Witless Protection Program

"That's part of it, but the one that seems like my best bet isn't actually prescribed in the US."

"Really? What is it? I bet I could bring you some from Mexico. I'm going to visit my cousin this weekend."

"The pendejo?"

"Haha no this one's a pendeja," she joked. "Fuckin' love her, though. Verónica is really funny, an amazing cook, and super cute. She's coming here on a student visa in the fall. Hey, do you need anyone to work here?"

"I'd certainly be interested!" I said noncommittally, more because I didn't want to offend the youth I had working the till at that moment than because I doubted anyone Angel might recommend.

"Her English is pretty good. You'll see," Angel said, but didn't push the issue. "So, like, what's your favorite?"

"Butterscotch vanilla," I said immediately, "Personally I like it with extra butterscotch between obleas wafers."

"Are you fucking kidding me? Obleas?" Angel asked, delighted. "I'm definitely getting that shit."

I laughed and set to scooping out Vanilla Bubble Cream and folding in the butterscotch sauce.

"God, your tits are epic, girl," Angle told me, probably because she was witnessing my contortions to see what I was doing past my personal mountain range.

"Thanks Angel!" I said, bobbling a little with pleasure. I was aware the girl at the till was probably overhearing and thinking that I was a complete airhead, but compliments from someone as beautiful as Angel just made me quiver inside.

I wouldn't let Angel pay, and she got her revenge by not letting me pay for the pills she brought back the next Monday. "You wouldn't believe how cheap they were anyway. Also, I checked around to make sure they're legit," she said, handing me a huge bottle of them. "Only thing is these are going to expire kind of soon, so don't, like, throw them in the back of the drawer."

"Oh?" I said, but I saw that I had 8 months before the listed date. "That's fine. Thank you so much!"

"My pleasure! Good luck! See you soon!"

The shop had spent all Sunday being out of my ice cream, so I started taking them straightaway. I didn't see any positive change the next day; in fact I was off by a few milliliters, but Wednesday I was up over a hundred. That was still within my normal daily variation, but Thursday was up even more, breaking the three liter mark for my first time. Friday took me up several hundred more milliliters, and Saturday I neared four liters in a single day. By the end of Sunday, my production had doubled since starting on the domperidone, which was far beyond my expectations, and I considered reducing the dosage, but Monday I was up only a few ml, so I kept on.

In the meantime, the pumping sessions lasted longer and longer, leaving me less time to work in the rest of the shop and also leaving me a bit, well, bovine. The longer the sessions lasted without Andrea there to help me climax, the more my mind started to go blank, like I was enjoying an erotic meditation. I had a lactation closet at the rear of the kitchen so no one disturbed me or was disturbed by me during my fugue states, but even after they were over, the weird tantric calm faded slowly, and I'd have to give myself five or ten minutes before I could hold a conversation without making a fool of myself.

Andrea and Nikki started coming to the shop, keeping an eye on things and helping out during the periods of my indisposition, which made me feel a little guilty, though at least in Nikki's case she clearly was having a blast. I didn't quite appreciate her joke in taking advantage of my state to dress me up in a sex cow outfit and record video while I obediently moo'd, but it wasn't as if she shared it with anyone outside the Squad, so I reckoned it was fair trade for her free labour.

Andrea, on the other hand, could snap me out of it quickly by donning a strap-on and rogering me until I exploded. They were amazingly extended orgasms, lasting several subjective minutes, and by the time I stopped convulsing, I was mostly my normal self.

I still wanted to find a way to shorten the pumping time, though, so when Amber quietly proposed that I buy an industrial milker, I was ready to take her seriously. If anything, I was excited to try it once I compared my nipples to those on cow udders and noted that milkers seemed to work fine on relatively stubby teats of about the same size and shape as mine. We'd try renting, and if it worked out, we'd buy it.

The Dairy

I got over my embarrassment at being hooked up to an industrial milker after a single session, because it was so much better. It was clearly designed for creatures that were going to lactate loads, and was designed to coax milk out as quickly and comfortably as possible. It emptied my tanks over twice as fast, and supplied me with a good orgasm to boot, so that I was done and over my cow phase within ten minutes.

