FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Thomas had handled cases like this so many times before his biggest fear was the inevitable boredom. He'd been to every dark and dejected corner of the planet investigating the hidden activities of powerful people. He'd faced down gunmen while unarmed, hidden in garbage trucks, sewn himself into rice sacks and ridden for days in shipping containers. He'd been hired by fat-cat businessfurs the world over to infiltrate and report on competitors in African oil fields, Chinese factories and post-soviet rust belt towns run by the most unsavory thugs imaginable. Now Thomas, a tall marmalade-colored tabby, was tasked with entering and investigating a company known for sneakers and power bars. "Really?" he'd said out loud when his bosses handed him the assignment. But here he was, sneaking in the back of the twenty-story downtown tower to get the scoop on their new sports nutrition drinks. He was tempted to sneak in a twenty-minute bathroom break just because he could. Y'know, add a little thrill.

Though he was a little nervous. Some of the employees or former product testers for the company had disappeared in recent weeks. Disappearances without bodies turning up. That meant no homicides, or especially gruesome ones. He was dealing most likely with human traffickers or people dedicated and equipped enough to liquidate bodies. But what could that possibly have to do with investigating their new sports drink? Was it some odd supplement craze? Were they adding harvested glands or hormones to their products? Or did they just have an over-juiced workforce? Thomas was letting his mind wander most unprofessionally at all the odd possibilities. His hands shook slightly as he swiped a hacked keycard in one of the rear entry doors of the building.

In a pair of work slacks and a denim shirt, ballcap low over his jade-green eyes, Thomas slipped in easily. Just the new maintenance guy, here to fix that vending machine on sixth. And there really was a vending machine on sixth, and he really did know how to fix it. Details, that was the secret. Details and capability.

Everyone worried about the security cameras. Valid, but all the footage stored on the cloud these days. He'd uploaded the virus to crash and wipe their system a day ago. In a week, none of the footage would be usable. He felt a little exposed without the small gun he often carried in his right pocket, but in an office in the city? He didn't fancy a trespassing and weapons charge should he trip up and get caught. And who would he shoot? A tennis shoe designer? His belly rumbled as he called an elevator; he'd skipped lunch. He hated doing it, but the last thing he needed was to have a bathroom issue hit him on a mission. They could take DNA from what he left. So, hungry he would be.

He'd looked at the blueprints and cased the building for a few days. Whatever was going on, it was unlikely to be on the upper floors. Those were all cubicle farms full of sneaker designers and chemists. But below-ground was some kind of labyrinth that the city had been handsomely paid to route sewers and the subway around. Something massive was down here, and even though it had taken Juan in the cyber division a long time to cook up a skeleton keycard, he now had all he needed to descend down into whatever depths awaited beneath the tower.

When the door opened, the cavernous room before him truly was immense. He did not have time to appreciate it, however, as a stout panda in a lab coat was waiting immediately outside the elevator doors, flanked by two tall, burly Clydesdale security guards.

"You know, it fascinates me that a hired espionage agent would not realize his coworkers are loyal only to the highest bidder," the panda said with a grin. "Still, welcome."

The two equines were swift despite their imposing bulk. The one on the panda's left had snatched Thomas' hand mid-grab for the elevator button. His grip was firm but surprisingly restrained enough not to be painful. His nametag read Hank, and his mane was styled in an unapologetic ponytail. His partner's read Mitch, and his mane was shaved down to bristle.

"God, I'm going to get my adrenal glands harvested by overpromoted personal trainers..." Thomas thought.

"My name is Doctor Mystic," The panda said in a surprisingly kind voice. "And I understand why you've been sent here. It's genuinely amusing to me at this point how many people underestimate me. How many think I sell sugar water and sweatshop shoes to the overly self-conscious. Though truthfully, I'm thankful. Their underestimation isn't necessarily ignorance. They're products of their environments, as victimized as all the others. Too... invested."

"So what now?" Thomas asked. "You kill me? You commit a felony and have a body to dispose of to protect whatever fairy-dusting nutrition scam you're running down here?"

"Young man, I am no monster. But this will go easier if you don't struggle."

Mitch snapped a combat baton to its full length with a deft flick of his wrist. His eyes were hard and vigilant.

