A Day to Remember

It was a warm August morning when it happened. When the earth shook. When the mountain erupted.

It had started at first as a timid murmur barely audible to even the most trained of ears, but within minutes the sound had escalated – the murmurs turned to a cacophonous storm so loud that nearby windows rattled in their frames. Tremors gripped the land, increasingly powerful shocks twisting the crust to and fro. Inside the mountain the pressure of the hot magma beat against the walls, the searing gases desperately searching for escape.

Freedom came swiftly. A vent opened up above the churning magma and without a second of delay the boiling gases rolled upwards and out of the mouth of the mountain. The eruption was tremendous. Masses of hot gases shot upwards into the atmosphere, polluting the environment with its smog. The ground shook tumultuously, the crust crumpling as it shifted and rolled over itself in one great migration of mass.

Grey jolted forwards, disturbed from his sleep by one of the thickest belches he had ever found himself performing. The shock subsiding, he smiled, the warm musk of his gassy emissions hung in the air and he took the time to sit back and enjoy it. He closed his eyes. The morning sun peered indoors from between the curtains and shone warmth across his face.

As he laid back into the stench of his own body, Grey put no effort into resisting the desires of his wings as they spread out across his ponderous paunch. From ear tip to clawed toe the bat stood at a measly four feet and two inches, quite short amongst the mixed species that composed anthropomorphic society, and yet Grey found pleasure in being larger than almost all of his peers, his meagre 50 inches in height compensated for by the hundreds around his waist.

It was 10am. Grey weighed 2,209 pounds.

It was a curious sight indeed to see such a short mammal be so mammoth in size. The dramatic difference in size between his height and waist was exemplified in one simple fact, one statistic that brought a smile to his face as he recalled it to memory – Grey’s stomach reached closer to the floor than did his dangling feet. His toes wiggled not against air or carpeting, but against the underside of his own gluttony.

The couch where he currently lay was testament to his excess, for where it should comfortably seat three individuals of reasonable build, it was currently occupied entirely by the singular protagonist of this essay. The couch was well worn, the fabric was dirty and the centre of the seat had partially collapsed into a sweeping, concave stroke. At the sides the armrests had splayed outwards, victims of the thick rolls that had pressed against them hours a day for the last several years.

It was with a quiet yawn that Grey removed himself from his meditation. He slowly opened his eyes to the world around him, a world that shimmered in the morning light. The room was Grey’s own; cramped and messy, but one he could safely consider his home.

Across from the couch was an old CRT television, held upon a small table and further jacked up by empty pizza boxes so that Grey could see the screen over the horizon of his own girth. Next to it was an armchair that had been saved from the wrath of the blubbery beast after said beast had grown too blubbery to fit into it, the seat still in decent condition in comparison to where he was currently seated. A wilted fern completed the room’s unkempt aesthetic.

Strewn across the ground lay cheap Tupperware containers, remnants of what they once held were still gracing the floor of the living room. Ceramic plates lay piled up on the floor next to the couch, the sauces of their former treasures congealed upon them. Grey would never admit that in the months previous he had become too large to bend down to reach the floor, rendering him unable to properly clean the pigsty that his home was steadily becoming, but he secretly revelled that such had become the case. To him it was just another trophy for the cabinet – another goal reached in his attempts to be huge.

Grey sighed contentedly, figuring he should get up before he dozed off to sleep again. However simply “getting up” was a practice he had long since abandoned. Heaving his bulk forth, Grey leaned as far forwards as he could manage until the bottom of his sagging gut pressed into the floor before him, using the weight as leverage to slide himself off the couch and on to his feet. His fat sagged as it lost the support of the seat, hundreds of pounds of adipose rolling into its rightful place upon Grey’s extravagant form.

He stood still for a while, his unclothed body exposed, letting the cool breeze of freedom waft over his unearthed back and rump, before taking the first cumbersome step towards the kitchen.

