Prompt of the Week - Week 105

TAGS: Growth/Growthsplosion, Infectious Growth, Different POV, Unconventional Narrative

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While the early warning system was designed with the ability to track multiple spurts at any given time, no one had actually given any thought to what would happen if this scenario came to pass. Sure, there was plenty of protocol drawn up, no doubt tucked away in some obscure tome of knowledge kept in a filing cabinet somewhere in the backrooms of the cold archive situated three states out, but apart from that, not much else.

Hypertrophic growth episodes were already rare enough that most of the facility staff’s days were filled with little more than ways to pass the time; it was busywork in its purest form, ranging from the ever-popular filing of paperwork that didn’t actually say anything, to the meticulous cleaning of every inch of open space that hadn’t already been dusted to the point where one could shave while looking at it.

Yet, it was still an important enough task that state funding kept them open twenty-four hours a day, three sixty-five days a year, with enough shifts to keep the rhythm going without any breaks in between. It was seen as an alternative to allowing growth spurts to go by without anyone calling them in before it was too late: better to invest a couple million a year in the early warning system and those hired to operate it than potentially reimburse tens of millions in damages, not to mention the hassle involved in rebuilding entire sections of urban landscape.

This led to the job itself being seen as almost akin to that of a soldier on the front lines: prolonged periods of utter boredom broken up by momentary spurts of absolute panic, rinse and repeat until one’s tour of duty was over and they had to go back to pretending like they weren’t deeply affected by it. Not that any self-respecting staffer would ever make that comparison while out in public; they weren’t at risk at being shot.

In fact, they weren’t at risk of anything, which was something of a letdown for those who joined hoping to be in the line of fire for the sort of thing that one could only ever dream of. It wasn’t every day that someone’s hyper gene was activated, nor was it any day that it did so with enough force to make that lucky person’s surroundings crumble; and while plenty of those in the listening stations would love to have an opportunity to feel it in person, it was their unfortunate task to make sure that nothing too uncontrolled took place.

A travesty upon good taste, but at least it paid well, and, for the most part, didn’t involve that much actual work; as noted, most of their time was spent coming up with new and inventive ways of pretending they were being productive, if for no reason than to stave off their own boredom, or to keep from going stir crazy. Thus, when the first alarm of the year went off, the entire station went on high alert, half-excited for an opportunity to do something, half-panicked at how most of them had completely forgotten about their basic training.

Luckily, there were enough people hired for leadership positions that one of them recalled what they were supposed to do. A bit panicky, definitely more shouting than was supposed to happen, but as soon as the right rears were sat upon the correct chairs, muscle memory, or what little of it there was, kicked in. Radars had to be scanned, weather patterns confirmed, long-distance signals had to be filtered and turned into something legible and comprehensible; it took a few minutes, but the satellite grid’s constant inflow of information eventually yielded something valuable: a location.

Approximately fifty miles to the east, smack in the middle of a large city’s downtown area, a growth spurt had begun. From what little data they had, none of them could tell which type it might be yet; for all they knew, it was a purely momentary, low-yield hypertrophic episode… or, it could be big enough to qualify for designation as a full-on macro incident. Or, perhaps, anything in between; the anticipation was the best-worst part of it all.

Their eyes on the prize, none of them noticed the system going off a second time until it was already too late to have a reaction to it; in between all the bells and whistles that management had decided to install for whatever reason, taking note of the one additional source of ringing amidst the cacophony was practically impossible. That, and the only indication that the system had identified a second growth spurt was yet another red light blinking in the middle of at least a dozen others; easier to miss than to take note.

When they did, however, everything seemed to go silent. Their training did, technically, cover for what they should do in incidents like those, though given how well it had survived the months of nothingness, none there were particularly inclined to trust whatever they remembered. Something about establishing parallel processing lines and dividing the team to ensure the multiple episodes were tracked with equal efficiency; something else about calling in whoever they could just to fill in the gaps.

Mostly, they were just terrified at the prospect that more than one growth spurt strong enough to trip their system could even happen at once. It wasn’t as if hypers ever stopped growing; they were only assigned to handle those cases where the explosiveness was such that it threatened the structural stability of whatever location it took place in. So for two of them to go off at once was either a sign that something dreadful was coming their way, or this was the universe’s way of paying back for years of the easiest, most well-paying job many of the staff members had ever had.

