Prompt of the Week - Week 168

It hadn’t occurred to her, at first, that anything was out of the ordinary: everyone got spam emails, right?

Plus, this was taking place at her workstation, and while Cherry was more than certain that she took care of her own computer while at work, she’d seen the way some other people in there treated standard infosec and basic internet security habits; she wouldn’t be surprised if everyone else was receiving those emails as a result of someone infecting their entire network, and just weren’t bothering to comment on it, waiting for It to fix the issue.

It wasn’t as if the emails were disruptive; these weren’t pop-up ads, and Cherry could easily disable the notification she received every time one of them landed in her inbox. She could very easily ignore all of them and not think twice about it, especially since she they all came from the same recipient: some weird blog about maternity and pregnancy that seemed oddly fixated on the idea of motherhood to an almost… esoteric degree.

She had no idea there were multiple nursery rhymes that supposedly contained hexes within them, or that there were so many different cream options for swollen ankles, and quite frankly, she didn’t really care; it was just bizarre that her workplace would be targeted by this of all things, considering no one in there even had children to begin with, nor had been planning on it for the near future.

Unfortunately, most attempts at actually filtering out the emails themselves failed. Placing the recipient on a blacklist just didn’t seem to do anything, and trying to directly block the email address itself using a custom filter would only work for about five minutes before the address somehow removed itself from the filter and resumed sending about two or three mails every hour. After a while, Cherry figured that she was spending more time dealing with the spam than doing work, something that she had no reason to do given how she could just… ignore the emails to begin with.

At least, she assumed she could, but for whatever reason, the thought of them kept bugging her, kept poking at the back of her head in a way that seemed to demand her attention, far more than one would expect from an inconsequential script kiddie being weird about maternity… which didn’t get any better when she started getting those emails on her personal inbox.

The escalation was grave enough that it immediately set off alarms in her head: her personal phone was not linked to the company email she used during work hours, and as a matter of simple security protocol, Cherry hadn’t ever connected to her workplace wifi using her phone, so there was next to no chance that whatever infection was filling her work inbox with spam would have jumped to her phone… and yet, she still received those emails regardless, leading to a short moment of panic when she first noticed them appearing.

Much like with her workstation, nothing she did seemed to solve the problem. Blocking the address did nothing, filtering it out was much the same, and just ignoring it didn’t fix the underlying issue of her inbox swelling with unread spam mails that refused to be dumped into the spam folder despise their very nature and her constantly telling her inbox to do so. It felt that, no matter what she did, the sender was making sure to bypass all security measures… to bombard her with information on motherhood and maternity and how good it would be to carry those “blossoming burdens” within her.

A weird phrasing, definitely kind of fucked up the more she thought about it, but what else was she going to do? Nothing she tried to do worked, and it was only impeding on her ability to actually do her job properly, something not helped by how her very work space itself appeared to be getting smaller by the day, and she couldn’t for the life of her figure out why or how; she just had less and less space to work with whenever she came into work, and soon enough this was extending to the door frames on the way in.

She caught a few odd glances being thrown her way as well, which Cherry at first attributed to her more haggard than usual appearance as a result of being constantly stressed out over the damned spam emails. This wasn’t made any easier by how IT had told her they received no complaints about them, which not only should be impossible given how their workplace network even worked, but seemed so unlikely as to be a deliberate practical joke on their part, raising questions as to who was sending the emails to begin with.

All of it was rendered irrelevant, however when she was called into her manager’s office one day to be told she was being sent home on maternity leave.

The thought alone was… hard to parse, mostly due to how patently, on-the-face absurd it was. Cherry wasn’t pregnant; she hadn’t had sex in months, which was definitely part of the stress problem, but only served to exacerbate how ludicrous the concept of maternity leave would be for her; she was, in fact, too shocked to complain, being mostly relegated to sitting on an ill-fitting chair and staring ahead into the middle distance while her manager droned on and on about “structural limitations” and how Cherry would be better served in an environment “fit for her current life situation”: back at home.

She remained shocked and mostly unresponsive for the rest of the day, mechanically going through her checklist while her mind raced to try and understand what was even happening. On the one hand, though, maternity leave wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for her: some time at home would definitely help her get her bearings together, and the company did have a generous benefits package for aspiring parents.

