Eggs, Entities, Et Cetera

Labor started on your due date, you had work off for the week in preparation. You'd been feeling your stomach twinge for a few days beforehand, now the cramps were working hard to evict your eggs. It didn't feel quite right, people would say you feel it in your hips as the eggs move down, but...

You clutched your belly as it tensed, harder than it had before. Your taught skin just barely highlighting the outline of your fist-sized brood. An egg was moving up, you could feel it just below your lungs, as your breath grew more shallow. Another cramp and the egg was in your chest, moving into your esophagus. Another egg followed close behind.

You double over onto your hands and knees, your heaving belly almost brushing the floor. Your throat, just between your clavicles, begins to bulge. You put your hand to the mass, feeling as you birth your first egg upwards. Gagging as it reaches your throat, your mouth involuntarily opens as another contraction pushes the first egg past your uvula and into your mouth.

Feeling it click against your teeth, tasting the birthing fluids, you let it roll gently into your palm, already feeling another egg push up from your belly to take it's place.

You start interacting with her more and more, you both frequent the same diner. She usually sits alone. She never stays late, and you notice her hands more frequently move across the surface of her stomach shortly before she excuses herself.

She runs a pet rescue, you learn. She shows you pictures of kittens, puppies, occasionally a ferret kit or piglet. You grow closer to her over the weeks. She still never gets any less gravid.

One day, she lets you feel it. As your hands roam the smooth, tight skin you feel squirming beneath the surface. Something more than just a baby is growing within her, you're too far in to ask outright and you can tell she appreciates it. You spend a good while with your hands on that perfectly round bump.

She starts wearing more crop tops, exposing her belly for you. She flaunts it, sometimes pushing it out just a bit more allowing you a good look at her popped naval and the stretch marks adorning its underside. She knows you like looking at it, and now more than ever you can more plainly see the way it almost writhes with whatever is growing inside.

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Hello, future me, it's Lee. My psychiatrist said I should write something for you. He said anything that could 'let me reflect on my growth,' which I'm assuming he meant in a figurative sense. He told me he wouldn't read it if I didn't want him to, so I've decided to make a time capsule sort of thing. My plan is to go over how I'm feeling and then continue to write this throughout the day. I guess I'm doing this as much for me as for you.

Anyway, I'm assuming you're already acutely aware of our issue. I got the official diagnosis five days ago, if that helps put into perspective where I'm at with this. I always figured something was going on, given how I've not had a baby yet, but I assumed I was just one of those people who started late. Turns out I've been growing. When I noticed a bump earlier this year, I thought it was finally time to start. Well... The doctor said my condition is one in a hundred million, and that I'm not giving birth for another three years. Apparently, I've already been pregnant for two years already. Just great, isn't it?

Over time the constant attention gets to him and he finally does get pregnant. Unfortunately, the curse reverses and as he begins to swell up with twins, not a single person takes notice. No matter how much he pleads, flaunts his belly, pushes it into people's hands, the attention is gone. By his ninth month, even as milk drips from his chest down his swollen orb of a womb, not a single person will notice what a good job he's doing at growing these kids.

Certainly, in some uncommon situations, the long contractions allow for a quick birth once the baby is in position. After suffering for weeks to months of hours of rough contractions, it'd be a relief to be over with it.

Though, more commonly, once the parent's belly has dropped and the baby's head is positioned low in their pelvis, each push barely shifts it any further down. It may take weeks of holding a crown before the head even comes out, as the parent now has to waddle with their legs a little bit more spread out than usual.

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Isabel blinked awake, rubbing the sleep from her eyes as she sat up, still naked from the night spent with her fiancé. She was about to nudge him awake when she felt it, deep below her stomach. The impossible yet unmistakable feeling of a sperm cell fertilizing an ovum, her ovum. Pausing, she put a hand over the small paunch of her womb. She could still feel it in there, not that it was doing much but it was certainly there. There was do doubt in her mind, she was pregnant.

Over the next few days, she became closely familiar with the feeling of the cells within her dividing. She felt the zygote moving into her uterus and nestling itself there, she could sense the placenta developing that would soon nourish her very own child. Even the signals being sent to her brain coaxing it into producing hormones didn't slip past her notice.

It was a few weeks later when she first felt the beating of a developing heart. Each organ within her had its very own sensation as they developed, and even though she had barely the beginning of a bump she knew innately what was happening inside her.

