Jennifer York sighed dreamily as she found herself drifting back into consciousness, the darkness of her vision melding slowly to the reality of the world again.  She ran her fingertips gingerly over her eyelids and cheeks and twirled her thumb through a silky tuft of her richly dark red hair.

            The man running the procedure had made it sound like waking up would be a little more uncomfortable than this, but she felt great.  Refreshed, even, like she’d just been hibernating and been awoken from cryogenic sleep to face the world head-on.

            She glanced around the small room, wondering where he’d gone.  By the sound of the lengthy explanation she’d been given, an indicator would alert them when she woke up so she could be tended to in case she felt weakness.  But she didn’t.  Her simple blue gown similar to the kind worn in a doctor’s waiting room was surprisingly comfortable, and she felt clear and coherent enough to stand up and start jogging.  In fact, the only sensation that unsettled her slightly as she sat up was the feeling against her back.

            The cushy white bench she was reclining on before they sedated her, molded softly around her frame like a memory mattress, felt different now against her bare arms and legs.  Wooly, almost.  Like gauze.  More like a medical napkin of sorts.  Had they moved her while she was asleep?

            Even with this odd discrepancy, Jennifer couldn’t possibly let it get her down enough to complain.  She was too excited. 

            She had YouPet Fever.

            YouPets were all the rage now in the upper echelons of society.  They were a beacon to people of lesser status that those who owned these miniature false versions of real people were not merely powerful, but omnipotent.  What higher state could there be than owning a person: body, mind, and soul?  Not simply possessing and controlling their every action with impunity, but reassured that it was their human right to treat their shrunken test tube concoction however they saw fit.

            It was, unfortunately, an idea unfathomable to Jennifer until she’d received an in from her friend Ellen, who had managed to make her way up to a mid-level position in YouPet Corp. before the company erupted in popularity, and was able to take advantage of an employee discount loophole.  The rate for cloning a subject into a shrunken pet, along with the necessary licensing materials, could often number in the hundreds, but through Ellen, Jennifer had struck a deal that would allow her to get several pets for only around fifty dollars a pop.  It was perfect.

            For a year since the YouPet phenomenon had begun, Jennifer had been lost in a maddening daydream of what she might do with a YouPet, should she ever manage to acquire one of her own.  Certainly it would be unbelievably fun at levels too tantalizing to fully realize.  Brutal, even.  Jennifer had spent most of her life being pushed down by family members, teachers, ex-boyfriends, and bosses.  It was time to let someone else feel some of the burn, and probably let them succumb to it.

            She had heard that YouPets were built to have a physical composition more resilient to harm than real humans in order to account for the rough treatment they often received by the enraptured public.  There was no reason to hold back.

            The cloning procedure was complicated, which contributed to the cost as well.  A drop of blood or a cell of skin from a subject wasn’t enough to create the clone.  This wasn’t simply a biological copy of the being grown in a petri dish.  This was a complete copy of the subject at the moment the procedural fluid was run through their veins and a brain scan was performed.

            A YouPet was the person at one-and-three-quarter inches tall, from the shape of their nose and the color of their eyes to their addictive cravings for adrenaline rushes and their childhood memories of spilling ice cream on the sidewalk.

            Jennifer had seen YouPets before at office parties where her wealthier coworkers would show them off, and her desire had been captured almost instantly.  These lucky people had miniature versions of friends, significant others, or just random people that agreed to take the procedure for a small cut of the price, cupped in their palms and tucked in their pockets like trinkets.

            Many people with the face for it made a decent living “modeling” as YouPets by getting into great shape and cloning their body and attached personality for the amusement of any who were willing to pay the hefty cover charge for a copy.  Biological prostitution was a booming industry now.

            Of course, Jennifer had no intention of creating a tiny clone of a model, no matter how much Ellen had recommended it.  She’d known almost as soon as she saw a woman at her office dangling a tiny copy of her unfaithful husband between her fingers over a steaming cup of coffee.  A tiny stranger was well and good, but how much damage could Jennifer really do?  Flick it in the skull, break its legs, swallow it alive?  Anyone could do that, and Jennifer dreamed of it almost every night.  But a true YouPet owner had to know their living possession inside and out to get the full effect of being their god before snuffing them out.

            And Jennifer knew no person as well as herself.

            Her curiosities of life.

            Her sexual needs.

            Her body parts that reacted most to pain.

            Her deepest, darkest fears that could literally peel apart the layers of her brain if enacted in the right combination.

            Now, as she sat on the bench in the room, which was empty now, the twenty-five-year-old redhead was bursting with excitement.  The process sounded very simple from here.  There was a two-week wait to create her personal clone, which sounded excruciating to Jennifer.  The clone would have the memory of its life up to being sedated by the YouPet Corp. worker, and after that would find itself awaking into her possession.

