The Day of the Slorg

It was 10am. Grey weighed 5,334 pounds.

Two days had passed since the digestive enzyme testing had gone gloriously wrong. Grey lay beached on the kitchen floor, fatter than he’d ever been and murring ecstatically to himself about it. This was *blissful*! So incredibly large and so satisfyingly warm and soft; he couldn’t help but grasp over every inch of belly that he could reach, simultaneously gorging himself on the latest order of Chinese food that had been delivered direct to the table next to him in exchange for a generously large tip.

Unfortunately his Asian paradise was not to last; his sweet and sour dreams were cut short by a notification sliding into his view, his vibrant orange computer goggles glowing to life. “Answer,” Grey mumbled out loud, his voice stifled by the meat still comfortably occupying his mouth.

The goggles beeped to life, the view fading into a landscape of green and white rolling hills seated comfortably on a couch.

“Ahoy there, neighbour!” Glaz’s voice called out from the aether. Glaz wasn’t wrong, he was Grey’s neighbour. He literally lived next door. He was a goggled cyborg too, a testbed for a lot of Grey’s cybernetics work, and likewise had a habit of overeating—needless to say they got along like a buffet on fire. “Yer haven’t popped around for a check up the last few days, not dead or anything are ya?”

“Nope,” Grey managed to stumble out between mouthfuls of chow mein, “m’alive,”

“That’s good! Think ya might have a problem with yer goggle camera though, seems a bit discoloured ta me,”

Confused, Grey paused the video call and glanced down at himself, slurping up the last of his noodles and gasping slightly as he took a proper look at himself for the first time in eons. His grey fur, once immaculate and smooth, had been stained with food—the reds of tomatoes and browns of chocolates mixed with milky whites and the occasional yellows, all generously mixed with the drool and sweat that had been so liberally dripping from him. He looked more like an explosion in a paint factory than, well, grey.

Grey resumed the call, “Hey Glaz, you wanna come on over? Kinda got something you need to see,”

“Erm… sure. Gimme twenty minutes or so and I’ll be right there, okay?”

The video feed hefted upwards as Glaz rolled off his sofa. “I’ll be waiting,” Grey muttered, smacking his lips as his eyes darted around the bombed out kitchen, “and bring snacks,”

* * *

True to his word Glaz turned up at the front door twenty-five minutes later with a king size pack of Doritos in hand. It took another five minutes for him to squeeze through the front door. The Doritos did not survive the journey.

Glaz turned the corner into the kitchen. Silence fell. The empty Doritos packet fell, dropping crumpled onto the floor.

“Ruddy hell, Grey! Yer huge!”

The hulking blob of bat meekly raised a wing and waved.

“What on earth did ya eat to get this big?” Glaz suddenly sounded less worried and more interested. He had always been the larger of the two, but the tables had turned so rapidly they had transformed into a propellor and shot through the ceiling—Grey’s bulk was practically dwarfing him! In just two days!

Grey looked around at the hundreds of empty containers piled around him and quickly gave up on identifying them all, instead deciding to chew on a dumpling, “Well… everything, I guess?” He grinned sheepishly, cheeks swollen with dough.

“I’m actually impressed,” Glaz smiled and leant down, his belly slapping against Grey’s corpulent bulk, picking up a dumpling and pushing it past his own lips, “I never expected ya to outweigh me with how far behind ya were, skinny,”

“I didn’t realise it was a competition…” Grey harrumphed, indignant at the petty theft that had just taken place to his seventh brunch.

Glaz laid a paw onto the plush pile of bat belly beached before him, feeling it squish and give below his fingers, “It was more of a race, fatstuff. Where’d ya get the extra capacity?”

The bat squeaked, “The what?”

“Capacity. I’ve seen takeaways coming in here all hours for days and yet yer still soft as a pillow,” his finger gave another soft poke, “Hell, I’d say yer’d barely eaten,”

Grey blushed, slurping the sauce off one of three dozen ribs, “Promise you won’t laugh?”

Glaz nodded.

“I invented a new digestive serum. Almost 100% efficient! Able to process just about anything! It’s probably the greatest thing I’ve ever invented! It just…”

“Makes ya grotesquely obese?” Glaz chimed in.

Grey fired eye daggers his way. “It processes everything, at a molecular level, into energy. And you shouldn’t need a PhD in biology to know that most folks store their excess energy as fat,”

“That doesn’t explain why yer ate enough ter give every restaurant and fast food joint in fifty miles the best week of their lives,”

Grey sighed, “Super efficient, yadda yadda, science jumbo. The point is that I’m CONSTANTLY STARVING!” His stomach roared just in time to accentuate the point, coaxing him to occupy his mouth with prawn toast instead of words.

