Oh bravo, PodCastle! Well done!
I loved this story. It doesn't knock my favorite Benjamin Rosenbaum story off its perch on the hill (that would be "
Start The Clock") but it met all my criteria for depth and complexity and is another solid example of what I like in his stories. While I normally whine about lack of character development in stories, I have to admit this is the type of archetypal play I can happily go along with, because there's enough layers and other things going on and references and resonances to make the stiffness in the characters work for me.
I'm afraid to say this without outing myself as a complete lunatic, but I have no association with California or Silicon Valley whatsoever (ok, ok, I played Zork about a billion times as a kid, but that's the ONLY connection, I swear) and yet I didn't find this story weird at all. Yes, I'm here to throw off the statistics in the CA vs. rest of the world weirdness debate. Maybe I'm overly at home with surrealism, or maybe my outsider persona lets me roll with time/place dependent scenarios better than most. I really liked the vividness of the setting, how concrete and specific all the details were. I also liked that people talked like they were from California in the 90's.
There's one more thing I loved about this story, which is that it worked as fairy tale. To me, fairy tales are stories about the hopes and fears of a culture. When they get reinvented (expurgated, changed, enhanced, etc.) it's a specific society's way of saying, 'we've changed, and this is who we are now'. We're a society that can't talk about sex, frex, but where eating children is just fine to treat thematically. Or perhaps: we can't talk about how painful transformation and change are, but we can layout an improbable tableaux of romantic love, bc 'romantic love' is what we're all about. At the rate of change in our world, I expect a remake of this one in about 20 years. I can't wait.
BTW, as far as the Greek connection goes, I've always thought of the Greek myths/legends/deity tales as a type of fairy tale. Probably because I was exposed to both in the same impressionable time frame and because the Greek stuff goes a long way toward explaining their society, so they work the way I think fairy tales work.