New Frontiers (Patreon Commission for DanMingle)

Tani’s birth had been the result of years upon years of careful genetic manipulation and animal husbandry in all but name, with their family ties being decided by committee somewhere in the vast halls of bureaucracy that controlled the Horizons Project; for most, used as they were to in vitro fertilization and the luxury of artificial wombs, the idea of a vixen carrying a child to term seemed almost alien, a relic of a bygone age that seemed oddly resistant to becoming history. For these people, the idea that a large section of their imperial government was dedicated almost exclusively to selecting genetic lineages in order to amplify specific traits over the course of several generations seemed utterly absurd, when their species had already cracked their own DNA centuries before, mastering the subtle art of transforming themselves in whatever way they saw fit.

The main motivation had been the slight inconvenience posed by the complete and total ecological devastation caused by centuries of fossil fuel overuse, capped with a couple of nuclear exchanges that forced their population to evacuate to orbital habitats or vast, underground cities to escape the destruction of their ecosystem. With so few resources to spare and so many disparate systems needing tending to, genetically manipulating newborns to fit a singular purpose in life became the norm, even when their fledgling empire recovered from its near-complete destruction and rose to become a regional superpower.

What most failed to understand, however, is that while their DNA was malleable, it was only ever allowed to be bent and reshaped up to a certain point; the ludicrous necessities and requirements involved in the Horizons Project’s line of work needed a far deeper and more intimate control over the circumstances of their test subjects’ birth than a simple artificial womb could provide. It wasn’t enough to pluck strands and change acid bases; if they wanted a proper terraformer, they had to start ten generations early.

Thus, Tani was born.

The Project had selected his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather some two hundred years prior for their exceptionally strong genetic resilience and high likelihood for beneficial mutation. As was standard procedure, they were submitted to a lifetime of gene treatments that would serve to increase the potency of their seed, hoping that, some time down the line, the pay-off would be as tremendous as their ambitions. In return, Tani’s ancestor was given a life of luxury that few, even living in the near-utopian conditions of their stellar empire, could begin to imagine; every one of his wants and needs, as well as those of his family, were tended to, no matter how seemingly ridiculous or far-fetched. This luxury was passed on to his child, then their child, and so forth down the line until Tani was born, the result of two centuries of hard work and careful monitoring. Of all those involved in the initial treatments, only one was still alive, a truly ancient vixen who had resorted to modifying parts of herself with mechanical augmentations in order to prolong her lifespan. She had made Tani her life’s work, and if she had to break the five-hundred line just to ensure he came to fruition, she would.

Not that his ancestry wasn’t filled with success stories; in fact, Tani’s father had been considered for the position his son ended up filling, but fell just short of the requirements when a genetic scan was performed. He still went on to become a colonial entrepreneur, preparing a vast empire-within-an-empire for his heir to inherit. The poor guy was under the distinct impression that his son would have any time at all to enjoy the fruits of his labour, and the Horizons Project took steps to ensure his belief wasn’t challenged; Tani was fated to become something far greater, of course, but if his father was made aware of it, he might do something drastic.

Thus it was that the young fox was separated from his parents at a very young age, as had been every other firstborn in his male line, to be prepared for a life of greatness. Unlike any of his ancestors, however, Tani tested positive for what the Project deemed the “terraformer gene”, an extremely recessive genetic trait that was borderline impossible to manifest by accident thanks to sheer probability. It was only a chance discovery by an unnamed vixen some six hundred or so years before that revealed its existence, and ever since then the Project had dedicated itself to maintaining several dozen lineages running at any given time. The top-level executives liked to joke that it was like brewing and aging whiskey; the grandfather would seal the casket and the grandson would get to taste its contents.

This gene began transforming Tani very early on, allowing the fox to speed through developmental milestones that would take other kits months in mere weeks, already being able to walk when only four months old and mastering basic speech just before his first birthday. Every day was stuffed with activities meant to improve his already-heightened abilities, building on a strong foundation in order to prepare the edifice of perfection that Tani was supposed to become.

Given the best tutors that money could buy, enrolling in any school would not be an option for the young fox; not only was it considered too dangerous to allow such an investment to run wild among the general populace, but the Project needed to make sure Tani received the necessary knowledge to perform his future job to exact specifications. Billions of lives would depend on his ability to do so, and thus there was absolutely no room for error.