            Jennifer could hardly sit still any longer and, despite a safety suggestion before they’d put her to sleep, she stood up and began to pace across the room.  The floor felt cold and plastic under her bare soles, no longer the rubbery tile texture of earlier, but she ignored this as she had with the bench.

            Suddenly, from beyond the walls, she heard a sustained humming noise.  At first it sounded like crisscrossing voices, conversing casually and bantering over one another, but the sound was more powerful than that.  It boomed along all edges of the walls as though trying to force its way inside the room, reverberating and even shaking the ceiling.

            The young woman froze, growing increasingly uncomfortable with the situation.  Where was the YouPet operator?  He’d promised he’d be there when she woke up on the bench.

            The rumbling grew louder, the voices now pronounced enough to be distinguished as human interaction, but muffled too much by the walls, which now were shaking every few seconds as though they had become flimsier than wet cardboard.

            Why the hell was the bench gone and replaced with the gauze recliner?  Why was the tile floor stripped away?  Obviously they’d moved her from her room, despite saying they wouldn’t.

            The answer to these questions never came, and they very quickly became irrelevant, as the roof of the room was torn away in a soft shuffle as though it had only been resting atop the detached walls like a shoebox lid.  Light spilled violently inside as the dim fluorescents were replaced with blinding reality.

            Jennifer looked up, blinking and holding her trembling hands around her cheeks, and realized she was staring into the face of herself.

            A much, much bigger version of herself.

            It was the same sight that greeted her every morning in the mirror.  Every fiery lock posed perfectly on her head.  Every pore of her smooth, porcelain skin lined up.  Every freckle that hadn’t yet faded from her awkward high school years still dotted her cheeks.

            The mouth curled, so gargantuan that Jennifer could make out every soft crack in the lips and every flushed curve.  A smile.  Simple, but so complete and full of joy that it couldn’t be ignored.  Holding so much glee that she could feel it from muscle memory on her own face.  She knew only one other point in her life that she had felt the desire to smile like that, and that was a week and a half ago when Ellen promised to get her her very own YouPet.

            Jennifer was paralyzed, not from fear, as she stared up at this bizarre and towering clone of herself with her gorgeous grin, but pure confusion.  Was this a fever dream?  Had something gone wrong with the procedure and sent her on a trip more potent than a bucket of LSD?  The clone was supposed to be under two inches, not ninety feet.  This was all so wrong that the only explanation was a drug-induced nightmare brought on by the procedure.  Ellen had warned of this side effect, and Jennifer was quick to accept it.

            She just had to let herself drift out of the lucid dream, and this visage of a giant version of herself peering down into the room would fade away like a puff of smoke in the breeze.

            “Oh…  my… God…” murmured the all-encompassing lips of the Brobdinagian version of Jennifer, her face refusing to budge as it was wreathed by sunlight from over her shoulders.  “I… I can’t believe it… it…”

            Jennifer flinched, broken from the stupor, and fell backward onto the plastic floor.  The booming voice from above was hers, that much was certain, but it felt like hearing her words from a radio, or even some twisted dream, where her thoughts and spoken words were no longer her own.

            Okay, so the sick fantasy world wasn’t fading as quickly as she thought it would.  All was still well and good.

            Right?

            “It worked,” the redhead giantess breathed uncertainly, blinking to confirm it.  “I mean, I knew it worked.  I’ve seen it.  But… but now.  Now, you’re here.”

            “What?” Jennifer finally gawked aloud, her throat dry, as the reality began to sink in like a dagger directly into tender flesh.

            “And you’re all mine,” the real Jennifer chuckled with elation down into the box her YouPet had just arrived in via corporate-controlled express service.  Her fingers twitching with expectancy already, she brought her arm up over the side of the special carrying receptacle and let her palm hover over the tiny room, casting a foreboding shadow directly over the terrified little clone of herself cowering meekly at the base.

            “NO!” screamed the YouPet of Jennifer York as she sprawled on her back in the plastic box she’d just arrived in, her limbs shaking so hard that standing would’ve been impossible.  “GET AWAY FROM ME!”

            “Why should I?” the real Jennifer smirked, raising an eyebrow with amusement as she gazed down at her cloned pet.  “You’re bought and paid for, fair and square.  I sat through that whole thing in the chair and had to wait the two longest weeks of my life for you to get here.”

            “There’s been a mistake.  A huge, massive FUCK-UP!” screeched the tiny woman breathlessly, trying to crawl backwards on her hands, as though that would’ve protected her from the massive hand that loomed above her and shared her exact DNA.

            “I only just got here today to get the scan done and things, I… I…” the YouPet gasped weakly, as the pieces started coming together in her head.

            Jennifer retracted her threatening palm from hanging over her prize and instead crossed her arms authoritatively, glowering victoriously.  “You can’t remember waiting the two weeks, can you?”

            “I… I…” peeped the clone.

