Mini Me and the Redhead Physicist

The US Department of Defense is responsible for managing the affairs of the various branches of the US military. That means they play a pivotal role in the development of new weapons systems and part of that role is approving funding requests by corporations for funding of those development programs. To get government funding for a weapons development program, a corporation has to submit a proposal outlining the type of weapon system being developed and a justification of why the DOD should budget money for that system development.

The justifications are always glowing descriptions of the new weapon systems's capabilities and how those capabilities will improve the fighting capabilities of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. They're filled with technical jargon and acronyms that are pretty confusing to most of the people reviewing the proposals because most of those people come from the military and don't have the background to understand the science involved.

I'm sort of the exception to that rule because I have a PhD in Physics. As a result, I consult for those making the decision about a particular funding request. That means I review the program and evaluate it for the possibility of success and practicality.

When I went to Hygraph Magnetics that day, I was certain I was going to find their proposal to be impossible to achieve. That wasn't because Hygraph Magnetics had a bad reputation like some companies. Hygraph had done a lot of the preliminary development on the Navy "rail gun", the weapon that accelerates projectiles to supersonic speeds and is devastating to targets. Hygraph had very talented physicists and electronics people, but on the surface, this project just seemed to violate the laws of physics.

The Hygraph Magnetics proposal was to use an intense magnetic field to reduce the physical size of an object in order to enable more efficient transport as well as to improve secrecy of said transport. One can imagine the strategic advantage of transporting hundreds of trucks, tanks, and the like to a battle zone in one aircraft. The enemy would think only a few pieces of equipment were landing when in fact, it would be possible to transport all the equipment for an entire army on that aircraft. Those were some of the words in the justification.

In theory, it would not be possible to reduce the size of an object by using a very strong magnetic field to force the atoms closer together. The electrical force that keeps the protons, electrons and neutrons in their normal spatial relationships would have to be overcome and since the force would increase as those particles were forced closer together, the magnetic force required would be gargantuan. The other problem is that some neutrons would probably escape and collide with other atoms which would release more neutrons to collide with other atoms. That's how the first atomic bombs worked. An explosive charge forced the atoms together releasing neutrons and created a chain reaction of neutrons bombarding atoms and releasing the resultant energy.

Even were such a thing possible, the practical difficulty is creating a strong enough magnetic field to shrink the object and then maintaining that field during transport. The other problem is unless the mass of the object can be reduced, i.e. some of the atoms are removed, the object would remain at the same mass, so even though it might be very small, it wouldn't be any lighter in weight.

I voiced these concerns to my supervisor, Major General Hayes, but he said Hygraph had done the impossible with the rail gun, and they may well have done it again. The next week, I drove into the parking lot of Hygraph Magnetics and then went through the armed guard's admittance process.

He eyed me up and down, then checked his roster of approved visitors. Upon finding my name, he looked up and asked me for identification. I showed him my Department of Defense ID and he compared the number with the number on his list. I then had to put each finger on a print reader and wait for the prints to be sent to NCIC for verification. My prints came back as verified, so he took my cell phone, locked it in a cabinet, and had me stand in an airport-style x-ray enclosure while he looked at the screen. He nodded, told me to have a seat in front of a camera, and then took my picture. About ten seconds later, a credit card sized badge with my picture and name appeared from a slot on the machine.

He attached the badge to a neck cord, handed it to me, and said "Welcome to Hygraph Magnetics, Mr. Robinson. I'll call the scientist who'll show you around." I was a little surprised I hadn't been strip-searched.

The scientist wasn't what I'd expected because Rhonda Sims wasn't a man and she wasn't wearing glasses thick enough to use for telescope lenses. Rhonda was a redhead about my age of twenty-eight, and was about like any other woman except she was pretty plain and she had bigger than average breasts. I knew they had to be pretty big because she couldn't get her lab coat buttoned all the way up. Under that lab coat was a frilly blouse, also open at the neck, and under that was some really fantastic cleavage.

