When my boss announced the plan, I immediately had dozens of objections. It was too dangerous, too risky, and unnecessarily convoluted. However, he was adamant in going through with it, and all my protests were waved away with platitudes and a firm reminder that if I didn’t do it, he could easily find someone else who would, along with the more regular duties of my job. I eventually acquiesced once I had been promised the freedom to pick my team in addition to a fat bonus when I got back.
A week later I was in a tiny, sealed packet with three other people and a liquid film transmitter. Shrinking technology was brand new and the highest corporate secret, and upper management was eager to exploit it before knowledge of it leaked to the press. It stood to reason that an exceptionally small operative would be exceptionally difficult to spot, and they had taken that to its logical extreme. They had a point: at our miniscule sizes we would easily be able to paint the film inside the USB socket of our competition’s server, compromising their encryption and giving us a firm edge not only in data technology, but in public perception.
We were taped to the side of a box, a supposed routine delivery that would get us into the server room. The enormous cardboard structure kept us in shadow while the cart rolled beneath fluorescent lights, with each minute bump rocking us like an earthquake. One bad wheel kept getting stuck, sending a jolt of tremors up the frame and through us. A team member looked like he was about to throw up, and the constant rumbling was making me nauseated.
Our movement came to an abrupt stop and a tremendous wall of black and white moved from the far end of the cart. I waited a few seconds to confirm we were being left alone, then gave a nod to the person with our means of escape. He fired up a blowtorch and walked along the bottom seam of our packet, burning a tear through the plastic that we never would have been able to make with our puny strength. When he reached me, he turned it back off and slung it through his tool belt. It was time for us to get in position so we could get to the target server in as little time as possible.
We hopped out from the ripped packet one by one and landed on a vast white plain about the size of a football field. The ground here was slightly textured and a little rough from grit, and lines of black, formatted block text covered it from top to bottom. I landed in the middle of a lower-case O with plenty of room between me and the dark circle, and my team dropped around me. Everyone got down safely with our tools, and it was now only a matter of biding our time before we were wheeled into the server farm.
A shadow engulfed us and held steady, its source looming over us from beside the cart. I gulped and looked up the tower of a human, their features dimly lit by other light sources. It was an absolutely gargantuan woman wearing a sleeveless black dress, her frame trim despite spanning hundreds of yards to either side. She was looking down at us, and I could see her face past her modest chest. I thought she was pretty despite being several thousand times my size, with big, dark brown eyes amid her light skin beneath well-plucked eyebrows. Her shiny brown hair was pulled back and held in place with a single chopstick just visible over her crown, and her face was a fine oval shape. Pensive lips painted a subdued shade of pink were pulled tight while she stared down at us, and I tried to decide whether it would be more disastrous if she had or hadn’t seen us.
“Huh, first drafts of the quarterly reviews,” she said. Though she was talking to herself, to me her voice was a horrific tsunami of sound that beat on my ear drums. It was a deep roar that made my insides tremble, and then I felt empty in its wake. “No sense waiting for them to come back around this afternoon.” She lowered a hand into the cart and slid her fingers beneath the stack of papers to keep it rigid. This was something no one had planned for, and no contingency for it existed.
She lifted the enormous platform we stood on as though it were nothing, her thumb pressing down to bend the pages slightly. A chorus of screams sounded as we slid down the curvature until bumping into her thumb like we were being sucked into a gravity well. I ended up wedged into the whorls of her fingerprint, effectively trapped between it and the paper. There was so much movement it was difficult to keep track of as we were lifted hundreds of feet into the air in the blink of an eye.
When we were resting against her digit my team scrambled to find some way to secure ourselves, either to each other or the woman’s skin. When she turned, it was clear that not everyone was successful. One person went careening across the top sheet, vainly digging his fingers into the paper to stop the slide. There was nothing for him to grab on to, however, and I could barely hear his scream when he disappeared over the edge. The world began moving again as our unknowing captor stepped forward, and the click of a heel left no mystery to his fate.
While she walked, she tried to keep her hand steady, but there was only so much she could do. The light swaying from her gait tossed us about like a ship at sea, and we did whatever we could to keep from getting thrown overboard. Her quick strides made the world move by us at a tremendous pace, and I felt the beginnings of motion sickness as she walked between the rows of cubicles. In order to quell it I focused on the ginormous woman dominating my view; at least she made my stomach feel empty rather than an intense need to vomit.
