Fortitude
From Metabods
Log 1
Rick strode down the corridor of the Fortitude, glad that they only had three more days cruising through uncharted space. After three months on remote patrol with a skeleton crew, all of ‘em wet behind the ears and barely out of basic training, he’d been sure that some kind of disaster would strike when they were furthest from home, out of range of any help. After all, the Vree were supposed to be cruising these very sectors, if the rumors were right. And a boatload of kids still checking their command sequences in the helpguide would be just the kind of feast they’d make gleeful songs about and sing for centuries.
But they hadn’t anything in months of gliding through black, desolate emptiness. No Vree. No nebulas. No star systems or strange new worlds of any kind—not even a stinking comet. They’d found a rogue moon and named it after Rick’s mom. That was it.
Half of Rick’s mind was inclined to think they were out of the woods. The other half was wondering just how naive the first half was.
An overhead chime sounded, followed by Kit’s voice paging him to come to a comm screen. It was already overnight shift—the lights had dimmed while he was working out—so it was easy to see the soft glow of the nearest screen, where the corridor he was in met the starboard main passage. He trotted over to it and called up the bridge.
“What’s—damn, Kit, put a shirt on,” Rick said. Kit, the comm officer, was clearly shirtless, the comm screen offering the free spectacle of his carefully sculpted torso from the nipples up. Rick felt his restless and very lonely cock react with a kind of lovelorn passion to the melon-sized pecs, straining toward them in his trousers. Rick gritted his teeth and tried to look stern, knowing he’d never looked stern in his life.
“I will if you will, lieutenant,” Kit said with a smile. Rick blushed and scratched the little patch of hair between his own (firm but rather smaller) pecs.
“I was just coming from the gym,” Rick said, his boner jumping frantically in his uniform slacks as his eyes drifted across Kit’s luscious landscape. He forced himself back to being an officer, with difficulty. Why couldn’t they have given him a bunch of ordinary looking guys? ... Who knew what they were doing?
“I can see that. You’ve got a great pump,” Kit said appraisingly.
“And you are the comm officer. Suppose the admiral called and you answered the phone like that?”
“Oh yeah, the phone’s ringing off the hook up here,” Kit said snidely. “C’mon, L. T., you know we won’t get comm until we’re back in Alliance space. So what’s the big deal?”
Rick gave up on trying to act stern. It was a lost cause. “The big deal is I can see the head of your cock,” he said, matching snide for snide. And yet—just for a moment it seemed like he imagined he actually could see something, the ghost of a massive cock that seemed to want to ease itself between Kit’s pecs. He blinked, and the vision was gone, leaving only a shred of memory.
“Ha ha, it’s big but it’s not that big.”
“Are you at least wearing pants?”
“Of course!” Kit said, then grinned sheepishly. “Well, boxers.”
“What the fuck?” Rick said in surprise, barely noticing his hand moving to his own crotch. “Look, Kit. I realize I’ve relaxed discipline, but come on!”
“Hey, L. T., it’s all for a good cause. We’re trying to seduce Kyle.”
Rick laughed in spite of himself. “Fat chance, he’ll never crack. He’s more stubborn than you’ll ever—wait, ‘we’?”
“Yeah, all of us up here,” Kit said jovially. “Me, Ted, Jode—oh, and Mikey too.” He sniggered. “Kyle’ll never last.” Rick knew he wouldn’t. His whole crew was teenagers who’d had nothing to do for months but work out. They were looking damn fine.
These distracting thoughts meant that part of what Kit said registered late. “Mikey? The holographic computer interface?” The one who normally looked like some government bureaucrat?
“Yeah, we reprogrammed him. Well, okay, Kyle did, to get back at us. But I think it’s turning him on.”
“Is not!” called a voice from offscreen—Kyle, presumably, at the geek station, otherwise known as computers and systems. In full uniform, no doubt.
Rick smiled. “Hi Kyle,” Rick called to the offscreen voice. “Hi boss,” it called back.
“All right, I’m going to bed. Hey, why did you call me, anyway?” Damn, he was the worst officer ever.
