Under the Macroscope - 3
#3 of Under the Macroscope
"With the sudden advent of almost four dozen macro rampages worldwide - almost overnight - the macro /threat/ has become very real. As the military escalates fighting what it considers to be the most devastating act of bio-terrorism it's ever seen, a single private tech firm - with a suddenly very unique resource - begins a plan that promises to change the world."
Plot. Because there is one, and it had to go somewhere.
To be honest, all of this just turned out to take up more space than I'd originally intended. I don't know whether it just didn't register that things other than sex could take up word count and page space, or whether I just went into exposition mode and got stuck, but I felt I needed more to the plot than 'girl gets big, the end'.
So this chapter is a mechanism to let me do what I need to do with the rest of the story. We'll get it out of the way now, and then you won't have to deal with it in future installments. I didn't write a gratuitous sex scene in like I'd planned (( I tried. It just felt ... in the way ... )), but there's a hint of things to come - and you'll finally get your daily allotment of technobabble.
The good stuff is coming. Soon™. In the meantime, character development, go!
(( I'm really starting to like Kayne. Arrogance makes everything better! ))
Under the Macroscope Corllengatu
Consciousness drifted slowly back to Sarah, bringing with it a strange sort of cool calm. Her skin prickled with goosebumps as she opened her eyes - greeted by cool, sterile steel. She was lying on her back, somewhere she didn't recognize - and that somewhere didn't look terribly friendly.
She sat up, the floor feeling unnaturally slick and smooth under her hands - giving slightly with the force of her rising as if it were memory foam. She prodded it with a finger out of curiosity, feeling the steel compress when she leaned her weight on it - before it solidified and became once more a solid barrier.
She didn't dwell long on the floor however. Looking down over herself revealed her body - graceful, if slightly obscene curves drawing her attention in stereo. The events of the night before - of the past two weeks - came rushing back into the forefront of her mind.
Shit.
She'd lost control. She'd gotten herself spotted. She'd gotten herself captured. Sarah felt her cheeks flush as she remembered the feeling of masturbating shamelessly in front of her would-be-abductors - remembered the feeling of ...
Her blush intensified as she remembered what she'd done to the one poor male. Knowingly driving him into a sexual frenzy just to help sate her own lusts. Her actions hadn't been frenzied, though. She'd done it all on purpose - in full possession of her faculties - even if she had been a little supernaturally motivated.
Then ... then they'd calmed her. Sarah glanced at her wrists, finding the strange bracelets still firmly affixed to her arms. They looked rather like under-sized bangles - thin, tight bands of metal stuck around her wrists because there was nowhere else they could go. When she looked closer however, she could clearly see intricate technological structuring just below a cool glass surface.
Thousands of tiny LED lights around the center glowed a reassuring blue that somehow made her feel ... calm ... collected. They looked so small and fragile. She knew she couldn't get them off from experience, but she felt like she could smash them easily enough - cracking the fragile technology on the surface against the metal floor and ending whatever effect they were having.
Except ... she had a sneaking suspicion they were the only thing keeping her sane. She was still a macro after all. She couldn't forget that. Just because that tingling warmth wasn't at her fingertips right at this moment didn't mean it wouldn't be back. She was controlled. She was contained. Everyone was safe for now - and she was fine, herself when it came right down to it - maybe this wasn't such a bad outcome after all.
Maybe. Sarah suddenly realized she'd been paying an awful lot of attention to herself when she hadn't given a whole lot of thought to her surroundings. When she actually looked around, she began to realize why. The world beyond her was clear and visible for another six feet - or what felt like six feet to her anyway - then it suddenly distorted and blurred like a funhouse mirror.
Slowly, she got to her feet and strode over to where her vision ended. As she neared, the light on the other side rippled and blurred like the view through a fish-eye lens. Then, just as her outstretched hand touched the surface of what was probably some /very/ thick glass, everything came into focus.
