Aria graduated undergraduate school in 2204 at the tender age of 14 and went on to pursue a PhD in genetic engineering at Cambridge.  Also around this time, she saw that tensions were beginning to rise again on the world scene as Russia and China became more and more aggressive.  She feared that a repeat of past horrors might be in store.  She began wondering how future wars and tragedies might be averted.

One day in 2206, in a graduate seminar dealing with research into the genetics behind human growth and development, there was a discussion of the genetics of sexual dimorphism.  It was then that Aria had a bold new idea come to mind.  She thought:   why was it that males had so dominated human history until relatively recently?  Indeed, to some extent they still did -- most of the key world leaders were male despite at least a couple centuries of relative equality between the sexes.       

The only answer was sexual dimorphism, she thought.  Males tended to be stronger, taller and more athletic on average than women were.  Those differences lead to a social dominance that dated to prehistory.  Aria thought to herself:  what if this were turned on its head?  What if women were suddenly the taller and more powerful ones?  This would not be totally unprecedented, in a few mammals such as the Spotted Hyena, the female was larger, and in many other species from worms and insects to fish and birds, the females were larger, sometimes much larger.  She was certain that making men smaller than women would have enormous socio-political impact; it might even change religions and reshape global politics. 

Aria did not speak her mind on this to others.  Although sociable, she was also a reserved sort of person who did not feel compelled to share her mind with others the minute she had an idea.  The idea became a secret obsession though as Aria’s distrust of men grew.  She had always had a rocky relationship with her father, and the few encounters she had had with boys had not gotten very far nor had they gone very well.  She had become deeply suspicious of men and whenever she saw a story about a rapist or murderer (almost always a man), or read about war mongering political leaders both past and present (almost all of which were men), her distrust was confirmed. 

It was not that Aria did not find men attractive at all, she was not lesbian, she just did not think they should have any control in society because they had demonstrated incompetence when given power.  She worried that testosterone crazed leaders would again careen the planet to disaster as they had so many times before. 

In genetic engineering, Aria saw a potential solution.  What if genetic engineering was employed on a massive scale to bring men “down to size” and create a new female dominated world?  Mechanisms could be employed to accomplish this.  Y chromosomes could be loaded with modifiers that would keep males smaller.

This was the genesis of her life’s work, nothing less than the transformation of human biology and society.  But how could she do it?  How far could she take it?  She did not know the details yet, but she grew more and more positive that it could happen.

Aria had her idea, but now she had to figure out how to implement it.  The first problem was getting the actual genetics right; what genes had to be added? What had to be removed and how?  This alone was going to take a while and she knew it.  She decided to openly pursue her doctoral research in the area of sexual dimorphism; she could then seek the necessary funding and permissions for animal and eventually human testing. 

Aria spent the subsequent four years of her life working on this.  She hired various undergraduate students to assist her using grant money she had obtained from a pharmaceutical company as well as from some NGOs.  Her first trials were, as you might expect, with those perennial favorites of scientists - mice.  Despite a few challenges at first, the trials were tremendously successful and Aria succeeded in engineering male mice that were roughly half the size of their female counterparts.  This was accomplished by modifying the Y chromosome in fertilized male eggs (zygotes) and then transplanting the engineered eggs into fertile female mice for implantation.

The modified male mice were healthy and the mothers continued to treat them as normal children.  The trouble came when they were adults; they had a lot of difficulty mating with female mice because of the size difference and the fact that mouse biology was not designed to accommodate this sort of dimorphism.  They were unable to impregnate normal female mice with any sort of acceptable success rate.

Aria had never thought of this potential problem before when she contemplated her secret plan to shrink the male sex worldwide.  Although in-vitro fertilization like that being used in many screened and engineered babies could get around such problems, it was essential that natural conception be available so humanity did not become too dependant on artificial methods.  She began brainstorming about how to get around this problem.  Higher fertility in the males might help, but then she got another idea.

A set of hormones that were responsible for the size of the males could be modified with some tinkering to either make the males larger than half size or smaller.   If males were only slightly smaller than the females there would not be a fertility problem.  That would work of course – men did not have to be bigger, they could be a bit smaller than females and still impregnate them.  It seemed that the problem became, at least with mice, more pronounced when they were fully half the size of the females. 

Aria thought about this and decided that she did not think such a half measure as only slightly shrinking the men would be strong enough to transform society into a matriarchy, certainly not fast enough for her taste.  In any case, fertility was not the only thing on her mind – even if half sized males were made more fertile, half sized men might not dramatic enough for the sort of radical break she was looking for.  After all, males had dominated human society for tens of thousands of years.  Something drastic was required to dislodge thousands of years of male dominance - she wanted to see results in her lifetime, not many hundreds of years or even thousands of years later.   A more radical change was needed.

She was not sure how far she would go, but she proceeded with her research on mice and earned her PhD with a dissertation on the genetics of sexual dimorphism in mice.  She conspicuously left out any mention of humans because she wanted to keep her plan under the radar screen as much as possible for now.