At around noon Max found me in the commissary, where I was polishing off a huge roast chicken -- my third meal of the day so far. He told me, in a businesslike tone, that I would have to complete a series of explicit legal consent forms before we could continue. "If we continue, that is. My father has certain ethical reservations."

"What do you mean?"

"Well," he said, "he believes that with as little as one treatment you're likely to surpass the parameters of what's been considered normal human physiology up till now."

I looked at him curiously, not certain I understood. "Can you say that in English?"

Max smiled, but his expression was still serious. "Nate," he said, "if you do this you're going to get bigger than anyone's ever been. Way bigger."

I felt a tingle of electricity in my groin. The thought of it was exciting beyond words: that I could become the biggest, most muscular human who'd ever lived. I looked down at my rippled, gigantic arms and my titanic chest; stared at a body that had continued to grow and improve its shape at an alarming rate. And for the first time, I was unsatisfied.

"The decision is yours," Max said. "My father agreed that as long as we fully informed you, you could make your own choice."

"What do you want, Max?" I searched his face for a clue, a signal.

"It's not for me to say."

"But it is!" I said, looking directly into his deep, brown eyes. "The biggest joy I take in my new physique is that it turns you on. You made me, Max. This body is yours as much as it's mine. I only want to do what's going to make you happy and keep you coming back for more!"

"You want the truth?" he asked, beaming me a dazzling, thousand-watt smile.

"Here's my fantasy. I want to be three times as big and strong and muscular as any man in any gym or weight-pit in the world. ...And I want a lover who's so fucking huge and powerful he makes me seem small and helpless. As far as I'm concerned, Nate, the words "too big" have no meaning. I want you as big as a tank. As big as a building."

I could feel my dick hardening into a pillar, threatening to burst through my pants. "Do it, Max. Make me freaky. I want to be your monster."

The final phase of the Process took less than a single day. I was taken to a lab in the Institute's sub-basement and placed in a staging area surrounded by thick, lead-lined walls. As an i.v. was attached to my arm and a glowing, reddish-orange liquid began flowing into my bloodstream, Max explained: "This substance contains an incredibly rich and bio-available protein that your body will use to build muscle. Lots of it." I glanced up and noticed that my i.v. was attached to a huge glass tank of the liquid -- a hundred gallons, maybe. "There's a component in the fluid that reacts when we radiate your body with energy particles of a particular type and wavelength," he continued. "It works at a sub-molecular level to hugely accelerate protein synthesis and cell growth. We know the results will be dramatic. We just don't know how dramatic."

I looked back at him as he stared into my eyes. "There will probably be some joint and muscle pain. It's hard to say how much. If it becomes unbearable you can signal us by hitting that button. We may or may not be able to stop the process." He paused a moment. "Last chance to back out,"

he said, looking at me earnestly.

"No way," I answered. "I'm tired of being a 250 pound weakling."

Max smiled gently at my joke and my confidence. He patted me on the shoulder, then signaled his assistants and they all retreated behind the lead-covered walls and locked me in the staging chamber. I could see them, dimly, through a small window on the chamber wall. After a moment there was a a loud whirring noise as the particle generator started up. The noise increased to a deafening, high-pitched whine, and suddenly I was bathed in bluish light. Almost immediately, my body felt warm and I was aware of sweat beginning to moisten my skin.

But that lasted only twenty seconds or so. After that point I felt only burning, stabbing pain in every joint and muscle of my body. There was a terrible chemical taste in my mouth, and a horrible smell like burning hair or flesh. I was screaming, and for all I knew I was being roasted to death. But I fought with all my will power against the urge to hit the panic button. I kept my eyes fixed on Max's blurry face in the little window, vowing that I'd rather die than let him down.

After what seemed like hours, the blue light faded and the noise of the generator gradually lowered and stopped. I was bathed in sweat, and my body continued to ache and burn for at least a few more minutes. At some point the door opened and Max and his assistants came into the room and began busily checking my vital signs. It wasn't until the burning pain decreased to a dull, throbbing ache that I was able to open my eyes and look at Max. When I did, he smiled.

"You did pretty well," he said. "Look..." He nodded toward the huge supply tank of the fluid, which was nearly empty. "You used about sixty gallons."

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"Well...." He took out a pocket calculator and tapped at it a moment.