The world outside was that sterile gray-white that she had always associated with hospitals, but instead of patient beds and medicine shelves, huge machinery hummed and ticked in the corners. Gone were the familiar heart-rate monitors, and IV relays - replaced by intricate display panels - scrolling letters and numbers and information completely unfathomable. What was all too familiar were the surgical implements scattered on nearby surfaces, and the two men in white lab coats and spectacles hunched over one of the readouts - looking slightly disheveled and more than slightly flexible in the morality department.
Shit. Again.
She must have made a sound, or triggered something on the readout they were watching, because one of the men - a lean, red fox with dark circles just visible under small oval-rimmed glasses. He smiled as he looked her over, causing Sarah to instinctively cover her breasts with her hands - flicking her tail around into a more obscuring position.
Her observer took this in with the good grace of a practiced bedside manner, straightening up as he stepped closer. It would have been menacing as hell if he hadn't been just over a foot tall. No, that wasn't right. He was fine ... she was the one who had grown to the size of a bus. She just had to keep a stiff upper lip and hope against hope that these people could help her.
"Good morning, my sleeping beauty."
Sarah flinched and glanced up - where the voice had come from. She stared at the empty celling above her for a second as the voice above her chuckled - before she realized what was going on. It was a speaker. She refocused back on the tiny fox in front of her. He waited patiently for her full attention before continuing.
"Sorry about the glass, my dear. Despite our precautions, your pheromones are still in full swing, and I prefer my inhibitions intact for the moment. My name is Kayne - owner and head researcher for Nydus Industries - and this," He gestured over his shoulder at the raccoon still attending the monitoring equipment, "Is Eddie, my assistant. We recovered you from the park roughly eighteen hours ago and transported you here for observation and ... testing. For the moment we have your ... ah ... 'condition' under control."
Eighteen!? She'd been out for more than half a day with these two poking and prodding and ... and ... she banished that train of thought from her mind. Okay, they were scientists. They were going to poke and prod. She was awake now, and big enough to keep them from doing too much more of that.
"Now," Kayne continued, spreading his arms wide, "I'm sure you've got questions. I'm not going to hide anything from you. You're not a hostage. We merely have to keep you quarantined. For your safety and the safety of my work staff."
"I-" Sarah paused at the sound of her own voice. She hadn't talked to anyone since her growth spurt, and her voice had changed nearly as much as the rest of her. She'd gone from the small squeak of her old self to a deep, sensual purr - dripping with sexuality. It was the kind of voice that could make a conversation about coffee arousing for both parties involved. It fit what she was on her way to becoming - and it begged the question. "What's going on? With me - with the world? Why is this happening?"
"That's a good one." Kayne nodded, his tail swishing. "The military's official opinion this is some sort of new bio-terrorist weapon."
"But you're not the military."
"No, and even if I were, I wouldn't be that naive." His eyes gleamed as he spoke. "This thing is happening everywhere. It's not a weapons test, unless it's not a nation on this green earth that's doing the testing."
That was an unsettling thought. "What /do/ you know, then?"
"Quite a bit, actually - thanks to my associate, here." He gestured back towards the raccoon again, whose attention was still completely occupied by the screen. "We're not dealing with biological here - not truly, anyway. Do you know what nanites are?"
"Nanites - like the science fiction thing?"
"Just like. Microscopic machines, assembled at the atomic level." Kayne made a completely unnecessary gesture with his thumb and forefinger - just in case she didn't grasp that 'microscopic' meant small. "There's been some experimentation with them in very controlled conditions before, but what's floating around in your bloodstream is completely mind-boggling. Infinitely more complex than anything that's ever been assembled by furkind. They self-replicate. They create matter. They can modify and sustain a single person nearly indefinitely."
"Modify?" Sarah didn't like that word being used, especially used to talk about her particular atomic level. "So they're what's making me grow?"
"Among ... other things." His grin widened. "They're making you bigger, yes - but they're also changing you on a glandular level - mucking about with the chemical balance of your body. The enhanced libido, the sense of self-importance, the addictive nature of the whole experience ... they're not side-effects. They're intended, and triggered any time your body creates those chemical reactions on its own."