“Oh yeah, the last navigational sensor sweep picked up something a few hours ahead,” Kit said, checking his panel. “It reads kind of like a micronebula, but a lot of the energy levels are wrong. Kyle and Jose are analyzing it now. Should we alter course to skirt it?”
“Hell no, we haven’t had a blip in weeks. Let’s get closer and check it out. Wake me when we’re close.”
“Aye, aye. In the meantime, you need any help with that, L. T.?” he asked, glancing down with a saucy grin.
Rick experienced a moment’s panic before he realized Kit couldn’t see his big boner—he was just guessing. “You wish,” Rick said, switching off the screen. Then he turned and continued his walk to his quarters, a little more quickly than before.
He woke suddenly to find a stranger standing over him, shaking him awake. “What the—who the fuck are you?” he yelled, still blearily trying to focus on the unfamiliar shape looming over him. “How the hell did you get on my ship?”
“I was installed on it,” said a voice he knew—dry, sardonic, a slightly refined accent.
“Huh? Mikey?” Rick’s eyes focused at last, but this Adonis wasn’t Mikey—every single corner of him from his sea-blue eyes and loose, dusty blond hair to his heavy, generous pecs and broad, bulging shoulders to his eight-pack and ludicrously narrow waist to—oh god, what a cock!
“Yes, the boys had some fun reprogramming my visual interface. Listen, lieutenant, we have a problem.”
“I’ll say, you’re a positive distraction.” Rick realized with chagrin that he was tenting his bedsheets in a big way. He moved to sit up, hoping to make his problem less visible. He felt weird being so turned on by Mikey—not only was he normally a barely noticeable interface, but there was something odd about him. Maybe it was that he had no smell. All the other guys had smells. Nice ones, sexy ones—damn, his dick was drooling fiercely. “At least put some clothes on,” he groused, his head in his hands. He was still waiting for his grogginess to pass.
“I can’t, I’m programmed not to now,” Mikey sighed. “Anyway, I’m not the problem.”
Rick stopped and listened to the ship around him for a minute, sensing something strange. He glanced at the A.I. in alarm. “It’s really quiet, Mikey.”
Mikey’s gorgeous face looked grave. “Engines are off line. Everything else too except life support and a few other systems.”
“What? What happened?” Rick yelled, jumping out of bed, his sheets falling draped over his protruding hard-on.
“Not sure, but it has to do with that cloud we found, I’m sure,” Mikey said. “We’re right at the heart of it.”
“I was supposed to be notified before we reached it,” Rick growled, angrily tossing aside the sheet.
“Apparently it reached us, sir,” Mikey said, moving to the closet and pulling out regulation boxers and uniform slacks.
Rick took them and pulled them on. “Where are the others?”
“The night shift is unconscious on the bridge, sir,” Mikey said gravely. Rick stared at him. “The rest of the crew are in their quarters, also unconscious. You’re the only one I could wake.”
“Damn it, Mikey, why didn’t you say so?” Rick tore out of his quarters, heading for the bridge.
When he bounded onto the bridge, only a little out of breath, he found Kit, Jode, Kyle, and Ted, all sitting at their stations, looking for all the world like they’d simply fallen asleep. All of them except Kyle were wearing nothing but boxers—Kyle was wearing a regulation tee and slacks.
Mikey appeared out of thin air standing in his accustomed place near the vacant command chair, as if things were perfectly normal apart from him looking like an irresistible god.
Rick moved to Kit and checked his pulse and breathing, which were both almost normal. “Kit! Kit, wake up!” Nothing happened. “You think they’re okay?”
“They’re more than okay,” Mikey said. “Look again.”
Rick frowned at Mikey, then looked back at Kit. He gasped.
Kit was bigger.
Rick knew his crew very well. He especially knew Kit. Every fat-free inch of him. He’d been jerking off thinking of Kit and what he would do to that perfect Nordic body for months.
