Girl Who Came Shrinkwrapped

Removing my headphones and putting them around my neck, he then tilted back my head and lowered my jaw. It was not working well enough yet to close it. Cupping me beneath my chin and holding the back of my head, he then started to draw me forward. I prepared to receive a cock.

"Wait a minute," he muttered, suddenly distraught. "What the fuck are you doing!"

Releasing me and fumbling himself back inside, I thought for a moment he had reconsidered--then I learned the truth.

"Damned fool! You're small enough to begin with. You want to make it smaller?"

He had only halted because putting it in my mouth would have subjected it to the effects of the field. I wanted to laugh, but the paralysis would not let me.

Putting the headphones back on my ears, the Professor hurried away and made some final preparations. His face was red, and he kept cutting me looks from the corners of his eyes. I could almost have enjoyed being raped in the mouth, if getting raped would have gotten him too.

When I was two feet tall, the Professor removed my lab coat and raised my blouse over my head, then removed my brassiere. "A little trophy," he said, putting my brand new Victoria's Secret brassiere into his coat pocket. He then put my blouse back on (after first kissing my tiny little breasts) then put my arms back into my lab coat sleeves. He button the lab coat up. Then he picked my panties up from my ankles and ran them up my legs, snugging them into place. His grin said he had considered taking them also. I realized only then that whatever I wore, shrunk along with me. Another effect of the serum?

Placing the headphones back on my ears, the professor got to his knees and checked the Walkman one last time. "I think you're ready," he said.

Everything--the Professor, the tables, the walls--were gigantically out of proportion.

Picking my up, the Professor set my on the table amidst a clutter of wires and apparatus. He began speaking again, and his voice was louder and very deep.

"This is the Rehyllium-80," he said, patting the square block of metal, nearly half my height. "SinceRehyllium is so intensely dense, it will afford you a comparatively dense universe in which to explore. You may not think so when you first get there, not with the thousands of light-years between stars. But, even though I know no more about this universe than you, I strongly advise you to stay away from the brightest stars and approach only ones that seem comparable to our own. They have the best odds of inhabitable planets. Choose your worlds well."

He was so big now he towered above me like a skyscraper. It felt like everything in the room, the Professor included, loomed. I felt very tiny, indeed.

"Well, this is good-by," he said. "We won't see each other again. Even were I to try, I could never locate the same planets you choose, not out of all the trillions and trillions there are. Also, because your rate of shrinkage is so great--it needs some adjusting-- you won't be able to stay on any given world more than a few hours. Perhaps this is best. Anyway, good luck."

He picked me up and placed me atop the smooth surface of the Rehyllium-80. I judged I must be about four inches tall. The paralysis was beginning to break up and I had movement in my face and neck. I could finally move my hand. I pulled it away from my still aching shoulder and, expanding my lungs, shouted out with all my might.

"Professor! Professor, wait!"

He bent over me. My voice must have sounded like the squeak of a mouse.

"What about air? How do I live in the empty regions between stars?"

"Don't worry," he answered. His voice was like thunder, and I struggled to get my hands up over my ears.

Understanding, he spoke more softly this time. "You'll be quite safe," he went on. "In the thirty years I've worked on the problem, I wouldn't have overlooked so important a point. I will admit it had me stumped for some time. But as it turned out, 'Shrinx' solved the problem for me. It generates a field outward around the body for about six inches. That's why your clothes shrink as well, and also the headset. Somehow it captures gas molecules within this field and shrinks them at the same rate as you. Otherwise--" he gave a short laugh "--you couldn't breathe at all. Once you descend to microscopic size, the air molecules will be bigger than you."

Helpful information, I thought. Remind me to not inhale anything bigger than I can swallow. Then I thought of something else I had almost swallowed and--

Cut it out, Joanna! You have more important things to consider!

"What about the cold?" I yelled up. "And what do I eat?"

He shook his massive head. He pulled away before speaking but I still felt his breath. It swirled all my clothes. "I've given you enough food and water for several days. It's in the backpack, Joanna. Use it wisely. As far as the cold of space, the field radiates a fair amount of heat by itself. While you're in your very large state, the molecules surrounding your body will insulate you well. There's nothing remotely massive enough, save maybe a Black Hole--and then only when you've become smaller--that could bleed them away. But keep your distance from anything out of the ordinary, Hesse, Black Holes included. Wouldn't do to have you sucked down one of those."

