Patient Zero was an artist named Jenna, but most of her fans knew her as JenPumps. She was involved in an ambitious creative effort for a particularly interesting community. Massively multiplayer games weren't unknown in Cyberdream, but they weren't nearly as popular as historians of the virtual would tell you they once had been. This made a certain sense, because all of humanity was already living inside such a game. Most contemporary virtual worlds were intended for individual use or small groups, but Jenna and her collaborators had a reason to build a dream within the 'Dream.
They were members of a fetish community focused on size, a remarkably diverse and creative group who were pleased with the additional mutability to human anatomy afforded by the simulation in which they lived, but who still felt that their ability to grow was far too limited. Legitimate cosmetic modifications were restricted in scope and were often locked behind financial barriers; illicit mods allowed for more freedom but carried significant risks; the most powerful of them were highly illegal. Size enthusiasts had responded by building a network that flourished with creatives of all types in pursuit of their expansive fantasies. Artists, authors, programmers, and performers stood at the heart of a surprisingly large community of fans eager to experience the human form expanded and exaggerated in nigh-infinite variations. They worked in every conceivable medium: traditional art and digital and holo, fixed and interactive, literature and visuals, performances using camera tricks and props and mods.
Jenna's area of expertise was holographic simulations, the most modern art form and the one requiring the most coding skill. The night of the incident, she was putting finishing touches on the visuals for a specialty of hers: ass inflation with air. The project that her team of kink creators was engaged in was the creation of a middle ground where the size community could congregate. It wouldn't be Cyberdream proper; it would be a holo, just a game. There wouldn't be any winning this "game," though; it was intended to be a large, detailed virtual world (though far more limited in scope than the 'Dream itself) in which people could meet and talk and interact much as though they weren't in a holo at all, with the notable difference that this world would contain the proper subroutines to allow size fetishists to indulge their impulses.
Pumps that could inflate body parts, lotions and potions and spells to bloat tits and asses and bellies to obscene sizes, spaces designated for those who wanted to walk around as tall as a skyscraper; the possibilities were endless, and supporters of the project proffered a never-ending stream of suggestions that added more functionality, and more complexity. Perhaps the most difficult task for the team's artists was integrating the look and feel of the transformations they created into any given holo character. If there were a limited number of appearance options for players to choose from, it would be a small matter to match the changes with each of them. If there were a smaller world with a limited number of participants, the code wouldn't have to be as optimized to avoid glitching; there were plenty of examples from other holos the community had created.
The team had decided early on, however, that they needed a powerful, flexible, detailed character creation process, as well as the option to load into the game with a copy of one's real image, and they needed every kind of expansion to work correctly on every kind of body. To create a central hub for a community with tastes as diverse and as extreme as size enthusiasts was no simplistic endeavour; they were breaking new ground to build a truly special and unique holo.
It was JenPumps who had made the most persuasive case to the community. She had written an impassioned appeal to their better nature, as well as their kink. The year before, she'd gone through the worst days of her life. Personal losses, a relationship shattered when she shared her inflation dreams, and a subsequent hit to her mainstream professional reputation had left her struggling mentally and financially, and she'd questioned her decision to be an artist at all, until the community rallied around her.
It wasn't exactly a surprise that it had happened, they'd done it as long as anyone could remember, she just never imagined they'd do it for her. Support, assistance and love poured in from friends and acquaintances and fellow artists and fans and people she'd never heard of, brought together by two enticements. The first was the art created in her honor, and her image; some of the best size artists around had raised donations by creating top-notch drawings and holoforms modeled (approximately) on her, pumping her up to enormous sizes as rewards for fundraising milestones.
The second, and more important, was their shared humanity, the bond created by the experience of being outside the norm, but out there together and in greater numbers than most people would guess. What if, she had asked, it were possible to come together in a space made for them, where they could show their support for each other almost in person? Where you could thank someone not just by making size art of them, but by actually making them bigger? It was that dual appeal that pulled the team together, and got thousands of people to put forward the resources necessary to do something really big.
Jenna had thus been central to the project, which led to her being central to the incident. On that fateful day, she had been testing the results of her butt inflation model on a variety of holoforms, and before she called it complete, she wanted to perform her usual final test: how did it look on a copy of an arbitrary human image?
Specifically, her own image.
