Matylda was absolutely elated to see her own name on the ID badge. She did not expect to become an apprentice so soon after enrolling at the university, especially not in the most advanced laboratory in Poznań. Provided that she did well, she could even be offered a job. If not, well, at least she would gain valuable experience. Not that the future really mattered to her now; she was simply happy to have achieved her lifelong dream of becoming a lab assistant.

She opened a side entrance door using her badge and headed, as always, for the common room. Matylda found her feet in the world of pipettes and spectrometers in no time. It only took a month for her to be treated as an equal by her senior colleagues and to know everyone on a first name basis. This friendly working environment was by no means accidental. After all, the lab in question was not some corporate, run-off-the-mill wing of an industrial giant, but above all a scientific research facility and a place to pursue your own ideas, even the unorthodox ones. No employee therefore found themselves working there against their own will.

Indistinct chatter emanated from the room through a door left ajar. Matylda recognized the voice of her mentor, Natalia, a young PhD student who took her under her wings and showed her around all the new environments. Having entered the room, she greeted all those present inside and, without slowing down her step, headed towards the closet, in which she intended to leave her outerwear and find a lab coat of a fitting size. It wasn’t the only thing her mind was occupied by; at the same time, she pondered her work schedule for the next few hours. The previous large project she helped with had recently concluded, and so she found herself in a kind of a limbo, spending the days helping out her colleagues with manual tasks or those that required little to no previous experience. As she  busied herself tying up her hair, she was approached by Natalia.

“Hey, you up to anything important today?” she asked preemptively, wanting to avoid losing her friend for the day to her coworkers and their mundane assignments.

“Not really. Why do you ask?”

“Perhaps you’d like to help me dispose of the remnants of a certain experiment?”

“Dispose of? You mean clean it up?”

“Kind of, but I promise you it’s nothing boring. Come, I’ll show you.”

“Alright,” Matylda had her interest piqued. “Lead the way.”

The women left the rest of the group and headed down the hall toward the staircase leading to the lower floors. Under the bright glow of sunlight-replacing fluorescent lamps, Natalia located a thick but rather unassuming door made of metal and frosted glass and opened it using her magnetic card.

“I’ve never been here before,” Matylda commented out loud, all excited.

“It would be quite the reason to worry for me if you had! The labs on this level are accessible only to authorized personnel.”

Matylda was about to reply with “no way, how cool!”, but she managed to bite her tongue in time, not wanting to come across as someone that hasn’t grown up since first going on a school trip as a young girl. Nevertheless, that’s exactly what she felt like whenever she was shown something a mere mortal had no access to.

The room they entered had its environment kept at a comfortably cool level and was filled with the constant noise of various machines specialized in analyzing the vast quantities of data that was constantly being provided to them. Natalia turned on the lights and pointed towards the station located in the middle of the room. It was bolted tightly to the floor and surrounded by a row of consoles used to control a robotic arm as well as every other piece of computerized equipment in its immediate vicinity, and supported a large steel and glass chamber, out of which discreetly led a series of ducts, tubes, and cables whose purpose involved both supporting the delicate microclimate within and herding every piece of gathered information into the data-hungry processors. It all seemed very high-tech… and very expensive.

“What is it used for?” Matylda asked, setting her eyes on the device pointed out by her friend.

“Instead of having me relay to you a bunch of indigestible explanations and scientific terms, I think I’ll just give you a small demonstration of its capabilities. Stand here, on this side, please.”

“Sure. Sounds good.”

Matylda approached her mentor, who was tinkering with the consoles, and after a short while noticed some activity inside the chamber. One of the opaque cassettes stored inside slid out of its column and was slowly heading towards the glass wall. At the same time, the eyepiece of a microscope, accessible via a small hatch that remained locked until the sequence’s end, was lowered. When the cassette came into contact with the other end of the optical device, gaining transparency in the regions it touched, an electronic beep signaled the machine’s readiness for receiving further instructions.

“Look, you can use these two knobs to change the position of the lens in relation to the cassette. Just do it gently, we don’t want to frighten them yet. This one, as you know, is for adjusting the sharpness of the image,” Natalia explained enigmatically and looked into the eyepiece herself, correcting the settings. “This seems good enough. Come take a peek.” 
Wholly unsure of what to expect, Matylda did as she was instructed. Up to that moment she had only observed bacteria and other microorganisms, as well as the products of crystallization, so it was difficult for her to understand the image that appeared before her eyes. She shied away from the microscope for a moment and looked again, this time having gotten rid of any expectations and presuppositions.

