Crime Brulee and the American Dream [preview]

Chapter 1.1

Special Agent Rosamond Somme of the United States Division of Heroics was absolutely perfect, aside from the small matter of her inability to drive. Nobody had ever taught her, so, it was onto the bus to make her way downtown…downtown? Uptown? Ugh! She was going to the headquarters of a one Mybrid, Inc. for her latest assignment.

After handing the driver a dollar bill, she picked herself out a seat that wasn’t wet or dirty. She’d hate to arrive at her destination with stains on her pink pantsuit.

*** higher-ups for sending her to this meeting across town at the LAST POSSIBLE–

Calm. Calm. She was fine. Impeccable, as always.

Rose was all kinds of things. Sort of. She was…well, she was blonde. Pretty. The work she put into her hair ought to have earned her a second salary.

She was fashionable. While the other ladies in the office contented themselves to dress like men, all black-on-black pantsuits with white shirts and black shoes, she stood out in her pastels and stylish hats.

And she was thin. Most importantly, she was thin, and she worked for it with every undressed salad and every hour on the elliptical that measured out her life’s passing weeks. So, when the bus stopped to admit a lone passenger who struggled to squeeze his rotund frame down the aisle and between the rows of seats, huffing and puffing with exertion, his joints surely screaming for relief, Rose justified gripping down tighter on the safety rail and remaining firmly seated, looking him dead in the eye as if to say, ‘You did this to yourself, buddy’. (Her air of dainty femininity was only skin-deep; anyone who knew her for a minute or more picked up on the huntress’ barbarism lying just below her girlish veneer.)

At last, the bus deposited her at an office tower, where she rode the elevator forty-some-odd stories high and was escorted by a secretary to the office of Leo Caprisky, CEO of the Mybrid social network and internationally famed inventor.

“Ah, you must be the young lady from the Heroics Division,” he said, looking up from the schematics and blueprints scattered across his desk as she entered. It was a shock: she’d almost asked where she could find the CEO. The man seated at the desk before her wore a rumpled Blackwater Blades shirt and a backwards Stingrays ball cap over a messy nest of brown hair. Glancing under the desk showed her he had on baggy pajama bottoms and no shoes or socks.

Before she’d said anything, he stood, both palms pressed to the desk. (It was spartan; a plain slab of glass on a wiry metallic frame. She knew the type of guy–she knew almost every type of guy; she’d met them all again and again and again, although somehow never managed to score a second date. Here was a man so convinced of his own intellectual brilliance that he assumed that his natural talent was where his effort to impress should be allowed to end.) “Shall we go down the hall so I can acquaint you with my marvelous machine?”

“Spare me the fanfare,” groaned Rose. “I know what you moody little geniuses are like: you all think you’ve invented the thing that’s really going to change the world this time, but I could give a shit. I’m only here to do my job, so let’s just get things over with, Dr. Caprisky.”

He chuckled; it was this weird laugh that almost sounded like a ‘whir’ in the back of his throat, alien and unsettling, but nothing that could easily rattle her. “So quick to profile me as the egotist, and yet, you’re the one overestimating my accomplishments. I’m afraid I can’t boast the Ph.D.” He walked out from behind the desk and led the way out of his cramped office and deeper into the winding expanse of Mybrid, Inc.

“May I ask what the Division’s interest is in the DreamWeaver 9000?” asked Leo as they traversed the level.

“Technically, it’s confidential, but…” But with the way rumors spiraled back at the office, ‘confidential’ barely had any meaning. “They want to know if it’s worth investing in a unit for use in criminal interrogations.”

“They’ve seen my asking price,” said Leo.

“And I’ve heard it’s steep, but they’d rather spend money on anything other than personnel, and they’re hoping in time it’ll pay for itself in shadow work salaries they won't have to pay anymore.”

“Shadow work?”

Rose rolled her eyes. “People that use their superpowers to torture answers out of suspects. We were working on a solution internally, but Agent Hastings fucked the dog, and, well, here I am.”

Leo stopped and turned to face her. “Are you supposed to know about the Verity Project?”

“Are you?” she countered.

