Matter of Matter, A
“Hello, Summer Shift, and boy, are we happy to see you two. The average attractiveness of this station’s occupants just spiked big time.”
Outside the airlock, Emma Garcia chuckled. To her left her partner, Maggie Bishop, was shaking her head, her long blond ponytail swirling around in the weightless environment. Emma pressed and held the button on the intercom panel, gripping the nearby handrail with her other hand. “Yeah, speaking of averages, they really don’t want you to come back planetside either, Lopez. Hope you’re good at holding your breath.”
“Actually,” came the voice in the speaker, “O’Bryan and I here decided to formally request an eight-month extension to our assignment anyway, to take place concurrently with yours. You know, in case the Earth explodes and there’s no other way to continue the human race.”
“The human race would be better off without your DNA,,” Emma barbed. “Besides, you were really just hoping to ‘accidentally’ catch one of us undressing.”
“C’mon, Garcia. Can’t blame me for wanting to see some curves after O’Bryan and I have spent four months looking at each other.”
Maggie floated closer to the intercom panel, drifting in front of Emma. “It’s really too bad, too...” she said in her natural alto voice, to which she added her best sultry flair. “...because once you two are safely off the station, we’re planning on stripping down and spending the next eight months absolutely… bare… naked.”
Emma tucked her wandering black hair behind her ear and stifled a giggle.
There was a pause on the intercom, and then a sigh. O’Bryan could be heard fake-sobbing in the background.
“Relax, guys,” Emma chimed back in, “you’re only about twelve hours and a debriefing away from a titty bar in Houston. So instead of getting to see us naked, you’ll get something shallower and more expensive.”
“You always know how to cheer us up, sir. Stand by to enter your station access codes.”
The panel turned blue and Emma, the commander of the space station, entered her access code. The panel flashed green, then back to blue. Maggie, one of the station’s two engineers, followed suit and the panel went solid green, enabling the airlock door to slide open. The women pushed off from the handrails, floating through the airlock and trailing their cargo bags behind them.
As they reached the end of the airlock corridor they made a 90 degree turn onto the main corridor, floating past the access tubes to the cargo bay, science array, reactor room, and escape pod. They stopped outside the crew cabin only to clip their bags to the railing, next to Lopez’s and O’Bryan’s which were already packed. One more 90 degree turn led them to the bridge, where Lopez and O’Bryan were waiting for them.
“Welcome aboard, sir,” Lopez said as he and O’Bryan saluted.
Emma returned a salute. “Thank you, Major.” She dropped her salute and then stretched her arms open for a hug. “It’s good to see you, Jorge.”
He wrapped his arms around her. “Good to be seen.” He then pulled back and held his palms up, looking around. “I think you’ll find we took pretty good care of her these last four months.”
Maggie chortled loudly. “As long as I don’t have to spend my first two hours fixing the zero-G toilet this time…”
“Look, I apologized for that plenty of times,” O’Bryan said defensively. “It wasn’t my fault that hombre over here didn’t vacuum-pack his special last-day tamales correctly. I was barfing for days after we got back planetside.”
“Anyway,” Emma said, holding up her hands, “can I get a report on station status?”
“Absolutely,” Lopez responded. “All critical systems are normal. I should let you know, though, that we’ve had to dip into the backup rations the last couple of weeks.”
Emma’s eyebrow raised. “Oh? Why is that?“
“We’ve been having a hell of a time with the matter translator in the cargo bay. Damn thing fires up when it shouldn’t, doesn’t fire up when it should, and when it does it never produces what we ask for. Then it just plain died. We finally just had to disconnect it and use our backup rations.”
“I’ve torn it down and rebuilt it twice,” O’Bryan said. “I haven’t even been able to isolate the problem.” He gestured toward Maggie. “I was hoping you’d be able to figure it out since you’re the senior engineer.”
Maggie shrugged. “I’ll do what I can.”
“I’m sure you’ll get it working,” Lopez said. “Houston’s been working on it too. But in case it can’t be fixed, you still have enough rations to last for your entire eight-month shift minus two weeks. Right now, the worst case scenario is for you to cut back on rations during those two weeks and the Cape will send up a new translator and new rations with us at the next handoff.”
