The Eden Protocols: A Bimbo Space Odyssey - Part Two
"Are you sure this is okay, Doctor Hughes?" Grace asked, licking her spoon clean. "I'm not contaminating the sick bay by eating at my station or anything?"
What a dear girl she was, Maeve reflected as she handed the mousy brunette another bowl of brown nutrient paste. So conscientious and thoughtful in the performance of her duties.
Efficient too, both in the way she was motoring through the gloopy food substitute and the data packets Tucker was sending them.
"Not at all, Grace. It might be a different matter if we had any actual patients but I don't see myself performing surgery any time soon." Maeve waved a hand at the otherwise vacant white room in explanation.. "Your body's reserves need replenishing after a long period in stasis and consider how empty your digestive tract must be after years of nothing but intravenous feeding. I can fetch you a different flavor if you prefer..."
The wall-mounted calorie dispenser had a variety of different settings to adjust the taste and seasoning of the brown sludge. Otherwise it was a tasteless porridge made from a genetically modified algae that was cultivated in vast qualities on the hydroponics deck.
Chemical additives were added to make it as sweet or savory as any palate desired. With a tap on the touchscreen interface it could be set to 'Beef Wellington' or 'Creme Brulee' or any number of other dishes spanning the width of earth's culinary cultures.
How close the gastronomic results were to the actual dishes, Maeve couldn't say. It always produced the same plastic soup bowl of brown gloop and she hadn't touched another drop of it.
The doctor herself had been subsisting on freeze-dried emergency ration packs she had found in the cargo hold. There were crates and crates of the silver foil packages, vacuum sealed, and therefore unlikely to have been tampered with by the ship's rogue AI.
"Nah, it's fine. Not as good as Mom's home cooking but food is just fuel, right?" Grace replied, clicking a few more keys as her jade green eyes remained locked on the glowing screen full of numbers and symbols. "If my doctor has no complaints, I say keep 'em coming. I can't believe how hungry I am."
It was nice to have company again. Real company instead of the vicarious sense of intimacy she got from watching Tucker fuck Charlotte's enormous tanned titties and blow fat, beautiful loads all over her ecstatic heart-shaped face as Maeve fingered herself silly in her office.
Grace was an academic prodigy from Canada, had earned her masters in Biochemistry from the University of Toronto by age seventeen and gained a fellowship before her twentieth birthday. She was a short, slightly stocky brunette who hadn't lost the bookish air of a student or gained the mature figure of a woman grown just yet.
She was good company and the perfect test subject both.
A stack of five bowls sat at the end of her work station, all but licked clean of their mud-colored contents as she started in on her sixth. Maeve had noticed Tucker and Charlotte consuming great quantities of the nutrient paste between frenzied bouts of face or titty fucking, and their increasingly short productive periods of work.
Only... Charlotte had stopped eating the dietary slop at some point. The one source of nourishment the gravid blonde spunk junkie now ingested spouted frequently from the end of Tucker's magnificent cock.
Maeve could read an obvious hint in the numerous dirty dishes that littered the engineering bay floor. Recognise a connection between her frantically fornicating crewmates and the empty bowls stacked up in the corners like teetering towers of plastic.
...and what better way to turn a hypothesis into a theory than through the scientific method of replication? Reproducing the same result would add merit to her eventual prognosis.
Repeatability was critical to credibility, she knew.
"These readings are pretty interesting. Too early to draw any concrete conclusions but pituitary gland activity is definitely up across the board. Like,
way
up in every case so far and somatotropin production..."
Maeve let the shop talk fade into the background as she scrutinized the young scientist. She would wait for her full report later instead of indulging in early guesswork. She had chosen Grace as much for her underdeveloped frame as for her esteemed intellect.
Her hair color too.
That had seemed important for some reason. Tucker already had a blonde in Charlotte, and Maeve had hair the color of midnight, so he'd likely appreciate the pigment diversity of a friendly brunette.
Maeve had her eye on a redhead named Harper Kelly next, once Grace was properly settled into life aboard ship with a hugely hung stud like Tucker, fucking like a prize stallion only a few decks away...
Harper was a young Scottish botanist with a thin runner's physique who would be helpful in investigating the vast seedling nurseries that generated supplemental oxygen, soaked up excess carbon dioxide, and grew the future crops which would support the new colony once it was founded.
...or something like that. She also had big amber eyes and an adorable rash of freckles across her cute button nose which Tucker would probably find irresistible.
For now Maeve was busy cataloging the changes already manifesting on her unwitting guinea pig.
Grace was clearly a studious sort, prone to getting lost in her work to the detriment of her situational awareness. Even as the distractible girl prattled on about testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone levels between spoonfuls of artificially flavored muck, her body was slowly changing.
It was an insidious, creeping change but noticeable if someone knew what to look for.
Grace remained in her sheer nano-weave hibernation suit at Maeve's insistence, never questioning the head physician's reasoning, but wore an open lab coat over it as a token nod to modesty and propriety.
Beneath the white coat, the early warning signs were beginning to appear. Gradual but significant.
Her quarter-sized nipples were pebbled and hard. The last vestiges of baby fat were melting away from her pooched belly by small degrees... or perhaps "creeping away" was a better term, as Grace's barely-there bust and boyish hips swelled by almost imperceptible fractions.
All that gobbled food had to go somewhere and... was her hair growing? The poor girl kept trying to blow the walnut brown fringe of her bob cut out of her vision, even as the chub was oh-so-slowly sucked from her apple cheeks to relocate down into her incrementally plumping lips.
"--you said some guy called Tucker was sending us these readings. Where is he and what does he do? Can I meet him?"
Tucker!
That name snapped Maeve out of her state of clinical observation and returned her to the present. Grace was staring expectantly up at her, expression perplexed as the Doctor's skin broke out in an immediate blush and she toyed with a loose strand of her long raven hair.
"I--I should probably check in with him." Maeve recovered, pulling her treacherous hands down to her sides and taking a deep, calming breath. "He's very busy and important... but I'll let Tucker know you asked after him. I think he would appreciate the kind regards."
"Sure, though I meant it more as a professional courtesy." Grace said, discarding the soup spoon in favor of raising the bowl to her lips to drink deep of its sludgy brown contents. "I don't play for the men's side, if you catch my meaning, and Doc... I've noticed the way you've been staring at me."
