Man’s Best Friend

by SeeguyShade

You input the last couple values into the terminal. Pausing for a moment, you look around the room. Electronic equipment hums and CPUs groan with the stress your instructions place on them. They don’t have to last long though, just long enough. You take a deep cleansing breath savoring the last moments on Earth that anything will be close to normal. Your ascension is at hand. Your machinery has tapped into a meta-energetic field, one of the fundamental forces of the multiverse, you theorize. The scientist in you regrets that you won’t be able to explore its properties and uses a little more, but that’s okay. The sadistic size pervert in you is finally free to get what it’s always wanted; free reign and absolute power over the world and every little mote of a human on it. You savor the thought of them fleeing, driven before your immensity. Everyone on the run from you, but there’s no place left to hide. You’ve destroyed any shelter with your bare hands and feet and other assorted body parts.

A green light bursts to life, and a klaxon sounds through the room.

BUZZ BUZZ

You stand up, peel every bit of clothing off, discarding them without a care on the lab floor, and walk over to the round metal sheathed platform. It is surrounded by 6 cylindrical towers attached to the main chamber by telescoping armatures and surging with so much energy that your body hairs stand on end. The combination of energy, cold, and excitement raises hundreds of little goosebumps along your skin. You step up onto the platform and stand, legs ever so slightly apart and arms held out to your sides. The automated sequence begins. The klaxon cuts out and you can hear a crackle in the air as the exotic materials in the towers and beneath the platform receive massive amounts of energy. The lab lights flicker and dim as the chamber reroutes electricity to itself. Surely someone will notice the power surge in a minute or two, but by that time it will be too late.

For them anyway.

The towers begin to rotate, each at a very specific individual rate. As they do the armatures attaching them to the platform begin rotating around like planets orbiting the sun. You would be the sun in this analogy, which you find very fitting since you’re going to be above everything and everyone.

They spin around and round, round and round, narrowing closer and closer in to the platform as they spin faster and faster. You feel the massive energy leaking from the machinery as static electricity. Your nipples go stiff, and you feel arousal activating in your genitals and in your brain. The towers close in tighter and tighter until they form a glowing cylinder of sorts spinning around and around you at high speed. You feel the whoosh of the air being removed from the chamber as it seals. It wont matter to you in a few seconds. The vents on the towers open emitting a purple glow that expands and brightens until it’s a nearly blinding white. You feel a warm wind caress every inch of your body. If your math is right, this should be the primal substance of the multiverse leaking through the little Swiss cheese holes your machine has created in reality. The light is warm, almost like a fluid bathing your skin. The platform beneath you activates, emitting a thunderous roar.

A whoosh, and you feel absolutely weightless. The sensation lasts. The warmth is gone. The light is gone. Your eyes adjust to the darkness. It doesn’t take too long, because, of course, there’s lots of light below you. Looking down, you see that the building you’d been working in was no longer there. That was to be expected. Your calculations predicted a certain amount of matter displacement outside the chamber. Mass shunted to the spaces between universes, some of it absorbed into your body contributing to its new size. It’s convenient too, far less likely someone could figure out what you did and repeat it. That wouldn’t do. Your plans for this world are for you and you alone.

You gaze down at the little cityscape sprawled out beneath you. The office buildings immediately before you look about as big as your toes, the “skyscrapers” over in the downtown section of the city look like they might come about up to your ankles with a couple of the very tallest possibly reaching your knees. With some quick math, you suppose you must be around 3000 feet tall now, but numbers aren’t important. What is important is that through science and hard work you have fulfilled your fantasy; now it’s time to enjoy the fruits of your efforts.

You lift one foot away from the unnaturally smooth ground beneath you and bring your foot down on some of those office buildings you noticed, the ones no bigger than your big toe. They crumble dryly under your sole, as if made out of little crackers. As your foot impacts the ground, you notice that your vision now zooms in like a camera, an unexpected side effect of the energy infusion you suppose. You can see the bits of broken building coming up between your toes like little crumbs. You can feel them too. You wiggle your toes a bit and enjoy the sensations of crumbling and the thought of how easily you demolished these little buildings. You notice that your foot only takes up about a tenth, or a little more than that, of the city block. You smile with pleasure, anticipating that it will take lots of stomping and smashing to obliterate this city, and every other after it. You wiggle your toes in the debris and can’t help but notice a definite squishing sensation between them. You guessed that there were probably some people in those buildings, but you hadn’t known for sure until now. Your smile widens; your first victims. You look, zooming in even closer. You can see little blotches of brownish red bits clinging to the skin between your mighty merciless toes. As you lick your upper lip in anticipation, you try to listen hard. Drifting up to your enhanced ears you hear the pitiful cries and gurgles of those left alive within the wreckage. Their lives are entirely yours now. You are the most pressing fact in the lives of the millions of people living immediately below you, and in the wider context, the billions of people around the world.