            “You can’t remember, because you didn’t do it.  Your memory stops after they took the sample from me.  All you remember is being put to sleep, right?”

            Tears began to well in the YouPet’s little eyes.  She nodded solemnly, biting her lip to stop herself from making a noise.

            “So I guess it’s pretty clear now.  There hasn’t been a mistake.  Actually, this whole thing has gone… kind of perfectly,” Jennifer admitted with a giggle.  Her radiant red hair hung loosely over her shoulders, but as she continued staring with abject desire down at this miniaturized version of herself, she brought both hands behind her head and began twirling her locks together into a ponytail.

            “But… but that m-m-means…”

            “Yep.  You’re not Jennifer.  I’m Jennifer.  You’re a thing they grew in a little glass tube and you’re half a month old,” the towering young woman reported callously as though sharing boring gossip with an acquaintance, finishing up her simple hairdo and bringing her right hand back to its previous position of hovering over her YouPet.

            She relished the sight of her fingers’ individual shadows moving and intermittently blocking out the light for the little copy of herself.  So much power, and it was all hers.  No one to have to share with.

            Jennifer dangled her fingers over the edge of the box and drummed them in a rippling pattern, each with a pounding thump that made the tiny woman cringe in tempo.

            The YouPet was only able to hold back the sobs in her throat because her entire tiny body seemed to have stopped functioning for fear of shutting down.  Her skin had gone cold enough to be warmed by acetone.  The proof was being beaten into her face like a steel beam, and there was no denying the truth of what she was staring up at this moment.

            She was not Jennifer.  She was not a real person.  She did not exist two weeks ago.

            No.  No.  No.

            NO!

            She couldn’t wrap her mind around these ideas without feeling them violently rotting inside her heart.  She remembered with such crystal-clear vividness every significant moment from Jennifer’s life: birthday parties as a little girl, ringing the bell while learning to ride a two-wheeler bike, spiking the ball at high school volleyball tournaments, her first kiss, the awkward post-prom losing of her virginity, tossing her grad cap in the air at college, and so many more that they were impossible to keep at bay.  The memories were so intensely animated in her mind, raw and real, biting at her consciousness so ferociously that she refused to believe she couldn’t be Jennifer, despite having all the physical evidence that could possibly be provided.

            NO.

            Why wasn’t she Jennifer?  Why was it so impossible?

            All that separated her from Jennifer, after all, was two weeks of memory after the procedure while awaiting her arrival.

            That, and the fact that she was now small enough for the real Jennifer to squelch her to blood and intestine jelly under a balled fist.

            The real Jennifer.

            It was no use.  She knew she couldn’t convince herself she was Jennifer and this was still some horrendous nightmare.  Even with all those memories swimming in her head in a fiery whirlpool, there was no denying that she had only existed for about a week and a half.

            The real Jennifer.

            That phrase was acidic in the YouPet’s throat, and it made her nauseous, despite her ability to hold back the traumatized tears.  She doubted she would be able to stop herself from being sick for very long.

            After all, included in those memories, so real they could almost be touched, were her fantasies.  Specifically, her fantasies of what she’d do with a YouPet if she ever got her hands on one of her very own, or two, or three, or four: plans constructed carefully over a year of pining.  The daydreaming, the planning, the unbreakable desire that all combined into a mortal thought process so clear that she knew exactly what fate was coming for her in alphabetical and chronological order as soon as Jennifer wanted to start.

            Jennifer herself had been caught in a reverie, just staring down at her tiny clone trapped in the box, soaking in the visage of terror in the little one’s eyes.  There was no where she could go.  No matter how many laps she ran around the corners of the container, no matter how much she cried or screamed, and no matter how long she bowed on her knees with her hands clasped in prayer, she could not prevent what was coming.  It was inevitable.

            The young woman ceased tapping her fingers against the edge of the box.  She’d been waiting twelve long months ever since she’d known YouPets existed for this moment, and she was through with being patient.

            Her hand descended into the box over her trembling prey, her fingers snaking around the clone’s quaking limbs.

            It was time to play.

            The feeling of picking up her YouPet- picking up herself- was more electrifying than Jennifer had anticipated.  Instantly the pathetic little squirt was broken from her horrified paralysis and thrashed about against the coiled surface of soft fingers steadily squeezing around her until she was flattened against Jennifer’s palm, which had begun to sweat from the tingling anticipation.  Jennifer raised her arm up so that her fist still hung about two feet over the box.

            Something close to a human life, condensed into a nearly two-inch package, was contained in her fist.

            Her human life, specifically, concentrated into a papery frame the size of a dragonfly.  Shaking and fighting like a caged animal.

            Jennifer sighed, wanting to meld this moment into her mind permanently.  She would not be able to experience this for the first time ever again, after all, and she wanted to relish it.

            All the troubles of her youth, big and small, seemed to be packed into this moment.  Her weaker self, siphoned off of her and shrunken down into a wheezing mirror image body, was now hers to take hold of.

