Chapter 4: Tits

So the next few weeks were spent editing the IRX gene to stop their bodies storing energy as fat. Then it was done, and in six months Melissa’s energetic young body had burned up what she’d stored, and she was lean.

“Wow that’s great I’m so supple!” she grinned, stretching this way and that one evening. Her elastic new skin didn’t even have any stretch marks. “My old self always hated being fat, the diary says, but she was too hopeless to stop eating.”

“Storing fat reserves was a silly evolutionary thing,” Susan smiled with her, “a hangover from a previous time. Now you look great.”

“My tits’re still a bit floppy though,” sighed Melissa resignedly, “but they’re just that sort I suppose.”

“They’re just kind of full and pendant really,” said Isobel. “But okay well, perhaps that’s the next step? New tits, why not? Like researching our history, really.”

There was a general nodding of heads.

“So we have to find the sequence for that,” said Susan. “We do have a nice big set of genomic libraries, at least, as a start.”

Melissa spent a few days going through the image libraries, researching the breasts she liked best. She finally settled on a pair that projected about fifty millimetres, were attached reasonably high, had a diameter of eighty-five, and looked nice and firm, with almost no sag and no dreaded crease under. They had nice dark areolae nice and central, in a good size: not too big, not too small, and likewise nipples that would stick out properly without being weird. Altogether they’d be sexy, according to the old Earth media, without being a nuisance.

Next they all searched for the sequence that defined them. It took a long time and a lot of comparing, but after a year they’d finally isolated the sequence and added it to their database. They edited it into Melissa’s genome and waited.

“They’re a bit tingly and warm,” Melissa felt her breasts in the bedroom a few days later. She showed them to her friends.

“Great,” said Susan. “That must mean the cells are being renewed with the new ones.”

“I wouldn’t mind a new pair myself,” grinned Leila, “if it works.” Leila’s tits were very small.

“Why?” asked Isobel. “You don’t need them do you?”

“I suppose ... they’d make me feel more feminine, really.” Leila knew it didn’t make sense. ‘Feminine’ didn’t mean anything, except in the old movies and stuff from the old Internet and books. There wasn’t any ‘masculine’ now, and apart from that there weren’t any babies to feed. She was just hoping proper breasts might make her a bit closer to the others, and Isobel in particular. Not that she didn’t feel close, but there are degrees of everything, and everybody else had proper tits.

“Now we know where to look, it wouldn’t take long to find new ones, if you wanted some. Would you want the same, or say slightly different?” Susan offered.

“I don’t know,” Leila pondered, “whether having identical tits would be good or not. What do you think? My ribcage is about the same width as Liss’s.”

“They used to talk about ‘diversity’, I suppose,” said Isobel, “but I’m not sure if that matters now, or why you want them, really, to be honest.”

Leila shrugged her shoulders. “Well...”

“It’s nice for us all to be the same,” Melissa had picked up some of Leila’s feelings, “but we don’t actually need tits do we? They’re another throwback, like fat. I could get rid of mine, I’m just used to them. It’s not like when girls had boys liking them, and sex. I didn’t like mine flopping about though. I don’t know why I don’t get rid of them really, now we’re thinking about it.”

“I think you quite like washing them though,” smiled Leila. Modesty had disappeared with their old brains and memories and embarrassing bodies, and now they showered and changed casually in front of each other. In fact Melissa quite often seemed to take her time over soaping her tits, since she lost weight.

“Hahaha,” Melissa laughed. “I guess I do. Not that I’m exactly sexy. But they do have that going for them, I suppose.”

“My diary reckons everyone selected for the mission had to have a low sex drive,” said Susan.

“Oh ... so we wouldn’t get into a lot of drama with the guys!” smiled Leila.

“Or each other,” Isobel giggled.

“God, can you imagine?” Melissa giggled with her. “Two thousand years in here together, and hardly anything else to do? No wonder they didn’t want us being sexy. I mean, what some girls used to get up to, by the look of it...”

“That internet stuff, yeah,” Leila nodded.

“Yes well,” Susan was ready to get to sleep, “just as well isn’t it? The last thing we need is some kind of overheated melodrama kicking off in here, like in some of those old movies.”

“I suppose so,” Melissa acknowledged, “though we’ve got to do something besides farming haven’t we? Well, ‘night. Sleep well.”

“Night,” said everyone.

The next day started off all about Leila’s breasts. Somehow they’d become public property, it seemed; perhaps because she wasn’t being her usual decisive self. Also an unspoken consensus had been reached that if one of them was going to have designer tits, they all could. The quartet clustered round the screen looking at the 3-D models in their genome library.

“Those are quite nice,” Melissa pointed to a plump pair that projected about four inches.

“Yes I like those,” agreed Isobel.

“I don’t know,” Leila wavered. Why did Izzy and Liss like them? “They look like they’d be a bit of a nuisance.”

“Don’t forget we don’t know what gravity we’ll have when we arrive,” cautioned Susan, “so it wouldn’t be the best idea to get carried away.”

“Well we can always reduce them down again,” Isobel pointed out, “when we find out, when we get there. It might be low gravity. How low can it be and still have atmosphere? I’ve forgotten.”

“It depends on the speed of rotation,” Leila was glad to talk about cosmology for a moment. “The lighter gases escape first, like helium, and the heavier ones last, like oxygen and carbon dioxide.”

“Oh okay, so we could have a small planet with low G and very long days, cool,” Isobel smiled up at her. “And big tits!” she laughed.

“Why would I want big tits?” Leila had to smile back. “What for?” Her eyes were drawn to Isobel’s tits, which weren’t that big but stuck out like two cones.

“You get more nerve endings,” Isobel grinned.

“Oh I see. Are you sure? You don’t get a higher density on small tits, say like Susan’s?”

Everybody looked at Susan’s tits, which were small and round and a long way apart. Susan shuffled nervously. Her tits sagged a bit, even though they were quite small and only projected about thirty millimetres.

“Why do you want more nerve-endings?” she countered. She had no idea what nerve-endings her tits had; she’d never bothered with them.