Aria was only 21 years old when she received her doctorate from Cambridge in 2211. It was not so unusual for genius children, themselves the product of genetic engineering, to be so accomplished at such a ripe young age, but even by 23rd century standards she was proceeding very quickly in her career. She also was still as single as she had always been. She was frequently asked out of course, and many men had gone gaga for her -- who could blame them? She was over six feet tall, very fit, drop deed beautiful plus a genius to boot, she was a full package and highly attractive by any standard. She just did not have time for them though, she was on a mission right now and it had become her secret obsession, she poured herself entirely into her work.
It is not surprising that she quickly found a prestigious professorship at Yale’s School of Biomedical Engineering. She could have gotten an even higher paying job working for a corporation but she decided that such employment would tie her hands too much. Yale offered her a chance to spend the vast majority of her time doing the research she wanted to do and gave her a platform to get the funds and means to do it. They were so impressed with her that she was quickly offered her own private lab space and given tenure within a matter of months – they did not want to lose her to a higher paying corporation, so they moved things along for her.
Her lab in place and her position secure, Aria moved on to the next phase in her plan. She was preparing for human trials. But there was still that nagging problem, the problem of size. She decided on a more drastically shrunken men; perhaps only four inches tall. If future generations of males were so small, there would be no question of them having any power at all – it would be almost instant and total matriarchy. But such a small size might be hard for people to accept, even in a seemingly small study.
She decided on secretly pursuing a duel approach: She would have a few human embryos modified to be half normal height – the public could handle that. She would at the same time try something more radical under the table; she would try some embryos at less than 10% normal height reaching about four inches on adulthood. At this size, males would be entirely dominated, and in terms of impregnation, the entire man could be inserted vaginally to accomplish procreation – this idea turned her on. Just the thought of it aroused her normally dormant and suppressed sex drive.
Such an exciting a thought it was for Aria – men would be utterly dominated, there would be no turning back, and a beneficent matriarchy could soon be established to rule not only individual countries but the whole world. Peace would finally arrive and the extreme sexual dimorphism could have benefits. Men could be given jobs that made good use of their small size – everything from some of the most menial tasks she could think of to much grander jobs in nanotechnology and space travel would be well suited for their smaller size. Think of all the resources that would be saved! Food, energy, everything. While Aria’s fantasy utopia had males totally subordinate to their female rulers, they would not be unimportant or unvalued, quite the contrary - they would be used for the benefit of all humanity, and would be better off themselves in a world without any of their testosterone driven chaos.
For this fantasy to become reality, additional modifications besides just size would have to be made - including a denser bone structure, denser neuron development so that brain capability was not hampered too much by the smaller size, and a stronger immune system to deal with the greater challenges that might be posed from such small size. For sexual use and procreation, male fertility would need to be boosted, and ideally, Aria wanted the modified males to have enhanced oxygen efficiency so that their breath could be held longer. Those were just a few of the adjustments she had to make, but she was confident that this secret subset would be a more viable and surefire way to make the social and biological change that she wanted, and in a much more dramatic way.
Aria also had to finally ask for funding and permission to conduct research on human embryos. To do this, she touted the knowledge that would be gained. She also played up the fact that a few smaller people someday would be ideal for space exploration. Natural dwarfism had been virtually eliminated by the eugenics movement and humanity had only relatively recently in the late 22nd century really re-engaged in the endeavor of space exploration after a long hiatus since the Third World War. She did not mention however her secret sample of extra small males that she planned to make. That would have raised too many eyebrows for comfort.