Rhonda had a nice ass too, and as she led me back to the conference room for the introductory meeting, I wondered if she was intentionally making her ass sway like that or if it was just natural.

The meeting wasn't going to be a full-blown drinks and canapés type of meeting. General Hayes had already attended that meeting. Instead, I'd be meeting with Rhonda and two other scientists who would explain the theory and answer my questions. After that, I'd be shown the progress of their research to date.

I'd read the report from the first meeting, so I already knew the theory Hygraph was trying to translate into practical application, and it was pretty sketchy. There were no detailed descriptions of the process or equipment involved. In this meeting, I got the same presentation I'd already read and it didn't change my mind. I did ask a couple of questions and got answers I wasn't supposed to understand.

That's pretty common when you deal with very intelligent people who stake their jobs and reputations on some new theory. They'll speak in scientific terms either because they can't speak in simple terms or out of the hope you'll be impressed. They got a lot more reasonable when I informed them I had a PhD in Physics. Their answers weren't any better, but at least they weren't trying to bullshit me.

When the meeting was over, Rhonda said she'd show me the lab and the state of their equipment to date. I said that would be fine. What I was hoping was after a short review of equipment I was sure wouldn't work, I could go back home.

After Rhonda swiped her badge through the badge reader, the lab door buzzed to let us in.

"Matt? It was Matt, wasn't it? Matt, this is where we shrink things", she said. "At first, we could only achieve a few milliseconds of minimal change no matter how large the magnetic field or how small the object. Once we removed the magnetic field, the object expanded to normal size again.

The second problem was that we could shrink things in size, but not in mass. That was one of your questions during the meeting -- what did we do about mass. Unfortunately, the answers you got were those prepared by our program security department and don't really contain much useful information.

"The answer was both simple and complex. As you know, Einstein developed the equation we all use relative to energy and mass -- energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. That equation has been shown to be correct for any reference system in which the mass is measured. Energy is always a constant for any object and is determined by the mass of the object in a particular frame of reference and the speed of light."

It was obvious Rhonda knew what she was talking about, but I wasn't convinced their proposal had any merit.

"It would seem then, that to reduce the size of an object, one would have to reduce the mass of the object. That's possible, but only if you can separate some of the protons and neutrons, and even if you could, you'd generate a lot of heat and radiation. You'd essentially be creating an atomic explosion."

Rhonda smiled.

"Yes, that's true...unless you can find a way to reduce the energy in the system relatively slowly. I did."

I grinned what was probably a condescending grin.

"You're not going to tell me you figured out a way to reduce the speed of light are you? The speed of light is a constant in any frame of reference. That's the basic premise of Einstien's theory."

"No, we thought about that before deciding it wasn't possible without warping the space/time continuum and there were several rather nasty unintended consequences from doing that. I thought we could remove energy from the system though. That's what I designed, sort of an energy sponge. We add enough energy to the system via an electromagnet to start the reduction process going, and then siphon off the energy until the object is as small as we want it to be.

That energy is converted into electricity to power the electromagnet, so the process is somewhat self-sustaining. After the initial application of electricity to the electromagnet, most of the required energy comes from that scavenged from the process. The result is a reduction in both physical size and the mass. It still happens pretty fast -- just a few seconds -- but not so fast the object explodes. It also lasts so there's no need for any equipment to continue the electormagnetic field. When we want to return the object to it's original size, we just add the energy back to the system."

"And how do you do that -- add the energy back into the system?"

Rhonda frowned then.

"That's the part we haven't worked out yet and why we need the funding."

I was still skeptical.

"I'll have to see a demonstration before I'm convinced."

Rhonda grinned.

"We knew you would, so I've prepared a specimen. It's by the reduction chamber over here."

The reduction chamber wasn't big enough for even a small car, let alone a tank of truck. When I asked Rhonda about that, she smiled.

"The process is scaleable, but not linearly because the magnetic force required varies as the square of the mass. We could build a chamber large enough to shrink an aircraft carrier, but we'd have to have our own nuclear reactor to supply enough power to operate it. If the DOD gives us the money, we can do both, but this size chamber was affordable and serves to demonstrate that the process does work."

