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Expansion: A Story Inspired by 'Expandingmuscle'


goremeridian

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EXPANSION: A STORY INSPIRED BY 'EXPANDINGMUSCLE'

Part 1

Tal couldn’t believe there were robots that still bleeped.

“This thing’s, like, from the Dark Ages,” the 14 year-old moaned, regarding the object floating before him with disgust. “You’d think a museum would be able to afford something a little less rubbish.” He poked it with his finger, lithe arm flexing, like it was a bubble he could just burst and then forget about. The robot’s shell echoed, tin-like, as it wobbled away from him, betraying its basic internal design.

Tal’s father turned to look at him, thick, ponderous muscles clenching into steel, a stern expression trickling slowly down his handsome features like viscous liquid, pulling the facial tendons tauter and tauter, ready to solidify into something grimmer.

“It’s the last remnant of a dead universe, Tal,” Bry said, heaving pecs flexing unconsciously for emphasis. “Have some respect.” He watched his son bash it again with his skinny little index finger. “My daddy brought me here to see this when I was your age. Now I’m bringing you.”

Tal shot his father the same withering look practised and perfected by mirror-obsessed teenagers across the multiverse.

“Dad, my fucking bath tap has more intelligence than this piece of crap.”

“Tal…” Bry’s big hand reached out and grasped his son’s. Why was the boy so goddamn stubborn?

The kid gasped.

For a moment, Bry was afraid he’d gripped too tightly – his ex-wife was always reprimanding him for his overbearing strength – but the kid merely shook his hand free and let off another tirade of f-words.

Bry’s ears ached from his son’s casual swearing, and it took him a moment to condense his anger into a gritting of teeth. “Look. Just…listen to the thing. You might learn something. Something important.”

Like I did, he thought. Probably the most important thing I ever learnt.

Tal sneered up at his father, the movement causing his tight little boy-pecs to tense into steel. “Learn something? From this piece of crap?”

Tal, Bry thought, I swear, if you weren’t my son, I would rip your fucking head off right now.

“Just. Listen.” He didn’t trust himself to spit out any more words. Sure the whole museum thing seemed out of character for him – Bry was a man’s man, and usually took his son to the gym during their allotted time together – but this was something he had to do. And like hell he was going to let the little shit saunter into the next room without learning about the most important multiversal event in history.

The kid, however, was already moving on, his skinny little form heading for a display case on the far side of the room.

Bry could have shouted “Tal”, of course. That might have stopped his son. But the hulking man had missed out on breakfast due to a mess-up in the timings of when he was supposed to pick Tal up, and he was hungry.

It was an unspoken law - one that Tal didn’t know yet, but by fuck he was going to know soon – that you don’t mess with a bodybuilder’s meals.

Bry’s thick fingers reached out towards his son’s shoulder.

He sometimes wished it were a real law. One time some little nerd at the office had taken the last chicken sandwich from the canteen. He’d been a newbie; he probably hadn’t known that there was a bodybuilder in the building. Yet EVEN AFTER BRY HAD CONFRONTED THE LITTLE SHIT ABOUT HIS NEED FOR PROTEIN, the newbie hadn’t gotten the fucking hint and had actually eaten the sandwich.

Bry’s cock still hardened sometimes just thinking about how he’d punished the puny fucker.

Then his thickly-fingered hand clasped his 14 year-old son’s twitching teenage delt.

“You’re not going anywhere until you listen to this…” Bry grunted. He glanced at the robot. Fuck, it looked pathetic, barely able to hover above the ground. The greatest scientific achievement of a universe…reduced to wiggling about in an off-track wing of a science museum.

But, like his daddy before him, Bry was determined to ram some education down his son’s throat. Even if it meant having to use some of his muscle to do it.

“Daaaaaaaaaad”, Tal groaned, lithe physique flexing. But he didn’t move.

The robot, perhaps sensing an audience, wobbled over to the pair.

“I am the last surviving remnant of the universe now designated Universe 281.”

Both father and son had heard this before. It was the robot’s standard greeting, thrown at everyone passing through the museum from the room of Exploding, Multi-Coloured Mini-Stars to the Hall of Ancient Bones.

Probably one in a thousand actually said, as Bry said now:

“Tell us about the fall of your universe.”

He waited, briefly, the silence punctuated by the beeps from the robot (geez, it was such a fucking basic design; was this really the best a universe could achieve?)

Half-expecting another groan from his son, Bry worried a second time about his grip. But glancing down his clenched, freakishly striated wrist at Tal, it was clear the boy was in just his basic Ignore Every Adult mode.

Much like Bry had been with his own father over twenty years earlier.

