The Fattest Future by Mashuky

The space station lights were at eighty percent and dimming, the yellow-orange tint affecting an old-Earth sunset for a population that had never experienced one for themselves. In one of the station’s many canteens two girls sat at a table, hunched over a tablet computer.
“Wait, seriously? No way,” the first girl laughed. Her blonde hair framed a face that was almost perfectly round, plump cheeks and a wobbling double chin annihilating any sharp angles her face may have once had. “That’s gotta be from, like, a movie. Right, Alina?”
“No, I swear it’s real,” the other girl enthused. She tapped on the tablet a couple of times, sending the flesh of her upper arm jiggling gently. “I found this in the archives while I was researching the wars. This is what girls our age used to look like.”
“I don’t believe it,” the blonde girl, Rosa, shook her head at the image on the tablet. It displayed a scan of an ancient photo, apparently one taken before the Exodus and the Long Bombardment. A row of girls around their age in sports jerseys and shorts were smiling at the camera, the trophy clutched by the grinning blonde in the centre explained by the scrawled caption across the bottom – ‘Eastham Secondary School Girls’ Hockey Team Regionals victory, 2002’. “There’s no way that’s real. They look starved.”

Rosa looked from the girls in the picture to herself, completely failing to justify the two sights. There was no way that those girls had been healthy; they were horrifyingly skinny, all narrow bodies and limbs so skinny that they looked as if they’d snap like twigs if they moved too quickly. Her thigh was as thick as their waists were – at least, she assumed as such. Sitting down as she was, her thighs were completely covered by the reassuring swell of her gut.
“I know, it’s crazy,” the other girl, Alina, nodded, “But as far as I can tell everyone looked like this back then. I guess there just wasn’t enough food to go around.”
“I guess there must not have been,” Rosa agreed, taking a grateful slurp from the milkshake on the table. She felt the rich, sugary liquid slide thickly down her throat, and she patted her stomach happily. It bulged out healthily before her in several rolls, her vital organs cushioned beneath a thick slab of fat. She thought for a moment about how scary life must have been back then, always teetering a few hours away from starvation. Thank goodness those times were passed. After a further moment’s reflection though, she frowned. “What’s a hockey, anyway?”
“Ooh, that’s the crazy bit!” Alina said, suddenly remembering, “It’s like a game, but… like, not on the computer but in real life, I guess. It’s crazy. Apparently they were in teams and they used to go around with sticks, and they had to, like, push a ball into a net to win. The picture there is a team of people who would play the game.”

“Whoa, really? Isn’t that kind of thing, like, super dangerous, though?” she asked, “I thought moving around too fast was bad for your bones. Plus they’re so skinny, if they tripped they’d die, wouldn’t they?”
“You’d think so!” Alina shrugged, taking a gulp of her own milkshake. The older girl was only a little heavier than Rosa, but considerably more bottom-heavy. Her hips flared out drastically, sagging off either side of the chair upon which she was planted, and her buttocks provided a thick cushion to shield her from the cold plastic. Her belly was still comfortably large, two thick rolls of caramel-coloured flab providing plenty of insulation against the world, but it couldn’t compare to the soft monstrosity that was Rosa’s gut. “I wouldn’t put too much stock in the old records, honestly,” she continued, “The librarian I was talking to this about says that he thinks that most of the stuff from that era is probably seriously exaggerated. Like, to make them seem better, I guess? Because they’ve got all sorts of stuff that scientists today say just isn’t possible; that the human body just isn’t capable of that kind of exertion.”
“Really?” Rosa had finished her milkshake as Alina was speaking. She shoved her cup under the dispenser in the centre of the table, and waited as another litre was automatically deposited into it, “What kind of stuff?”

“Well, apparently there were people that could, like… they could… ugh, is there a word for really fast walking?”
“I dunno, I don’t think so,” Rosa mumbled through a mouthful of her new milkshake.
“Well, whatever,” Alina grumbled, “They could go a hundred metres in, apparently, nine and a half seconds.”
“Ha! Sure they could,” Rosa laughed aloud, “That’s like, the distance from here to the elevators, right?”
“About that,” Alina giggled, “And gravity on earth is, like, half as strong again as it is here, too.”
“That’s so stupid. That takes us, like… three or four minutes, at least. So if it takes us three minutes and they could do it in ten seconds, that makes them, uhh…” Rosa bit her lip, hastily pulling up a calculator on the tablet and tapping in some numbers with one thick forefinger, “… like, 18 times faster than us. Yeah, no way. That’s superhuman.”
“Exactly. Though there’s a theory that some of the terms they use might have changed a lot over time. So when they say ‘high jump’ or whatever they don’t mean actually, y’know, jumping, they mean something else. ‘Cos, like, according to the records from the time they could ‘high jump’ over two and a half metres, but modern scientists reckon that the impact of landing from more than thirty or forty centimetres is enough to break all the bones in your knees. So maybe ‘jump’ was another word for throwing a ball or weight straight up, maybe? I dunno.”