"Well, show me what you can do."

Rhonda put a hammer in the chamber and closed the door, then went to a computer console and tapped the keys for a while.

"Uh...you don't have a pacemaker or any tattoos, do you? If you do, you need to wait outside. The stray magnetic field would probably stop your pacemaker, and with tattoos...well, some of them have metal in the ink. One of our techincians had one and it got ripped out of his skin."

I said I didn't, and Rhonda smiled.

"Good. Ready?"

I nodded, and she pressed a key.

Nothing much happened except for a really loud hum and the sensation of the hair standing up on the back of my neck. A second later, I heard Rhonda tapping the keys on her keyboard again.

"That should do it" she said, and walked around the chamber and opened the door. "Let's see what happened."

"That didn't take long."

Rhonda smiled.

"Nope. The energy exchange happens pretty fast. Now, all we have to do is find that hammer. It'll be about the size of a pinhead so we'll need these."

She handed me a flashlight and a magnifying glass.

It took half an hour, but she did find it Rhonda picked it up with her tweezers, put it in a petri dish, and then put the petri dish under a microscope on her desk.

"Have a look."

It hadn't changed shape, color, or anything else. It was just one hell of a lot smaller.

That seemed too good to be true to me, because it was contradictory to everything I knew about physics. There had to be some illusion involved. That wasn't unheard of in military projects. A company can invest millions before they figure out the idea doesn't work. Once they come to that conclusion, they need to get enough money to rework the design or get at least some of that money back. To do that, they cheat.

Some can get really creative in order to recover some of their money. I once witnessed a test of a ground to ground missile that was supposed to be self-guided once locked onto the target. The first two appeared to work. They hit the old trucks stationed half a mile away and the trucks exploded. The third missile hit it's truck too, but it was the truck fifty yards from the truck it was aimed at that exploded. They had a guy in a hidden bunker with a panel wired to explosives in each truck. He triggered the explosive in the wrong truck and exposed the ruse.

I looked at Rhonda.

"You won't mind if I inspect your chamber, will you?"

She shook her head and smiled.

"No, go ahead. You're not going to find anything though. While you're doing that, I'll go shut the system down."

I must have bumped the catch holding the door open when I crawled inside the chamber, because I was inside when I heard it close and then latch. I turned around and was waiting for Rhonda to let me out when I felt that prickling sensation on my neck again. After that, things got weird.

I was sitting there with my flashlight and magnifying glass when the chamber started getting bigger. I thought I had them then. Nobody would be able to see the increase in the size of the chamber because of the external shrouding, but the chamber was now big enough I could stand up, so somebody hiding inside the shroud could have switched the real hammer for a miniaturized copy. Any second now, a door in the side would open and I'd see that somebody.

After what seemed like only a second, I started to worry a little. The chamber was either still getting bigger or I was getting smaller. I couldn't believe the latter, but by now, there was no way the external shrouds would be able to hide the increase in size.

It was when I started walking toward the door and tripped over a machine gun I realized what had happened. That machine gun hadn't been there when I crawled inside the chamber unless it was already there and just too small to see. I started pounding on the door so Rhonda would let me out.

A few seconds later the door did open, and what I'd feared became reality. The threads of Rhonda's lab coat looked like a rope cargo net and the button was as half as wide as I was tall.

Rhonda flashed her flashlight inside the chamber and blinded me, but I heard her shriek, "Oh God, what have I done? Are you in there and still alive?"

I waved my arms and yelled, "I'm here. What the hell did you do to me?"

"I hear you but your voice isn't very loud. Stand still and keep talking so I can find you."

A second later I saw Rhonda's eye looking through her magnifying glass and then saw her giant hand reaching for me.

"There you are. I'm afraid if I pick you up with my tweezers I'll squish you. Climb up on my hand."

When I was sitting in the palm of her hand Rhonda held her hand up so she could see me.