And, now that my milkings were so quick and enjoyable, I was happy to keep taking my pills even if they did increase my lactation a bit more. And they did, bit by bit. It crept up on me slowly, more noticeable in my ravenous appetite than any other way, but within a month my production had doubled again. However, my nipples were expressing milk more efficiently, so milking times were up only moderately.

Meanwhile, the shop went from strength to strength, and we continued to sell out. We were also getting inquiries about distribution through specialty grocers. Obviously we had to turn them down, but the prices they offered made clear there was a significant market for what we were making, if only we could make more. If I could make more.

Now, I did continue to increase my production, but the rate of increase was slowing, and while 8 liters a day seemed attainable, ten liters was probably too much to hope for. Also, I found that I was still falling into a bovine trance at times, and even when I didn't, I discovered that milking left me somewhat asthenic, unable to make intelligible vocal sounds and quite unsteady on my feet. Nikki thought this was very cute, but it made me anxious to think of what might happen if I had to respond to something while in that state.

I was also a little concerned that the nitrous oxides in my breasts were doing long term damage to my brain. I didn't have any concrete reason to believe so, but I couldn't dismiss the possibility, either. And given my tentative conclusion that it was precisely those nitrous gasses that gave my milk its special je ne sais quoi, I was reluctant to bring the matter to a doctor who might declare my ice cream to be dangerously psychoactive or some such nonsense.

But then a new danger and a new possibility arrived simultaneously, in the form of Nikki beginning to lactate. Moreover, she was lactating cream frothing with the same nitrous oxides as my milk. We had, of course, been spending lots of time together, and her preferred oral method for cleaning the last dribbles of milk off my teats meant that she had had extended contact with my mammary fluids, but the possibility of her somehow catching lactation from me was extremely alarming. It implied that I might be shedding some live mimivirus containing one of the transgenic payloads that had transformed me. Given the timing, I had to assume it had been in the topical ointment, which implied that it wouldn't just be me spreading it, it would be dozens of people.

After that, I made sure not to let anyone else drink directly from the tap, no matter how much I enjoyed it, putting them off with the very credible, but untrue, claim that my nipples were sore from milking. My milk was always flash pasteurized before being made into ice cream anyway; the pasteurizer was the one gift from the mobsters that we'd kept because they seemed to have forgotten that it was one of the items in the warehouse of castoffs they'd given us access to. It had been freshly refurbished and inspected, though, so I felt very confident that any viruses in my milk would be inactivated by the rapid heating and cooling action.

At the same time, Nikki was delighted to be able to contribute to the dairy, though even with domperidone her production was barely a fifth of mine. On the other hand, that meant that between the two of us we roundly surpassed ten liters a day, good for almost 1400 Bubbles Bars a week. And if she kept growing until she was as big a cow as I was, well, I was sure she wouldn't mind.

You may think this was a little cavalier of me to assume, but understand that she custom-ordered matching cattle-style ear-tags earrings for us to wear, and got a matching cow outfit to the one she'd had me wear, then took some pictures of us each holding up transparent jugs of our milk production as if in triumph. That picture she kept for herself, but I also know she made enthusiastic and lucrative use of her outfit in her ForFans channel even after I declined joining her for that one.

The Laboratory

Throughout all this, it was difficult to get back to my research, and also I was getting to the point where I couldn't just read papers and run simulations. I had pieced together many things about how CHANGE worked that I didn't think I had known even when I'd been working in the lab. With X-25, the body had to be pre-treated in order to accept the mimivirus, or whatever they used. One key insight was that the CHANGE mimivirus, in the process of being reengineered to carry its human DNA payload, had been fused with a much smaller satellite virus that was capable of entering mammalian cells. That satellite virus eliminated the need for pre-treatment. By itself, the satellite virus didn't actually reproduce itself or damage host cells in any way, except to make them susceptible to invasion by the mimivirus.