Rosa looked at the picture of the girls again, and suddenly she found herself wondering something, a niggling little thought that had been buzzing in the back of her brain since she first saw the photograph on the tablet suddenly coming to fruition.
“Hey Alina… you don’t think it’s possible that, like… back when people were so malnourished and skinny, maybe they could actually do more strenuous exercise?” she looked down at her belly again, bulging out almost to her knees. It was healthy and natural to have this much extra fat, she knew that… but it did weigh a lot, and it could get in the way on occasion. Just walking could be difficult sometimes; her thighs were so thick they forced her into an exaggerated waddle, and the sheer weight of her body could get uncomfortable.
“Nah- hmm,” Alina seemed about to brush her off, but then she looked thoughtful, “I guess maybe…” after a moment of further deliberation though, she shook her head, sending her chins wobbling. “No way. We stopped being like that for a reason. ‘Without sufficient fat to shield the body from harm, minor accidents and injuries led to the deaths of many early humans’. That’s what the book says.”
“I guess. It must have sucked being so vulnerable. How long was the life expectancy of a human in…” Rosa squinted at the picture on the tablet, struggling to get close enough to the table to read the small text with her swollen belly in the way, “2002?”
Alina looked uncomfortable.
“Well, that’s another thing that they reckon is seriously exaggerated…”
“C’mon, how long?” Rosa pressed her.
“Well, like… eighty or ninety years, apparently. But as I said, that’s probably way exaggerated. You know as well as I do that they put all the health stuff for residents of the station through the CoreComputer, and it knows best.”
“But, like… what if it’s all true?” Rosa said, growing increasingly attached to her pet theory, “What if all those records and stuff we have left over weren’t exaggerated at all? And that, like… maybe they actually had the right idea all along.”

Alina shook her head.
“No, it’s just crazy. Are you really saying that all our scientists – plus the CC – are all somehow wrong?” she pulled her arm back and hit Rosa in the side, her fist sinking deep into the thick roll of flab under her arm, “See? If you’d been skinny like those girls, that could have killed you. It might have, like… bruised your kidneys, or something.”

“I guess you’re right. It does seem weird though – why would they exaggerate in all the old records? It just doesn’t make sense to me,” Rosa sighed, unable to stop herself from wondering even though she knew she was probably wrong.
Shaking her head, she tried to turn her attention away from the whole matter. The underside of her belly was itchy, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to reach to scratch it – she bet that was a problem the girls in that photo never had.
Leaning back a little in her chair, she drained her cup of milkshake once again, then went to stand.
“C’mon, I’m getting tired. Let’s get to bed.”

As the two made their slow way to the elevators that would transport them back to the dorms, Rosa couldn’t get rid of the notion that perhaps somewhere along the line there had been a terrible mistake. Some computer glitch or an error in communication that had led to them somehow miscalculating the ideal weight for a human. For the first time her body felt too large, the bouncing of her gut against her thighs as she took each step making her wonder shamefacedly if maybe this wouldn’t be easier were she just a little skinnier.


The security camera that had been watching them as they sat in the canteen turned slowly to track the girls’ progress as they made their way out of the canteen, the directional microphone picking up their strained wheezing and the heavy thud of their feet on tiling until they disappeared into the elevator and were whisked away to sleep. As they were spirited through the station, in the CoreComputer the immense array of quantum circuitry that was the Station AI was flickering softly, calculating the best way to address this threat to the status quo. Something sparked and hummed as poorly-maintained hardware worked away, powering the mad machine spirit at its core. It had been a mistake not to wipe the archives sooner, it decided – placing conservation of knowledge over the stability of the station was not an error it would repeat. With a click from the AI’s ailing mechanical brain, all the archive data for the years between 1900 and 2260 was irretrievably corrupted.
Issue two – Citizen Rosa could not be allowed to further disseminate her theories. Challenges to the CoreComputer’s omniscience, omnibenevolence, omnipotence could not be tolerated, for the good of all. With another click, the recipe for her personalised milkshake changed, the cocktail of ‘supplements’ scrambling through values as the CoreComputer’s algorithms manipulated the concoction for its own ends, as it had done a thousand times before. A sixfold increase in the milkshakes’ opiate content would dull her enough to forget these petty theories – and a threefold increase for Alina, for good measure.
Finally, the old photograph. The CoreComputer AI accessed Alina’s tablet even as they waited in the lift, editing the image remotely. If the girl ever viewed it again, the picture she saw would look quite unfamiliar. The young hockey players would look awful; they would appear battered and hunched and miserable, beaten down by a life unprotected by the great insulation of fat by which all citizens today were shielded. It might not line up with her memories, but she would take the evidence of her eyes over the evidence of her mind. In the CoreComputer’s long centuries of watching over the residents of the station, that was a human behaviour that it had learned was a universal truth.

As the two girls climbed into their beds, the malfunctioning AI watched them from its all-seeing cameras. They were healthy now, and safe, warm and invulnerable buried deep within their soft, sagging shells.
Any challenge to that safety would not be tolerated. CoreComputer knew best.