Katie and the Queen

The mainframe chamber buzzed, low light flickered soft candle darkness over the walls, rising central in the room the data core and atop that rested the upper torso of Katie.

"Awful lot of data for something we don't know anything about, don't you think?"

Her voice high and lilting with triumph. Somewhere far behind them a klaxon sounded, mournful and long past due.

"It can't be you, you passed through all the tests. You're clean. There's nothing inside you but data…"

Katie laughed. From somewhere inside the data core a low moan emanated

"Who designed those tests? Who logged the results? It was me, I'm the queen. I did this. All of this."

She stifled a giggle.

"Why"

"Why does anyone do anything? Boredom, money, fame, power, besides, I've always wanted to be a mommy…"

A pneumatic hiss. A gasp of steam escapes from the seams of the data core tower encasing Katie's lower body. It begins to creep open.

Between the panels of the core, something is visible. Pale white, almost blue white in the low light, ghostly, but big. Very, very big.

Katie.

The panels fall away suddenly, and she is revealed. Her face, shoulders, arms, breasts, lab coat, blouse, everything of her upper body remains unchanged. Below this, nothing is the same. Her blouse is fastened by only two buttons down the front, Katie's generous cleavage being the beginning and end of it, after that the two halves are forced aside by Katie's abdomen. Colossal, ivory white, gargantuan and rumbling monstrously, it extends in an unbelievable swell, jutting out to ridiculous dimensions in all directions.

"I'm the queen. Within me grows the new hive, soon I will birth them, and they will do my bidding. An army of slaves, all mine!"

She runs a hand seductively over the bloated swollen orb, its surface perfect white. Her tiny belly button sat at eye level, pensively watching them.

She laughs at the spectacle of the tiny observers running their eyes over her triumphant, magnificent, succulent girth. Her vast swell an ocean of success and cunning, her brooding and intelligence magnified and summated by the intense distortion of her abdomen, it's heaving swollen circumference both her trial and reward. She playfully coaxes it, it moans and gurgles in response, she feels both maternal and terrifying in the same breath.

Katie smiles, motherhood awaits her. She pauses her hands, both extended to reach as far as they can over her gargantuan tummy, she feels a shift, something moves inside…

The surface of her stomach distorts massively, suddenly, fearfully.

"What the fuck was that?"

Katie looked genuinely worried. She winced, her eyes belying the struggle within her.

"It's a contraction, my brood are nearing arrival."

She turned her gaze on them, her eyes piercing and triumphant. The horror and fear of the moment before passed as her hands soothed and eased the churning of her digestive tract.

"Make your peace, soon my army will be born, and I will bend the world to my bidding. I shall be queen of everything, my power absolute, my rule unchallengeable, I shall be beautiful and all powerful forever!"

She laughed loudly and cruelly, her hands those of tiny infants against the snow white sphere of her lower body, rubbing tiny circles on the massive gurgling orb.

"They were never yours to command…"

The voice echoed around the chamber, gravely but feminine. Katie looked about her, searching for the intruder.

"Who's there? Show yourself?"

"Look down."

Katie turned her baleful gaze downward. Down, over the crevice of her cleavage, to the great white whale beneath.

"I've been with you this whole time. I needed somewhere quiet and safe to grow, to build my strength, somewhere away from the prying eyes of those who sought me. It was never your bidding they followed. It was mine."

Katie clutched her stomach, feeling the shift inside.

"My brood? My slaves?"

"They never existed. All you carry inside yourself is me. And now I think it high time to make my entrance…"

Katie gritted her teeth as the surface of her titanic abdomen shifted horribly under her carress. Whatever it was she had gestated inside of her now wanted out.

Her belly heaved and groaned animally, bulges and ripples denting and warping it's vast surface as it gargled and roared, all the while Katie sat atop the monster, crying softly to herself and moaning in pain.

"I can hold you, you're in my womb after all, I can keep you there…"

Katie chanted like a mantra, tears running over her plump cheeks, sweat standing out on her forehead, her eyes rolling in their sockets in pain and fear.

Her stomach swelled visibly.

The outline of a terrible creature, limbs outstretched, head upright, straining to escape.

Katie screamed in agony, her colossal womb betraying her, it's surface aflame in agony as it distorted around the beast within.

