I was a student at Matheson university, studying to get a degree in nuclear physics, and a minor in electrical engineering. My name is Deuce Orion, and I am 25 years old. I was good friends with a professor there, a certain Professor Stiles, a theoretical physicist who was experimenting with a method of perfecting cold fusion.

Professor Stiles hired me to assist him in his laboratory after school, and he payed me pretty well. I didn't completely understand the professor's theory, because he kept the details a secret, but what I knew about it was that he had stumbled onto a unique theory that would allow the quarks and gluons of the protons and neutrons of a tritium/deuterium serum to be stripped of neutrino particles. Somehow, this miniaturization of the atoms composing tritium and deuterium would initiate cold fusion and form helium atoms.

The part of this whole theory I was unsure of was whether or not quarks and gluons are composed of neutrinos, and the professor had found a way to seperate the outer layers of the quarks and gluons of neutrinos, or if quarks and gluons were made of something else entirely, and the professor had found a way to convert this sub-quarkian matter into neutrino particles.

As far as how he did this was was the biggest secret of all. Professor Stiles simply said it was through an application of quantum physics, and left it at that. I wasn't interested in stealing his theory and taking credit for it, I just wanted a piece of the action; I wanted to be able to tell my grandchildren some day that I was there in Professor Stiles's lab when he initiated the first successful documented and verified cold fusion reaction. I couldn't blame him, though. There were a lot of different people who could profit from stealing his theories. Any company that generates electricity for a profit could either prevent the public from having access to this new technology, or they could control the patent, so they could generate electricity for a fraction of what it costs now, while still charging consumers the same price as before.

I'll never forget the Friday afternoon when the experiment was an apparent success. All of the read-out monitors started beeping, and the digital power gauge L.E.D. display indicated that the micro-reactor was generating much more electricity than the power supply that pumped electricity into the reactor. We had broken past the break-even point, and the digital thermometers indicated no increase in temperature! The inside of the micro-fusion reactor was the same as the room temperature of the laboratory.

Before Professor Stiles could grab a bottle of champagne he had stashed to celebrate, the door to the lab was kicked in by a group of gun-men with ski-masks on, and they held us up at gun-point!

They specifically asked the professor for all CD-ROMs and floppy disks with any and all information pertaining to the cold fusion experiment recorded on them. After Professor Stiles handed them what they requested, one of the masked hoods used a machine gun and opened up on the cold fusion experiment I was standing right in front of!

Neither I nor the professor was injured in the attack, thank God, but I did find myself drenched in the mysterious tritium/deuterium solution. The crooks had told us to count to two-hundred before we were even to think about moving, so after they left, and after the professor reached what he assumed to be a reasonable interpretation of what counting to two-hundred should be, he left to call the cops at a payphone at the student study hall, because the bandits had clipped the phoneline to the lab just before the robbery, and they had taken our cell-phones.

I would've went with the professor, but I told him I'd better sit this one out, because I felt really dizzy. Must've been the tritium/deuterium solution that got all over me.

As I sat down in a chair, alone in the lab, the strangest sensation overtook me. I closed my eyes hoping that it would go away, but when I opened them, I could see a layer of what appeared to be steam rising from every part of my body. As I looked around the lab, the dizziness seemed to return in greater intensity, and I had a strange sensation similar to vertigo as the lab seemed to expand in all directions all around me.

I blinked my eyes to make this optical illusion go away, but that did no good, because the walls of the lab seemed even farther away each time I opened my eyes...because this wasn't an optical illusion!

The lab seemed to fill with the steam I mentioned before, and I decided to stand up to catch my breath and maybe open a window or two. It's a good thing I did, because as soon as I stood up, the chair I had been sitting in seemed to expand directly behind me until it was bigger than a one-story house from my perspective!

That was when it finally occurred to me that I just might be shrinking, but even at that point I wasn't completely convinced yet, like a drowning man grasping at straws, I tried to rationalize what was happening to me by assuming that I was suffering from previously unknown hallucinogenic side-effects of being drenched in the tritium/deuterium solution.

Apparently, the steam I saw was the subtracted mass of all the quarks and gluons making up the atoms of my body being simultaneously reduced in size and forced to occupy less space. The reaction the professor had discovered did in fact cause miniaturization to occur in quarks and gluons making up the protons and neutrons of the tritium/deuterium solution before fusion was intitiated, so that was in fact exactly what was happening to my body...

I was shrinking!

When I finally stopped shrinking, and the steam finally went away, I was reduced to the helpless size of six millimeters tall! I knew this because I had helped the work crew that installed the tile floor in the professor's lab one weekend last summer, and the distance between each two individual tiles was six millimeters, a measurement I had to make many times that weekend to ensure that the tiling was installed as neatly as possible. That was my exact height, the same distance between two of the floor tiles!

I knew I had to escape from the lab before the police arrived, so I could try to find a solution to my problem. It wouldn't do any good if I ended up as a government experiment at Area 51 somewhere in Nevada, now would it?

Luckily, the professor had been in such a hurry before he left that he left the door to the lab ajar just a couple of inches, something I hadn't even noticed before, but at my diminished stature, it was now very obvious. At six millimeters tall, a door that is open a couple of inches would be a door with a width large enough for an elephant to go through, had the same distance been duplicated proportionately for a normal-sized man.

I ran outside into this brave new world of giants that was just waiting to be explored, where I would now try to live out a fugitive existence in an attempt to restore myself to my former stature. My closest family members lived over 100 miles away, so I had to find another plan. Who could I trust? My studies didn't leave much time for any kind of a relationship, and all my spare time and vacations were spent working for Professor Stiles in his lab, because I definitely didn't come from a rich family, and I needed all the money I could get.

There was one possibility, a seventeen-year-old chick named Jessica. She was in love with me. She was basically the only one I could trust besides the professor. The only problem was, she lived about ten miles away. So I made my decision, to set off on a quest to find Jessica, come Hell or high water, and damn the consequences!

Good or bad, I was willing to accept the risks, whatever they may be, as a six millimeter man!