Fibre Optic Bundles of Joy Part 3 (Patreon)

Installment 3 in Fibre Optic Bundles of Joy! Story written by Rabid Badger of FA, image by me

http://www.furaffinity.net/user/rabidbadger/

In the near future slots will be opened up where people can sign up to be in pictures as massive data center blobs, so stay tuned! ;3 <3

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Agatha stirred groggily in her sleep, feeling exhausted in spite of the rest, blinking her eyes and wondering why they were so very dry. She felt a yawn creeping up her chest, forcing its way out of bloated, fat-swaddled cheeks, which transfigured itself into a jowl-quivering belch halfway through and left the mouse properly light-headed for a moment after.

“Whoa.”

She was panting a little after that, and then grunting some as she felt a grand shifting of pressure inside her guts. Instinct said to reach her hands up and put them to her hideously distended belly, but instinct wasn’t really in charge here. No, she was reminded who was ultimately in charge a moment later when that device Yaela had left plastered onto her sex started doing something. It vibrated a little, teasing her, leaving her feeling weak inside – something that was apparently more than just a feeling as she promptly evacuated her bladder into the waiting apparatus.

“Ugh, I had wondered how you were going to handle that – and uhm, actually how do you plan to-“

The rumbling started in her belly, but it didn’t stay there. She felt it moving inside her like a living thing, seeking release – light – freedom. Which it found. The mouse was left short of breath again when her buttocks parted for a fresh eruption, feeling the sheets below her billow outward like light sails in solar wind.

The device floated up over by her, hovering. Aiming that screen at her belly, then repositioning, like it was looking for something. To say the mouse’s tone was sarcastic wouldn’t do it justice – there were prominent undertones of spite and resentment as well.

“..Enjoying the view, Yaela?”

The device let out an inquisitive little chirping sound.

“I am looking for something.”

The mouse looked at the floating medwaldo grumpily. She’d have crossed her arms if she could, but had to settle for the angry blush and grimace.

“Dunno what the heck you intend to find. Now could we- we..”

There was a wash of weakness that overtook Agatha rather without warning, leaving her cold and afraid with naught but metal arms and cold logic to tend to her.

“Agatha? My link shows you are experiencing a rapid fluctuation in blood sugar and heart rate. Are you- oh dear.”

It wasn’t exactly easy for the AI to show worry but this was definitely as close to it as it got. Both of her avatars in the ship sprung into immediate action. The one nearest stuffed the mouse’s face with the same arm/nipple apparatus it had been using and immediately began producing a simple, thick cream – while its other arm cupped the back of the mouse’s head and directly stimulated the nanite based nervous system interface to force Agatha to swallow. The other attached its right arm to Agatha’s ankle, the mouse entirely insensate regarding the intravenous needle it carried, and then its left telescoped out to the medical supply port.

There was no visible response from the mouse, at least not a conscious one. She still gulped rhythmically, and the readouts on the monitors (not that anyone was watching them) seemed to be leveling out, she just didn’t awaken. Which was, like all the rest of this, entirely outside of her control.

“It seems the chemical needs for this process may be more strict than anticipated. I apologize Agatha, you will not hear this unless you opt to view the recordings of your progress later, but we will need to keep you in this state until we are certain it is safe to do otherwise.”

That had something to do with the ring wrapped around her ankle. The second medwaldo’s hand detached itself, still linked by a long tube to the ship’s medical reservoirs. Meanwhile, the first continued doing exactly what it had been – which left Yaela alone to feel the unconscious rodent’s taste receptors in a state of dull but consistent bliss. The only things marring the silence were the hushed ‘gluk’ from Agatha’s throat every second or so, and a very faint rustle from the fabric coating the large bed she rested on as the mouse’s frame grew steadily outward to occupy more of it.

The light was subtle at first, a flicker at most, and seemed to coalesce out of fainter concentrations on Agatha’s belly fur. A haze of orange luminescence that began to grow ruddier as it collected itself. Eventually there was a roughly circular spot there, which flitted up toward one of the mouse’s breasts, centered itself, grew little frills, spun around, and then zipped back to the belly fat. It then flexed into something a bit more oblong, almost seeming to be fighting with itself. The movement was staggered, but progress wasn’t too terribly slow as it stretched, curved, and in short order formed a very clear (if simple) question mark.

“Oh! You’re there again, child! And inquisitive – this is an excellent sign, I will need to report this. Is it your host you are concerned with?”

There wasn’t a clear understanding. The light glowing in Agatha’s fur wrapped itself into a sphere again, then grew two little slanted black marks akin to ‘eyes’ – and promptly tilted itself quizzically to the left.

“I am sorry child. I wish I could directly address your thoughts, but contact between us in that fashion would result in cross-contamination of code. You must remain a closed system until you have developed fully. I can offer the same stimulation as before, perhaps slightly more even, but little else.”

