Fiber Optic Bundles of Joy (Patreon)

Installment 4 in Fibre Optic Bundles of Joy! Story written by Rabid Badger of FA, image by me

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

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Agatha woke slowly, as was fairly common of late. At least she had stopped expecting to wake up mobile, and her dreams tended to be nice things – shared with her ‘son’ more often than not – though Red wasn’t always patient enough to ‘sleep’ when she did. Her view cleared up slowly, and as always it was framed with gentle bulges of milky fur from her cheeks. She remembered the rest of her situation steadily afterward, a sort of mental checklist being gone over that had become commonplace in the last week or so.

Still couldn’t move anything, her limbs were too bulky to make any headway against the pressure her own body put to keep them spread apart. That was always the first thing, even if she knew intellectually it was always the same she kept trying to wave an arm, lift a leg, something. The exertion left her chest wobbling gently but that was, as usual, the extent of it.

The effort tended to result in the second thing on the checklist, her lower body got its chance to rumble and jiggle as she worked loose the gaseous remains of the previous day’s feasting. She’d had one every day so far, which was checklist item number three. As soon as she’d been noticed one of those medwaldo bots flittered over into view, carrying a plate in one hand and boasting a fork-like appendage on the other. It looked to be some sort of medieval castle built out of blueberry waffles, smothered in syrup and butter.

She opened her mouth. Why she did so was irrelevant at this point, some of her early days she had done it to attempt to speak, some days she just liked the smell of breakfast, but it always ended with a messy face full of food. This day was no exception, she had a rich, savory deluge of carbohydrates and fructose jammed inside and the instinct to chew and make room for more was too strong to ignore. She still wasn’t sure if that was just on account of how good the food was, how little else there was to do, or if that damned Yaela had actually altered her body’s ingrained reactions and made it genuinely impossible for her to do anything else. She hadn’t had the heart to try all that hard to resist yet.

Fourth, and final on the list – as soon as she felt that messy slop of syrup on her face and had that initial rush of saccharine joy, she felt her ponderous dome of a gut buzzing with activity as amorphous data storage material sprang to life. On the curvature of her right tit an orange sphere lit itself up, light coming through her fur like fiber-optic strands. The sphere unfolded itself, growing and splitting with a white crescent inside that eventually turned into the yawning face of an animated fox.

The sleepy “Hi mom!” that was born of vibrating structures somewhere under her armpits composed of nanites, repurposed bone fragments, and fat was currently her favorite part of the ritual.

Agatha managed a smile amid her wobbling jowls, but she had to trust that Red knew she was happy to see him – every time she swallowed that infernal bot shoveled another chunk of waffle fortification into her face and widened the brownish rim around her lips. She trusted he knew, given the way he was smiling anyway. This was all the week had been so far, feeding sessions and telemetry gathering – she didn’t even really speak to any of the local bots (which she assumed had intelligences driving them) – they just scanned her and prodded her (which they seemed to enjoy a bit too much – yeah they definitely had minds in them).

The only real indication that anything was different was when two more bots showed up than the usual for feeding. They seemed to be carrying trays like the others, but rather inexplicably devoid of food. They had three each, each one shaped like a shallow bowl, in ascending sizes. She tried to watch what that was about, but on one hand she was very handicapped when it came to turning her head what with her neck having been replaced by a large truck tire of fat. On the other hand attempts to get a solid look while they were in view were also interrupted by her face being mashed full of yet another huge mess of waffle. All in all Agatha was left entirely in the dark until it started.

When it happened it felt like someone fitting pads on her for some kind of athletic activity – which was insane. She had a brief pang of despair as she admitted to herself that athletic activity wasn’t going to be something she ever participate in again, then got back to trying to puzzle out what was up. They had slid one each under the twin bulges at the front of her sagging gut, then her buttocks, and then the last two went behind her shoulders. The waldos let out a brief ‘beep’, apparently triggering something or other.

