by Wilson Barbers
For all the strides that'd been made in weather, they still couldn't get humidity right. Page Briant woke in his roomapt feeling both raw-throated and muggy, none too thrilled with this getting-up-in-the-morning sack. His wall was strobing insistently, though, so there was nothing to do but roll out of bed and answer it.
A message from his service. Shift his ass cross city for an appointment at Fab Media. 0800 hours. It was 0740 now, which didn't give Briant much time to pull himself together. So he went for the quick clean 'n' spruce, didn't bother with a tie. If he hit the metrowires right, he'd be able to make it across with a couple minutes to spare. What a way to start the morning.
Halfway over, though, he was awake enough to wonder why he was so all-fired in a hurry. Wouldn't do any good for him to arrive at Fab on time if he didn't have his wits about him. So he stepped off line for a shot of caffeine at Higgins' and arrived at 0825 with both clear throat and mind. Glover was waiting for him at the entryway, accusingly flashing the time on his chest console.
"I know, I know," Briant told the bot. "You want me on time, gimme some kinda advanced warning. What's so hot that it warrants waking me at this hour, anyhoo?"
The law contractor turned without answering and lead him into Fab Media Complex. Typical citygovbot snottiness. You'd think they were still in the twentieth century the way an op got treated. But the truth was that the only way any copwork got done these days was by free-lance hirees like Briant. He followed Glover on ramp and took a good slow gander at Fab complex's interior.
As the city's foremost producer of stimulations, Fab catered to audiences of all orientations - from anorekt to adipost - and its complex was it own small city. They shared ramp with a pair of anorekt technicians on their way to complex center. The techs' sunken faces showed distaste at the sight of Briant's slightly paunchy reg-sized fleshiness. But that was typical, too. Except for their skull-shaped heads (even an anorekt was unwilling to do away with brain weight), their skeletal bodies glinted with the look of well-polished synthesis.
The feeling of disdain was mutual.
He got off with Glover at the office of Raymond Fab. If he was meeting with the head of the whole smear, this had to be a big deal indeed. They found Fab sitting in a custom-made stimulation seat, going over the previous day's rushes, his bearded face wrapped in critical concentration. Briant and Glover waited for the guy to finish experiencing, then the bot flashed an interrupt. The media mogul sat up, took in their presence and rose from his seat.
"Checking out the finale of the latest Jason movie. Anorekt audience loves to feel those body parts getting sliced off." He cringed, then headed for his desk. Though one of the biggest media men in city, Fab had one of those naturally casual styles that automatically made Briant wary. Nobody that successful should be that relaxed. "They're our second-most popular anorekt items - right behind the Brundlefly comedies."
He shot Briant a rueful what-ya-gonna-do look. Fab had gotten his start directing adipost stimulations, and his tastes clearly remained on the other end of the spectrum. But he knew his company's success lay in its diversity, so he gave all his product equal time.
As an adipost fan himself, however, Briant knew Fab's fare was at its best catering to that sector of the city. Behind the bizman's desk were two framed displays from his directorial debut, Big Meal on Madonna Street.
"So why'm I here?" Briant asked. "I've no interest in slice-'em-up stims." He reached for a bowl of cordials on Fab's desk and took a sample. Whoa, real chocolate! Wouldn't Ginny love a kilogram or ten of this?
"To the point, eh?" Fab said approvingly. He turned to the flashing Glover. "Give him the basics," he ordered. The bot complied.
Kidnapping, Glover's console read. Taylor Delta. Early this morning.
Took him a few beats to i.d. the name, but he finally got it. "The reg star?" Briant said, savoring his chocolate. "Where and when?"
Fab smiled at the op's quick recognition, tagged him as a reg fan. "She was taken from her roomapt right here on complex. Sometime between 0110 and 0700. Had a wake-up call for seven, so that was our first indication."
"She in the midst of a project?" Briant asked. He couldn't see anyone willingly getting up at that hour unless they had to.
"Historical romance based on the life of Mamie Van Doren," Fab explained. "It's our prestige project for the reg audience."
"So who discovered her missing?"
"Our director, Richard Howard. Perhaps you saw his Life of Jayne Mansfield?"
"Don't get into reg stims," Briant said. "No offense, but it isn't what I wanna feel on my off hours."
The bearded media man smiled even more broadly, reassessing, and pushed the bowl of cordials Briant's way. "Just came in this morning," he said, nodding as the free-lance op took a second handful. For an instant, Briant flashed on something his ex-wife'd said just before she'd left to get enhanced:
"You're the kinda audience the growth stims're made for. Eager for the sensation but too scared to make the commitment!"
She was right, dammit.
"Any ransom messages yet?" he asked, pushing his mind away from that dead end.
"Nope," Fab answered. "Won't get one either, if I'm right about the brains behind this."
"You've got an idea. Care to share it?"
"Not 'til you've committed yourself," the media man said.
Fair enough.
"Newsies know anything about this?" A negative from Fab. "I wanna see her roomapt," Briant decided, knowing that in doing so he was all but sealing a contract to take the case.
"Fine by me," Fab said. "Glover can take you there. Stop on by once you've checked it out. We'll talk some more."
The reg starlet had a ground floor roomapt facing a densely planted arboretum. An excellent setting for a snatch. Briant found little nosing around the roomapt, which was blandly furnished (rumpled futon, bedstand, stim seat) but for a single holographic display of the missing actress. With her long dark hair, bee-stung lips and full-breasted hourglass figure, Taylor Delta was the quintessential reg star. Briant guessed her weight at somewhere around 60 kilograms.
He hit the bedstand and turned on the wall. Rows of printed dialog started scrolling across. Taylor must've been studying her lines before falling asleep. Or maybe she was still working on them when her kidnapper broke through the window. He followed a trail of jagged plex to the sill, noting the scrapes on the carpet. She'd been wearing soles, so she hadn't gone to bed yet. Outside the window, he could see a footprint in the soil. It was too big and deep to be a sixty kg. woman's.
"See this?" he asked Glover, bending over the all-too-convenient clue. "Scan it and gimme a guesstimate."
Left food. Plain sole. Male. Four hundred kilos, the bot flashed. High possibility: adipost.
"Maybe," Briant said. "But look at how flat the imprint is. Even the biggest adipost footprint'll have some flex to it thanks to their enhanced bone structure. This looks faked to me."
Not an adipost?
"If it is," he said, "I'm turning anorekt."
She woke to find herself on a gurney in a white room ringed with cabinets, the scent of something tasty in the air. Last thing that Taylor remembered had been this broad silhouette obscuring the words on her roomapt wall. She'd been going over her character's first face lift scene (no matter what their size orientation, the stim audience had a morbid fascination with the last century's primitive body sculpting techniques), an important shoot scheduled for next day, when she'd spun into unconsciousness.
Shaking the hair out of her eyes, Taylor Delta took a closer look around. The room was about nine centares. Didn't seem to be a door anywhere, which meant she'd probably been wired there. All the cabinets were locked, though, so any one could've hidden an exit. Only other furniture aside from the gurney was an adjustable futon with a tray fitted into both armrests.
She sat back on the futon and fingered her outfit. She was dressed in a kimono several sizes too big that she'd never seen before. It hung askew on her shapely shoulders, obscured her reg-shaped curves. Colorfully emblazoned with images of hybrid fruit, the robe was louder than anything that Taylor typically wore. Didn't say much for her kidnappers' taste, that's for sure.
Someone had undressed her, she realized as she looked down her robe's cleavage, face coloring with the realization. She'd done dozens of nude scenes for the stims, but this was plain unsettling.
"Don't worry," a treated voice suddenly said. "Was purely a professional procedure. No sordid voyeurism involved." She turned around to look, but, of course, the voice was being broadcast from outside the room.
"What am I doing here?" the actress yelled.