Glaz’s ears perked, a sly grin spreading between his cheeks, “Oh really..? So where can I find this new enzyme?”

“Oh no no no!” Grey spluttered, sesame seeds spraying from his mouth with each word, “I’m not letting YOU anywhere near it!”

Glaz lifted up a beaker with viscous clear liquid sloshing around inside it, ”Is this it?”

Grey’s fat jaw hit the floor. “I… what… WHERE DID YOU FIND THAT?!”

“I found it,”

“WHERE?!”

“It was right there!” Glaz made a non-committal wave to the counter near him.

Grey casually planted his face into his palm, “I don’t suggest drinking it, Glaz,”

“And why not? You seem ter be fine,” Glaz posed back, pushing his free paw deep into Grey’s ample pudge, eliciting an awkward squeak from the bloated bat, “Hell, I’d say yer healthier than ever!”

“Glaz, please don’t…”

“Besides,” he continued, “I’m not coming in second place ter you without a fight!” With an unfamiliar nimbleness Glaz’s fingers pulled the stopper from the beaker and lifted it to his lips, a wide grin spreading across his face as he downed the oozing contents with a single gulp.

* * *

Grey’s eyes squinted open, trying to filter out the dazzling beams of light flowing through the kitchen window. The pinkish tint indicated that sunset was at hand. Some time had passed, that was for sure.

Across from him laid Glaz, practically catatonic and significantly fatter than he used to be, his furry green flab having wedged itself in a laying position, securely between kitchen and doorway. His face was sunk against Grey’s gut, using the batflab as a makeshift pillow; his tails twitched with his loud snores, a river of drool pouring from the vulpine’s sleeping muzzle. He almost looked cute sleeping, in a weird way.

Glaz had overdone it massively. His desire to be fat overcoming any sensibility he might have had, his newly christened appetite driving him to call every takeaway he could get to deliver. He had gorged himself a hundred times over until his body—weakened by weight and buried under flabby folds—stopped cooperating entirely. He’d even tried to carry on eating afterwards, but Grey had scavenged much of what was left for his own appetite.

He groaned as he tried to wipe clean his filthy, slobbering maw. His friend blocking the kitchen door and now he was out of food again, and his goggles were still crying out for sustenance. A loud rumble broke the semi-permeable silence.

“So… hungry…”

Glaz was awake.

“Glaz? You okay?” Grey posed to the vulpine blob that was flopped against him. Glaz was really quite massive, and in that one mad feeding session grown at least as large as Grey had gotten in the past week. He was definitely back in the race.

Glaz moaned softly, his ravenous appetite coursing through him. A thick trail of slobber dribbling from his maw. “Hungry…”

Grey nodded, he was familiar with that feeling by now. “C’mon buddy, rise and shine,” he cooed softly, “it’s the start—well, end—of a new day,”

Glaz huffed, groaning again as his body quaked, “I can’t move…”

“Welcome to my world,” Grey rolled his eyes, “that’s what happens when you decide to be a living blob,”

Glaz grinned softly, “Good! I wouldn’t say we’re blobby just yet, though!”

“Give it a few more days,” Grey sing-songed sarcastically. His stomach gave a soft rumble. Glaz just grinned wider at the thought.

A glimmer of light caught Grey’s eye, shining off Glaz’s side. He was about to write it off as a trick of the light when he saw another on his arm, and then another on his back. Glaz whined quietly, managing to fight his lethargy enough to press a paw into his aching, grumbling middle. More glimmers appeared over his body, all of them facing towards the window. A dirty, viscous fluid was slowly coating Glaz’s body, it was pouring out of his folds and oozing down his rolls, clinging to his fur and dripping to the floor. This couldn’t be the enzyme’s work, surely? “Glaz, you okay?”

“Yeah, just hungry,”

“You appear to be sweating quite a lot,” Grey pointed out matter-of-factly.

Glaz tried to look around himself, though his head stayed securely smooshed into his living pillow, “Is that what that is?” Some of it dribbled down his face and landed by his muzzle. He looked at it hungrily. His stomach complaining audibly.

“It’s from your body, so I’d assume it’s safe. I don’t think it’s a by-product of the enzyme,” Grey waved a wing over Glaz’s body, glistening with sweat in the sunset, “nothing I did could do… this. Go ahead, I guess,”

Glaz licked the goop, which had started to harden into an almost gelatin-like substance. He snapped it up almost instantly and licked his lips, appreciative of having something to eat.