His belly dragged against the floor as he moved, each lumbering step causing the bat to lurch from side to side as thousands of pounds relocated themselves with each step. The floorboards creaked painfully as they were subjected to more weight that many stronger materials couldn’t handle. Walking was by far Grey’s least favourite part of being large, trying to manage such mass was unwieldy at best, but he appreciated the miracle that he could move at all. His slow gain up to his current weight had afforded him time to acclimatise to increasing levels of obesity, and although it would be impossible to see through the blubber that swaddled his thighs without some manner of medical equipment, he actually had fairly well developed leg musculature.

Irregardless, his movement was slow and ponderous. It took several minutes to reach the kitchen that was barely ten metres from where he had slept and many more to navigate the two doorways that laid the course between them. Heavy and gasping for breath, Grey made it into the small kitchen. Sweat dribbled from his brow as he leant against a countertop, recovering from the exertion that moving such mass entailed.

Grey’s kitchen is not what one would expect a kitchen to be like. His short stature required counters to be much lower than what was standard fare, and ruled out completely cabinets that were attached to the walls. His excessive corpulence additionally ruled out any cupboards that had doors – as they wouldn’t be able to open with him standing in front of them. Instead the kitchen was laid bare, with short counters and open shelves providing access to appliances with relative ease. The small size of the kitchen did little to help accessibility, Grey alone took up over a quarter of the available floor space.

His energy returned, Grey waddled before the two refrigerators located next to the door, approaching one from the side and reaching out, trying to tug it open without having it impact the thick tyre of fat that encircled his body. From inside he grabbed a dozen eggs, a dozen sausages, a packet of smoked back bacon and the remaining half of a black pudding.

A lashing of oil sizzled as it was poured into the hot base of a large frying pan. Slices of bread inserted into the top of the four slot toaster and swiftly replaced when the resulting toast popped back up. Grey moved with surprising swiftness whilst cooking, his familiarity with his kitchen presenting a smooth flow from counter to stove to plate that even his mass failed to hinder. In a short fifteen minutes a four cheese omelette larger than most dinner plates has found its way onto a specially oversized dish, joined by rich Cumberland sausages, eight slices of deep brown black pudding and a plethora of still sizzling rashers of bacon. Twelve slices of thickly buttered toast sat on a separate, smaller plate.

Grey took a moment to admire his handiwork and dug in.

His appetite had grown steadily greater throughout his gain and his eating habits more ravenous in nature. Grey disregarded the need for cutlery, instead opting to sandwich pieces of meat and eggs between slices of warm toast before shovelling them into his mouth – his fingers were too clumsy with the fiddly pieces of metal anyway, and the food inevitably got cold before he could finish it. He stood as he ate, no dining chair strong enough to carry him in his position.

Within mere minutes the dish he ate from was desolate from all but a few breadcrumbs and a slick of grease that had dripped from his breakfast. This same grease had matted the fur around the bat’s maw, causing it to glisten in the late-morning light. A hearty belch permeated the atmosphere, the pleasant smell of breakfast filling the room once more.

The plate was deposited into the sink with stale water and another dozen plates, Grey’s attention already turned towards the second of his refrigerators; his fingers carefully prying open the sturdy door. This fridge was almost entirely dedicated to drinks – almost all of which were variations of fruit juice. A fresh carton of orange juice – with bits – was taken into wing and pulled open, the opening pressed to lips as Grey chugged down the litre of cool juice with confidence. Small streams of juice dribbled from the corners of his mouth, mixing with the already grease saturated fur, his tongue licked up what excess he could find. The empty juice carton was dropped into the recycling box with dozens more of its kind. No agenda for the day in mind, the engorged bat squeezed his way out of the kitchen door and began the arduous waddle back towards the living room.

It was 11am. Grey weighed 2,216 pounds.

With his bulk once again squeezed through the thin doorway, Grey stood to catch his breath, taking a short look around the living room as he waited. He made and a mental note to clean up at some point, quickly disregarding it as he once again classed such a task as futile with his current level of mobility. With little else in mind, he returned to the couch where he had awoken only an hour before, presenting his rump to the crater it had imprinted upon the seat and letting it fall with a sickening crunch – the already splintered and broken frame of the couch taking another blow.

Reaching over to an end table to the side of the couch, his chunky fingers grasped a remote control and hit the on button. The high pitched screech of a television filling the room, the grand orchestral chords of Star Trek’s opening theme breaking the deafening squeal.