This was important, because the CHANGE was predicated on an immune system response preventing the mimivirus from infecting non-target cells, but I had developed a strong suspicion that the immune system didn't actually react to the benign satellite virus at all. If the satellite virus was only loosely fused as I suspected, I could still be carrying a lot of it in me without showing symptoms. I could even be producing it from live stem cells.

Even then it wouldn't explain how actual human DNA could be carried from host to host, though, because the satellite viruses didn't contain any DNA in the first place. So, I was pretty sure that it was actually something the clinic had given me that was causing the contagion, not the CHANGE viruses. But I really wanted to test this hypothesis with actual instruments. My burning curiosity aside, I also knew that someday soon, as the technology spread, people would start looking for escaped engineered viruses in the environment, and I didn't want everyone pointing to me as the source.

But how to get access to the right equipment? There were a few different combinations of machines that would do what I wanted, but would would cost tens of thousands of dollars and take up lots of space. I toyed with various schemes on how to get access to the local university's laboratory, but they required awfully elaborate plans that I knew I wouldn't be able to keep straight, and even if I did, I was sure there was no way for someone who looked like me to maintain a low profile.

The growth of the shop, however, opened up new options. As we outgrew the tiny kitchen both in volume and the variety of products we wanted to flog, our balance sheets also became more attractive to small business lenders who could finance our subletting a portion of the mostly-vacant warehouse that abutted the rear of shop. As an added bonus, the corridor we used to take our rubbish bins to the alley also had an entrance to our side of the warehouse.

With great excitement I set to work installing dividers and an industrial HVAC system. Not all by myself, of course, but I found that while I had to delegate the tracking of subcontractor paperwork to Angel's excellent cousin Verónica, I had no trouble drawing plans and even performing quite a lot of the construction and renovation myself. I don't think I convinced the various tradespeople who came to perform work that I was intelligent, but they did at least learn to respect my grasp of craft in most respects.

In the process, I was able to build for myself an inconspicuous place to locate any lab machines I cared to buy or rent, so long as I stuck with the most compact versions. I hid the secret room behind a refrigeration unit and ductwork, and the only access to it that didn't require removing a divider was through a hidden door the private milking room.

Embezzling money from myself to obtain the machines was much harder. I wasn't going to make Verónica break the law on my behalf, and I knew my bubble brain couldn't keep one set of accounts straight, much less two. Just buying them for the company might draw attention in its own way. So, I asked Nikki to buy them for me in return for going on her ForFans to do the cow-themed series she'd been wanting me to do.

I didn't remember many details about the first episode because Nikki had me in a milking stupor almost right from the start, but it was evidently a huge success, and I had my 'toys' as Nikki called them in very short order. It was a very good plan because I didn't even have to feel awkward or do any acting when I was basically just featuring as a brainless bimbo cow, and she recorded it right in the milking room of the warehouse where I would have been stuck being milked anyway. I wasn't sure how I felt about the leash and the bell and all the bovine getup she had me wear for it, but it started to feel natural very quickly.

And in the meantime, I had my very own small but tolerably complete laboratory!

-Reproduction-

The Virus

Learning to use the new machines convinced me that I was actually smarter than I was before the CHANGE, because I mastered them very quickly. I could sequence DNA beautifully, even if I could barely remember to change out of my cow outfit before returning to the shop after a milking.

You might wonder why I put the cow outfit on in the first place if I wasn't recording a video for Nikki, but you have to understand that I relied very heavily on routine when I was in my cow state, and if I didn't follow all the steps, I'd forget more important steps. Practicing a new personal routine enough times for it to stick was almost impossible when it wasn't something that held my interest, but for whatever reason when Nikki led me through the routine while I was in a fugue, I picked up the routine almost immediately. That made it easiest to just continue doing what she'd asked me to do, including putting on the cowbell collar and so on. What did it matter if I dressed up like a cowgirl where no one except Nikki could see me? And she was very appreciative of my look when she'd join me for her own milking.

Regardless, anyone who watched me closely would never believe how advanced my work in the lab was getting or how exciting it was. I was nearly living down at the shop, maximizing my production of both milk and science, saving commute time by sleeping overnight in the professional massage chair that I'd modified into a comfy milking rest. I just didn't want to waste a moment.

