Revelations

The eight men still in the cell waited expectantly. When Hector‘s face peered back through the gap in the ceiling, his eyes were wide and he was shaking his head.

“Well?” asked John.

“You have to see it esé, I,” his voice dwindled off, as he looked up and away at whatever was on the other side.

“Get me up there,” instructed Jack, fixing his good eye on Marcellus and stepping forward. The big black man tented his fingers and Propelled Jack up so that he could squeeze through the opening.

The light outside the box was subdued, standing up, Jack looked around, his mind having difficulty processing what his eye was telling him. Around the table upon which the model was situated were six mounted cameras facing down over the model.

In the distance glowed the word EXIT in bright red letters, but to his estimation the sign was like a billboard. In the dim light, he could see a number of desks, some with computers, along the wall a long blacktopped counter.

“Jack?” called John.

Turning, he looked down at his feet, able to see directly into the living unit, as if the entire roof/ceiling was one way glass.

“Holy fuck,” he muttered.

“What is it?” John asked excitedly from below.

“It’s the roof, the whole thing is made up of see through panels. There’s giant cameras everywhere that can see down into every room from here,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “You need to get up here John, you all need to get up here,” he said, moving back toward the gap and extending his arm into the breech.

One by one, each of the men were lifted out of the cell and on top of the model. Standing there, it appeared the model was situated on some type of elevated platform approximately fifty or sixty feet above a light colored tiled floor.

“What the fuck?” breathed Hodge, shaking his head.

“This don’t make no sense at all,” mumbled Marcellus. “This place is bigger than the inside of the Superdome.”

“It’s like one of those home show models or dioramas or something,” Cornelius said.

“Why is everything so bloody big?” Russell asked, running a hand over his head, eyes boggling.

“No,” said John, shaking his head. “Everything is not big. I think it’s us, we are all small. Two and half inches maybe judging by how large everything appears.”

“Balderdash,” snorted Maynard, shaking his head disdainfully. “Obviously this is some shared delusion precipitated by the ‘experiment’. There currently exists no technology capable of shrinking people.”

John turned toward the doctor, “Maybe this is the human trial version of that goddamn technology you pompous ass. You ever think of that?”

“Verily? You think it more likely that some company has developed some new profound technology and is clandestinely testing it on incarcerated persons as opposed to dosing us with something like a dopamine antagonist? Really?” challenged the disgraced physician.

“I believe what I see,” John countered, extending an arm toward the interior of the lab room.

Maynard shook his hand and waved flippantly, “Obviously it is some mass hysteria primed by the plethora of tests we were subjected to prior to this elaborate set up. And before you attempt to dispute the notion of mass hysteria, it is a much more common phenomena that you might expect, examples like Blackburn 1965, Mount Pleasant Mississippi 1976, or the Holliwell Incident 1980 all support my position,” he asserted indignantly.

John grinned, “In each of the cases you’ve cited, you’re talking about physiological manifestations of infirmity as opposed to sensory delusion. We all see the same thing and we’re not talking about the Asch Paradigm of conformity through peer pressure theory,” he countered. “Look with your own eyes.”

“What I am saying is that your hasty decision to suggest we have all be made miniature by some heretofore previous unknown technology is asinine. Take a look at any ‘mass UFO sighting’. Just because a hundred moonshine inebriated hillbillies think they see a UFO instead of a lenticular cloud hovering in the sky doesn’t make the UFO real. Obviously you possess some education, albeit limited, ask yourself if which is more plausible, we are psychologically impaired, or we have all been magically shrunk down to less than the length of a regular cigarette? ” challenged Maynard haughtily.

Jack stepped up, “Whether this is some incredibly impressive feat of engineering and a complex psychological test project or Dagmara waving a bloody magic wand and now we are all the size of little green army men, I honestly don’t give a shit. What I do know is right now we are out in the open and we need to get down off of this goddamn thing. We can braid together some of the bedsheets and make a rope to get down to the floor and see if there is a way out of this monstrous room,” he snarled, extending an arm in the direction of the massive door under the exit sign.

“Well,” started Maynard before he was cut off.

“At the moment, that is something we can control instead of sitting here bitching about the how and why everything is haywire. Another thing, running around in here dressed in bright orange jumpsuits is going to make us easy to spot, regardless of how big we are or aren’t, so cut the shit,” Jack growled, asserting himself.

John looked to Jack and nodded slowly, “You’re right,” he conceded.

Maynard let out a long breath. “Fine,” he said reluctantly.

Cornelius walked over to the edge of the model and looked down, whistling, “That’s going to be a lot of bed sheets,” he commented, hawking up some saliva and spitting it over the edge.

Jack recognized it a moment too late, Hector’s body language said it all, and before he could intervene, the small man stepped in and pushed a surprised Cornelius off the edge, the sound of him hollering before hitting the distant ground below less than two seconds later making an audible thud followed by silence.

“Pendejo,” hissed Hector, pursing his lips and spitting after the fallen man.