Prompt of the Week - Prompt #169

In retrospect, perhaps making the retroviral agent airborne hadn’t been the best of ideas.

It had happened long enough ago that historians in ensuing years had had enough time to piece together what had truly happened, after the initial backlash created enough chaos that most were too busy trying to survive to really think about the causes of the global disaster unfolding below their very eyes. Even so, some elements remained unknown even to the modern day; no amount of rigour could bring back something that had been completely obliterated, after all.

The inciting incident for the Growth came some two hundred or so years back, when an unnamed genetic researcher developed a formula whose goal was quite simple: alter the genetic code of all dairy cows on the planet so that they could produce more milk, more efficiently, without the need for additional food input.

Initial testing showed promising results, and shortly thereafter, the formula for the retroviral designed to effectuate these genetic changes was being sold to companies throughout the planet, and for a time, everything was perfectly fine: cows were made milkier, every shareholder was made richer, and everyone’s bones were slightly healthier from a wider, cheaper access to calcium.

But, at some point, something changed. None quite knew whether it was intentional sabotage, whether the formula was altered in some way, or if it was just the result of a series of cascading failures compounding on one another, but the changes brought about to dairy cows began to manifest outside of them: soon enough, it became normal for even non-pregnant folk to begin lactating, followed soon after by the gradual increase in the average cup size for all peoples of the Earth.

This process eventually culminated in what was later referred to as the “Growth”, an event whereby a rapid series of population-wide growth spurts led to the complete and irrevocable transformation of society, as most people found themselves growing tits so massive that they could barely function… and tits so milky that, regardless of what happened, access to food was plentiful, and the occurrence of violations of thermodynamics became commonplace.

It took a significant amount of time for things to even so much as stabilise, let alone return to a semblance of normalcy. Biology had been radically altered in such a short timespan that the society that emerged from the other side of the Growth was effectively unrecognisable to anyone living before it; not to mention the damage done to infrastructure and water tables globally, as well as the mass displacement of ecosystems due to milk damage across the planetary surface.

But, against all odds, civilisation survived to some extent, and with great effort, began the process of reconstruction, rebuilding an entirely new world in the image of a much weirder form of reality, one where having to account for house-sized breasts and enough dairy production to drown out a small start became more than just the stuff of kink art and the occasional roleplay.

Borders ceased meaning much, and polities were organised primarily based around large, industrial mega-complexes built for the express purpose of milking as many people as possible: like giant, beating hearts, these tangles of machinery thrummed and whirred twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, four weeks a month, twelve months a year, just to keep the billions on Earth at a size that could be, charitably, described as stable.

In the ensuing decades, the same gene that had originally kickstarted the whole process suffered additional mutations, leading to a much more gradual, though no less drastic alteration in sizes and productivity across the board: bovine traits became far more widespread throughout all species, average sizes shot up tremendously, and the same industrial milking centres that had once served to stave off another milkpocalypse became dreadfully insufficient, forcing all national entities to band together to invest into orbital infrastructure; within a few short years, most of the problematic cases were moved into the various equatorial rings build around Earth, where their size could be significantly better managed, and their productivity deliberately pumped towards the Sun for easy disposal.

Well, apart from the fact that projections indicated they’d be shortening Sol’s lifespan by about a billion years within the next thousand, but who was counting? By then they’d have conquered interstellar travel anyway.

It was into this world that Beatrice woke up one morning, doing her best to ignore the pounding sense of pressure that had built up inside of her chest; ever since her milking pump stopped working properly, every single night became a race between herself and the poor machine’s reduced capacity, one that the latter had been steadily losing ground on. She could only hope that the replacement arrived before she broke the one she had, or else the neighbourhood was going to have a significant problem.

The cheetah, as usual, went limp as she pressed the activation sequence on her night stand, allowing the automated systems attached to her bed to pack up her sleeping accommodations, lift her to a raised, standing position, and then dress her after she picked out a selection from her inventory management software. There used to be a time, she was taught in school, when people her age were still capable of getting off from bed by themselves, a time when one could get dressed and cleaned up without the help of any one of a variety of branded autodrobe systems, but that time was long gone; nowadays, even the smallest among them required mechanical assistance if they wanted to get anything done, especially when it came to going vertical after waking up.

Stretching, Bea yawned, every inch of her feeling that blockage several dozen yards in front of her, beyond that wall of spotted breastflesh stretched in all directions in her field of view. Almost immediately, she resolved to just sit back down: there was enough ass on her that she still ended up taller when doing so than while standing up anyway, so it wasn’t as if she was sacrificing accessibility.

