"Now be good, Leipaki," Nassaiu told her child in her language, "or else the Goddess - Ka-rèn - will not swallow you up when you are big."

Leipaki looked at her mother with a mixture of awe and fear.

"Yes," the mother continued, "you will die all alone without Her stomach's embrace. You won't know Her mercy like the foolish chief in the story I told you last night."

"But if you're really good, maybe She'll swallow you up when you're still little. Then you won't have to wait a long and difficult life to be inside Her."

* * *

In all likelihood, Leipaki would not have too long to wait. She was one of the unregistered children. Since Karen's arrival on the island, the real demographics of the island state had shifted dramatically, even if the official statistics belied it. What appeared in the official statistics looked pretty good to statisticians. To them, the declining birth rate meant that Vanuatu was developing, as countries that became more developed also saw declines in fertility. This left the foreign statisticians happy and none the wiser.

Children were Karen's favorite. Her minions had discovered that her rate of physical growth increased, the less her food was pre-shrunk. By now, she was large enough to swallow infants and willing toddlers. There was also something satisfying of absorbing a person who would still have so much potential in a full life, but to have that potential be destined for her stomach.

'Ka-rèn' had truly become a Goddess, and she was still waxing in power and stature. soon, the toddlers would no longer have to be willing, and eventually she would be able to swallow up fully-grown adults. Mike Hardt's peculiar attribute would then be obsolete, because people would no longer need to shrink down to meet their destiny within her. She could (finally) reward him for all his hard work and loyalty by also giving him a place inside her stomach.

It would not be long now before she could grow beyond Tanna Island and its archipelago. It was not that she did not enjoy the tropical Pacific island. She loved it, and she loved how its people loved her - worshiped her. Yet, what she wanted was a greater empire - an overt, rather than a covert empire. Eventually, she wanted her empire to swallow up the entire world!

For the time being, her realm was Vanuatu and the kinky corners of the internet. The religion devoted to her captured the devotion of the islanders and those who seemed to have a hidden desire for submission. The island nation's authorities had either been co-opted or swallowed. They had engineered that 'what happened on Vanuatu' 'remained in Vanuatu'. People could go there without being tracked, and therefore they could disappear without being traced to her. It was almost common knowledge on the web, but the Western authorities treated it like a fictitious fad. Hundreds of tourists - she thought of them as pilgrims - would come to the island and show her their devotion. Many decided to never leave, but become hers in their entirety. Some had that decision made on their behalf. Many returned home to be her evangelists.

Those evangelists spread the word of the island Goddess, which brought more tourists. Initially, those tourists had primarily come from wealthy Western countries, where internet traffic was relatively unregulated. As word began to spread, so did the origins of her worshippers. There were many from Indonesia, which was relatively close, as well as from Japan, which had always had a special relationship with kinky things on the internet. (She had even been featured in a hentai manga.)

The great growing population of worshippers, however, came from India. Part of that was purely a function of size. A certain small percentage of any population would be interested in anything, but when that percentage was multiplied by over a billion people, that percentage represented millions, and some of them had the financial wherewithal to make a one-way journey to Vanuatu and into Karen's stomach. Her evangelists in India, however, attempted to dissuade people from taking out loans to pay for their trip. While paying back those loans would not be a problem for those who had found their end in the gullet of their Goddess, she didn't want to have too many creditors hunting their debtors all the way to Tanna Island and making problems.

There were, however, very few Chinese worshippers. Maybe that had to do with Chinese culture, or maybe it was because the internet was controlled by the government. That government frowned on anything too religious or strangely foreign.

So, it came as a surprise to Karen's following when a plane arrived on Tanna Island that was not only from China, but that it was a government aircraft to boot. The aircraft of foreign governments did not come to Tanna Island. Official government business was conducted in the capital, Port Vila, on the island of Efate. Efate was some hundred miles from Tanna's shore. Yet, this Chinese government airplane had arrived unannounced and unexpected.

It was in the evening that the plane landed, and a party of men disembarked on the airstrip. Junior members of the delegation inquired with select locals, and received silent negatives in return. The islanders were smartly distrustful of these official outsiders. The senior members of the delegation grew impatient with their subordinates' lack of progress, but were similarly rebuffed.

Eventually, they wound up in the lounge of a tourist resort, which had drinks and also served snack foods. They didn't care for the island food that much, but appreciated the adult beverages. They sat in two groups, divided by seniority, talking among themselves; the seniors being louder and more indignant than the subordinates.