But this was the new and improved version. His whole body was bigger, taller, thicker. Every single muscle was 25% bigger. His pecs had reminded him of melons before, and now they were thick and heavy and spherical, honeydews replacing cantaloupes. His formerly tight abs were now an even tighter, deeply crevassed eight pack.
“Holy shit!” he gasped again. Spilling out of the leg of Kit’s regulation boxers was a huge sausage of a cock. There had to be three inches of soft, impossibly thick cock hanging out of those boxers.
Rick ran over to Jode at the navigation console. He was bigger too. All over. His lanky Hispanic body was even lankier—he looked like he had a ten-pack—and what was falling out of his boxers was by itself enough cock to make any man proud.
Ted, the pale redhead who covered the engineering station, looked like a statue carved in pure white marble. His musculature, exquisite before, was now unbearably perfect. And something like eight inches (!) of thick white cock snaked out of his left boxer leg. As in, eight inches of soft monster cock was what emerged below the hem of his regulation boxers.
Kyle, the pretty-faced geek with nothing more than a trim swimmer’s build yesterday, was something else now—he was packed into that tee shirt like it was painted on, and every seam was straining even with all his ponderous new muscle totally relaxed in unconsciousness. The formerly loose slacks were now tight and straining as well. Especially at the crotch, where the fasteners were actually starting to be pulled out of the fabric by the obscene bulge.
Rick glanced around frantically, at a loss to even process what was going on, and his eyes hit on the main view screen at Kit’s station—it was filled not with starts but with swirls of an opaque milky blue like he’d never seen.
Somehow they had drifted into the micronebula.
Log 2
Rick dropped into his command chair, stunned. He looked around him at the four young officers. They looked relaxed, comfortable, like they were idly wiling away a night off, their eyes closed peacefully, their beautiful faces composed, as if they were listening to pleasant music or enjoying a reverie of some bygone moment of serenity.
He turned his gaze to Kit, whose comm station was to his left. Kit looked completely, utterly at rest. To look at him you’d think there was nothing happening at all, no motion, no waveforms, no vibration even of the smallest particle. He exuded stillness, as if the universe were paused, suspended. In that moment, as he looked at Kit, there was no movement anywhere—nothing, but the slow-moving milky blue swirls of the nebula.
Rick became conscious of his own heart beating. It felt like the only heart in creation.
For a moment her felt terribly alone.
“Are they all like this?” Rick breathed, almost afraid to speak, to break the stillness.
There was a brief pause. He was not looking at Mikey, but the avatar answered the question. “The crew? Yes.”
“Unconscious and—?”
“Augmented, yes.”
Rick shuddered, processing the thought. 67 men below decks, all—
He realized his big, torpedo-shaped cock was hard, had been hard. For all that he’d been unbearably horny and lonely this whole voyage, he felt now like hardness was some new thing, like he’d never had a hard-on before. The hard, thick boner in his lap straining against his uniform slacks seemed to radiate scalding heat, enthralled by its own existence, aching with arousal that felt suppressed for a lifetime and more. This ship was filled—packed—with—
Rick fell back in his chair and was momentarily surprised by the course feel of the upholstery against his bare back. He thought bemusedly that he had never felt that before. Which was not surprising—he certainly (Rick snarked to himself) had never come to the bridge shirtless before.
This was a very—strange—emergency.
The distraction, in any event, was bracing. He stood up and faced Mikey. The avatar, recently reprogrammed (as a joke) to exhibit all the characteristics of male beauty and then some, looked oddly at home among the unconscious gods Rick’s bridge officers had become.
Mikey, at least, was able to achieve the superhuman, or nonhuman, tact necessary not to glance down at the outline of Rick’s raging boner in his slacks. If Kit were awake, he‘d be staring at it—and grinning like a Pridestian hyena, Rick thought dryly. Rick felt his face warming with blood. Shit, now I’m blushing.
But Mikey met his gaze. And anticipated Rick’s line of reasoning. “Only you seem to be immune,” Mikey said neutrally. “From both effects.”
“Lucky for me,” Rick said. Mikey raised an eyebrow, somehow managing to look even more gorgeous as he registered demure surprise. “At least with the unconsciousness bit,” he added with a small smile. “So what’s different about me?”
