The Rendering Pit, Chapter 26 (Patreon)

Waking up with a face full of pig snout tends to put a damper on one's day! In this chapter Genevieve goes into hiding, she may not be able to face Tiffany and her room mates, but perhaps this is a good time to get some other work done.

This story was written and illustrated by me! We thank you for your continued support, you've helped make this series what it is <3 

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Points of data buzzed at her, nodes shooting off yellow and orange sparks across the campus. 

A pig snout. This had to be some sort of highly reversible practical joke.

Genevieve shifted, and her chair groaned gently beneath her. As she moved, rolling the muscles of her back, she felt the fat around her sides scrunch and fold, her massive gut pooling between her legs. It seemed like an undeniable fact that she’d gotten big, and was getting bigger. A fact that her folding, wobbling body reminded her of at every available moment. She bit her lower lip, ignoring the buzz between her legs, the sensation of need and desire, and focusing on the task at hand, the dataslate she was streaming data to.

Professor Victoria had given her the task of sniffing out the signs of infection manifest by the same program that had taken over one of the students last term. How was she supposed to create a program that could monitor for signs of infection, when there was only one documented case and she wasn’t even present for most of its development? But if she were able to pull this off, she might be pulled out of her job as Junior Lunch Lady. No more midnight gorging, no more standing behind counter in the middle of the room serving students, no more giant, weight gaining exhibition for everyone to make fun of. She’d be done. 

If she could solve potentially the biggest problem of her school career. 

Thankfully it wasn’t as though she’d been idle. Her swarm of drone bees had been steadily gathering diagnostic information for the past couple of weeks. The only real question was, would she be able to pull something usable out of it? Could she find meaning in the miasma? 

The vixen leaned back and sighed, looking over the quiet room she found herself in. It was small, stacked with unused dataslates, a crumpled looking mattress and blanket stashed in the corner. She’d booked out a study room in the library, one of the ones on the lower levels where students sometimes quietly performed experiments. She wasn’t likely to be disturbed for a while, which suited her purposes just fine. Beyond the quiet and the isolation down here, Genevieve needed somewhere to hide. She rubbed her eyes, pointedly ignoring the porcine snout beneath which she’d somehow developed. Seriously. A pig snout?! 

It wasn’t funny.

Idly, she glanced through her inbound messages. There were a handful from Tiffany, though she hadn’t had the nerve to reply to the jackal. Nothing from Jenny, the Lunch Lady, despite the many, many messages Genevieve had sent. No surprise. She was on one of her ‘vacations’. Genevieve too, had filed for some time off. For a few days, the cafeteria would have to be staffed by the drones, and the students could take it or leave it, for all she cared. 

Another flare sprung up from the tablet resting on her stomach in front of her. Another information node spilling forth incomprehensible data. There could be secrets there, if she could muster herself to see them. Balancing the tablet on her gut for a moment, the vixen leaned down to grab another from the pile beside her. It was patient zero’s records. Most of what was available had been purged when the violent AI was overridden from his system, but whatever was left would be important, Genevieve knew that much. The problem was, unlike a usual virus, she couldn’t count on anti-bodies springing up to defend the host. Genevieve had to look for something else. What’s more, now that the virus had been caught once, it would have to be quieter. Whereas patient zero had become aware of his infection almost instantly, new infections could arise where students aren’t even aware that their neural systems have been compromised. 

Genevieve leaned to the other side, pudgy fingers clasping around a large milkshake cup. Even if she was in hiding, it didn’t mean she couldn’t indulge herself. Her bee drones knew by now how to work the cafeteria’s systems, and had become adept at anticipating her needs, often before she herself realised she had them. She sipped from the straw and allowed her mind to wander back to the idea of Hard Pudge.