No indeedy, I thought--you fucking cock bastard.

By now, I was barely an inch high. I could move about, but my limbs tingled and ached fiercely and felt intermittently weak. I sat down and rubbed my calves and my feet. Along with my neck and my lower back, they seemed to ache the worst. Despite the incredible circumstances, what hit me most was how odd it felt without my bra. Having my breasts sway back and forth under a blouse was something I couldn't remember in the last ten years. Then I thought how ridiculously mundane this was.

"You are an asshole, Joanna. Get the hell up!"

I got up.

The Professor appeared more like a mountain now, towering thousands of feet into the air; beyond him, seemingly miles away, the walls of the room extended to unimaginable heights. The ceiling seemed as far away as the moon.

Walking to the edge of the block and peering down, I found myself at the top of a cliff. The face of it was black and smooth, and absolutely perpendicular. Far below extended the vast cluttered plain of the table and experiencing a sudden strong vertigo, I stepped back. I wouldn't want the Professor's experiment to end so soon.

Walking back to the center of the block, I sat down again and rubbed my calves. They ached something awful. Then I underwent a momentary panic as I remembered what always cramped my calves--but no, I had just finished my period last week. I was safe for another three weeks. This, I bet, was something the Professor had never considered. I bet he never considered I'd eventually have to pee.

By now, every movement of the Professor sent air swirling around me; I felt light as a feather. He was just an indistinguishable blur, looking at me through one of those gigantic magnifying glasses, the kind that is lighted. I had to shade my eyes. It was becoming hot.

"Stop it," I yelled, waving him off with my hand. Evidently he got it, because the glass pulled away. A booming thunder echoed and bounced around the room. He may have said, "I'm sorry," but I wasn't sure.

Well, I'm sorry too, I thought, wondering what made me so calm.

Suddenly, the smooth flat metal surface was no longer so smooth and flat. I felt scratches biting into my rear end and stood up. I was maybe the size of a pea, more like a BB, and everywhere around me, ditches were opening up, slowly becoming trenches. They extended in all directions. I stood in one now.

"Jesus," I whispered. "This is it."

I began to loose my cool. "Professor! Professor Sturgeon!"

I looked up, but all I could see was fog. I was small enough now, that light refracting off the molecules sometimes missed my eyes. Or so I guessed.

Stumbling blindly along the trench, I waved desperately up at the fog, aware that he might no longer see me at all. I hollered his name. I begged and I pleaded. I began to cry. Coming to an intersecting ravine, I turned to my left and then to my right, wondering what to do. The walls of the ravine were now over my head, and soon I was between two towering cliffs. I continued to shrink.

"Professor Sturgeon!" I screamed. "Professor, where are you!"

I began to run and run and ran until I ran out of breath. My eyes poured out tears and my lungs bellowed breath in and out. I felt dizzy and immensely hot. My fucking side ached. Then I looked at a big gouge in the cliff face ahead and screamed at the top of my lungs.

"Noooooooooooooooooooooooo!"

Throwing myself around, I fled in the opposite direction. It was a mite, an immense enormous beast, exactly as I had seen in photos. Only instead of magnified 50,000 times by a scanning electron micrograph, this mite was a horse.

"Professor!" I screamed. "Heeeeeeeeeelp!"

Turning a bend to my right, I threw back a look and found the mite in pursuit. I started screaming again and poured on the speed. The thing was blue-white in color and almost transparent, with hundreds of ugly spikes rimming the body on the lower and upper sides. I saw things inside the body--things I didn't like. I could see its stomach.

Rounding another turn, I looked back again and saw that the mite had gained. It had a double row of double jointed legs on either side of its body that propelled it ahead, sometimes bouncing up and off the walls. It was right from a nightmare.