            This lowly, pathetic life form squirming between her fingers represented every part of Jennifer that she loathed and wanted to be rid of.  No one was going to be able to put her down ever again, because she held the power over herself.

            She did.  Jennifer.

            And it was time to put this side of herself to rest.

            Of course, she wasn’t going to let $50 go to waste, either.  She’d spent over a year imagining this moment, going over ever squalid detail in her mind.  Jennifer had become an architect of time for this specific frame of her life.  She knew what she wanted just as clearly as the YouPet did, and she doubted it would even be necessary to state her wishes of the worming mini-Jennifer in her fist.

            In fact, the little victim could probably recite it just as well as she could, if not better due to what she assumed was the adrenaline rush of a two-week lifetime.

            “Are you ready?” Jennifer whispered to her pet in her clenched fist.

            “No,” croaked the YouPet, feeling hollower than ever, and wanting very much to return to sleep for as long as possible.

            Jennifer’s fist opened up.  Her fingers splayed out in the air, abandoning the YouPet in freefall over the box.  The little thing barely had time to yelp as she plummeted the equivalent of a two-story drop back into the prison she’d awoken in.

            The YouPet, too horrified to contemplate proper landing procedure, landed right on her feet but quickly slumped to the ground.  She yipped like a wounded animal as the pain shot from the tips of her toes to the top of her head.

            Quivering with shock, she looked down at her legs, and was surprised to see them looking perfectly straight and un-splintered.  From the feeling of it, she would’ve assumed one of her knees had snapped at the hinge and left her crippled.  But this was not the case.  In fact, aside from the searing pain now settling into her skin, she felt physically capable of standing up again and actually walking.

            The moment stretched on silently as the YouPet whimpered forlornly, rubbing her shaking palms against her knees, until she looked up into the leering expression of Jennifer, who was leaning as close as she could into the opening of the box.

            “Good,” Jennifer said simply, nodding her head.  “You’re still in one piece, just like I thought.  What do you say we move to Phase 2?”

Jennifer simpered at the pathetic little clone of herself writhing between her fingertips as she dangled her over the hardwood floor below, her hand poised at eye level for a close examination before she completed the second part of testing the YouPet’s tolerance for physical damage.

            So far, the results were looking extremely positive.

            For Jennifer.

            When she picked up the YouPet again after dropping her back into the box, her miniature had still been trembling from the lingering pain of the fall, but now she seemed back to normal, or at least as close to it as could be deduced given how hard her limbs were now quivering with anxiety at what was coming.

            “You don’t have to do this,” the YouPet wheedled desperately, knowing full well how futile her pleas would be, her words choking together as she became hopelessly lost in the eyes of her gargantuan exact copy.

            She never believed she could fear a face as much as this, so passionately and completely that she felt she might vomit if she had to stare into those piercing green eyes much longer.  And the worst part was she couldn’t tear herself away from the stare, because it was her own.  Even if she closed her eyes, she’d spent a lifetime touching her face and glancing into mirrors.  Not even going to sleep would save her, because she could conjure herself up in a nightmare with ease.  There was no escaping from it.

            Her own eyes, her own mouth, her own face.

            Her own sick, twisted desires that now clung like cancer in the back of her falsified memories that had been cooked up in a lab rather than actually lived like the real Jennifer.

            “You and I both know I do have to do it, though,” Jennifer answered with a steely grin.  “How else will we know how much you can handle?  It’s something for both of us to learn, really.”

            “Please,” the YouPet cried, her eyes welling with tears as she fruitlessly begged her giant self.  “Please.”

            “Happy trails, mini-me,” Jennifer said, and with that she parted her thumb and forefinger, releasing the YouPet to the cruel talons of gravity.

            The fall into the box had happened too quickly for the little life form to even take stock of it, but this plummet she felt for sure.  This was long.  This was everlasting.  This was what she’d heard people talk about as their life flashed before their eyes on the way off a tall bridge.

            She squirmed in the cold rush of air as it swept past her cheeks and inflated her simple blue gown as she careened past the towering features of Jennifer’s body, lower and lower, passing the stomach, the crotch, the knees.

            The toes she recognized so well from many a time painting them came clearly into view just as the YouPet smacked into the floor so hard that her hearing was squeezed from her ears into a hollow world of imploding agony that ripped through her limbs in time slower than molasses.

            She had never conceived of a feeling like this.  Pain, so absolute and all-consuming, she could focus on nothing else.  It burned through every inch of skin, from her fingertips to the ends of her hair.  It curdled in her very core.

            Her vision was patching out every few seconds.  She managed to glance up at the colossal skyscraper of all-powerful red-headed woman that made up her authentic self, dizzied by the sight of it, but knew one thing for certain: had she fallen from that high as a real person, she’d be a gory splat on the pavement.