With a final, hideous shriek and a horrific organic tearing sound, her gargantuan stomach tore open, viscera and gore raining down on the chamber as Katie's dream came to a terrible, bloody end.

Something unfolded itself in a smooth, chitin covered uncurling from where moments before the ivory perfection had rested…

The queen.

"At last...."

The armored creature unfurled its - her - many hook-tipped limbs, stretched her head skyward, antennae swiveling back and forth, attempting to find a signal. She cleaned herself with her extremities and her curling tongue, wiping away the thin sheen of gore that covered her, at last gleaming in the light of a hundred monitors. The woman who had served the queen while it suited her lay strewn about the chamber in a red crescent.

She surveyed those who stood before her. White coats. Shivering like leaves.

"As for the rest of you...." Her gravelly but unmistakably female voice echoed throughout the laboratory. "I am a merciful queen. "Serve me, and live."

The scientists gathered to witness Katie's triumph murmured amongst themselves, the fear plain on their faces. The queen reached out and snatched up a slight, bespectacled girl with short hair and a ruddy complexion.

"Identify."

"C-C-Cynthia Rousseau." The girl's eyes were wide as saucers, made comically large by the thick lenses of her glasses.

"Good. You will serve me, Cynthia-Rousseau." The queen set the small scientist back on her feet. "My brood must feed. I require data. Where is your database?"

"Th-there. Mistress." The mousy girl scuttled over to a bank of computers. "The data ports are encrypted."

"It is of no consequence."

The queen lumbered over to the mainframe and tuned her antennae to its frequency, binary code rushing by on every monitor until at last...yes...yes, she was in! She unfurled her long tongue and inserted it into one of the ports on the front of the machine, drinking in the enormous pool of data at the laboratory's core.

The small Cynthia-creature returned to her colleagues and spoke with them in hushed tones. This too was of no consequence. The queen focused on her feast.

"Ah yeeessss...." She drank ravenously, her antennae drawing electromagnetic interference from the air as she drew file after file from the laboratory mainframe, her body beginning to swell and bloat with her feeding. Inside her womb, her children absorbed binary code and quantum theory, growing larger within her, swelling her further, the segments of chitin along her abdomen parting as the white flesh beneath pushed through.

It was lovely.

Never had she expected such a delicious surplus of raw data. The queen gorged herself, glutting with information, her mind abuzz with a million ones and zeros, her womb expanding ever outward as her unborn young became saturated with her feasting, her exoskeleton creaking as it parted around the rippling white mass beneath. She was growing enormous, replete, her insectoid head perched atop her titanic abdomen as she filled herself.

She let out a warbling cry of power-drunk fulfillment, basking in her own magnificence.

"Reverse polarity!" the small creature that called itself Cynthia-Rousseau cried out from somewhere behind the curve of the queen's bloated crescent belly.

She felt a change in the flow of data, a sudden, terribly increase in its flow, and found herself entirely unable to retract her long tongue. She squealed as raw information, every theory, every piece of junk mail that had ever clogged the laboratory's in-boxes, began to flow into her. It was too much, too quickly. She felt her abdomen bulge outward, her white stretched skin creaking ominously, her legs unable to support her rapidly growing bulk. Her children continued to grow and squirm inside of her, the segments of chitin now mere dark islands on her vast white moonlike surface.

"No! No, you must undo this!" she cried desperately, pulling at her tongue with two of her spindly forelegs - to no avail.

"No," the small scientist said, mustering a bit of confidence as the monitor-light glinted off her spectacles. "This has gone on long enough. Katie wasn't always like that. You made her into something terrible. Something evil...."

More than anything else, she looked sad. She glared up at the queen as the massive insect neared her bursting point, her multifaceted eyes bulging as she whipped her head and antennae to and fro, the pain overwhelming as her poor abdomen began to rip like wet canvas.

"Have pity on me," the queen gasped.

"I have pity *for* you," Cynthia said grimly. "She would have wanted this."

The queen let out a final, terrible sob as her womb at last split open, spilling its contents, deflating and wrinkling until nothing remained but a hollow shell of black chitin and a thousand half-formed, dying young, squirming inside her empty husk.

Cynthia sniffed, dabbed at her eyes with the back of her hand, and wiped her glasses with a corner of her lab coat.

"Take it to the incinerator. Burn it all." She turned, her head hung low, leaving her colleagues stunned and motionless. "This can't be allowed to happen again."