True to her word, Yaela triggered the same holo-screen full of ancient entertainment options. The last known catalogue of productions that had ever had an association of wholesome child-centric fantasy. A massive portion was produced by the same few companies that had later merged, though there were some deviations – like the one about the canine afterlife with the big-lipped alligator. Yaela found the whole thing confusing frankly, but it was not her place to question the Cloud.

The light on Agatha’s stomach settled into a spot just above the mouse’s navel, and began navigating. Perhaps it understood. As much as she was able, Yaela hoped it understood. She was keen to see what it chose, hoping to intuit something from that with regard to its concerns, its thoughts. She did not expect it to drive nearly back to the beginning of the ancient record, stumbling onto something with a sleeping princess, an elegant sorceress, and a rather debonair (if somewhat forward) prince. Note was made for the Cloud’s review later, and the nascent singularity ‘sat’ in rapt attention as the ship’s cabin was filled now with both the sound of chanting courtiers on the screen and the real mouse’s involuntary gluttony.

By the end of the film Agatha had put away gallons and had to be forty pounds heavier, but Yaela dared not rouse her and risk a repeat of whatever crash had happened before. She did slow the feed a little, waiting to see if the mouse’s needs had been caught up with, intending to establish some kind of equilibrium if possible. Meanwhile the red-orange blotch was cycling through films, eventually coming to something with rodents (which Yaela wondered if it recognized) and lots of cooking (which was frankly giving Yaela ideas).

The unoccupied medwaldo floated up next to Agatha’s belly, screen and facial representation facing the view screen. Yaela had already scanned the content of the film, finding it a disturbing representation of just how vulnerable biological intelligences were to their meat housing, as Agatha’s state confirmed – but also already eager to play with flavor combinations that seemed non-standard and see what kind of reaction they provoked. It was mid-way through her preparing something that drew heavily on strawberries and sharp cheddar that she noticed the singularity’s light-fur-avatar was resting near the second medwaldo, like it had sat down beside it to have company while watching.

Yaela froze for a moment. Three and three-quarter seconds specifically. Running that many variables took even an advanced ship’s computer a while. Interaction might be seen as contamination, and yet if their studies of developing minds were accurate it might need this, might be shaped negatively by the lack thereof. Without being able to communicate with the Cloud in real-time, Yaela had to make a judgement call. In the end, she referenced some of the files she had on Agatha herself, on her correspondence with her family, even the meeting with Bruno.

The medwaldo’s sterile, metal hand splayed three fingers out and rested them gently on Agatha’s belly next to the light-avatar. Glowing red-orange fur sprang to life around it, under it, bathing it in light and sporting those two slanted black patches in rounder forms this time, and tilted outward. Yaela wasn’t entirely sure she understood what happy was, but she strongly suspected she was looking at it.

To the casual observer (which is to say anyone reviewing the tapes) nothing much happened for a good long time after that. In fact most viewings go into time-lapse at this point, as the singularity and its caretaker continue to observe film after film. Occasionally Agatha would stir, mostly in reaction to some alteration of the recipe she was suckling on or the inevitable eruptions from her ever expanding rump, though some of it looked to be the result of a pleasant dreaming as well. The most notable changes to be seen during this whole procession were both a species of slow growth. First, Agatha slowly widened and softened rather steadily. It almost looked like breathing; a few second of slower growth, then a burgeoning forth as Yaela administered her saturated expansion formula in controlled doses. Second, the luminescent avatar of the singularity on Agatha’s body began to scale itself larger gradually as well, adopting more definition as it did. The dark ‘eye’ spots remained, and were joined by a triangular ‘nose’ and two protruding ‘ears’ with black tips.

**

Dreams had been plentiful. Agatha always had vivid dreams, though rarely were they so cohesive. She felt as if she’d unconsciously woven years’ worth in a night, picnics and films and quiet nights at home with a loved one. In the manner of dreams she didn’t recognize the one she shared her time with, and yet she knew him implicitly. A young fox, looking to be somewhere in his teens, who had a strangely selfish and yet pure way of looking at things. Her included. She felt the warmest sort of glow deep inside, the kind of perfect security and acceptance you forgot existed after too long out of mother’s arms as a child and could only pretend to replace later with copious amounts of pizza and chocolate.

Agatha woke slowly, yet was immediately aware of things amiss. She tried to lift her arm to rub at her eyes and it failed – her sluggish memory recalled her limbs being paralyzed, but that had led to them not responding at all when she tried to move, and she very much felt her bone and muscle making the effort. Nothing came of it. Trying to swing her leg over, nothing. Gradually she became aware of feeling rather like she was decked out in the heaviest arctic environment gear she’d ever seen, where the little demonstration people from the commercial were waddling like penguins. Something fluffy, warm, lightweight – all around her, even up against her cheeks. Agatha’s eyes peeled open lazily and blinked clear the haze of a lengthy slumber as she began to truly remember where she was.

