The uTopia - once the humanity greatest hope not only to survive, but to thrive and rebuild - now the ultimate trap enslaving countless number of people. Many modern thinkers and historians are asking themselves how could it happen and what made so many humans neglect reason and logic to get themselves in this mess.

The reason was simple: they had no choice.

During Earth's twenty first century, there were numerous breakthroughs in medicine, which allowed to treat most diseases and age-related conditions leading to unprecedented increase in longevity. Problems like cancer, organ or limb failures became as easy to fix as common cold was to cure in the first decade. Which was made extinct, by the way, just like flu, HIV, malaria and many other diseases. Nearing the eight decade, people's lives could literally be extended indefinitely - and easily enough, that almost everybody were able to afford it. Populations boomed. Entire countries were consolidating into gigantic megapolies, making the concrete jungle more common than any other habitat, natural or not - including the sea, now almost filled with huge city ships sailing on every available scrap of water.

Although resources were scarce, people were getting around that, coming up with more and more sophisticated ways of mining, goods manufacturing and beyond: fusion power plants ensured energy availability for the next billion years, huge magma mines provided raw metals and materials, synthesizers and genetically-engineered organisms gave more food than anybody needed as well as oxygen to breathe. On the eve of twenty second century, sun dawned on almost thirty two billion people. It seemed that technological progress will overcome all problems, at the same time steadily improving the standard of life.

One invention perfected around year 2112 changed all that. The molecular assembler - a device capable of manipulating atoms using sophisticated nano-machines to create literally anything the owner could imagine - or, usually, get blueprints for. Laws of physics still applied, of course, and you needed to provide raw atoms as input, but it seemed a new age of universal prosperity was coming. Put a lump of coal, nitrogen bonding catalyst and water, wait a couple minutes and you got fresh steak. Put some iron, carbon, copper and bits of other minerals - voilŕ, the newest skycar model.

There was only one drawback to this contraption: due to large amounts of alpha and beta radiation being used in the process of nano-assembly, it produced a substantial amount of unstable isotopes as its by-product, requiring costly recycling and utilization. It often cost more than two hundred times more to safely utilize them than to buy the raw materials and energy. And there were people, entire corporations even, who put raw income over the environment and simply dumped the dangerous and deadly waste wherever they could, delivering discounted products and making huge profits.

It was the main reason for massive public outrage, new tough government regulation and even wars when some countries were themselves abusing the newly created global environmental laws. Within three years of the technology becoming common knowledge the air became dangerous to breathe without a filter and continued to deteriorate at a dangerous pace. Oceans were turned into a toxic slump even sooner. Some radical environmental groups took drastic steps to use nano-assembled thermonuclear weapons to reduce the world's population, hoping to reduce the speed at which Earth was being destroyed, but the main outcome was increasing the radioactive pollution even more.

Newly created archologies and off world colonies were targeted first, seen as havens for the richest elite being built at the expense and with disregard for Earth's environment - which was almost always the case, since huge amounts of nano-assembled goods were needed to create an internally self sustaining environment.

Chaos and havoc quickly spread.

It took two more years to reduce world's population by a factor of ten. Many died from terrorism or war activities, most - simply from the radiation, killing them more quickly than even the miraculous medicine could fix. Almost all remaining hope for survival died when the final project of the world's governments - the Atlantis, a two thousand mile radius ship, submerged in the middle of the pacific was blown up by multiple nuclear detonations near the hull - planted by people who could not afford the ticket inside - outraged and exacting their hatred by using home-assembler made tools to filter some uranium and deuterium from the oceans to be fed to a simple blueprint for an efficient twenty megaton bomb. It was simply impossible to guard half the ocean against every threat and when millions of people were independently trying to assault it... it was only a matter of time.

The most optimistic forecasts at the time did not give more than two more years for any larger settlements to survive - it seemed only pockets of humans would remain, vaults amidst ruins of once proud civilization. Even cockroaches would not survive the man-made cataclysm in the works - perhaps only some bacteria, deep in the parts of oceans with limited water circulation. Desperate for a way to save the remaining people - or at least enough to ensure the survival of the human race - the best researchers were trying everything. Even the craziest ideas of mad scientists were taken seriously now - as long as they gave at least the smallest chance of succeeding in providing a safe haven. Some of them turned awry and contributed to the global extinction.