His days were carefully structured down to the minute, with his “fun time” being comprised almost entirely of pre-approved activities designed to further stimulate his mental faculties. Young Tani didn’t really care much for them; he might have been incredibly intelligent for his age, but he was still a child, and sometimes children just want some stupid fun to hold their attention for ten minutes at a time. Unlike other kits, though, Tani could make his own fun, and quickly learned that if he dolled it up as a “learning exercise”, he could get away with building entirely pointless toys that were, nonetheless, incredibly entertaining for someone with his kind of imagination. He figured someone must’ve been the wiser eventually, but seeing as he was building complex machinery out of bits of cheap plastic and replicated motors, several birds were being killed with a single stone.

By his seventh birthday, Tani’s education, mixed with the terraformer gene improving his cerebral development far in excess to what anyone else would experience, had turned him into something of a small expert on the fields of science required to turn a barren, lifeless planet into a lush world teeming with life and waiting to be colonized; the list of which was so long that it would take even the young fox at least ten minutes to rattle them all off the top of his head, after which he’d say something about needing to study the latest developments and go enjoy some quality time with the databases. If questioned, they could recite entire encyclopedias by heart; if needled further, they could probably come up with some brand new scientific discovery just in the process of trying to explain another one. All of this put together confirmed the Project’s suspicions that Tani’s lineage might very well be the strongest they ever had the pleasure of working with, and if their mathematical models were correct…

… well…

Physical exercise was, of course, also an important part of Tani’s rearing; while the terraformer gene didn’t really start having any major effects until late puberty, nor did it kick into drive in earnest until its recipient was at least twenty years of age, it was important to get the fox accustomed to a healthy daily workout, lest he get lazy about it later in life. Cardio and endurance at first, then exercises meant for bulking once he became old enough, all turned up several time over once he became of age; it was important to take advantage of the accelerated effects of the gene while they still could, because while Tani would keep on growing throughout his (considerably long) life, it would be those first years of adulthood that really sealed the deal on what kind of scales he would operate on; the Horizons Project learned that the hard way.

They needn’t worry when it came to Tani, however. On his 20th birthday, the fox towered above everyone else in the room, even managing to outsize his own father in that one rare occasion he was allowed to see his son again. The rooms he was kept in were considerably larger than normal, and yet the red fox managed to bump his head against the ceiling whenever he wasn’t paying attention, all twenty feet up in the air. For his main handler, the vixen who had first started the gene treatments on Tani’s ancestor, it was the culmination of two centuries of daily work, and for once in her life, she allowed herself to relax and enjoy some good cake. It tasted better than anything else she had ever eaten, and on that moment, knowing that her greatest project was in good hands, she declared she could die happy.

Still took them another fifty or so years before the reaper came knocking, long enough that she got to see her little baby, all grown up as he was, do his best work terraforming several planets for their burgeoning empire.

Tani, however, experienced the fastest and most drastic changes to himself and his surroundings after turning twenty, almost like some unseen god had flipped a switch and finally allowed his body to develop like it was supposed to. Not that he wasn’t already massive; as tall as those rooms and yet his width managed to surpass even his height, the fox needing to carry himself with extreme care so as to not destroy his environs without even realizing it. His body had become more packed, tight and rippling muscle than anything else, to the point where doors had to be replaced in favour of automated hardlight projections to cut down on repair bills. And yet, despite this, what Tani went through in the months following his birthday blew everything up until then clear out of the water.

It all started when he began waking up bigger than his bed. Not just big enough to feel his feet poke out the sheets, but genuinely so much larger that the whole thing groaned underneath his weight. Every replacement they found for him met the same fate after a few days, until his bedroom itself began to feel tight and cramped, unable to hold such a perfect specimen as him. Being moved outdoors was the first indication that something big was going to happen, and it was only after he was informed of what the terraformer gene would do to him that all the disparate pieces of information he had stored inside of his brain all clicked into one picture.

Tani already knew what his goal was and what their job was supposed to be. In a way, they were aware that they would have to undergo some very drastic changes if they were to be used as an organic terraforming station, it being slightly difficult to change a planet’s entire biosphere when they were just building-height. But the full extent of the changes required never really “hit” him the way it should; his handlers constantly occupying his mind with something else made sure of that, and it was only the freedom of his ascension that finally allowed him to comprehend the kind of scale he would be operating on.

Gaining several feet in every direction became a daily occurrence, until it stopped being something he noticed if he paid attention every couple of hours and began turning into a semi-constant process; all Tani had to do was hold still for a couple of minutes and he would soon notice the difference between him and his past self. Within weeks, these minutes turned to seconds, and with his body growing so much that it would be bursting out of the compound within a matter of days, it was time to bring him somewhere where he’d have all the room in the universe to stretch out and fill up space.