Up one ravine I sped and down another, doubling left and then right to shake my pursuer. I no longer felt winded or out of breath and the irony of being pursued by a fucking mite struck me as hysterical, but I had no time to laugh. I ran until I really was out of breath and could run no more. Let him take me, I thought. It's got to end sometime. I turned around to meet my fate and. . .the mite wasn't there.

"What?" I panted. I looked all around. I looked up the walls. The cliff face disappeared into nothingness above and I was alone. I was the size of a germ. A germ, for Jesus Christ's sake, a germ. I waited there, panting. I didn't wait long.

"Fuck you," I whispered as the mite appeared behind me again. "You and the horse you rode in on."

Only now the mite was bigger than a horse, more like a fucking T-rex. I slowly backed away. "Nice, buggy," I whispered. "Nice little friend." A friend who would eat me alive.

Whirling, I fled again, screaming at the top of my lungs. I continued to scream, not wanting to hear my pursuer run me down. Suddenly tripping over a knife-edged fracture in the rock--there were chasms and pits all around me--I flew face first through the air, not touching the ground and not seeming to need to. Had I shrunk out of gravity's grip? Almost.

Finally coming back to earth, I bounced lightly once, then shot back into the air. I kept heading up until something sharp grabbed my leg and I was hauled back down. Screaming and kicking I prepared to die.

The thing let me go.

The thing had bigger, more important things to worry about: a two story high blob of gelatinous mass that threatened to eat it.

I backed away, scurrying on my hands and heels like a crab, as the two monsters battled it out. I backed until I came to a chasm that extended wall to wall. It looked bottomless with dark. The mite had extricated itself from the gelatinous mess--I realized this mess was a fucking germ--and was trundling toward me. It really looked pissed.

Knowing I had nowhere to go, and no time to think about it, I simply pulled myself up to the edge, and let go. I fell backward into the depth less chasm, silent and resigned. My adventure was done.

Nothing happened.

I expected to crash into the bottom, if not into oblivion itself. But there was no sickening sensation of falling, no sensation at all. I seemed to just float.

Opening my eyes, and finding myself in darkness (the light at the top of the chasm, seemingly miles above, was very faint) I extended my hand and encountered a rough surface. I was falling, but at no great speed; I walked faster than this.

How long I continued to drift there in that jet black darkness, I have no idea. It must have been a few minutes, and every minute I grew smaller. I also grew less afraid. I hadn't died when I had expected to, and this gave me an inner piece.

After a time, I became aware of immense objects all around me. They pressed in from every side, and they gave off a soft luminescence that helped me cope. Some were no larger than myself and others loomed as large as Mt.Everest. None of these masses ever approached each other or myself; we just drifted slowly in space.

As I continued to shrink, the accompanying objects spread out and away from me and disappeared. I realized they were molecules of air. I became alone. I became afraid. Was the Professor wrong and I was not falling into an underlying universe of starlight and matter, but into an endless and sightless void? Would I get smashed by a speeding electron? But then the ambient light level increased--I could suddenly see my hands--and I watched as tiny iridescent patches of light appeared and became swirling, expanding, individual stretches of milky white. They grew in complexity and size, and surrounded me in every direction. I saw individual points of light and sudden intense flashes that told me what they were.

These were nebulae! Galaxies and clusters of galaxies! Galaxies in globular clusters and pinwheel shapes, and arranged in random and scattershot order. They came and they went and the the flashes of light I saw were novae and super novae inside. . .it stole my breath away!

Growing ever smaller, the nebulae grew larger around me, but also more distant apart. One particularly large galaxy near my waist became a million dots of light, then tens of millions of dots of light, and some of the dots were significantly larger than others. They ranged in color from intense white to a dullish red or blue. These were super giant stars, I knew, what the Professor had warned me to avoid.

The general luminosity became intense and suddenly I was swept up in one of the spiral arms. The stars and clouds of dust swept past me and cascaded around my head and my hands and my feet, becoming totally disarrayed. I dared not move for fear of knocking them completely out of the arm. I also worried they'd get up under my skirt, although none evidently did. Then the swarm was past me and I was between spiral arms and watching the next arm approach. As scared as I was, it was still an incredible sight. I wanted to shriek like a teenager going down that first incredibly plunge of a roller coaster and then the next arm swept in and engulfed me and began to haul me along. The stars much bigger and brighter than before and I began to see multiple-star systems and huge outer planets. They continued to grow and spread farther apart as I became smaller and then I began to match their speed as gravity hauled me along.