Grey’s wing strayed over his overindulged belly, gently caressing the rumbling, quivering mass as it slowly digested the morning’s meal. He smiled. He loved being large.

It was 12pm. Grey was bored.

Star Trek had just finished, and a quick scan through the channels brought up nothing of interest. With a sigh and a heave to get him back on his feet, the lumbering bat started making his way out of the living room once more and back into the all too familiar (and small doored) hallway.

Disregarding the tempting scents of the kitchen to his right, Grey instead faced left to an open elevator. Once checking himself over he stepped in, the squealing groan of metal clenching his ears as his foot touched the cold floor of the conveyance. He squeezed his bulk into the claustrophobic box and headed underground. The lift was very capable of carrying his weight, having been installed to carry machinery to and from his basement laboratory, but the very audible complaints were always worrying.

The elevator pinged, the doors sliding open to pitch darkness, the bat outstretching a wing to flick on the lights. With a stuttering, high-pitched buzzing the room slowly lit, exposing to view a variety of plain wooden workbenches lining the walls; lowered like those in the kitchen above. Some had various mechanical parts strewn upon their surfaces, others complex set-ups of beakers and bunsens, shelves of chemicals lining the walls.

The contrast of his laboratory to the rooms above was astounding; the area was spotless – somewhat dark and dusty from the exposed brickwork and concrete – but relatively clean in comparison to Grey’s typical living standards. It had to be, some delicate work occurred here.

Grey was a cyberneticist, a fairly uncommon but highly skilled trade. Grey himself had a stake in the venture, being a cyborg himself. After the collapse of the cybernetics industry nearly a decade prior Grey had started needing to perform his own maintenance checks, these soon snowballed into building replacement components and further still in developing new and better ways of developing the cybernetic body. He held few patents in his work; his income came instead from selling his parts to what few other cyborgs existed. Trade was slow, but he could charge highly for his products, there wasn’t much competition in the industry nowadays.

With those familiar, lumbering steps Grey made his way from the elevator across the room, passing a fond glance over to his most recent work – a cyber conversion kit contained within a single set of goggles – a far cry from the long and laborious conversions of the heyday. The goggles had not been publicised as of yet, but he was sure they could prove popular with a niche market. Conversion services were few and far between after the collapse.

Right now his attention was focused on a new digestive enzyme. Most Asimov-based conversions included nanomachines dedicated to digestion to process food more efficiently, remove harmful toxins and minimise waste. Grey was currently trying to synthesise a better version of the same – one that could process food instantaneously, remove any harmful poisons and potentially remove waste matter altogether. The work was difficult, requiring intricate knowledge of digestive chemistry and molecular gastronomy; the open books strewn around the table a testament to the research needed to complete this sensitive work.

With a steady wing a solemn mind, he began.

It was 5pm. Grey had finished.

His fingers pulling the gas tap to a close marked the end of his newest development – the Mk III nanite digestive enzyme. The solution was clear but viscous, oozing like syrup as Grey tilted the small beaker of the concoction around in his hand.

Many an hour had been invested into the enzyme over the past few weeks, and it was now – with their manufacturing process and chemical make-up documented in frantic scribbles – that the new version could be tested.

Test subjects for such work were few. No regular Joe could be used, as the intense biological changes brought on through cyborg conversion left them with radically different physiologies. An enzyme that would do nothing to a cyborg could kill someone else in a matter of minutes.

With a deep breath and a heavy sigh, he lifted the beaker to his maw and drank. The mixture was safe, the heavily corrosive properties of the digestive enzyme would not active until the nanobots within took hold of it. Within seconds the enzyme had been absorbed, spread and duplicated around his body. Grey stood, eyes closed, awaiting any pain or discomfort that could be the result of a catastrophic failure.

Nothing came. Grey sighed a breath of relief and peered up at the wall clock; it was well past five o’clock by now. He should eat. No point in ingesting an experimental digestive enzyme if you’re not going to use it!

With a gentle smile on his face, the obese bat made the slow, ponderous footfalls back to the elevator.

It was 6pm. Dinner time.

