no sex Bulletproof

[tortolis]

Bulletproof

“You know you could wind up pretty much bulletproof?” Geoff asked me.

We were about three weeks into the process of slapdash gene-editing at that point. Alchemy, with Geoff as the wizard and me as, I don’t know, a toad perhaps. Before we began, the anticipation — the idea of me emerging from it with the kind of strength that had fueled my fantasies all through childhood — just imagining that gave me the wildest pleasure I had ever known. Geoff’s work was kind of sub rosa, and I was surprised I had actually managed to connect with him and that he was willing to take me as a subject. Willing? Hell, he was happy like a clam, and I was happier than that. True, I had lost all interest in sex with partners, because for me nothing could compete with the sexual rush I got imagining how strong I was getting. Bending steel bars? Punching through walls? Hand me that mirror and close the door on your way out.

Of course, that initial euphoria was tempered after the first couple of weeks. It struck me like getting married: Mundane questions come up, possible complications arise. Bulletproof? “I don’t want to develop some hide, like a rhino,” I said. “Is that what’s going to happen?”

“Not sure. You know it’s too late to do anything about how that kind of adaptation might play out, right?” He said this kind of thing repeatedly, any time I expressed concern. Too late to do anything, the die is cast, we won’t know until the process is complete, et cetera. “Anyway, it’s not about your skin. It’s about the tissues underneath.” He had done some experiments not in the human genetics lab where he worked, but in an art studio, using ballistic clay, which contains lead, iron and acrylic clay. It can stop bullets, or majorly bog them down. Geoff does a surprising amount of work at the art studio attached to the MFA program in the fine arts building at a major university — I’m not supposed to say where, but you may have read about one of the MFA students who hired him to clone some frogs to create a kind of froggy chorus line, with electrodes attached to their legs. It didn’t work out as planned, and she got picketed besides.

“Will my skin turn grey? I don't want to have grey skin, like an elephant.” Is it Ogden Nash I was thinking of? I shoot the hippopotamus / with bullets made of platinum / because if I use leaden ones / his hide is sure to flatten ‘em…

Truth be told, I would have liked to stop the process right there. I had grown taller and broader and was totally ripped. I was feeling like a dynamo and eating for two or three linebackers. Yes, my skin had begun to change, but not in a bad way, and my body hair was falling out, with just itchy stubble left. That was going away, too, and I was also losing the hair on my head, so I might wind up totally bald. Not a bad look, but I’d need to get cooler glasses, or maybe contacts.

I could usually recapture my initial euphoria just by slipping my hand under my shirt and feeling my chest. The emphatic division between my pecs. For all my working out, it was never like that before. And rock-hard, as they say. Even the stubble was kind of a turn-on. Geoff wanted me to find inconspicuous ways of using my strength to get used to it, and I had a new trick. “Hey, Geoff, regardez,” I said, and fell forward with my body board-straight, stopping myself with my hands so that I was in push-up position. Then, keeping my body straight, I reversed the motion using only my wrists and hands, back into standing position. “Cool,” he said. “Like showing the movie backwards.”

I don’t know what other gene-splicing projects Geoff worked on before I found him, but apparently they can get pretty bizarre, because it was the very ordinariness of what I wanted that attracted him. These people go around in secret, or so it is said. There are street rumors about people wanting to plug themselves in to store electricity like electric eels, or deflect laser energy from satellites in the Strategic Defense Initiative that probably don’t exist anyway. The most popular story is basically about “beam me up, Scotty,” people who wanted to teleport or walk through walls or under closed doors. “Just strength?” he kept asking me. “Nothing else?” I told him that having a fabulous, muscular build would be great, but that strength was the primary criterion for success. He indicated that this would be much easier than some of his projects had been. But when he actually started working, the amount of research seemed huge. For me it was mostly a matter of waiting; for him it was drudgery, doing genetic sequencing not just of human DNA, but of animals you’d think had nothing to do with it — gorillas, rhinos. Mountain goats? Yes, mountain goats were crucial. When matters of judgment came up, he would not consult me, even though it was my body. One day he snapped at me, saying “The heart and the diaphragm are muscles too, you know,” as if I had denied it.

Then out of the blue he said “You're looking pretty fantastic, you know.” Not his kind of comment. “Let’s get your shirt off and have a look.” He looked my torso up and down, and then said “give me one of these,” indicated a bicep flex. I obliged. “Holy shit,” he said. “You're like a fucking comic book. I did that. Me and my little viruses. I wonder how strong you’ll wind up being. How strong are you now?”

“Don't know.”

Geoff started knocking on me like a used car. “We should have thought about measuring your development. That was an oversight.”

“I went to my old gym yesterday to get an idea,” I said. “It didn't go too well.”

“What happened?”

“What happened was the guy at the desk didn't recognize me, which was fine, and he gave me a tour, also fine, but when I thought I’d play around with him, he — well, there was a racked bar that had about three hundred pounds on it, and I hefted it with one hand, and he was nothing but annoyed. ‘I don't know if that’s some kind of illusion or if you’re some kind of freak’ is what he said. Not how I imagined that would go.”