“Well, Houston’s not going to be of any help to us,” Emma said. “This is going to be a dark shift.”
“The hell why?”
“The Chinese. They intercepted and decrypted some of your datacomms just a few days ago. We can only assume voicecomms have been compromised as well.”
“Shit,” O’Bryan said, running his hand through his hair. “Why didn’t Houston tell us?”
“Because that might tip off the Chinese,” Maggie said. “We don’t want them to know that we know we’ve been compromised because it’s also giving us some clues to their own encryption protocols. So after you disembark we’re going to send a datacomm to Houston saying a meteorite damaged our voice antenna. After that we’ll firewall the transmitter from the rest of the station and set it up so that all air-to-ground datacomms will be simulated. Houston will be doing the same thing planetside.”
“No contact with the ground,” Jorge thought out loud. “Isn’t that… you know… fucking dangerous?”
“We are pre-authorized to abandon the station with the escape pod on my authority if necessary,” Emma continued. “Anyway, at the next handoff you’ll be bringing up some new encryption protocols to install. Along with the new matter translator and backup rations, I guess.”
“But I don’t know the first thing about upgrading encryption protocols,” O’Bryan said.
Maggie smiled and lightly punched him on the arm. “What do you think you’re going to be learning for the next eight months?”
O’Bryan sighed. “I have a pretty good guess now.”
Emma smiled. “Well, with any luck, at least you won’t have to install that new matter translator too.”
“True.” O’Bryan looked at a nearby clock, then gestured to Lopez. “We’d better scram.”
Lopez nodded. “You’re right. I don’t want to be landing in twilight.” He turned to a nearby computer and banged out a few commands on the keyboard. “You’re officially back in command of the station, sir.”
Emma patted Lopez on the shoulder. “Thank you. Safe travels, Jorge.” She gave both of them a salute, which they returned, and then they were off, floating into the corridor to pick up their bags and head home in the shuttle.
Maggie floated over to the station ops console and tapped a couple of keys. “Outer airlock door is secure. They’re through.”
“Begin auto-undock,” Emma responded.
“Aye, sir.” Maggie tapped another key on the console. The klaxon of the airlock’s warning siren could be heard, albeit softly, all the way in the bridge. The klaxon then stopped, and a few more seconds passed. “Airlock is at zero pressure… docking clamp released… they’re away. Zero-point-four percent station attitude change. The computer has already compensated.”
“Bon voyage, fellas,” Emma sighed, half-unzipping her jumpsuit to reveal her shirt underneath. “Maybe now it’ll start smelling a little better in here.”
Maggie laughed as she let her hair down. Or, more appropriately, all over, as it flowed freely about her head when loosed from her hair tie. “No kidding. There’s no way the scrubbers aren’t fully saturated right now.”
“Make that first on your maintenance checklist, chief. That’s an order,” Emma said in a mocking official tone. “Now, start the simulation daemon.”
Maggie reached into her chest pocket and retrieved a data disk, which she inserted into the console. A few keypresses later the fake datacomm program was running. “Done. Transmitter firewall is online. The daemon will spool up the fake message about the fake voicecomm antenna problem at a random time between three and seven hours from now.”
“Good. I guess we’re all set.” Emma craned her neck and stretched. “I’m gonna go unpack.” She pushed off toward the corridor.
Maggie sighed. “I guess I’ll get started on that matter translator.”
Emma whirled in midair. “What? No.”
“Why not? I figured I’d start on it as soon as possible.”
“We’ve got 295 days up here. I think you can at least wait until day two before laying a finger on the translator.”
“You sure?” Maggie pinched gently at her waistline. “I’m not sure I have the ten or fifteen pounds I’d lose after 295 days of backup rations.”
Emma chuckled, then looked down and patted her own stomach. “Me neither. But I always hate working on the first day. Plus, I smuggled some wine up with me this time.”
Maggie looked at Emma with wide eyes. “You did?”
“Yep. Amarosa.”
“Please tell me it’s at least a good vintage.”
Emma smiled. “Does ‘78 count?”
Maggie wilted. “Alright, you convinced me. The multiaspirin should take care of the hangover in the morning.”
“We’ll see about that,” Emma chuckled as they started floating toward the crew cabin. “I’m not sure there’s enough multiaspirin on board for the hangover I’ve got planned.”
