Late into the night, long when all the good and decent creatures of the galaxy had tucked themselves under blankets and into beds with nary a decadent thought polluting their sweet little minds, Alma Anzar Ruiz was wide awake and thrumming with an indescribably manic energy. While her crewmates - in some far-flung corner of whatever wretched quadrant they’d parked their junker in - had no doubt slouched bleary-eyed in front of their dingy old bathroom mirror, brushing their teeth and rinsing their mouths with all the gusto of a sea slug, Alma had posed herself in front of a full-length body. Really it was more of an extra-length vanity, given how much extra length the grinning gator brought to bear. 
	“Extra long and extra wide,” she’d drawled into her communicator on the night she’d finally decided to hatch her scheme, and the salesman on the other end had not disappointed her, gifting her with a hefty mirror to match her hefty build. The hefty check had soured her mood for a moment, but standing in front of the mirror now, inspecting her gorgeous body, had turned all that sour into something deliciously sweet.
	Even with the mirror’s dimensions bordering on the absurd, it nearly struggled to frame the massive alligator preening opposite its gleaming surface. Alma didn’t have the flexibility to twist and turn herself and flaunt her curves the way her flirtatious comrade Emile could, but nevertheless she could still admire her poundage in the mirror’s reflection, and it was mouthwatering. Her species was naturally quite prone to a certain degree of largesse (a rather delicate bit of phrasing she’d happily adopted from Emile) but Alma had taken that sturdy, stocky foundation and embellished it with insatiable gluttony. 
	The results spoke for themselves, most prominently with a stomach that bulged out feet in front of her, a heavy, ponderous protrusion that jutted out a good three feet in front of her and crowded out her massive thighs for space, with stretch marks intermingling with battle scars across the soft, pliant surface of her skin. Her chest sat heavily atop her stomach, twin mounds of thick blubber that creased over the peak of her gut and rounded out her sides, giving her the accentuation of an unusually scaly pear. She flexed her arms, and chuckled under her breath at the sight of a thin bulge of muscle struggling to poke its way out of the thick, pillowy layers of flab lining her biceps and rounding out her triceps. Slowly and clumsily she dragged her tail across the ground, marveling at its sheer girthiness - it easily had the size and weight of a grown man, and did a marvelous job of adding to the overall sense of heft that her massive body exuded. 
	“So much… but still not enough…” she muttered to herself, sliding a claw beneath the strap on her bra and stretching it out just a hair, letting the pink material snap back against her broad shoulder. “Space-age nanotech polyester!”, the advertisement had promised, and there were enough buzzwords crammed into that brief description to raise even Alma’s lone surviving eyebrow. But she’d made the time to try it out for herself and found, to her giddy and bellowing delight, that the very same bra that comfortably slipped around the petite stoat’s chest in front of her had expanded itself out far enough to accommodate her ubermelons without the slightest of strain. The gator gal had slapped an embarrassing amount of credits down for this, credits she knew would be so well spent by the end of that night. The mirror, the bra and the panties (only visible on her sides, she’d noted gleefully) - all were just so much delicious buttercream icing on the cake she’d secured for herself tonight. A shudder rippled through Alma’s bulk, and she pivoted slowly around on the spot, waddling over to the piece de resistance of the evening. 
	A “livestock enrichment and enhancer”, as she had understood the shady, back-alley dealer who had secured one of the spurious devices for her, stood opposite the porcine gator gal. It was a machine altogether unburdened by the complicated trappings of most temporary technology - understandable, really, given its explicit original intent as a supplement for bovid farmers supplying the most nutrient-rich milk and meat to blighted colonies. The intent behind the machine - fattening up livestock, rendering them utterly helpless behind the pleasant veneer of “nutrient-rich” - had sent shivers down Alma’s spine when she’d first heard of it, and standing in front of it now she couldn’t help but feel those same spasms of delight wracking her body all over again. 
	There was practically nothing to the machine, which on the surface resembled a clumsily-designed shower for the spectacularly obese. It was a stand nearly the size of the storage unit Alma had rented out for the night, with what appeared to be plexiglass rising up all around the perimeter of the stand, ostensibly to provide the clueless hicks meant to operate it with an unobstructed and safe view of their cattle. Modular tiles lined the surface of the stand, and Alma had spent countless hours on her knees inspecting and fiddling with the circuitry and equipment stowed away beneath them, painstakingly customizing it to her debauched specifications. She hadn’t bothered to formally test the device, however; she was satisfied with her inspection of her final modifications, and wanted whatever came next to be a delicious surprise. Somewhere in the farthest, most sensible corners of her mind, a tiny sliver of the gator wondered if she would regret letting herself be caught off-guard by this strange technology, but the pleasure centers of her brain had overwhelmed this sliver and snuffed out all its perfectly reasonable protests. 
