Ruination / The Mother of Invention
Alex’s body wobbled. A strained grunt escaped his mouth. He paused briefly, huffing for breath before letting out a mighty groan. Slowly, his arm lifted a thick slab of cake. The tree trunk-like limb moved as lethargically as its owner, squeezing past the crest of his ample chest and climbing towards his head and mouth.
He was fortunate that fat was so malleable; otherwise, there wouldn’t have been enough flexibility to even attempt this manoeuvre. The sagging flab of his arms shifted and squashed, forming new rolls as it ascended the final hurdles: the rings of fat around his face and the cheeks that shielded it from either side.
Gradually, he pressed the misshapen handful of rich chocolate cake against his mouth, smearing icing across his lips. Once again, he tried and failed to shovel the entire thing into his mouth in one go. His entire body shook as gravity pulled his arm back to his side, causing crumbs to cascade down his chest and collect in the folds of his grotesque obesity.
And thus, the cycle began anew. His hand grasped a chunk of the enormous, three-tiered wedding cake that had partially collapsed against him. Cream and icing splattered against the rolls, inevitably sinking into deep folds. He tore out another thick, misshapen lump of sponge and icing, embarking on the arduous journey of lifting it to his face once more, haphazardly stuffing it into his gluttonous mouth.
He hadn’t been properly mobile for well over a year. He had done very little but sit and eat for even longer. The sheer exertion of walking killed his motivation to move long before his weight made it impossible.
The cyborg bat was a hulking blob at this point, his weight close to cresting 5,500 pounds according to his goggles’ estimation. His body was stained with debris from the thousands of meals that had taken place since his last bath. His folds pooled with sweat from the oppressive heat of being so much more massive than his species’ biology would normally permit, the two mingling together into a disgusting solution that stained the furnishings and carpet wherever his bloated body smothered them.
Despite his technical augmentations, breaths were difficult and those that came were shallow and wheezing.
And yet, he persisted. The more people called him an obese slob, the more he took pride in the fat. The more aggressively that everyone from casual acquaintances to medical professionals called his intentions ruinous, the more he desired to ruin himself.
His goggles’ heads-up display blinked constantly: warnings about his extreme weight, his ludicrously high cholesterol, his low blood-oxygen level, all flashing in his eyes. He relished them. He celebrated watching the numbers shift to ever greater extremes.
He was fat. Fatter than any of his species that had come before. Fatter than anything and anyone. Being fat had been his goal for as long as he could remember, and this—in all its proclaimed insanity—was the fulfilment of that goal.
Almost.
The mere fact that he could still feed himself was a failing. He could still move his jaw to chew, tilt his head to see, and swivel his ears to hear. Every modicum of motion was a persistent reminder that he hadn’t done enough yet—he could still be fatter.
With renewed determination, he blindly grasped at the wedding cake, violently hoisting another overflowing handful of the rich, calorific dessert to his hungry, messy maw.
He didn’t know how much longer he could keep this up. Each arm was like a morbidly obese fur in itself, the weight of a whole other person clinging onto his arms and pulling them downwards. Total immobility would be soon to come, but the more he thought about it, the more he questioned whether he was ready yet.
Why settle for immobility at 5,500 pounds when he could keep going until 7,000 or 8,000? He was a cyborg, an engineer, a scientist—he could still get so much fatter before any modicum of movement could be wrestled from his hyper-obese hands, if only he put his mind to it.
Maybe some kind of feeding apparatus? Mechanical arms? A moving chair of some kind?
A spark lit itself in his mind. He wasn’t going to give up independence just yet…
It had taken weeks for him to design, and it had taken months more to have it manufactured. Even the final installation process had taken several days, inconvenienced as it was by Alex’s sheer size and immobility. The constant “snack” breaks didn’t help either.
But for the first time in about two and a half years, Alex was standing up. Not only that, he was moving under his own control. He wasn’t that fast, and he wasn’t that dexterous, but even his lumbering, floor-shaking waddle-shuffle was a marked improvement over the functional immobility he had been stuck with for so long.
A network of bulky metal and machinery wound around his body, pushing against his overabundant blubber. The bulk of the apparatus stretched from behind his head to beneath the soles of his feet, with branches extending down each arm to near the tips of each finger.
It was an exoskeleton, integrated into his cybernetics, capable of handling the overwhelming effort required to move a 6,000-pound bat blob with minimal physical exertion on Alex’s part.
It wasn’t a perfect system; there wasn’t much they could do to counteract Alex’s sheer size. Even while standing, his gut smothered a wide swathe of the floor and sat high enough to obscure most of the view in front of him. Similarly, his rump was still massive enough to drag against the floor, even with his stomach providing counterbalance.
He couldn’t turn his head more than a few degrees, and his hands couldn’t grasp anything further away than his own moobs. But at least the act of moving them was no longer a Herculean physical effort in itself.
Despite all the caveats, Alex was happy. He was able to walk again, carrying at least a couple thousand more pounds. He retained the ability to feed himself, grow, and hopefully augment himself and his home, so that he could continue gaining indefinitely.
He gave an idle thought to how huge he’d need to get before even the best engineering and materials science would fail to carry him anymore. He smiled softly, putting a pin in that thought for a future weight goal.
As he prepared to take another shuffling, wobbling step forward, he looked around the room where he had spent so much of the last few years… and he was far larger than any doorway out of here.
Ah.
Guess he would have to invent a larger door first. Necessity is the mother of invention, after all.