--
“Ow! Shit!”
Emma had been in the corridor floating past the open hatch to the cargo bay when she heard Maggie cursing from inside. Doubling back, she poked her head in. “You alright?”
Maggie was on the other side of the cargo bay at the matter translator’s control console, massaging the tips of her fingers. “Not as long as this fucking thing is busted, no, I’m not.”
Emma floated inside the cargo bay. Tools were weightlessly drifting everywhere; in just ten feet she had to pluck an autospanner and an amp torch out of the air just to get close to Maggie. Over the last six weeks Maggie’s increasing frustration at eating backup rations had made her increasingly meticulous at disassembling and reassembling the matter translator. This had the opposite effect on her ability to properly store her implements. She had also taken to dressing down for her battles with the machine, opting for the comfort of just a zero-G bra and standard-issue crew shorts. “I guess I should be lucky you haven’t caused a hull breach with all this crap floating around,” Emma said, palming a hyperdrill and tucking it into the back pocket of her own pair of shorts.
Maggie wiped the sweat off her brow and onto her sweat-dampened shorts. “I just don’t get it,” she huffed, drifting over to the top of the translation assembly to reattach a relay. “It’s not even powering up now. I’ve stripped this thing down to its chassis and rebuilt it eight times. I’ve scoped every millimeter of circuitry to check for shorts. All of the proc diags check out. The software is golden. It should be making us hot meals and drums full of water right now.”
“Maybe we’ve just gotta eat paste for another few months,” Emma said.
“Maybe.” Maggie lowered herself a few feet to the bottom pad of the translator, reconnecting its actuator matrix. “But if I have to eat paste for another few months there may not be much left of me to send back planetside.”
Emma nodded, tugging at the loose waistband of her shorts. “Trust me, I know. They could take both of us off the landing pad at the Cape and shove us into an overhead compartment for the flight to Houston.”
“Or a casket,” Maggie grumbled.
“Oh, give it a rest,” Emma chided. “Anyway, you could use something else to do for now. The solar inverter is undervolting so we may need to EVA again. Think you can break up with your boyfriend here long enough to get gussied up in a pressure suit?”
Maggie closed the matrix housing and snapped it shut. “If you must know, it’s a girl, her name is Mildred, and our relationship is complicated.”
“I think the Chinese know that, too,” Emma chuckled, then motioned toward the hatch. “Come on. Tell Mildred you’ll come over and play later.”
“Alright, fine,” Maggie said, pushing up gently from the bottom of the assembly. “See you later, Mildred, you fussy little bitch.” She planted a swift kick to the matter translator’s upright support column.
Instantly, the hum of electrical current filled the cargo bay. Maggie whirled around in the microgravity to face an incredulous Emma, a wide grin on her face. A white light began to bathe her from above and below as the formerly dormant matter translator began to glow to life. Maggie pumped her fists and triumphantly shouted, “Ha! I fixed---”
The matter translator was designed to translate matter into a datastream and vice versa. The station’s crew used it to create food, water, breathable air, and other supplies; they called up the stored datastream from its archive for an item, then the translator would load the datastream into its memory buffers and then convert it into physical form. To get rid of waste they would run it in reverse: it would convert the waste into a datastream that went into the translator’s buffers, and then it would simply wipe the buffers.
All of this happened too fast for the human eye to clearly see since it literally happened at the speed of light. The machine creates a point of light between the top and bottom of the translator assembly. The light acts as a carrier for the transformation process as it is the only medium fast enough to transfer that much data. In this case, the translator opened a carrier light beam in the middle of Maggie’s stomach and proceeded to rapidly convert her into a datastream from the inside out. An ultraspeed camera would have captured the carrier beam exiting through her belly button (and, from a different angle, the small of her back) before spreading outward in both directions, rapidly translating flesh and bone, clothing, and brain waves into invisible ones and zeroes that were then whisked away to the machine’s memory buffers.
To Emma, there was only a flash of light and Maggie was gone. Emma flinched. “Oh---oh, no.” Matter translators were neither designed nor approved for use on living beings. It had been tried, and it usually succeeded, but a pesky 18% incidence rate of deformations and brain damage prevented it from being an acceptable way to store and transport living beings.