Mikey shrugged. “Not much,” he said. “I have been considering it. You are from the colony Elqon III, which is unusual in the Alliance fleet but not unheard of. There are three others on the ship, and they were all affected.”
Rick nodded. Elqons tended to be lanky and well hung, but apart from the predisposition for golden-red eyes they were biologically indistinguishable from the main population groups of the Alliance even after centuries of independence.
“I’m a couple years older than these tenderfoots,” Rick said slowly, nodding at the four hunks at their stations.
Mikey nodded. “Yes. But there are a few veterans aboard, and they were affected as well.”
A thought struck Rick. “Even Seldie, the security chief?” Mikey nodded, and Rick whisted. “I’ll have to see that. He was huge before. Was his—?”
“Focus is probably important right now, lieutenant.” Mikey always managed to say things like that without sounding snide. It was just a fact. And yet, Rick had caught an amused twinkle in the avatar’s eyes on more than one occasion in the past, and, yep, there it was again.
“No laughing at the humans, Mikey,” Rick said with a smile. “We’re—vulnerable. To—certain stuff.”
Mikey looked down at his own flawless, naked avatar. “I had, in fact, noticed that,” he said.
Rick turned to face the image of the micronebula. “I don’t suppose you know what’s causing the effect? Wait—are they still being affected? Are they still—growing?” Rick’s boner, distractingly, throbbed a little as the idea rose through his mind. A thrum of emotional arousal—a vibration of all the cells of his body—seemed to pass through Rick like a wave.
Unbidden the teeming motion in his body started to occur to him. Coursing blood. Electrical impulses. Cellular mitosis. He’d never been more aware of himself as a physical creation, an impossibly intricate edifice of living, thriving organic matter.
“No, and no,” Mikey said. Rick’s boner seem to want to protest. It wanted to ask: Are you sure?
“Well, if we can’t figure out the causation, or why it’s selective, we can be reasonably certain it’s to do with the micronebula,” Rick said. “So logically we should move out of it and sort things out afterwards.”
Mikey said nothing. It was not his job to comment on command decisions one way or another.
His mind made up, Rick moved quickly toward the navigation console, where Jode seemed to be in a peaceful slumber. Rick had meant to reach past the teen cadet to the helm controls in front of him and start the ship moving out of the nebula. But as he did so, his naked, buff torso within inches of Jode’s arresting body, Rick suddenly felt intoxicated, overwhelmed with the proximity to Jode, as if he had come close enough to him to become trapped in Jode’s presence, a passing ship snagged by the event horizon of an irresistible gravitational force.
Rick felt absorbed into Jode’s beauty. His warmth, his clean, rich smell, his gorgeous pecs and ten-pack and fascinating dusting of hair along their vertical axis, his too-handsome face with just a bare hint of dark stubble around the mouth and along the chin line, the inches of cock falling out of his boxers, and there was nothing in the whole of existence but Jode, his body, his lips—no past, no regulations, no Alliance, no ship or nebula, just the embodiment of physical arousal, a hardon made man, made into a demigod. Jode seemed almost to be glowing with power—the power to draw Rick in. Without being aware of himself Rick was moving his lips toward Jode’s—
Their lips met, and a charge shot through them both, and they began slowly, sweetly making out. Jode’s tongue slid gently, warmly into Rick’s mouth, and Rick was suddenly consumed with rapture that his mouth’s long loneliness had, in a moment unlooked-for, been slaked.
After a few moments Rick pulled slowly back, just an inch or two. Jode’s bright brown eyes were gazing deep into his golden-red ones. He felt Jode’s warm breath on his lips.
“That was the best kiss I’ve ever had,” Jode said softly.
Rick smiled, gazing back into Jode’s beautiful eyes. “I’ve had better,” he said.
Jode’s lips twitched into the smallest of smiles, which, to Rick, made him look even more devastatingly handsome. “Bitch,” he whispered.