Literally. Space.

One of the quirkiest effects of the terraformer gene was making their recipient vacuum-proof. So long as they were given a constant supply of oxygen in order to keep their bodies running, they could live outside the atmosphere of any planet just as comfortably as they would on its surface. Bringing him up to orbit was a pain and a half though, requiring several multi-stage rockets all assembled into a rickety and highly unstable self-supporting cluster that just barely managed to hoist Tani’s colossal frame off the ground and up into the sky. He was still growing mid-flight, hence why constant adjustments had to be made, at least until they broke free from the gravitational pull of their home planet; at which point, Tani could float around as much as he pleased, so long as he reported to the Horizons Project’s orbital station for an oxygen refill every couple of hours.

He wasn’t even alone up there; with his body approaching the “final” stage of its development, Tani got to meet the Project’s other “long-term investments”, kept around in orbit until such a time as they were needed. Though their bodies reflected very little light, it was still common practice for amateur astronomers to try and locate where they were on their trajectory without resorting to high-end telescopes; Tani could only be proud for joining such a magnificent pantheon of gods among men.

Of course, he also had a hard time hiding his sheer excitement at being larger than all of them; he had been told his genetic make-up was unique, even for someone with the terraformer gene, but never that he had completely destroyed the Project’s most optimistic predictions by several thousand miles. The biggest of his new companions was still only as large as one of his pecs, with the smallest one barely able to cover one of his nipples; Tani alone stood as the most gigantic of them all, eager to show off his strength whenever he had the slightest excuse.

It wasn’t all fun and games and exhibitionism, however; he had been bred and raised to be a divine creature for a purpose, and that purpose was to expand the reach of their stellar empire to as many planets as it could get. Without any suitable opportunities for aggressive expansion, it fell to the Horizons Project to fashion new, habitable worlds out of dead rocks. And while some would say that it would be cheaper to just employ terraforming machinery to do the job those foxes were supposed to, the Project insisted that theirs was the most cost-efficient solution in the long-term; machinery breaks and requires constant supervision, potentially ruining a planet permanently if their specifications are even slightly off-target. Foxes like Tani, on the other hand, could not only be counted on for their initiative, thus bypassing the dangerous dilemma of using AI to terraform anything, but their endurance; each one would be able to go through multiple planets without ever needing more than the occasional food shipment, in stark contrast to the constant demand for maintenance inherent to most standard machines.

The very first job Tani was assigned to was indicative of the amount of faith the Project had in him; typically, first-timers were sent off to small moons, sometimes even larger asteroids meant for long-term mining operations. The titanic fox, meanwhile, was given the enviable task of terraforming the sole remaining uninhabitable planet in their species’ home solar system, located far enough away from their star that all previous attempts at turning the barren rock into something livable had crashed and burned spectacularly.

“It’s not a make-it-or-break-it thing,” Tani’s handler assured him, “we’re just trying to test how far your abilities can go. If you can’t terraform Trondel, that’s perfectly fine; no one else has managed to do it anyway.”

Despite the reassurance that his probable failure wouldn’t weigh down on his record, the colossal vulpine had every intention of trying his best; success was the only option, and with his body far outshining everyone else’s, it was insanity to assume that anything other than a complete and perfect terraforming would take place. His handler tried his best to temper the fox’s enthusiasm, reminding him of the immense list of difficult conditions that made life on that planet more of a pipe dream than anything else, but to no avail; regardless of how much he made it obvious that Horizons wasn’t actually expecting him to succeed, Tani assured him that he would. Not only that, but that he would do it in record time!

Movement between planets was only possible for the organic terraformer via the use of vast solar sails, installed onto his body like a wingsuit. It still took him several months before he reached his destination, kept alive via shipments delivered in warp-capable ships, and by the time he broke through the atmosphere of the small outer planet, he had already grown big enough that he was perfectly visible from lower orbit without the need for special equipment.

Trondel was a special case, there being several very good reasons for why it was left behind in the initial terraforming craze that had turned the rest of the solar system’s planets into lush paradises; it was so far away from their home star that each full rotation around it lasted over a thousand standard years, and possessed absolutely no atmosphere whatsoever. The only reason it was even considered a planet was its remote location and completely empty orbit; it alone stood that far away, the last thing left of their system’s creation before the spherical wall of ice asteroids further out.