Emma frantically floated to the translator’s control console to check the device’s buffers. One of the dangers was that living beings, being so complex, turned into a huge amount of data, easily taking up tens of exabytes. Emma found the buffers mostly full and managed a brief sigh of relief; it meant that Maggie was indeed in there, gradually working her way through the buffers and into archive storage. Thankfully the machine hadn’t set itself for waste disposal.
But storage was not unlimited, and with the translator already programmed with the capability of reproducing thousands of gases, liquids, and other types of physical matter, adding an adult person into the mix would come dangerously close to exceeding the machine’s storage capacity. The machine did have some automatic safeguards: in the event of a buffer overflow or archive storage reaching full capacity, the last procedure would simply be reversed, the stored data being dumped back out into physical matter. But transfers between the buffers and long-term storage always ran the risk of data fragmentation. For inert objects this typically wasn’t as much of an issue, but it could be very problematic with living beings. The safest option was to reverse the process as soon as possible, before too much of Maggie was sent to, then pulled back from, archive storage. However, Maggie had not yet fully rewired the control console; it did not respond to Emma’s commands.
There was only one other option: a combination of jumpers in one of the support columns’ recessed panels to operate the translator completely manually. As Emma floated over and opened the panel, she cursed at the tiny binary diagrams showing which combination of jumpers accomplished which functions. “Why couldn’t she be the one out here fixing this?” she thought. “I’d much rather trust her skills than she trust mine.”
Conceptually the procedure was simple: set the jumpers for an active procedure dump. But once Emma had located the correct jumper block she had difficulty getting a grip on the tiny jumpers with her fingernails. After a little more trouble and another quick study of the diagram, she had swapped two jumper positions, closing two circuits while opening two others. Emma turned back to the display hoping to see the buffer increasing, but it was still doing the opposite, off-loading Maggie into the archive. Nothing had happened.
Emma was about to turn back to the jumpers when another loud electrical hum filled the room.
“Oh sh---”
There was another flash of light, instantly consuming Emma. If someone were to review the station logs they would show that, at that point in time, the station was unoccupied.
Although enough of Maggie had cleared out of the buffers to make room for Emma, the translator quickly calculated that there wasn’t enough archive storage for both. For the first time in weeks the machine did exactly what it was supposed to do, beginning an immediate buffer dump. But with both Maggie and Emma in the buffer, and Maggie split between the archive and the buffer, the situation fell outside normal parameters for manual operation. The dump procedure threw an exception, falling back to the settings on the jumpers to determine what to do. A few seconds later the hum returned, followed by a flash of light.
“---it!!” Maggie and Emma both yelled. They both blinked in surprise, gathering their bearings.
“Where are you?” Emma called out, looking around.
“Right behind you,” Maggie responded. But after a few moments had passed, they realized that something was very wrong. Maggie craned her neck around to look at Emma, then looked down. “Um… damn.”
Emma began to panic. “Oh God, oh God, oh God…”
Where there had been two women before, there were now two women in one body, as if they had been fused together back-to-back at the spine. Each still had their arms and legs but they connected to the same hip and shoulder joints. They floated there together in the same zero-G bra and crew shorts, the translator having discarded Emma’s crew polo in the process.
“What just happened?!” Emma asked, flailing her arms and legs as if to separate herself from Emma.
“Whoa! Calm down!” Maggie urged as she took a moment to get her bearings. Although she couldn’t control Emma’s arms and legs, she could feel them moving as Emma flailed about. She looked down and her side - their side - and marveled at how her fair skin smoothly blended into the light brown tones of Emma’s skin where they came together. She reached her hand down to feel that spot and found it perfectly normal to the touch, a seamless transition from her body to Emma’s. “The matter translator must have recognized that we share some similar body parts and eliminated redundancies to save storage space.”
“That’s not possible!”
“Seems pretty fucking possible right about now.”
Emma shook her head. “But if that were true, then why didn’t it just turn us into one body with two heads?”
Maggie shrugged, feeling Emma’s upper arms move unwittingly from the gesture. That would take some getting used to. “Beats me. Maybe it didn’t need that much space. Besides, I don’t need to remind you that this thing has been fucked for the last two months.”