            Obviously, rather than destroy her and end all sensation mercifully, the physiology of her specially designed body merely converted the kinetic energy of her fall into pain, which she was also apparently capable of experiencing without blacking out.

            What a skill to have.

            Luckily, like last time, the pain was draining from her body almost as quickly as it had come, which was more than welcome in that moment, and yet further confirmed hers and Jennifer’s suspicion.

            YouPets were damned hard to kill merely with gravity.

            And that was going to make things interesting for Jennifer very soon.

            There was a shorter delay before the normal-sized woman took action again.  The YouPet blinked, newly freed of the unbelievable pain of her nine-story fall, just as a shadow was cast impetuously over her cowering form.

            Jennifer’s foot, rosy and moist from the gleeful adrenaline high she was experiencing through her body, came down unrelentingly on top of her little clone with a rush of cold wind and a deafeningly hard stamp.  The creamy wrinkles of her sole smushed down against the tiny being’s frame as the foot began to pivot, twisting back and forth against the floor, pinning the victim hopelessly underneath like a newborn mouse.

            The YouPet screamed at the pressure building up exponentially with each passing second as Jennifer applied more and more strength centered down into her slender foot, testing the unbelievable resilience of her toy.  The texture of the foot was milky and slick with sweat, but the raw power from above concentrating itself onto the little body beneath superseded any sensation that might’ve been picked up otherwise.

            To the YouPet, it felt like having a damp mattress laid atop her body, followed by a string of ten eighteen-wheeler trucks attached and trained to a single point in space just above.  She was barely conscious of the ridges of her own detailed footprint, magnified dozens of times over, familiarizing her with every squishy crevice of a foot she never truly knew this intimately until now.

            The little Jennifer wailed again, the sound absorbing directly into the unforgiving ceiling of thick flesh continually avalanching from on high.  She howled until it felt her throat would bleed.

            “I know we’ve both been wondering what would happen,” Jennifer commented unassumingly at last, not letting up the pressure on her pet at all, and instead arching her pink sole and focusing all the strength of her stomp into the ball of her foot.  “If you would actually make it, I mean.”

            The YouPet felt the tears coming now, her muscles breaking into involuntary spasms, her brain imploding in protest.  She could sense her limbs quivering around her joints, threatening to snap finally under these conditions.

            “But I think we have our answer now,” Jennifer sighed, and only then let up the pressure from her foot, lifting it casually off the YouPet and slamming it back down onto the floor with such force that it bounced the tiny girl several inches off the floor again like a popcorn kernel.

            The YouPet clenched her eyes shut, writhing and trying not to bite her tongue as she rode out the pain, so cutting in its intensity from nearly every moveable angle of her unfortunately resilient body that she doubted such a sensation could ever end.

            In the silence that proceeded, as Jennifer observed her prey with interest, the YouPet could feel the torment fading again.

            As she peered down at her ravaged limbs, though, she could make out a number of bruises that had swelled up, purple and round along her knees and elbows, and they weren’t going away.

            “Interesting,” Jennifer said, tapping a finger against her lip.  “It looks like you can get over getting dropped and stepped on pretty fast, but not too much of it.  Huh.”

            The YouPet lifted an arm above her face, using her hand to try to blot out as much of the leering visage of her own face far above, because looking directly up into Jennifer’s eyes made her start shaking again.

            “Hey, listen up,” Jennifer continued freely, her tone easygoing and almost musical from how much fun she was having in discovering all this.  “Quiz time.”

            The YouPet’s already jagged breaths caught in her throat.

            “Can you guess what comes next?” Jennifer whispered down.

            The YouPet could’ve nodded, but she didn’t need to.  They both knew darn well what the answer was.

            “Here’s a hint, in case getting dropped right on your little head made you forget: hold your breath,” the taller woman warned.

            Jennifer hocked in the back of her throat loudly, inhaling a burst of air, and then fired.  The spit unspooled in generous, string dollops from between her lips into a single wad.  It plummeted like a gooey bowling ball through the air, sailing closer and closer to its target, and landed with a violently viscous splat directly upon the YouPet’s upper body in a shower of saliva.

            “I guess that’s what they call a bull’s eye, isn’t it?” Jennifer cheered softly, clenching her fingers into a fist and pumping her hand with victory, while her little doppelganger gasped desperately for oxygen through the dribbling mass of sputum, a warm river of goo dribbling through her gown and over her bruised sides.

The YouPet had only just managed to choke through the frothy swamp of Jennifer’s sour saliva and take a recuperating breath before she felt the probing fingers of her source pinching around her ankles and plucking her off the ground.  She hung upside in the air, too worn out after the stamping to flail, and was brought back to chin level with Jennifer as a few stray droplets of spit plopped off the ends of her red hair.

            “Disgusting,” Jennifer said, wrinkling her nose and shaking her head.  “Not sure I really feel like looking at you like this.  It reminds me too much of… me.”

