Jen was away for a work conference. She’d dislike these professional things when she was younger, but she’d grown to like them as time went on. Usually the work, the ostensible important work of ‘safeguarding investors and borrowers’ was done on Friday. Saturday and Sunday were for networking, I.E. lots of drinking, gossip, and some sex. She’d been an attractive 20-something, and she thought back to why she disliked these events. It was always an insular community, and she’d been looked down upon with a mix of derision and sympathy by women and men alike. A rising intern at a Manhattan firm, she’d gotten pregnant by her boss 2 months before her 21st birthday. He was 35 and married, and just wanted her to go away. She’d been too humiliated to push for child support. She mused about these standards for feminine morality as she looked at the skirt and minidresses these young professional women were wearing. Of course she’d snagged her second man without those…..he might have took pity on her, or have just been horny. He was 10 years older with a daughter of his own. She missed him, but there had been a lot of pain. 2 miscarriages and the marriage just couldn’t hold. It ended 5 years ago. Her daydream was interrupted when his spitting image appeared before her. One of the minidress girls, black-haired and pale skinned with piercing green eyes, approached her inquisitively. Jen recognized her immediately “Reina”. They embraced. It had been a few years since the divorce, and Jen had not seen her stepdaughter often. They covered the basics, what they had been up to. Reina, like her father and stepmother, had recently graduated with her accounting master’s. She was already licensed, and this was her first conference. More or less her adoptive mother, Jen felt obligated to tease her about boys. She was dating a guy pretty hard. Reina then took out her phone “but look at these guys”. Jen grinned and squinted at the phone. Reina had 563,000 unread DMs. It increased by the hundreds every few seconds. Jeez, the only person with more than that, was herself, from the micros, though she had ignored them for almost a month. She didn’t want her toys revealed, so she played dumb.
“What’s up with that?” she replied to Reina.
Reina grinned. “I think you know”.
She then pulled up the location tracking of one of the messages. He was a cute boy, about Mike’s age. The location was Jen’s address.
Jen sighed, and then Reina laughed.
“Come on, there’s no shame in that. Very feminist of you, absolute power over lots of men and boys”.
Jen smiled. “well, let’s just so they got to know another side of me”.
“Oh?”. “Well, whatever you have done, I bet they deserve it….I texted Megan. They’ve been harassing her too”.
Those little shits. Jen angrily pulled out her phone. She scrolled for a few seconds. She was going to text Mike to get him to tell them all to knock it out. She’d force them to make him King, her enforcer, if she had to. But then something caught her eye. It was hate mail (she occasionally got it, mostly from women) called “Roast Beef”. She turned down the volume and switched on close captioning. It was still bad. Some mite version of a shock jock was describing her pussy as roast beef and speculating that her 18-year old daughter’s virgin vagina would be so much better to see every morning. She excused herself from Reina. “Going to run to the lady’s room”. Reina nodded. In reality, Jennifer ran to the hotel parking lot and hopped in her car. She googled the nearest size store in the city. It was a few miles away. She sped off, fighting Friday night traffic.
Her plan was simple, but perhaps deranged. Buy another micro-city. Give the micros time to escape, arrange for a few strategically placed cameras, and then destroy it in every way possible as a matter of intimidation for the micros she had in her house.
She exhaled and tried to compose herself as she entered the shop. She approached the clerk, an goth looking girl not much older than her daughter. With a twinge of embarrassment she asked “I, I need the largest microputian civilization you have”. The clerk, ever a professional, ignored her embarrassment. “M’am, the largest we have are shipping containers, 20 feet by 8 feet”. Oh? “the mites are placed on plywood, and they can be split up so that you may easily fit them in an SUV if you desire, or they can be disposed of”. Great. Now she’d have more to not know what to do with. “the price is $200 for 24 hours, with a disposal fee of $50”. “I’ll take it” Jen replied.
“Please follow me”. The clerk led her outside. It was a beautiful late summer evening. She tugged open the shipping container doors and Jennifer saw what looked to be an aerial view of a planet. They helped each other into the container and the clerk handed her a card. “This phone number links you to the leadership of this container, who are at your disposal”. The clerk grinned creepily “please enjoy”. The doors slammed behind her. Some darkness-detecting lights flipped on. She was acutely aware that approximately 200 billion were now looking up at her. The card told her this was the estimated population. She pulled out her phone and dialed. A terrified male voice on the other line answered her. “Grow a pair and listen closely. I seek to physically harm none of your citizens. However, I need to destroy lots of your civilization. I will give you 12 hours to evacuate your citizens from the south half of this container. Anyone in this area will likely die under my body”. The President began to sputter, and Jen rolled her eyes. She’d rather have the bold specks of Mike’s civilization. “Relax. You get to enjoy the show. I’m 40, but lots of men don’t seem to care. My only other demand is you leave at least 100 high-quality live-streams in the areas which I destroy. If you have to leave a few people on-site to accomplish this, so be it”. She ended the call. She’d come over at dawn before the 2nd day of the conference.