It was with familiar swiftness that Grey cooked his evening’s meal. The required testing of a new enzyme of course warranted thorough examination into how it handled differing foods and the qualities they behold, as such he consciously prepared a diverse range of consumables ranging from the generous salads that the herbivorous species fed upon, to the honeyed locusts that his insectivorous brethren so frequently gorged upon – much to the dismay of the insect lobby.

Less consciously prepared was the size of each portion. Grey was habitually inclined to prepare a single meal capable of sating his appetite, and now he was developing not one, but dozens of dishes capable of doing the same. Where a few slices of gammon may have sufficed for the purposes of the test, he instead drew an entire pork joint from his oven; where a wingful of fries could prove viability, instead an entire bag of them were sent to fry. Even the honeyed locusts were served in quantities more familiar to chiropteran feasts than a lone individual.

By the time the clock struck half past the hour, dinner was ready. Dinner was also everywhere, each countertop overloaded with the food he had prepared, sauces and soups still sat in the pots where they were cooked – no serving bowl remaining to hold them.

Grey’s belly let out a pained rumble. He had been once again distracted by work, and had neglected to even think of eating throughout most of the day. He could not gorge himself however, testing was afoot, and as such it had to be performed carefully and methodically. The purpose of this new serum was to 1) make the process of digestion more efficient, 2) remove harmful toxins and poisons from food upon ingestion, and 3) to try to eradicate completely the waste material that results from the digestive process. It was these three things he would have to test.

With the necessary metrics and a debugging console at the ready, Grey took a measured slice of roast pork into his maw, a momentary pause to savour the taste before chewing and swallowing the hunk of meat with a satisfied slurp.

He tracked the progress of the pork as it went on a biological graph. When it reached his stomach it vanished, the meat instantaneously dissolved. Point one: check.

Next on the menu was fugu liver. The pufferfish is a potent source of tetrodotoxin, and the liver is the most poisonous part. The perfect test of whether his new enzyme could neutralise harmful substances.

The liver was small and unappetising, the fleshy pink colour not helping in the looks department either. Grey prodded it with a chopstick, causing it to wobble slightly. He picked it up and plonked it onto his tongue, gulping it down whole before the toxins could do more than numb his mouth. Like the pork before it, the fugu was obliterated the instant it reached his stomach. He sat and waited, eyes watching the numbers for abnormal levels of toxicity in his stomach or blood. He kept his legs and wings moving in small circular motions in an attempt to catch any signs of paralysis or numbness that the neurotoxin provided.

After a minute he had nothing but a continuing numbness in his mouth – something that was much more preferable to the quick death that the fish was known for. He checked the second point off.

The third was to see whether waste had been reduced or eradicated, something he had hoped to achieve through allowing the digestive enzyme to digest or convert practically anything. It was this attribute that made it such a corrosive threat, and had warranted such specific testing in the first place.

If the body to be digested could be digested, it would be. If not, it would be rewritten at the molecular level into something that could be – 100% of what was eaten was to be used by the body. Peak efficiency, like music to his ears.

Grey pulled the remainder of the roast pork joint towards himself so he could rest the dish upon his ample breast.

The best way to see if he could digest anything would be to eat everything, no?

He lifted the joint to his mouth and ate it. Grease splattered his cheeks as he took ravenous bite after ravenous bite out of the thick hunk of meat until the whole thing has been devoured. A thick belch rumbled through him, a contented smile plastered on his messy face.

But he wasn’t contented. A joint of that size should have made a decent meal on any other day, but now… now he was just hungry. Starving in fact.

With a grunt he leaned over the tabletop and pulled over the honeyed locusts, taking a pawful of them and shoving them past his cheeks, followed by another, and another before he simply emptied the bowl directly into his mouth, crunching away at them hungrily. The bowl of fries followed a similar route, their radiant heat hardly slowing him down. The salad went with it.

Waddling about the table, Grey slid battered fish, cheese sandwiches and slices of watermelon into his maw. He approached the countertops, upending a large pot of simmering vegetable soup directly into his mouth. He took cheeseburgers in each wing, taking turns to tear huge chunks out of them. He slurped up spaghetti as if it were mango juice.

