
"Ma'am, I've got some more butter chicken for you," One of the production
assistants said, wheeling in a cart with a huge bowl and a plate with
a massive pile of rice next to it. It looked like the kind of thing
meant to feed a large family or set a couple up with leftovers for
the rest of the week.

*Ma'am, huh, I always used to be Rachel before,* she mused, *I don't hate it though.*
"Thanks Austin," Rachel wasn't hungry, but she could eat. She had finished a
massive bowl of beef stew, a pot actually, just forty minutes ago, and her
stomach was still bulging. Rachel didn't really get full anymore though,
and Jen and Charlie made sure that she always had food in front of her at
work. It had started a few days after she had complained that apparently, she
was one of those HERS women who kept growing after their initial burst of
growth. Her doctor had later informed her that pretty much all HERS women
continued to grow, usually by a quarter of an inch to an inch a year, though
the secondary growth was most intense right after the initial growth spurt.
He'd also mentioned that some women who fought the food urges initially had
larger secondary growth spurts as their bodies forced them to their biological
set-point. Since Rachel had grown by almost a foot and a half and gained eight
hundred pounds over the last nine months, he had told her that was likely what had happened
with her.

Rachel's continuing growth was annoying because it meant buying more overpriced
HERS clothes, or at least it had until Jen had stepped in to tell her she could
start expensing her wardrobe with no restrictions. It was a very generous policy
considering the fact that Rachel was spending three thousand a week on clothes
while she built up her wardrobe again. It was totally unsustainable on her own.
Evidently Jen was willing to go to great lengths to keep her star happy. Even
without the expense, continually outgrowing her clothes was annoying because it
meant she was often in undersized clothes as she waited for new ones to be made
and had to take the time out of her day to get new clothes. She'd had to spend
two hours at the seamstress's this morning, where she had learned that her
individual breasts now had an average diameter of a hair over two feet and that
a bra better equipped to deal with such monstrous breasts wouldn't be ready
for another two days, even with the rush order. To take the circumference
measurement the seamstress had used to compute that number, the seamstress had
needed to switch to her extra long measuring tape soon after Rachel started coming
to her, since the more normal sized one she'd been using only went up to 72 inches.
It was, unsurprisingly, a first.

Keeping her belly bulging the way Jen and Charlie seemed determined to do was
definitely making her grow faster, and a sensible part of Rachel thought she
should ask them to stop having Austin keep her constantly supplied with food.
That part of her was outvoted. She had discovered a drive to dominate
the airwaves, which seemed to be easier the bigger, and bustier, she was.
Keeping her belly full would give America what it wanted: more Rachel.
There was another reason she was willing to go along with the News and Opinion
directors plans for her. Rachel liked being big. As inconvenient as it was,
she liked the reactions her body got from people. After thirty years of trying to
downplay her breasts, she loved the way showing them off elicited stammers and
space-outs.

"Austin, I haven't seen you in the fact checking fishbowl lately," Rachel
commented, referring to the glass walled meeting room where junior staff
did live tag-team research. She used to see Austin in there all the time,
but lately he had been attending to her personal needs more and more.

"N-no ma'am. Jen told me to help you since not everything is set up to
accommodate HERS women yet."

"Do you want me to ask her to rotate PAs through the duties. You were pretty good
at research, I don't want you to have to give that up for me."

"Oh, t-that's ok, ma'am. I like helping you." Austin said.

"Ok, well, let me know if you want someone else to take a turn,"

"Yes, ma'am."

She couldn't type out email or notes while eating, so she Alt-Tabbed to a paper
that had come out recently about how HERS women had age related biomarkers consistent
with a woman in her early to mid twenties, regardless of their actual age. People
pretty much knew that HERS made wrinkles disappear a bit, but apparently invisible
signs of aging that had to do with esoteric molecular biology showed an even bigger
change. Rachel didn't understand all of it of course, but they were thinking of having
the researcher on the show, and she liked to challenge herself by trying to skim
scientific papers they were going to report on. She'd read the press summary provided by
the researcher and the workup her own staff had done, so this wasn't really necessary, but
she was curious after the researchers had run her biomarkers. It was one thing for them
to say she had a "biologial age of 24", but what did that actually mean?

She was surprised at just how much of the highly technical paper she was able to understand.
She had to stop spooning ladlefulls of delicious Indian food into her mouth a few times
to look things up, but she'd been doing a lot of reporting on HERS and doing this kind
of dive into the medical literature a fair amount. She felt sharper these days, more focused,
and she'd found she could understand the technical fields she brushed up against in her
reporting more easily. She hadn't heard any reports of HERS making women more intelligent,
so she worried a bit that she was just experiencing more confidence as a result of the
well documented emotional impacts of HERS. She never used to be able to remember phone numbers
after hearing them once, and now she could, so that was something concrete that pointed
in the direction of it being a real cognitive improvement. Still, despite the possibility
that she could understand things more easily now, nothing could compare to the experience
and expertise of the real experts, so she tried to stick with what they said most of
the time.

The pot was empty. Rachel pushed the cart away from herself and turned back to her
computer more fully. She finished reading the paper in the next twenty minutes, reading
faster than most people skimmed, yet understanding it remarkably well. She turned back to
her regular work, pulling up her email and typing out for long emails in quick succession,
fingers flying at a steady 180 words per minute. She didn't once pause as she switched
gears between topics as varied as suggestions for what to do for Anna's birthday and
feedback on a brief one of her junior staff had worked up for her. Typing was so much
easier on the new keyboard IT had installed for her last week. She'd been reduced to
hunt and peck on the normal person sized keyboard she'd been using up until now. Now
she was typing faster than ever.

"Ma'am, they want you on set."

"Thanks Austin," she rose to her feet. In her foot tall heels, she was over 13 feet tall.
It wasn't too long ago that Austin's head had been right about at her hip. Now it was
lower, more crotch height than hip height. It was something she'd taken advantage of a
few times with Rick already.
