“Okay, but like, seriously, how does it actually work?”

The background noise in the bar seemed unusually distracting tonight—glasses clinking, happy patrons chattering away endlessly, sound effects from the pinball machine in the far corner twinkling away as usual. Ethan knew he had heard the question, but his brain was lost enough in a twisted jumble of thoughts and all the added noise that he hadn’t really processed it.

“Babe—you still with us? Conversation’s kinda hanging on a thread here…” Ethan’s girlfriend Valerie reached out her hand and waved in front of his face to get his attention and snap him out of his trance-like state.

“Wh-what? Oh, yeah, sorry, hah. My head’s a mess tonight! What was the question again?” he said.

“He’s such a space cadet sometimes. And so unlike you to get distracted when this is your FAVORITE subject to ramble on about,” Valerie sighed.

Even though she was mostly just poking fun at him, Ethan bristled internally at her comment. Better not let that show though, he thought. Better to just enjoy himself.

It was Saturday night, and they’d been out for a few hours now bar hopping before arriving at Trusty’s, their go-to spot. It was a little bit divey, but unpretentious in the best way and usually a good time to just kick back with friends.

Ethan and Valerie had been dating for two years and had settled into a comfortable rhythm. They had a good thing going, at least in his estimation—they were young, making good money, and it was fun and carefree to just while away the nights and weekends drinking and shooting the shit with their social circle and enjoy the breeziness on life.

Or, that was the pitch Ethan figured he’d give to others on why things were so great, anyway. He still hadn’t quite found the words to describe the deeper sense of boredom with life he suspected was simmering in his bones somewhere, so it was just easier to give people the “things are great!” spiel instead.

Valerie’s best friend Olivia repeated her question and snapped him back to reality.

“Heh, space cadet is right Val. But sometimes you need a brainy space cadet like Ethan to enlighten you with his awesome intellect,” she quipped. “Anyway, I was saying, how does the MicroTech stuff all actually work? You see it in the news a lot, but they never get into that aspect. It really seems like science fiction,” she asked.

Ah, so that was why Valerie had made the crack about his favorite subject. “MicroTech” was the fancy public-facing brand name for a relatively new niche product that had been developed and introduced to the world over the past few years. At its core it was based on cutting edge advancements in nanotechnology. A person would voluntarily introduce nanites—essentially a host of millions or even billions of microscopic, incredibly sophisticated robotic drones—into their body.

Once the nanites dispersed throughout their body and had bonded with the user’s DNA and biological make-up, they could then be used for countless different purposes, health-related and otherwise. Of course, that was the more general background, the use cases for the nano-tech that had essentially become genericized at this point, whether for things like blood pressure monitoring or whatever else. It was the watered-down version that you could get from a doctor with a prescription, if your insurance was willing to pay the still-hefty price for it.

MicroTech was another beast altogether—a more “recreational” application of the technology, so to speak.

Ethan, having always had a healthy streak of nerdiness to him, had read up on the history and background of the tech more times than he could remember, and could give this rundown in his sleep.

“Ah, yeah. I forgot I’m the unofficial brand ambassador on this, apparently. Even though I don’t have anything to do with the company in any way, I’m just someone who appreciates good science!” he joked, before continuing.

“Anyhow, it started out as like a medical technology kind of thing. They wanted to develop these nanobots that you could put into your body and then they’d be able to give you all sorts of incredibly accurate, real-time bio-feedback monitoring. You know, like check your blood pressure, your hormone levels, how your stress was doing, monitor your menstrual cycle for you ladies.”

“Ahh, so thoughtful and such a feminist, Ethan’s always remembering the gals,” Olivia laughed.

“Isn’t that weird, having a bunch of tiny robots in your body all the time? Do you like, feel them moving around inside you?” asked Charlotte, another one of their friends.

“No, it’s super non-invasive. Remember, they’re microscopically small. You swallow a little capsule filled with them and then they’re dispersed throughout your body before you know it, and you just go about your life like normal. Nobody would ever know you have them just from looking at you, and you’d never notice them or even remember them, except when you were interacting with the app to check your bio-data or whatever.”

Jeez, maybe I do sound a little like a sales rep for the company, he thought to himself with a ghost of a smirk as he reeled this information off.

