Internal Airbag

Stephanie gets into a car wreck, but is saved by an unconventional safety device.

Stephanie grumbled for the fifth time in as many minutes. She just could not find the street that her sister had mentioned. In irritation, she blew a bit of her chestnut-brown hair out of her brown eyes, and waited for the light to turn green at the intersection she was currently at. She'd just finished a fourteen-hour plane ride from London, and her inability to find her sister's house via the directions she had been given was proving to be quite irritating when all Stephanie wanted to do was be able to relax. The light changed, and Stephanie put the green Buick she had rented at the airport back into motion.

As she continued along, she suddenly noticed that this was the same area that she'd been through just a few minutes ago. Exasperated, she dived into her burgundy handbag and drew out her cell phone. She resolved to simply call her sister and get some better directions. She had just begun to dial her sister's number when her car went over a pothole in the road, causing the phone to fly from her grasp and land down on the floor on top of the bulge over the Buick's transmission.

Stephanie reached down and retrieved her phone from on top of the transmission hump. When she rose back up, her world went into slow motion.

The car in front of her had pulled to a stop in the middle of the road, and had its emergency flashers on. She slammed the brakes on, but her vehicle was already far too close and it plowed heavily into the rear of the other car. There was a heavy lurch and Stephanie felt her head being thrown down and forward towards the steering wheel. A tiny and calm portion of her mind registered the fact that she was suddenly aware of a very cold sensation in the middle of her abdomen and an accompanying hissing noise. Abruptly after she cataloged this fact, she was also aware of an alarmingly rising pressure inside of herself. Still in an adrenalin-induced slow-motion view, she saw her flat stomach begin to bulge outwards alarmingly as the cold sensation spread throughout her belly. She felt her belly begin to press into the steering wheel as it ballooned outwards. As her middle bloated, she felt other various portions of herself plumping up either in some sort of bizarre sympathy or a concentrated effort on their part to make her into a human sphere; her breasts, thighs, and upper arms all swelled and began to rapidly merge into the growing sphere that was the center of her body. Meanwhile, her calves and forearms swelled only slightly, leaving her hands and feet unaffected.

She was dimly aware of various stitches and restraints all about herself letting go. She thought she felt her belt burst, and the seams on the right and left sides of her clothing conducted a rapid race along her swelling figure to determine which could rip the fastest. The seat belt burst from her body as she felt the full force of the impact between the two vehicles, but the impact seemed oddly subdued, as if it had dispersed into her hugely swollen body. Then there was silence, aside from the distant hissing of steam billowing from her radiator.

All this had happened in the space of half a second, and the front seat of the car seemed to be alarmingly almost full of Stephanie. Nearly her entire field of view was full of a large tan-pink sphere that was evidently her body, but a slight crescent of windshield broken in a craze of web-like cracks was visible beyond the top curve of herself. The remains of her shirt hugged her neck and extended down onto the huge sphere of her body like some sort of ragged teal baby bib. She felt the rags of her jeans clinging yet to her plumped calves, but she was naked other than those two articles.

She struggled to bend her inflated arms in order to inspect herself. She poked into the enormous curve of her spherical torso experimentally and it felt quite soft, but there also seemed to be a rather alarming amount of pressure pressing back against her fingertip. Just what the heck had happened to her? Abruptly, the face of the other driver was at her open window; he was a middle aged man wearing a ball-cap and a grey t-shirt.

"Are you okay? My car died in the middle of the road and...whoa," he began, voice crescendoing in both volume and pitch upon catching a better view of Stephanie. "What happened to you? Are you okay?" he repeated, more insistently.

"Um...I'm not sure, I feel okay...but...full," she said. "And cold," she added, noting that now her entire body seemed to be full of the frigid substance that had blossomed out from within her belly. Recognition seemed to bloom on the face of the man just then.

"Oh, I know...you've got one of those new airbags, right? The kind that's inside of your body?" He wrinkled his brow in thought for a moment. "I just read about them a few weeks ago in the paper; I thought they were only over in Europe, though," he added. That seemed to ring a bell with Stephanie, dimly. She thought about it for a moment, and then remembered a year or so ago. She'd gotten a new insurance plan that was much cheaper than her old one, but one of the conditions for the cheaper plan was the surgical installation of the airbag device; it was a small grey oblong about the size of a D-cell battery. She'd had it installed then as an outpatient procedure, a tiny cylinder nestled underneath the curve of her liver. She hadn't really thought much about it since then, and she hadn't been in any accidents until now.

"I'm from England," Stephanie managed at last. She attempted to tug the blue square of her ragged shirt down over the vast expanse of herself, obviously an impossible task. She felt better to be doing something, though. At any rate, her statement of nationality seemed to be enough for the man.

"I see....well, um...I'll go call the police, and get them to bring something to...er, get you out of there," the man offered. He walked back to his car, and Stephanie heard him talking on a cell phone. Stephanie settled back into her spherical body, resigned to waiting. She reflected that when she finally got to her sister's house, that this would make a very interesting anecdote indeed...