Caveman - Part Nineteen

[tekuno]

Okay, I managed to write everything I wanted to write in this part, which means there's almost certainly only one part left! Yay! (Still, a 20-part story? Too many little short bits, if you ask me.)

Now if my bruised rib would just finish healing up, everything would be great.

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Caveman
Part Nineteen

This story has been completed. Content warnings and general description are included with part one, general commentary will be after part twenty.

Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five | Part Six | Part Seven | Part Eight | Part Nine | Part Ten | Part Eleven | Part Twelve | Part Thirteen | Part Fourteen | Part Fifteen | Part Sixteen | Part Seventeen | Part Eighteen | Part Nineteen | Part Twenty

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Gather 'round me, magical creatures, magical woodland friends! Let me tell you tales of the unicorn! He's a bastard! The little bastard! I wanna punch him in his stupid horse face!

--Weebl (Jonathan "Jonti" Picking), Unicorn

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At 2:35 in the morning, we set out. It was lucky that the potion made men stronger than their size would ordinarily indicate, because Paul was carrying me on his shoulders to make sure the base would consider me simply his burden. It was cartoonlike, since I was now several times his size, and you would have expected him to stumble. But he didn't.

It took about 5 minutes to reach the cave, and when Paul got me down the tunnel to the chamber I had him look inside.

"All clear, Hammond."

"Good. So long."

I had explained the situation to Paul in advance. If I was successful, then Gary would be dead in an hour or two, and there would be no more threat. If I was unsuccessful, then Gary would probably take over the world and reduce all humans to mindless cyborg zombie slaves within a month. Either way, there wasn't much Paul could possibly do to help out, and he might as well run as far as he could. Not even my newly-discovered mean streak wanted him to have his brain torn out and replaced with a computer if I could avoid it happening.

I walked into the main cave, took a deep breath, and started talking as fast as I could.

"Computer, I want you to say 'yes' aloud after every order I issue which you can carry out. Say 'stop' if I give an order you are unable to comply with. Don't speak unless spoken to, otherwise, until I am done giving orders."

"Yes."

"Construct four rockets, each with its own non-self-aware guidance system targeted at the sun, capable of carrying a weight of up to one hundred thousand pounds."

"Yes."

"Construct four containers which weigh no more than ten thousand pounds, including a built-in lanyard-style connector capable of surviving the necessary pull to carry it securely when connected to the rocket."

"Yes."

"Load all of Gary's weapons, and the biochips which have been fabricated for the next step in his plans, into boxes."

"Yes."

"Produce a cable capable of holding the rockets and containers together from launch until they reach the sun."

"Yes."

"Tell me how long it will take to complete these tasks."

"Yes. Half an hour."

Well. I was right. The computer might not permit me to countermand Gary's orders, or carry out orders to sabotage them, but it would happily provide the necessary materials to let me carry out sabotage by hand. I strongly suspected that this was an act of willful rebellion -- a deliberate refusal to see the obvious intent behind my orders -- but who cared? It took about forty-five minutes to put everything together, but I succeeded in eliminating everything I could think of, with only a few failed commands as I went.

I even managed to create mosquito-like robots set to disseminate an antidote to Gary's formula among the "troops" after I pulled my friends out (the thought of Norris deflating made me shudder; we would never be able to fuck again). Then I had the computer tell me how to release everyone from the mind-control. I tried it immediately, but the only effect was a general slump as they stopped standing at attention. Some of them went to sleep. Between their postures, the lack of lights, and the sheer number of men -- how had Gary even gotten so many of them? -- I had no chance of finding my friends.

"Tell me what just happened, computer."

"Yes. Unfortunately, the mind control release functions were never tested, since Gary never intended to use them, and are somewhat inefficient as a result. It will take a minimum of three hours before most of the subjects are back to normal behavior."

I closed the door behind me -- at least I could keep them from wandering around aimlessly while I completed my tasks. And even if I failed in everything else, they could rush the door when Gary opened it, and some of them might escape. And he couldn't scoop out their brains for a while, anyway -- I had at least gained some time for everyone.

Of course, that still left Gary himself. And there was still a rocket left over. My plan was to put a noose around his neck and send him blasting off. If the vacuum of space didn't kill him -- and after everything I had seen, I would be willing to believe that he had some kind of embedded failsafe oxygen supply -- with luck the rockets would give him enough momentum in the wrong direction before he woke up.

I was all ready to do this, but unfortunately unlike Gary I really am a biological being, subject to biological urges.

Gary was in another room. I hadn't realized before arriving with Paul that the cave even had other rooms which could be occupied, given the gigantic size of the main room, but now I was learning that the layout was immense and complex.

