers, liking her posts, leaving the occasional generic comment she’d never reply to. She existed in a realm of pure abstraction, as distant and untouchable as a star.
Until now.
His heart thudded a slow, heavy rhythm. This wasn’t about debt or height. This was different. This was crossing a line he could feel in the air, thick and electric.
He clicked on her profile. Her feed was a cascade of golden-hour perfection. There she was, in a sports bra and tiny shorts, capturing her reflection in a gym mirror, the sweep of her lower back dramatic, her thighs powerful. The caption: “5 years deep! Can’t believe my journey started back in 2019! Consistency is EVERYTHING.”
2019. He stared at the date. Four years of training. It had produced that. A body that dominated algorithms and daydreams in equal measure.
His fingers were cold. He licked his lips. What would four additional years of obsessive, dedicated training look like on that frame? What would eight years of squats do?
With a precision that felt surgical, he moved the cursor. He highlighted “2019.” He backspaced. His thumb brushed the cash box key in his pocket. He typed “2015.” He paused, his finger hovering over the touchpad. The act felt infinitely heavier than changing a football team or a dollar amount. This was rewriting a person’s history, her identity, her very shape.
He clicked “Edit.” The page stuttered, a barely-perceptible flicker, like a screen refreshing in a dream.
The caption now read: “8 years deep! Can’t believe my journey started back in 2015! Consistency is EVERYTHING.”
He scrambled, scrolling down. A post from six months ago, celebrating her “4-year physique anniversary” was gone. Vanished. In its place, a new grid of photos appeared, documenting years that had never happened. A younger, leaner Ava in 2016, holding a medal from a local fitness show he’d never heard of. A 2017 progress photo in a garage gym, her form visibly more advanced. The timeline was packed, dense with evidence. The comments sections on these newly-minted old posts were full of usernames he recognized from her current community, their congratulations and support stretching back seamlessly through the fabricated years.
But it was her most recent photo, the one he’d just edited, that held him transfixed.
It was the same photo. And yet it wasn’t.
The Ava in the mirror was… more. The contours of her shoulders were sharper, capped with distinct deltoids that hadn’t been there an hour ago. Her back was wider, tapering to a waist that seemed even smaller by comparison. And her legs. God, her legs. The thighs were denser, thicker, with deeper separations between the muscle groups. The sweep of her glutes was more pronounced, a dramatic curve that strained the fabric of her shorts in a way that felt almost aggressive. This was not four years of good genetics and hard work. This was eight. This was the result of a near-decade of monastic dedication. The body in the photo was a professional’s body. A champion’s.
He’d done that. With five keystrokes.
A dizzying cocktail of power and vertigo flooded him. He’d altered a human being. He sat in the dark, breathing slowly, watching the numbers on her likes climb as if nothing had happened. Because for everyone else, nothing had. Ava Rose had always been an eight-year veteran. This was just another Tuesday.
The scientist in him reawakened, pushing back the awe. Could he push further? Could he refine? The post he’d edited mentioned she was coming off a “dreamer bulk” that had started in January. He found the post. He changed “January” to “last October.” Six extra months of controlled caloric surplus.
The photo updated again.Subtly. The muscles looked fuller, harder, like they were carved from something heavier than flesh. The scale mentioned in the caption now read a number twelve pounds higher, yet her waist, in the picture, looked if anything, tighter. The body recomposition was physiologically improbable, a logic-defying sculpture of simultaneous size and definition.
He needed specificity. He searched, his fingers flying. She had a “Measurements Check” post from two weeks prior. 36-24-39. He looked at the newly-bulked, eight-year-trained version of her in the recent photo. The hips, the thighs… they demanded more.
He edited the hip measurement. 39 became 42.
The change this time was not subtle.
The mirror-glow of the photo seemed to intensify. The curves of her hips flared out, a dramatic shelf that made her waist look impossibly snatched. The fabric of her shorts now dug in fiercely at the sides, creating soft, sensual divots in her flesh where the hems bit in. The lower halves of her glutes, now wider, seemed to spill slightly beneath the leg bands. The image was breathtaking, a parody of an hourglass, yet rendered with hyper-realistic detail. Every pore, every sweat sheen, every hair was intact. Only the proportions had been warped into something mythic.
He leaned back, his spine pressing into his cheap desk chair. The cold thrill was gone, replaced by a deep, simmering heat in his gut. He had not just changed history. He had taken a public figure and remolded her, like digital clay, into his private ideal. And she had no idea. No one did.
A new notification popped up on his screen. A direct message. From @AvaRoseFit.
His blood turned to ice slurry.
He clicked it.
“Hey you!” it began, with a casualness that crushed the air from his lungs. “I see you’ve been liking all my old posts tonight! That’s so sweet. Blast from the past, right? 🥹 It’s been a wild 8 years!”
He couldn’t breathe. This wasn’t possible. The pencil edited text. It shouldn’t create interactions. It shouldn’t make her message a stranger.
Unless… unless the edit to her history had woven him into it. A loyal follower for years. A fixture. The logic of the pencil was airtight: if her past had changed, then her past interactions had changed, too. A new memory, smooth and whole, had been installed in her mind. One that included him.
His hands trembled as he typed a reply, defaulting to the bland fan persona he’d used before. “Haha yeah, just going down memory lane! Your progress is insane.”
The three bouncing dots appeared immediately.
“Honestly, couldn’t have done it without support from people like you from the early days,” she wrote. “It’s late for you, isn’t it? East Coast? You should sleep! But this made my night. Talk tomorrow?”
The casual intimacy was a knife-twist. She thought she knew him. She thought they had a shared history he could barely begin to imagine.
“Sure,” he typed, his fingers numb. “Talk tomorrow.”
He slammed the laptop shut. The room was utterly dark, the only sound the frantic thumping in his ears. He had crossed the line from observer to participant. He had reached into the screen and not just changed a body, but forged a connection. A fake one, built on rewritten time.
He fumbled for the cash box, unlocked it, and took the pencil out. It lay cool and passive across his palm. It was no longer just a key to reality’s code.
It was a scalpel. And he had just made his first incision into a living thing. The surgery, he knew with a terrible, exhilarating certainty, was far from over. Tomorrow, she would talk to him. And he would have to decide what to say to a person whose very memory of him was a fiction he had authored.