"In due time," the voice told her. "For now, all ya need do is relax and enjoy the experience."
Relax? This was nuts! She crouched and traced her way along the wall. As she got halfway around the room, the cabinets all loudly snapped open. Now that the voice'd made itself known, she caught a faint vibration in the room. Something substiminal, no doubt.
Standing, the reg actress examined the closest cabinet's contents. All three shelves, she saw, were rowed with familiar packaged foods. Next four chambers turned out to be refrigerated and equally stuffed with delectable fare. Whoever'd snatched her knew what she liked, she thought, as she made her way around the rest of the room. There was enough in these cabinets to last her week. Something to tide her over while her kidnappers negotiated her ransom with the company, no doubt.
"Hope the selection is up to your taste," the voice was saying, "cause you're gonna be famished soon. While you were out, you were enhanced!"
Enhanced! As the word reverbed in the back of her head, she pursed her full lips and considered its ramifications. Enhancement: the first step toward becoming an adipost!
Looked like those cabinets weren't meant to last that long, after all. . .
The actor playing Henry Kissinger, one of a long line of Mamie Van Doren sycophants, adjusted his tie in preparation for the scene they were about to re-enact. Briant had watched them go through four takes already. "Henry" kept stepping off his blocking and letting the furniture get in the way of sensory record. Howard, the director, was rapidly and openly losing patience.
"Dammit, Stig!" he grumbled. "You've done this role a dozen times in a dozen different stims. You're the twentieth century man o' power, ready to give up everything for an exciting reg-bodied woman. Quit gesticulating and stiffen up, man!" He turned to an assistant and said sotto voce, "His accent stinks, too."
Fifth shoot was on the mark, though, so Rick Howard called it quits for the morning. "Can't do anything more 'til they get Taylor back," he told the crew.
The stimulation director was a lean, gray-haired vet of the media biz, and while he was known for his prestige packages, his own image as a bit less shiny. He looked like a purveyor of more sordid fare (pet gratification stims, say) than a three-time award winner. Pulling Briant aside, Howard lead the op to a tree-shrouded bench away from cast and crew. Glover hovered respectfully on the edge of the arboretum, but Briant knew he was taking in every word.
"So you're the one found Taylor missing," Briant opened.
"Yeah. She was late for shooting, so I went to get her." He pointed across the arboretum in the direction of the actress' roomapt. "Found the place a shambles, so I immediately buzzed Fab."
"Any chance the lady left by herself?"
"You saw the roomapt," Howard shrugged. "Taylor was in the midst of starring in the biggest production of her career. Why would she bolt?"
"What was she like to work with?"
"A dream. One helluva reg stim actress, considering."
"Considering what?"
"Considering that good stim actors are hard to come by, period," Howard said, a why-am-I-even-bothering edge to his voice. "It's nuthin' like the old dramaturgy when actors had only sound 'n' image to work with. Stim actors need to feel what's happening to 'em!"
"When you said, 'considering,' I thought you might've been hinting that something coulda been getting in the way of her performance," Briant pursued. "Know of anything bothering Miz Delta?"
The stim director focused on a nearby hybrid fruit tree as he answered. "If there was," he slowly said, "she didn't tell me."
"Anyone she might've told?"
"Before she was big enough to move into complex, Taylor useta live in city with a reg extra named Summer Faulkner," Howard answered. "I think they've kept in touch."
Across the way, Glover was processing the name already, zipping through reg equity files for the woman's current address. No need to pursue that avenue further, Briant thought.
"So how long you been on this project?" he asked instead.
"Two weeks."
"Anything unusual about the shoot?"
"Actors are unusual," Howard said. "It takes a certain kinda person to be able to perform in historical stims. You needta have something missing in you to get that fully into character."
"And to be a successful director?" Briant asked.
"You need to be a total blank," the director said, laughing. He stood and picked a browning leaf from the hybrid. "I haveta get back to the set. Make sure the equipment gets checked in."
Briant nodded and waved Howard off. Howard's tree, he noted, seemed to be suffering from plasmic infestation. Like so much of the media biz, the closer you looked, the sorrier things appeared.
He joined Glover on ramp. On their way back to Fab's office, he asked the bot for data on Summer Faulkner.
Turned out Ms. Faulkner's equity membership had expired two years ago. She didn't turn up in the free-lance file, which only meant that she hadn't sealed any short-term media contracts recently. It'd take a while to track her address down.
"Keep at it," Briant ordered. "I'm not taking our Mr. Howard at face value."
They found Raymond Fab napping behind his desk. "Too much stim time wears me out!" he said once he'd been strobed into full wakefulness. "Not as young as I useta be." He ran his fingers through his thinning hair and asked, "You thinking of taking the case?"
"Maybe," Briant answered. Though they both knew it was a foregone conclusion. "You said you had some ideas about the identity of Ms. Delta's kidnappers."
"You needta talk to a former director of mine named Larry Robertson."
"Of Heaviness Stimulations?" Briant knew the name. Heaviness was Fab's foremost competitor in the sale of adipost stims. Where Fab specialized in product with a patina of class and sophistication, Heaviness was more aggressively free-lance in tone. Briant knew some of their stims by heart.
"That's Larry's outfit, alright. Never could take that I've gotten so successful diversifying Fab. Wouldn't put it past him to've engineered this just to give me grief!"
"Man holds grudges, huh?"
"The man's a lunatic," Fab said, "Pandering to the basest audience instincts and then wondering why his stims don't have the staying power of a Madonna Street! You may get an audience to buy a force-fat stim, but they ain't gonna vote for you when awards time comes around!" He indicated a wall of framed Metro Choice Awards to emphasize the point.
"And Robertson started out working under you?"
"The boy had promise once," the media man acknowledged. "Did second unit work on my musical remake of Babette's Feast, then graduated to the first three entries in our prestige circus ladies series.
"Did a particularly fine job on A Day with Dolly Dimples. But he kept pushing for my permission to do something more contempo. Larry's idea of modern was to dress up the old force-fattener mythology and update it to modern biomed technology."
"Seems to've proven a successful formula," Briant said. He had a copy of The Enhancement of Susan in his own stim library, in fact.
"Sure it has," Fab agreed. "There are a lotta regs out there, the only way they feel safe fantasizing about becoming adipost is to put a coercive spin on it. But it's a cheap, sordid fantasy."
And anorekt sliced-'em-ups weren't.
"So how'd Robertson leave Fab Media?"
"Not well. Caught him shooting his own docustim off hours. He'd talked this reg free-lancer into getting enhanced, so he could record the overnight results. Almost got away with it. We were a much smaller concern without a decent equipment tracking system. But I came into the studio that night. Don't even remember why."
"So the stim wasn't finished."
"Poor girl thought she was on her way to adipost stardom," Fab recalled. "Had the looks, but the reality was she couldn't act for soya. Only way she could do an enhancement scene was to have it really happen to her." He paused, remembering, and it was obvious that the scene wasn't all that unpleasant to him. "Went from 50 to 550 cageys in the space of a night. Haveta admit it was something watching her eat."
"So why'd you stop the shooting?"
"You don't understand the media biz, do ya?" Fab said, returning to the present. "Basic rule of art is this: you've gotta make things look as realistic as possible, but the audience still needs to know deep down that it's all faux. Real-life isn't as interesting. Or as controllable."
"So that was it for Robertson."
"Fired him in the morning," Fab said. "He did well enough in the long run, I suppose."
"And the actress?"
"She got outta acting, I think. Dunno what happened to her."
"Got a name on this adipost?"
"Never took it," Fab said. "After all, she was just a free-lancer."
Media biz, Briant mentally sighed. He gestured Glover over and held his op seat up, so the bot could scan it. "I'm taking the contract," he told both bizman and citygovbot, though the verbal confirm wasn't necessary.
He was officially on the case.
