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Bullet-Proof


tortolis

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Something new that came together quickly but seems to beg for continuation…the question is how. Suggestions welcome.

 

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"You know you could wind up pretty much bullet-proof?" Geoff asked me.

 

We were about three weeks into the process at that point. Before we began, the anticipation — the idea of 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. I couldn't believe I had actually managed to connect with Geoff and he was willing to take me as a subject. Willing, hell, he was thrilled. Suddenly, for me, sex with partners was out because nothing could compete with the sexual rush I would get imagining how strong I might get. Bending steel bars or punching through walls as a reality? Orgasm.

 

That initial euphoria didn't last. At least, not consistently. It struck me like getting married: mundane questions come up, possible complications arise. Bullet-proof? "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, right?" He said this over and over, any time I expressed concern. Too late to do anything, the die is cast, we won't know until the process is complete, ad nauseum. "Anyway, it's not about your skin. It's about the density of the tissues underneath." He had done some experiments not in some fancy human genetics lab, 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 won't say where, but you may have read about one of the grad students who hired him to clone some frogs to create a kind of froggy chorus line. It didn't work out as planned.

 

"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. Yes, my skin had begun to change in texture 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 better 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 GMO 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. There were 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. The most popular story was basically about "beam me up, Scotty," people who wanted to be able to walk through walls or under closed doors. "Just strength?" he kept asking. "Nothing else?" I told him that having a fabulous, muscular build wouldn't be bad, but that strength was the only 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 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 out of the blue, saying "The heart and the diaphragm are muscles too, you know," as if I had denied it.

 

Then, just as unexpectedly, 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. No metrics. I can't believe it."

 

"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. I picked up a twenty-pound plate and just broke it. It broke 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 is looking fragile to me lately," I said.

 

"You, on the other hand, 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. I wish I could describe the feeling — it not only did not hurt, but the fact that it didn't hurt made it fun. Seeing the effort in Geoff's face, and then the fact that he hurt his hand. "You're incredible," he said. "It's like you're made of ballistic clay. That didn't hurt?"

 

"It felt 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 paid him 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.

 

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 arrested 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 like you're going to explode, 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. What a problem. We're going to have to think of some strength adventures for you."

 

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Dude that is a great start of that story.  love to see him use some human barbell, well for him it would be dumbbells but still...  Keep that one going, it has my vote...totally into strength.

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Hope he gets much bigger. Kinda hope the head har comes back however. The gnes cna fix his eyes too- but let the growth ramp up higher, as he becomes a giant.

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