Further corruption

The crawl to your quarters took four full minutes—long enough for her knees to ache and for the corridor's sparse late-shift foot traffic to gawk. A maintenance tech passed her on hands and knees and just stared. May didn't notice. May didn't care. The old her would've died of embarrassment. The new her just swayed her hips and kept crawling, the dress riding up over her ass with every forward lurch.

You'd left the door unlocked.

She crawled through it and stopped in the middle of the room, knees together, palms flat on the floor, head down—waiting like a trained thing. The pose itself was an admission. I don't know what comes next. Tell me.

You were sitting on the edge of the bed, boots on, watching her like a man watching a fly walk into a web on purpose.

"Look at you," you said. "Crawled the whole way. Didn't even stand up at the door. Did anyone see you?"

"Yes, Master." Her voice was small and proud, like a kid who'd won a spelling bee.

"And what did you think about while you crawled?"

She hesitated. The old May wanted to say something clever. The new May just wanted to be right. "About… your boots, Master. About how good they'd look… closer."

You smiled. "Come here. Show me how dumb the smartest girl on this station has gotten in one evening."

She crawled the last few meters on instinct and knelt between your knees, hands on your thighs, mouth already open before you'd given her a single instruction. That eagerness—that was new. That was learned. Twenty-four hours ago this woman had needed a spreadsheet to decide what to order for lunch.

You fed her a bootlace to pull loose with her teeth, then made her untie the other with her hands behind her back. She fumbled. Dropped the lace twice. Laughed at herself—a bright, empty little giggle that the old May would never have produced—and started over.

"That's it," you murmured. "No rush. No thinking. Just the boot."

When both boots were off, you pulled her up onto the bed, and this was where the real work started.

You'd already decided on tonight's project. The symbiote had been whispering to you for days about "improvements"—about how a body could be edited to match a mind's new shape, and how May's mind was shrinking by the hour. The old May's shape was lean, efficient, practical. The new May's shape needed to announce itself. Needed to strain at every seam and make Joshua stutter when he next saw her.

You ran your hands up her ribs, unhooked her bra, and said one word into the room:

"More."

The symbiote answered.

Her whole torso seized—a full-body cramp that made her gasp and arch off the mattress, fingers clawing the sheets. It wasn't painful exactly. It was the feeling of being assembled. The skin over her chest stretched and tightened, her existing curves swelling, pushing, rearranging themselves with a wet, warm, alien logic. She watched it happen: her modest B-cups climbing through C, D, E, the dress she'd worn stretched taut across them until the dress ripped under the stress as her tits broke freee. The symbiote didn't stop. It was going to give her a body that couldn't be mistaken for a data analyst's anymore.

F-cup. Then past it.

She ended up somewhere around a G—heavy, full, absurdly soft, the kind of chest that made her old uniform an outright lie. Her nipples, dark and tight, sat high and wide on the new swell. She looked down at herself and let out a sound that was half laugh, half whimper.

"They're—" she started.

"Bigger," you finished. "They're bigger. Say it."

"They're bigger, Master."

"Say it properly."

Her face went red in a way that had nothing to do with shame anymore. "I have big dumb bimbo tits, Master." She said it slowly, tasting each word like a new flavor. "My tits are huge and dumb and they're gonna spill out of everything."

You sat her up. The new weight settled. She swayed, thrown off balance by her own center of gravity, and had to catch your shoulder. The symbiote was already working on the rest of her, subtler: hips a touch wider, waist a touch narrower, ass fuller where it met the sheets. Nothing dramatic. Just a body tuned so that every curve pointed back to the middle.

Then came the mind.

You pulled her to kneel on the bed facing the mirror across the room and put the earpiece back in. The symbiote fed her a slow drip of whatever chemical soup it used to keep her pliant, and you began the lesson.

"Look at yourself. Old May would have called those 'impractical.' She'd have measured them and filed them under 'statistical outlier.' Say what the new May calls them."

"Mmm… toys," she said, cupping them with both hands. "Fucktoys. For Master."

"Good. Now—that paper you were so excited about. The warp harmonics one. What was the third postulation about?"

Her brow furrowed. She could almost see it. Almost. Then it slid away like a bar of soap.

"It was… it was about… um." She looked at you, desperate for a hint.

You didn't give her one. "Simpler. One word."

"Unstable?" she tried. Then, when you shook your head: "Bad? Wrong?"

"Wrong's good. Explain it to me using only 'wrong,' 'dumb,' and your tits."

She thought about it for a long time. Then, very seriously: "The paper was dumb. It said a thing was wrong, but the thing wasn't wrong. So the paper's wrong. And…" she glanced down at the weight on her chest, "and there's a lot of tits now."

You laughed out loud. The symbiote purred, delighted with itself.

That was the loop you ran her through for the next hour: every time she tried to sound smart, you interrupted with a simpler word until she gave up and picked the dumb one. Every time she got something right, you rewarded her—a hand on her thigh, a thumb on her clit, a slap on her ass that made the new flesh jiggle in a way that hypnotized her. Every time she got lost, you made her look at herself in the mirror until she calmed down.

By the end of the hour she was sprawled across your lap, tits crushed against your forearm, chin propped on her folded hands, mouthing along as you taught her a new mantra:

"I'm the smart one who's dumb now. I'm the smart one who's dumb now. Big tits, small thoughts, happy. Big tits, small thoughts, happy."

Somewhere around the twentieth repetition she actually came, with no hands on her at all—just from the sound of her own voice in the earpiece and the sight of her own absurd new silhouette in the mirror. The old May would have written a paper about it. The new May just squeaked and drooled a little.

You eased her off your lap and onto the bed, tucking her under the blanket with her tits threatening to escape the whole time. She was half-asleep within a minute, thumb drifting toward her mouth.

"Tomorrow," you said softly, crouching by her ear. "Joshua's going to see you in the mess hall. And he's going to lose his goddamn mind. You're not going to explain anything. You're going to sit down, cross your legs, smile, and say one sentence. You want to know what it is?"

"Mmhmm," she mumbled, eyes already closed.

"'I'm expanding my datasets.'"

She giggled into the pillow. Then, quieter, almost asleep: "What's a dataset?"

You kissed her forehead and left her there—G-cups rising and falling, mouth slack, hair a mess, and not a single coherent thought left in her skull that didn't start with Master and end with please.