A western man walked in and ordered a drink, before appraising the two groups. Eventually, he approached the junior officials, speaking heavily-accented but fairly-competent Mandarin:

"I hear you've been asking around about the 'believers'," he said.

The junior officials were hesitant to reply, but their superiors were not paying attention.

"We are looking for someone," one of the juniors said, guardedly.

"Looking!? Found someone you have!" the man said in English, barely keeping himself from adopting the iconic character's voice.

The Chinese officials did not get the reference.

"Steve Smalls, formerly of the New York Times," he said in Mandarin again, introducing himself. "I used to be at the Beijing bureau."

The officials nodded.

"Like I said, I hear you've been asking around, and I might be able to be of help."

They didn't trust this intervention, but at the same time the superiors looked to be getting deeper into their cups, and probably did not want to be disturbed. Besides, this was an opportunity to produce results.

"What kind of help?" the most entrepreneurial of the officials inquired.

"Well, I know what - and who - you're looking for, but parties want to know why you're looking."

As a journalist, he wanted to get to the point quickly. On the side of his interlocutors, however, the matter had quickly shot up over their pay grade. The matter was sensitive; a senior should be in charge of it, and here was this unexpected Western journalist. The juniors seemed largely befuddled, but it remained the case that the seniors were in no position to negotiate or make decisions.

"You should come back tomorrow, and talk to the Deputy Secretary," one of them said.

"Deputy secretary?" Steve asked. "Deputy secretary of what?"

"Deputy Secretary!" the official replied, putting greater emphasis on the words.

Steve thought for a moment, when it dawned on him. The man was the Deputy Secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, one of the most important councils in the Communist Party of China. He looked at the group of seniors and then recognized the person who was the Deputy Secretary.

"Holy crap!" Steve said to himself, in English.

"Yes!" the entrepreneurial junior chimed in, also in English.

* * *

After some initial overcoming of wariness and protocol, the following morning Steven Smalls met with the Deputy Secretary. The latter had insisted that Steven negotiate in English, so that the translation would be done by one of the junior officials. Steven had been around long enough to know what that was about and did not fight it, regardless of his own capacity for speaking and understanding Mandarin. It had also taken some doing to convince the Deputy Secretary that Steven could speak on behalf of the 'Island Goddess'.

It appeared that the Chinese authorities were fully aware of what had been happening on the island; its missing tourists and the online fetish empire that had emerged. Initially, Steven thought that this might mean trouble for Karen, but it seemed like the Chinese, or, at least the Deputy Secretary had something very different in mind.

Over the past several months, Steven had also come to take a position with Karen's 'regime' on the island. As a Times journalist, who had had several worldwide postings, he knew a thing or two about international politics, which is why he had been sent to deal with the Chinese. Like so many had done, Steven had also fallen in worship of Karen.

It was a strange thing - maybe almost as strange as the premise that an otherwise regular girl would have this gift of growing from the consumption of shrunken people, and have come into this position on an out-of-the-way Pacific island. The strange thing was that when confronted with Karen, her size, and her voraciousness, most people did not recoil. One would have thought that she would be seen as a monster, just like so many people-eating giants in old fairy tales. But instead, she had the effect of inspiring awe, and, indeed even worshipful devotion. It was not just islanders, who may have been culturally peculiar, but she had this effect on tens or hundreds of thousands of people on the internet.

Apparently, she also had this effect on high-level Chinese functionaries. The Deputy Secretary had a scheme in mind. He had convinced a number of fellow collaborators within the Communist Party that the 'Island Goddess' could solve a burgeoning problem in China - namely a growing unbalanced overpopulation of elderly people.

* * *

"They want what??" Karen demanded, incredulously.

"They seem completely serious, mistress," Steven told her. "If you are willing to come to China, you can have all the elderly people you could possibly devour."

"Elderly are not my favorite, but I do like the idea of a limitless supply of human food," Karen mused.

She had not forgotten about her wish to rule a world empire, one in which any human being might wind up inside of her stomach after a moment's whim. The more people she swallowed up, the closer that dream seemed to be in sight. Also, the People's Republic of China already ruled a fifth of the world's people.

"And what would be my relationship to the Chinese government?" she asked.

"I'm not really sure," Steven replied. "I don't know for sure who all the Deputy Secretary really represents."

"Well, let's find this out," she said, "If he's for real, he shouldn't mind coming here."