Which meant – like he had been – the boy might be receptive to a bit of history. Or at least, he was moody enough to not interrupt the robot.

The bleeping sounds folding away into silence within the museum’s tenebrous interior, the robot finally asked:

“The end of Universe 281. Would you merely like facts, or a narrative?”

There was a strange little silence then. Strange, because there is no such thing as silence in a museum. Even as Bry’s thoughts turned to his father, a hulking man who had disappeared from his life shortly after his 14th birthday…even as Tal’s thoughts, twisted and hormone-enflamed though they were, turned to his own father, wondering why, for the umpteenth time, why Bry was just SO FREAKING BIG COMPARED WITH THE REST OF HUMANITY, possibly even THE BIGGEST MAN ON THE PLANET…there was the muted hustle of the public from the room next door, the susurrate whirrs of the more sophisticated AIs dancing through a tutorial on Brownian Motion or Post-Tribulation Chaos Theory, and the slipslap of thousands of excited feet moving through the volumous building.

But all sounds seemed to just…stop…for a moment. Like the museum was holding its breath.

“We would like,” said Bry, not sure whether he was grasping his son at all, let alone too tightly, “a narrative.”

Beep. Beeep. Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

“And so it begins,” said the robot, with a final, fourth beep.

Bry saw his son roll his eyes.

Fuck parental concern. Bry’s grip on his son’s shoulder increased. The boy squirmed, a little, but Bry held firm. For reassurance. For some outdated notion of parenthood. And because he knew…from personal experience…what horrors Tal would soon discover.

“Ian,” the machine muttered, oddly coldly, dispassionate and metallic in the retelling of the fall of its universe. “It began…with Ian.”

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EXPANSION: A STORY INSPIRED BY 'EXPANDINGMUSCLE'

PART 2

The sweat on Ian’s pale forehead glistened golden-yellow under the neon ‘Arrivals’ sign at Gatwick Airport. As the big man shuffled forward, trying carefully not to step on any of the smaller people clustered about him, the beads of man-sweat bedecking his brow caught too the glimmering azure light of the ‘Taxis This Way’ sign opposite, the shimmering amethyst glow of the adjacent ‘Tie Rack’ shop, and the sparkling ruby ‘Nothing To Declare’ panel hanging ever-so-slightly-lopsidedly on the wall. So it was that when the bodybuilder finally set foot in the arrivals lounge, that moment when he felt that he had finally arrived in Great Britain – and the moment Great Britain finally laid eyes on him – his head was ablaze in a corona of multi-coloured flame.

Like a king.

Like a god.

Of course, he didn’t feel that way. The flight had been cramped and all of the hulking man’s thick muscles ached. With the kind of monster weights he hefted in the gym on a daily basis, Ian was used to deep muscle pain – but at least there was some gain to be made from putting himself through those hellish workouts. The only thing he had gained from sardining himself in a teeny aircraft cabin for eleven hours was a bad mood.

A mood that didn’t improve as his mind drifted back to the last conversation he had had before leaving the States.

I’M LEAVING EVERYTHING BEHIND FOR THIS, he had typed. MY CAREER, MY FAMILY…MY WHOLE DAMN COUNTRY.

YOU’RE GOING TO THINK DIFFERENTLY ONCE YOU SEE THE RESULTS, I PROMISE YOU, Andrew had replied. EVERYTHING’S ALMOST READY.

That ‘ALMOST’ had twisted in Ian’s intestines like a bad burrito for the entire flight.

His cock told him it was worth it, his brain that he had made a dreadful mistake in trusting some Englishman he had met online. And there, equidistant between the two, squirming away in his gut, sat that ‘ALMOST’.

 

Dwelling, as he was, on one ‘ALMOST’, Iain fell foul of another, and almost missed the sign with his name on it held up above the thronging crowd of little people waiting in the arrivals lounge. His dark eyes followed the sign down to the person clutching it.  

“Andrew?” His deep voice carried over the heads of the other US arrivals.  

The bodybuilder had seen pictures of the skinny Englishman before, but he still threw out the question. The little man nodded enthusiastically, and gestured with the sign – nearly, in his excitement, clunking the head of the woman beside him – for the muscular hulk to meet him at the end of the barrier separating the arrivals from the waiting crowd.

As is habitual when you meet an online acquaintance in the flesh, there was a moment of awkward silence between them. After all, these were two men who had shared their extreme dreams and fantasies over the net. Standing face to face (or, more accurately, face to chest, as Ian was a good foot taller than Andrew) in the middle of an airport, both men felt uncomfortably exposed. It is one thing to bare one’s soul in the safety of a chatroom. It is quite another to do it in the flesh.