            The YouPet gagged as the little gown now clung stickily to her body from the dispersed saliva, soaking her completely.

            “Let’s try paring you down a little.  Just so you don’t forget what you are,” Jennifer suggested, and pinched her fingers around the back of the YouPet’s gown, rending the sopping threads almost instantly with a strong tug.  The shorn fabric was flicked aside like a corner of moist toilet paper, leaving the dangled YouPet nude and damp from the residual fluid of Jennifer’s mouth.

            “Now that we’ve tested what your body can handle, let’s try out your head,” Jennifer grinned, reaching into her pocket with her other hand and rummaging her fingers around.  “I came up with this a week ago out of the blue.  We don’t want you cheating on this part, after all.”

            A frigid void overtook the YouPet’s mental state in that moment.  As painful as it was, she’d known about the previous steps before they arrived, at least allowing her to brace as best as she could for the onslaught.

            Now, she couldn’t anticipate with certainty what was intended for her, and the ignorance was even more terrifying than waiting for the crushing misery of her own enormous foot to stamp her into oblivion.

            At that moment, Jennifer’s other hand rose back up into the YouPet’s limited field of vision, most of which was just comprised of the jumbo-tron representation of her own blushing, conniving countenance.  Pinched between a colossal thumb and forefinger was a simple red thumb tack.

            “Know where this is from?” Jennifer asked.

            The YouPet nodded uncertainly, a lump forming in her throat.  It looked like it was from the corkboard Jennifer kept in her bedroom to pin up pictures.

            “I keep that board full of random stuff from parties, but I never have anything really interesting go up on it,” Jennifer explained.  “Nothing I could point at when people go in there and tell them I made it.”

            The YouPet was only half-listening, because her focus was now trained aggressively on the thumb tack, which to her was the size of a fire hydrant with a steel spear on one end, steadily inching closer toward her exposed and dangling body.

            “So maybe you’d make a nice addition,” Jennifer murmured.  Her fingers shot forth the remaining inches until the thumb tack, the sharp ended pointed outward, was touching the YouPet’s belly button.  “I could just stick it right through you and keep it there until I get sick of looking at you.”

            The tack teased against the YouPet’s skin, tracing a line around her belly button, not prodding her hard enough to break the skin, but enough to let her know it was there and then some.  Another nudge and the tack would be inside her intestines.  And certainly only the gentlest of pokes from Jennifer’s fingers was all that separated the two outcomes.

            “Maybe not there, though,” Jennifer continued, twirling the plastic end of the tack along the rounded rim of her thumb.  “It’s a little too obvious.”

            The harder the YouPet tried to focus on keeping her limbs from shaking, the more they quivered out of control.

            “Maybe we’ll go with somewhere that makes a little more of a statement,” she continued.  Jennifer’s hand tilted a few degrees upward with a mere twitch of her wrist, and suddenly the thumb tack was prodding at the inverted YouPet’s clitoris.

            “Open your legs wider,” Jennifer instructed calmly, her voice lilting and gentle as could be.  “Show me your little pussy better.”

            Hanging upside down over the same gut-churning drop as before, unable to do anything but swing her arms and one leg, with a point sharp enough to drive into her skin and impale her to a wooden surface now touching her labia, had brought the YouPet to her breaking point.  Choking back a few terrified sobs, she vomited, the tiny flecks plunging toward the ground until she could no longer even see them.

            “I guess that’s the winner, huh?” Jennifer chuckled.  “I figured that would do it.”

            “Don’t…” the YouPet whimpered dryly, trying to smack the horrid taste out of her mouth, her breathing laboring almost to the cusp of hyperventilation.  “P-P-Please.”

            “Who’s to say I don’t secretly have a masochism fetish that’s so secret even I don’t know about it yet?” Jennifer pondered aloud, glancing up at the ceiling for unseen clarity.  “Maybe I’ve been missing out all along by not getting fucked by a spike.  Maybe you’ll be the one teaching me something about myself.”

            “W-Why would y-y-you…” choked the Youpet, “…want to s-s-see that thing g-go into your own… y-your own…”

            “I wouldn’t.  It probably hurts a whole hell of a lot.  That’s why I’m not sticking this in my vag, I’m thinking about sticking it in yours.”

            “This w-w-wasn’t p-part of the p-plan,” the YouPet gasped, surprising even herself at her capacity for conversation or even coherent thought as the cold metal continued to stick at her delicate lips between her legs.

            “Well, who says I can’t improvise a little on the plan?  I’ve had two weeks thinking about you getting here, after all.  Who wants to stick with the same-old, same-old?”

            “B-B-Because I know that I wouldn’t do this!” the YouPet screeched with breathless panic.  “I know it would freak me the FUCK out to have to look at that thing going into me, even if it wasn’t me!”