"So ..." Sarah mulled the information over in her mind. She did /not/ like the idea of her emotions being controlled as some sort of ... 'experiment' seemed like the only thing that fit. She hefted her breasts absently. "The changes to my body are all ... ?"
"Exquisitely sculpted for the express purpose of turning you into an uncontrollable sex monster." He shrugged. "Even - and especially - the lactation."
"What - !?" It was mildly offensive to think that Kayne even knew about that, much less that someone else would have knowingly caused it.
Kayne chuckled. "We think that was a fail-safe of sorts. You were resisting the urge to grow - admirably - but that's not what the creator wanted, so he built one last little surprise into the equation. In the past twenty-four hours alone, there have been more than two dozen new macros reported. Every female has been 'gifted' with lactation, and the males ... well ... they've been exponentially more ... productive. When the timer ran down and you hadn't maxxed out your size, it gave you something to force you into it. We're lucky we found you when we did. You may be the only macro left on the planet not at full size - and that makes you an /invaluable/ resource."
"Invaluable ... how?" Sarah didn't miss the emphasis on the word - and she /really/ didn't like the gleam in the fox's eyes when he'd said it.
"Once the nanites reach their cap, they become basically inert - unresponsive to communication from their fellows, and consequently unresponsive to our studies. Full size macros are an astoundingly useless resource. An impressively expensive, unfathomably dangerous, and completely - utterly - useless resource. The nanites in /you/ on the other hand, are still active. They're talking to us. We're gaining information we've never dreamed of before. You, my dear, are going to help me change the world - and make me and my associate here very wealthy."
"You're going to turn people into ... into macros? For money!?"
"Not all the way obviously," Kayne dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. "But the early stages? Say ... twelve feet? We're not talking just size here. These things offer youth, beauty, strength, sexuality - an end to hunger and disease - and as far as we can tell, they might even be the key to immortality. Everyone's going to want to be big!
"And don't worry about yourself. Even if we can't figure out a way to bring you back down to size immediately, you'll still be a celebrity - the model for every rich and powerful woman's new ideal. Once we get over this silly macro 'scare', you'll come to represent the perfect woman - everything they want, and everything they can have - for the right price. Wherever this goes, you're the start. The template. The muse! I'm in it with /you/, and I'll do everything in my power to make sure this is the last lab you need to see."
"Kayne." Eddie interrupted his boss' exposition, beckoning him over to the display he'd been watching. "I think we're go for phase one, whenever you're ready. I've prepped the ... uh ... " Eddie cast a distinctly nervous glance in Sarah's direction, "Tissue sample for testing."
"Wonderful!" Kayne smiled and turned back to Sarah for a theatrical bow. "Now if you'll excuse me, my dear - I have to go make the military a weapon. Even greatness requires funding!"
"Alright Eddie, what've we got?" Kayne stepped away from the glass enclosure and glanced at the computer screen. Sarah could probably still hear them - the speaker had been designed to be fairly sensitive - but she wasn't exactly going to go running off to the competition, now was she?
"Well, I've been talking with the nanites from the milk sample we collected earlier, and what I've got so far is two problems." The raccoon pointed to a bit of his 'conversation' with the nanites that they'd taken from Sarah. Kayne couldn't make heads or tails of it, but then, this was Eddie's area of expertise. "The first, is that the nanites are localized - designed to function within Sarah's body - but with a little tweaking, I think I've managed to make them work outside their natural environment."
"So we get them in someone else's bloodstream, and they don't shut down anymore." Kayne nodded, easy problem, easy solution.
"Right. From there, they should respond to emotional stimulus like normal. Voila! Instant macro. However," Eddie pointed to another section of the screen, where the nanites in the sample were continually reporting the same number over and over again. "The problem we have is that the nanites in the sample are keeping a tally of their numbers. We'd get maybe one macro out of the sample, and that would be that. Well, thirty-two feet short of a whole macro, to be specific." Eddie gestured at Sarah, watching quietly from her enclosure. All thirty-two feet, four inches of her. "Then we'd have to draw another sample and deliver it to get a repetition."