	Sliding the plexiglass open, Alma lumbered onto the stand, her heavy body visibly quivering with anticipation. “Livestock enrichment and enhancer…” That tiny sliver of her mind whimpered that this might be her last chance to stop, before the damage was irreversibly done. She swatted away at it with a clawed hand as though it were a fly buzzing near her snout. “Activate!” Nothing happened, and Alma spun her head around, looking for any clue that the device had switched on. There were no lights, no loose tiles, no indication whatsoever that it had heard a word she said. “Piece of junk… turn on, before I scrap you myself!” She roared, stomping her left foot down hard enough to make the plexiglass shake in response. Alma bent over, curling her fingers into an impatient fist, when a synthetic voice echoed around scantily-clad brawler. 
	“Helllo. This is the Farmhand Equipment Enhancement Device. How may I be of service?” Alma’s lone eyebrow raised up. 
	“Your name is… FEED?” 
	“In acronym form, this would be an acceptable rendering of my name.” The artificial voice paused, as though it were contemplating its next response. Alma couldn’t help but feel slightly unnerved - the dealer who’d given her the machine, and the cursory research she’d done on it, had said nothing any kind of VI construct inhabiting the machine. Maybe this wasn’t such a hot idea after all. “My purpose is to enrich farm materials through the deliberate application of nutritional materials. Where is the specimen I am to assist in fattening?” 
	Alma bit her lip, keeping herself from squealing at the machine’s unintentionally wonderful choice of words. It wasn’t especially charming or elegant, but something about that awkward phrasing being applied to herself - her being the specimen that was going to be so exquisitely fattened - banished all the fears and doubts that she had rightly brought with her into the machine. “T-the specimen is here, FEED.” Alma wasn’t ordinarily one to stumble over her words, but she was on the precipice of a magnificent transformation - she could barely contain herself. “You’re gonna…. F-fatten me up.” As though worried the machine might have doubted her resolve, she thrust her stout gut out, giving it a hard, proud smack that made it wobble appealingly. 
	The air in the machine hung silent for an uncomfortable moment. Alma wondered if she hadn’t triggered a sort of security protocol - something designed to shut down the device in the event that madwomen like herself forced their way inside, making insane demands of what was meant to be nothing more than farm equipment. “Understood. Please specify growth parameters.” She heaved a sigh of relief, the tension visibly ebbing out of her stomach as it rolled back down over her hips. 
	“Let’s see, um… how about…” Another hundred pounds or so would be more than satisfactory. It would be enough to add a healthy foot of flab onto her body, and leave her feeling well and truly fatter than ever before. But Alma wasn’t one to settle for half-measures, and before she could stop herself she blurted out, “I wanna double.” The tiles beneath her lit up, and she heard something whirring underneath her feet. 
	“Calculating… calculating…” FEED intoned mirthlessly. Its dry delivery was a marked contrast to the breathless giddiness rumbling through Alma’s voice. “Specimen weighs in at 756 pounds. Calculating double weight. Calculation concluded. Specimen’s new weight would be 1,512 pounds, with an estimated 78% ratio of body fat. Is this weight and fat satisfactory?” 
	It absolutely shouldn’t have been - it was nothing short of absurd. Alma would be barely anything more than a blob of fat at that point - with so much of her body swollen with pure blubber, she wondered if she’d be able to so much as lift up her arms, to say nothing of how utterly anchored she would be to the stand. The most tiny, halting steps would be a marathon for her - she would be immobile in spirit if not in fact. It was ludicrous, and even the less rational bits of her mind knew it. “Um… how about… we, uh, increment the weight gain? Just so, uh, I can like… inspect the specimen, uh, make sure we don’t go… overboard.” 
	That awkward silence lingered in the air again. “Cautionary measures considered and implemented. The supervisor must merely request that the fattening process be stopped when the specimen has reached a satisfactory weight.” Alma could have sworn that there was a teasing inflection to the way that FEED said fattening, but the machine was otherwise monotone in its delivery. She nodded, realizing in the next moment that clearly some sort of surveillance equipment had been installed into FEED’s stand, given its immediate production of what she assumed was the nutrient tube. “Please specify desired method of nutrient administration.” 