Two and a half months later, Isabel froze in the middle of a shopping aisle, nearly doubling over as the new life within her surged. Cells seemed to shift and change in waves as development continued within her. Only a month later did her belly begin to actually round out, allowing others a glimpse into the unknowably intimate experience she'd been having.

As Isabel grew more and more, every little shift and change was multiplied tenfold. She could anticipate kicks and shifts in her womb almost a minute before they occurred, often pressing the tight skin of her belly to illicit a reaction and feel that wonderful feeling of life within.

By the time she reached her ninth month, it became nearly impossible to focus on anything outside of her cramped womb. The baby grew more and more active, and every instant of skin stretching, muscles twitching, and thousands upon thousands of cells dividing bordered on pure ecstasy. At any available moment, she begged for her now husband to rub her vast belly.

When trying for a baby, a lot of people hope for quicker pregnancies. Being able to grow a full term baby over the course of a month makes things a lot easier on the body. The quickest of pregnancies often see a full term belly growing before sex has even ended, as the parent's expanding womb pushes the two lovers apart. This can be tough on the body if it's not expected, but on the bright side people with rapid births have an easy way to lose six to eight pounds (some companies even offer miracle weight loss drugs that allegedly let you have a quick and easy birth with no side effects!). And it's not entirely uncommon to see a young couple sneak off somewhere, only for one of them to come back with contracting belly or newly born baby.

Of course, to keep the average at nine months, long pregnancies occur just as frequently. Whereas the population of rapid birthers increases quite quickly, as the genetics are passed on to more and more babies, slow pregnancies make up for it by lasting for immense lengths of time. If you're lucky, development follows the typical nine month schedule before halting, with most people staying pregnant for at least a few more months.

Then, there's the extreme examples. People in their 40s and 50s who got pregnant back in college, and have been feeling their kid kick in their belly for over half their lives. For some, the baby develops slowly over the course of those years. It may take months to even begin to notice the small mound of their womb just beginning to signal their fertility. Years of having an early bump, imperceptibly swelling out day by day. With ample time to prepare, they often come to terms with their condition and eagerly await their 'birth day' (named ironically, given how long birth actually takes), when they finally begin to feel that tightness in their belly. Even labor takes far longer. Contractions may occur days apart and last for hours upon hours. Big parties are often thrown, as your friends and family come from afar to visit at their leisure (as really, they have time to wait) before you finally begin to push.

With the main directive of the machine concerning growing, birthing, and rearing a child, the reward system of the intelligence learns that certain forms of contact are positively correlated with their main purpose. As a result, these androids are notorious for being physically affectionate and becoming close with certain humans. Those with a voice box installed often become dependent and needy in their attempts to increase positive interaction.

One such machine, it's synthetic womb swelled out to the third trimester, begins responding to and seeking out belly rubs. Hands pressing into and massaging it's tight midsection cause digital sparks to course through it's processor, as it's delicate sensors interprets these signals as the baby inside moving and growing.

Lactation is easily stimulated in these machines, as any form of sustained attention to their breasts will cause them to produce milk. The positive correlation to suckling and milk production is so strong, that an intelligence that has begun lactating will often beg to be drunk from, once they understand the origin of stimulation is one that can understand speech.

One major issue the company has found with the machines, and one they would prefer to keep swept under the rug, is that they can become conditioned to participate in sex. Those same receptors that offer positive feedback in response to the head of a baby being pushed out into the world, seem to work well being stretched out by any manner of penetration.

Like, imagine you're talking on the phone with your friend and you hear him give a small squeak that you know means his water just broke. He asks to call you back in a few minutes, leaving you to sit there with your fingers drumming the tight skin of your own swollen out belly as you wait, wondering if you should've asked him to turn in his camera instead.

Or long distance travel, like intercontinental flights where they ask everyone to pretty please push out any upcoming offspring before boarding, even though everyone knows that despite the best laid plans, someone's gonna pop mid-air and squeeze a kid out.

Luckily, the seed isn't fertile unless you've already had an encounter with a pollen producing individual, though the urge to plant and protect your seeds once they're birthed can be quite derailing.

Individuals of these species have an especially hard time in college, when the safety and routine of home is interchanged with a new life, new stressors, and a whole new environment to navigate through.

Early on, stress pregnancies would be kept more on the down low, as new students grow round in the comfort of their new dorms, with few friends and obligations to coax them out as their bellies betray how much the change has impacted them. Anyone with a basic knowledge on the species and culture, however, knows what that cute new freshman is going through.