Olivia jumped back in. “Okay, but yeah I know all of that, we’ve all been bludgeoned relentlessly with the medical company ads for all that nonsense. I’m talking about MicroTech specifically.”

“Right, I was getting there. Well, I say ‘started out’, because once they worked out how to make the nanites safe for the human body, the bio-monitoring stuff turned out to be a lot easier than they probably expected. Most of the companies stopped their research there, but one of them kept experimenting with what else they could do. A lot of the research turned into dead ends—that’s how research goes mostly, it doesn’t always pan out.”

Ethan paused briefly to take a swig of his beer, but also to revel a bit in the knowledge that he was a good storyteller. Everyone was hanging on his description now, their friends Mark and Danielle and Charlotte who’d come out with them tonight, all. And Olivia, whose eyes with sparkling with either fascination, or maybe playful impatience that he was dragging this explanation out so long.

Val was the only odd one out, her subtle eye roll and long, slow sip of her cocktail a clear giveaway that she was not as intrigued as the others. They probably thought she was just bored of hearing this breakdown again from him (and she surely was), but he knew there was a much deeper vein of distaste from her toward his fascination with the nanotech underpinning things.

“But one of their teams was experimenting with using the nanites for matter manipulation. That’s essentially using them to alter the physical or chemical attributes of material at a molecular level. Some of the stuff they wanted to do was easy, you know, little spot adjustments to your body like replicating the effects of a pacemaker for someone with heart issues. But they were also trying to figure out how to use it to do things like shrink tumors inside the body to reduce their impact, or shrink blood clots, stuff like that.

Now as crazy and space age as the technology is, our bodies and our biology are still insanely complex, so they could never quite get that sort of localized size manipulation they were aiming for to work. Trying to manipulate just one area of the body like that while leaving everything else the same caused too many other health side effects, and it turned out to be just wildly unsafe. Buuuuuuut, as nuts as it sounds, they figured out – essentially by accident, if you can imagine it – that even though they couldn’t get the localized size manipulation to work, they could actually do total size manipulation relatively easily.”

“Total size manipulation? What even is that?” Mark asked. Oh Mark, Ethan thought. A really cool dude and a good friend, but if something wasn’t playing on a TV inside the gym while he was working out, the chances of him having heard of it were always very slim. No surprise he was oblivious to once of the greatest scientific advances in the past century.

“Shrinking!” Charlotte giggled excitedly, jumping in before Ethan could respond. As she said it, she held up her hand with thumb and index finger spread apart, then drew them close together until there was barely any space between them, illustrating the idea. At least some people aren’t quite so clueless.

“Er, yeah, pretty much hah. Shrinking is the LAYMAN’S term for it, I suppose,” Ethan laughed along with her. “They couldn’t reduce the size of specific problem areas in the body like the tumors. But they could reduce the entire body. And hey I know you asked how it works, but to be clear, I’m not a molecular biologist or a nanotechnologist or anything. I can’t explain every last details. All I can say is from what I’ve read, it has something to do with the fact that by reducing the entire body all at once and keeping everything proportional, it avoids all the side effects and major issues that crop up when you try to just spot target specific areas for manipulation. Keeps the body in balance, or whatever.”

“Oh, okay, that makes sense. So that explains why I haven’t seen any commercials for trying to use this stuff to triple the size of your dick or anything! I think I would’ve heard about that!” Mark guffawed, as everyone at the table chuckled at his suggestion.

“Haha, yeah…well that’s true, but that’s not only because of the issue with manipulating specific areas or body parts, honestly. The matter manipulation that the nanites can do, it only really works one way. It can manipulate the size of living tissue by reducing it, and then it can restore it to its original size since it memorizes your atomic configuration, but it can’t make anything larger than its original size. With reduction, the nanites can alter your molecules stably and reliably, it can reduce the size of them and the subatomic space between them to change the organism’s overall size—sorry, we’re really getting into nerd territory here, haha—and then it can rearrange them back to normal afterward. In fact with reduction, the nanites can actually store up the excess energy and mass left over from shrinking the host and use it to help add additional power to themselves and do other cool stuff too. But it can’t do the opposite, it can’t make your molecules bigger than their original size. There’s no way to do that safely, or honestly even at all I’d guess.