“How was lifting three hundred pounds with one hand?”

“Pretty easy, actually. In the weight room I picked up a twenty-pound plate and just broke it. Like a cookie. Also not what I expected, somehow. The guy just asked me to leave.”

“And I am having pretty much the opposite reaction,” he said. “The idea that you are actually real is seeming pretty incredible to me just now. I wish I had a twenty-pound plate for you to break. What is there for you to break around here?”

“Everything. Everything is looking fragile to me lately,” I said.

"You look fucking indestructible," he said.

“You could punch me if you like. Nothing hurts very much anymore, at least nothing I’ve encountered yet.”

Geoff ran at me and punched me in the gut, or I should say, in my abs, which were looking pretty great. He was wincing but he had a goony grin on his face. And me, I wish I could describe the feeling — it not only didn’t hurt, but the fact that it didn't hurt made it fun. I loved seeing the effort in Geoff’s face, the fact that he hurt his hand. “You're incredible,” he said. “It’s like you're made of…I don’t know what. That didn't hurt?”

“It felt kind of good, actually.”

Under the terms of our agreement I had three more weeks to spend at Geoff’s apartment. Gene-hackers, as they've come to be known, are doing better than you might think, judging from Geoff’s digs — very luxurious. I imagined the conditions would be Spartan, but then, do the math: I agreed to pay thirty thousand plus expenses, and he can do a fair number of these a year, and I've noticed that he also does consulting work and has his lab job. But it’s all very secret. There are serious legal risks, and they’re mostly on his side. After the gym, I had kept an appointment with the lawyer who handled my father's will. I asked him questions I said were hypothetical about gene-hackers. I wasn’t fooling him, and I knew it, and he knew that I knew it. “The laws on cloning and genetic modification are aimed at the practitioners, not the subjects of experimentation or the modified organisms,” he droned.

“Then the subject in an experiment would be in the clear?”

“Not necessarily,” he said. “Let’s say a subject approached a practitioner of genetic modification and paid him or her to convert him into a genetic superman.” He didn't have to put it that way; he knew it and I knew it. “The subject then facilitates the crime by making himself available. And if he pays for it, even more so.” Gene hackers, according to this guy, will soon be as dangerous and as costly to society as computer hackers.

I was confident there was no legal exposure for Geoff or me. Our deal was based on a handshake. The artist with the frogs was hassled and her show was shut down, but the case had been settled in her favor as a free speech issue: artistic expression. And after three weeks of his dour moods, Geoff's sudden appreciation was just what I needed. He was looking at the shirtless me like a new and astonishing specimen. “You don’t just look like an athlete or a bodybuilder,” he said. “You look more special than that.”

“Special,” I said, “is that some technical scientific term?”

“Like you’re going to explode,” he said.  “Like you're exploding with latent power. I can’t explain it.”

“Hit me again,” I said, this time with both arms raised and biceps flexed. He ran at me and then just kind of pounded my chest, then started to climb onto me. I grabbed him by the belt and just tossed him in the air, catching him like a baby. “I’ve already got so much power I don't know what to do with it. How much more before it levels off?”

“I know, right? What a problem. We’re going to have to think of some strength adventures for you.”

“You have any debts you need collected? Someone you want to intimidate?”

“You’re joking,” he said, “but I do.”

“Really? I’m your guy. Figure it out and let me know. Nothing illegal, please.”

“No time like the present, right? Come on, let’s go right now. Just follow my lead and don’t kill the guy. I don’t think you’ll have to touch him.” And so Geoff and I were off on my first muscle adventure, to a lab where we had to show our IDs and get buzzed in and follow a maze of corridors. Geoff stuck his head in a door and called out “Hey, Dr. H.” He sounded friendly rather than pissed. A bush-haired guy emerged, fifty-ish, wire-rims.

“Ah, look what the cat dragged in,” he said. “And I see you brought a mouse with you.” We entered a lab with such powerful ventilation that you had to speak up.

“Yes,” Geoff said. “A lab mouse, an experimental mouse. You should have a look at him. Take your shirt off, mouse.” I could feel the airflow, and it felt great. But after a minute, I slipped my shirt back on. “Jesus fucking Christ,” said Dr. H. “That’s amazing. How long did that take you?”

“Couple of months is all,” said Geoff.

The guy turned to me. “And this was your idea? You’re a paying customer?”

“No,” said Geoff, “he had nothing to do with it. I figured now that I’m getting entrepreneurial, it might be handy to have an enforcer. Considering how crazy some of my clients are. Present company included. You know, better safe than…isn’t that right, Bruno? You know, Dr. H. is a client of ours. Research staff. Day job.”

“Got it, boss,” I said.

“Bruno’s not his real name,” Geoff told Dr. H. “That’s what I call him. His professional name, you might say.”

Dr. H came over to me. “Shame,” he said. “That name suits you.”

“That’s why I picked it. I was thinking that I wanted to change up our working relationship a little bit, stay a little lower profile. I don’t want my name on any future articles. But I’d like to keep my staff position plus an equity stake. I was thinking seven percent. And Bruno agrees. He wants to make sure I get what I deserve.”

