Long Overdue

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; when he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C Clarke, 'Profiles of the Future'.

*****

"Ladies... nggggh... Ladies and... Gentleman..."

Sweat stood out on her forehead as she spoke. Bella looked pained, winces and twinges flickering across her impeccably made up countenance as she struggled to speak, the microphone catching every moan and laboured breath as she stumbled through her speech.

"Thank... thank you for coming..."

A murmur had arisen in the assembled crowd of reporters, disinterested onlookers to scientific achievement, they had waited for the section where Dr Bella Simmons would summarise what she had actually been working on in terms their target audiences of dullards and simpletons could understand.

"I'm... I'm here today to-"

A groan echoed out from the podium, at first mistaken for speaker feedback from the microphone or some electronic device, but then as they watched her right hand veered to the source of the sound. It moved between the gaping halves of her pristine snow-white lab coat, under the light salmon fabric of her straining, clearly inadequate maternity shirt and to the bulging, heaving surface of her immense, swollen stomach. It groaned once more, the low, vagrant roar shifted deep within the troubled bloat of her midriff, causing the surface to distort and draw tight for a moment, lumps and bulges showing through the taut, aching flesh.

"Not now... Oh God, please... Not now..."

A whispered half-prayer of desperate need, delivered privately to each and every one of the gathered press-men through the scientific magic of electronic amplification. They were standing now, the murmur had become more, a seething, tumultuous morass of whisper, rumour, concern and the fleeting whiff of a story. There was blood in the water here, they could sense it. The shark in each and every one of them began to circle.

Her waters broke with a spectacular splash, soaking the boards of the stage as vile fluid spilled out from between her thighs.

Karen was by her side. She had never really left, but it was not concern that masked the elder woman's face as she gripped the elbow of the struggling woman and held her, her other arm snaking around her back to prevent her falling.

"I told you this would happen..."

*****

Six months ago...

"Bitch! That... scheming, dirty, two faced fucking bitch."

No wonder Karen had been so unusually pleasant to her recently, she had played Ella for a fool, and when the time was right, she had struck.

Bella's department was being closed at the end of the month. Unhappy with the expense and the lack of publishable, document-able results her research was being forthwith terminated in favour of reallocation of resources. Ella would be out on the street in two weeks, and her thesis would never see the light of day.

Her security card at least still worked. She slid it through the automatic card reader with a practised 'CHUNK' sound before the doors opened to the sterile, white lab beyond.

She should have gotten changed into a sealed atmosphere suit before entering, it was lab policy, but as the whole lot was about to be broken up into scrap, it really didn't feel much like it mattered right now.

"I'll show her, her and her two-bit fucking fertility shit..."

Bella was angry, and as she grunted to fit the power couplings together and slot them home in the generator housing she let it flow through her, giving her strength and an extraordinary reservoir of swear words to draw upon.

Dr Karen Martinson was one of the country's foremost experts on female infertility, and it had been quite a coup for the corporation to snare her with promises of research grants and outrageous funding demands. The money had to come from somewhere, and in this case it would come from Bella's lab. She let out an exasperated 'Fuck!' as she caught her finger in the cable holster, an angry welt appearing on her finger as she slipped the finger between her cherry red lips and sucked, pausing as she did so to flip her short brown pixie-cut hair out of her eyes. She felt contemptuous of Karen, dismissive almost, regarding the steady procession of pregnant women that entered her offices with sneers of derision. There was something about them, the way they waddled or their supposed glow she presumed that made her feel uncomfortable, itchy almost. She grew to detest them, their bloated, precarious bulk riddled with stretch-marks, ankles swollen, navels popped out, skin stretched to aching over fullness. Her research involved nothing of the kind, all she had to deal with was the prototype.

The machine throbbed, the dark, multi ribbed, menacing looking casing seeming to crackle not with power, though enough of it coursed through it to light a small town.

No, it was alive. Alive with possibilities. With purpose.

She'd show them it would work...

Then they'd have no choice but to support her.

*****

"You shouldn't have done this... not in your condition."

