It was late afternoon the day of the lab accident that reduced me to six millimeters tall, so it was still daylight.

It was pretty easy making my way around campus without being spotted. I mainly stayed in the planters, walking among the plants and decorative tree bark.

I was on my own in a world of giants, so I had to be careful. Anyone was a potential predator, and I knew I could trust nobody at all, not even Jessica. But I knew that eventually I had to try to trust someone, so if I was going to be foolish enough to make my condition known and introduce myself to someone, it was going to be Jessica. After all, she was in love with me, and although it was stupid to trust anyone, it seemed to me that there was the least amount of risk involved in trusting her than there would be in trusting anybody else.

The only problem was, Jessica lived in a small coastal California tourist town that was ten miles away, and getting there would be one hell of a journey. At six millimeters tall, one ordinary mile to me is equivalent to between thirty and thirty-one miles. If I averaged one mile a day, I should be able to get to Jessica in a week and a half.

It was getting to be late afternoon, and the sun would be setting before too long. so I would have to wait until morning to begin my journey. At my reduced size, my body temperature was reduced also, making me vulnerable to low temperatures. Even though it doesn't get too cold in the month of May on the central coast of California, I was going to need a warm place to crash for the night.

I knew of a place where there was a steam-grate that was connected to the utility room that supplied heat to the dormitories. It took close to an hour to get there without being spotted, and by the time I arrived the sun was going down. I built a little camp with some leaves I dragged over to the edge of the steam-grate, and I was concealed from view. I had shelter for the night.

It took a while to fall asleep that night, because I hadn't eaten anything since earlier that afternoon, and I was hungry. Sleep finally came, and I slept peacefully.

When morning arrived, I had almost forgotten that I was shrunk, but when I opened my eyes the reality of it was painfully evident. I peeked out of my camp that was constructed of leaves, and I could see a bright blue morning sky. It must've been early still, because I didn't see too many students walking around, which was good, because it would make it that much easier to get around without being spotted and captured by one of the giants.

Before I had fallen asleep the night before, I had developed somewhat of a plan. I knew of a place behind the engineering classrooms where there was a dumpster that was used to throw away useless electronic components. If I could find a broken piece of magnet from an old speaker, maybe I could tie it to a piece of string, and utilize it to ascend to the rear axle of a vehicle at a gas station. Then I wouldn't need to walk to Jessica's, I could hitch a ride!

Progress was slow, and it took up a good portion of the entire morning to get to the engineering classrooms. Avoiding being spotted was the main reason, because several times I had no choice but to dart across exposed areas where I had to make absolutely certain that there was nobody around to see me. The other reason was the distance. To a normal-sized student, the distance from the steam-grate to the dumpster would take about five or ten minutes, walking at a moderate pace. But when you're six millimeters tall, it takes a lot longer.

When I arrived at the dumpster, it was just as I had hoped. In addition to several pieces of wire, nuts and bolts on the concrete beneath the mammoth dumpster, there was the frame of a discarded stereo speaker, and several chunks of the magnet that once made up the innards of the speaker. Some of the pieces of the magnet were larger than me, some were the size of grains of sand, and there was a plethora of sizes in between. I picked up a chunk that was to me about the size of a basketball.

It was kind of heavy, so I decided to look for some string to tie it down with, so I could wear it like a backpack. After looking around for a few minutes, I did eventually find a nice long coil of string among the discarded trash at the foot of the huge dumpster. I laid it out end to end, then I tied it around the chunk of magnet.

There was a flat side on the magnet that I tied several loops of string around, and before long, I had an improvised back-pack. When the time came, I could simply untie the string from the magnet, unroll it, and with one end of the string still tied to the magnet, I could swing the chunk of magnet over my head and use the string as a lasso to hurl the magnet to the iron axle of a car at a nearby gas station.

I wished there had been some way to obtain some food, but wherever there was food, there would be people, and if I valued my freedom, I had to completely avoid any and all people for as long as possible. I knew that as soon as somebody spotted me, I'd be through. If someone did ever capture me, which would be extremely easy to do, I knew escape would be virtually impossible. Who in their right mind would ever allow a miniaturized man to ever have the opportunity to escape? Nobody that I had ever met, that's for sure.

And so, with an empty stomach and a plan of action, I set out for the nearest gas station, where I would try to hitch a ride with my magnet and my piece of string. The nearest gas station was about half a mile form the college campus, so I figured that I should be able to make it there just before nightfall.

I experienced the greatest amount of difficulty just getting off campus, because at that time of day it was especially crowded, and I couldn't take any chances. At one point, I was stuck hiding in a planter at the bottom of a huge bush for a good twenty minutes or more, because two female students were standing on a sidewalk I needed to cross. They were making what to me seemed to be insignificant conversation, but maybe I just felt that way because they were blocking my path. If I had been foolish enough to chance it and run across the concrete walk-way, the two women would've easily spotted me. While I waited, however, the view wasn't so bad. The brunette had some pretty incredible legs, and it was interesting to view a great pair of legs from this new perspective. Finally, they left, and I looked to my left and my right, and I ran across the sidewalk to the planter on the other side as fast as I could, and nobody saw me.

Once I was off campus, my progress was much swifter, and before long I was more than halfway to the nearby gas station that was located not too far from campus. It was amazing, I had never pondered the relatively close distance of the gas station when I was at my normal size, but with my reduced stature, I was angry at myself for having taken it for granted for so long. It was only about half a mile from Matheson University, but the proportionate distance to me at my reduced size made it equivalent to a distance of about fifteen miles. I had walked the distance from the college town where I went to school to the beach town where Jessica lived many times when I was at my normal size, so I was conditioned to make this kind of a journey.

I ducked through back alleys and went through apartment complexes that would've been impossible for a normally-sized person, and I only had to cross a street once to get to the gas station. That was the greatest obstacle, because I had to wait for just the right opportunity to cross when there was no traffic and no pedestrians that could've seen me.

When I finally arrived at the gas station, it was late afternoon, with a couple of more hours of daylight left. I had gotten there sooner than I had anticipated, which was good. There was a drainage pipe I hid inside of, where I had a good view of the cars and trucks that came and went.

I made a point of reading the license plates, to see if the vehicle was local or from out of town. Sometimes, there were bumper stickers or some other signal that indicated the car was local, like a familiar radio station on a bumper sticker, or a tag that advertised a local car dealership where the vehicle had been purchased.

I couldn't get too picky, so when a woman stepped out of her car to go inside and pay, I ran out from inside of the drainage pipe where I had been hiding, and began to swing the chunk of magnet around on the string that I had prepared while I had been waiting for the right moment.

It took a couple of tries, but eventually the magnet connected to the differential in the center of the rear axle, and I started climbing up the string. Before I had even reached the axle, the woman had returned to her car, and closed the front door and started the ignition.

I climbed up as fast as I could, and soon I was standing on top of the differential, and I pulled up the length of string and coiled it up. As the vehicle started moving, I held onto the string like reins on a horse, and the magnet held firm to the iron differential casing.

Soon, we were on the freeway, just as I had hoped, but from my estimation, we were heading in the wrong direction, north, instead of south! Every bumper sticker and dealership tag had indicated this was a local car, but by a random stroke of fate, I had chosen a local car from the north county, under the mistaken assumption that the car dealership advertised on the woman's car was from the south part of the county, so therefore, the woman driving the car was from the south county, but I'd been wrong! And so North we went, the nearest town being thirty miles from Matheson university, and the next town was twenty miles still further!