Iain broke the silence with a characteristic grunt. He scratched the red-brown stubble of his square chin with a paw big enough to palm a basketball.

“So you’re the little man who’s going to help me grow, right?”

‘Little man.’ Like they were back in roleplay territory.

Online territory.

Safe territory.

“Um…beyond your wildest imagination,” the other replied, uncertainty and hope giving his voice an odd hollowness.

They silently took a moment to acknowledge in each other’s eyes the awful sense of trust that must be shared between two fetishists. Then Ian broke into a smile.

“Glad to know I didn’t cramp all this muscle into a fucking sardine can for eleven hours for nothing, ha ha!”

And with that, he snatched the smaller man up into a hug.

And everything was all right.

Though if he had been less caught up in hugging, and more observant, Ian might have noticed the smaller man squirming – and trying to peer over his shoulder.

He might also have noticed the name on the reverse of the sign.

*

“Whoa, what?” Tal choked, the guttural sound interrupting the robot’s narrative. “ ‘And everything was all right’?” He mimicked the machine’s metallic monotone. “What did this Ian guy even come to Britain to do, anyway? And who is Andrew? You introduced him without telling us a thing about him.” He reached out a lithe arm and, steely tricep flexing, flicked the robot’s shell with a clink.

Bry tried not to smile. The kid was clearly getting into the story.

“Andrew.” The robot stated the word, unfazed. “Would you like facts, or a narrative?”

“Facts,” Tal said, before his father could reply. “Just give me the facts.” He sniffed aggressively. “None of this ‘And everything was all right’ bollocks.”

“Very well.”

*

Andrew had made his fortune five years before when he discovered a Bhelloricite meteor buried deep within the soil of his back garden. The rock was around the same size as a football. And I know what your response will be: no Bhelloricite deposit has ever been found greater than atomic size.

This was truly an astronomical finding.

*

“Bullshit,” Tal threw out, cockily. “Our fucking SOLAR SYSTEM runs on an atom of Bhelloricite, and has done so for the last 200 years.” He poked the robot again, harder than before, setting the machine wobbling. “A chunk that size could power a UNIVERSE.”

“TAL,” his father sliced in, aggressively, heaving, muscular throat scratching out his son’s name. “Let the damn robot finish talking. You asked for this, remember?”

*

Andrew made many billions selling particles of the meteorite to countries around the world.

Humanity suddenly found themselves on a planet with a sustainable, and very powerful, energy source. It took a while but within three years not a single country was still using fossil fuels. There was no more competition for oil or gas. No more dangerous attempts to harness nuclear energy.

Some called it a new era, a golden era. The Bhelloricite Era.

In short, things were good.

Surprisingly for a person who had saved the planet from self-annihilation, Andrew kept himself out of the public eye. He had a huge complex built to house the meteorite he had found…and for his experiments.

You see, for years he had wondered whether it was possible to raise the bar on human potential. Now he had the resources to find out. He gathered about him the finest scientific minds on the planet, and set them one task: to see how massive, how muscular, they could grow a human being.

*

“Why would scientists want to work on something like that? I mean, what about trying to find the cure for a disease, or inventing some new method of space travel?”

Bry swelled a little with pride, causing his already-straining t-shirt to tear a little about his gargantuan musculature. He had asked the same question himself, when he had come here with his own daddy, two decades earlier.

“Scientists on my world were often under-resourced,” the robot bleeped. “Andrew offered them essentially unlimited funding if they would work for him for a few years, and many took him up on the offer. Some even came to enjoy solving the mystery of human potential and turned their backs on their former areas of study.” It paused, then said, with a surprisingly human tone of snootiness: “May I continue the factual account now?”

After a moment, Tal shrugged his acquiescence, teen delts clenching into sinewy titanium beneath his father’s thick fingers.

*

It was eighteen months before the aforementioned meeting of the two men at Gatwick airport that Andrew’s experiments finally arrived at a solution.

Or, rather, two solutions.

The first was the ‘superlative’ process. Andrew’s scientists discovered a method whereby all the nutrients required for growth could be extracted from foodstuffs and optimised; that is, made as effective as possible. Superlative carrots were force-fed to a laboratory rabbit over the period of a month, and the creature doubled in mass. Similar experiments with a range of different animals proved that the potential for growth is there in nature. The fuel we use for said growth just isn’t effective enough. By reducing the fuel to its superlative – its most effective, potent – state, the scientists discovered that they could work wonders.

