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.