Leo scoffed. “Either way, I’m not the one whose job is on the line if anyone finds out what I know. If anything, your higher-ups should be grateful I’m not a poorer man–taking the scandal to the Bugle would earn me quite a buck. But no…no. They can keep their secrets. Unless anyone other than me decides to spill them, that is.”

In truth, Rose knew nothing about the Verity Project, other than it had something to do with truth serum and it was now shut down. Interesting to know it might be worth a chunk of change if she could find out more, though.

“This way now, it’s just a bit further.”

Their trek ended in a white-walled laboratory lined with shelves and counters loaded with all manner of vials, beakers, and monitors, but in the center of the room lay the main attraction: a pair of chairs, interconnected and woven through with wires and machinery, with twin helmets attached to the headrests.

“How does it work?” asked Rose.

“Oh, it’s all easy-breezy-lemon-squeezy, you see?” said Leo. “First, you sit down, like this.” His palm landed on the back of her shoulder. He guided her into one of the chairs.

“Then I numb you, keep you from moving, and finally, I sedate you.”

An IV went into her arm.

“Then we just plug you in. A probe goes into your brain.”

The helmet lowered over her head, its pinkish visor falling at the level of her eyes. If the probe was in, she didn’t feel its entry.

“And then…”

***

Her belly was HUGE.

Not that any part of her was small. Her legs squirmed in her bed, trying to comfortably arrange their cumbersome, yet somehow familiar flab. She was supposed to be skinny…but she was fat here, she’d been fat here before, and furthermore, she was supposed to be fat here.

Her tits weighed against her arms like jelly-filled sacks as she struggled with pudgy fingers to rip open cellophane packages of sweet, sweet snack cakes, pink, yellow, and chocolate…

Greasy bags of chips…

Candy bars full of fatty nuts and creamy peanut butter.

But back to her belly: it was stuffed, jutting high above the rest of her frame in bed as she crammed each fattening handful of snacks into her mouth, chewed, and greedily swallowed.

There was a rhyme and reason to this, in this place. The President decided to award a mansion and a yacht to every American woman willing to double her weight in a year, for patriotism, or whatever. Or the new alien overlords demanded all humans become as fat as possible as a form or worship to their sacred deity, or something. Or a sexy foreign prince had arrived in town, fresh off a boat that had come up-river, and he had a heart full of love and a wedding ring ready, but only for the fattest, most beautiful woman in all of Blackwater City.

Either way, Rose had never felt sexier than she did when she was free to put her inner glutton to its ultimate test. Moaning, she slipped a hand down her panties just as she crammed down a handful of food. It was a little of everything scattered on the bed, and the knee-shaking orgasm hit her just as the fistful of chocolate landed heavy in her stomach, heavenly. Reveling in the afterglow, she licked the melted chocolate and smeared cake filling from her open palm before kissing the salty chip dust off each of her fingertips.

“Having fun?” asked Leo, seated in the corner, in a wicker chair.

Rose screamed, scrambling in bed to prop herself up on her elbows.

“Before you ask, yes, I’ve been here this whole time.”

Rose yanked up the covers to conceal her giant, flabby, stretchmarked, braless chest and her soaked panties. Looking frantically around, she noticed for the first time that the bed and the bedroom were unfamiliar. Stark white sunlight streamed in through white curtains and bounced gleefully off white sheets and the white canopy overhead. “Where am I?”

“I hypothesized this might be disorienting the first time,” said Leo. “Do you remember the laboratory?”

“The, the, the…yeah,” she nodded, her breath steadying as it all came back to her. “I’m dreaming.” Come to think of it, the ‘getting fat’ dream was a recurring one of hers.

But not a nightmare.

“It seems my machine is in fine working condition,” said Leo.

Rose absently palmed her belly outside the luxuriant bedsheets. “That’s good. I don’t know what I’m going to tell my boss, though. This doesn’t feel anything like an interrogation.”

“Isn’t it?” Leo quipped. “As operator of the machine, I have the power to ask questions.”

“What did you ask?” What could he have possibly asked that would land her on her back, so corpulent and compromised?

He smirked. “I wanted to know your deepest desire.”