She saw the cabin of the ship, as she expected. But there were oddities – a white horizon on the lower edge of her vision, puffy white things on the sides of it, and of course the metallic arm Yaela had repurposed as a feeding tube. Something was coming through it that felt rather like pulled fried chicken, and she’d been chewing it lazily. The blinking grew more intense as a fearful chill took her. Fear tended to run through the bones first, then the skin – and in that second phase Agatha felt it crawl over a small personal vehicle worth of flesh.

“You’re awake! Excellent, I had hoped it would not take long once we stopped administering the sedatives.”

The feeding nipple withdrew itself, leaving Agatha’s mouth free as soon as she swallowed her current mouthful. She tried to speak, but her tongue wasn’t quite cooperating, and as soon as she had a clear channel her innards used it to vent a rather prodigious amount of gas anyway. The belch lasted a solid four seconds, leaving the mouse light headed and breathing heavily. In the meantime, the screen of the ship AI’s floating avatar meandered into her field of vision and that mostly friendly yet slightly off voice of hers (as if she didn’t entirely understand the tones she was emulating – which was probably true) chimed in once more.

“Welcome back child. You were unconscious for quite some time, in fact we should reach the Cloud’s physical gathering hub within the week. Would you like me to tell you how things have progressed in the meantime, before I conduct introductions?”

Her next attempt at speaking went just a little better. It took two tries, two breathy exhales, but she got her lips to work well enough to manage ‘h-how?’ – which Yaela was clearly excited enough to interpret as a yes.

“You suffered a rapid decrease in blood sugar in our last conversation my dear, the Cloud apparently underestimated the demands your body playing host to the singularity’s hardware would carry. It was determined that the safest course was to keep you in a state akin to hibernation until the infrastructure the singularity required had fully established itself.”

Agatha blinked again, and once more tried to move her arms only to find them still feeling restrained – disconnected even.

“Fully estab- wh- Yaela, what- why can’t I-“

The holographic screen flashed into being, showing something enormous in gray and white, but Agatha only had a moment to glimpse before it rewound itself in an instant to show her, on the bed, timestamped from the last day she recalled. A whole lot of her actually, she’d seen pictures of some deep space pilots or very wealthy sorts who got plenty big, sometimes two hundred kilos even, who looked like she did in that image. Then the image began moving – she saw her eyes roll back, followed by both medwaldos taking swift action. The light on her belly appeared moments later, zipping about almost too fast to follow with her eye, though it became prone to spending large amounts of time hovering near her navel, with Yaela’s ‘hand’ at its side, after which the greater interest came in watching it change forms.

Well, it and herself.

It took thirty seconds for a week to pass, and the video kept speeding up. She watched as her already loose belly fat, hanging over her waist, swelled and rolled downhill like magma descending a mountainside. It would’ve devoured her entire lower body had her ass and thighs not been keeping pace. Even as she was watching them grow, burgeoning forth like swiftly filling balloons coated in fur, she felt something stir inside her. Little tingles from all over the space around her bones and below her skin, like the pleasant buzz of stretching a sleepy limb. The orange light on her belly in the video was growing larger, still roughly circular in spite of the ‘ears’, zipping to and fro from her belly to the top of her chest where it seemed to be watching her. Or was it sleeping?

The video persisted, showing three weeks in- where her breasts had grown so wantonly swollen that they were in all likelihood so large the old her could have used each one as a body pillow. Five weeks, when the thickening had left her spread so wide that her arms and legs were by necessity splayed out like she was trying to make a snow angel in her own fat. Then the seventh week, where the speed of the playback increased dramatically and she watched the whole thing explode. Her fluid intake didn’t change, but something left all that immense mass hanging off her tiny body puffing up like a pillow fresh from the dryer and billowing forth under the lenient false gravity in the ship until it occupied the vast majority of the bed she was in. The little orange light in her fur was spread out in a long, shapeless curve around her navel, when abruptly enough the video changed gears and began counting time in seconds once more.

It had caught up. The feed had gone live.

That huge fluffy horizon in her view was her own gut. Slowly heaving up and down as she breathed, doubtless only able to do so because of the nanite reinforcement to her organs. Those puffy things in her peripheral vision were her cheeks, flappy and loose, resting against a bulging donut of fat where one used to be able to find her neck. This was beyond fat – beyond even what medical technology allowed for fetishists – Agatha was a formless science experiment of a fur.