It just struck her as eminently dangerous to be taking advantage of something that just wasn’t true, especially given how easily one could confirm that she was not, in fact, pregnant, and thus give the company all the reasons it could have to either demand the money back or even fire her for taking advantage of a clerical error.

Was that the point? Was this some bizarre, roundabout way of getting her fired?

Whatever the case may be, Cherry now had two months ahead of her to work from home and figure out a new schedule; that, and come up with an excuse as to why there were no children forthcoming by the end of that period, but that was something for later. Thankfully, the same maternity leave package also included a workplace-provided laptop and phone, allowing her to stay in touch with her department and keep up with deadlines; not-so-thankfully, the damned things were also infected with the same bug that kept pitching her endless spam mails about the “growing blessings” inside of her, and how she should be preparing for the “glowing aftermath” of becoming a mother.

Cherry, meanwhile, was experiencing… conflicting feelings when it came to those messages. They were still a distraction, enough of one that she often spent upwards of an hour having to clear out her work and personal inboxes, but other times she found herself just… reading through the contents, out of some form of morbid fascination or curiosity over what, exactly, had been causing her so much grief.

More disconcertingly, none of the information really stuck to her in any meaningful manner: she’d read through multiple mails, recognise that she had spent several more minutes than necessary doing so, but then be unable to recall the contents just moments later, like a dream fading away into the aether after she woke up from slumber. Yet, despite this, Cherry consistently felt better after going through a reading session; not better in a sense that could be explained or made explicit, but just generally in a “happy chemicals” sort of mood that left her feeling like smiling for no particular reason.

Thus her days slowly, yet inevitably turned into a cycling rhythm, where she would wake up, waddle her way over to the bathroom to freshen up, then go back to her bedroom to get started on work, before immediately being sidetracked by the influx of maternity messages, then spending the rest of the day going back and forth on trying to get anything done.

Work never complained; her management didn’t send a single message to her about her productivity, even if Cherry knew that it had sunk tremendously as a result of her constant distractions; in fact, should she even be working at all? She insisted on it, mostly due to her belief that the whole maternity leave in general was a mistake, but if she was issued a leave to begin with, she had every right not to do anything and just focus on herself.

… so, she did.

***

It became very clear over the following weeks that, despite her best intentions, Cherry still needed to do some work in order to keep herself from going completely stir crazy, especially after her mobility became so affected by her “condition” that she ceased being able to go outside or do most of the chores for herself; she was lucky that her workplace was not only so incredibly accepting of it, but so willing to provide assistance far beyond what should be necessary given the terms of her maternity leave.

Cherry was still not sure why she qualified, but having someone designated to come take care of her grocery runs and assist with personal hygiene was definitely a big plus; she’d been unable to move from place to place for some time, what with her maternity leave being extended for several months and, apparently, not “having an end in sight”, according to her latest performance review.

Not that she particularly cared, of course; Cherry had long-since made peace with the idea that whatever was “wrong” with her, it was out of her hands now, and as long as her workplace and management were fine with her staying at home and doing what she could, then there was no reason for her not to do just that.

Looking down, at the vast mound of herself she rested on, her mind ran wild with the possibilities. There was certainly a lot of belly in her field of view, and it certainly did feel tight and warm and filling and good, enough so that her serotonin levels had remained at an all-time high for so long that she couldn’t recall the last time she wasn’t lost in a dreamy smile. With her arms and legs spread wide open onto a canvas of herself, and enough of her to take up most of her bedroom, it was honestly a stroke of good luck that so many would volunteer to come assist her; not just because it saved her quite a bit of money hiring people to do the same work, but-

-well, she didn’t want to admit it, but there was something about having people around her, about having others admiring her large, dominating self. About hearing their kind words, their crooning, the names they came up for her around the office; never in her life would Cherry have assumed that being called a “broodmother” would activate her the way that it did, but there she had it. Never mind how it was just wrong, but she didn’t care about the technical details: hearing the words spoken aloud made her brain drown in the happy juice, so that was good enough for her.

Things did seem to be getting “worse” for wear over time, however. The intensity of the spam emails had been getting steadily higher as her condition progressed, with some of them making reference to thoughts and feelings that Cherry had experienced before, almost like it was reading her mind before dumping the words onto a poorly-constructed, horrendously garish pamphlet or image file. Surely, however, it was just coincidence: plenty of people ought to think the same thing in those circumstances, and she was probably just conflating random word choices with meaningful ones.