"Allowing for the portion of the fluid that's burnt off or excreted, it means you've synthesized about four hundred pounds of new cellular material." I looked at him blankly. Science was never my strong suit. "I estimate your current weight at about six-fifty."

"Six hundred fifty pounds??"

"Give or take." He gave me one of his megawatt smiles. "Don't worry, you definitely carry it really well. Soon as you feel back to normal you can come with me and have a look."

I got up immediately -- shaky on my feet, at first -- and followed Max out of the chamber. He had his assistants stay behind as he led me into a darkened examining room and shut the door behind us. I could dimly tell there was a mirror on the far wall of the room. And then Max turned on the lights.

My first impulse was to scream in horror at what I saw in the mirror. It was... well, it wasn't human. I stared for a few seconds, just trying to find my head. The one part of me that hadn't grown significantly, it now sat on my massively thick neck like a melon set on a tree stump. And below it was a physique like nothing I'd ever seen.

As if massive boulders had been piled on top of each other and bolted together in the approximate shape of a man, unearthly slabs of thick, dense muscle bulged obscenely, straining against each other along deeply cut furrows where muscle met muscle. Even standing relatively still my body rippled and flexed -- its steel-cable fibers jumping and tensing fiercely into high relief in response to my slightest, unintentional movements. It was almost hard to see a human shape within the mountain, the living fortress of solid beef that I had become. Having hypertrophied ten times, a dozen times beyond anything nature intended, my body was no longer a structure where muscles existed to power a human frame through its normal movements. No... I was Muscle for the sake of Muscle, plain and simple. I was pointlessly, absurdly, irrationally huge -- a product, a thing: the ultimate technological expression of Freakishly Exploded Human Beef.

"I'm... I'm a monster," I said solemnly, as I looked at the reflection of the hideous being I'd turned into.

"Not a monster," Max said, smiling at me with an insane-looking combination of lust and pride. "A new human paradigm." My gaze met his glowing eyes.

"It just takes a little getting used to," he said. "It's like looking at the ocean for the first time, or confronting the vastness of outer space."

I looked back at myself in the mirror, still trying to somehow humanize and identify with the bizarrely proportioned tower of pulsing, sculpted meat that was -- irreversibly -- the new me.

"Anyway," Max said, "to get the full effect you need to see yourself in motion. Why don't you move around a little, Nate? Hit a few poses."

With absolutely nothing to lose, I swiveled a half-turn to my left, threw back my left leg and raised my right hand in a single-arm biceps pose, instinctively tensing every muscle in my newly-gargantuan body.

Immediately both Max and I began laughing uncontrollably in hysterical shock and delight. The act of flexing hardened my physique into what looked like shimmering, suntanned titanium, and the ridiculously huge muscles of my arms, shoulders, back, thighs and calves inflated cartoonishly, by easily an additional twenty percent. We found ourselves staring at a superhuman, outrageously morphed caricature of strength and virility, and the effect was both insanely comical and overwhelmingly erotic... as the massive bulge in my own tent-canvas loincloth and the one in Max's khaki slacks both attested.

I proceeded to writhe and power through the entire catalog of standard bodybuilding poses with comic grandiosity. As I did, my Doctor Frankenstein and I howled in hysterical amazement at both the hilarity and the sheer, cock-hardening, overblown eroticism of the sexy moves and stances -- each pose amplified by my nearly seven hundred pounds of chiseled, exquisite muscle. It was probably the funniest, and yet without a shred of doubt the absolutely hottest fucking thing either one of us had ever seen.

Giddy with laughter, I took the game to a new level by tearing off my loincloth in a single swipe and continuing to pose -- now with my beercan-thick, lethally rock-hard dick sweeping upward in a scimitar-shaped curve above a pair of balls that would do any bull or stallion proud.

Purple-faced and breathless from his laughter and from the incredible hormonal rush, Max had by now dropped his trousers and was vigorously cranking his own substantial and exceedingly engorged prick with both hands. In a flash I wheeled toward him and picked him up like a toy. Quickly, I stripped every scrap of clothing from his body as if I were peeling a tangerine. Balancing his muscular 220 pounds on my left palm with complete ease, I licked my right middle finger and worked it slowly and expertly into his muscled ass, lovingly teasing and coaxing his tight hole. Max rested his legs on my haystack-sized shoulders as his perfect rosebud twitched and began to loosen in response to my touch.