With each step I was thrown back against her thumb, and every turn made me cling more tightly to it. Every one of her strides made me deeply uncomfortable, and the constant movement overwhelmed my senses. One more turn and a pair of steps, then she suddenly released her grip on the stack. We plummeted away from the titanic woman until the papers landed on a desk with a tremendous thud. My bones rattled from the impact and my team was scattered over the page, and she had no idea about any of it.
The titanic woman looked down at us, though she did not see us while scanning the top page. Her chair squealed when she dropped her butt into it, and while she pulled it to the desk I struggled to get to my feet. My legs were weak and did not want to support my weight, but I gritted my teeth and forced myself up. By the time I was standing she had settled in place, and though she was hundreds of feet away there was not much to look at besides her.
It would take hours if not days to get back to the cart from her desk, and that was without having to watch every foot in the office lest it obliterate us. Our mission was no longer achievable, and we already had one fatality. No job was worth dying for, especially in such a senseless and unnoticed way. I decided it was time to cut our losses, abort the mission, and deal with the consequences of being discovered – if that were even possible. When I began shouting up to her the rest of my team members followed suit, and we waved our arms to help our chances of getting noticed.
A few seconds after we started she reached a hand over me, fingers splayed outward. It passed above and continued on its path toward the top of the page, where it descended toward the corner. I spotted one of my team mates there, barely visible to me from just the center of the page, and I realized how unlikely it was that we’d get spotted. His hands stopped waving and pressed upward in a futile defensive measure when her thumb engulfed him. There was not so much as an audible crunch when she pressed him between it and the page, leaving behind a miniscule smear as it scraped along the paper. The paperclip unlatching from the papers made more of a noise.
As though she had not just snuffed out a life, she calmly tossed the clip aside and lifted the page so it was tilted toward her. My teammate and I slid along the slanted ground until we came to a rest at the bottom of the page, mere inches from the terrifyingly huge woman. With her other hand she slid a pair of large, round-rimmed glasses onto her face, the lenses magnifying her eyes. Hopefully, she would now be able to notice us and determine that we were tiny humans instead of specks of dust.
Before beginning, she grabbed a pen from a cup beside her and worked it into her fingers. She clicked it several times with her thumb to make sure it worked, causing a horrific clang to assault my ears. Her fingers adjusted their grip, and with a tremendous thud that sent out shockwaves she set an elbow on the desk. While scanning the lines she chewed on the tip of the pen, sucking at the nub with her thin lips as she gnawed on it.
Suddenly her arm swung down, crashing onto the desk beside the papers with a powerful quake. Before we could recover she began idly tapping the pen against the paper, leaving minute wet spots wherever it touched. Amid the chaos and cacophony of it rapidly slamming onto the paper I noticed my remaining team member juking back and forth beneath it, trying not to get smashed. Unaware of the torment she had caused, she lifted her hand back to her face, though as a final kick her fingers jerked involuntarily when they left, pushing the moistened part of the pen into my teammate. The next moment he was no longer there, stuck to the pen by her saliva.
Horrified, I watched her grip the pen with her lips again, the muscles moving very slightly while she sucked on it. She worked it into her mouth, puckering around it, and chewing the plastic with her incisors. A small lump moved down her throat when she swallowed, then she released the pen from her mouth. There was nothing on it where it had been in her mouth aside from a thin, shiny film of saliva.
I was alone now, and I had a feeling that my minutes were numbered. Her hand raced down, slamming onto the stack of papers with a bang and narrowly missing me with her forearm. The impact’s shock stunned me, and I staggered away from her enormous limb. My eyes followed hers while she scanned the page, unaware that she was being watched from beneath her nose. Every so often she mouthed words without making a sound, followed by the scratching of her pen against paper grinding into my ears. With each passing second she drew closer to me, and all I could do was watch.
Her hand lifted from the page and hovered over me, and I started running. The shadow over me drew smaller and I dove, just clearing the impact area before her fist set back down. A current of air emanating from it seized my body and carried me along, depositing me several words away. I looked up the towering hand, its smooth skin pulled tight against the bones beneath it. Every so often her hand twitched, making a short mark on the page before sliding toward me and I took a step back. In seconds I was out of room to retreat, and I expected her hand to overwhelm me the next time it moved.
