EXHAUSTED BREAKTHROUGH

“The board meeting is tomorrow night,” said Ms. Anri Sato, her hands on her hips as she glared down at Dr. Brian Taylor at his desk in the lab. “Investors are going to want something concrete I can show them, we can’t keep giving them vague promises anymore.”

“I understand, Ms. Sato,” Brian said in his broken Japanese, running his hand through his hair.

“No, I don’t think you do,” Ms. Sato said, giving a weary sigh. “I know this is difficult research you’re working on, but I don’t have unlimited time and money to pour into it. I need results, and I need them now.”

Anri Sato was the CEO of Sato Industries, the company that was about to revolutionize the world. With Brian’s research and Anri’s money, the company had spent the past  few years developing something right out of science fiction: a shrinking device.

It was planned to be a simple procedure. The machine was set up like a chamber that one could walk into, and after a few seconds of the science doing its work, that person was reduced to just a few inches in height. The process was irreversible, but it could mean a brighter new future for everyone on earth. At a fraction of their size, anyone could afford anything they want while consuming a sliver of the resources.

It was also going to make Sato Industries wealthier than ever before. Anri Sato inherited the business from her mother. Only in her late twenties, she was one of the most powerful young executives in the world already, and she had a lot to prove.

Brian had learned that from working under her. She was a chronic workaholic, but if there was one thing that could be said about her, it was that she never let a job get neglected. Even if that meant working herself to the bone.

“I expect that we’ll both be spending the night here,” Anri said with a sigh, checking her phone clock and frowning down at Brian.

Brian felt his gut turn. She’d been putting him under more and more pressure with each passing week, and he was so used to it by now that he could almost time the hours by listening for her hurried footsteps to come loom over his desk and tap her foot expectantly.

But he didn’t know if he could keep working through these long overnight hours, no matter how good the pay was. Then again, he hadn’t adjusted to life in Japan very well as it was, so the lab might as well have been his sanctuary, if Anri didn’t invade it every few hours.

“Of course, Ms. Sato,” he said respectfully. “Believe it or not, I think I’m very close to the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for.”

“I hope so, for our sakes,” she said, rubbing the bridge between her eyes and taking a deep breath. “Look, we’re all stressed, trust me. I still have three meetings to sit through, and I expect we’ll be going until after midnight. I’ll have one of the interns send up a coffee.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Brian said with a crack of a smile.

He watched his boss turn and walk away. He was so exhausted already that he realized he was watching her backside as her long legs carried her away. Her professional black outfit ended in a skirt that left most of her legs bare, and her heels pushed her up taller than she already was. He gave his head a shake as he snapped out of it, his cheeks going red.

That wasn’t like him. He nearly laughed at himself. He and Ms. Sato had always had a very professional relationship that never crossed those boundaries, despite how closely she liked to supervise. As much as he hated to admit it, Brian was every bit the workaholic she was.

Of course, if he really finished this project in time, she might just marry him, he thought. He did laugh at himself that time. Thinking of Anri Sato as anything but the powerful executive she was was so outlandish it was funny. It did make him wonder what her personal life was like, if she had one.

The smell of coffee approaching snapped him out of it. He smiled as the intern set the mug on his desk and waved him off before he stood up, stretched, and made his way over to his brainchild--the shrinking machine.

Hours melted away like snow.

The hot coffee got cooler and drained sip by sip as the night wore on, and Brian alternated between reviewing his notes, tinkering on the machine, and writing more notes. Ms. Sato had always been very clear about the level of detail she expected from the process.

Once voluntary shrinking hit the markets, they were going to want to know every last detail about the technology and guard it carefully.

They’d be rich, and the rest of their lives would be easier than they could imagine.

By midnight, Brian’s vision was getting fuzzy. The coffee could only do so much, but his hands weren’t as coordinated as they needed to be, and he felt like he was in a perpetual yawn...but he was so close that he couldn’t stop now.

This should have been done a week ago, but there was something in the circuitry that was just a little off that he couldn’t quite figure out, no matter how long he looked at the problem. For what felt like the hundredth time, he got on his back and tinkered with the machinery inside, fumbling in the poor lighting. He was just starting to let his mind wander off into another hazy daydream when something sharp brushed his hand and shocked him.

He yelped and shook his hand, but he realized that he’d touched a loose bit of copper he hadn’t noticed before.

Furrowing his eyebrows, he patched up the stray wire,  carefully using his tools to reconnect it to its proper place.

The moment he did, he was hit with a jolt of light so intense that he thought he was going to die. His life flashed before his eyes--his youth, graduating from MIT, accepting this job, meeting Ms. Sato for the first time, the coffee taste still on his tongue…

...and when he opened his eyes, he was somewhere unfamiliar.