“Ah, so my dreams of packing a foot-long rod will have to stay dreams I guess,” Mark laughed again. “But then what do people even use the tech for? Can’t make my dick bigger, and then even with shrinking stuff, like, I know some women get breast reduction surgery if they have issues with back pain and such. But you can’t even use it for that either, right? Can’t just change one part of your body, right?”

“No, totally, that’s all spot on, but there’s, um, other applications…” Ethan started to trail off, wondering how exactly to describe this tactfully, given that Mark clearly had paid next to zero attention to any of the news coverage about MicroTech. He figured it was a helpful reminder that no matter how familiar you were with something or how much it seemed like it was in the zeitgeist, the world was a big place and there will always be millions of people who are oblivious to any given topic.

Luckily, Charlotte was unexpectedly able to come to his rescue.

“It’s for sex, you dummy!” She giggled again, while holding her arms out and making a bawdy gyrating gesture with her hips mimicking sex as she looked in Mark’s direction.

“Sex…?” he stammered back, his face blank with confusion.

Danielle jumped in this time, the conversation now crackling with interest from almost everyone at the table. “You sweet, simple, fine boy. I guess we forget sometimes that your porn search history is like 100% naughty stepsister videos and you don’t realize there’s a world beyond that.”

“Hey, first of all, that’s only like, a hefty chunk of it. And anyway, you like what I like! Can’t change that!” Mark said

“Amen to that brother.” Ethan nodded, raising his beer glass toward Mark and getting a cheerful clink back from him in response. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught another eye roll from Val that gave him a twinge in his gut.

Danielle continued, “I read somewhere that MicroTech’s research was pretty hush-hush for awhile, cause they were trying to figure out a way to still make money from it for a bit after the medical shrinking stuff they wanted to do turned into a dead end. But somebody at the company must’ve eventually gotten tipsy and told a friend about it or something, because eventually they were made aware of the fact that there is a healthy population of people out there in the world who are into the idea of being…small…in the bedroom.” Charlotte started giggling again at Danielle’s description, clearly amused by the titillating turn the conversation was taking.

“Small in the bedroom…like…OHHHHH…” Mark trailed off for a moment, the light bulb finally clicking on in his head. “But that’s…whoa, that’s wild! So people actually want to shrink themselves?!”

“And he puts it together at last!” Olivia chuckled.

“Isn’t that dangerous though? You’d be the size of a bug or whatever, wouldn’t you be worried about getting squished?” Mark asked.

“No, there’s a ton of safety measures involved, they’ve thought about all of that. Remember how I said the nanites store excess mass and energy and all during the shrinking process? They’re also able to use all of that along with some crazy complex science and engineering to make the user super resilient. It all gets channeled inward and so at that size you’re virtually indestructible. So if somebody like, I dunno, stepped on you by accident, it’d be no biggie. You’d feel the pressure, but your bones and your innards and all, they’d all be fine.”

“Or stepped on you on purpose, right?” Charlotte whispered to Dani, leaning in and giggling.

“So people really do that? Like am I meeting women every week who want to get all tiny when they’re getting down with their boyfriend or whatever, and not even realizing it?” Mark asked.

“Uh, well, I’m sure there definitely are women into it, though I couldn’t really speak to how many,” Ethan answered. “But from what I understand, the user base of people buying MicroTech nanites definitely skews pretty heavily male.”

“Huh, I wonder why that is?” Mark asked again, thinking out loud.

“Are you kidding me?” Danielle replied. “Women have more than enough problems getting men to treat us with respect when we’re normal sized—why would we ever want guys to be EVEN bigger and have more of a power imbalance over us? I’m not surprised MicroTech doesn’t get many takers for that. I mean to be clear though, I don’t judge any girl who’s into that, like you do you, chase your bliss and all that. I’d just hope that it’s only ever with a guy that you trust—can’t be messing around with that stuff on Tinder hookups with randos.”

The whole group nodded and laughed at her observation.

“Totally Dani. I think it’s that, plus, you can literally print money with anything if boners are involved. I’m sure that the forest of dicks that perked up in anticipation once the dude-sphere was alerted to the possibility that they can make themselves small enough to climb a girl’s tits like they’re a pair of mountains made the demographic split on this pretty inevitable,” Olivia added, to more chuckles from the group.