At precisely the right moment, as I stared into Max's beautiful dark eyes, I suddenly flexed my chest. My pecs exploded into a massive precipice of striated beef, unquestionably the thickest, widest and hardest configuration of muscle that ever graced a human body. Max moaned deeply, and I could feel his asshole surrender all resistance, and by pure reflex open hungrily.

I pulled his body tight against me and smothered his mouth with mine, at the same time gently working him down onto my big, stiff tool. His ass accepted my huge cock with surprising ease, and then tightened around it greedily -- squeezing and milking my enormous manhood with a desperation I'd never seen in Max before.

His hungry butt was clearly starving for the taste, the touch, the blood-boiling affirmation of my newly-godlike strength and virility. For several minutes I relaxed and enjoyed this new Max, sweaty and wild-eyed, reduced by my overwhelming physical superiority to a mindless cockslave, a desperate muscle-junkie. I knew he would go on fucking my giant cock with his hungry muscle ass all day if I'd let him.

But as I felt his passion approaching its peak, I started -- slowly at first -- rhythmically sliding Max's body up and down the shaft of my dick.

As if he weighed no more than a feather, I slid his huge, gorgeously muscled physique back and forth with one hand, using him like a living toy to masturbate my thick, hard rod. Moaning in pain/pleasure, he clamped his eyes shut and held on tight to my huge left bicep with both hands as I pumped him up and down my throbbing cock, gradually faster and faster.

My upper arm measured easily over 35" around, and Max's big hands barely managed to maintain a grip on the two interlocked heads of my left biceps, a mass the shape, size and density of a bowling ball. Utterly helpless to do anything but hang on for dear life, Max soon went limp and his eyes rolled back in his head as he meekly submitted to a superhuman power-fucking that lasted a good two hours and far surpassed anything either one of us had ever imagined. When we finished I was bathed in steaming sweat that gushed down the crevices of my back, and formed salty pools in the deep furrows between my abs. And Max was limp as a rag doll, soaking wet and barely conscious, his broad chest heaving as his lungs struggled for air.

...As it turned out, the huge particle generator in the Institute basement was used only once more after that day. Soon, in fact, old Dr. Corelli retired and closed the place down for good, putting all his papers and research in storage and heading off to a tiny island in the Indian Ocean to finish out his days studying butterflies.

Max and I ultimately opted for a quiet existence, as well. Shocking the world with our gargantuan strength and muscle mass was fun for a while.

But, in the long run, getting gawked at and poked and photographed grew tedious fairly quickly. So we took the millions we'd made from lectures and personal appearances and photo books and TV commercials and built "Olympus," our rambling, isolated compound in the Maui high country.

Now we spend our days sunning, playing in the waterfalls and natural rock pools that dot our property, tending to our orchids and our groves of exotic fruit trees, and reading or talking or just watching the setting sun paint the tops of the cloud fields that surround our mountain hideaway.

And of course we spend a lot of time eating. We eat just about constantly, with almost a ton of muscle to feed, between us.

We've kept training, too, both for the sport of it and as our one nod to scientific research: after three years we're still trying to see if there's any limit to the size and strength we can pack on. If there is we haven't found it yet. I'm a little over eight hundred pounds now, and still as dense and ripped as ever. Which makes Max extremely happy, since he likes me bigger. He's a scrawny six hundred eighty-five pounds, but I tease him and tell him not to feel bad, since his movie star good looks make up for it.

I'm thinking of training hard again this year, maybe seeing if I can break the thousand pound mark. I'm pretty sure I can. At which point the two of us will go back to the mainland for a few weeks, and I'll do some photo sessions and video shoots for whoever's willing to meet my outrageous price. Of course, we're always careful never to stay away from home too long.

People ask if I get bored, or feel isolated, living such a solitary life in the middle of nowhere. I suppose I do have a wistful moment now and then.

But most of time I stay focused on the warm sun, the bracing, cool air, the constantly changing cloudscape and impossibly green mountain vistas...and on the beautiful, godlike man cuddled close in my arms. None of this would be good without Max, I know that. And I know we'd probably be just as happy together if we were a couple of skinny boys sharing a cramped walkup in some noisy, polluted city. But... for whatever reason, it didn't happen that way.

See, sometimes you just get lucky. •