When the translator started humming again, the women barely had time to react before another flash filled their vision. But when the visual sensation subsided, they were still there.
“What was that?” Emma asked.
“I don’t---” Maggie started, then stopped. “Hmm… do you feel… like you just ate?”
Emma reached a hand down to her stomach. “Actually, I think I do.”
There was another hum and another flash. Maggie ran her fingers up her torso, feeling her rib cage less defined than before. “I think it’s creating food… inside of us.”
Emma felt full and stifled a burp. There was another hum and flash, but this time the hum remained. Emma swore that her stomach was a little bigger. After two more flashes in quick succession, Emma watched her stomach pudge out a little further. But it wasn’t just her stomach; for the first time since middle school, she had the beginnings of love handles. She reached down and pinched one of them, her hand brushing against Maggie’s, which was doing the same on her side. The machine flashed twice and suddenly they looked like they had both put on the freshman fifteen, with a definite muffin top, thicker thighs and upper arms, and a little more cleavage escaping their bra.
“This is crazy,” Maggie said, her voice showing no sign of worry, her sense of scientific wonder taking over. “It’s almost like it’s putting the food right inside us and we’re digesting it right away. We look like we’ve been overeating for weeks.”
There were two more flashes, and Emma winced as she tugged on the bra that was digging into her chest. Her arms wobbled slightly when she moved them. “I think we need to move away from this thing.”
The machine flashed again and Maggie looked down, stunned to see her normally skinny thighs positively pudgy and jiggly as she rubbed them together. “I think you’re right.” She tried to reach up to the matter translator’s upper assembly and push away from it, but it was at least two feet beyond her reach. Similarly, she tried to extend her toes down to the lower assembly, but it was also too far. Three more flashes filled their vision, and they both grunted with discomfort at their clothes now painfully tight on their joined bodies. Emma looked down, a new double chin pushing against pillowy new cleavage as she fought with the band of the bra.
After two more flashes, Maggie moaned with pain. “Let’s worry about these clothes first,” she said through gritted teeth, also reaching for the bra. After much grunting they were able to peel it up over their breasts and off their arms.
Finally feeling some relief, Emma collected her enlarged floating breasts in her hands, rubbing the angry red lines that the bra had left. After a few seconds she shivered… except she hadn’t. “What was that?” she asked.
Behind her, Maggie sighed, then waited a few seconds. “Sorry,” she said, audibly embarrassed, “it’s just that I’ve never touched boobs that big… even though I didn’t… you know… it just felt good.” She crossed an arm over her own newly swollen breasts while letting her other hand rest on her generously plump stomach.
“Ha,” Emma scoffed. It was true that she was always the more well-endowed one of the pair, but waif-like Maggie made that an easy bar to clear. “You can’t be serious.”
“I’m sorry.” The heat from Maggie’s face almost reached Emma’s. “This is all so weird, I… just didn’t expect that to happen.”
Emma shook her head, her dark hair floating wistfully around her face. “It’s okay.” She took one hand away from her chest and held it up, studying how chubby her fingers had gotten. She looked down again and pushed on the soft roll that her stomach had become. Assuming that she and Maggie could be separated, she estimated that she would have 40-50 pounds to lose. Then she noticed something. “Hey, do you hear that?”
They were both still for a few seconds. “Hear what?” Maggie asked.
“The humming. It stopped.” Indeed, all either woman could hear was the constant low hiss of the air recirculators.
“Well, that’s good,” Maggie huffed. “So let’s see if we can get out of here.”
“I can’t…” Emma stretched her arms and legs as far as she could, but she still could not reach something to push off from. Behind her, Maggie extended her own arms and legs. The translator had brought them back with exactly zero relative momentum in any direction. “We can’t just float here for another six months. We’ll starve.”
Maggie looked down and pinched her tummy roll again. “Are you sure about that?”
“Shut up,” Emma snapped. “We have to figure---”
The humming returned. “Shit,” Emma grunted and winced, waiting for a flash. It never came, but something else did. Emma opened one eye, then the other. “Do you feel that?”