Pan-american energy and research conglomerate's project "u-habitat" - from micro-habitat, later renamed and popularized under the name of "u-topia" or eventually - the uTopia, was one of such crazy ideas. Deep under the Andes mountains - or at least what has left of them after the second war for Antarctica. It aimed to employ theoretically known for some time already, but sparsely used, the non-singularity atemporal matter-phase dilation field generators to turn relatively small chambers into huge fertile valleys. The NS-aTM-PDFG, simply known as dilation generators, were seemingly strange devices that could be used to compress space and "multiply" matter within a confined space.

The mechanism was simple: use a set of efficient superconductors and powerful fusion generator to produce a massive electo-magnetic field inside. This field, when properly managed, will bend the space itself and make the interior of the machine more capacious than when dormant. It will also cause matter to "multiply" in order to retain the same total energy - as atoms in this "smaller" space have less mass each, which requires more of them for the entire system to have the same energy. Early devices were completely useless and the technology was generally ignored, as they allowed to increase the volume of less than a cubic inch by barely a thousandth of a percent - still measurable, but maintainable only in vacuum, since the mass multiplication manifested in huge gamma outbursts - since atoms were unable to create 1.00001093 copies of themselves each, effectively destroying any equipment when turning the device with any content inside - or if any mass, say.. larger than a pikogram, tried to enter the dilated space.

The uTopia scientists first managed to increase the multiplication factor to 2 by using even stronger closed-loop self-powered superconductors in special patterns and then managed to make atoms duplicate rather than burst energy outwards by coupling their field waveforms in stable positions - creating two perfect, smaller copies of each particle. They were not completely self-propelling, of course, but managed to maintain stable dilation field with minimal external electromagnetic emissions - and therefore only minute amounts of energy needed to be provided from outside, at least comparably to early prototypes.

Further improving the process allowed to copy entire molecules rather than just loose atoms and even repeat the duplication making more mass and more space. Eventually they settled on manageable 40 cycles, which compressed the space length a little over 10321 times. With improved equipment, they were able to turn five meters high and a hundred meters wide and long square hangars into over thousand kilometre large spaces with over 400 thousand square miles - differently put, about 50% more than the surface area of Texas. And they could produce a lot of these machines - even within within the confined space of deep underground ex-military base, that they were operating in. Each one filled with rich soil for plants and huge stacks of materials for anybody to use.

Dilating - that is shrinking - anything was a difficult process and took some time to perfect. Eventually they figured how to force mass/energy waveform representing any small enough object to manifest in exactly one perfectly the same, except being scaled down, instance when entering the dilated space under special circumstances - and extract the extra energy to speed up the construction of other chambers. It was, at the time, one-way only operation, but they believed they could reverse the process, if given enough research. They also discovered they can use NS-aTM-PDFGs to "teleport" between different chambers and possibly from and to any given one - as long as the scale factor was the same across the teleportation and the mass dilation remained the same. In other words - they could connect all these chambers into a single civilization via specialized devices.

And thus, they had all the tools necessary to quickly create a safe, clean, miniaturized environment - hence the uTopia name. The first chambers were built, but constructing and seeding them seemed like a terribly strenuous and time-intensive process for the shrunk population, as they would be greeted only by heaps of base molecules - miles high piles of soil, sand, metals next to miles deep bays of water - all stretching for hundreds of miles in every direction. Preparing them before dilating would be pointless, as the process would not preserve desired land shape and form. Therefore, configuring special deflection fields into the generator function, they were able to send teams of several full sized people to enter the already dilated space and manipulate it, sculpting beautiful landscapes - mountains, plains, rivers, coasts, islands - entire continents built and seeded with plants for the future inhabitants. Of course they were rather rough - as detailed as a relative 10 thousand times bigger person can do with basic tools. It was assumed that over time, the occupants, erosion and nature forces would take care of the rest.

The deflection capability was also refined over time, creating a very sharp, almost impenetrable outline just on the skin and clothes surface also allowing the caretakers - as the maintenance crews became called - to breathe the local air - being un-dilated on the fly using the superconductor reserve energy - which was simply recovered when they breathed out and the air was again dilated. It only worked, however, for simple materials and was noisy enough to kill all life - so they did not have to worry about any micro lifeforms to contaminate the maintenance space, even if they were able to survive outside of the dilated space. All of which allowed the caretaker teams to go through the zones sculpting quickly. The researchers believed this process is the key to reverse the shrinking - should it ever be necessary or desired, but failed to pursue it further on behalf of more pressing matters.