The problem was, that the extracted superlative was little more than sticky, revolting – and, as some described it, “hellish” gunk. It was neither visually appealing nor in any way edible. In fact, it could almost be likened to an emetic. This meant that the people eventually chosen for the experiment would have to fight an almost constant urge to regurgitate it. The sheer willpower required for such an undertaking would have to be staggering. It became a sort of running joke in the laboratory: scientists would play pranks on one another, putting a tiny drop of the solution – a superlative apple, say, or a chicken breast – into the coffee of a co-worker. Said co-worker would then be forced to spend the next few hours bent over the toilet bringing up the superlative and anything else they had eaten in the last year or so.

The animals were no different. Sedation had been the only way to get the superlative foodstuff inside their stomachs.

The second solution was the tube. To achieve the kind of growth that Andrew fantasised about, at the speeds he had dreamed of, the bodybuilder would need to consume VAST quantities of nutrients, at a TREMENDOUS rate. So the scientists devised a feeding tube. It was a spaghetti-thin device that could be inserted into the mouth, down the throat and into the stomach of a person. It would then, in theory, deliver a stream of superlative foodstuff into the stomach of the bodybuilder. The first setting would guarantee a steady flow of nutrients. The fifth would cause a normal man’s stomach to swell up like a balloon and explode. The machine’s settings went up to five hundred.

Andrew hoped to be able to grow someone big enough to handle that setting easily.

All they had to do was find someone willing to get that big – without vomiting the superlative solution up before the process had even begun.

*

“So he found Ian?” Tal murmured, eyes narrowing.

“Yes. And…the others.”

“Others?”

"I will continue the narrative from where I left off."

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

*

The big man finally released the hug. Andrew felt as if his bones had been compressed by the bodybuilder’s flexed, iron-hard muscles – and it took him a few seconds to struggle out of his dolorous disorientation and realise that Ian was talking.

“Heh, was a bit of an awkward silence there for a moment, wasn’t there? I thought we were going to stare at each other forever.”

Andrew laughed too, a touch of nervousness tickling his throat. He snuck a peek around the side of the bodybuilder’s hulking form. Everyone in the arrivals lounge was stealing surreptitious glances at the man’s monstrous mass.

“Yeah. I mean, I know I’ve been expecting you, Ian – it’s just weird seeing you like this all of a sudden.” Part of him knew he was gushing but he couldn’t stop. “I mean, you’re so much bigger in real life than I thought you would be…I mean, bigger than your photos on the site…”

He realised that he had said “I mean” three times, the filler betraying his nerves and excitement. He batted the thought to one side and took another glance past Ian.

This time the bodybuilder noticed.

“You…looking for someone?”

Even as he made a move to reply, Andrew caught sight of him.

It was impossible not to notice him. He was bigger than everyone else coming through the arrivals gate.

Bigger even than Ian.

“Ah, there he is.” Andrew snatched up the sign again and spun it around, displaying, in broad letters, LUKE.  

“Luke?” The big bodybuilder frowned. “Who is ‘Luke’?” He followed Andrew’s gaze to the stream of people pouring into the arrivals lounge, as he himself had done minutes ago. Within seconds, his pupils found the man. He stood out like a monolith of obsidian muscle, nearly two feet taller than the throng about him.

A huge, black bodybuilder.

And upon his head – Ian knew it was a trick of the light, but even so, the feeling caused his stomach to sink – a glimmering crown of man-sweat shone forth, a puissant halo. For a moment the pale bodybuilder had the strangest feeling that he was looking not upon a man, but upon a king. A god.

The monstrous black muscleman caught sight of the sign and, shoulders bunching into a horrific display of strength and power, began heading in the direction of the two companions.

When Andrew spoke, his voice sounded reedy. Was it nerves? Embarrassment at withholding information from Ian? Or simply awe at seeing the biggest, most muscular human being in the world – a man whose size easily dwarfed Ian’s mass?

“That’s Luke. Your competition.”

Edited by GymWolf
Corrected explicit use of white font colour
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  • 2 years later...

I'm reaching in the way back to bump this, but I just reread it, and I thought it deserved some exposure and maybe some consideration for a new chapter by the great Goremeridian (even though he's probably tired of me asking him to continue different stories 😉).

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25 minutes ago, expandingmuscle said:

Thanks! I'm glad I'm not the only one interested in this story, even though I have a lot of motivation to see it continue.

You're welcome! It has one of the most interesting introductions I've ever read. It has the potential to be an epic.  Of course, that's a big commitment for goremeridian, but I would love to see it.

BTW, it took me quite a bit to realize you were a person and not the title of another story, lol. I had this story saved, but I had a bad habit of not including the author's name. I would have sworn the story was from CoiledFist or an old macro site rather than here. So, I was searching for story titles that didn't exist in the wrong places, lol. I was hoping to find that it had already been continued  or the "story," you, that it was based on. 😀

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