Grey waited for a few seconds to see if anything happened. Aside from a pleased mumble, nothing did, so he lifted a lump of the jelly from Glaz’s body and gave it a nibble. It tasted salty and bitter, but the effect it had was momentous. The hunger pangs stopped; for a few glorious seconds they ceased, replaced by a sense of immense contentment before roaring to life once again.

“Oh… oh god…” Grey managed a gasp before he launched himself towards the fat, disgusting, buffet-sweating vulpine before him. His mouth was watering, appetite roaring as he desperately tried to stuff his muzzle with the fox’s sludge. Glaz too had suddenly become a lot more ravenous, trying vainly to slurp his dripping tongue over his cheeks for any sliver of the delicious slime, his stomach rumbling with a hunger more powerful than any he had felt before.

Grey, with his last dying embers of self-preservation, pulled himself away from the delicious gooey sweat, and placed a phone call…

* * *

A svelte otter rapped his knuckles on the front door of the inconspicuous residence. He’d had a bit of a way to come, but the desperate, garbled phone call he’d received from his friend an hour before was motivation enough to hurry out. He waited patiently, but no one answered.

“Grey?” he questioned, pressing his ear to the window, “You in there?” A low rumble emanated from within the confines of the house, but he heard no other response.

Minh started to panic, he wracked his paws across his head, trying to think. He could break the door down, maybe? But what if it isn’t an actual emergency? He could get into trouble! But what if it is? What if Grey fell down the stairs and is paralysed from the neck down?! What if a burglar got in? How would he defend himself?! What would he-

Impulsively he raised his foot and kicked the door, snapping the bolts and making it sway wide open. Immediately he recoiled as a wave of stench crashed over him, the smell of old frier grease and a thousand putrid takeaway containers making him gag painfully. From the open threshold a thin film of brown, noxious sludge dripped onto the paving stones before him like dirty, congealed fat. He held his nose and took a defiant step inwards.

He had barely progressed more than a few feet inwards that he saw it; a hulking pile of green-furred flab partially sticking out of a snapped door frame, jiggling and swelling at the command of some unknown master. Minh moved closer to it, seeing the sunlight glisten over the moist, matted fur of those trunk-like thighs. He recognised the markings.

“Glaz…?”

He heard a grumble, an unmistakably vocal grumble, come from the neighbouring room.

Minh jumped to alertness, “Are you alright?! Is Grey in there?!” He pressed a hand into the growing wall of fat, immediately retracting it when he felt the hot sludge almost engulf it. He stumbled backwards, repulsed by the warm jelly now stuck between his fingers, feeling his shoulder blades impact a cool metal door behind him. He heard another grumble, louder than before.

“I’ll… I’ll find a way to fix this!” he shouted to the swelling form rapidly bearing down on him, pounding his paw against the elevator controls beside him, “I’ll fix this! I swear!” The elevator doors creaked open and he leaped inwards, mashing at the close button before the blubber and sludge filling the corridor could make its way inside. Silently, he glided down into the bowels of the earth.

The laboratory below the house was almost a different world compared to what was above it. The sparse room was quiet and sanitary, a contented silence rolling over the empty workstations. Minh stepped out of the elevator, slowly making his way around around the room, at the Bunsens and flasks littering across tables, and the cardboard box filled with assorted goggles that he knew Grey had been trying to sell on.

Taking the box, he looked up at a wide blackboard covering the adjacent wall, the diagrams and equations covering every corner in a messy, inelegant scrawl. Next to the board was a bunch of stoppered flasks, each filled with a crystal clear, viscous solution. He was just about to take a closer look when a loud cracking sound suddenly shook the air and brick dust fell from the ceiling, tendrils of brown fluid starting to seep through.

Once more aware of his situation he grabbed the flasks from the counter and ran—knowing the elevator would be blocked by now—he instead made for the sliver of natural light coming from a small window on the farmost wall. Deftly, he leaped onto the countertop and dragged himself through the window and onwards down the street; turning only to see a gelatinous grey fold burst through the front of the house.

* * *

Minh hadn’t stopped running until he had reached his home, he came to a gasping, shuddering halt as he reached the front door still carrying a box of pilfered lab equipment under his arm. He wiped the sweat from his brow as he clambered through the door, setting the box down. “This must have something to do with what’s going on,” he thought aloud, digging through the goods, “One day Grey’s making a new digestive enzyme, the next he’s making jumbo jets look like light aircraft!”