You take a step with your other foot and bring it down on the same block as the first, annihilating more office buildings. Your ears hear the squishing and screaming amid the crumbling, telling you that you’ve snuffed out more little lives. You wiggle all your toes, luxuriating in pure destructive power. You listen to the surrounding cityscape and zoom in to see what’s going on in the streets around you.

The people try to run, scrambling like little bugs. You relish their panic and terror. In a way, you think they should thank you. You’ve taken the endless complexities of their daily lives (jobs, families, responsibilities, mortgage payments) and narrowed them down until only one fact of life is really of any importance at all.

And it’s you.

You listen in on their screams. Men and women yell and run as hard as they can. Police try to direct them in a pointless attempt to exert some control over a situation beyond the control of any human.

That situation is you.

You hear the shouts of families. Parents pulling their children close trying to get them away from danger. You hear the children crying and screaming. They cannot sway your heart. The morals of this world no longer apply. Your size has made all equal before you and you see no less reason to torment children and use them as your playthings as you would an adult. All humanity is one mass, one granular toy for you to enjoy as you see fit. Some seem to have accepted their fate; families staying completely still, huddled together in fear.

You are that fear.

You see an elder, gray and wizened, perhaps witness to, and survivor of, the many disasters and inhumanities of their time, but none were like you. You hear their heart beating faster and faster as they stare up at your body, trying to contemplate your scale. The very sight seems about to give them a heart attack.

That heart attack is you.

If you could smile any wider, you would. You look down at the city, contemplating your next move. You might crush a few more buildings under your feet or use one of the taller buildings to gratify your carnal urges. Your stomach is a bit rumbly. Perhaps a handful of screaming wriggling snacks is in order. The menu of giant size activities is wide open to you.

Then you hear one more thing, something you hadn’t thought of.

“Woof!”

You listen in again.

“Woof! Woof!” and then a whining noise, then more. More barking and howling and panting and whining.

You hadn’t thought about dogs. Millions of them in the city alongside their human owners. Dogs that would get squished, dogs you would end up eating, and dogs that would get squished into your genitals. The last thought makes you shudder. You look around at the teeming mobs of humans still fleeing and screaming. They call to your lust, your cruelty, and your right as a giant monster to play with their little lives.

The dogs continue barking and howling. They call to your heart.

You look around at the ground. Frustration builds, warming the inside of your face. You take a deep breath, then exhale sharply through your nostrils. By the time your lungs are empty, your mind is made up, but you don’t like it. You clear your throat, and give a long sharp whistle. The chaos beneath you goes quiet. A few helicopters fly by. You recognize the logo of a major broadcast company on one. The world is watching you, so you lay it all out for them.

“Alright folks,” you say. “You can see that I’m a massive destructive giant. What some of you might not realize yet is that I’m completely sadistic and depraved. Completely indifferent to human life. At this scale you exist only for me to play with, eat, and squish nicely against my body. The only thing keeping me from doing just that at this particular moment is the existence of dogs.

“Now, I’m going to reduce my size back down to the rest of you, but you should know that I have enough stored energy in my body to regrow myself any time I want, as often as I want. I’m also completely invincible to physical harm, and have vastly enhanced senses that can hear things from miles and miles away. Anyone I catch abusing or neglecting a dog will be dealt with severely and slowly. All the sadistic fun I’m giving up on right now will be directed completely and solely at you. You should also all know that if enough people continue mistreating their dogs, I’ll just say 'fuck it', and go with my original plan. If you don’t all shape up, it might be more merciful for a dog to live in the ruins I create. Heaven knows there will be plenty of fresh steaming meat for them to enjoy in the wreckage.”

And that’s that. You shrink yourself down. Refuse and ignore all attempts to arrest or interview you. A couple hotheads try shooting you, but their bullets just bounce off your still invulnerable body. A few who’d had their loved ones smashed in the buildings you crushed cry and beg you to bring them back, and that gives you some satisfaction at least.

Eventually you just sort of walk off into the night after threatening obliteration to anyone who tries following you. After a few blocks you come to an activewear oriented clothing store. You tell the shift manager there that you got mugged for all your clothes. They’re sympathetic and comp you some sandals and a tracksuit that got damaged in shipping. They ask you if you’d felt the earthquake earlier that night, and you just smile silently, savoring the moment.

As you leave the shop you see someone walking their dog, a border collie with a glossy well cared for coat. You watch them as they pass you and go up the street. As they walk into the distance, it almost seems like they’re shrinking bit by bit. You put out your hand so that the distant dog walker’s figure is positioned right between your thumb and forefinger.

“Better thank them,” you say to no one in particular, “otherwise…”

You squeeze your thumb and forefinger together.

“...squish.”