"God, I am so sorry, Matt. I didn't have the system shut down when you closed the door, and it went through the cycle automatically. Do you feel all right?"

"Hell no, I don't feel all right. I'm only two inches tall."

Rhonda shook her head.

"No, you're more like one and a half inches."

"Oh great. I feel a lot better now. What are you going to do about this?"

"I don't know. We have some theories about how to bring you back to your real size, but without the funding..."

I was pissed then.

"You're gonna need more funding than you asked for after I sue Hygraph for everything they're worth. I'll end up owning the company and then I'll fire your ass."

She smiled then, and it was scary to see teeth as big as dinner plates smiling at me.

"Now, let's not get all carried away. One of my theories is to reverse the polarity on the electromagnet and on the energy sponge. It's one of the theories for regeneration we've been working on, but we've never tried it. Of course, we've never tried shrinking a person either."

"Well do it. I'd rather be dead then an inch and a half tall for the rest of my life."

Rhonda shook her head.

"I can't do that today. We use big capacitors to supply the initial energy for the electromagnet because the power lines can't carry enough current. We only get two cycles before the capacitors are drained. It'll take the capacitors forty-eight hours to charge back up."

"So, how are you going to explain that I'm the mini-mini-mini-me that I am now?"

Rhonda thought for a second.

"I'm not. I'm going to take you home with me for safe keeping until the capacitors get charged back up. I'll bring you back with me on Monday and we'll see what we can do."

"How are you going to do that without anybody knowing -- stick me in your purse?"

"No, the guards will look in my purse when I leave to make sure I'm not stealing anything. I'll have to put you someplace they won't look."

"Rhonda, when I've been here before, they always ask me to sign out and hand in my badge. How do you intend to get around that?"

She wrinkled up her brow for a couple of seconds and then smiled.

"I'll tell them you got sick and the nurses said you'd have to stay in their treatment room over the weekend, and I know where I'll put you. They'll x-ray me, but you're so small, you'll look like the birthmark they've already seen hundreds of times."

Rhonda used one hand to open her lab coat.

"I'm going to put you in my bra. Just wiggle down between my boobs until you can't see out, and the guard won't be able to see you."

She carefully lifted her hand up to her cleavage and then said, "You'll have to jump because I don't want to pick you up."

Rhonda had been hiding more under that lab coat than I figured. The deep cleft between her breasts looked like the Grand Canyon. I took a deep breath, hoped it was as soft in there as it looked, and jumped.

It was soft in there, really soft and really warm. I wiggled around a little until I started sliding down between her breasts. It didn't take long before I was inside her bra. I poked her left breast a couple of times and Rhonda caught her breath.

"What are you doing in there?"

"I'm finding a comfortable place to hide."

"Well don't do that. It makes me...well, just don't do that anymore. We're going to leave now, but don't be afraid. There's no way you can fall out or anything."

Well, she was right about not being able to fall out. The problem was that with each step Rhonda took, her big breasts bounced up and down and I was getting bounced right along with them. I needed something to hold on to, but I couldn't see anything. Her bra was one of those microfiber things with no seams.

I tried burrowing deeper, but that didn't help. It was when I looked up, I saw something that I could grab and hold tight. I pushed myself up, put both arms around Rhonda's right nipple, and held on tight.

She took two more steps, then stopped, and whispered, "Now what are you doing?"

"You're shaking the crap out of me when you walk, so I'm holding on."

It seemed as if her nipple got bigger then, and I had to let go and then grab it with my arms again. Rhonda caught her breath.

"Well...don't hold on so tight."

"Why?"

"Because you're...I'm very sensitive there. Now, we're almost at the guard station. Keep still."

I did keep still. I didn't move the whole time the guard opened Rhonda's purse and then asked her to step into the X-ray box. I was still not moving when I heard the guard ask Rhonda why I wasn't with her. I felt her heart beat speed up when she told him I was sick and had to stay in the nurses treatment room over the weekend.