He pressed his fingers to his temples, trying to recall the equations scrawled across the blackboard, but he couldn’t remember more than a few meaningless sections. Thinking on his feet, he hurried himself upstairs to his room, digging into his cupboards. In short order he held in his possession a microscope, the dusty remains of a birthday present from years past. He carried it back downstairs and set it down on the dining table, placing a drop of the mysterious enzyme onto a hastily cleaned slide, he placed it under the lens.

What he saw astonished him. The enzyme was utterly rabid! The molecules shifted and shook violently, and he’d barely had much of a look at it before it had eaten clean through the glass slide it was contained in and was slowly burning away at the base of the microscope.

It was ultimately elementary chemistry that came to his aid. If the digestive enzyme caused extreme weight gain by virtue of being incredibly potent, then surely neutralising it would be as easy as adding an alkaline to it? He pulled himself to the kitchen and dug into the back of the pantry, searching for that rarely used half-filled box of baking soda. Bingo.

Back in his dining room he unstoppered the still mostly full flask, looking at the crude smelling concoction within. He took no time in forcing a hefty tablespoon of bicarbonate down the neck of the flask, causing the solution to fizz angrily back at him. He watched it intently as it softly simmered down to its clear, viscous state.

“Did it work?” he asked the flask. It didn’t reply.

Suddenly struck by the new dilemma of ‘how do I test this?’ Minh came upon the only realistic answer—he’d have to test it on himself—and to do that he’d need to convert himself.

He looked dauntingly over to the box of goggles next to him, a squared off, greenish-tinted pair looking back into his eyes. He had resisted this for a long time, despite the teases of his partially-robotic comrades, valuing more the ‘organic’ part of the word ‘organism’ than he did the potential benefits of being grotesquely immobile and obese, as his friends had evidently decided. He looked towards the goggles again and hesitated…

* * *

It didn’t work. Oh god, it didn’t work.

Minh gasped breathlessly as he tried to carry himself down the street, each struggling inhale accompanied immediately afterwards by a mouthful of snacks. The otter’s arms were filled with as much of his kitchen as he could carry, the goggles screaming to him about his need to eat. His stomach was already bulging out from his shirt, shaking with each plodding step, growing with each mouthful of food he couldn’t help but eat.

He whined loudly, trying vainly to withhold tears and ignore the luscious smells emanating from every nearby restaurant and market as be started the mile-long trek back towards Grey’s house.

Or rather, it would normally be a mile. Minh had only waddled a few streets before he saw it. Illuminated dimly by streetlights and those of helicopters circling overhead. Burbling orbs of dark green fur, wider than the street and gradually moving towards him, lubricated by the thick brown sludge that fell from it in congealed chunks.

Fleetingly he could see two specks of dirty white fur high above, two tails, and it was with horror that Minh realised: it was Glaz’s butt. He was too late!

No, he was worse than too late, he was one of them. In mere hours he too would be crushing the homes of his neighbours, smothering all that he knew in uncontrollable excess. A tidal wave of lard for which he could only blame himself and his foolish plan to try and help his friends.

He tugged open a bag of pretzels and poured them all into his mouth. Well, here it was; the apocalypse. He looked back towards the butt that would mark his doom. Towards the police officers and hazmat teams trying to combat or contain it. Towards his own gut, already a hundred pounds heavier and sagging softly towards the ground.

He sniffled, and sniffed, and sniffed again. That smell, it was… His nose pinpointed it precisely: the slime. He felt his stomach roar to life as his appetite found second, third and fourth winds all at once. Slowly he waddled, then jogged, then sprinted towards the globular green mass, bursting through the gathered police officers like an otter-shaped bowling ball as he launched himself at Glaz’s thigh and nosedived into the slime.

It was unexplainable. It was disgusting. It was wondrous. It was everything he needed and more. Hungrily he attacked the river of sludge, slurping and gobbling and swallowing with all the muscle he could muster.

This was not the apocalypse; this was salvation.

* * *

“What the hell is going on over there?!”

CI Suthers had just witnessed an obese otter burst through police lines and topple nearly a dozen officers before plunging himself into the current ‘incident,’ and she felt rather compelled to scream about this fact over the police radio.

Even from her perch some 50 yards away from the action she could see the otter shake and bulge in the darkness, his clothes tearing off as he was was submerged with fresh fat. It had been less than a minute and yet he was already starting to challenge the street for size, a brown, shapeless blob of fur, glutting itself.