Every hue I could imagine was represented among the stars and their encircling planets: dazzling whites, reds and yellows, blues and greens, violets and every intermediate shade. I glimpsed also the barren darkness of suns that had burnt out and left their planets lifeless; others seemed incredibly tiny and looking metallic. These had no planets at all, and luckily, were few and far between.

There were double suns that revolved slowly about one another as if on an invisible string. There were triple sun systems that revolved about one another in an strange but somehow effortless symmetry. I saw one quadruple sun: The smallest was a dazzling white, the others, all roughly the same size: a blue, a green, and a deep wondrous orange. The white and the blue stars circled each other in the horizontal plane, while the green and the orange suns circled on the vertical; they formed a perfect interlocking system. Around them sped sixteen planets of varying size, the smallest on the inner orbits, the largest in the middle, and smaller again toward the outside. The effect was a kaleidoscope of unimaginable beauty. Then I remembered what the Professor had said about receiving my thoughts, and wondered if he was tuned in to them now. If so, he didn't deserve such a sight.

I determined that one of the planets of this quadruple sun should be my first attempt at landing. I found it relatively easily to maneuver, in a dog-paddle, concentrate-on-what-your-doing sort of way, and dog-paddled myself alongside it. (I've since decided that its both a combination of the dust in interstellar space allowing me to push against it, and another weird side effect of the 'Shrinx'.) My length was twice the size of it's orbital plane; I didn't come too close.

When the outermost planet swung past, I found it a frozen ball of ice. I wasn't landing there. Once it went by, I headed in toward the next planet in line, an aquamarine giant. Through rifts in the cloud layer I saw vast expanses of liquid, but no land; probably a sea of methane. It looked very cold. So did the next planet in line. And so did the next. I dog-paddled on, deciding my best chance lay with the inner planets.

Outside the orbit of planet number six, I waited as the baseketball-sized sphere left the opposite side of its orbit, and began to swing round. It was a considerable distance in from the next farthest planet, and barely one-fifth its size. I was now less than the diameter of its orbit, and too small to make moving interplanetary distances a viable pursuit. I did not want to get stranded in space.

Finally the planet grew close and I saw that its atmosphere was crystal clear and a deep azure-color. It passed me a scant few yards away, rotating counter-clockwise lazily on its axis. It too was a vast world of liquid, but there was one large land mass, right on the equator and many scattered islands. I was five times the size of the planet on its next pass; when it came around again, I would try to land.

As I waited for the planet to complete its next orbit, I thought of the Professor. If his amazing theory were true, that universe after universe lay ahead, then my adventure had hardly begun; wouldn't begin really until I had set down.

What would I find? Life? A breathable atmosphere? For sure, the coloring of the ocean, the sky and the land looked comparable to earth, but looks told me nothing; I could just as easily be acid for water, cyanide gas for air, and species that could live in both. I'd face the danger alone, while Professor Sturgeon, safe and sound in his faraway lab (far away? He could reach out his hand and moved me and my new universe anywhere he wanted), listened to my thoughts and made objective criticisms about everything I did. The son of a bitch.

The planet returned later than I expected, and this made me realize with something of shock that life on its surface--if there were life--had just experience a full solar year, while I had experienced a few minutes of thought. I had existed in their universe for how long now, relatively speaking? Millions of years? Billions? The thought was staggering, but every revolution of our own galaxy took upwards of 250 million years (I'd learned this fact not long ago on some boring PBS show, while stranded at home by the snow--I wished now I'd paid more attention), so billions was not unlikely.

I watched in trepidation as the planet swung closer, estimating my size as about a quarter of its size--still too big to land. It skimmed past me, so closely that I could have reached out and touched its surface. Did I sense staring eyes? It moved away again and I wondered if I'd just made a tragic mistake. The smaller I got, the slower things moved, and by the time it showed up again, I could be way too small. I might burn up in its atmosphere like an incoming meteor.