“But yeah, uh, so that’s a thing,” Ethan laughed. “And once MicroTech got wind of all of this…er, interest…they decided to kinda pivot their whole business model toward it. That’s not even the original company name, actually. They used to be called Integrated Medical Dynamics, when they were still a biomedical firm. But after they did some focus group testing and a lot of initial trials with human subjects, they realized that their product had a lot of, shall we say, niche appeal. And they completely rebranded and renamed the company to MicroTech to focus more on recreational services.”

“Recreational services, I can’t believe that’s how they market it, haha,” Charlotte laughed. “That makes it sound SO mundane. ‘Pleasure at any size,’ isn’t that their tagline? People are literally turning themselves into DILDOS and they’re talking about it like it’s renting a tandem bicycle in the park or something.”

Charlotte was clearly buzzed on her third ranch water at this point, the volume of her voice rising without her even realizing as she giddily gave her off-color description of the MicroTech experience. A few of the patrons at other nearby tables turned to look in curiosity as she loudly emphasized the word “dildos”, and Val quickly elbowed her to try to rein her in.

“Girl get yourself under control and quiet down! We’re in polite company here, plus they know us at this bar! I don’t want you getting us kicked out or banned for being the weird shrink pervert people!”

“Oh calm down Val, it’s not 1955 anymore. People can talk about sex around friends without any shame if they want. Plus what’s wrong with consenting adults choosing to do something they wanna do? You’re not kink-shaming are you? Miss ‘I’m a super-evolved modern woman who supports everyone’s right to fully explore their sexuality and feel loved and respected’?!”

“Shut up! Of course I support that, this isn’t even about that. I just don’t like talking about…ugh, never mind.” Val muttered. She was clearly annoyed at this point and decided to avoid creating an argument. Charlotte continued giggling, and Olivia and Danielle seemed just as amused at her antics, while Mark continued to stare off into the middle distance with a dumbfounded look on his face, as though someone had just taught him how to split the atom. He was still processing what he’d just heard, Ethan figured.

“Turning themselves into dildos…” Mark mumbled, his utterances reduced to sentence fragments as his mind reeled at all the information he was still trying to take in.

“She’s just being colorful with her language,” Ethan said, in an attempt to explain. “She means like…making yourself the size of a dildo, not literally turning into a dildo. Using the MicroTech nanites to shrink yourself to be that small.”

“Hey, I mean, is there really much a difference between the two at that point?” Charlotte asked, making herself laugh even more with her own rhetorical question.

“I suppose that’s ultimately all a matter of perspective,” Olivia said.

“Oh yeah, ‘perspective’. Like, if I had a man willing to try out MicroTech, then at that size, from his ‘perspective’ my pussy would be the size of a cave to him. And from my ‘perspective’, he’d be the perfect-sized little toy to stuff it with. And even if he didn’t share my ‘perspective’, I’m pretty sure in that situation I’d be able to make my ‘perspective’ the only thing that matters.” Charlotte said, fighting the urge to start giggling uncontrollably again, and emphasizing the word ‘perspective’ each time to make the implications of what she was imagining painfully obvious. With her third drink now finished, she didn’t seem to even be aware of her hips lightly bouncing and grinding her chair.

“Okay Miss Horny Toad, maybe it’s time to save your dominatrix fantasies for dissecting with your therapist. You’ll always be our sweet sorority-girl who never grew up in our hearts, but come back to us here in the real world.” Olivia said to her, rubbing Charlotte’s shoulder with a bit of playful condescension.

Mark by this point had recovered enough of his composure to start forming full thoughts again.

“Well that is certainly a hell of a mental image, damn! So wait, have any of you guys ever…tried it before?” he asked, looking around at the group with his eyes wide. They each shook their heads, including Ethan, and murmured some “no’s” as well.

“I totally would!” Charlotte chimed in, continuing her trademark oversharing. “I would love to play around with a cute little boy toy in the bedroom, but I googled it when the news stories about it first came out, and it’s kind of a whole ordeal to even get to that point.”