A heartbeat passed. A normal human would have delicately cleared his throat, but somehow the programmers had omitted this ancient social tool from Mikey’s repertoire. So Mikey said, “Ahem,” forcing Rick, somewhat shockingly, to realize he had forgotten about the existence of Mikey, the Fortitude – everything outside Jode.
“I seem to have discovered how to wake them,” Rick said, still staring into Jode’s eyes.
“Yes,” came Mikey’s dry reply.
“Was I asleep?” Jode asked sweetly. His brow furrowed just slightly. It occurred to Rick to say something humiliatingly corny, like, “I was asleep before I kissed you,” but instead he straightened up and turned away. His eyes happened to fall on Kit. Kit! He’s amazing, but why didn’t I fantasize about Jode before? Was I blind?
Or did the change—did it give Jode something more? An aura, an—atmosphere that induces lust? Infatuation. Love –
“Whoa,” Jode said. Rick turned. Jode was looking down at his own body. Rick, reconfronted with Jode’d beauty, felt his heart start pounding and his skin start to warm again. He was very aware that his own big boner had never gone away and was now pumping and jumping in his uniform slacks. Naturally this thought caused Rick’s eyes to drift downward toward Jode’s gargantuan cock. He suppressed a gasp. During their make-out Jode had gotten a semi-hard-on, and what had been several inches of thick, soft cock visible below the hem of his loose boxers had become—more. Longer, thicker, a huge casing of potential energy, to be unleashed by another man. Not any other man. Only Rick. Only me.
Jode looked up at Rick, not freaking out, not alarmed in any way. He looked merely mildly surprised, like the guy who woke up in the Academy dorms the morning after a party to discover he was naked and sprawled out on the common room couch rather than back in his room. It was a Huh, that’s weird kind of look. A thrill of apprehension ran through Rick’s body. Why is he so calm about something that should be impossible?
Mikey noticed it too. “Interesting,” he said. “Another part of the effect?”
Rick glanced at Mikey, taking in the avatar’s muscle-hunk beauty as if for the first time. A horrifying thought struck him like a taser charge. “Someone’s reprogramming us—just like we did to you!” Rick said, feeling the blood drain from his face. “And they’re doing it for exactly the same reason.”
Mikey frowned. “For kicks?” Rick nodded.
But Mikey shook his head, glancing at the swirling micronebula on the viewscreen. “My analysis suggests a natural effect is still more likely –”
But Rick was too overcome with dismay at his own theory, unproved or not. He dropped down into his command chair, ignoring the unpleasant feeling of the upholstery on his back, and faced Jode, who was still looking at him inquiringly, slightly confused. Rick forced his lust, infatuation, love brusquely aside and said, “Navigator, chart a course clear of this micronebula and execute at best speed!”
“Lieutenant –” Mikey began to object. Rick frowned thunderously at him, his sudden near-panic to get free of the micronebula causing him to be enraged that Mikey was overstepping his bounds and questioning a command decision. Mikey subsided, but he looked unhappy.
Jode had turned and was operating the helm as normally as if nothing bizarre had happened, despite being a few sizes larger than the last time he’d seen Jode working. “Executing course to clear the micronebula, boss,” Jode confirmed. On an ancillary screen next to the main viewer full of milky-blue swirls, Jode had brought up a three-dimensional chart of the nebula, with their own projected course curving through and out into normal space.
“Why is your course not a direct line, cadet?” he asked, half angry, half curious.
“There are gravitational streams and eddies throughout the micronebula,” Jode said. “A direct course would incur greater danger to the ship.”
Rick wanted to order Jode to fly the Fortitude out in a straight line anyway, get them out now, now, now, but he steeled himself to be a proper commander who trusted his officers’ judgment. Jode may have been a kid when he signed up for this mission, but he had proved himself an adept half a dozen times already on this mission.
“Gotcha,” Rick said a little reluctantly, relaxing into his uncomfortable chair. There was sweat on his back now, making the chair’s coarse covering even more uncomfortable. Rick stood up irritably.