Besides, she wasn’t going anywhere until she had her morning milking.

The machine was calibrated to keep its suction power to a relative minimum during sleeping hours, as otherwise it would be borderline impossible to get some actual rest; being milked was stimulating enough that, even now after years and years of it happening, the chee still couldn’t go through the process without breaking and cumming a couple of times, her refractory period having been trained into near non-existence as a result.

It was necessary though. With her draining being majorly reduced over the course of eight hours, especially now that her pumps weren’t even functioning properly, the amount of bloat was enough to be legitimately crippling, with movement becoming impossible until she shed some of that weight; it didn’t help that her natural state was already big and heavy enough to require mechanical assistance, either.

So, as usual, Bea settled in for another milking session, engaging the sound padding on the room and turning on the pumps, so could have some alone time for herself without waking anyone else up.

The ensuing size reduction wasn’t necessarily major by any means, but it was sufficient to make a difference: Beatrice shed several yards’ worth of diameter on both breasts, all of it stored-up milk, placing her at just the correct size threshold that the machinery could apply the custom-made nipple rings she’d bought a few months prior: her very own anti-grav solution!

How exactly people went around walking when they carried assets several times larger than they were was mostly down to personal choice, and options were about as varied as the sizes themselves were. While Bea herself chose anti-gravity nip rings, these weren’t the only option at her size by any stretch of the imagination.

For the smallest among them, compression tech, an older form of containment, was still a possible solution: localised spatial folding allowed a larger volume to be “contracted” into a smaller one, for some of them even managing to mimic sizes that would’ve been seen pre-Growth. This solution, however, didn’t scale well, with power consumption becoming prohibitively more expensive the larger one became; past a certain point, one would need an industrial-sized battery bank just to be able to shrink at all, and further refinements in energy storage tech had fallen by the wayside in the past few decades.

For those of a larger size, solutions were mostly designed around moving large masses rather than attempting to hide them. For most, anti-gravity pads were the preferred option, variably-sized pads of metal covered in a soft material, mostly synthetic cotton, and equipped with gravgen engines that could be adjusted on the fly for greater or lesser effect. This basic technology then spun off into a variety of anti-gravity accessories, mostly jewellery and similar items, meant to capitalise on the aesthetic sensibility of those who were just too big to hide themselves in any way any more. Beatrice herself opted for the nipple rings, as she found that the small pulling force created by the grav field also helped soothe her perpetually-sore dairy factories.

For the fortunate few that were even bigger than she was, but not yet big enough to be moved to the orbital rings, there were two options: either establish their own milking complex and give up moving altogether, or invest into an Alcubierre Bubble Bra, a proprietary piece of tech that functioned almost like an inverse compressor, bending the space around the tits instead of the space the tits themselves occupied.

This was, for obvious reasons, not permitted outside private residences, and most polities had rules against their usage at all, but there still remained a few individuals who chose their own mobility over the stability of spacetime around them.

Eventually, however, there would come a point in time where one’s breasts became too large for even current tech to handle, no matter how much money was thrown at the problem. It simply became cheaper to move said person to an orbital facility, where not only would size management not be strictly necessary, but where their productivity could be either dumped into the sun as needed or used to power the dairy fusion reactors keeping the whole structure stable.

Then, if one grew too large even for that… well, there were talks of turning a handful of the biggest folk around into living spaceship cores, but that was still mostly just speculation. The real issue, Bea knew, was that it was speculation she had to pay attention to, because she was headed very much in that direction.

The gene only activated after a certain age, giving most people a view of what life was like before the Growth before being suddenly hit by a second puberty so powerful that it made whatever hormone storm one had experienced look like a calm breeze by comparison. The average age for the growth spurts to begin was roughly situated around twenty-four to twenty-six, with a prolonged period of expansion into their early thirties, before the genetic growth petered out and only milk- and production-derived gains remained.

Beatrice, meanwhile, was just about to celebrate her twenty-third birthday. A year prior, she’d been five-foot-nothing, flat, and had about as many curves as a ruler.

She was now nine-foot-ten, both her tits were the size of a pre-Growth house, and her ass was large enough that she could crush some of the smaller milk transport auto-trucks driving down the road next to her home at that exact moment. And checking the measurements after the milking was complete only served to confirm what she already knew: a month prior to that date, she was gaining roughly one foot of diameter every day. A week before present, she woke up to a whole new yard.