Maggie could feel her stomach growing again, but gradually this time. She watched it gently spread out, her newly loose skin now pulling tighter. The sensation spread up to her chest as well, her breasts swelling on her broadening ribcage. When she jostled her stomach she felt a sloshing sensation inside. “I think it’s producing water now… inside of us.”
Emma tried pushing down on her stomach but it continued growing, taking on a rounded shape, the rolls smoothing into a single curve. “I don’t know that that’s any better!” The machine continued humming as it dutifully continued to fuse hydrogen and oxygen atoms within the carbon-based container that occupied its space. Every move she made caused the water within them to slosh and swirl around. Their shared torso was bulbous, with two water-balloon-like stomachs neither of them could reach around and four bloated breasts that wobbled and swayed as Emma fought.
Maggie said nothing, her eyes fixed on the pair of engorged breasts just below her face. They were round and supple, and only becoming increasingly tantalizing as they grew. Maggie had never dreamed of having such assets, and now that they were hers she really just wanted to give one of them a squeeze, despite everything that was happening below them. But she couldn’t do anything without Emma finding out.
Emma could feel the water spreading into their arms and legs now. She turned her head to the side. “You’re the engineer! Do something. That’s an order!”
Maggie knew her arms and legs were stiffening as they swelled with water. There wasn’t much time left. She smiled. “Okay.” And she brought her hands to her breasts and squeezed. Her skin bulged between her fingers as she felt the water displace inside of her.
“What are you doing?!” Emma cried, trying to kick her feet toward Maggie’s legs behind her.
Maggie stifled a small giggle as she shook her breasts, letting them sway and bob in the microgravity until they regained their equilibrium. “My official assessment, commander, is that we’re screwed anyway,” she said, “so I really just wanted to have a little fun before I can’t.” She could feel her hands being pulled apart as her wobbly arms bloated.
“Unacceptable!” Emma barked. “There has to be a solution, and we’re going to figure it---”
Suddenly the humming stopped again, and along with it the sensation of filling and expanding. Emma, ignoring the fact that Maggie was holding the pendulous new breasts jutting out of her back, breathed a sigh of temporary relief. She could only bend her arms halfway in front of her, her legs slightly less mobile. Maggie continued pawing the outer halves of her breasts, each squeeze causing another part of their shared body to swell a little larger. Emma just floated there quietly, allowing her arms to float to her sides, fuming at how useless Maggie had become. “Put a pair of tits on her and she becomes a braindead bimbo,” she thought. “When we get back to normal I’m going to boot her ass so hard she won’t shit for a week.”
Suddenly the humming returned, and with it a faint hissing sound. Maggie and Emma both froze as they felt an unusual sensation forming at the base of their spine. “We’re growing again!” Emma cried as their sides filled out further, her arms stiffening straighter. But it wasn’t water this time. It was an emptier sensation.
Air. it was the only answer. The matter translator was now treating them like some kind of oxygen tank to be filled.
“No!” Maggie whimpered as her arms retreated to her sides, her blob-like breasts now out of reach. The newly forming air was causing the water to shift unevenly within them; at times Emma’s massive stomach felt smooth and tight, loose and wobbly at others. Maggie would feel water squish against the inner wall of a breast and let out a low moan, desperately flapping her hands to try to touch them. Emma tried to ignore it, but she had to admit that the sensation felt… pleasant. That was all she could allow herself to think.
As the volume of air outpaced the volume of water, the two-woman body took on a uniformly rigid round shape, their arms and legs ceasing to be distinct body parts. A tool floating in midair nudged up against Emma’s prodigious breast. Maggie felt a chill behind her. “See?? Even you can’t resist!”
“Shut the fuck up!” Emma snapped as she blushed, her massive underbelly nudging another tool toward the floor. She had to think that the humming and the hissing would stop soon, but it didn’t. Maggie could only stare at the mounds of her breasts, each one at least four feet in diameter, as they inched closer to the translator’s support column. A blob of water slid down the inner wall of Emma’s right leg and settled at her groin. Her lower lip quivered.
When Maggie’s left breast pressed against the support column, even Emma couldn’t fully stifle a moan, stimulated as she was by a number of floating tools rubbing against her own curvy parts. Their heads bumped into the upper assembly, then their south pole firmly pushed against the lower assembly. “Figures that once we can actually reach something we can’t do anything,” Emma thought to herself.