Suthers panicked. Whatever this shit was, it was biological, and there was no way she was going to risk the lives (or, at least, waistlines) of her officers on this. Hastily she grabbed the radio to call a retreat, but almost as soon as she hit the button did a deep rumble permeated the air. She had only a moment to duck before a shockwave of heat struck her, accompanied a fart a hundred decibels louder than any other. Horrified, she could see those closer by succumbing to the prevailing stench. Even the guys in the hazmat suits seems to be choking.

“Well fuck this,” she muttered to herself, “I’m calling in the big guns,”

* * *

Grey was all too aware of his situation. His keen intellect could be stunted by his illogical wants and desires, sure, but no amount of fat could smother it completely.

His muzzle was buried into one of Glaz’s deep folds, snuffling and slurping out the thick, brown sludge that congealed under his moob. The same sludge had been forming on himself. Nearly a foot thick already, the viscous mixture clung to his fur and painted the light grey into a muddy brown. He could feel, somewhere out of his limited vision, that Glaz was feasting upon him too, their contented groans ringing through the air.

His goggles still worked. Their gentle orange glow providing enough light to see his weight (over 365,751 tons) climbing rapidly. He knew this could not go on. He knew the laws of biology and thermodynamics could not allow this, and that for anyone else this would rightly be deadly.

But he couldn’t stop. The slime was moreish, addictive. His biological mind screamed for it to sate his hunger. His cybernetic components screamed for it too, the alert that he *must* eat still flashing before him. He had tried to pull himself away, back when they first started messily slurping the sludge from Glaz’s hide, but he couldn’t stop himself. And now he was too fat, too immobilised, and too hungry to stop at all.

This should have rightly killed a normal person by now… But they weren’t normal people; They were cyborgs. And he was a cyberneticist! He spent every day tearing down the barriers of biology, chemistry, thermodynamics and what-have-you! This was not the failure of a digestive enzyme. This was a victory! This was a success of *everything* he had ever done. The creation of enhanced lifeforms that could adapt to just about any situation they may find themselves in.

This would not be the end of life. No, this was the genesis of new life altogether.

* * *

Officer Jenkins ran upstairs as quickly as his lapine legs could get him there. Ignoring the complaints of the secretary outside, he barged his way through the door and into the office of Air Marshall Wolfram.

“Sir! We’ve received orders to launch a bombing run on these positions,” he flapped a loose sheet of paper, “It has been requested to happen immediately and without delay, sir,”

“Here? On domestic soil?” Wolfram queried, grabbing the paper.

Jenkins nodded, “Yes, sir. Apparently there is some sort of invasion, sir. These orders are from very high up…”

“Well shit,” he sighed, “Fine then. Get a sortie and some recon out there stat, have the armourers start loading up a balbo and by god we’ll blow these fuckers sky high,” he paused to look at his watch, “I want to see a blitz run in one hour, midnight, you got that?”

“Sir, yes sir!” Jenkins saluted, hurrying back out the doorway.

Wolfram flicked on the TV in the corner of his office, watching in determined silence as he got a birds eye view of buildings crumbling before the invading blobs. “Shit.”

* * *

Glaz was in love. He knew the enzyme would give him an appetite, but *this?* This was unexpected and at the same time a dream come true. Ever since he was a kit he’d wanted to be fat; he had demanded seconds and thirds at every meal, spent his allowance on all-you-can-eat buffets, joined gainer communities from the moment his family got an internet connection.

It was the latter that had persuaded him to be Grey’s beta tester. At the time he was only forteen. Weighing in at 800 pounds of morbidly obese fox, he knew that his body would be reaching it’s biological limits soon and he would succumb to immobility, at which point his family would likely stop him gaining. On forums he learned that cyborgs could gain and remain mobile much past that limit; nanomachines could keep him healthy for the rest of his life and enhance his muscle mass over time.

The only problem was that cybernetics wasn’t what it once was. The “cyber wars” had ended years before, with the three main providers of mass-produced commercial components—Asimov, Cybus and IWS—discontinuing all sales and support after only a couple of years on the market. The industry had collapsed due to poor sales, and with confidence in cybernetics all but evaporated, it had been left to smaller groups to keep existing populace running.

Grey was one such person, and Glaz had been directed to him by one of the forum’s users. After much begging, Grey gifted him the earliest version of his Combined Conversion Goggles in exchange for frequent checkups on how they performed. Their friendship bloomed rapidly afterwards and Glaz took the opportunity to move in next door when the property became available a few years later. He had made no secret of his desire to get as fat as possible.