"I'm doing the opposite of murder, my friend. I'm freeing people from their old bonds. Their limitations, their fatigue, their internalized shame. And you, though you entered by accident, will be one of the first to see this world I am building." Mystic removed a prefilled syringe with the needle still capped from the pocket of his lab coat. "All will be called to the new world," he said. He twiddled the syringe with surprising dexterity between stout fingers. "Many will come willingly, and they will find themselves freed even as they see their desire is bottomless. Some will resist, but their desire is no less existent."

"What kind of sick..." But before Thomas could finish Hank pulled his arm straight and the doctor uncapped the needle.

"You're going to thank me before the night is up, I assure you," Mystic said as he plunged the needle deftly into the cat's vein. "Strap him to the gurney, and we'll continue," he said to the guards, but not authoritatively. He spoke to them like friends, and his tone was hushed.

Thomas tried to jerk his arm loose, but already his head was swimming. Colors blurred slightly at the edges and his limbs felt as though they were filling with cement. The two Clydesdales manhandled him into the straps of a hand truck that looked like the one from that cannibal movie, and he felt them tighten. Not enough to restrict his breathing, but he felt his pulse quicken nonetheless. He did not feel nauseous, but fatigue was rolling in waves and his neck seemed dedicated to betraying his head. It felt like the time he got burned on bad Ecstasy in college. The sensation of floating through space as Hank wheeled him about on the gurney wasn't helping.

"I'm a kinesiologist, a biochemist, and a medical researcher," Doctor Mystic was explaining. His drone had an unmistakable air of self-importance, but he was clearly trying to be engaging, turning to walk backward on and off and gesturing fluidly as he spoke. "When I went to work for a sports nutrition concern after acquiring my doctorates, people thought I was wasting my talents. Someone with my capabilities, shilling false nutrition to jocks. But I saw a trend in society fifteen years ago. I saw the shame that people carried, the deep need they had to feel superior to each other. To treat their urges and their own bodies as shameful and disgusting. To struggle and struggle for improvement and never feel satisfaction. And to try in vain, sometimes a whole lifetime, to fill a void inside that cannot be sated. People need to see that the void is eternal. That it is the act of filling it that brings us joy."

The room they inhabited was massive, long and wide as two football fields and at least three stories high. Gated steel doors intermittent along the walls suggested even more of the facility that the initial area, possibly manufacturing or other productive activity. Great opaque plastic sheets were hung about in sweeping continental lines, lit from the ceiling in a way that cast oddly disquieting shadows. Massive, blobby outlines wavered against the dull plastic as though a melted geographical form was hidden behind it. There was a soft whir of machines and a regular hum, pause and hum again of a pump running. Wet sounds like a great beast slurping echoed softly in an unsettling murmur against sheer concrete floors and walls.

Mobile office trailers like the types at construction sites were strewn about in a seemingly disorganized mishmash and handful of furs in plastic smocks and slickers moved about in an unhurried but dedicated manner, dragging long canvas hoses and carting trays of food on hand trucks. Pizzas, cakes, stir fry, protein and sautéed vegetable dishes drowned in heavy marinade. The room smelled like a diner and was warm and steamy, but not uncomfortably so. Thomas, still fighting to keep his wits on alert and catalogue the disquieting bustle, noticed tall steel tanks like small grain silos at regular intervals along the walls. The pumps at their base hummed on and off in rhythm, hoses snaking from them under the sweeping plastic sheets.

The blobby shadows behind the curtains were arranged by size about the room, biggest ones in the back. A tall rat with a slicked-back haircut appeared by Mystic's side when the group had come to a stop and handed the doctor a tablet computer. The panda began diving intently into menus on the various programs, continuing his monologue. "The greatest tragedies and atrocities in our history have been famines," he said, his voice faltering as he spoke the last of the sentence. "Starvation has plagued our entire development as a civilization. Agriculture, faulty as it is, defined our social patterns and our development of culture. And in the dark days of antiquity the rules for whom the carnivores ate gave us civilizations of almost unimaginable if orderly brutality. Colonial empires throughout the history of every continent ruled by withholding food from those they ruled. Starvation will make people do unconscionable things..." his voice wavered with nerved as he spoke, and when he tapped at a button on the tablet computer the farthest plastic curtain began to rise.

"I did my graduate research in a region of north Africa where a civil war had created a famine. Deliberate acts of bombing and violence by the government were used to starve out the people living there. I was studying nutrition relief with a grant from an NGO. I... I saw people resort to the most unimaginable cruelty. People who abandoned children after birth because they could not be fed. Villages where the dead were stacked in fallow fields. The government was committing genocide. Our country had abandoned them, or backed the military. I saw people hollowed out, doubled over in pain but too exhausted to cry. I understood then what I had to do. I knew what I had to change."