This morning, she’d gained ten.

It wasn’t as if the cheetah didn’t appreciate an explosive bout of growth, but it was definitely an… experience, considering how much nothing her original puberty gave her; for most others, they’d receive a small taste of large by way of their average growth being more in line with pre-Growth ninety-ninth percentile, but her?

She had nothing.

And now she had everything.

It wasn’t uncommon for one’s productivity to far surpass even one’s size either, but her body seemed to want to take the gold back home on that as well; the nipple rings were as much a fashion choice as they were a clarion call for her mobility, seeing as Bea could, at times, feel her tits growing from how much milk they were producing. It was a vicious cycle: she made too much milk and it made her breasts grow, which stimulated production of more milk glands, which made her pump out even more milk, and it never really ended.

Even with the nipple rings on and a fastidious dedication to her milking schedule, her “mobility” was still mostly a polite lie Bea kept telling herself, as she barely had ten minutes of autonomy away from a milker before her girls filled up so much they grounded her, and it was only going to get worse very quickly, assuming her growth curve kept up the way it was going.

Hell, she’d only just removed the suction cups from her nipples when the chee felt her breasts immediately fill to capacity and begin bloating, sighing to herself as the true culprit for her milking machine’s failure made itself apparent. It was just her luck that, at the very least, her apartment had a large-scale Alcubierre bubble generator installed to give her as much space as she wanted, or she would’ve likely needed to be evacuated before bursting clean out of her home.

Instead, she got to sit around pretending like she wasn’t going to do that anyway long before the bureaucracy got to her about moving her to a suitable equatorial ring. Bea wasn’t blind, she watched the news every day, she looked up size updates and official statistics: she was firmly aware that there was something going on, that she wasn’t even the fastest-growing person around, and that no one had any real explanation for what was happening, much less a solution.

The world was staring down the barrel of another Growth, except this one would come over an agonisingly long period of time compared to the first one, letting everyone see it coming from a mile or five away, yet remain completely unable to do anything about it. It would be a disaster of untold proportions, just barely kept at bay by the technological advancements that arose from the Growth.

And yet, Beatrice couldn’t make herself care about it.

She… enjoyed how big she was. She liked being incapable of entering a significant number of buildings, loved being an inconvenience to others, and, above all, positively adored the morning ritual of milking herself like a dairy cow (or, well, she supposed she was a dairy cow, just a cheetah-flavoured one) and cumming her brains out as a result. But, more than that, the very action of waking up and checking her growth statistics, only to see the line trending further and further to a vertical, was-

-she had to clean herself up after that little moment; that, and the cheetah was fairly certain she just grew a few extra yards from the stimulation alone, something that put her right back on the edge the moment the thought was formulated. Really, this was what it was all about: being on the edge.

She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to get used to being that large. She knew some people successfully acclimated to it, actually went the distance and altered their own brain chemistry through stubbornness alone to find these sorts of fluctuations to be tolerable and reasonable. But, even if she could do such a thing, Bea… didn’t want to.

They woke up every morning and it was impossible for her to function. Her tits were too big, were too milky, were too sensitive, and just the maintenance required to keep her stable was enough to set her off so hard as to sap whatever energy she had left. She was so big, and so fast-growing, that the simple fact of her own existence was enough to leave her scrambled and in need of heavy assistance. Within a year, not only would she not fit inside her own home, if her projections were correct, she’d barely fit on one of the orbital ring docking stations, and the worst part about that?

She felt herself growing again as she thought about it. Those three words that made the walls tremble and her legs quake with equal strength.

It wasn’t enough.

Because it was never enough. Not even when she woke up that one day with her back to the ceiling and her limbs flat against it, no room left for her to move or wiggle in. Not even when she sat down to type out her growth numbers on a spreadsheet calculator and it spat out the most delicious-looking graph she’d seen in her life. Certainly not when the income statements for her milk sales came back a couple of days ago and it was more money than she’d seen in her entire life.

A year ago, she had been flat, and now she was fast-tracked to becoming one of the biggest cows around, and honestly?

She was spoiled, and couldn’t settle for less.

So of course she didn’t do anything to stop it; why should she, when this was exactly what she wanted? Within a month, at best, she’d be tapped to go up into orbit, and from there, well, they’d just have to see what else came around. Because one thing was for certain: she wasn’t going to stop growing, nor did she intend to even so much as slow down. Quite the contrary, actually, because it wasn’t really enough to just grow.

She had to Grow.