And now it was happening. He slurped and guzzled at the slime, relishing it’s taste and the sensation of his cheeks as they jiggled and bulged with each mouthful. He delightedly watched the numbers tick up on his goggles, the one million ton mark flashing past without much fanfare. His body was smothering entire neighbourhoods. He was too fat to move, too fat to speak, too fat to even really feel anything other than the pangs of hunger than emanated from within him. Fingers too lost in lard to brush the air and face too eclipsed in fat to ever be able to see or hear properly again.

This was his dreams coming true. And best of all, there weren’t going to be any negative consequences!

* * *

WARNING! MULTIPLE INCOMING HAZARDS.

The message flashed before Grey’s eyes, sirens ringing in his head as his vision dimmed to red. A red alert. Red alerts were rare, so rare he’d never even seen one before. Had the goggles finally caught up to the situation? Was 1.5 million tons the tipping point for the software to think that *maybe* something weird was going on?

It wasn’t that, of course. He knew the software like the back of his wing and he was pretty sure that something like this wouldn’t cause a red alert. (That said, he hadn’t seen the back of his wing lately. Harrumph.) Unfortunately his thoughts soon came to a head as 22,000 pounds of heavy ordnance became wedged in his folds.

“THEY’RE BOMBING US?!” he screamed silently in his head (his mouth is too busy eating, can’t think when hungry), “They’re actually bombing us?! What the hell is wrong with these people to think that this would be a reasonable… hey, wait what,”

The bombs hadn’t gone off, they couldn’t have. There would’ve been an Earth-shattering kaboom if they had, but there wasn’t, so they couldn’t. In a rare moment of clarity he decided to turn on the news.

There for the world to see—in helicopter-provided high definition—was three amorphous, jiggling, sweating blobs. Wedged into them were at least a couple of dozen bombs; all undetonated, all smothered by the thick brown slime, their detonators seized up immediately upon impact.

For the first time he got to see himself as he now stood. Swollen, immense, featureless. A collection of lumps and rolls, moulded and thrown together, adhered by sticky brown goop. With effort he could make out roughly where his head must be, cheeks being the giveaway… even pressed against Glaz they could outsize buildings…

He kept watch intently, sharing the video feed with Glaz and Minh as the 24-hour news machine kept rolling. There was footage of them toppling skyscrapers, picturesque skyline images besmirched by their growing presence, and the ever present question of who they were and what had happened. Seemingly only Minh had been identified, the authorities and bystanders having bore witness to him joining the party. Glaz and Grey were too far gone by the time the media had caught on for anyone to recognise their features.

News anchors talked throughout the night, mourning as the city fell, theorising what could have caused this disaster and what those poor souls—trapped and isolated within their own bodies—could be thinking. They didn’t know the truth, of course, that Combined Conversion Goggles have a built-in neural messaging service.

MINH: Guys, I feel kinda bad about this.
GLAZ: Why? This is awesome!
GLAZ: I just hit 75 billion tons!
MINH: I just destroyed 400 homes…
GREY: It’s not your fault. You didn’t want this to happen, I didn’t want this to happen. We couldn’t have anticipated this outcome.
GLAZ: I wanted this to happen.
MINH: …
GREY: …
GLAZ: What? I did!
GREY: Regardless, I don’t think many people would agree that three people smothering an entire metropolitan area is a good turn of events.
GLAZ: I think it’s a GREAT turn of events! I finally got me some gaining buddies!
MINH: I didn’t want to be a giant blob of fat!
GLAZ: Psh, we’re not blobby yet if you ask me.
MINH: Grey, please tell me this is reversible.
GREY: I don’t think it is… I made a digestive serum that works instantaneously, how do you even neutralise that?
GREY: And even if someone did make something that could, would the serum already inside us just digest it before it could do anything?
GREY: Urgh…
GREY: This is heavy…
GLAZ: You’re heavy, billion-ton-butt.
MINH: Glaz I swear to god…

* * *

It had been about a day, by Grey’s measurements. Glaz was happily spamming their neural pathways with rejoice that he (and by association, Grey) had ticked past one trillion tons each. The ‘gain train’ was quickly becoming unstoppable. Minh was due to do the same in the next half an hour or so too. He had perked up a little since he stopped watching the news.

Grey had otherwise kept a constant eye on it. Glaz and Grey had finally been identified. Since their predicament had become international rolling news the internet had started scraping details together. Some mystery user had dug up a years-old image of the three of them from Minh’s Facebook profile, which the media printed and pushed through every outlet available to them. Upon seeing it Minh lamented ever posting it publicly. Glaz lamented how bony and fragile they all looked.