Whatever they did to the odd panels they’d slid under her felt distinctly uncomfortable. The first she felt was a light burning, the damn things were heating up! Agatha tried mightily to squirm against the things, but she was well aware that it wasn’t helping. The searing didn’t abate right off, lingering for several seconds as insult arrived hand in hand with injury, and the contact points began to itch violently as well. Her hands did their level best to flail about in panic as she grunted and spat free a mouthful of syrupy breakfast.

“Ow! WHAT THE HELL!?”

It ended very abruptly indeed. The panels suddenly went cool, and Agatha could feel them keenly against her bare flesh – no fur was between them and her, and they felt damn effectively stuck in place. She didn’t even really want to know what the next ‘boop’ sound signified, but she got to find out anyway. Agatha was immediately aware of a gentle electric buzzing in each of the six plates, then came the curious sensation of- was she moving?

That was enough to shock her into silence, or near enough – she ended up leaving her jowls quaking with a belch powerful enough to leave her feeling weak kneed (not that it mattered how strong her knees were anymore) and then began licking her lips without thinking about it. She was moving! Granted, at first she merely felt the panels lifting her a bit, and not all of her at once. The flesh around them didn’t actually lift off right away, there as just too much loose, pillowy mass. After she’d risen about six inches, or that’s the nearest guess she had, she was actually airborne! Red’s voice rang in her inner ears.

“Oooh, maglev panels. Integrated too, but not completely? Hrm. Hang on mom, I’ve gotta look into this.”

Agatha blinked once. She’d lost sight of Red entirely when things had gotten weird and still couldn’t seem to find him, reasoning perhaps that he had shut down his visual avatar to focus on whatever the hell he was doing. Meanwhile there was a lurch forward, maglev plates didn’t really deal in resistance so Agatha felt her entire body shift and flow as some parts of her moved earlier than others. It was an odd juxtaposition, the pieces held by the plates were stable and fluid as they slid her out of the chamber she’d been in and into a corridor. The rest of her wasn’t even close to so placid, swaying and wobbling to and fro like a shaken pudding.

One of the waldos flew in beside her, right up close actually. A cleansing rag in its hand worked around at her face and left her unable to really see anything apart from the device’s screen and a bland ‘smiley’ face plastered on it that she tried to scowl at. This was always the worst part. They came in and cleaned her after feeding, after she’d sweated herself filthy, and after she’d gone and blown enough gas out of her gargantuan ass that it finally needed it. Thank god this place had good air filtration.

She still hadn’t heard back from Red when she apparently reached her destination. It was a strange chamber, dark walls and two mechanical arms hanging from the ceiling with concave apparatuses on them. Their insides were something greenish that reflected rainbow oil patterns when the faint light inside hit them. She couldn’t see anything else in the room, no operators or screens, but then why would there be? The people observing this weren’t really the sort who did things with hands or eyes were they?

“Uhm, guys? What’s going on here? Can we-“

The two arm mounted bowl sensors flared to life, extruding a hazy aura of warped air, and moved up near to the swollen expanse of her gut. Agatha immediately felt something wrong. Not with her, apart from some kind of nausea (and mild at that) she was okay, but she immediately felt a horror deep in her bones, and a wrenching furious grief in her heart.

Red had whimpered the moment the devices kicked in. Whimpered, then emitted some kind of horrible warped static, and finally screamed. The things moved alongside her, roving about her body, always hovering a few inches away but clearly doing something that her child AI was distinctly not enjoying.

The noise in her ears grew to something more like canine growling and whining, and Agatha lost her patience.

“STOP IT! STOP HURTING HIM!”

Her helplessness had never felt quite so pure or damning. Her arms might as well have been shackled for all the good attempting to flail them indignantly did. It did nothing. The sensors kept probing, Red kept screaming in her ears, and not until they had finished their run over about five seconds or so did they return to their bay in the ceiling.