“Do you, Bruno?” asked Dr. H. He was looking at me the whole time Geoff was speaking. “You agree? Geoff, I think I need a better look at this lab mouse. He may need to be medically monitored as time goes on. Would you mind, Bruno,” he said, gesturing at his own shirt.

“Not at all,” I said. I saw where this was going. I whipped my shirt off again. And this time, I handed it to Dr. H.

“Unbe-fucking-lievable,” said Dr. H. Is he as strong as he looks?”

“Stronger,” said Geoff. “Stronger than you can imagine. One of my best. He’s still developing, but already — ”

“Bruno,” Dr. H. interrupted, “I have a thought…I’ve been trying to get that specimen freezer moved for weeks. Could you oblige?” He indicated a stainless steel console that looked smaller than a kitchen refrigerator. “It’s heavier than it looks. Extremely cold temp, you know, thirty below, special compressor, dedicated power supply…could I impose? It would be so helpful. We've cleared it out but we can't turn it off.”

I smiled and nodded, but when I started to put my shirt back on, he said “I think you might find it easier if you leave that off.” Okay, so that was how it  was. For me, the freezer itself was like nothing. If it hadn’t been an awkward shape, I’d have done it with one arm. Geoff went with me down the hall and we repositioned the fridge in another lab. Dr. H. stayed where he was, and Geoff gave him a couple of minutes alone before we returned. “You seem to have made quite an impression on Dr. H,” Geoff told me. “I didn’t realize he was of that particular persuasion, whatever it is. Sorry about that.”

“You mean, turned on by my muscles?”

“Yeah. He’s married, actually. To a woman.”

“Well, whatever. You weren’t that interested muscles either, until you got a look at me lately.”

“Yeah, well, shut my mouth,” said Geoff, and we walked back to Dr. H.’s lab.  

“So. Gents.” He asked. “How did it go?”

“Cake,” I said, and gave him a bicep flex. Right arm. Seeing this, he came over to me and caressed it, unabashed. He was all over it. He actually put his chin on it, then his lips. I was a little embarrassed, but not much. “Christ,” he said. That’s not a bicep, it’s a cannonball.” He paused in a way that seemed wistful. “You know, if you were so inclined…”

“Thanks,” I said, “but it wouldn’t work. The price of strength. I would pulverize you in the first five seconds.”

Then he looked at Geoff. “Be that as it may,” he said, “I can understand your wanting to keep a lower profile, and we can keep your name out of the journals if you like, though if you have a staff position with the company…anyway, an equity position is certainly not inappropriate, I’ve been thinking we should work that out. We don’t want to lose you while the firm is still aborning. And I am so pleased to welcome Bruno into the fold. Bruno, I’m sure we’ll find a way to win each other’s mutual loyalty. Shall we say three and a half percent for each of you?” I was horrified — I wanted no part of whatever this was — but Geoff gave me the high sign, and later explained that we could work out a separate agreement between ourselves. And so it was that the entire cost of his work with me, the research, the surreptitious use of the CRISPR, the viral engineering, the special diet, the three days of induced coma for an invented emergency, the seclusion under controlled conditions, the thirty grand in fees plus untold expenses, all of it wound up costing me nothing; Geoff basically gave me a full refund for services rendered, and I have this body to show for it. Of course, Geoff stands to become a millionaire if all goes well with Dr. H.'s startup. But as for my plans, so far they’ve gone better than I could have imagined. We’ll just have to see where it leads.

[Ro20316]

Pretty amazing first chapter.

I like hou he understand his strenght and how he freaked the guy at the gym when he thoought he was gonna have a good time.

Also i like that eh knwos he is too strong to eb intimate with another person. They need to coem up with soemthing cause the guy will only have his right hand then

[xmrr20a]

Will there be another chapter? Please.

[aitchbee]

21 hours ago, tortolis said:

In the weight room I picked up a twenty-pound plate and just broke it. Like a cookie. Also not what I expected, somehow. The guy just asked me to leave.

Your character broke the gym's property and he was surprised that he was asked to leave? He was lucky the gym didn't call the cops and have him arrested for vandalism!!

[Kymuscleboy]

4 hours ago, aitchbee said:

Your character broke the gym's property and he was surprised that he was asked to leave? He was lucky the gym didn't call the cops and have him arrested for vandalism!!

Ha! You're like me. I can't help thinking of legal ramifications if I don't really try to put aside my disbelief. It's like that Carrie Underwood song, "Before He Cheats." All I hear is felony, misdemeanor, civil suit for property damage, etc... rather than the actual lyrics.

That said, this story is AWESOME. I really hope the author continues it. I love gene editing as the source of muscle  growth, as it's realistic enough to be believable, even if really stretching the boundaries of what is possible. Also, the focus on strength is incredible too. I hope we get to see much more growth in that area and examples of what "Bruno" can do. 

[Strengthlover]

This is a great beginning.  The super strength is awesome. Anxious to see how strong he is. Thanks for sharing this with all of us! ☺