As the curtain rose it revealed what at first appeared to be a white sack of grain the size of a small house, streaked in odd but appealing patterns with black lines. Then Thomas realized it was a fur, a wolf fattened to the size of a building. His belly, contained in the skin-tight suit like it had been painted on, flowed forth the length of a small front yard. Folds and valleys were hinted at under the sheer slope of the fabric. The faintest suggestions of arms and legs studded his sides, wiggling happily. Not much could be gleaned from his face, swaddled in folds of fat the size of an obese normal fur's belly, but it was clear his eyes were squeezed shut in reverent ecstasy as small tears leaked out. A hose hung from a strap on his jaw, pumping in an endless supply of whatever was in those tanks.

Thomas felt the straps growing tight, adding to his swimming panic, but when he looked down he saw they had not been tightened. He was getting fatter.

Mystic turned and regarded him with a pleasant grin. "Curiosity killed the cat, as cliché as that may be, but you, my friend, have a far better fate in store." He tapped another button on the tablet with dramatic flourish, and the curtain obscuring the second-biggest form began to rise.

It was an immense blue ram. He had no suit and was only two thirds the size of the wolf, but his body was unconstrained by the outfit of the first... victim? Subject? His folds and rolls were covered in soft blue and tan wool and his hooves barely poked out from beneath the gelatinous mass of his belly. His arms were thick and plush as full rice sacks and though his lower legs seemed skinny his thighs were the size of a normal hefty fur's body, like that hippo that worked with Thomas in IT security.

The ram's belly spilled out before him, jiggling and sloshing with the sheer greed of his intake from the hose that was also strapped into his mouth. Both of the visible and immensely fat furs, and all the forms behind curtains to a certain degree, had grown taller than normal furs as they'd fattened. Even seated the tops of the ram's horns must have been at least ten feet off the floor, and his belly took up enough area a couple could have had a pleasant picnic on its slope. With the tap of another button on Mystic's pad the straps on the hose disengaged and it fell from his slobbery muzzle, leaking beige cream in a dribble on his belly as it slithered down onto the floor. A scissor lift loaded with pizzas, cakes, pastas, tacos and other heavy meals was wheeling in. When it was fully extended and stopped level with his head a female pigeon in a Tyvek suit began gently feeding one course after another into the ram's mouth.

Behind the nearest curtain with the smallest of the fat furs an anguished wail emanated.

Thomas was getting fat all over, and somehow he was getting hungrier. His belly growled and was beginning to have shooting pains of need even as his arms and legs ballooned up, his lean muscle beginning to be buried under a swaddling of fat. And his belly was swelling rapidly, straining against the straps enough to make them creak audibly. His denim shirt was straining at the buttons, his marmalade fur sprouting through, and then the first popped. Then a second.

"You've been injected with a nutrient and steroid cocktail that's one of my proudest creations," Mysic said, his voice and grin warm and fatherly. "I've condensed months of calorie intake into an amount of liquid that can fit in a teaspoon. It's more of a fuel than a food, and if it catches fire it can be quite volatile, but once I created a way to make it function with cellular respiration and then sped it up with a steroid also of my own design it became the central answer to our needs. My team and I have developed a way to produce as much of it as our civilization could ever need in a totally sustainable manner. And it can be added to anything as an ingredient. Any food you could want."

The ram was gobbling with the single-minded intensity of a starving fur. Everything the pigeon fed him he gobbled down as though he was dying of hunger.

"Some, like my first test subjects, have learned to embrace the feeling of growing. Of living without want. Their shame is gone, their appetites are pure and clean. A guiding principle that can be easily fulfilled and need never end."

"This is what you're hiding?" Thomas managed through his haze. His voice sounded deeper and rattled a little around the edges now. "You confined these people down here to feed them until they can't move or go out to see the sun and you think you're helping them?"

Mystic's composure finally faltered. His brow furrowed and his mouth took a hard, tight frown. "Who have you defended? Multimillion dollar interests that force people to toil in misery so a few can become rich? People who own mines and factories where children die every day? Who have you freed? Who did you rescue?" The doctor stepped close, and as short as he was he had to extend his arm to its full length to reach up and grab Thomas' fat cheek. But his grip was like iron. "I have seen the world fail. I have seen what will happen as the planet boils. I have seen what will come when we turn on each other. I am saving people. Yes, I am saving them from themselves. Civilization is not painless. Rules and change are not painless. And no one is innocent. But don't you dare call me a monster." He released Thomas' cheek and tapped aggressively on another button. The spot he'd held in his pinch tingled as the blood flow returned.