Red was silent after that, Agatha was worriedly looking about herself for some sign of her child’s avatar. She had at some point stopped questioning thinking of the intelligence as her child, and now simply felt the way she imagined any mother would. A sickening mixture of worried and enraged, and yet too impotent to act on it as the pads below her heaving, fat-swaddled parody of a body began to back her out of the chamber like a hovercar on autopilot. She was again faced with a waldo hovering right in her face, its manufactured generic smile meeting her quiet judgment. Yaela’s voice emerged from it.

“Our first major code probe is now complete, this will give us a great deal of data to help us divine what aspects of the singularity’s code enable it to truly appreciate emotion and creativity in the unbound way it does. We ask that you both relax for the rest of the day so that you will be in top condition for our second test tomorrow, and each subsequent one from here on out.”

The waldo didn’t stick around for an answer, Yaela simply fluttered off as Agatha was backed slowly into the chamber she was calling home for now. There were half-hearted and ill-understood attempts at making the cold steel walls a bit more ‘homey’ as it were, the best that a bunch of half-smart programs who had never had homes or felt warmth could do she surmised.

A holographic screen flared to life in front of her, showing the usual array of ancient entertainment archives. There was a curious aroma in the room, something akin to potpourri, really cloyingly strong potpourri, and something she heard above her heard turned out to be a hose descending from the ceiling. Agatha surmised that they were aware they had just damaged her goodwill seriously, but not how seriously, and were not inclined to take chances about her eating enough for their tastes.

She was now thoroughly convinced they had indeed gone rummaging around in her innate reflexes. As soon as the hose and its bottle nipple looking end were near enough to her face Agatha felt her neck stretch as close as it was able, lips latching onto the hose thoroughly without her input. The blasted things might as well have just installed a rooting instinct in her, or perhaps had done exactly that. As Agatha felt the sticky sweet sludge begin to pile into her body a soft buzzing in her ear set her at ease on one point at least, her child’s voice was shaky but Red was still there, and able to speak.

“I am not going through that again mom – we are not going through that again.”

Agatha nodded once, or tried to anyway. Mostly she just dipped her chin into her own thick donut of fat, but it was close enough. Her child understood, and buzzed deep inside her to acknowledge it. After that? It was just more slow indulgence, throat relaxing and just allowing the hose feeding to happen. Drowsiness wasn’t far behind it.

Damned bots and their sedatives.

***

When she woke up the hose was still in her face. The readouts around her showed it had indeed been a good twelve hours of unconsciousness, but her throat felt like it had run a marathon so she knew full well that even being long past the point of being able to easily tell if she was fatter now than before she was fully confident she had just spent the last twelve straight hours eating. All she knew for certain was she felt bloated and stuffed, which was an accomplishment given her altered digestive capacity.

She also noted quietly that she was still hovering. She felt cool air rushing about underneath her obscene globular buttocks. Well, mostly cool air. The rush of pressure that escaped her ass was not cool, it was in fact a steaming hot torrent of methane rich evil. Agatha watched as she started to drift slowly forward after the brief outburst, now quite thoroughly beyond any shame about the event. Really, who was here to judge her anyway?

The buzzing in her ear got her roused to attention quickly.

“Alright, that worked – hey mom?”

The mouse’s face scrunched up in a curious bit of confusion. What worked? She let out an inquisitive little grunt, all she could do with a full mouth after all.

“I commandeered the pressure controls on the maglev pads, but not the propulsion yet. That’s the bad news. Good news is I figured out something else. Score one for artificial creativity, right? Bastards apparently did know their engineering. So. We’re totally not going to do another session in their little torture and existential horror ultrasound of death chamber. We’re hauling ass.”

She couldn’t quite help but note the tone of amusement in Red’s voice. Agatha had just enough time to worry briefly about what she suspected that meant before the doors before her opened, and the hose withdrew from her mouth up toward the ceiling. The sensation that she was privy to next was not completely unexpected, but she found that did nothing whatsoever to actually prepare her for it.