The first step towards making Trondel inhabitable by other members of his species was heat. The whole place regularly dipped as close to absolute zero as a terrestrial body could get, and being so far out meant it didn’t have “days” per se as much as a perpetual starry night; in addition to the lack of sunlight, it was geologically dead, robbing it of any kind of usable geothermal energy. These two things alone were enough to make even Tani start doubting his previously-displayed confidence; the only way to even remotely heat the planet up enough would be to pump so many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that anyone wanting to live there would need a pressure suit just to get around, and kickstarting the core just wasn’t possible given their current understanding of geology and planetary formation.

A better solution was required.

Part of the terraformer gene’s effects on a living being’s body involved the production of a variety of gases as byproducts of their regular biological processes. These were stored in hyper-pressurized glands and could be released with the terraformer’s breath at any point. Most of these glands were filled with the same kind of gaseous excreta common to most living organisms, albeit in vastly higher quantities, but a few held exotic substances that almost defied classification and proved to be incredibly useful for the sake of altering atmospheric conditions. Normally, planets that were difficult to heat up would receive a hefty dose of GH-56, a hyper-potent greenhouse gas several times stronger than methane and not nearly as short-lived; once injected into the atmosphere, it could be relied upon to stay around for at least two hundred years, after which it would be relatively simple to just replace it with more as needed.

However, even GH-56 wasn’t enough to heat up that freezing space rock, and thus Tani needed to get inventive. Twenty-two years of near-continuous training and education on all matters concerning terraforming culminated in that moment, where he was expected to come up with an adequate solution on the fly based on what he had learned. A combination of gases would be needed, and not just a weird mixture; he needed to deliberately fuse their constituent molecule’s atomic structure together in order to create an entirely new greenhouse agent, one with a potency far in excess to anything their species had ever seen before. Something that could be used to capture the faintest of their star’s rays and amplify them until the surface was heated.

It still took him the better part of three months of silent contemplation before he figured out what the chemical structure for the new gas would be, having to remind the Project that yes, he was still fine, and no, he hadn’t given up on Trondel yet. Back on their homeworld, the Board of Directors was beginning to show doubts regarding their greatest investment yet, with a couple even calling for outright termination if they refused to do anything but sit and grow larger on company time. All of these thoughts and more would be squashed as easily as Tani’s surroundings when the fox finally decided to do something.

The ground trembled with each step, cracks and canyons forming whenever the fox stepped too heavily or just didn’t pay attention to what he was doing. This was irrelevant; most of the planet’s surface would be repaved later on anyway, to make way for a full lithosphere replacement, meaning he had the whole world to tread on without needing to care about the consequences. It was easy for him to do just that, being large enough that he could circle Trondel’s (admittedly small) equator in just a couple of hours, releasing heaps of his newly-designed terraforming gas with each breath. It was practically invisible, having only the smallest hint of white mixed with powdery blue, and rapidly dissipated into the thin-but-thickening atmosphere. As expected, it had the same effect as GH-56, except magnified by such an insane degree that Tani could feel the temperature rising in a matter of a standard week, breaking through the 100K barrier in only a single month! There was still a long way to go before it was anywhere near freezing, let alone liveable, but it was enough to quell any worries the Board of Directors had back on Tarana, with the oligarchs throwing a massive party in Tani’s honour.

Tani himself was unaware of this festivity, far too busy being productive and making more room for his species to expand their empire into. He slowly built an atmosphere from scratch, having to contend with Trondel’s incredibly low mass constantly allowing those gases to slip into interplanetary space… at least until he gave up completely and started making quick “supply runs” to the vast halo of icy comets that made up the last orbitals before interstellar vacuum, sending them careening towards his terraforming project in order to add to its mass. It was a long, arduous process, and Tani threw his hands up after just a couple of months; the small chunks of stone and frozen water were very obviously insufficient for the purpose of adding mass to the planet.

For that, he would need something more drastic.

While his growth had slowed down compared to the ludicrous spurts of size that characterized the last few years of his life, Tani was still swelling over time, even if he wasn’t straining himself or… doing much of anything. This guaranteed that the terraformer could tackle larger and larger projects as time went on, or would if he weren’t already far bigger than any other worker in Horizons; for Tani, it just helped with what he had to do, even if the mental block was a far larger obstacle than he himself was.