First stop: Heaviness Stimulations.
Her appetite was starting to build. One more sign that the mysterious voice hadn't been lying about her enhancement. Taylor'd already tested her new bone and muscle composition by lifting the gurney one-handed. Her inner structure had clearly been retooled to support more weight, would continue to adapt as she grew. Unfortunately, her new strength wasn't enough to push through walls or dislodge cabinets. She-Hulk, she wasn't.
With her body's building ravenousness, Taylor's ability to think her way out of her predicament was dimming. Her enhanced body was craving the nutrients it needed to accommodate its new internal workings. No matter how hard she tried to focus, she kept mentally returning to the food in those cabinets.
There was only one way to defeat her distracting obsession. Hit the cabinets hard and fast. Eat until she felt bloated and uninterested in anything further. Then she could go back to working up an escape plan. Taylor stood from the futon, dislodging a pile of ravaged candy wrappers from the tray.
She looked down in surprise. All around her bare feet were even more brightly colored wraps. She'd been nibbling all this time, and she hadn't even noticed it! First shelf of the cabinet had a major dent in it, and she still felt like she hadn't eaten a thing.
She pulled open the first refrigerated cabinet, grabbed two frozen dinners and quickly zipped open their packaging. They heated up in less than fifteen seconds once you broke the seal. So she grabbed a handful of synth chocolate bars to tide her over until her meals were fully cooked.
Midway into her first full meal, she stood once to pull out the rest of her refrigerated fare. They covered the gurney, cooking as she cut through her second full-course dinner. This should be sufficient, she thought, licking her reg-star lips.
Once they popped open, sending an array of stimulating scents through the closed-in room, Taylor lost all control. Leaping off the futon, she went at her offerings voraciously, stuffing soy meat and hybrid veges into her mouth with the kind of total absorption only the enhanced can know. Flavor after flavor bombarded her heightened senses. Taylor bent over the gurney, her formerly hourglass form widening and filling in the middle, new-formed pot belly peaking through the gap in her kimono, as she packed gram upon gram onto her body.
Halfway through the gurney, and she was up to 80 kgs., a more-than-respectable initial binge gain. Twenty minutes later, and she pushed the depleted packages to the floor. She was coming down from her opening wave.
That was incredible! She couldn't believe how exhilarating an enhancement binge could be. There was no way the faux stims came close to approximating it!
The actress felt alive for the first time in years, wiping food from her rounding cheeks with the sleeve of her kimono, myriad flavors of lingering on her tongue. She was, she saw, at least 100 kgs. of womanhood now. Her middle had thickened and was catching up with her once prominent breasts; her belly hung about an inch over her crotch. Her thighs, which had always been lush and fulsome, were insistently chafing against each other.
She had her mind back. But all she could do was lie back on the gurney with her robe undone, flashing on the binge experience. If she didn't pull herself together, she'd soon be gorging her way through the second wave without accomplishing anything.
But, damn, that binge'd been something!
TWO
The day's humidity'd dissipated when they got to Heaviness. Briant smiled at the 450 kg. receptionist, a slight redheaded adipost named Shelley who looked to be working on building herself up through a liquical feeding tube. Many adiposts shunned liquid diets; they denied you an essential part of the dining experience. But this poor gal had obviously gotten shortchanged in the binge enhancement phase.
"We're here to see Mr. Robertson," Briant announced. "Citygov investigation." He tapped Glover's console to verify the statement. Shelley nodded her chins in recognition. Pointing a pudgy finger rampwards, the redheaded adipost smiled around her tube and gestured them past. Briant gave a small wave as she watched them pass through the recognition gate and continued swallowing her hi-cal repast.
Heaviness Stimulations' complex was small-time compared to Fab's. Soon as they stepped on ramp, they were ready to step off. Robertson was waiting for Briant when they arrived at the stimstage, posing like a despot welcoming the op to some exotic Unamerican land. Behind the media man, an adipost crew was moving flats.
"Shelley buzzed that you were here," he said. Robertson's boyish voice was at odds with his physical appearance, which was broad and bizlike. "Word has it that Fab's big reg star's been snatched."
"The word is right."
"So Fab sent ya over to question me," Robertson said thoughtfully. He lead the op over to an adipost-sized set of chairs and offered Briant a seat. The media man hardly be classed as adipost, but he was pretty big for reg. Even so, the chairs dwarfed both of them. "He thinks I'm responsible, eh?"
"Word I have is that you didn't part Fab on the besta terms."
"Hey, I was shitcanned," Robertson grinned, a quaver in his voice undercutting the expression. "Ol' Man Fab wasn't thrilled with the direction I wanted to take his stims. So he dumped me."
"Maybe he didn't think that coercive stimulations were the way to go," Briant offered.
"Fab's a hypocrite," Robertson sneered. "Know why he's so big on historical stims? They hearken back to the days when biology was destiny. When a person was stuck with the body they'd been genetically given. As if nature's coercion was somehow nobler than homo sapiens'."
"Fab told me you were trying to shot an enhancement docustim without permission," Briant continued.
"Big mistake," the media man admitted. "Do anything for real, and it's all one take or nuthin'. Tried it a coupla more times with volunteers, but I learned illusion works better. Lemme show you." He heaved himself out of the chair and lead the op behind set. Arm outstretched, he proudly gestured to a row of dining women. "Meet the actresses responsible for my last five stims. From The Enhancement of Susie to Brenda's Blimping."
Seated behind a dining table in ascending order were five tangibly similar blondes ranging in weight from reg to 700 plus kg. Briant recognized them all from Susie, only in that stim they'd been brunette.
"Clones?"
"Quints," Robertson laughed, sounding like a young boy showing off his best birthday present. "Bari here dreamed of becoming adipost. But like so many regs she was also somewhat frightened of it. Talked her sister into undergoing varying degrees of enhancement first."
"The reg-sized actress is Bari?" Briant asked.
"I'm Bari," the largest blonde stated from behind a pile of emptied food packs, jowls quivering sexily.
"Once she saw how good her three sibs looked, heard how it felt, she jumped in line and went full treatment," Robertson chortled. Bari beamed happily and tilted an open pack into her wide mouth, tongue lasciviously stretching for the gravy drippings. "Problem's been convincing her reg sister, Mari, to remain the size she is! If I don't watch out, I may haveta resort to cloning to keep my reg-sized heroine."
The way each sister got progressively more gorgeous was too much for Briant. He reluctantly turned away from Robertson's sister act.
"Illusion," Robertson said. "These five're the best in the biz when it comes to acting out enhancement binges! They live their parts!" He lead the op away from the dining sisters and back to their seats. The techs' finished their work on the stim set, a replica of a well-stocked enhancement chamber.
"Better than that free-lancer the night Fab canned you?" Briant asked.
Took a few strides for Robertson to get the question. "Her? She was just an extra. I hadda use someone free-lance. I was recording on the sly! Too bad Fab came in mid-shoot." The look on his face belied the director's earlier words about the superiority of illusion.
"Sure," Briant said. "This enhanced actress. You know her present whereabouts?"
"Don't know if I remember her name," Robertson said. "It was somp'n seasonal, though."
"Summer Faulkner?"
Robertson nodded. "Last minute replacement, if I remember right," he added. "Reg actress that was gonna do it backed off at the last minute."
"Don't suppose you remember that gal's name."
"Never even met her," the director said. "Whole thing was arranged through BigWeigh Enhancement Clinic. They sent a buncha holos of their most recent applicants, and I picked her from that! It was no contest really."
Just then, the middle-sized actress (360 kg., Briant guessed) waddled on set. "Larry?" she said in a little girl voice. "Isn't it time to shoot my scene? I'm famished!" She eyed the set's display of comestibles eagerly.