            “Oh, you wouldn’t do this, huh?  So what?  You’re not me.  I can change my mind on a dime, and that’s one thing you do know,” Jennifer retorted coldly.

            “But what d-d-does this p-prove?”

            “What does it prove?” Jennifer snickered back, concentrating the tip of the tack with a little more purpose against the YouPet’s genitals.  The little woman sucked in breath, horrified that moving a single muscle would end with sliced flesh.  The tack still hadn’t broken skin, but any added pressure and it was going to start messily penetrating her in a spray of crimson and tears.

            “No…”

            “It proves you’re really goddamned boring when you’re not flying through the air like a little birdie, that’s what,” Jennifer concluded, withdrawing the threat of tack-raping her miniature at last.

            Her wrist arching downward, her fingertips clamping tightly around the YouPet’s ankles, Jennifer flicked her hand forward like she was tossing a Frisbee and flung her clone through the air with perfect form for maximum distance.

            Life for the unfortunate shrunken copy spun into a haze, like stumbling drunkenly through her living room after a real night-long bender.  Her vision blurred, her eyes watered, and her limbs flailed in the chill of her soaring trajectory.  Now that she was naked, every corner of her skin was touched by the rush, and it iced her to the bone.  As soon as she felt herself losing height, she wrapped her arms around her head and tucked her legs into her torso with detached resolve, already processing what was coming to an agonizing degree.

            The landing was not a single crash like before, where she’d been deposited straight downward on a nine-story fall.  Jennifer’s throw had provided even more height than before as well as an arc, and a solid one-hundred-and-twenty feet of gravitational yank collided with the YouPet’s body.  She bounced twice, skidding over the floor like a discarded marble and smashing headlong into a glass flower pot.

Consciousness clung poisonously to the YouPet even as the pain ricocheted from the tips of her toes to the top of her head like a bullet trapped inside her body at full speed, her vision blacking in and out.  She wanted out so desperately, but no such mercy was delivered.

            She only became aware that Jennifer had picked her up again by her hips between a thumb and forefinger when she realized her feet were no longer touching the ground and she was instead being brandished before those demonic green eyes of hers again.

            “I don’t care, you know,” the little Jennifer spat out into the icy silence as the searing pain receded more slowly than before, bruises swelling up like diseases across her ravaged body.

            Jennifer froze, continuing to dangle her pet nine stories in the air, and bit her lip pensively.

            This was something she hadn’t expected.

            “You don’t, huh?” the real Jennifer queried with bemusement.  “You don’t care.  So you’re saying I could just let go of you again.  Maybe drop a chair on you.  Throw you out the window of my room.  Go put on my Louis Vuitton spikes, go find wherever you landed in the yard, and stick one right through your stomach like a kebob.  And you wouldn’t care?”

            The YouPet shook her head furiously up and down, knowing she had little time left to communicate effectively before Jennifer tried something else.  “That’s right.  And you know why?”

            “Why’s that, mini-me?”

            “Because I’m NOT just mini-you!” screeched the YouPet with newfound vigor, even getting Jennifer to flinch at the muted cry of her own voice.  “I’m JENNIFER!”

            “Don’t be stupid.  I think we both know who’s who.  What more do you need to see to get that through your tiny head?”

            “I don’t need to see anything else.  Yes, maybe I didn’t come out of mom like you did.  But I am you in every other way.”
            “Really?  Because I don’t remember somebody having the right to kill me if they felt like it,” Jennifer opined thoughtfully.  “You, on the other hand…”

            “I’m not finished!” the YouPet hissed.  “I remember stealing that midterm answer key back in ninth grade.  I remember punching Sherry in the face when she called Betsy a whore.  I remember fucking Tommy behind the trash cans at that Bed Bath & Beyond in college.  And most of all, I remember why I made copies of you.”

            “So?”

            “Don’t play stupid, we’re both thinking it.  We have the same goddamned brain!” the YouPet shrieked, her words flowing like fiery poetry.  “I can’t stand the sight of myself anymore.  I wake up and want to know why I exist and why I can’t just squeeze out the weak part of myself so I can really become something.  And I can’t, because I don’t know how, so instead I did THIS.”

            Jennifer’s verdant eyes glowed with recognition even she couldn’t hide, her cheeks slowly frosting into a ghostly white.

            “There is nothing that makes us different.  I hate so much about myself, and I am you.  You were just too afraid to say it before.  But now, no no matter what you do, no matter what you say, no matter how hard you try to forget it, you’ve heard the truth in your own voice.  You won’t be able to ever get it out of your head that deep down, you know that the only thing keeping it inside you is somebody threatening to kill you,” the YouPet bellowed meekly through parched lips.  “And that’s pretty fucked up.”

            The behemoth original Jennifer nodded solemnly, biting her lip again.  The silence chilled both of their lips and caused the collective heart rate of the room to settle into a death march pace.