Whatever the case, it was happening, and they couldn’t deny it; while one of the supervisors ran to the main office to start calling up anyone listed as being off-duty, the rest of the on-call team struggled to divvy up tasks so both growth spurts were accounted for. Just one was bad enough: the influx of data from the wide variety of sources they drew from was enough to make anyone’s head spin, doubly so when one brought in satellite imaging feeds and naval long-range radar, both of which had to be decrypted in real-time given which satellites and ships were being tapped.

The first sign that something worrying was taking place came when the first signal began to “spread”, as they called it. None of them wanted to see it; on the list of things that could happen, infectious growth was quite literally on top of the “catastrophy” subcategory, given how easy it was for it to go completely out of control before anyone could even begin to get a handle on it. One person growing was already bad enough; for them to share the wealth, as it were, only made it that much harder for authorities to put a stop to it before mass hit a critical mass.

And yet, that was exactly what the team saw when triple-checking the monitors: the first incident was reporting yet more cases of growth beyond the initial one, with the first eyewitness reports making it clear that something was in the epicentre of some grandiose growthsplosion that afflicted them mid-sentence. Getting anything out of anyone on the scene very quickly became an exercise in frustration, especially once the hormone storm began in earnest and words were replaced with moans and whines so loud that the audio system had to be taken down.

Heat levels were rising, the cloud of steam was visible from every camera powerful enough to zoom in on the scene, and already the first news reports were coming in of a “disturbance”, which the team in the bunker now had to deal with. Phone calls were made and threats issued to keep the story from circulating, alerts placed on relevant websites and text messages sent out to everyone in a five mile radius who happened to have a number on record; the main goal was to keep people away from the contamination zone, no matter what it took.

The more souls were allowed to join the growing disaster area, the worse it would become; infectious growth had a way of stacking on itself to the point of becoming exponential, and it wouldn’t be the first time an entire city had to be quarantined until suppressors were delivered en masse. Plenty of political headaches that came with it, hence why their team had been empowered to effectively censor any information about the growth spurt as deemed fit… mostly because everyone there knew that, should any of it leak to the population at large, they’d immediately have thousands flocking to add to the pile.

So busy were they taking care of the first case, while still trying to keep an eye on the second one, that they missed yet another alarm going off. This one, unlike the second, was not caught at any point; in between the blaring of the few alerts that were allowed to remain active and the sheer confusion created by a twin spurt episode, it was practically inevitable that the statistical near-impossibility of a third simultaneous growthsplosion would fly under the radar as easily as it did. If anything, it’d be odd if anyone in the team caught it; a boon to the otter who had just stepped outside of the coffee shop and promptly fell flat on a bust that hadn’t been there a moment ago.

The first one was already taxing enough on resources, hence why the second one displaying signs of infectiousness was enough to make the entire bunker’s staff stop in their tracks. They didn’t want to believe it; the odds of there being two growth spurts within a hundred mile radius of one another, at the same time, with both of them being of the “spreadable” variety, were so low that they couldn’t possibly be true. In fact, were it not for further news reports trickling in, as well as imagery from a local camera network, no one there would’ve believed it; they would sooner begin checking their system for errors than accept it was taking place.

And yet, the data was incontrovertible: not only did they have two hypertrophic episodes ongoing simultaneously, but they were both subverting the biological processes of every bystander within an increasingly-larger radius for the sole purpose of feeding themselves, thus creating more growers. That the second-generation hypers were curable wasn’t at all the silver lining it was supposed to be; at that point, the only thing anyone there could think of was the sheer amount of work that would have to go into coordinating everything to make sure no one got caught in the wave of growth… no one who didn’t intentionally throw themselves onto it, that is.

They couldn’t stop the dozens of volunteers from willingly walking up to the two growers and offering their bodies as willing tribute; nor should they, since this would only lead to violence escalating needlessly, not when the local authorities should be focused on evacuating those who actually cared to escape from a fate worse than immobility. Yes, it only led to the growth spurts growing in intensity, but a more proactive approach to denying the fire fuel was far better than attempting to yank out the coals from the inferno itself.