	Of all the things she had thought would elicit a blush from her, this was the last that Alma had anticipated, yet there she was, glowing red while her claws bashfully crept down her sides. Hitching her panties down a notch, she grinded her canines nervously against her lips. “Help lift my… um… I mean, help lift the specimen’s tail outta the way, FEED. We’re gonna administer the nutrients via the rear hatch.” She would’ve snickered at her own crude joke in less intimate circumstances, but all Alma could manage now was a muted, shy little giggle that evaporated when she felt strong hands gripping her tail and hoisting it up into the air. Alma gulped and closed her eyes, gritting her teeth. “Just… tell me when it’s administered. I, uh… I can’t watch. Squeamish.” It was probably the most honest she had been with FEED in the entirety of their brief relationship. 
	“Administration of nutrient tube complete. Provide confirmation to initiate the fattening process.” There was undeniably something sinful about the way FEED said fattening, but it was at the same time an all but imperceptible shift in intonation. Alma was too distracted by how seamlessly she’d been hooked up to the feeding tube to care, however, and she stared through the transparent plexiglass, gazing hungrily at her reflection in the mirror. This was the smallest she was ever going to see herself again. All those mouthwatering fantasies of her figure magnificently ballooned with blubber were about to bleed back over into her waking reality. All she had to do was seal the deal. 
	“Feed me. Make me fat as hell.” Alma probably should have been concerned when FEED followed up on that command without bothering to seek out clarification. She’d collapsed the distinction between the specimen and herself, and this meticulous VI had ignored it entirely. And perhaps for a split second she was concerned, but the second after that she heard the pump rumble and felt the slop shoot into her body. She pressed a trembling palm up against her stomach, and in the same moment her eyes and her belly bulged, the latter tickling up against her claws with a fresh slab of fat. “Oooh.. oh my…!” Alma panted, kneading at the new flab lining her figure, then felt herself groaning involuntarily as the rest of her stomach followed suit. She stared down at her torso as it swelled with lard in real time, inch upon inch filling out her figure, her pasty green stomach dominating more and more of the gator’s horizon and crowding out the view around her. 
	Alma grunted when she felt something constricting her neck, hefting up her arm with some difficulty and pressing her hand up to whatever that something was. “Oh god… another chin…!” She murmured happily, taking an extra ounce of delight in how much deeper and richer her voice had grown with her throat swaddled with another ring of jowly fat. She glanced back over towards her mirror, and her jaw dropped at the sight of how much she’d already swollen. Her gut had taken the brunt of her gains - it was hard to gauge just how much further out it jutted, but given that her arms couldn’t stretch across even half its width, she figured she’d blimped it out to a gobsmacking four feet of fat. Her flanks flared out stupendously to either side of that spectacularly fattened gut - her love handles now were easily as fat as her hips had been at the start of the night’s debauchery. Her third chin was bunched up against her ridiculously fatty chest, with breasts twice the size of her fat head wobbling against her impressive stomach. Even her face had enjoyed a bit of growth - her cheeks were genuinely plump now, and beautifully complemented the rings of fat lining the underside of her face. “Not… too shabby…!” She wheezed, struggling just to keep herself standing. This was more than enough excess poundage - way more than enough. She could comfortably stop herself now and feel confident that she was one of the fattest things she’d ever seen - man, woman or whatever else waddled beside her. The whir of machinery beneath feet that simply felt fatter grounded her thoughts. 
	“Calculating… calculating…” Alma knew exactly what FEED was calculating, and she bit her lip harder than ever, her gargantuan body quaking with excitement at the preposterous number she was about to hear. “Weight calculated at 989 pounds. Is this amount of fattening satisfactory?” Shouldn’t it have asked if the weight was satisfactory? A rational Alma would have agreed with that question, but the rational Alma wasn’t the one panting from the effort of supporting the extra 200 some odd pounds of lard she’d had pumped into her body. The barely-ambulatory pile of gator huffed underneath her breath, shockingly frustrated by the weight read out to her. 
	“Not even…. 1000…?” It was just a smidge harder to speak, but it didn’t deter the perturbed gator, who wouldn’t be satisfied until she at least broke into the quadruple digits. “FEED… keep going… I need to be… fatter…!” She balled up her fists and spread her legs as far apart as she could, gasping at the sensation of her buttery thighs smacking together from the motion. FEED beeped its acknowledgment of the crude command, and Alma braced herself for another rush of the fattening sludge. 