A vibration was building, being transferred through their skin. Emma realized it had to be the translator straining against their pressure, and smirked at the irony that growing even larger was their best hope now. She needn’t share that realization with Maggie, who was preoccupied with her own thoughts as the domes of her breasts wrapped around the column. The sound of straining metal arose over the hissing sound and the sound of Maggie’s purring moans.
At last, the translator’s structure failed at two joints. The tension released, Emma and Maggie’s body, having been pinched in multiple places, suddenly snapped back to a fully round shape and propelled across the cargo bay, nudging more tools out of the way. The water within them dispersed instantly, tickling all parts of their body. The combined sensations finally proved too much for Maggie, who gasped silently with her climax. Emma could’ve gone right over the edge with Maggie but refused to let herself go. So she chewed her lip and held her breath, trying to ignore the tiny water droplets right on the inside of a very large, very erect right nipple.
When Emma’s belly bumped against the edge of the cargo bay hatch, they bounced in another direction before Maggie’s left breast settled against the ceiling. Emma’s own left breast nearly reached the floor a dozen feet below. Neither spoke for several minutes, Maggie trying to come down from her peak, Emma doing everything she could to resist hers.
“I’m gonna be honest,” Maggie finally said, audibly flustered as she stared at the ceiling. “No matter what happens now, I’d do that again just for these things.” She nodded toward her breasts.
“Shut up,” Emma grunted, too ashamed to agree. She took a deep breath and blew, trying to see if she could generate any motion with their lowered density. They rocked in place a bit but she couldn’t blow hard enough to move them.
“What do we do now?” Maggie asked.
Emma sighed. “We wait.”
--
The sound of a distant klaxon and a call out caught Maggie’s attention. There was another yell: Lopez had forced the airlock open. Maggie had forgotten about the shift change. She couldn’t catch her breath long enough to cry out in any meaningful way.
Moments later Lopez and O’Bryan appeared at the edge of Maggie’s peripheral vision. “What the fuck happened to you??” Lopez asked, his jaw slacked.
No doubt Lopez was wondering why he could only see Maggie’s and Emma’s faces. No doubt he was wondering why their faces - Emma’s right side up, Maggie’s upside down - were embedded into some sort of two-tone sphere bulging out the cargo bay doorway and nearly all the way across the corridor. No doubt he was wondering why that sphere was glistening with what looked like - and was - sweat, why Emma’s eyes were closed and a low moan escaped her lips, why Maggie licked her lips between gasps and sighs.
It had been so long. The best Maggie and Emma could figure at the time was that they continued growing as they digested everything inside of them, and that their body had even converted the added fat into some sort of gas. They had gradually grown to fill the entire cargo bay and swelled out into the corridor before it stopped. They’d been lucky to not burst open the cargo airlock. It had actually been months since either of them had seen each other or even talked, but Maggie knew Emma was down there because her long, sweat-dampened hair had grown long enough to tickle the corner of Emma’s mouth.
And it all felt wonderful, so wonderful that they had both given up being concerned about much of anything long ago. Emma had fought off both her own slow burn of arousal as well as Maggie’s more frequent peaks as long as she could, but she finally gave in a couple weeks into their ordeal when they had swelled enough for her nipple to rub across the cargo bay floor. Maggie had shown much less discipline with her pleasure the entire time, so when Emma finally let herself go and Maggie instantly responded in kind, it was too much for either of them to come back down. The feedback loop had continued in this way longer than they could possibly comprehend.
But that was all too complicated to explain. O’Bryan reached a hand out and traced their body where their skin tones blended into each other. Trickles of sweat dribbled downward and Maggie gasped while Emma’s low moan rose into a soft wail before dying back down. O’Bryan flinched and drew his hand back.
Maggie’s eyes were still uncrossing as Lopez floated directly in front of her. His mouth was moving but she was lost in thought. Eyeballing him, his height was about right for his crotch to be right on level with Emma’s face. If only he’d get a little closer, maybe he’d brush against her mouth by accident. If only Emma would open her eyes and notice, they could both get a little more aroused.
“The… good news…” Maggie said hoarsely between gasps, interrupting Lopez to answer his earlier question, “is… I fixed… the matter translator...”