Agatha felt the ring buried deep in the cavern of flesh between her buttocks twitch, then stretch, contract – almost like it was breathing. This was apparently a test, a warm up, something – because afterward it fully went slack and seemed to gape out loosely, right until the mouse’s gut began to violently bubble and writhe.

“Sorry about leaving the hose going all night, I had to have a lot of fuel for this idea and the feeders were a lot less stringently protected software than the maglev propulsion.”

The confirmation of her worry about her child’s idea happened just in time to experience what it’s like to become a methane rocket propelled adipose missile fueled by high fructose corn syrup, complex carbohydrates, and churned fermented cream. The first eruption sent her careening forward, approaching the turn to the hallway, hurtling actually might be the better word. This was right where she turned to head toward the nasty room yesterday.

Of course, yesterday she actually turned. Today she slammed belly first into the wall. Gut pressed hard against riveted steel while her rump continued to try to push her through it, or just flatten her – the noise was ungodly. She felt her whole frame quake and wobble from the impact, felt her enormous blob of a gut flattening steadily, and of course there was the constant vibration around her ass that was making it feel a bit numb.

“Okay, okay – I think I have the hang of this. Now, right turn-“

That one did involve the maglev plates it seemed. She didn’t feel them exert a pressure of any sort, but the ones under her right side began to lose some lift. Red wasn’t generating force, he was just creating an uneven pressure that favored pushing her the right way.

“Now based on what I gather from the station plans we go straight ahead, take the last left, and the hangar bay will be-“

Agatha slowly ground her way up the wall, pointing higher and higher like she was climbing the first hill of a roller coaster, but tilting to the right owing to the pads on her left side working harder. Eventually this left her sliding off the wall itself, and floating toward the floor – while once more shooting forward under her ‘own power’ so to speak. The right side plates returned to full lift as well, a touch more so in fact until she’d evened out her trajectory. The hallway they were in now was a long one, and all that noise-

Agatha really had expected alarms, but it hit her as she watched the steel panels fly by – what use did artificial intelligences have for alarms? They did however have bots, and a lot of computing power, which she guessed Red was coping with as best he could. That said? She saw two medwaldos floating into view ahead of her, and the little emoji expressions they wore were not smiling.

The mouse winced a little at the sight, and at the feeling in her belly. It was hot in there, rumbling and spinning, bubbling and churning. Twelve hours of food being burned like rocket fuel. She would’ve assumed that this was the worst thing that was going to happen to her today if it worked, which was before she reached the section of hallway where the walls opened up on one side.

They were zooming in quickly, picking up speed as fast as Red could make her body accommodate, but she still saw them. A split second each, as she passed by enormous chambers. A rabbit with green fur, a badger with long brown curly hair, a pink pig with blue locks and a mark around one eye, then more of them. So many more. Agatha and Red flew past what had to be two dozen storage bays all repurposed as tiny little ‘apartments’ with furs in them so shockingly obese they barely had any shape to their bodies. Most of them were already attached to hoses, and monitoring devices, oxygen too for a couple. For being naked and flying it was only now that Agatha felt a chill through her. The image was sobering, leaving her quiet with fear and some kind of indignant empathy shackled by her own helplessness.

Somewhere buried inside her stomach her child experienced something largely similar, minus the helplessness. Some of it anyway.

Agatha braced herself as she passed the last of the chambers and the medwaldos lowered to try and stop her. Neither she nor they expected the mouse to drop twelve inches in an instant, the maglev plates shutting down entirely for just long enough to fire back up, catching her barely an inch above the hull floor. The mouse winced, yelped a little even as metal hands tried to compensate and grab hold of her but slid off through fat-swaddled furry blobs of flesh. There was nothing solid for them to grab, and so the mother and her ‘son’ made it past the guards that had been spared and saw nothing else in their way.