Confirming that I was still absolutely infested with satellite viruses was easy, because every part of me had them. Figuring out where they were coming from and if any were still attached to a live mimivirus was more difficult. For the sake of due diligence I confirmed that I couldn't culture any satellite viruses in vitro. They definitely attached to cells successfully, but without any code to reproduce themselves, they didn't spread after initial exposure. The only part that really surprised me was how resistant to heat they were: the flash pasteurizer failed to inactivate them. After a few simulations I decided the most likely reason was that if they were carrying viral RNA necessary for self-replication, the heat would have destroyed it, but the protein structures that allowed it to attach to cell membranes were much more hardy.

Because of the cascading, oncovirus-in-stem-cell nature of CHANGE and X-25 transformations, though, that meant that the satellite viruses I was shedding could, if they reached stem cells, potentiate someone for reception of appropriately-configured mimiviruses encountered in the future. That is, I could be performing the first step of an X-25 style transformations for those who came into contact with large amounts of the satellite viruses I was still producing.

That was alarming, but as far as I could tell, no one had yet replicated a CHANGE-type pairing with any satellite virus, much less the specific one I was spreading. And it wasn't as if a virus that couldn't replicate would affect very many cells, even it my ice cream was loaded with them. The concern was really purely theoretical. The phenomenon of Nikki seeming to have 'caught' a transformation from me was probably a red herring. After all, Andrea had also spent a great deal of intimate time with me, and she had not caught it. Angel's oddly recovered breasts had not started lactating, either, so I thought I was off the list of suspects there, too.

But I knew there had to be a bunch of mimiviruses out there. Media reports of mysterious new unapproved treatments to do all sorts of things were cropping up, to great alarm in the medical community, but less so amongst a public that seemed to have a wide variety of very confused ideas about the phenomenon, ranging from skeptics thinking it was a scam to cover for unlicensed surgery to alternative medicine enthusiasts regarding it as vindication of their favourite treatment modalities. From my perspective, on the other hand, it seemed clear that at least a few of the cases could hardly be anything but a mimiviridae-based tissue transformation.

Creating a test to detect them was another matter entirely. If I had any examples, they were surely buried in my tissues, probably inside somatic stem cells. At least, I tried to find any signatures in my milk, blood, or other fluids, but everything I found turned out to be false positives from normal viruses. My new skills didn't extend to self-biopsy, and even if it did, I'd have to get a whole new roster of lab machines to isolate my stem cells.

In order to obtain a sample of the virus, I'd have to go to the source. So, I requested a consultation for a procedure at the mob-affiliated clinic.

The Clinic

Evidently the consulting physician hadn't heard of me, based on the way his eyes bulged out of his head at the sight of me wobbling into his office.

"Miss... Suckle?" he asked.

"You can call me Bubbles," I said with my best ditzy giggle.

"Sure, Bubbles. You can call me Doctor Jim," he said with an unctuous smile.

"Nice to meet you, Doc-tor," I said, drawing it out and playing with my hair.

"I think you must have been here before," he said.

"Yeah. How did you know?" I asked, adding a little twist that sent my chest surging back and forth to indicate that I had some idea as to what might have tipped him off.

"Sixth sense," he joked. "So, what can I do for you?"

"I really liked my results so far. Maybe I could enroll in another 'preclinical trial'?" I asked. My previous experience with the clinic notwithstanding, these dodgy clinics made their money by offering 'preclinical trials' in a legal grey area wherein those who wanted the treatment paid to enroll in a 'preclinical trial' of a procedure that wasn't medically approved. It could be incredibly expensive, but I hoped to be able to swab for viral traces without going through with anything.

"Well, you know we can't treat any tissues we've treated within the last six months, but maybe there's some conventional cosmetic surgery you'd like redone with natural resculpting?" he suggested, looking me up and down.

"Oh, what's the process?" I asked, thinking of Angel's unusual recovery. Perhaps she got this treatment and hadn't wanted to mention it.