Turn 172 of 228

Both of them look forward to the changes, they missed the growth. Everyone else's changes come even faster.

Lena stretches her arms above her head and feels the shoulder joints pop — not pain, not discomfort, the sensation of bone finding new room. The ribcage expands a half-inch with each breath and the breath is deeper than yesterday and the breath will be deeper tomorrow. She grins. The yellow teeth. The unwashed face. The twelve-foot body filling the research bay with a warmth that has nothing to do with temperature.

"I missed this," Lena says.

Diane is standing at the desk, her hands on her hips, feeling the pelvis widen under her palms. The 1,340 pounds shifting. The beard. The stretch marks that have been there for two years now deepening as the skin pulls taut over new bone.

"I missed it too," Diane says. "I didn't know I missed it until it started again. The first time was — I didn't understand what was happening. I was frightened. I was managing it. Quarterly reports. Bullet points. And then it stopped and I thought — I thought that was the shape. This is the shape now. And it was. But it wasn't the final shape."

"It's never the final shape," Lena says.

"No," Diane says. "It isn't."

They don't celebrate. Celebration implies an event with a beginning and an end. This is not an event. This is the hum resuming the work it paused. Lena goes to the eating bay and eats four plates of Carl's rice and beans and the calories fuel the growth the way gasoline fuels a fire — not ceremonially, just functionally. The body needs material. The body is building. The body takes what it needs and transforms it and the transformation is visible by evening: the shoulders wider, the arms longer, the feet broader on the concrete.

Marcus's growth spurt hits full stride by the second week. The 980 becomes 1,040, then 1,090, and the skeleton is ahead of the weight — his frame widening so fast that the fat redistributes, the belly shrinking temporarily as the bones underneath spread. He stands in the corridor he designed and his shoulders brush both walls and he laughs. The laugh is deep and loose and genuine. He designed the corridor for his body and his body outgrew the corridor in fourteen days. He pulls out the laptop at the workstation and begins redesigning. The new corridor is sixteen feet wide. The new sleeping platform is rated for 4,000 pounds. The new ceiling heights — he recalculates. He doesn't look frightened. He looks like a man whose building just told him it needs to be bigger.

Carl's hands keep growing. The fingers are enormous now — the yellow nails thick and curved, the palms wide as dinner plates. He stands in the kitchen and the commercial cutting board looks like a saucer. He picks up the knife and the knife looks like a pen. He starts cooking with two knives, one in each hand, the coordination effortless, the body adapting to its own scale. The 910 becomes 1,020. His skeleton stretches — the spine lengthening, the ribcage expanding, the legs thickening. He is seven feet tall now and still growing. He cooks and he grows and he cooks more because more bodies need more food and the eating bay runs twenty hours a day.

Billy Jo's acceleration steepens. The 234 becomes 248, then 261. The belly is unmistakable now — round, soft, pressing against her thighs when she sits. Her breasts have grown. Her arms have thickened. Her face has rounded into something softer, fuller, the angular features that said *scientist* giving way to curves that say *participant*. She stands on the scale every morning and the number climbs and the graph bends and she takes a photo of the readout every single time. The photos go in the study. The photos go on her own phone in a folder she hasn't named. She looks at the folder before she sleeps. The wanting is quiet and steady and hers.

June is nine feet tall. She runs the bay in 0.9 seconds. She has stopped running on the floor — she runs on the walls now, the feet finding purchase on concrete seams, the body moving horizontally and then vertically without breaking stride. Marcus watches her run the wall of the facility he designed and his face does the thing between pride and terror and he takes notes. June weighs 490 pounds. She is three years old. She has begun moving the thermal curtains aside without touching them — she moves so fast through them that the air displacement pushes them open before her body arrives. She doesn't notice this. Iris notices. Iris writes it down.

Iris is seven feet six inches and 360 pounds. She has fifty-one composition books. The prediction in the SELF notebook — DA'S BONES WILL MOVE — was not isolated. Iris has predicted six events now. Four have come true. Two are pending. Billy Jo has the pending predictions in a sealed envelope in the research bay desk and she has not opened them because Iris asked her not to. Iris says the predictions are not mystical. Iris says she is observing patterns that repeat across bodies and the patterns have trajectories. She says the hum has frequencies and she is learning to read them. She says this with the vocabulary of a three-year-old and the precision of a seismograph.

Mae is 740 pounds. She is ten feet tall. She is three years old. She is taller than Diane was six months ago. She is heavier than Marcus was a year ago. The curve Iris charted has steepened again — the exponential function now has a coefficient that Iris wrote in her notebook and Billy Jo copied into the study and the coefficient says Mae will reach 1,000 pounds by age four. By age five the coefficient says 1,400. Mae eats 24,000 calories a day. Carl cooks for eighteen hours. The eating bay is always full. Mae sits at the eating bay with her belly on the floor and her hands on the belly and she says, "I'm getting closer, Mama," and Lena says, "I know you are, baby," and the number 1,940 is close enough that Mae can see it from where she sits.

Lena is 2,100 pounds. Thirteen feet tall. The facility holds her. The thirty-foot ceilings are high enough. The sixteen-foot corridors Marcus redesigned are wide enough. The 5,000-pound floors are strong enough. The body is growing and the building is growing and the building grows because Marcus redesigns it and the body grows because the wish is working and the wish is working because the building brings everyone close and the closeness is the gradient and the gradient is the experiment and the experiment is everyone. The hum is loud. The hum is in every body. The hum is not done.