It was the only thing that genuinely embarrassed him about himself; the terraformer gene did a lot of weird stuff to his biology, but that had to take the cake in terms of sheer bizarreness: rather than more “typical” fluids, the fox’s cum had been replaced with a fast-acting, easy-setting expanding slurry, fit for covering entire landscapes in order to add onto them. It was like painting, in a weird way; except the “coat” was about fifty feet thick, rapidly adapted to what was underneath it, and was capable of turning even the tiniest of asteroids into a planetoid with just a few dozen releases. It was still a last-ditch resort; that kind of output not only put a great strain on the terraformer’s body, but it also had the “unfortunate” side effect of spiking their production to greater levels and then refusing to come back down.

Tani even considered just giving up on the project altogether; being well aware of what he was about to do to himself, he had to weigh the pros and cons very carefully, lest he end up irrevocably destroying his ability to participate in further Project terraformings. He knew his main reason was built almost completely on his pride, his inability to admit that he might’ve bit off more than he could chew; there would be no shame in admitting he needed help, in telling his handler that, despite his best efforts, Trondel was just too small to retain enough of an atmosphere. On the other hand, he had the ability to fix that right there at his disposal, quite literally on the tip of his fingers as well; all that was needed was a little push, a little grope, and then a not-so-little climax later he’d be thickening the planet out nice and evenly.

The best part about it is he could just ask the Board of Directors; they were constantly monitoring him, after all, using a subspace transmitter to maintain a live feed of his efforts. All he needed to do was speak up using his in-built cranial intercom and he would receive permission… but where was the fun in that?

Eager to cut loose after more than two decades of rules and regulations keeping him locked in a reinforced glass bubble, Tani sighed when he sat down and brought his hands to his shaft; it had been increasingly difficult to ignore how needy it was, what with it growing about as much as the rest of him did and carrying underneath it a pair of balls so enormously overstuffed with the mass additive that it was a wonder the fox could even walk with those things swinging beneath him. The moment his hands touched the leathery, vein-covered skin, it was all over; no doubts remained inside of his mind, and he became absolutely convinced that this was the right course of action, regardless of what the dangerously loud gurgling emanating from his sack seemed to indicate.

Courtesy of the terraformer gene, it was easy for Tani to start leaking, but extremely difficult for him to reach climax, a sort of “safety feature” to prevent unnecessary growth. With no one there to stop him, however, and the nearest warp-capable ship still at least an hour away from being able to reach him, Tani could relax and enjoy himself in ways that he never had been able to before. It was the first time for him; he was no saint, and knew very well how the whole process worked, but being constantly monitored every minute of every hour of every day made it impossible for the fox to explore his budding sexuality in any way that wasn’t reading about prepared lineages and arranged marriages. Thus, when he began stroking his cock, it was a whole new experience that even his hyper-developed brain didn’t quite know how to process.

It was pleasure, raw pleasure, the kind that overrode rationality and poked at the most primal parts of his brain, ones the Project had worked very hard to suppress. There was a voice inside of him he had never heard before, praising the simple joys of self-indulgence and urging Tani to prod and grope harder with each passing moment. It didn’t matter that it would ruin the terraforming project and require months of careful sculpting just to keep it from falling into a lopsided orbit; with his shaft as hard as it was, worrying about his job was entirely secondary to getting off and enjoying every second of it.

Whatever happened in between succumbing to self-exploration and reaching his climax was… uncertain. The sequence of events was shrouded in some kind of weird mental fog that refused to lift no matter how hard Tani tried later on, mostly because it had been finished off with an orgasm that literally shook the planet hard enough to almost tear it in half, followed by a deluge of the fox’s modified cum that carved vast grooves into the surface of Trondel wherever it landed, only to immediately harden and take on the characteristics of the surrounding terrain. The mindless release was powerful enough for some of Tani’s fluids to be jettisoned into low orbit, only to arc back down and slam onto the planet’s surface on the other side of it. Each load only added to Trondel’s size and mass, allowing it to not only keep a thicker atmosphere, but expanding the amount of surface area for future Project developments!

Of course, this would have to wait until Tani was done working the surface of it into something that didn’t look like an abstract 3D sculpture. Space-scraping mountains neighboured canyons that plunged miles into the ground, interspaced with confusingly-arranged structures resembling solidified magma where the currents of cum had been particularly strong. It would be work for months, if not years, but at the very least it turned the small Trondel into a celestial body that would eventually shine like a beacon, the first to welcome any travellers into their species’ home; a herald of their empire’s perfection.

… as soon as Tani dislodged himself from the thick cocoon he had trapped himself in.