The viewscreen now showed forward motion. But something was wrong. He was feeling some kind of force. It shouldn’t be the motion of the ship—inertial dampers prevented that. This was something—else—
A sudden riiiiip made Rick snap around. Kyle, sitting serene and unconscious up at the operations console behind him, was the only one of them wearing a tee shirt. It had been loose yesterday, but the young cadet’s body was now packed with muscle, especially thick, heavy pecs and shoulders, and the seams that had been straining along his bulging lats were now starting to pull violently part! And the shirt was also inadequate in other ways—a full pair of deep-carved ab muscles showed where the shirt had been pulled up out of Kyle’s slacks.
“Oh shit –” Rick breathed.
He glanced at Kit over at the comm station. As he watched, Rick could see—it was just barely perceptible—Kit was growing. Very very slowly, but Rick could see it, sense it. Kit was already huge—he had been big before!—but his pecs were swelling and firming, his abs slowly tightening, his legs strengthening. And his cock –
Rick turned to the other side of the bridge, where the pale-skinned, red-headed engineer Ted sat. He walked closer to him. Ted had never had any extra body fat, and now he looked like a paragon of impossible fitness: he was growing, but also evolving—
Rick’s eyes dropped to Ted’s cock. It had grown the most before, a good eight inches of heft cock spilling out of the regulation boxers before. And now Rick bent down to stare at the beautiful organ as it swelled, a little longer, a little thicker, with each and every passing breath.
The cock started to consume Rick’s vision. He could feel nothing but his heartbeat, see nothing but Ted’s growing cock inching out of his shorts –
“Sir,” called Jode. “Sir!” added Mikey, an unusual note of urgency in his voice.
Rick turned blankly, distracted. No one on this ship ever called him “sir.”
Rick stared at Jode, who was looking down at his pecs and ten-pack and at a cock that was spilling off the front of his chair. “I’m grooooowing,” Jode said, half to himself, as if he were unsure not of what was happening, but where it would lead.
“I tried to tell you, lieutenant,” Mikey said patiently. “This is what happened the first time, while you were asleep.”
And Rick nodded. “The growth is tied into propulsion within the nebula,” he said.
Jode stood up. And up. Rick did gasp this time. He was a head taller than the already tall and lanky Rick now. And his body—he could see, somehow, that every muscle in Jode’s body was filled with thriving life, wanting to grow, to expand, to become not just larger but better, more perfect. From his neck to his ankles, every part of Jode’s gorgeous body was striving, bulging, pushing toward muscle nirvana. And the obscene cock hanging wide and ponderous out of Jode’s boxers, was striving and growing, too, constrained even less than the muscles of Jode’s body which had to remain workable, functional. It could keep growing and growing. It reminded Rick of a great steel pendulum he’d seen once, hanging from the domed rotunda of an important building, nearly scraping the tiles of the lobby five floors below.
Rick said nothing, staring at Jode. He was aware that he was consciously letting the effect happen. Jode was growing. The bridge crew. Sixty-seven young muscle cadets and veterans in the quarters below. All of them, except Mikey, and him. Why except me?
Jode stared back at him, passively, at peace, confidently leaving his life, his growth, his everything in the hands of his commander. Rick was aware of only one sound during that long silent moment, the sound, from behind him, of another thread from Kyle’s shirt seams popping open.
Finally he spoke. “How long until we clear the micronebula?” Rick said, his mouth dry.
Jode already knew the answer. “Twenty-eight minutes.”
Jode was suddenly overwhelmed with an almost irresistible urge to yell, “Floor it!” They’d get out, they’d be a shipful of giants—giants, Rick considered, who’d been screwed around with by some unknown force. For laughs. Or even another, unknown, even sinister reason.
Maybe he’d end up with a shipful of giants, Rick thought ridiculously, but he’d do it on his terms. He shook his head.
“All stop!” he ordered. “Thrusters at station-keeping.”
“Aye aye, boss.” Jode turned to execute the command, bending over his console. But after a few bleeps and bloops Jode quickly turned and looked down at Rick in surprise.
“Boss, the helm won’t answer,” he said, his eyes wide. “We’re still moving!”