The curtain surrounding the third smallest form rose. A tawny lion with the bushiest, most impressive mane Thomas had ever seen was revealed. Swollen past the point of being intimidating the figure was nonetheless imposing, claws jutting from his wide paws. Long, sleek highlights of yellow ran up and down his arms and the muscle under the flab of his form made him seem still commanding, even if he was gulping greedily from a hose attached to his face.

The straps holding in Thomas gave several loud, troubling creaks. Another button popped. He was feeling loopy and hungry and wanted to nap or maybe lounge and watch TV. Focus eluded him. The panda smiled again.

"Most of my subjects find they are quite happy with this life. It need not comprise an experience simply of static gluttony. You are here to meet them before you join them, to see the new world first hand."

The sharp creak this time came from the strain of the metal composing the gurney Thomas was strapped to. His arms and legs had swollen so fat they were crushing each other in the restraints and his rib cage. He was in pain from the pressure, and from the now ravenous, inescapable hunger in his belly. His head was swimming worse than ever now, and the only clear impression in his mind was a burning, all-consuming need for food. All of it. He wanted to eat and eat and eat. He eyed the tanks scattered all along the walls of the chamber and worried it would not be enough. It could not possibly be enough. And then one only slightly smaller fixation bloomed in his mind. He was afraid.

"They are my friends," the Doctor said kindly. "My children. Everyone will be my children. I will feed them and grow them big and strong. I will care for them as the world become inhospitable. I will save them from themselves, and make everyone free."

A bolt broke with a violent snap on the gurney. Hank and Mitch, the two silent Clydesdale guards, began to step back quickly. Mystic pressed a button on the tablet.

The curtain on the last test subject rose. It had been obscuring the fur who'd been moaning. The unfortunate soul was a large, chocolate-brown Tanuki with purple markings around his eyes like those of a racoon's mask. His eyes were long and thin, and a comically oversized bushy tail lolled behind him, laying limp on the floor. His legs were disproportionally short and bent at the knee, somewhat like an avian fur. He was struggling with the hose strapped in his mouth, tears falling from unhappy eyes as he guzzled the slop that was being pumped into him. He'd grown from a normal height, but he was yet small enough to have clearly visible traces of buff musculature on his frame. Even the traces of muscle under his fattening pecs were visible. His belly spread, distended with his feeding, and fattened to a size where it could have comfortably fit a large fur inside it. He groaned, seemingly in pain, and wriggled slightly against restraints on his wrists and ankles. He restraints were chained to anchors in the floor.

"Not everyone is immediately enthusiastic about accepting their feeding. Everyone defends the system they associate with their interests. Everyone glorifies a process or group that hurt or maimed or exterminated others. But I know what I do is necessary."

"This can't be necessary..." Thomas managed, thick and slurred. The gurney groaned constantly. Thomas was barely able to focus enough to notice the elevator door chime and hear furs shouting and rushing toward them, and then the straps snapped and his fatty flesh poured forward, shredding out of his clothing.

Thomas stumbled on fatty legs like small tree trunks, still expanding with fat but just mobile enough for him to recover his footing. His vision was swimming at the edges and even though he was now mobile his mind felt more clouded than it had before. He held up his fat furry arms and marveled at the waddles of flab growing and sagging from them. He placed his hands to his belly and felt a jiggly globe of fat wobble in his grip. His belly had to be as big as a beach ball. And it was growling more than ever for food.

Thomas turned to see a crow and a white wolf striding toward them from the elevator gesturing wildly and shouting something he couldn't quite make out. His head was swimming, his hearing was faint and distant, and his belly growled incessantly even as it expanded like dough rising. His gut distended out and sagged over his groin, and he could feel its heat and mass settling along his thighs even standing. It felt good. It felt right, somehow. But he fought back the urge to lapse into a fugue and turned, albeit slowly, to watch the unfolding confrontation.

"Cedras, Cedric! How nice of you to finally visit," Mystic said. The acidic tone in his voice was faint but chilling.