Karen hissed into her ear like a snake. She didn't care, as she lay on her back on that stage, the cameras flashing and the violent movements within her stomach threatening to snap her in twain all she could feel was a burning desire to do one thing.

Push.

Her pencil skirt had risen up her thighs, her bare legs offering little friction to stop it, parted they allowed the journalists a view of something that most certainly did not belong in the scientific journals some of them represented, nor the more base publications catering to mass media consumption that employed the others.

The lips of her sex began to bulge, pushed outward from the inside by something large and hard.

*****

Six months ago...

She had been aware of a sensation like falling, slipping at once downward as if the stark white insides of the pod had parted like water around her, and a tugging feeling, like a myriad of tiny hooks embedded in every part of her pulled all at once to jerk her violently and agonisingly through space and matter itself.

She was aware that she was screaming, but no sound reached her ears.

Things blurred as she passed through them. Walls and floors and corridors and offices became a meaningless smear across her retina, her brain unable to process the shock of stimulus, she could feel herself teetering on the edges of unconsciousness.

There was a crash as she reached her destination.

She blinked, and the world seemed to pause for a moment as she solidified, the two of them, the scientist and the universe, eyeing each other apprehensively as they each came to terms with the fact that what had just happened was most likely impossible, as Karen had outright said in the earlier funding meeting.

Karen...

She was watching her, open mouthed and slack jawed, outwards through a perspex sheet.

In an instant her perspective corrected itself and she realised she was being looked out from outside. Karen was looking in on the suddenly materialised figure of her competitor and rival, who had appeared without warning inside her fume cupboard and smashed her carefully cultivating experiments with the rude, plump curve of her buttocks, the shards of glass snatching at fabric and slicing into her eager flesh.

She gaped for a moment, before with elegant cunning Dr Karen Martinson recovered her composure, and having considered briefly sucking all the air from the sealed chamber, instead hit the button marked 'Air cycle', circulating the air around the trapped young woman, and the spores of her viral culture with them.

She watched as Bella's chest rose and fell rhythmically in shock, drawing in deep, thunderous breaths.

*****

"nnnnnnnnNNNNNGGGGHHH!"

A cry loosed itself from her parted lips, her eyes squeezed shut as the next contraction bit deep. Her shirt had sprung apart beneath Karen's fingers, her hand placed, spread fingered, atop the heaving dome as it clenched and the muscles laboured to expel the contents of her womb.

The other had slipped under the hem of her skirt, holding aside her pink cotton panties the fingers trembled over the warm, moist lips of her cunt as they explored and probed, feeling the lips distort and begin to part as something emerged with a wet pop and a slight gush of amniotic fluid.

Something hard, and pointed, darkly coloured and terribly, terribly cold.

Someone in the crowd, a slight, angular looking blonde, screamed.

Inching forward, each muscular spasm from Bella's engorged stomach brought more of the mysterious thing out into the glaring light of the auditorium.

She would not be the only one.

*****

Three months ago...

Bella let out a sigh as she slipped her legs over the edge of the bed, her feet finding her slippers in amongst the soft, warm fibres of her bedroom carpet. The rest of her house was floored with cold, sterile looking faux-wood laminate, but in the bedroom she'd been adamant that there should be carpet. Not least because the legs of her bed would squeak against the floor when she masturbated.

She righted herself with a grunt of exertion, and padded softly over to her closet to pick out her clothes. Her alarm still buzzed shrilly in the background, it would continue for a moment longer before switching to radio, a blast of morning news and current affairs waking her faster than the cup of coffee she was no longer allowed.

"Women in your condition should not partake of Caffeine." She heard Karen say in her head.

She stood before the sliding, mirrored door of the closet for a moment, regarding her naked body in the way all humans do when given an opportunity to express that most fundamental of sins; vanity.

She turned this way and that, looking with the eye of one less concerned with how good she looked, rather, how different she looked.

Her breasts were noticeable larger, the nipples darker and the bud at the centre of each more prominent. Blue veins were faintly visible beneath the skin, and large one bisecting her right breast neatly.