"And that's not feasable with only one source." Kayne grimaced. Not only would such a procedure be hard on Sarah while the military stocked and tested their new weapon, but it would delay his own research while they gave most of their samples away. "I need the military to get more mileage out of one sample, so we don't get bogged down in red tape. This contract doesn't pay well enough for red tape."
"The option I'm thinking about doing is to remove the nanites' tally while they're in the sample, and figuring out a way to get them to initiate it again once they enter a subject's bloodstream."
"Can you do that?"
"Well, zeroing the tally is the easy part," Eddie shrugged, "But they're already programmed to look for emotive chemicals, so it shouldn't be too hard to get them counting again once they work their way into the subject's neural architecture."
"Sounds good." Kayne patted his assistant on the back. "So we want to turn the tally off and back on real fast just to see if we can?"
"Alright." Eddie turned his attention back to the computer - typing commands out to the nanites. "Zeroing ... now."
The readout blinked momentarily, and then the nanite count on the bottom of the screen changed from hundreds of billions to a nice, neat 0. Unfortunately, so did the nanite responses. The terminal rapidly filled with little digital 0's as the nanites seemed to flounder about in confusion.
"Ahh shit." Eddie pinched the bridge of his nose. "Of course they wouldn't like zero. There's got to be at least two of 'em for them to be talking at all, right?" He tapped a few things on the keyboard, scratched his head, and then typed again. Kayne didn't see any change in the results. "Well, that's it. They've locked me out. We're going to need another sample. This one's - "
He was interrupted as a low moan played over the PA system connected to Sarah's enclosure. Kayne's head broke speed records as he turned towards the sound. Sarah leaned heavily against the glass, panting heavily - all modesty forgotten as the rise of her chest pressed her breasts up against the thick glass. Her body was trembling slightly, her eyes pressed tightly shut - from his chair, Kayne could make out the barely perceptible swell of her body. Growth. But -
"G-guys? We might have a s-slight -ah- problem-mmm." The word degenerated into another low moan - spiked with tremors of fear. "H-hot. Very hot."
Kayne caught a flash of red on her wrists. That would be the indicator LED's on the control bracelets - the only thing keeping the nanites from responding to her emotive state. He scrambled over to the display that showed the reports from the nanites still in Sarah's body. Energy output was through the roof - the nanites were indeed busy creating more of themselves - and more mass for Sarah's slowly expanding body ... but why?
His eyes fell on the corner of the screen where the computer displayed the current nanite count. He expected to see it scrolling up uncontrollably. It ought to be. That was certainly what was happening physically.
Instead, it simply read '0'.
Sarah tried to take a deep breath. Slow. Steady. Calm and in control. Too bad her knees were knocking together from the sheer sensation - her breath ragged and shaky. This was unlike anything she'd felt before. There hadn't been the subtle warmth that crept across her body. There was no soft, caressing pleasure whispering promises in her ear. No impulse to give in. There was only the hot, burning euphoria that flooded her whole body with power and heat.
Her mind was still there - her core still intact. She knew she was growing. Still had the will to resist, but it was all she could do to remain standing - or rather, leaning heavily on the glass enclosure. Tremors ran through her legs and arms as bone, muscle, flesh, and skin all fought her will, swelling and growing.
She heard the metal floor underneath her groan as it bent and strained against her weight - against the involuntary flexing of her powerful legs. She felt pressure building in her chest as the heat tore into her there, throwing her production back into overdrive. Just leaning her nipples against the glass was stimulating her, but the warm wetness that flowed down her chest - and coated the glass - barely registered against the pleasure that was dancing across her every nerve.
She heard the speaker overhead crackle. Heard Kayne's voice say her name. He asked her something, - softly, gently - but it didn't register. She was too busy fighting the damn heat. She worked her eyes open, anyway - searching below her for the fox. Maybe he could explain. Maybe he could help.