“Yeah, the cost of buying the special nanites that only MicroTech knows how to make is uh, not cheap,” Ethan added. “They’re a lot more complex than the garden variety ones that people get for just health monitoring. Not only that, you also have to give the company a DNA sample first too, so that they can bond the nanites to your genetic profile specifically before they’ll be able to function. That’s like a security measure so that lunatics can’t just go around dosing people with nanites without their knowledge. And then you have to sign a mountain of legal forms, all sorts of informed consent stuff to verify that you’re absolutely sure what you’re agreeing to, liability waivers, the works. Plus even MORE legalese stuff if you’re gonna do like, master control.”

“What’s ‘master control’?” Olivia asked.

“It’s wh—” Ethan started to say, but Val jumped in to cut him off.

“Guys this has been a scintillating journey into the state of modern science, or porn, or porn science or something, but is anybody else getting tired? I think I might need to hit the hay,” she said.

“What’s the matter Val? You’re not into all this MicroTech stuff?” Mark asked. “You don’t wanna explore any of this with your beau? My boy Ethan’s a handsome, successful man, he’s a catch! You don’t wanna do some size play and shrink down and see how impressive his cock is when it’s the size of a monument? Ride that bad boy like the bomb in Dr. Strangelove?”

“Look at Mark, only known about MicroTech for 20 minutes and he already knows the lingo like ‘size play’” Charlotte chuckled.

“I guess I’ve heard it before and never realized till now what it actually meant. I thought it was like, foreplay while wearing shoes that make you look taller or something, haha.” Mark retorted.

The group snickered as Val met Mark’s questions with an exasperated sign and another eye roll. “Yeah, uh, I think I’m…more than good as far all that’s concerned.”

“Yeah, I think if anything the dynamic would be the other way around with those two lovebirds…” Olivia added while flashing a smirk at Ethan, her voice hovering somewhere between an open statement and dancing under her breath.

Val, hearing the remark all the same, shot a death glare at Olivia, who quickly hopped out of her seat as she nonchalantly said, “Seems like I need another drink! Gonna hit the bar and circle back.”

“Yeah, well, I’m heading out. I’m totally wiped from this week at work and I need to recharge. But you guys keep partying as long as you want, don’t let me be a downer or make you feel like you need to call it early.” Val said. “Ethan, we’re still doing bar trivia on Tuesday night, right?”

“You know it babe. Do you want me to take you back to your apartment?” he answered, as he got up to help her get her coat on.

“Nah, I’ll be fine. I just wanna decompress on my own for a bit,” she said, clearly trying to convey that she wanted a bit of time to herself.”

“Okay, I love you sweetness.” He said, giving her a quick kiss on the lips.

“Love you too,” she replied, her voice softening to let him know she meant it, before heading for the door.

************

The night wore on, with the rest of the gang continuing to hang out at Trusty’s and drink. Ethan and Mark got up to shoot a few rounds of pool together while Olivia, Charlotte, and Danielle kept chatting at the table they’d claimed. As the evening wound down, they each decided to head out a different point, until finally just Ethan and Olivia were left.

“What’s the matter, my nerd-bro scientist king? You’ve been staring into the last few drops of that IPA for what feels like eternity now. Something bugging you?” Olivia asked, nursing her own gin and tonic.

Ethan liked Olivia. In addition to being one of Val’s oldest friends, she was a very moderating influence on their friend group—always playing the mediator, always smoothing things over whenever there were arguments. She was drop dead gorgeous, just like Valerie, and yet had never developed that ‘mean girl’ streak that so many guys naively assume any hot girl will likely have. Maybe they’d been good influences on each other in that way.

And she was preternaturally good at reading people (as he could feel right now) and always seemed to be able to use that power to lead people to figuring out how to spill their deepest truths when they needed to.

“I’m not a scientist, I’m a statistician. Very different. Probably the two most different things in the world!” He laughed, trying to deflect her question.

“Ah yes, definitely the two most different pursuits. But that’s not what’s bugging you, is it?”

“No,” he answered flatly, hoping she’d drop it, and yet hoping she wouldn’t at the same time.

“Trouble in paradise with your girl?” she asked?

He broke down and relented at last. “You…don’t know the half of it.”

“Hah, she is my best friend you know? I probably have a slightly better idea than you think. But why don’t you try me,” she responded.

“Okay, but this stays in the circle of trust, you got that Liv?”

“Circle of trust baby, impromptu therapy session, we were meant for this!” she answered cheerfully in an attempt to reassure him.

Ethan took the final sip of his beer before saying, “But first I need one more of these.”