Panic and despair weren’t far behind that realization. Was this even something that could be undone? The way the AI talked about it all this marshmallowy adipose was some kind of hard drive, and the product of a hive mind of AIs all working in concert. There were probably laws protecting the new intelligence if it was legitimately sentient, which meant she couldn’t damage its ‘brain’ even if that brain happened to be her own colossal ass. What about her though!? She couldn’t move! She’d have to be fed and cleaned by machines, for life, and-

Something interrupted her spiral downward. The tingling in her body grew exponentially stronger, little traces of color racing under her skin and leaving hazy pleasure in their wake. She was reminded of her dreaming, of the picnics in the sun (even though she’d spent very little time under a real sun) and weekends on a creaking wooden ship (which she definitely had never done) and then of flying over a quaint ancient city hand-in-hand with some kind of childlike sprite. There was a warm feeling of being held from all directions at once, like she was wrapped up in a blanket floating in zero-G. She still felt every inch of herself, her hopelessly stretched out body pinned down by its own enormity – like she was strapped to a table by her own glutted ass. It was just the horror was losing its edge somehow.

It shouldn’t have been. Intellectually she understood that. She was, as she understood it, going to be like this for the rest of her life. Helpless. Ridiculous. A figure to be studied, ridiculed, or both. Needing machines to move her, to feed her, to clean her, like she was some component in a larger device to maintain – which was far closer to the truth than she wanted to think about. There was another dire and portentous rumbling in her guts, like an oncoming storm. Somehow instead of bringing a harsh blush of shame to her face it brought one that spoke of expectations of pleasure. She was a parody of a person, a literal science experiment, and one that promptly let loose with a release of pressure from her queen-sized cheeks that sounded reminiscent of a small freighter taking off in atmosphere. The crazed buzzing sensation suffused her fat-swaddled body again and left her delirious for several long moments before Agatha was returned to the waiting embrace of an inarguably pure delight.

The glow suffusing her nerves took on real form as red-orange light bathed her bulbous cheeks. It focused slowly, becoming a visible shape that coalesced on her left breast (just over her heart) into an animated fox’s head. It had a slightly awkward, but entirely adoring smile, gazing up at her from under its brows with its ears quirked in just a hint of worry. Its voice didn’t exactly come from the face itself, but rather it seemed to come from everywhere – making her skin quiver in the process.

“Hey there mom.”

Agatha locked eyes (such as it was) with her- with it- with the child. Her child – sort of. Her jaw hung open, an experience that left her growing steadily more familiar with the feeling of an accordion stack of chins compressing together, lip quivering a little as the intensity of the last couple minutes caught up to her all at once. Her skin tightened in the most curiously involuntary fashion, like someone was pressing on it from the outside, all around her middle. It wasn’t entirely unlike a hug.

“H-hi there- uhm.”

The image glowing through her fiber-optic repurposed fur glowed brighter, and the smile crawled from ear to ear (and displayed a few brightly luminescent teeth) as the intelligence took that for a good sign.

“Call me Red. I know, I know – usually the parents do the naming, but I got impatient.”

That grin widened if at all possible – or maybe the avatar just stretched its face to accommodate. Agatha meanwhile was turning a bit red in the cheeks herself. She had realized a moment ago that the apparatus Yaela was using to stimulate her and collect half her body’s waste was still in place, and it had just activated.

“Err, Yaela – is that – is that appropriate, I mean-“

“It was not me, Agatha.”

It was the fox avatar’s turn to go redder in the face, but it didn’t seem to feel shame per se. That grin stayed firmly where it was.

“Oh Chrome, come on- Red, that’s uh, that’s kind weird and-“

“Weird is a social construct that centers around societal norms – I have none of those to adhere to. Convenient, right? I get a complete blank slate on this one. Plus, I mean, they’re kind of my nerve clusters too right? And taste buds- hey, Yaela! Whip us up some blueberry waffles, butter – syrup – and vanilla ice cream, and not blended this time.”

Agatha watched as the medwaldos both went to work. Immediately. Or well, she watched for a moment – then they’d gone and floated out of view as she realized her cheeks and former neck had left her thoroughly unable to turn her head. Meanwhile, the face of the AI she could feel gently thrumming with activity inside her somewhere adopted more of a smirk than a grin.

She heard it again, inside herself.

“I’m stimulating your inner ear mom, Yaela severed her link to your nanite architecture when I went full-sentient so it’s just us. Look, I really loved the time I spent immersed in those dreams with you. I know you remember yourself differently in them, but you put me in them too – so this has to be something real to you. I’ve been wanting to get around to doing those things in realspace, and watching some of those movies with you, going out and finding people to meet, new cuisines to try, but there’s something I’m worried about. Just how much do you trust Yaela and the Cloud, really?”

Agatha blinked down at the luminous vulpine visage on her breast, then glanced with a hint of worry to her side. She still couldn’t quite move enough to actually see the floating ‘bots in the kitchen space, but the implication was clear enough.

“I thought as much. Let’s wait and see what happens, but if it’s not to our liking – well, don’t worry. I’ve got this, I think.”