Because, again, it wasn’t as if she was pregnant. Sure, her belly was absolutely enormous, and she occasionally felt something kick inside of her (many somethings, as the case may be), but she hadn’t had sex in almost a year, so obviously it couldn’t be that. What it was, she had no idea, but it was absolutely not pregnancy, never mind how much reality was apparently trying to make that claim.

Never mind how part of her really wanted that to be the case.

It was a thought that Cherry had learned to disregard, for her own sake, lest she make a few calls and make some decisions that she would heavily regret later; last thing she needed was a one-night relapse with people that were better off away from her life. Especially given how she seemed to be waking up every morning slightly bigger than the night before.

It wasn’t really noticeable on a mundane, moment-to-moment scale, but if she just stopped paying attention for a few days, she’d be visually and clearly closer to the ceiling when her alarm went off, what with her having to sleep on top of her new “bed” after the old one collapsed under the weight of the “new” one. Nowadays, she was about a foot and half, maybe two maximum from reaching the ceiling, and once she did… well, she didn’t really have any plans for that; it felt like such a ludicrous proposition that Cherry’s mind just refused to consider it as a serious one.

Nevertheless, her body crept closer and closer to that seemingly impossible goal, and it really wouldn’t take long before her entire bedroom was taken up by her growing midriff. The volunteers sent by her workplace had been nothing if not helpful in setting up valuable infrastructure, from food delivery to a system of wi-fi connections and cabling that provided high-speed internet access at any point she wanted it, but… it was one thing to ask for better internet or snacks, quite another for her to ask for new accommodations.

Even if she was fairly certain they’d just give it to her, at that point.

She didn’t want to stop growing, whatever was causing the process in the first place. It might be dangerous; hell, it probably was dangerous, but she couldn’t bring herself to want to stop it; it was warm, it was comfortable, it was fulfilling, and it was just so much that it became most of her daily life. Cherry couldn’t remember the last time she did anything that wasn’t just lie on top of herself and rub her belly down, or ask someone to rub her down for her, or just snooze or doze off to the sound of low churning and sloshing come from within her.

That, and it had done a number on her tits.

They’d never been small, but ever since her condition had begun to exacerbate, she’d been going through multiple cup sizes every month, until eventually she gave up trying to buy new ones and opted to go topless around the house… which did also help immensely when she began producing milk, and the daily draining sessions became twice-daily sessions became multiple daily sessions, until Cherry was effectively constantly plugged in to a milking machine or another, keeping her size just barely stable enough that she wouldn’t break through a wall within a matter of hours.

But all this did was postpone the inevitable. When she was first sent home, Cherry was perfectly capable of moving on her own two legs, with some minor difficulty; now, the thought of even reaching the ground to begin with was nothing short of a fantasy, and every day it grew fainter and fainter, along with her ability to pretend like nothing was wrong with her, that everything was fine. A comforting delusion, sure, but it could only withstand the siege of reality for so long before it crumbled, leaving Cherry free to understand just how thoroughly screwed she was in the long run.

It had been months, plural, far longer than the original two that she had been alotted by management, but they hadn’t once said anything about calling her back; if anything, her employers had been nothing if not understanding and extremely permissive, allowing her to remain home for as long as necessary, even going so far as to extend a raise offer if she needed assistance with her future birth.

Not that it would happen, of course.

Meanwhile, the spam emails had gotten so frequent that Cherry had stopped even trying to “fix” the problem: she could just lie there, on herself, staring at her laptop’s screen, watching her inbox fill up with email after email, each one setting off another serotonin shot, each one letting her know that what she was doing was right, was correct, was what she was meant to do.

They spoke of the wonders of motherhood, the joys of the “eternal expansion” of her “unyielding womb”, of the “glories of maternity” and the possibilities of “perennial fertility”. They promised her that this would never end, that she could just keep going, that she’d grow bigger, and fuller, and warmer, and heavier, and milkier, and more, for as long as she wanted; for as long as she remained in this blissful state of self-imposed ignorance, she would carry this “pregnancy” to a term that would never come, but merely become extended, permanently.

After all, she could only give birth if she were pregnant, and as had been established, she couldn’t be pregnant. She didn’t know what she was, but it definitely wasn’t pregnant; so there was no reason why this “condition” of hers had to stop after nine months.

No reason why it should stop.