"I gave you leeway on the basis of trust," the crow said. "This is meant to create a viable commercial product. This isn't some fascist science lab. We're not making monsters. This isn't something we can cover up!"

"Cedras, my friend, you know I take my work seriously." Mystic said to the crow. "And frankly the support you gave me was critical; out of respect I'll be gentle with you."

"What you're going to do," Cedric, the white wolf, said, "is cooperate, hand over your ID badge and all your research files and come with us. If you help us put this to bed quietly we can assure you don't do prison time."

"Gentlemen, I'm well aware you were the ones who hired out our friend Thomas here to gather the evidence on my practices that you as the chief investors were unable to. I highly doubt the police are on their way, given how deeply you all are tied into this mess as well."

An awkward silence hung. Thomas' belly was drooping almost to his knees now and threatening to pull him forward with its weight. He kneaded it with his now-pudgy fingers as he tried to focus on their talk, finding himself enraptured with the growing softness of his own body. He wondered with more brainpower than he was comfortable sparing what the cream from those hoses tasted like.

"You're not the only investors. Your company isn't the only group I receive funding from. You're smart men. I'm sure you know investing. But you're not visionaries and you don't know how to change the world. I promised you a nutrition product to expand your market. I delivered. I promised a lot of furs a lot of things. But we're all greedy by nature. I can't fight it, but I can feed it."

Long, articulated robotic arms snapped down from the ceiling and pincers on their ends ensnared the two businessfurs. They looked like devices usually used for moving and handling the steel nutrient tanks. Two of Mystic's assistants were already hustling in, a badger and a fox, to snap hoses into place. These two were connected to tanks near the elevator, marked with all manner of strange green chemistry notation beyond Thomas' grasp. As soon as the hoses were affixed the pumps began to run, and much to the surprise of Thomas and the two executives they were released immediately from the robotic arms. It was quickly apparent why. They began to inflate instantly, fattening like balloons on the end of a garden hose. Their expensive shirts shredded and their bellies bulged forth, slapping down onto their legs and swelling big enough to settle to the floor in less than a minute. They tore at the restraints attaching the hoses to their faces with desperate and increasingly fat and ineffective fingers, but it was without success.

"I've bid my time. I've been patient, tried to change things for the better with understanding and supportive work in academia, the retail market. Governance." Mystic scoffed when he mentioned the last item. "I've seen it all fail. I've seen people fail. Greed, gentlemen. It cannot be overcome. It can only be fed. This product will go into the water supply. It will be mixed by foreign distributors into every food product that every fur eats. It will have complete market and societal penetration within a month. Everyone will learn from experience that to feed is to live. Even if the lesson must be taught sternly."

Tears were streaming down Cedric and Cedras' faces. They were swelling rapidly, fattening and growing and now almost the size of the ram in the back. Taller and wider, love handles the size of kayaks and legs being consumed by their growing mountains of bellies. Necks like stacks of tires, all those chins piling up and growing. Thomas struggled to step forward, his knees squishing into his belly as he walked, his breathing ragged. In the outline of the doctor's coat pocket Thomas could see several more syringes.

"Frankly I hope you're suffering, the both of you," Mystic was saying now, that acid back in his voice. "You profited off shaming people. Off selling them sugar and dried whey at markup and making them hate themselves and their bodies. You took all you could from their fear. This nutrient mix is the most dense and fast-acting possible. Though I'm sure once we've launched I'll be able to improve it. We'll change the world, and even the two of you will have a part to play..." He was cut off abruptly by an enormous fatty orange paw clapping over his mouth.

Thomas felt like a cement replica of himself, cast in far too oversized of a mold. His belly was the size of a weather balloon and his arms were rapidly losing articulation from all the fat swelling on them. But he was getting taller as well, and being a giant (if a fat one) gave him the needed advantage. He reached into the doctor's pocket and removed the four syringes within, all of them marked with the same chemistry symbols at the tanks feeding the businessfurs. He snapped the caps off with the flick of a fatty claw. He wheeled the doctor around held him in place with the other fat paw, staring down into his eyes through the haze.

"Thomas, please. Don't." Mystic said. His voice was pained and tears were welling in his eyes. "This isn't about me. This is about everyone! I have the key. I have the plan. I can save us. All of us! If you take me out you know what's coming. You know what people are like. You know what will happen. It will be on you. I'm offering an imperfect solution. But it's life or death! You'll never be sated ever again if you do this."