Public statements had come and gone, COBRA meetings, states of emergency, mass evacuations. A huge UN operation had begun to get people out of the country. He couldn’t blame them, by his own calculations there’d be very little of the country left in under twelve hours…

Their growth had been exponential, Grey had known this for a while, but the severity of the curve was much more intense than he could have imagined. His numbers may have pegged the end of the nation in twelve hours, but it had also marked the end of the planet in twenty-two, it was at that point that they would collectively outweigh Earth itself, and probably destroy it completely.

He decided to keep his calculations to himself for the time being.

* * *

250 miles above, Commander Pipkin was watching the looming silhouettes as they moved across Earth’s horizon. “First people visible from space,” she muttered, distain in her voice.

The crew of the international space station had only been alerted to the impending disaster a few hours prior, and since then had observed the trio as they spread over greater and greater parts of the planet. The ISS moved quickly, with each orbit only taking about 90 minutes, and along with instrumentation on the Hubble telescope allowed for detailed measurement of the situation. Worryingly, the trio had visually doubled in size since the last orbit.

Pipkin pushed herself away from the window towards the monitor where the raw telemetry data was coming in. Nothing about it looked promising—the oceans were becoming polluted by their presence, atmospheric readings were becoming more and more incomprehensible—and all she could do was observe in silence as they steadily engulfed the world. She knew nothing else. There was no television news out in space and the crew depended entirely on mission control for information, which had been less than forthcoming so far.

“Good news?”

She turned the monitor to face him, “I dunno Felix, you’re the math nerd on board, you tell me,”

Felix read out the most recent data, scrolling back to look at the numbers from earlier orbits, his mathematical mumbling falling to silence as the colour ran from his face.

“I… This… This isn’t good. We should contact control, tell them we’re scrubbing, and get our asses back down there pronto,”

“A mission scrub?! We’re not in any danger are we?”

“We aren’t, yet. But that place is fucked,” he motioned out towards the Earth, “And personally I’d rather go hug my kids one last time than starve inside a tin can in interstellar space,”

He started pushing himself away but Pipkin held him back, “If you’re wrong about this then control is gonna murder me,”

“Then they’ve only got a few hours to sharpen the guillotine, Commander. Earth is toast.” And with that, he left.

* * *

GREY: You know, this isn’t THAT bad when you think about it.
GREY: I mean, I didn’t know this would happen, so this is all just an accident at worst. And it’s made us basically immortal.
MINH: What…?
GREY: And it’s really fricking comfortable.
GLAZ: Haha! I knew you’d turn eventually!
MINH: We’re immortal?!
GREY: Well, I guess?
GREY: So long as the nanobots keep working we can’t get ill. The slime is produced to keep us fed and watered with all the nutrients our bodies need and protects us from outside interference. The goggles facilitate entertainment and communication with one another.
GREY: We’ve got most of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs right there.
MINH: Are you serious?
GREY: We’re self-sustaining, self-actualising, endless by nearly every definition. We’re basically a new lifeform altogether.
MINH: Are you actually serious?
GREY: I’m entirely serious. We just have to accept it, Minh. There’s nothing anyone can do to stop this by now.
MINH: I am NOT spending the rest of eternity being a space-filling slob!
GLAZ: Why not? What’s wrong with being a space-filling slob?
MINH: …
GLAZ: It’s like Grey said. This is everything you need! No more work, no suffering, no struggle; your life from here on is just infinite pleasure! You just need to choose to enjoy it!
MINH: I guess…
GLAZ: And on the subject of new lifeforms, I vote we call ourselves fatborgs.
GLAZ: Or sloborgs.
GLAZ: Slorgs?
GREY: Nah. That’s a dumb name.

True to Grey and Felix’s calculations, the planet met a sticky end less than a day later. The trio fell communities even before they had grown into the area, people overpowered by their stench before being engulfed in a tidal wave of sludge thousands of feet thick. Radio stations stopped, websites went offline as data centres were flooded, television networks ceasing broadcasts so that employees could spend their final hours with family.

The last news broadcast Grey witnessed documented the events of the last two days. The first footage of Glaz and Grey, barely fatter than a street, was reshown. Already at that point they were unidentifiable. A montage of clips showed them growing unabated, Minh joining their ranks, their bodies dominating the skylines after mere hours. More clips followed, now mixed in with statements from world leaders, scientists and military men, each discussing their attempts to stop the ongoing situation. Images and video of themselves grew more sparse, resorting to blurry satellite imagery to be able to capture them all in a single shot—a shapeless pile of blubber, stained brown by the filth that grew from them. The world’s final hours were spent launching their knowledge into space on a trajectory out of the solar system: a message to the universe and the last remnants of civilisation on Earth.