The ground was hard and metal, but he didn’t recognize it. He had been halfway inside the machine a second ago, but now, everything was wide open space and a lot of darkness. He saw light behind him, and he staggered toward it.

It wasn’t until then that he realized just how strange this situation was. Had he been sleepwalking? The only thing he could think of was that he’d fallen asleep and had sleepwalked his way out of the lab to some dark alley.

“Can’t wait to hear the chewing out I get for this,” he muttered in English, hurrying his pace. But he soon realized this couldn’t be an alley--it was much too wide and open, the lights were too distant, and the climate felt too controlled.

Was he in a warehouse?

Then he stepped off the metal surface he was on and reached a stretch of what looked like smooth marble or tile, and that led into a strange ridged surface. At a glance, he could have sworn it looked like carpet, but it was far too big and far away for that.

Then he saw his chair.

There was no mistaking it. He was far away enough that he could see the shape of the rolling base and the plastic pillar that led up to the seat that he’d occupied just a few minutes ago.

It was big enough that it could rival a mountain.

Dr. Brian Taylor fell to his knees.

===

Anri Sato was dead on her feet when the elevator doors slid open. She stepped out of it and looked down each long hallway, seeing nothing but dim lights and the office plants in the corners.

It was long, long after work hours, and she knew the only two people probably left in the office were her and her Dr. Taylor.

Sometimes it felt like they were the only two who got any work done around the place. And even so, sometimes she regretted hiring him. He was a brilliant mind, but it was clear he couldn’t handle the kind of workload she expected on a daily basis.

She took a couple of steps into the hallway, then stopped, feeling the stabbing pain in her feet from her heels. She’d been running here and there all day, meeting with this bank and placating that investor, promising the press team things she could barely back up and moving more money around. And damn it, she was tired.

Sighing, she kicked off her shoes and picked them up before taking another step. The clean, warm carpet felt better by far, but it was a poor substitute for the soft bed she was longing for.

She made her way down the long hallway to the lab in the back, where she pushed the door open.

===

Brian was halfway across the carpet when the door swung open, and his jaw dropped.

The march across the carpet had been bad enough. It was simply absurd. He had to climb up onto the thick fibers and start making his way across it like it was an obstacle course. Every fiber was so thick that he could stand on an individual one and not lose his footing.

He had been shrunk. That much had come to him in a panic when he first realized he was looking at the chair. When he reached the carpets, he found that if his estimation was right, he was right around half an inch in height, if that.

His heart was pounding, his hands were shaking, and his face was pale. He’d shrunk himself. Whatever he did had caused the machine could work, and he’d shrunk himself. Maybe there was a wire that was in the wrong position, or some safety precaution he’d forgotten to take, but regardless, here he was.

That told him two very important things.

One, the machine worked. By god, he and Ms. Sato had done it. They had developed a working shrinking process that could reduce a person to a fraction of their size, exactly proportional and as far as he could tell, healthy.

Two...there was no going back. The shrinking process had been designed to be permanent. Sato Industries was cutting-edge, but they were still a corporation, and they had plans to market tiny cities and everything that went with them for the newly-shrunken people’s new lives.

Ms. Sato of all people had her reservations about the ethics of permanent shrinking when things got started, but when she saw the projected profit margins, she was won over. It was supposed to be something that people did after thorough counseling, though. People were expected to sign waiver after waiver and put weeks of thought into this life-changing procedure. But it had all happened to Brian in the blink of an eye.

An accident.

Up until now, Brian had turned a blind eye to the ethics of the process. All he really cared about was the prestige and the money, because hey, he wasn’t going to be one of the dipshits who actually shrank themselves down for kicks.

All that changed when the door swung open and he saw Anri Sato standing in the doorway. Standing at 5’2”, Ms. Sato was an average woman by all regards. Brian stood taller, just a hair above average for a healthy Irish man. What he was looking up at now was nothing short of breathtaking.

He saw her feet first. They were miles away, to his scale, miles, but the size of them made his knees weak. If he were his ordinary height and she were scaled up, one step could easily fill a stadium, he had no doubt. Her feet stood bare on the ground, and he followed the silhouette up her long, long legs to the shadowy hem of her skirt. It was like gazing up at the mist-covered peak of a mountain from below...but she didn’t even end there. By the time his eyes reached her hips, he was dizzy. This was his boss. A woman he’d literally looked down on when he met her, enveloped her entire hand with his. By the time he reached her neck, he was looking up at something taller than he’d ever experienced in his life, and it was just a woman younger than he was. Shorter than he was. By the time he looked up at her tired face and the glassy eyes staring straight ahead at where his full-sized self should have been, his mind was reeling with the implications--there were other people, many other people out there in the world even bigger. People who dwarfed this gargantuan woman he was now confronted with.