Grey loved digestive testing. The already terminally obese bat could engorge himself on every treat he could get his hands on, each mouthful making his beloved gut swell outwards a little further, and still say he was doing it for science.

Imagine his surprise when he noticed he had grown more than just “a little”.

He struggled to stifle a squeak as his sheer and expanding girth caught his eye. Where once his belly had merely pressed upon the floor it was now smothering it, the thick rolls of his own outrageous blubber spread out across the linoleum surface, daring the plastic material to resist it.

Grey’s attention was snatched away soon after, a tremendous pang of hunger struck through him. He immediately lunged towards a cheesecake on the counter, ploughing his fingers through the soft surface and ripping it apart, lifting chunks of the messy dessert to his maw and slurping them from his grubby fingers. This was followed by the still steaming teriyaki chicken next to it, hardly a hesitant thought passing through his mind. He couldn’t help it, the food was delicious, his body called for more and he could do nothing but oblige to his fantasies.

The deeper recesses of his mind were much more troubled. Inside he was deep in thought, a sudden awareness had dawned on him moments earlier – he should be full. Yes, he did have a “bottomless” appetite of sorts, but it was not literally bottomless! A meal fit for four would normally sate him, but he had easily managed double that in the preceding time, and he was still hungry.

Nay, he wasn’t hungry. He was starving.

It was 7pm. Grey was starving.

Slices of saucy chicken still sticking out from his mouth, Grey leant back and looked around himself desperately, looking for any physical reason for his excelled appetite. No physical cause was obvious. It must be the enzyme.

His wings kept piling food into his mouth, this time twee sticks of beef satay coated in peanut sauce, his chin almost touching the countertop just to reduce the distance between food and his mouth.

The enzyme. Why would the enzyme make him gain fat so much faster? Why would it give him an endless appetite? Thoughts flooded his mind. A chemical miscalculation? He went through every formula he could remember. No, none of them could lead to this. Maybe his body was having an adverse reaction? But the debugging console never threw up any warning, that couldn’t be the case. What was doing this?

As his conscious dwelled in thought his subconscious took control. His body urged him to eat, and that is what it did: cauliflower cheese, cottage pie and carbonara found a welcome home in the bat’s warm, comforting mouth.

As his gut grew outwards, so did the intensity of the hunger pangs. His complaining gut urged him onwards, it needed food and needed it now, and wasn’t taking no for an answer. His goggles repeated the biological message, his stomach was empty and needed filling, filling fast; yet no matter how much he tried to fill the tank, Grey’s gut read empty.

He paused. His eyes grew wide. His eureka moment came. His stomach was empty – it digested everything instantly – it had no time to fill, no time to register as having eaten anything. It made him hungry, hungrier than he had ever been before.

His second realisation came soon after the first. The enzyme could reduce waste matter production by molecularly converting it into something useful. Something useful, like energy. And the biological body… it stores energy, it stores it as fat.

Grey groaned as he realised the stupidity that had brought him to this moment. He had to develop a cure, am antidote, a new enzyme to reverse this process.

He wearily wiped a wing across his face, smearing tomato and cheese sauce along his arm from the enchiladas he had subconsciously indulged himself in moments prior. He grunted and groaned, the pain of a simulated starvation still coursing through him. He made for a step forward, but… nothing.

Grey gasped, appreciating his immensity for the first time since he had invested in the indulgence of thought.

He was tremendously large. Larger than he had expected to be for many more years, his fat rolls piled outwards far in front of him, obscuring his view of the floor and even of the refrigerator on the far side of the room. These rings of fat extended around his body, disallowing him from lowering his wings to his sides, as well as displaying an impressive cascade of rolls down his back towards his rump; and what a rump it was, each cheek could weigh as much as a well built member of his species from what he could reason. Below them his thighs sat, buried from all sides by the overhanging lovehandles, belly and rear that adorned his physique.

For a moment he paused, cautiously reaching a wing outwards and grasping at one of the ample rolls on his belly. He squeezed it, rubbed it, a rumble of pleasure escaping from his throat.

Actually, this enzyme would do nicely.

It was 8pm. Grey weighed 3,164 pounds. And he loved it.