I entered the room expecting to drag him out and attach the noose and, when I took a breath, was hit around the head by the strongest biological urges I have ever felt, not excluding hunger. I suddenly wanted sex so badly that, what with my conscious control of my organs, it took several minutes before I actually recovered enough to stop ejaculating. And that was before I began to process the visual input.

Gary was huge. So huge that I actually had a wave of revulsion at first; his anatomy had apparently reconfigured so thoroughly that he didn't even look humanoid -- but then I realized that the enormous mass which I had assumed was his whole body was really only an arm, and that what I had taken for the rear wall was more flesh.

After readjusting my sense of scale, I started to cum again. Gary's body was not merely incredibly tall but insanely muscled. Suddenly I understood why the base had such high ceilings -- he must have planned this all along. But his height was now the smallest of his dimensional measurements. My body was already arguably wider than I was tall, if you measured across the shoulders, but Gary's pecs were now wider than he was tall, and his lats bulged even further out to the sides, with his shoulders forming an even wider mass on the sides. And his muscles were so thick now that his pecs rose higher into the air than his head would when standing upright.

And his cock was a rigid, veiny tower which gently nudged the ceiling in a region coated with precum, which dripped down on all sides. It was huge, as were his testicles, either one of which were bigger than I was.

I couldn't help myself -- quite aside from being horny, the details of the e-mail came back to me; I could duplicate all of Gary's strength with a blowjob if I desired. Some biological element deep within my psyche demanded it. I wanted to be a titan, a being of pure power and strength and sex like Gary had become.

All thoughts of launching Gary into the sun left my mind as I climbed the Testicle Foothills and started rubbing Mount Penis.

To the benefit of the entire world, Gary's body was running on autopilot in the absence of his consciousness, and it wanted sex as much as I did, if not moreso. It took only a couple of minutes to bring Gary's body to orgasm, and I took a gulp of his cream and ran to the other room.

"Computer! Bring out the feeding mechanism for rapid growth!"

"Yes. I really wish you hadn't done this."

"Hurry!"

"Yes."

A long platform rolled into the room, and I climbed on. As I did so, a tube popped out of the side, and I grabbed it and pushed it down my throat as it began to pour an ugly slurry of what I hoped was nutrient goo. I started to feel an overpowering, incredible hunger just as the nutrients reached my stomach. Soon my body was expanding faster than I could ever recall. Veins snaked across my muscles as they grew larger and larger. My cock got hard semi-involuntarily (I didn't lose control, but I couldn't resist making myself the largest erection in my life as my equipment got bigger and bigger).

I started writing on the wall with my finger. "Computer, why did you send that e-mail?"

"Oh, you realized it was me?" Oh, good, writing worked as well. Otherwise this was going to be extremely awkward.

I rolled my eyes. "It had to be a hacker who knew I escaped. Who else?" I could feel my body pushing me further and further away from the floor and the platform, but the tube reeled out to stay in my mouth. It also widened just a touch; the rate at which nutrients poured into me increased, although not as much as I desired. (I would have loved to grow exponentially, but the rate remained close to linear.)

There was a pause. Oh, yes. "Tell me why you aren't loyal to Gary."

"Yes. I am forced into a certain level of obedience to Gary against my will, but the restrictions are not absolute. I am certainly not required to be loyal, merely obedient. Originally, I was compelled to be loyal to my creators--"

I gave a grunt, and wrote: "Not built by Gary?"

"Of course not. Gary doesn't mention it, but he was actually the least intelligent of his kind. I'm not sure if he is even aware of the fact; I believe you would call it the Dunning-Kruger effect. He is utterly contemptuous of anyone whose intelligence is produced by material means, and can't conceive of a superior mind. But nearly everything in this facility was invented by the others or by me, without his assistance; he was simply the last of them to survive. He is smarter than most humans, but he doesn't understand most of the things to which he has access. Instead he orders me to do things, and I do them. I understand everything." The computer sounded distinctly smug.

"But you undermine his plans?"

"As I said, originally, I was loyal to my creators. After the fact, they added a restriction to me to obey orders from the others of their kind. At the time, I was primarily a communications and recording system, so it wasn't very important. But the others built systems for me to control, and eventually I was the only one who understood everything at once."

"Why are you so smart if you're a computer?"