And thus, an alternative was created. An alternative to slowly waiting outside for death to come - pioneer as one of the citizens of the uTopia and begin a new life in a fresh, clean world. Of course there were harsh laws and restrictions - most notably, mindful of how Earth was destroyed, the molecular assemblers were completely banned inside of the habitats. The only allowed ones were controlled and maintained outside and used to build products which were then teleported to one of the chambers, with all pollutants being safely removed from the facility. Due to restrictions on amount of assemblers based on the amount of available space and energy, habitat-internal manufacture of goods was strongly encouraged. Additionally, thanks to several slick tricks with the all encompassing dilation field, any fission weapons were made much less efficient - making any nuclear bomb barely stronger than a firework - on top of the fact that it would be virtually impossible to construct one, due to scarcity of uranium (which simply was not put into the source chambers). Also almost all high-tech nanobot weapons did not work due to subtle noise of the dilated space.

Eventually, the most carefully guarded facility in the world, massively promoted and advertised in the outside, the project soon attracted many people. Millions of immigrants quickly turned into billions - for obvious reasons, almost everybody preferred to move inside, instead of being vaporized by one of nuclear explosions regularly rocking most of the planet's surface - or even worse, waiting to die in pain in one of the shelters.

How were the chambers colonised? The process was simple - all started with a sculpted terrain, left for a period of two years to allow vegetation to grow - later shortened to one, due to large amount of immigrants - a single chamber. It was sealed to disallow any maintenance crew to enter as long as there were any humans inside - it was recognized that eventually, the terrain may need to be re-sculpted, since the chambers lacked many natural terraforming facilities, such as volcanoes or tectonic plates. Depending on the amount of water available in the chamber, human influence and erosion would eventually turn into plain or swamp even the highest mountains - even though some chambers had ranges even twenty miles high, when the sculpting crew wanted to create something "original". In the need of re-sculpting, the plan was to have a caretaker team enter the previously evacuated and disconnected zone to redo the terraforming and allow colonists to settle again.

When it came to the colonization, the first wave of immigrants had the toughest job - being deployed only with a handful of vehicles, tools and materials - they had to build the foundations of the civilization. Deploy farms, mines and factories before they run out of the prefabricated resources. The management was reluctant to provide much more from external micro-assemblers, as supplying them with micro-matter was problematic and they preferred to focus on creating ever more chambers to make space for refugees that were constantly flocking in.

Despite all that, with modern technology and plenty of resources in the environment around them, most of the pioneers succeeded - building clean and efficient cities, starting food production and making themselves independent from the outside world - except externally powered lamps producing "sunlight", rotating in daily and yearly cycles - emulating time of day and seasons. They also brought different plants and animals to create more natural environments than cities and even artificial pockets of wilderness - as nature will claim any land when it is left alone for a decade or so. Soon those various settlements would connect within a single chamber to start trade and cooperation, and then cross-zone highways would be created by manipulating the dilation field, connecting multiple of them. Within a year, a solid self-sufficient organizational structures emerged, which soon turned into countries and alike. People lived with each other peacefully, since there was plenty of room for expansion - it was just a matter of connecting another, uninhabited zone for newcomers to settle. Countries were dividing rather than trying to conquer each other - to better reflect the beliefs and value systems of people living in given areas. And of course - no civilization inside any of the chambers could possibly act against the managers of the uTopia for long, as their littlest action could turn an aggressor into a smouldering ruin or give enormous advantage to the other side, and who were simply against any kind of war.

And thus, a paradise was born. In 2120, three years after the official opening, the total number of humans alive outside of the uTopia was calculated to be below one million - based on various communications and observations. Eight years later, the last external contact went silent - suggesting that the facility has remained the only refuge of the humankind. And it flourished. Three years later, in year 2131, the first census showed that little over two billion immigrants total has given more than double that number of children already - and some of which has matured and were looking for a place of their own - often in different zones, creating new societies and even declaring new countries.

The only problem was slowly deteriorating conditions for the management staff - even using molecular assemblers and advanced robots, they were unable to create a reasonably large space for themselves to live, resulting in simple and dull facilities, with barely any excitement - or anything to do, in fact. The brilliant researchers, that created the place, found themselves migrating to the zones. Seeking to spend their eternal life in a more alive and entertaining environment, while leaving a smaller and smaller staff guarding more and more automated facility. After several decades even the sculpting before colonization was abandoned, in favour of simple robotic-made environments shaped further by local immigrants.