Fortunately, her hand raised away again before it overwhelmed me, and I was spared. A moment later, however, I was covered with a deep shadow, and I reluctantly looked upward. The tip of an enormous nose was almost within arm’s reach, and tremendous dark eyes were centered on me from either side. I waved my arms, hoping to grab her attention and spare my life, but saw no sign of recognition on her gigantic face. My desperate attempt to get noticed was clearly visible in the reflection from her glasses, so I was confident they were visible to her, too.
Instead of making a move to pick me up, however, she puckered her lips, and a powerful gust of air rushed forth from between them. It picked me up and threw me to the side, and I tumbled head over heel in the draft. I landed back on the page and rolled, the raised ink from each letter pummeling me as I passed over it. To my dismay, I stopped further down the page than where she had paused, setting me up for another battery of punishment.
Apparently she was satisfied and resumed her work, scanning each line with her pen while sliding her hand across the page. A minute later she had reached my line, and I stood in awe of her titanic fingers clasped around the pen’s grip. The tip scanned along the text, making the occasional jot as it went. It reached me, and I realized that I was standing between the d and l of the word “shoudln’t.” “Stupid,” she whispered in her booming voice, and set the tip down at the start of the word. I only had a few seconds to get free before it ran me over and my blood mixed with its ink.
Her pen raced toward me, leaving a black line twice as thick as I was in its wake. At first I tried running from it, but it quickly became clear I would not be able to outrun it. Desperately, I dove to the side and rolled when I landed, with nothing I could do but hope that I was far enough out of its way. The interminable scratching of ink running onto the page dominated my ears, but it passed by me harmlessly, not even brushing against my legs. She wrote the correct spelling above the word and sighed, blowing a cloud of warm air over me, and continued editing.
She reached the end of the page without encountering me again, but that was not the end of my torments. Her fingers gripped the sides of the page and lifted it vertically, spilling me onto the next sheet. Gingerly, she set the last report face-down on the desk beside the stack and turned her attention to the next one. When her gaze came back I was still struggling to get back up and must have looked like an ant writhing in the dirt. I was fully aware of how pathetic I looked when she leaned forward, bringing her face unbearably close to me.
“There it is again,” she muttered, making my bones quiver from the force. I kept moving, hoping that I would be recognized for what I was despite expectations otherwise. She stared intently at me for two long blinks of her brown eyes, somehow making me feel even smaller than I actually was. There was no sign she saw me as anything other than a bug or a speck of dust, though my outline was still clearly visible in her lenses.
In a rush she sat back up, freeing me from the beautiful tyranny of her face, but continued regarding me on the page. She extended a hand over me, fingers together but outstretched, and set it down just beyond me. Her hand swiped forward, catching me with the rushing wall of her pinky as it overwhelmed me. I was thrown from the paper as though I were nothing and slammed into her stomach. After a moment of being stuck against her dress I dropped from it and landed in her lap, rolling until I was nestled between her thighs.
I was incredibly dazed and most likely concussed and had no idea if I stayed there for minutes or hours. She inevitably became restless, however, and stood from her chair, pushing it back with her toned calves. Though I tried to maintain my grip I spilled from her lap and landed on hard plastic on the floor. With two quick tugs she pulled her dress down over her thighs before sitting back down, making the chair groan in protest beneath her weight.
In the brief time she stood I drank in the enormity of the woman who had kidnapped me and murdered my comrades. The soles of her shoes alone towered over me like a wall, and the shiny leather walls above those were as tall as apartment buildings. Her legs were vast towers, taller than any building I had seen even before they were covered by her dress. I looked up at the rest of her body completely agog, amazed that anyone could be so humongous compared to me. As a real kicker, she had no idea I was even there.
She raised the shoe nearest me and crossed it over the other leg, letting it dangle in the air. I watched while it danced above me, the toe making lazy circles in the air. Every three circles it stopped while she slid the heel off her foot and back on twice, like it was a comfortable pattern to her. It was mesmerizing, and I could not take my eyes off it despite my situation. Her fidgeting might decide whether I lived or died, after all, and there was not much else to look at beneath her desk.
My intense focus made it so I could only watch when she unhooked her legs in an endless effort to get comfortable. Her gigantic shoe raced toward me and quickly dominated my field of view. The minute trenches of her tread became more apparent as it drew closer, the sole of her high heel centered on me. There was not even time to shield myself before it impacted, wracking my body with intense pain. After a moment that seemed like a lifetime it was over, and I was naught but an unnoticeable speck spread between the floor and her shoe.