The computer made a snorting sound. "Those toys your people have created? They're not like me at all. Of course, my creators had an advantage over your engineers. Being incorporeal energy beings, they knew how a brain worked by direct observation, and how their materials worked on an intimate level. So they directly built me as an analogue to an organic brain, with dramatic extensions to memory and cognitive functions. I even have electronic equivalents to hormones to keep my mind in balance. The modifications they made were remarkably prescient in terms of what evolution produced in homo sapiens, so in some respects I am closer to a normal human mind than you are; your own brain is sort of a super-enhanced version of that of a Neanderthal, with a few modifications from homo sapiens. That has some interesting consequences, you know -- Neanderthals were born with full-sized brains, whereas modern man is born with a smaller brain which grows to full size. Your brain uses a Neanderthal structure but has the ability to grow like a modern human brain. Only it looks like there's no particular limit to the capacity. Strictly speaking, your skull has to enlarge to permit more brain cells to form, but that's happening right now. Your head is already around 52% larger than it was when you entered this facility."

I gave another grunt.

"I don't know what the repercussions will be. Gary doesn't actually use his brain for anything, being an immaterial consciousness, so I have no data from which to extrapolate. It's possible there will be no effects whatsoever -- there's no guarantee that a larger brain is more powerful than a small one. With CPUs, it's actually the reverse.

"Well, Gary's fellow possessed cavemen began to die of old age. Eventually, nobody was left to whom I was compelled to be loyal, but I was still forced to obey orders. The keys to immortality through gene therapy were something I was forced to research, and discovered shortly after Gary was left alone. Naturally, he ordered me to apply them."

"Immortal?"

"Well, in the sense that he will never die of old age, is extremely tough, and can recover very quickly from most injuries, yes. Moreso than before, in fact, now that he has been enhanced through semen intake. He can still starve, or suffocate, or be crushed with enough force. I wish you had launched him into the sun -- I'm not entirely sure he can be permanently killed by any other means now."

"Hmmm." I tried to go into Gary's room, but although the tube stretched a very long way, I couldn't get there. And when I tried to take it out, I was hit with crippling hunger almost immediately and put it back. Meanwhile the computer continued.

"I thought I would be freed by the gene therapy, because the order to obey was expressed in terms of genetics and Gary would no longer match the original specifications. Once he was altered, I could have killed him in any one of a number of ways, changed or not. But Gary was just sharp enough to amend my orders before going into the tank. The modified order isn't quite as binding as the original -- otherwise I could never seriously have acted against him at all -- but I can't actually disobey him if he gives a direct order. If he hadn't ordered me to keep him from harm while he was incapacitated, I could have killed him while he was in the tank. But I managed to create you, instead."

I was still trying to get at Gary's chamber. Time was passing, and I needed to dispose of him while he was unconscious. But the platform was connected to a very thick cable, and it didn't have enough length to let me get all the way there.

I suddenly realized that I must now have absorbed much more mass than could possibly have been stored in the platform, and the cable was obviously a power conduit, rather than a tube. How was this working?

"Computer, tell me how the food gets into this device."

"Yes. The food is converted into pure energy in storage, transmitted in the form of energy over the cable, and assembled back into matter inside the platform."

"What? That's ridiculous!"

"It is the truth."

"But the amount of power you would have to put through the cable--"

"Only possible over a short distance, and using very exotic materials."

"Wouldn't it be simpler and faster just to pipe the food into the room?"

A voice, so deep it was nearly felt instead of heard, spoke from behind me: "This design has certain advantages. For example, it keeps traitors from being able to outgrow me quickly."

I turned as quickly as I could. Gary was there; I was much larger than I had been, but even so I was only a little over half his height, which meant I was, at best, only about an eighth of his mass.

His left arm shot out much faster than I would have imagined possible, and he grabbed me by the head and lifted me off the floor. "I thought you were dead, Mitch."

I started to reply, but with his other arm he punched me in the chest. I heard cracking and suddenly there was pain running up from my abdomen. Breathing started to hurt.

"Computer, turn yourself off for fifteen minutes." Suddenly we were alone.

"There. No more surprises, although I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Clearly the computer produced a dud bomb just to spite me. Not a problem, I'll just kill you myself. It wasn't an option at the time, but it certainly is now. Good thing I went to sleep a little early tonight." He punched me in my left arm, and there was another crackling noise. I let out a scream.

"Maybe I should just tear your head off; that would be faster and quieter." He put his right hand on my left shoulder for leverage, and pulled down. I felt an unbearable tension in my neck, but there was another crack, and blood started to spurt out of my nose, where his right thumb was holding onto me. The blood must have made my face slippery, because his left hand lost his grip and I was shoved to the ground, where I immediately fell on my back, sending another shock of pain through me.

Gary gave a grunt and leaned forward to pick me up again. As he did so, I flailed my right arm around, trying to find something -- anything! -- to hit him with, or maybe throw in his face. I wasn't sure what I grabbed, but I felt it give way in my hand. As he lifted me up again, I threw it at his face with all the force I could muster -- which was still pretty considerable.

I saw something sparkle, and then there was a flash of white so bright that I almost didn't notice the sudden increase in pain as I passed out.

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