Thomas' belly rumbled, gurgling and wobbling with the ferocity of his need. Mystic shook, held against it, that pleading look wild in his eyes. There had to be something to say, some question or statement or at least a cool one-liner. But Thomas was woozy and starving and the words would not come. And he jammed the syringes into Mystic's neck and depressed the plungers to the end.

The doctor stumbled back, gasping, and as he wobbled away the syringes slid from his neck, staying in Thomas' paw. The panda's body shuddered, and he coughed dryly, and then he began to swell so fast it was almost an explosion. His belly inflated like it was being filled with a firehose, and his belt buckle snapped off and pinged into one of the tanks on the wall. Like a fast and fatal reaction to a bee sting his face swelled and his pudge grew so fast his eyes were pressed shut by globs of constrained fat. His belly grew faster than the rest of him, and Thomas lumbered backward with his own belly wobbling to avoid being buried under the growing flab. The doctor was soon the size of a hot-air balloon and still growing, his stubby arms flailing. He was attempting to speak, but the words could not escape his throat. Bigger and heavier he grew, wobbling and billowing with the agitation of his predicament. A great bulbous monument to unending feeding.

Each already stubby finger puffed to an unbendable black lump, and the palms of his hands swelled like beach balls. Each manboob puffed and spread on his chest, fattening and spreading forward, becoming the size of small cars. His labored breaths jiggled the mountain of lose flesh, sending ripples up and down the slopes and folds of his belly. He moaned deep in his throat and gurgled. But the moan sounded contented. Bigger and bigger he swelled, though it did seem to be slowing down a hair.

Still plodding back away from the swelling doctor, Thomas bumped into the two security guards. He turned to face them, knocking them down with a belly that protruded at least a yard and a half. They stared up at him, as he had to have grown to be at least two or three feet taller than them even when they were standing.

"Can you shut off the pumps?" He forced out before collapsing to his butt.

********

To most outside viewers, the operations at the athletic products company in the tall office tower remained unchanged. The quality of their powdered nutrition drinks dropped notably but their brand remained viable. And other than a great deal of renovation ongoing in the office, with truckloads of excavation dirt removed daily and crews entering with subterranean construction equipment the tower seemed as it ever was. It was the city itself that began to change.

Homeless furs were going missing. Furs living in poverty began to disappear from housing projects. Service workers, unhappy professionals, recent divorcees. It was as though most of the deeply dissatisfied people were vanishing from the community, leaving all their things behind. But no bodies turned up. No crimes seemed to have been committed.

And every day more truckloads of excavation dirt left the tower. No one seemed to go looking. People who were lonely, who found no satisfaction or valuable relationships, tended to be people no one would go looking for either.

**********

Thomas had to admit, after he'd been humbled the daffy doctor had a point. Getting really fat felt good. They could provide for a lot down here, everyone working together. There were furs who sewed (often making blankets donated to local charities), wrote and published books and research papers, read, even played a version of ping-pong for mountainously fat furs. It was a good life, and getting to gobble the sweet doughy nectar from that hose whenever he wanted was pretty good too.

He must have weighed several tons by now, having grown to at least twelve feet tall seated and with a belly that could hold a fullsize car. He loved to jiggle himself, gauge how much he'd gained from the feeding and relish every new inch. The communal cavern could barely keep pace with the new arrivals who found them by their backchannel recruiting. They'd let that poor tanuki go, but almost no one who entered the colony left. Thomas scratched idly at as much of his massive fat roll as he could with his arm so stubby and immobile from fat. There were all manner of furs at various stages of their journey in the ever-expanding room now. A pheasant woman who'd been living on the street had arrived yesterday, and she hadn't taken the hose off since they'd offered it to her. She was plumping well past obesity already, flipping through a magazine as she ate.

And all the way in the back was the doctor, hard at work despite his humbling. The size of a house and gobbling constantly from a hose on his own nectar he worked day and night at his computer on new projects. He greeted all the new arrivals, along with Thomas, and thanked each one for casting aside their shame. Thomas had to give him credit. After a few days to reconsider he'd proven remarkably more understanding of the issues with his plan. He still believed there would be a marketing push, maybe a cultural turning point. Thomas had told him to stick to the sciences. But my, the feeding was nice.

One of the lab techs, a tall collie, was clambering up the incline of his belly, holding up the hose and strap with a questioning look on his face. Thomas smiled as best he could with a face swaddled in fat balanced upon a neck of all chins, and opened his mouth.