"They all love acting out enhancement binges," Robertson explained. "Adipost actresses have a different view of dining than your average post. Sometimes I wonder if they even notice their maintenance eating. It's like they're all in a perpetual state of enhancement."
Now, that was an intriguing concept. "But that's impossible, isn't it? The process is only supposed to last about eight hours."
"Method acting," the director smirked. "I'm not complaining, mind you. These gals're always ready for a scene!" He stood from his seat and shouted to the stimtress, "Hold on, Kari! I'll get the crew!" He turned back to Briant. "Anything else you wanna ask?"
"A personal question," Briant said. "Both you and Fab are big names in adipost entertainment. Yet you both weigh in at the reg range."
"Doesn't mean a thing," Robertson said. "Eighty-eight percent of my audience is reg. The general post audience more typically goes in for the bios or basic dining stims. I've got other folks making stims for that slice of the metrographics. Only half of my people are adipost themselves. This is a democratic industry."
He hustled off toward the set and his waiting actress. As Briant stood to leave, he could hear Robertson giving Mari directions:
"Remember. When the scene starts, you're still feeling pissed off at your rich husband for forcing you into this. You wanna fight the binge when the urge first hits you. So I want at least five seconds of heart-felt resistance."
"C'mon, Larry," the adipost actress snorted. "Don't waste my time with the obvious! You'd think I was Bari or somp'n!"
"I heard that!" her massive sibling shouted from behind set. "She's just jealous cause I'm not called to hold back in any of my scenes!"
A democratic industry. Could be. But the only ones in biz positions that Briant had met so far were reg-sized. Lots of different-sized techs and actors in the media biz but way less variety at the top. It was, he remembered telling Ginny, one of the reasons he felt so reluctant to take the plunge himself.
It was time for him to hit the zone, talk to Ginny and get her take on things. But first, he wanted to stop at BigWeigh. The clinic, he knew, was conveniently set on the edge of adipost zone.
The redheaded receptionist had left her desk. Close to 1200 hours. Lunchtime. He hoped the lady was munching on something solid. Liquid dining was just too unexciting for him to imagine.
He headed back to Higgins' for his own lunch. Behind the counter Gruber, the acromeg manager of the eatery, gave Briant a look that was half welcome, half challenge. Acromegs couldn't help but come across as aggressive. Their height (3.2 meters, in Gruber's case) clashed with most everyone else's proxemics. Briant leaned across counter and swatted Grub's thigh with a menu, then made his usual order.
"Make it a double, though," he added, flashing his seal. "I'm on a contract today." He turned his attention to a newsie holo overhead. No public word on Taylor's disappearance yet.
"Bout time," Gruber boomed, punching in his order and reaching upwards for a caffeine. He plunked a squeezee in front of Briant, then a pair of packaged multiburgers. "Remember that when it comes time to figure my tip. I'm sicka these zero percentagers."
"Will do," Briant said, popping open his first package.
"Lunchtime!" the voice shouted, and Taylor roused from her memories and unconscious snacking to see that each of the emptied cabinets had been restocked. Curious, she rolled off gurney, her 112 kg. body starting to rev up for its second growth spurt. Calm down, she told her salivary glands. But they ignored her.
Menu this time was a lot less contempo. Plenty of twentieth century dishes with modern hi-cal additives. It all looked remarkably period. Taylor'd played plenty of historical dining scenes, but none of them had food that looked as appetizing or close to era as this. She tentatively bit into a beefburger, savoring the taste as even more food was wired on the vacated gurney behind her.
Were those squeezees filled with real Coca Cola?
Taylor paused before popping open a drink, though it took remarkable force of will to do so. She'd blown the last hour doing nothing but resting and noshing on snack items. Some heroine she was! She had to hold back. Keep her impulses at bay.
"Longer you hold off," the voice was chuckling in answer to her thoughts, "the stronger the binge. No one holds off for long, of course."
"Damn you!" Taylor panted, turning away from the cabinets. But no matter where she looked, there was food. She shut her eyes, but the scent of all those pre-cooked items remained. In a battle between mind and enhanced body, it was ultimately no contest.
"Fifteen seconds," the voice crowed. "Some kinda record!" The substiminal soundtrack came up full force for emphasis, but at that point it didn't make any difference. Taylor Delta was once more lost in fervid gormandizing.
As the enhanced actress ravenously went at the food that surrounded her, Taylor's body began to visibly swell. Her belly ballooned and pulled her robe sash apart; her breasts raced to keep ahead of her inflated paunch. Her chins grew in number and covered her neck. Down on the lower end of the hourglass, the former reg star's hips widened and pulled her hem up so far that it soon ceased to cover anything worth covering.
So this is real animal fat, she remembered rapturously thinking at one point. Real beef. Real milk product. It was all unlike anything she'd ever tasted. She plunged into each new flavor happily. There was an almost orgasmic sense of discovery in each new taste. Taylor went through twice the mass of her first binge, and when she'd finished, it showed.
She had to be past 200 kgs. Taylor'd experienced enough growth stims to be able to gauge her present weight just by looking down at herself. Her front loomed before her like it had a mind of it own.
Her kimono had all but vanished to her billowy sides; its once loose sleeves tightened around her arms uncomfortably. Lifting her right hand to pull the garment off, the actress felt both sleeves' seams rend. Her upper arms felt cool and free as she shucked the robe to the floor. It'd soon be wired off with the rest of the discarded packaging.
She sat back on the futon - which stretched to take in her newest size - and felt her flesh jiggle on both sides of her strengthened skeletal structure. Her widened flesh tingled with each new fat cell. Taylor lifted a hefty leg and examined her fattened right calf; it sagged down toward the back of her knee. Her thigh fat had started to segment into an ever shifting landscape of bulges.
At her current weight, the actress was still in the small adipost range. But the day was still young. Each binge, Taylor knew, came with greater intensity. In letting herself be taunted by her unknown captor into that futile show of resistance, she'd all but guaranteed an upper level weight gain.
She'd been acting like one of Heaviness' chump heroines. Susan in the Unamerican fattener's Middle-Eastern lair, for instance. There was no way to halt the enhancement process at this point; to continue trying would only ensure its irreversibility. Few adiposts chose to revert to reg size, but the process was possible, if only for a tiny percentage of people. What she had to do now was relax, see what her kidnapper had in store for her.
She only hoped it was half as good as that beefburger.
Sitting behind his desk, bony ankles perched on a corner, Jay Michaels was working to act casual. And failing. It wasn't Briant's presence so much as Glover's, for the citygovbot had the power to initiate a licensing probe at the hint of a suspected violation and was virtually unbribable. As head of BigWeigh Enhancement Clinic, Michaels was naturally sensitive to citygov influence.
Briant was trying to get that sensitivity to work for him.
"All we're interested in," he said from his chair, gesturing to emphasize the plural pronoun, "is any contact you've had with Larry Robertson."
"Not much to tell," the thin man said, clearing his throat. "Robertson uses us when he's got an actor who wants to -umm - enhance their career. Our most intriguing contract, in fact, was a setta sisters who. . ."
"Met 'em," Brian interrupted.
"Then perhaps you'd be interested in knowing that Mari contracted with the clinic today. Robertson'll be having conniptions when he finds out. But that's not my concern." He paused and tapped his slender fingers on the desk, trying to focus on Briant but glancing periodically botwards. "Interesting type of sibling rivalry there," he concluded. "If will was everything, I bet Mari would be the biggest sister of 'em all."
"But it isn't."
"One of the enduring myths surrounding the enhancement process," Michaels stated, "one that the stim perpetuate, is the idea that you can increase weight by willing it during enhancement. Or conversely, by holding off on the binge process. The truth's much more mundane. Every client's gain is a matter of individual genetic coding as well as the clinic's biomedical programming. With Robertson's quints, for instance, their genetic makeup was so similar that virtually all initial size difference was created by us."