Then she lifted her foot and took a step.

It was quick. Faster than anything his mind had been trained to process for something that fast. He let out a shuddering cry and staggered back when the first step hit the floor. He watched her foot sink into the carpet ever so slightly, fibers poking up between toes, muscles relaxing and shifting as the whole frame of her person moved its weight around.

At a normal height, he never would have considered Ms. Sato heavy. He’d even thought idly about how she seemed to move effortlessly across the floor on light feet. Now, at this scale, every toe moved like a fine-tuned machine making the behemoth move.

He watched the next foot lift up and sail through the air. It was a hypnotizing sight, like watching a whale breach, thousands of times grander in scale. When she pulled her toes back and started to bring the foot down, he could see every imperfection, every wrinkle, every fuzz from the floor that was invisible to the naked eye on the vast surface of the sole of her foot.

Something felt so bizarre and wrong about observing her like this, so personal and close up. The fact that it was cold, aloof, workaholic Anri Sato made it all the more wrong. He never saw her letting her hair down, much less every little detail of her legs blown up to monstrous proportions.

Then the foot landed, and suddenly, he realized how urgent time was. Ms. Sato was walking toward him, and he had to act fast to get her attention. Part of him felt his stomach twist in knots at the thought. There were supposed to be so many trial runs before human testing. So many variables eliminated, so many dangers circumvented. This was the worst possible scenario, and he knew that the moment Ms. Sato found out, she’d be furious.

Nevermind the PR disaster of the headlines SATO SCIENTIST SHRINKS SELF that would utterly annihilate all their hopes for this project. Realistically, he knew that getting her attention meant he would be hidden away while regular testing took place, and he’d then be quietly slipped out into the shrunken population as one of the volunteers.

The thought of being a decorative scientific consultant living on Ms. Sato’s desk until then, though, made him feel ill.

For just a split second, he considered running. Maybe he’d be able to avoid the cleaning staff in the morning and quietly get the attention of some intern instead.

All this flashed through Brian’s head in the span of a few seconds as Ms. Sato approached. All the while, never once did he consider that he was in real, life-threatening danger.

When Ms. Sato took her fourth step, that danger dawned on him, and his face went white. She moved so fast, and he had so little frame of reference for how long her strides were, that he had failed to realize that he was right in her path.

He stretched his arms out and started to shout, “MS. SATO!” as loud as he could. But even as he did, everything felt heavy like the end of a bad dream when he watched her sleepy face disappear from view, and all he could see was the underside of her jaw, then her legs, and then…

Anri Sato’s foot appeared over him, toes pulled back before the foot began to relax on its descent. Brian fell on his back and held a hand up in vain as everything seemed to slow down before him. She was not a woman who pampered herself much. Some of the surface coming down at him was rough and reddened from a long day. His eyes focused on a freckle just under the ball of her foot as it came down so close that the shadow darkened the world around him.

In his last moments, Brian felt a laugh curling his lips up. A freckle on her foot. He never knew that about her. Somehow, that thought was strikingly funny to the man who was the first human being ever shrunk, and about to be the first victim of its consequences.

Brian felt the warm, rough skin make contact with his hand, and the next instant, everything went dark.

===

Anri wasn’t even that mad that Brian had evidently abandoned his post. After the day they had all had, she was about ready to take a power nap too. She furrowed her eyebrow as she padded across the soft carpet, shoes swinging from her fingers. It looked like he had left in a hurry, too, because everything showed signs that he had been in the middle of working on the machine when he left.

Maybe he went to go get more coffee, she told herself. A little brisk walk could be good to freshen the mind up.

On the way in, she had decided that she’d been too harsh on Dr. Taylor. She’d worked with him for over a year on this project, but in all that time, she’d never really taken a moment to get to know who he was. She’d been planning on letting him take a break to chat a little, complain about the irritating meetings she’d just sat through, and maybe share a coffee before they got back to work.

Taking a breath, she walked over to his desk, let her shoes fall to the ground, and crossed a leg under her to prop herself up by the elbows on the desk and peer over his notes.

After a few moments, she began to feel her work day catch up to her, and her vision went blurry.

Maybe a power nap wouldn’t be a bad idea, just until Brian got back from whatever corner store he was running to. Anri set her head down and breathed deeply, thinking that this desk felt remarkably comfortable right at that moment.

She let her hand move to the foot that was poking out from under her other thigh, pressing her thumb to the arch and running it up while she flexed her toes back and forth.

When she reached the ball of her foot, her thumb touched something warm and wet. Her eyes sprang open. What on earth?

Frowning, Anri twisted her foot up and leaned over to look down at what was on the sole.