Her stomach was vast.

She had to arch her back and move in an exaggerated waddle to make any headway these days, her body an almost parody of those gravid women she had sneered at a few months ago.

Karen said she didn't know what was happening to her, the almost daily ultrasounds revealing nothing of what was going on inside her, only the continued indication that it was growing.

And as it did, so too would she follow. Her belly protruded from between her rib cage, drawing the skin tight so that the hint of each bone was visible before the spherical downward slope obliterated them. It itched a little, her fingernails finding the offending spot on her right flank and idly scratching it with her nails, her hand resting on the vulgar slope for a moment as she eyed her bulbous silhouette for a moment. Her thighs had thickened to support her, her back had stretched out to accommodate the alien curve of her waistline, clicking painfully when she stretched only to flood her with relief.

She slipped on a black, lace embellished bra, somewhat too small but not uncomfortably so, and struggled for a moment to bend enough to allow her panties the good humour of being put on. Her girth was rigid, unyieldingly taut and with a constant physical sensation of being stuffed to its utmost, she had nightmares sometimes where the skin simply tore open, a great dark shape pushing through from beneath the dark smear that marked where her tender, innocent little navel had once been.

She fastened her shirt and pants and slipped on her lab coat, the security tag dangling from her breast pocket.

Dr Bella Simmons, Researcher

There was a string of numbers and letters beneath next to her photograph that indicated she worked for Karen. Worked for was not strictly right, Karen had promised her the ability to continue her work if she could be allowed to study her.

No one need ever need know.

*****

"I can feel it... God, yes! Keep pushing Bella..."

Karen's eyes were wild with excitement, her face a bizarre mix of anticipation and joy. It looked somewhat like this when she achieved orgasm, though Bella had no way of knowing that, all she could feel was the painful stretching click as her pelvis widened to allow the thing to squeeze through her burning, agonised snatch, her legs spread near impossibly wide as the ugly thing protruding from her sex slipped ever outward, Karen's fingers fussing over her and it, wiping it and cooing softly while she uttered tiny, insignificant phrases under her breath like 'Astonishing' and 'Extraordinary'.

Bella's hands were clamped to her trembling, pulsing girth, her stomach alive beneath her fingers, an ocean of movement passing over the achingly taut surface as contraction after contraction roared through her like a boxer's blow. Her midriff tightened, another scream creeping from between her lips.

"Nearly there... You're so close..."

She couldn't hear her, Karen could only guess at the exertion required for Bella to give birth, her brain so overwhelmed by it, her senses so drowned, that sound would have no meaning to her. Still, she felt the compulsion to appear outwardly like a midwife.

Bella paused for a moment, the stretched lips of her cunt squeezing around the wide, dark dome that  poked out of her, caught at its widest point. Her breath ragged, raging, her chest rising and falling as she cried and groaned like an animal for a moment, before her face tightened, her brows knitting as she pushed again, her hands forcing down on the unyielding bulge of her womb, the skin of her belly unable to give unless either her or the object squatting in her birth canal did so first.

There was a splash of fluid and an almost comical pop as Bella at last forced it out, the strange, hard thing slid outward, tapering to a point. Karen grasped it, and for a moment everything was silent, even Bella's pants and sighs of relief seeming to mute themselves in the hush that descended upon the hall.

Karen stood with the thing in her hands, feeling the reassurance of its weight and the hard coldness against her palms, her face a near manic grin of joy and accomplishment as she turned to them, holding the thing aloft for them all to see. The silence broke as they looked upon it, aghast at what they had seen and fearful of what it could mean. The black thing regarded them with it's grave-cool exterior, smooth and uniform and featureless as the camera bulbs flared and the questions began to spill out like the pyroclastic eruption of a volcano, incendiary and scorching, it rested in the upward stretched hands of Karen Martinson, Fertility expert, having delivered it from the womb of the exhausted, traumatised Bella Simmons. It looked upon them, and the fear of it radiated through them like a whisper.

The Egg.