Michaels was obviously one of those types who used the lecture mode to sidestep real conversation. He even dressed like a throwback to the days of discourse education. A teacher from the early scenes of a Fab biostym, say. Briant let him continue.
"Another myth shattered," he said by way of encouragement.
"It's a popular one," Michaels said, grinning, "because it helps take the sting out of the coercive fantasy. If a person's ultimate weight is dependent on their individual forcefulness, it removes part of the force-fattener's responsibility. The guilt's placed on the victim."
"I take it you're familiar with Robertson's fantasies."
"I've taken some of the early ones in," Michaels admitted. "Wanted to see how some of my early clients were doing. Material itself didn't do much for me, though. After all, I haveta supervise enhancements all day. One of those cases of too much knowledge spoiling one's enjoyment. I prefer the adipost historicals."
"Makes sense," Briant said. "Robertson told us about an early docustim. Had an actress enhanced and shot the binge growths on set. Isn't that dangerous?" He looked back toward Glover, just in case Michaels forgot he was there.
"Not really," the clinic head hastily said. "We've had folks get enhanced in clinic then head home to do their bingeing. Takes an hour for the body to fully gear up, y'know. We don't recommend this, of course. The amount of fuel that the growing adipost requires is hard for the inexperienced to gauge. Few homes possess the culinary resources of our clinic. At BigWeigh, we have an entire floor devoted to food prep.
"I remember that shoot, though. Robertson was more than well stocked!"
"You were there that night?"
"Sure was," Michaels said. "Nuthin' untoward about the procedure. But I wanted to make sure everything went off okay. It did. At least as far as the enhancement itself went." He paused and lowered his voice for effect. "There was some unpleasantness about the shooting itself."
"So I've been told."
"When that poor gal found out that Fab had ownership of the recording chip and that her big bid for stardom was gonna be filed away, I thought she'd explode!"
"She was planning on getting enhanced, anyway, wasn't she?"
"Sure," Michaels said, "but who can figure out people?"
"This actress was a last minute replacement for someone else. Remember anything about that?"
"Can't say I do," Michaels said. He flicked on a desk holo of a svelte brunette reg and continued. "Sent Robertson a buncha holos like this, but we don't keep our withdrawals on file for long. Enhancement's a pretty big step, and only three percent of those who undergo the procedure are physiologically capable of reversing it. We regularly get last minute withdrawals." As he spoke, the reg holo started to fill in provocatively, transforming into adipost. Michaels obviously used it as a demo.
"Does the name Taylor Delta mean anything to you?" Briant asked, tearing his eyes away from the display.
"She's a reg actress, isn't she?" Michaels said. "Not the kinda gal you'd expect Larry Robertson to be involved with."
"Dunno if he is," Briant answered. "You mind if I ask you a personal question?"
"Depends on the question," Michaels said, shutting down the holo.
"What gets a guy like you into the enhancement field?"
"Genes," the clinic head said. "When I was young, I was fully prepped to undergo the procedure myself. Then I found out that I fit into the fractional percentile unable to safely take part in the process. This way I'm still part of things."
Unable to become adipost while clearly wanting to: it made Briant's own ambivalence seem almost criminal. "You've been helpful, Dr. Michaels. Hopefully, we won't bother you again."
"No problem," Michaels said, though the relief on his face said otherwise. Briant and Glover left the office and headed for the exit. On ramp they passed two biomeds leading a dazed enhancement client to the clinic's resting area. The procedure'd obviously been a huge success for the new adipost. Only way the two could support the man was by wearing robotic muscular intensity frames.
"Any data on Summer Faulkner yet?" the op asked Glover, as he watched the biomeds tromp alongside their bloated but happy client. That, he thought, could've been him if he'd had the nerve to along with Ginny.
Searching adipost equity now, the bot scanned. Nothing yet.
"Well, maybe Ginny'll be able to tell us a thing or two."
The period food had been a one-binge deal. Her captor'd gone for bulk items this time. A cabinet full of chomp bar-sized pans of multiburger casserole. Another with vast bowls of a hybrid fruit salad. A third with sliced spuds in a hi-cal tofu sauce. Taylor made short work of them all, including that hectoliter keg of liquical. Didn't taste as good as the milk fat, but she could understand why they'd switched from the ultra-high-cost fare. Her capacity was increasing in wondrous degrees.
By the time she finished off her third binge, she was near 400 kgs., barely able to move around the room without part of her body bumping into something. Her belly hung down around her knees, which themselves were nearly lost in the growing population of bulges and sags that swaddled her legs. Her upper arms had widened substantially during this most recent growth. They swarmed over her elbows and dangled towards her hips. As she stood in the center of the room, her strengthened cardiovascular system pumping through layers of her that hadn't even existed a half hour ago, Taylor marveled at what she'd become.
"Not half bad, eh?" the voice suddenly said. "How's it feel to have your deepest fantasy realized?" She turned her mid-sized adipost body and saw that the gurney'd been wired away.
"Not half bad," the actress admitted. "The half that stinks, though, is the fact that it's all been done against my will."
"I know, Babe. We've all gotta make some sacrifices," the voice chortled. "Gotta bow to the demands of our audience."
Damn. These sackheads were recording her!
Gin's Joint was jumping, the floor of the chomp 'n' bounce bar packed with single adiposts eyeing each other's avoirdupois. The after-shift crowd. Over their heads danced holo reproductions of a variety of twentieth century cultural icons (TV Mama currently soundlessly shrieking into a microphone). A detek reconstruction of the pop standard "Fat Bottomed Girls" blared over the sound system. In back, two regs in frames were unloading empty drums from the kitchen wire. The room was rife with wonderful scents.
Soon as Briant stepped through the entrance, he was met by a familiar super-sized frame.
"Page," the adipost said, blocking Briant's path with his 700 plus kg. body "You back again?"
"Can't keep away, Blake," the op said.
"I'm sure Ginny'll be glad to see ya," the bar manager said. "She always is. Though I'm damned if I know why."
"Who can figure women?" Briant said, stepping around the adipost's imposing forefront. "Which reminds me. How's your better percentage doing?"
"Fine," Blake answered, a grin creasing his variably-chinned face. "As you can see, the place is doing well enough to keep us busy." He waved at a full-sized adipost who Briant vaguely remembered from one of Fab's musical dining stims. She stood outside the club, posing for entertainment newsies who recorded celebrity comings and goings. "You wanna see your ex-, she's upfloor in the office with Verda." He gestured through the crowd toward a blinking vertical wire in the corner by the dessert wall. Leaving Glover behind, Briant took a deep breath and shot upfloor to see Ginny.
He found her scanning receipts with an accountbot, Blake Conrad's reg-size wife standing by her side and handing her noteworthy bills. She was reclining on an air platform suspended two feet above the floor, sucking on a liquitube and wearing a translucent robe that showed each fold's shadow. Ginny'd added some kgs. since he'd last visited her. She had to be close to a ton.
"Ten cageys over," his ex-wife said, guessing his thoughts soon as she saw him. Her long blond hair was divided into a set of Valkyrie braids; her well-fed face was colored with the glow of healthy obesity. Ginny was definitely looking fine.
Shifting her voluminous form on the platform, left thigh spilling over the edge, she dismissed both bot and secretary. As Verda passed the op, she tapped Briant on the shoulder and said, "Niceta see you, Page,"
"You, too, Verda," Briant said, pulling away from the vision that was his ex-. The reg secretary shook her dark hair, a knowing look on her angular face, and wired downfloor.
"Figured you'd be heading my way, Page," Ginny said, letting go of her drink, "when I heard about Taylor Delta."
"News travels."
"It does upfloor," Ginny answered. She slid her platform across the floor toward Briant. He bent over and kissed her on the lips, tasting something soya. Before he could get too wrapped up in it, though, she raised herself out of reach and puled down a fresh liquitube.