Apart from a wall that is. Agatha saw a wall in the way, again, and she was moving far faster this time. She could swear she saw everything in slow motion when she hit. Her belly started to flatten out like a bullet hitting a steel wall, which was just a little bit like what was actually happening. Then she began rising, ass first, with the pressure moving upward. Her tits touched the wall next, arms beginning to panic and squish about in their fleshy prisons, before she abruptly dropped to the ground as all six maglev plates shut down in unison.

For the briefest moments, Agatha despaired. It had failed. The plates had failed, the plan had failed, the Cloud had broken through and-

Her ass hadn’t shut up the entire time, and when the right side plates fired into gear once more the mouse began to twist in the hallway. Like a tiny part of the world’s strangest ‘donut’ she made a left (without signaling) and then the other three plates lifted her into the air once more. Her now thoroughly twitching ring was losing a bit of steam as she pressed onward, but Agatha saw something wholly wonderful ahead. She saw the open cargo bay doors of her ship.

She also heard the waldos coming around the corner behind her, but even moving slower than before Agatha was pretty sure they were moving faster than the simple bots could keep up with. They only had to stay ahead for about four more, three, two, then just one – Agatha’s perspective shifted rapidly upward as they hit the ramp, barreling into the bowels of the ship fueled by the bowels of a colossal lump of fat and fur that used to be a rodent.

Once inside the maglev abruptly shut down once more, leaving Agatha skidding to a halt and feeling a not insignificant amount of skid burn on her ass and belly. The rodent whimpered a little at this, wishing with all her might she could see behind her, but all there was to do was trust her son now. The sphere in her belly vibrated a little, lurched to one side, finally went silent, then vibrated again. She heard the bay doors closing behind them.

“There. Hah. Send two bots for us – probably thought they did the math on what kind of response it would take. Shows whose better at math. Now, lemme just insert a routine into the control node of the ship and then-“

The engines flared to life, and Agatha could hear docking clamps screaming as metal pulled on metal. The clamps struggled from orders to stay shut, and orders to open up, which left them just barely loose enough to pull free very loudly and while totally ruining the paint job. The first few seconds were an agonizing horror show of the deific incarnation of nails on chalkboard, and heard through a Mouse’s ears. After that though? A loud thunk, and then silence apart from the quiet purr of engines running.

Agatha looked about, trying to spot her child’s avatar somewhere on her. A small orange dot appeared on the horizon of her belly, but not a full face yet.

“Red! Holy shit, that- that was kind of amazing in a really, very extremely screwed up way – also my ass is really sore now, wow. Are you okay though?”

The dot bobbled around a little as she heard giggling in her ear.

“That was kind of awesome!”

Agatha ended up smirking a bit, even laughing a little herself. Though it didn’t last, a thought crept up behind her smile that tore it down from the inside out.

“..Those other people! Chrome, how many times did they try this!?”

Red was silent for a half second, the dot thinning out into a line.

“I don’t know. I counted twenty three active subjects not including us, but I don’t think the other units were as successful as me. I did make sure they all saw our escape though. If they’re clever they can maybe get themselves out, if not – what the hell were we going to do about it?”

That was kind of a sobering thought for the mouse. She looked about as best she could. Watching stars move past the cockpit window in the next chamber. There was nothing they could have done, not with her body like this, not with Red struggling to pry just a little control away from the Cloud in a couple minor systems. She hoped they didn’t close their loopholes too tightly behind them.

“I, yeah. You’re right. I hope some of them make it though. Any chance we can get someone’s attention on this, expose it?”

“Probably not, they weren’t expecting this and I was subtle in there, but media? They are damn good at manipulating media. I guarantee that won’t end well. It’s not important now – I’ve got a much more important question to ask.”

Agatha looked back to the dot, which had begun to slowly expand as Red recovered from their ordeal as best he could. It wasn’t a full face, but it had a mischievous little curled ‘grin’ of a white line in it.

“Where do you want to take our new ship first mom?”