            “Not bad.  Now allow me to make a counterargument,” Jennifer said simply.  “Here’s one thing that makes us different,” Her mighty fingers curled downward around the inverted form of her clone, pinning her inside her fist and squeezing without remorse until she felt the tiny limbs wobbling uncontrollably with agony again.

            But unlike when she was stepping on the YouPet, she didn’t let up when she felt the thrashing.  Jennifer clenched every muscle in her arm, tightening her grip as though she were hanging from the ledge of a collapsing building.  She gritted her teeth and put everything she had into squeezing, even wrapping her other hand around her fist and pressed until her knuckles turned white.

            A pop was heard.  Then a crack, like dry straw.  Then a few more cracks.  Bones snapping as easily as peanut shells.

            “And here’s another thing,” the gargantuan woman giggled softly as she opened her hand to let the broken YouPet sprawl in her palm.  She licked her lips, savoring the sight of her vanquished form literally under her absolute power.  “You remember how many of you I was planning on ordering, right?”

            The YouPet nodded, her throat too dry to summon words freely, as the pain exploded outward from all thirty-seven bones she’d just had broken, settling permanently into the forefront of her brain.

            “Say it,” Jennifer demanded.

            “F-F-Four,” the YouPet wept sorely from pain rather than concession, keeping her eyes closed so she could at least enjoy the solitude of darkness for a few brief moments.

            “Right.  What were they all for?” Jennifer continued.

            The YouPet took a deep breath, a death rattle beginning to emanate from within her with each attempted word.  “One, tag.  One, s-s-stomp.  One…” she sputtered, swallowing again.  “…s-s-scissors.  One… dildo.”

            “Not bad,” Jennifer congratulated, juggling the YouPet’s battered and limp form between her fingertips, agitating her broken bones with each casual bounce of her expansive palm.  “But here’s the thing.  After I did the procedure, I changed the order.  And I added one more.”

            “O-O-One… more?” the YouPet wheezed.

            “Just one,” Jennifer repeated innocently, holding her pointer finger up for visual reference.  “And do you know who that is?”

            The YouPet gulped and met identical eyes with Jennifer.  No words were needed for them to understand each other.

            “I guess that’s one thing you didn’t know, huh?” Jennifer teased.  “Just one little fact that I decided myself, before you existed, before I had you in my hands or under my foot.  One teeny tiny little decision I made that makes me Jennifer, and you a pathetic little piece of shit that’s costing me fifty bucks.”

            The YouPet closed her eyes again as the tears rolled anew down her flushed cheeks.  It was time.

            The rest came swiftly.  Jennifer’s mouth unleashed, her tongue striking out like a slimy crimson cobra as the YouPet was pushed over her thick, quivering lips.  The splashdown into the pooled saliva was sudden but was quickly followed up as Jennifer’s tongue slaked her clone along a slick row of teeth capable of snapping through even a YouPet ribcage and then pinned her up against the roof of her dark mouth.

            The YouPet had stopped trying to breathe several seconds before and was simply letting her body fold in any direction Jennifer’s tongue chose.  She was flung like a ragdoll from cheek to cheek as Jennifer sampled the flavor of her own skin, getting irritated as she felt her luscious red locks getting sticky in the soggy shuffle and gluing to the sides of her tongue.

            She had had enough.

            The tongue curled backward, scooping the YouPet into a convenient ball of broken bones and swollen skin with only the tiniest glimmer of a consciousness still contained inside as it was bundled toward the back of the throat, carried on a sweltering river of phlegm and froth to the abyss of her gullet.

            The twenty-five-year-old woman stood alone with herself, drenched in the calm of the air and the lump burrowing without identity through her esophagus.

            That part of her was gone.  The bad part.  There was nothing left to fear.

            She was Jennifer, and no one was going to take that away from her, even if they bellowed it in her own tiny voice from her own tiny lips.  Everything was fixed now, and couldn’t be broken again.

            Right?

            Jennifer York opened her eyes, yawning, and felt happier than she had in a long time.  She was so excited she could hardly stand it.   Now that she’d undergone this part of the process, all she had to do now was wait two weeks for her four YouPets to arrive, and she could begin the games.  The whole thing was mapped out in her head like a choreographed dance, and she was itching to feel each tiny version of herself writhe like a worm under her thumb.

            Come to think of it, maybe four wasn’t going to be enough.  It would probably be best to have them send her a fifth as well, even with the increase in cost, to ensure she had enough back-ups.

            Yes, definitely.  A fifth.

            The comfortable white foam recliner she’d laid down on for the procedure seemed to have been replaced with a cheaper material beneath her back, but she hardly noticed or cared, nor did she pay much attention to the low humming coming from outside the walls of the room.  In fact, the only puzzlement she had was from being told earlier that this DNA extraction procedure would leave her with some discomfort when she awoke, but that was wrong.  She only felt free and energetic now.

            Like she was brand new.