	Once again, she felt it rocket into her body from behind, and the force of it this time nearly knocked her off her feet, the gator lurching dangerously forward and rocking all of her near-tonnage back to keep herself standing. She felt dozens of hidden folds of fat jiggling against one another, and whimpered when her gut gurgled from the motion. She groaned, arching her head back, and forced out a booming “BRAAAAAAAAAAAPPPPP!” that she knew was likely echoing well outside the soundproofed walls of her storage unit. The gluttonous gator tried to bring her hands down onto some reachable slab of her stomach, but found herself breaking out into a sweat from the effort of heaving her limbs up. She dragged them sluggishly across the rolling fields of her flabby flanks, and could only plop them weakly up onto the sides of her stomach. She glimpsed over at the mirror again, and knew that if her fourth chin wasn’t already squished heavily up against her chest, her jaw would’ve dropped down to it. Her belly was preposterously wide now - the mirror that had easily eclipsed her less than an hour ago now barely contained her sides, giving her the very appropriate appearance of becoming a literal ball of fat. Her legs had all but vanished beneath that selfsame gut, which she noted with astonishment now hung barely an inch above the ground, swaying from side to side, a pendulum of nothing but fat that dominated her body. Her arms, she noticed, were barely recognizable as such - barrel-thick masses of blubber that probably weighed more alone than the rest of her crew, propped uselessly up against her staggeringly bloated sides. 
	“Oh… urrrrrp…. God…… bruuuuurp…” Alma was wheezing pathetically now, her face flushed - that she was standing at all was clearly something of a minor miracle, but she had utterly ruined her mobility all the same. She doubted she could muster so much as a single, pathetic, shuffling step forward. “I’m fat… I’m so, so fat…” She could barely believe that the fat face mouthing these words back at her in the mirror was her own - the quarter of jowls quivered with every painstaking syllable she uttered, while her cheeks had swollen into cantaloupes of corpulence threatening to overtake her snout as the most defined feature on her face. It hardly mattered by now, of course - her face was practically just a footnote compared to the elephantine sprawl of her gut. 
	“Calculating…. Calculating…” FEED clearly wasn’t interested in the melancholic musings of the immobile mound of gator. “Weight calculated at 1,512 pounds. Threshold weight achieved. Would you like to continue fattening?” Absolutely not, Alma thought. She had let this get the better of her, and even though she still found herself relishing the sensation of being reduced by her own hand to almost nothing but useless blubber, she had to stop herself somewhere. There was nothing to be gained by continuing on this fattening crusade. 
	“Urrrrp…! N... “ The rest of the no sat limp in her mouth, as inert as Alma herself. She couldn’t possibly prolong this any further. She wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but she had some sense to her. But the part of Alma that had driven her into this decadent ditch was whispering a new temptation into her ear, perched like a plump little devil on her massive shoulder. She was already so impossibly fat that it didn’t make sense to stop now. Just a little more. Just a little fatter. And such a lovely round number was just around the corner. “Brrraaaap…. More…” 
	Alma didn’t even bother to brace herself for this round. She groaned weakly as the caloric slurry poured into her body, and only shuddered this time when her stomach made contact with the cold tiles beneath it, the acreage of her flab brushing up against the ground at first, then spreading out further and further in front of her. Belches bubbled out of her gasping maw in between her desperate wheezes, the subsequent rolicking of her gut making the blubbery globes of her chest wobble within her hot pink bra. The gator was nothing more than a burping, wheezing blob by the time FEED retracted the fattening tube, letting the helpless mountain of blubber collapse backwards onto the twin planets of flab her ass had ballooned into. Alma lay there, utterly and inescapably pinned to the spot by her own insatiable greed, too stuffed to even whimper now, simply struggling to fathom how thoroughly she had destroyed her body. 
	“Calculating… calculating…” FEED’s voice rang in her ears, intermingling unpleasantly with the dull gurgling of her goliath gut. Alma forced out another thunderous belch and a groan, meekly wiggling her bratwurst-thick fingers and toes - the only real mobility the implausibly obese glutton had left. “Subject weight recorded at 2000 pounds. Subject’s body fat calculated at 96%. Subject is practically nothing but fat now.” The cruel words provoked a guilty, pleasured shudder from the blobbish gator, whose fifth chin jiggled as she fought to put some kind of response out. 
	“Mo… moo…” Alma couldn’t help but cringe at how appropriate the call of a cow was for her now. She could probably put even the most egregiously enriched cow to shame with her whalish physique. There wasn’t a practical option left to her anymore - in truth, there was only one thing left for the useless butterball she had turned herself into. “Moooooore…”