Hard Pudge, as most students knew, was a university patented technology that allowed students to transcend the limits of most modern day technology, giving them access to advanced cybernetic systems, typically at the cost of their waistline. It is a form of information storage stored on the body like fat would be. Soft, squishy, but infinitely more useful. Given that every advanced cybernetic implant generally requires a lot of computing, it makes sense that the processing and information storage be made available internally, rather than externally. And thus, Hard Pudge was born. It was called Hard Pudge, not because it was hard (it has the same general weight and feeling as regular adipose tissue), but because once installed it is next to impossible to remove. Most students don’t mind, a few extra lbs is nothing compared to the power to control entire sets of robots, multiple limbs, or even manipulate space itself. 

When they found patient zero, he had a fairly excessive amount of hard pudge installed, though they didn’t find out what it was used for, aside from apparently hosting the AI virus itself. After the virus was purged, the student was positively a mountain of pudge, hard or otherwise. It seemed the purging process required such an expansion, leaving him immobile in a way that Genevieve had only seen once before. Completely helpless, trapped within his own fat, barely able to move his fingers. Though, if she was to believe the word of her professors, his situation is now much improved. All of this would lead a person to believe that, voluntary or not, an artificial intelligence of the scale they were looking at must require a minimum of hard pudge to be installed on the victim. Whatever processing was being done by these programs, it must be absolutely massive, she could only shudder to think what the end goal of such calculation would be. In any case, to Genevieve it made sense to link hard pudge to infection. If a student gains a significant amount of weight without receiving the benefits of any obvious implant, then they would be a good candidate for observation.

The only problem was, she was wrong. She knew she was wrong. She couldn’t submit a report like that to Professor Victoria, the professor would rightly tell her off (or worse). The AI behind the infection was intelligent, it wouldn’t use the same route of attack. Whatever it did would be different. 

Again, the vixen bit her lip before letting out a grunt of frustration as she rubbed the bridge of her newly acquired snout. Her claws scratched gently at the tender flesh beneath her fur. It felt like throwing darts blindly and hoping to hit something, anything. What was worse, was she was the possibility that she had stumbled upon another dead end, which soured her more given she’d spent the last thirteen hours compiling all the data to do with weight she had available to her. Her brain was awash with numbers and pounds. If the virus was going to infect the student population, it would have to do it without the benefit of copious amounts of hard pudge. It was going to have to do it in a more subtle manner. 

Rubbing her eyes with one hand, Genevieve pushed one data slate off the downy fur of her stomach and replaced it with another, before going back for a sip from her milkshake. Hard pudge wasn’t off the table just yet. The virus needed storage space, after all. External storage implants would stick out like a sore thumb, so hard pudge it had to be. She leaned back into her chair and settled in, it would take a while to analyse the different changes observed in patient zero, but she was in hiding. She couldn’t show her piggy self to Tiffany, so she would sit down here, in the basement of the library and analyse data instead. 

Minutes slipped into hours, and Genevieve’s mind was becoming a fog of useless information. From body mass to dental records, elevated levels of certain hormones and reduced levels in others. It wasn’t until, her eyes drooping, Genevieve was going through body temperature statistics, that she found it. Her correlation. She yipped and leaned forward, spilling what was left of her twelfth milkshake across the floor. It was about the hard pudge, it just wasn’t only about it! When the infected student had gained small deposits of hard pudge, he hadn’t just gained hard pudge, there was also a corelating rise in temperature that was statistically speaking, significantly higher than average students, and centred around the hard pudge deposits themselves. If her information were correct, it would seem like the AI was a tax on the host’s internal systems, even when augmented with increasing amounts of hard pudge, causing the host’s pudge deposits to subtly overheat. Assuming no significant advance in coding, any new hosts would present with the same symptoms, even if the hard pudge deposits were substantially smaller. If anything, that might even exacerbate the body’s internal heat differences, allowing for easier diagnostics. But she couldn’t get ahead of herself. Hopefully this would be enough to track new infected students. Hopefully it would be enough to get out of her lunch assistant job.

She sat up, gathering the relevant data slates and beginning to compile an official looking report that she could send to Professor Victoria, her folded ears twitching as the data she had been analysing wove into an easily recognisable pattern. Hopefully she wouldn’t have to deliver it in person.