"I'm surprised you know the name," Briant said. "Not many in the zone who'd recognize a reg actress like Taylor."
"She was a visitor here," his ex- told him.
"Really?"
"Another waverer," Ginny said, as she buzzed downfloor for a plate of sandwiches. She spoke around bites, but Briant didn't mind at all. He'd always loved watching her eat. "Didn't want any publicity around her visits. Was worried that her reg audience'd desert her if they knew where her heart lay." Gin went through each sandwich efficiently. A maintenance meal, something that her thousand plus kg. body regularly demanded. "But you could see it in the way she kept returning. She loved watching us."
"An adipostate?"
"Like Verda?" Ginny chuckled. "No, this was no reg, looking for a fuller-sized lover. Taylor was more like a certain free-lance op I know. Teetering between commitment and familiarity." She held her plate above her great surging front and offered a sandwich to her ex-.
"Way I guess it, she almost took the plunge once," Briant said, reluctantly shaking his head. "For one of Larry Robertson's early enhancement stims. Backed out at the last minute."
"I heard that rumor," Ginny nodded, into her third sandwich. "Supposed to've taken place when she was a free-lancer. Dunno how true it is. But you could probably find out from Summer."
"Summer Faulkner?"
"Another one of our - you should excuse the expression - regulars," Ginny explained, pulling out a napkin and using it to wipe mustard from her chins. "Nice lady; good appetite. She's the one brought Taylor upfloor to meet me some months back. Wouldn't have known who she was otherwise."
"Summer ever talk about her experiences in the media biz?" Briant pursued.
"Not really."
"She's the one took Taylor's place in that early docustim," he told her. "Could be she's a little teed off about the way things turned out."
"What d'you mean?"
"Well, Robertson's stim never got showed. Kinda blew her shot at stardom."
With that, Ginny started loudly laughing, dislodging her nearly empty plate and sending billows through her beautiful tonnage. Quite a sight.
"Never thought I'd see the day when I had one over on Page Briant," she finally gasped. "Dunno who fed that line about Summer's stim, but I can tell you it's a load of sack! Chips of that stim've been floating around the zone for years! I've felt the thing myself."
"Really?"
"How do you think I gained my last couple hundred cageys?" she said. "Enhancement's a one-time deal, Page. Those of us with bigger goals need inspiration to get where we are."
"And docustims help you achieve it?"
"Better than those faux stims the mainstream's been putting out," Ginny explained. "After all, we posts know what the real thing feels like." She waved her puffy hands and proudly indicated her magnificent form. "At this point," she continued, "I don't see myself going any further. As owner of a chomp 'n' bounce, though, I felt like I hadda be the most that I could be."
"You definitely look the part," Briant said. "Never better."
"Good enough to return to?" she asked, reaching down to pull her robe tight so that every delectable roll was visible.
Briant gulped. He watched as his ex-wife slowly stood, her platform segmenting to keep her middle from scraping the floor. She deliberately walked up to Briant and pressed her flesh against him. Ginny's distent womanliness nearly overpowered him.
"Pretty damn good," he finally said, as flab and fabric flowed around both sides of him.
"Still wavering, I see," she sighed, shuddering erotically against him. "Sometimes you really piss me off, Page. You don't haveta be enhanced to stay with me. You never haveta be. You know that I still love you."
"I know," Briant said gloomily. The damnable part was: he did know.
Ginny shook her head, then backed away from her ex-. "We've had this conversation before." She waddled over to her secretary's desk, her fleshiness impudently shimmering on all sides of her. "You wanna get in touch with Summer, she's got a roomapt on Popnecker Place."
"Thanks."
"Got another rumor for you that may be relevant," Ginny said. "Seeing as you didn't even know about the current zone market for docustims. Word around the bar is that somebody's getting ready to market a force-fattener docustim."
"Real-life force stim? That rumor's been around forever! Larry Robertson's even made a faux stim based on it."
"Maybe," Ginny said. "And maybe it's time the rumor became fact."
It was feeding tubes now, a row of multi-colored offerings hanging from the ceiling. All Taylor had to do this time was lie back on her futon, swallow and watch both breasts and belly rise. Each liquitube had its own fresh taste, but once she started on one, she was unwilling to pull her lips away until she drained its contents. She had no way of knowing how much she imbibed
When she finished, though, it was obvious that she'd swallowed quite a mouthful The adipost actress was teetering on the edge of 650 kilograms, near the upper range of the newly enhanced. Her belly swelled in a series of ever-expanding rolls and flowed near her ankles; her breasts were two ponderous masses parting beneath her chins. They rested against both of her blubbery upper arms and continued to wax ahead of her inflated paunch.
At this point, all she wanted to do was lie back and adjust to her new size. For the first time all day she felt full. But she knew that sensation wouldn't last long. The process wasn't over yet.
Watching the tubes wire out, Taylor felt her gelatinous backside flattening against the futon, texturing against the expandable fabric. She knew that whatever the results of her kidnapping, her transformation was irreversible.
It felt too much like her to be anything else.
Now that they had Popnecker Place, Glover was quickly able to nail Ms. Faulkner's address. A roomapt on the seventh floor of Building C. The entire complex was a turn-of-the-century construct, reworked to meet the adipost tenants' physical needs but kept period. Unsurprisingly, its client was primarily free-lance.
Metrowiring ended two complexes over, so Briant had to hoof it over to the actress' building. Weather'd turned coolish, which didn't bother him or the various strolling adiposts that he passed. It made for a pleasant walk, in fact, until they got to Building C.
720A, Glover scanned, as they hit the entryway. In her roomapt now.
"Anyone with her?"
System not that modern, Glover stated, as he buzzed the door open.
"Figures," Briant groused, and he stepped through the doorway. The sound of cracking plex overhead drew his attention outside and skywards just in time to see a massive female figure sailing away from the building. It had to be Summer Faulkner. She landed in the quad right in front of a picnicking adipost couple.
"Dammit!" Briant shouted, as he raced for the building's antique elevator. He hated it when cases turned violent like this: it was just too damn retro! By the time he got to seventh floor, there was no sign of Summer's assailant. The door to her roomapt was unlocked, its window smashed.
He gazed through the opening to the gathering crowd below. Glover, he saw, was doing a bioscan on the body. She'd landed at least twenty meters away from the building, still appeared to be moving. Took someone with strength (acromeg, adipost - or perhaps an ahnold) to throw their victim that far.
With Glover handling the body, Briant decided to search her roomapt. It was tastefully furnished with some antique prejust furniture, clean and tidy with a well-stocked wall of cabinets. Only thing he found of note was a sliver of something dark in the seam of her futon. Scraping it off with a fingernail, he sniffed and decided to bag the sample for analysis.
Cocoa butter. Milk fat. Sugar. Emulsifier, Glover told him. Moisture content was notably high, too.
Summer was lying face up on the pavement, a dazed expression on her face. Her enhanced body was intact. She'd landed lucky: still breathing but obviously in need of biomed attention. Even in a state of shock, her adipost beauty was obvious. He watched a troupe of bots cart her body toward the nearest general biomed clinic and felt a flash of regret that he hadn't gotten a chance to talk to her.
"Chocolate?" Briant mused, as he watched the defenestrated adipost roll away. "Where would a free-lancer get real fresh chocolate?"
Unknown.
"Maybe not," Briant said. He found an easy path in the crowd of dispersing adipost and hustled back to metrowire.
Raymond Fab was standing on the edge of the anorekt stimera crew as they prepared to record the climax of a heartwarming anorekt romance entitled Slice of Life. As the stim's heroine happily embraced the biomed responsible for her final limb lob, her new frame glimmering prismically, Briant tapped the media man from behind. Fab turned angrily, registered Briant, and turned on the amiability. He led the op away from the anorekt stimstage to an empty office nearby. Judging from the size of the furniture, its absent owner was at home in the anorekt camp.