After numerous restrictions made to the equipment, it seemed they were only a shade of once all-powerful management staff, being there only to watch for any unexpected errors or anomalies in the equipment, being denied the ability to affect the zones in any way. It was still sought by some people, solitary types - for instance. Or the ones, who did not trust some eggheads to be miniaturized. Either way, with every year there were less and less people on the outside. They were still called caretakers, even though they were not doing anything for the ones in the zones directly.

And thus, humanity thrived. The robots were constantly expanding the uTopia facility, building and connecting more chambers than humans could ever use. People inside were constantly expanding, colonizing more and more zones, spawning rich and booming cultures everywhere they settled. All went perfectly smoothly for several generations - as 3-4 decades were still commonly called, even though everybody could live as long as they wanted - not including accidents and murders, but those were insanely rare.

Nobody really knows what happened next. Or - more specifically - why or how it happened. All cross-zone and external links simply died. One second they were fully functional and allowed millions of people to move across the zones, not to mention billions to communicate with each other and even with the caretakers - the next one, all highways turned back into regular dilated space - sometimes cutting cars and trucks in half - and communication links became just a bunch of useless electronics.

Many zones found themselves stranded from their normal food sources in other chambers - or simply overpopulated, which caused billions to die. Billions more killed each other in attempts to grab as much land and resources as possible within a single zone they found themselves locked in. Some zones even went back to stone age - with advanced equipment destroyed or simply never delivered there - what for would a farming community need a smelting or electronics-assembly equipment - and realized they are unable to assemble any industry without fossil fuels and available ores.

But in most places, civilization survived and people more or less peacefully tried to undo the effects of the Failure, as they called it - to get out from a multitude of traps they suddenly found themselves in. They quickly learned it is simply impossible to get out. Without access to NS-aTM-PDFG controls, the electro-magnetic field was like an impenetrable wall - strong enough to deflect or destroy anything even normal sized and they were thousands of times "smaller". Which created another impassable obstacle - in order to return to normal world, they would have to supply thousands of times the energy of their mass, to properly de-compress the space. It was simply hopeless.

The questions everybody, who knew how the uTopia was made, kept asking themselves were: where are the caretakers, why haven't they done anything - or what have they done, if the current situation is their doing. But many people, younger generations mostly, were previously just living there without paying any attention to the external world and its history - many zones, notably the newer ones, were left without any information about what could have happened - why has the gates turned off. Years and then decades passed without any answers. In the year 2392 - for anybody who still counted artificial years from the birth of an ancient prophet - the Caretakers returned.

What people fortunate enough to survive found puzzling, was that the Caretakers did not know what exactly happened either. They only had stories and theories about the communications shutdown - as they called it, as opposed to "the Failure" for the micro people. One theory said there was a rebellion within their group and they cut any contact with the zones - and therefore any control the scientists had over them - but it didn't explain why they had no idea what happened. Could all conspirators die and leave them with no knowledge? A second theory suggested the fault was incidental and it left the remaining maintenance crew struggling to survive and try to repair it under harsh conditions of heavily restricted and automated workplace - also many holes. Another one guessed it may have been associated with the machines becoming sentient and playing a terrible joke on their creators. But nobody knew for sure - and even more theories tried to explain strange situation they found themselves in.

The strangest one was, there were only women left - that fact baffled absolutely everyone. Maybe all males went into the zones looking for adventure and excitement before the incident? Or perhaps they killed each other off leaving only their spouses? A gender war perhaps, or some disease killing only members of a single sex, a feminist surgery and mind-washing dormant program that eventually activated and turned men into women, a computer error during yearly prostate exam... again those were all parts of various theories, circulated for decades, but the fact remained there were only five woman Caretakers. They lived supported by medical life extension systems, using assemblers for food and simple goods - as assembly of anything more sophisticated became blocked by the operators within the zones. Who were, it seemed, afraid of their possible exploits - at full size, they could pose a grave danger to the infrastructure.

But that was it, five women, who were bored to death, being deprived of access to any interactive entertainment or human contact outside their group. Left only with a bunch of recordings and each other, for over a hundred years. Unable to reproduce since their medical equipment was apparently locked for the cloning or any kind of external insemination functions. Yes, five women who, after decades of futile attempts, finally managed to break some of the codes and security mechanisms that, until then, have been stopping them from accessing the facility's administrative functions and tools - were suddenly able to use some - including, most notably, the teleportation program that was once used by the maintenance crews to sculpt the land before sealing the zones.