Light radio chatter persisted for a short while after the last television went black. And then, silence.

* * *

Time kept passing and the weight written on their goggles kept growing. The goggles quickly ticked over into scientific notation, the vision-filling stream of digits reduced to a meagre “2.60025e+40” (and rising).

After three and a half days they had destroyed the solar system; the planets, the sun, the astroid belts and Earth’s poor final probe were overtaken by the exponential growth of the new slorg empire. All obstacles in their way crushed, dissipated, smothered and consumed. Twenty Earth hours later they had already bridged the 24 trillion mile interstellar gap to Alpha Centauri. The three stars pulled apart by gravity, their heat extinguished by the thousand mile sea of nutrient slime that coated the invading force.

Fearful eyes watched on from the rest of the galaxy. Entire civilisations fell to them, all attempts at communication, analysis and destruction hindered or halted by the sheer abundance of slime. In mere hours they demolished the Big Dipper, annihilated the Pillars of Creation and gorged on the galactic core. The Sol system’s new biological weapon tore the Milky Way apart without hesitation. Five and a half days after Glaz first laid lips upon the sludge their entire galaxy was dust.

GREY: Seems like the whole universe is talking about us…
MINH: What do you mean?
GREY: I managed to fiddle my way into some sort of intergalactic communications… thing. I don’t understand the words, but there’s pictures of us on there.
GREY: Nothing but fat and slime as far as the eyes can see.
GREY: Oh hey, their imagining is actually good enough for some decent shots of us.
GLAZ: Do share!
GREY: [Sending 7 files]
GLAZ: Haha! Look at your cheeks, Minh! They’re taking up like the WHOLE photo!
GREY: I’m surprised they could see past all the slime and drool and stuff.
GLAZ: You look good!
MINH: …Really?
GLAZ: Hell yeah you do! At least they managed to get some of your face!
MINH: Thanks, I guess?
GREY: Sure beats the whole six pixels they dedicated to Glaz’s tails, that’s for sure.
GLAZ: They can still see those?
GREY: Seems so!
GLAZ: We obviously need to grow faster! Spread faster than they can photograph!
GLAZ: This is so awesome.
GREY: It is quite awesome.
MINH: …
GLAZ: C’mon now, Minh.
GLAZ: I know there’s a hulking blob in there who’s desperate to get fatter!
MINH: It’s… nice.
MINH: It’s warm and it’s comfortable and squishy and it’s nice to hang out with my friends so much.
MINH: And it’s keeping me alive. Can’t fault that.
GLAZ: Join the slorg! Join the slorg! Join the slorg!
GREY: We are NOT calling ourselves the slorg!

* * *

Grey’s eyes lazily flicked around the glowing orange confines of his goggles. Everything past them was darkness. His head was buried under Glaz’s impressive moobs—the same place it had been for the past eight days—surrounded on all sides by immeasurable tons of hot, sweating fat. Entertainment had been in short supply since the trio’s combined mass had started to take up significant amounts of the universe, and he had resorted to scanning the scarce remaining intergalactic channels for information before they succumbed to his cavernous folds.

A chat notification from Glaz popped up: “1.75093e+80! I love that number!” He silently admitted that liked that number too.

His eyes idly skimmed a short article garnered from a passing ship’s computer. Fresh imagery of Glaz, Minh and himself, filling everything these aliens had ever known with their ever expanding girth. Grey didn’t mind so much nowadays, he was enjoying himself too much. His tongue dug into the familiar place by Glaz’s moob, greedily digging into the gelatinous sludge that had become so abundant in their recent escapades. Delicious.

He found himself pondering the times before the incident. How did he survive before this? He was barely a ton in weight! Confined to working to survive and travelling for food! Now he had invented new life, he had played god, he was challenging reality itself in scale and grandeur!

He could feel it coming. They all could. The tightness. Pressure building rapidly as they were all forced against each other, every mote and every speck of space—filled by them. He vaguely recalled a week before, the same tightness as he and Glaz had filled his house to the brim, before…

The pressure dropped, the tightness relieved as he and his companions broke through the confines of the universe and outwards into the infinite multiverse.

It was eleven days since he invented the new digestive enzyme. Grey weighed around 284 quinvigintillion tons. And at last, they had room to grow.