Easier said than done though, as coordinating the emergency response services in two different cities while processing enough data that their servers began slowing down from the overload was… less than doable. The team could only hope that their coworkers would show up on time to help them; commuting or driving or sprinting or flying, they needed more people there to handle the workflow, or else something was going to break.

And not just organisationally either, as they were all, ultimately, still people. There was a good reason why they had a room in the bunker network built specifically to allow for mandatory cooldown periods… and why they were in a bunker network to begin with. The innate need to join in on the (literal) growing bliss was one present in all of them; to some extent, whether or not they acted on it, being exposed to these types of events as a job carried a non-zero risk of it getting to them. While most were able to hide it, at least externally, the thoughts were still there.

They needed other people there precisely so they wouldn’t get stuck looking at the monitors and wondering what it would be like if it were them stuck underneath a pair of tits big enough to turn a truck into a metal package; they needed other people there so they wouldn’t look at the cock count and think about how great it would be if theirs was adding to it as well. They needed sane people to check them, ring them out, and give them an opportunity to find where they dropped their common sense. After a stint in the nearest bathroom, evidently.

Alas, in the absence of any helpers, it fell on their own discipline and self-control to keep everything on track. Not that they had much power to do anything to affect the course of events; all they could do was maintain constant surveillance and relay important information to those that could help: the firefighters, the EMTs, the aerial crews with the suppressant syringes, all of them combined with whatever help the local precincts could offer, along with keeping the roads in and out of the affected area as clear as possible. They were relayers more than anything else; hence why them completely missing the third event was as damaging as it was.

For the first two, they already struggled to maintain a decent level of safety; in between swapping from one site to the other, completely skipping over how multiple reports were pointing towards an uncanny amount of knowledge both growers seemed to have about one another, just keeping on top of things was itself a challenge. Sifting through all available information, choosing the important bits, then relaying the appropriate instructions took up so much time that, once it was done, the data was already outdated.

And this was to say nothing of the third hotspot that no one had yet noticed. The first two had barely encroached on a hundred infectees each, courtesy of the scrambled efforts to save onlookers from exposure, when the last one had already reached four digits. It took a live broadcast for anyone to take note of it happening, and even then they initially assumed it was just someone in one of the initial two locations who they had somehow missed. On calling ahead and finding out that no such broadcast was coming from either city, however, panic set in.

One hypertrophic episode was a disaster. Two was unmanageable. Three was just the universe’s way of telling the team to pack it up and just accept that nothing was going to work that day… or going forward, given that they had already allowed the third growth spurt to progress to such a state that it simply could not be reeled back in; if it was still in the initial stages, then they might have had the chance to call up whoever was handling it to take over, but with the number of growers on-location climbing to two thousand?

No, it was over. No matter what they did, nothing would be able to salvage their complete and utter negligence; the only hope they had was that local emergency services, by some miracle, successfully mounted an evacuation operation without any sort of top-level coordination, and somehow didn’t botch it up so hard it became farcical. On the other hand, the team did still have two active growth hotspots that were very much active and in dire need of coordination, and it wasn’t going to be them feeling sad for one another that made that go away.

They had to abandon the third city to its fate and focus on the other two, it was the only way. Sure, they also had these odd reports coming in of how all three of the hypers at the centre of it all were talking about “outdoing” one another, plus some extremely bizarre readings from the orbital surveillance network revealing some sort of high-energy link between the three disaster areas, but that was… sortable. With some work. Maybe.

They just had to keep going. They had to keep their heads down, focus on their work, and worry about the implications of what they were hearing about never. They had to think of what to do to help people get away without being caught up in the “cum waves” or the “milk tides”; they had to draw up plans for how to literally unclog entire avenues of what had been termed “barricades of mass”. And above all, they had to ignore the fact that they had completely lost the plot at some point; clearly, they just had to try harder.

The delusion was strong enough that it didn’t take the fourth grower showing up on their readings to break it; much like the third, it was something to throw in the bin and not worry about, focusing instead on salvaging what they could. They could just ask the government to condemn the affected areas until enough suppressant was distributed; they’d done it before, they could do it again.

No, it took until the seventh before things began filtering through the thick haze of self-denial was finally broken and reality set in, a healthy amount of panic soon following. Mostly because, rather than the data streaming in from an off-site location, it actually tripped an entirely different alarm system, one that had never, in all of their time operating the bunker network, been activated.

Their internal one.