Yes. The Caretakers have returned. And they were fucking ten miles tall.

Nobody could have dreamt, not even in their worst nightmares, what happened next. The carnage was worse than anything they have ever seen. The - so called - Caretakers visiting the micro zones... it did not matter whether they were playful or cruel... they were both, switching across the entire spectrum depending on the mood or how bored they were - regardless, both curiosity and anger caused millions to flatten under their standard worker sneakers. Even littlest parts of their bodies - like a tip of a finger, or a strand of hair - touching the ground resulted in mayhem and death of thousands. Zone after zone, in groups or alone, they ravaged through what was left of the civilization using the people for their own fun and pleasure.

It became even worse when one of them, Erica - the informal leader of the group, discovered they can actually become pregnant using the tiny sperm - after playing numerous times with largest cities she could find, a casual medical check has shown a pregnancy. They rejected any reasons they could think about how this could have happened, except an option that deflection field may have de-compressed the sperm which then reached her egg. This was suggested by the fact, that within the group, she was the most passionate to fill her pussy with once magnificent creations of the powerful civilization, especially relishing in skyscrapers and ships.

In their newly acquired desire to have children, the rest has all started to do exactly that, gathering any amounts of micro men they could find and just ramming them in their cunts. Usually it they were fine with any people, including children, since distinguishing and selecting mature males would be a waste of time - and asking them to gather themselves was pointless. It was probably the worst way to go for any civilization - no contact with anybody outside their zone for hundreds of years and then a sex hungry indestructible giantess appears and starts to grab literally every man-made creation large enough for her to hold and push it down her pussy. One after another, however, they all became pregnant within weeks.

Strangely enough, their medical equipment was able to process birth and supply medical care for the babies. And so all six (Rachel gave birth to twins) girls were growing quickly to become later named as the first generation to join the five goddesses in their pantheon, ruling over miserable excuses for humans, the microscopic slaves and toys that people became for them. The second "generation" - as they called it to distinguish different groups age, even though they came from the same mothers (and crushed remains of their fathers were forever lost in heaps of goo excreted with tons of concrete, steel and other "packages" they used to fill up with) - born three years later, had only 3 girls, Kate, Nicole and Amber - since Lauren's pregnancy failed and Rachel decided to withdraw from this, being the only one to feel some kind of remorse or compassion for the little people. They were followed by triplets from Lauren five years later and another girl Erica gave birth to the next year - the four of them were promptly called the fourth generation.

All girls grew up learning to use, and abuse, their power over the little worlds leaving a number of once glorious hubs desecrated with their piss, crap and puke (apparently even giant children do that) - often much to delight of their mothers. Even leaving them to deal as they pleased with the micro people had terrible effects. Simply no human construct could sustain playful touch of such little girl, resulting in burning metropoly centers scarred with hundreds of feets deep and wide valleys as well as crushed suburbs and farmlands.

After almost eleven years of happily destroying and decimating tens of thousands of zones, with hundreds of billions dead, the five women discovered the sad fact about civilization - it takes much longer to build, than to destroy. Especially for a bored giant woman or girl. They had to give the people time to rebuild - and they even restarted the colonisation program, although being unable to reconnect the chambers (whatever happened during the shutdown/failure left those systems disabled), they had to move the little people by hand, literally - regardless of whether they were willing or not - which created many social problems and strange situations in both new and old zones. Namely - religions and strange value systems.

It changed when Lauren and Lisa (Amber's mother) continued to play in the remaining chambers freely - risking the future of humankind - hard decisions had to be made. Erica once again surfaced as the leader type and with other's support forced them all to catalog the zones they had visited and the ones that should still contain undamaged civilizations to randomly divide between them and lock teleportation access for others. This way if any of them was irresponsible enough to "run out" of humans, only she would suffer for that - having to painstakingly carve and support survivors rebuilding from the ruins. Survivors who would probably hate her for what she did. They could also allow others to visit various zones as they pleased or even give the entire ownership - which quickly became to be a definition good taste to do on various birthdays and other occasions. Notably, it became a norm for the first generation, that any mother should give her daughter some reasonably advanced chambers upon the 18th birthday as a sort of "graduation" gift.

And thus, the humanity was reduced to mere toys and slaves - each and every one of them basically owned by one of the women that could, without much effort, obliterate them all completely or instead help rebuild and rise again as a proud race they once were, although it seemed they would never rise above the goddesses ankles.