Fab caught Briant's look of annoyance as he eyed the room.
"I assume you're here cause you've got somp'n for me," he said, sitting on a corner of the desk. Briant walked up to the media man, and when he was less than a leg length away, he spoke.
"Summer Faulkner was nearly killed today."
The statement was a facade smasher. "What?" Fab gasped. Pretty strong response for a man who claimed to not even know the woman. He looked like an anorekt who'd just been told they'd gained ten kgs. "How'd it happen?"
"Someone tossed her out a window," Briant snapped. A bit brusque for a client, but if Fab'd been open about knowing Summer in the first place, she might've been spared the unnecessary flight.
"She okay?
"She hit the ground flat. Best way for her to land," Briant said bluntly. "Though even an enhanced bod's gonna get a bit bruised falling seven stories. Thought you didn't know Miz Faulkner. . ."
The man had enough sense to look embarrassed. "I lied," he finally said, sliding off the desk and putting it between the op and himself.
"I guessed that," Briant snorted. "Summer's old stim's been floating around the zone. It has quite an underground rep. Only one with the original chip was you. I figured you 'n' Summer had some kinda arrangement. She distributed the stim to its special audience and gave you a cut, perhaps." He swung around the desk and stood before the media man. "Does Robertson know what you've been doing with his magnum opus?"
"Don't give a damn," Fab snapped, a bizman once more. "I own the thing. And I can do what I damn well please with it."
"Yeah. Right. That's why you and Summer have been distributing it so publicly."
"You don't understand," Fab protested. "I've got a certain image to maintain. An image of professionalism and quality. Robertson's docustim was cheap!"
"But effective, apparently."
"With a certain kinda audience."
"Yeah. The ones savvy enough to tell fantasy from reality." Briant headed for the door and let in Glover. "Look, I don't wanna debate aesthetics," he said. "I just want the truth for once. How close were you to Summer Faulkner?"
"Close enough," Fab admitted.
"So why'd you let her live free-lance?" he asked, leaning against the door-frame.
"S'how she wanted it," Fab said. "Offered her all kinds of positions here. But she wouldn't take a one of 'em. She prefers her status as an underground celeb.
"Summer's been a guide to adipost zone for folks in the biz. Size samplers. Adipostates. Actors who don't want it know that they spend their free time among adiposts. Every zone in city has at least one resource like Summer, someone who can take you outside your orientation without the newsies catching on."
"Wouldn't think that'd be such a big deal these days," Briant said.
"In this biz it is," Fab answered. "The stim audience is fickle, but one thing they're sure about. No matter what their orientation, they wanna believe their actors are committed to their roles. Tell 'em otherwise, and you run the risk of shattering a delicate illusion."
"And Taylor Delta was one of Summer's steadies."
The bizman nodded.
In the background, Glover was upping Briant's contract to compensate for Fab's earlier omissions.
"She couldn't have had anything to do with Taylor's kidnapping," the media man protested. "They've been friends for years."
"Who can figure friendship?" Briant said. "I assume you still haven't gotten any ransom demands?"
Fab shook his head.
"Didn't think so." He looked back at the anorekt's desk. No bowls of candy there, of course. "Where'd you get that real chocolate you had this morning?" he finally asked.
Fab told him.
As she came down from her last enhancement binge (a mixed bag of everything she'd been served before), a new kimono was wired into the room. Probably her new size. It certainly looked capable of covering her 850 kg. body.
Taylor had made it into the upper circles of adiposts with her final splurge. Bigger than her old roomie Summer, bigger than any of the adipost actresses that she'd experienced. Who'd have thought she had it in her?
Feeling both sated and satisfied, Taylor fingered the kimono and wondered what would happen next. She was at that phase in the enhancement process where all she wanted to do was hibernate, give her body time to acclimate itself. Last time she'd seen Summer, the adipost had sneaked her into BigWeigh Enhancement Clinic. She remembered the look of happy exhaustion on the faces of a new-made adipost couple who'd undergone the process together. Enhancement afterglow.
She wondered if she looked as contented lying back, her body totally smothering the futon. Standing to wrap the robe around herself, the adipost actress fought off a wave of dizziness and smiled.
The robe fit snugly and went down to her ankles. Her feet were never going to be close to each other again; at least two meters width of belly hung spread between them. Though she couldn't see with so much front in her way, she was certain that her paunch grazed the floor. Whenever she took a step, she felt cold tile on her shifting apron. If she wanted to get around comfortably, she was going to have to invest in a platform.
A second surge of lightheadedness hit her, so she edged back down onto the futon. She fell asleep imagining Summer's reaction seeing the new her.
He could hear Gin's Joint in the distance prepping for the night crowd, a detek blues song ("300 Cageys of Heavenly Joy") blasting through the night. 1730 hours. As they headed toward BigWeigh, Briant felt himself starting to jolt up: he always got this way close to a contract resolution.
The clinic's reception area was packed with folks waiting to see how their loved ones had turned out. A busy night. Briant and Glover got into the building without even having to ask permission. Tough part would be getting up to see Jay Michaels, though.
"He's inside?" Briant asked Glover. Behind the bot a family of adiposts waited for their post-teen daughter. Her younger brother and sister, both naturally fattened, argued between themselves over who would be bigger once they were old enough to get enhanced.
Hasn't checked out of building, Glover noted. No record of Michaels on first through fourth floor.
"I counted five stories," Briant mused. "Must have the top floor screened off."
Possible.
"Can you get me access to a maintenance wire?"
Nearest wire: fifteen meters past the recognition gate, Glover told him.
"Open the wire for me," Briant said. The bot obliged.
Want a weapon seal? Glover flashed.
Now that was a first: a citygovbot offering him short-term pistol use. Summer's plunge'd obviously made an impact on the bot. Briant smiled at Glover, considered his options and finally said no. If he couldn't deal with Michaels unarmed, he might as well hang it up.
Still, he appreciated the offer.
"Stay outside," he told Glover. "You see Michaels coming out without me, shoot him."
He squinted over the crowd, spotted the blinking wire. Briant turned to the anxious adipost father and said, "is that your daughter comin' down ramp? She looks so frail!"
"What?" both parents shrieked, and with their smirking kids in tow, they stormed past the recognition gate for a closer look. Briant let himself get carried between them. As he hit the wire, he could hear the angry father crying breach of contract to a distraught receptionist.
Briant arrived upfloor in a room full of muscular intensity frames. For a moment, the op considered getting into one, but he'd never liked the idea of robotic anything added to his body. Too much like anorekt to suit him.
Stepping into the rampless corridor, Briant got his bearings. A string of entryways ahead of him, nothing behind. All he had to do was proceed forward and see what he found. Halfway down the hall he hit it: a room with state-of-the-art stimeras aimed against a wall, a portable wire, a monitor showing a white room filled with cabinets. On monitor, a monstrous figure was bending over a half-conscious woman. Even with her face swallowed in dimply flesh, those lips and hair were unmistakable.
Taylor Delta.
Briant ducked back into the corridor, waited for Michaels to come out of the enhancement room. A minute later, the clinic head tromped out of the room, dragging the super-sized actress with him.
Michaels was snug inside his frame, crooning to the dazed Miz Delta. Didn't look so professorial now. He'd even dressed himself over the frame. With padding inbetween the struts and an oversized adipost suit over the entire package, he looked like one of those hulking monsters from the pre-stims. If Briant had any questions about Jay Michaels' sanity, they were put to rest by his costume.
"Couldn't be post for real," the op said, stepping into the kidnapper's field of vision, "so you hadda settle for this. I think it looks cheap."
No word from the man in the robotic suit. Instead, he backed up to a wire and quickly blinked himself and his captive out of the corridor.
