Pumping your arms and legs as hard as you can, you sprint for the colossal door, aiming for the little gap under it. You should be able to fit, surely – if you can just get there ahead of her. Eva doesn’t move for a moment, watching you, and you take advantage of every spare second to get ahead. It’s a distance of dozens of metres though, and you’re not in the best shape for this, heart pounding. In fact, you do quick calculations as you go: at three or four inches, every foot must be the equivalent of about twenty feet. You’re not sure how accurate that is, but it seems reasonable that the couple of metres you’ve got to cross to reach the door could actually make for a forty-metre or so dash. Further than you’ve had to run in a while, but spurred on by the pursuit of a giant.

The ground quakes with the thump of a giant footstep, your manager coming after you. Time to give it the last of your reserves – head down, arms back, you surge for the finish line. Another giant footstep as you dart over the next ten metres. Almost there. But you sense a huge object coming from behind, the push of air, a shadow passing over you – and you’re hit from behind, a nudge, but by a shoe so massive that it throws you off your feet. You’re airborne for a moment, carried forward by the great weight, then you smack into the floor and tumble over yourself, moving so fast you’re scraped on the carpet.

Dazed, you rock up onto your hands and knees and twist back to see Eva looming massively over you, her giant right foot near your left side. Even the toe of her shoe stands taller than you. It taps once, ominously, and you cringe at the sight, so easily able to imagine yourself falling under it.

“I admire your spirit,” she says, “but that’s enough of that. Now, are you going to cooperate, you little bug?”

You sit back on your haunches, trembling with fear. This woman who has dominated your working life for so long with her sharp looks and mean words is now a physical embodiment of terror, big as a skyscraper and clearly not going to hold back. One of those shoes could easily squish you flat, to say nothing of the rest of her enormous body that towers overhead. And there's a fierce focus in her eyes, watching you like a
predator. Ready to pounce.

Experiment, that’s all you are to her now. But at least the assurance gives you some hope – she’s not planning to hurt you right now, however easily she could. And she’s so impossibly powerful, so massive above and around you. Then, you’re still so close to the door . . .

[A] Go for it; you might not get another chance.