Tears - from a mixture of euphoric joy and abject terror - stained her vision, and she wiped them away from her eyes with a shaky hand. When she finally spotted Kayne, she gasped. He seemed so small. He hadn't been that small before, had he? It was hard to tell. Hard to think and fight the growth at the same time. Something ate at the corner of her mind - something missing - where was the other one?
"W-where's the r-raccoon?" Sarah voice felt weak and unsure, but the speaker crackled with the force anyway.
"Eddie?" Kayne threw his thumb over his shoulder at the open door out of the building. "He did the smart thing. He ran away. Of course, I'm not one for temporary solutions. Sarah, I'm sorry - but it's not going to stop. We did everything we could, but we made a mistake - and now ..."
"N-now, I'm going to blow-w up to the size of a c-city." Sarah let herself laugh at that. It was a nervous laugh - not real humor at all, but it still felt good.
"No, Sarah." Kayne sighed. "It's /not/ going to stop. The other macros you've seen, they all had preset limits on how big they could get - how many nanites they could produce. They're the ones who wound up the size of a city. But we screwed up. Your nanites are simply not keeping track anymore. They're not going to stop multiplying. They'll go on and on until they run out of power - and to be honest, I have no idea when that'll be. From what we can estimate, though ... there may not be a safe place left on this continent."
"S-so what?" She looked down at the diminutive fox on the other side of the glass. Such fragile glass, it seemed now. "You're going to just s-stand there and see long it takes for me t-to -ah- grow over you?" Now that he mentioned it, it was an exhilarating idea. She'd play along. Wouldn't even move - just see how long it took her to crush him underfoot with just the force of her growth ...
"Hardly." He slipped off the lab coat and set it on a chair, working on unbuttoning his shirt as he spoke. Was he getting off on this? Kinky. "I've been weighing my options. You're growing fairly slowly right now - because those control bracelets are doing their job - keeping you thinking. Of course, they're not going to last forever, and as soon as your inhibitions go, so does this city - and probably even my poor, fleeing assistant. If I want to catch up, I'd better do it now."
"Catch up?" She watched him, hungrily now. His shirt was off, exposing his lean chest, and he was already undoing the buckle on his belt. "But you're n-not - not like me."
"Not yet." Down went his pants, off went his shoes, and soon even his boxers had been casually tossed aside. He had a nice package for such a thin guy. If only he were a bit ... she shook the thought from her head forcing herself to pay attention as Kayne went on. "What Eddie and I managed to finish isn't perfect, and hasn't been tested - hell it just might kill me outright - but I meant what I said when I said we were in this together, and this? Well, I'd be crazy to turn this down."
He smiled at her, and swiped a device like a small silver gun from off of the desk behind him. A few taps on a keyboard, and one of the machines whirred - spitting out a thumb-sized clear canister, partially filled with white fluid. Her milk she guessed - the 'tissue sample' from earlier. In one swift motion, he attached the canister to the back end of the gun and held it up to his neck. There was a hiss of pneumatic pressure being released, and the canister emptied. Kayne flinched and clapped a hand to his neck - but it did little to hide the changes - already taking place.
It was like watching a ripple move across a pond. Silver fur spread from the injection site and flowed up over his face. The long, thin point of his canid muzzle thickened and shortened - his nose rounding out as more numerous whiskers spread across the sides. His sharp, masculine jaw softened and slightened, becoming more gently curved. His eyes changed - becoming more almond-shaped and taking on a radiant emerald tint. His lashes lengthened. His ears rounded - losing their sharp vulpine angles in favor of a more round, feline shape - while his short-cropped auburn hair lengthened and darkened, falling down his back in a wavy curtain of shimmering black locks.
Sarah watched in amazement as she realized what was happening. Kayne had just injected himself with nanites - crazy little machines designed for /her/ body. In him, they found things that didn't mesh - and they simply fixed them. Kayne was turning into a gorgeous - remarkably feminine - snow-leopard ...
He was turning into /her/.