Briant followed.
They all wound up on the roof, night breeze stirring Taylor into full wakefulness, clear sky overhead. Her eyelids started fluttering, so Briant started gabbing to distract her captor.
"Knew it was you, Jay, when Raymond Fab told me where he'd gotten his chocolate. You said as much yourself: best place for an enhancement - or a force-fattener docustim - was an enhancement clinic. Bet you fed Taylor some of that chocolate, too."
"Just once," Michaels panted within his suit. Not exerting himself, just excited. "Audience expects it."
"Can't disappoint them, can we?" Briant sneered. He took a half step toward the two of them. "What kinda low-life gets off on that stuff, anyway?"
The mega-sized stimtress had gone back to playing unconscious. A smart move: Michaels was dangerously near roof's edge. Don't think of Summer, Briant futilely told himself. The entire zone spread ahead of them.
"Nobody free-lance, that's for sure," Michaels shouted. "I've got people all over city ready to seal a chip of this stim! It won't be cheap."
"Hope I never get to meet any of 'em."
Out of the corner of his eye, the op could see a blinking light maybe eight meters away. An outside wire.
Briant kept stalling, half wishing he'd taken Glover up on his offer. "So why'd you try to kill Summer?"
"That exhibitionist! She was the only one could connect me directly to this," Michaels explained. "Knew about her marketing that stim, and I wanted to check it out for myself. Let her sneak some friends into the clinic and kept the visits quiet."
"Which was where you first saw Taylor, right?" Michaels was nearly halfway to the wire. "Must've seemed perfect. Force-fattening a big-name reg star who'd been teetering on going adipost for years. What were you gonna do? Tell the newsies she'd sealed herself in?"
They were both within a meter of the wire. Was Michaels planning on taking Taylor with him? Or - more likely - on dropping her?
"Shouldn't have give Summer that candy," Briant told him. "May've been a good ice-breaker, but it ultimately pointed your way. I should've known something was off when you recognized Taylor Delta's name so readily. Wasn't somp'n an adipost fan would easily know."
Michael took his last step toward the wire. But in mid-stride, Taylor quit playing dazed. Twisting her voluminous body in his arms, she freed one arm, then planted her knees on the asphalt roof. As he bent to pull her up, she aimed her fist for the space between frame head struts. Wasn't much room for her huge hand, but she still hit true - she flattened the force-fattener's face. Stunned, he backed off enough to let her roll free.
Landing on her left side, Taylor used her enhanced right leg to kick her captor off-balance. Michaels fell back, away from the wire.
And off the roof.
Briant watched him frantically try to reach for the wire as he shot to the ground.
He never caught it.
"He didn't need to kill Summer," the actress was sobbing as she struggled to her feet. She adjusted her kimono and joined the op at roof's edge. Michaels was lying face down on the ground and immobile. The back of his suit was split, foam padding peaking through the seams. Off to his side, Glover was scanning the scene.
"You okay?" Briant asked, turning toward the distressed and lovely face.
"I feel fine," Taylor told him. "Better than fine," she corrected. "He didn't need to do all this to keep things quiet."
"Maybe he wanted to," Briant shrugged. What, he wondered, would Summer's stim do to a man who couldn't become adipost? He thought of all the years of jealous resentment that had accumulated in Michaels. And he thought of all the years of indecision that he'd let keep him away from Ginny.
He took the actress downfloor. In the gathering he could see the adipost family with their newly enhanced post-teen daughter. Not frail at all.
No one in the crowd recognized her, but that was to be expected. The reg-sized woman she'd been was one for the historicals. As she waddled over to the body of the man who'd held and made her adipost, Taylor turned to her unknown helper and asked,"Who are you, anyway?"
"Summer's okay," he said, a paunchy reg dressed in a free-lance quality suit. "Though she'll probably be in clinic for the next day or so." He paused, let her digest this info, then introduced himself. "Was hired by Fab to find you. Name's Page Briant." She shook hands with the op, was pleased to see him distracted by her jiggling. He looked pretty good for reg, she decided.
"We needta get you somewhere else before the newsies catch on," the reg op told her. He surreptitiously gestured to a citygovbot for a retinal i.d. of the stimtress. A confirm of his contract resolution. The bot shot forward and did a quick scan. "How steady are you?" Briant asked.
She stared down at Michaels. His head was poking out of the intensity frame at an unlivable angle, mouth gaping open unpleasantly. This was the voice that had been taunting her all day. The madman who'd nearly killed Summer. For an instant she was tempted to put her foot down on that face, press every kg. of her body on it. Then she swung back toward Briant.
"I'm okay," she said.
"I believe it," he told her. He held out a hand, and she let him wrap his left arm around her right. It disappeared in the bulges of her torso; his hand was swallowed in her puffy palm. "I'll be back to give my report," he told the citygovbot. "I wanna take Miz D. somewhere safe first."
He took her to Gin's, of course. On their way, they filled in the gaps together. Taylor had started on her expeditions to the zone a year ago; she'd maintained contact with her old roomie but previously had lacked the nerve to visit Summer on her turf. Then she was nominated for her first Metro Choice for her stim impersonation of reg pin-up queen Betty Page. The nomination, as well as the attendant publicity, spurred her into trying something risky.
On one of her first treks, she'd taken Dick Howard along, but the stim director had been bored by the outing. He was the only one on complex who knew of her deception, she believed. To everyone else, she was a typical reg actress.
"Went for years going through the motions," Taylor confessed as they slowly walked along zone's edge. She was struggling to hold her belly up with her hands, which necessitated regular paused and adjustments. "Dunno how long I would've kept it up if Michaels hadn't forced the issue."
"Doesn't excuse what he did," Briant said. "People have the right to pick the body they want. Make their own decisions. Freedom includes the right to be indecisive."
"You're right," she sighed. "But wavering's an exercise I'm glad I've outgrown." She stopped to consider her vast beauty in a shop window, evaluating herself with an actress' eye. From what Briant could see, she had a lengthy career ahead of her.
As they hit the bounce bar's side entrance, they passed a pair of appreciative adipostates. Taylor registered then grinned at their open ogling. "All those months on complex I kept acting like I didn't see Fab's chocolate. Wotta waste."
Before he could answer, Verda opened the door. "Got someone needs to spend the night," Briant told her. "Ginny'll know what it's all about. I've gotta file a report. But tell her I'll be back."
"Will do," the secretary said, stepping back to let the adipost actress pass.
Briant returned to clinic just as Michaels was getting pried from his suit; a troupe of disposal bots ringed the kidnapper. He took Glover inside BigWeigh and gave his report as they examined the recording room. Halfway through, the op found the chip of Taylor's enhancement along with a pile of other stim chips. Over a dozen copies of Summer's docustim. He bagged all but one of the latter for evidence, kept Taylor's chip to give to the stimtress. Fab'd get his chips after they were processed.
He returned to his roomapt, washed the day off, and opened a couple packs of noodles. The scent of simmering sauce piqued his appetite, got him obsessing about Summer's docustim. He kept seeing both Fab and Robertson as they relived that shooting for him, their looks of more-than-fond remembrance. He scarfed both dinners, barely tasting them, then sat through the enhancement.
Larry Robertson's docustim was choppy in parts but utterly entrancing. When Briant'd finished experiencing, he thought he knew the real reason why Fab had wanted to keep it off the general market. It was too damn real, so effective in communicating the euphoria of enhancement that it wiped out any reason for wavering. It blew the faux stims away.
He rose from his chair and buzzed Fab Media. The bizman had left for clinic to check out Summer's progress.
Briant took a look around his roomapt, check the time. 2310. Outside, with most of
the city cloistered in its respective zones, it had started to rain. He didn't mind getting wet,
though. He changed his shirt and headed for the metrowire. Toward adipost zone.