Adam Mickiewicz Park, the Imperial Castle, the Grand Theatre, Collegium Maius… trees, buses, cars, people. She felt as if she was watching a live satellite feed. Taking use of the focus knob, she admired the fully tridimensional, finely detailed city that reminded her of tilt-shifted photos. She was familiar with the capabilities of Google’s artificial intelligence that used aerial footage to construct models of urban environments, but those seemed like nothing more than child’s play compared to what Natalia had shown her. No graphical glitches. Perfect quality.

“How did you manage to achieve such a beautiful image?” Matylda asked, still gazing through the eyepiece.

Natalia was confused at first, but soon she realized where this question was stemming from.

“It’s not a display screen. The city really is there.”

“You mean this was 3D printed? At such a high resolution?”

“Tyldzia, there seems to have been a misunderstanding. This is a faithful copy of a section of Poznań’s inner city, created as a result of shrinking the original. Every normal-sized thing is obviously still in its place. All the buildings, vehicles, foliage, and people you see down there were simply cloned and placed inside the correct cassette. I wish I could go into more detail, but I’m afraid that would count as breaking the NDA.”

“People, too? Are you saying these people are real?” Matylda turned towards her friend and looked directly into her eyes.

“Real? Well… yes. It would be hard to deny that. But they’re just clones! Tiny copies. The original ones didn’t notice a thing. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if you found your own self in here.”

Matylda had no idea how to reply. She looked through the microscope again. Some man was running across the distinctly paved Adam Mickiewicz Square. She adjusted the focus.
It was then that she had first noticed the dilapidated state of the city. Cars abandoned on the road, trash and debris cluttering the streets, traffic lights out of order. Certainly, this was no live feed; it was more of a post-apocalyptic vision.

“Why does it look like this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like the city hasn’t been cleaned up since last week. Like something really bad happened.”

“Well, there’s only so much we can fit inside a 15-centimeter cassette. These sections are 1 kilometer by 1 kilometer; in most cases that means no access to power generators, no running water, no internet, and obviously no contact with the outside world. Try maintaining social order under conditions like these! Impossible, wouldn’t you say?”

The man from the square disappeared somewhere behind the trees of the nearby park. Doing some quick maths, Matylda calculated his approximate height. A quarter of a millimeter. A person the size of a small grain of sand. Remarkable. The young apprentice had to take a short break.

She glanced from a distance at the opaque cassette. He’s in there somewhere.

“How do you feel?”

“That is not what I expected. I didn’t even know that shrinking people is physically and biologically possible. Where did you get the idea from? How do you use this technology?”

“I can’t reveal any particular scientific or business partners, but in most cases it’s about simulating environments or conducting terrain analysis.”

Matylda thought for a moment about the remaining cases. Maybe cinematography? Or warfare? After all, if you’re not sure what to make of your new invention, you can always try the military. She set her eyes on the rest of the cassettes, arranged in a column carefully calibrated with the robotic arm in mind. What’s going to happen to them? She asked Natalia this question.

“They’re not going anywhere. Not that they were meant for export. Some we keep for ourselves for calibration and experiments,” she explained. “Arranging multiple sections into something bigger is quite time-consuming and often results in unnecessary damage, so we’re still working on making our shrinking device more powerful. Personally, I hope that by the end of the year we will have fit the entirety of Poznań inside a single cassette,” she passionately concluded.

As Matylda was listening attentively to her friend talk, she remembered what it was that brought her to this restricted lab in the first place. Natalia mentioned that there was something to be disposed of, didn’t she?

“Could you remind me again what kind of task I am to do here?”

“I wouldn’t call it a task. It takes only a moment to dispose of the cassettes. I just thought that you could accompany me while I prepare them. Since they’re about to be thrown away, why don’t we make use of the opportunity and have a bit of fun playing with them?”

“You want to play with the city? Have you done this before?”

“Yes, a few times! There’s nothing dangerous about it; or illegal. You just open the cassette before discarding it and… go to town. Just don’t have the contents spill out onto the station. It’s bothersome to clean up.”

Matylda had no clue that her friend was capable of something like this. Didn’t she just say that the shrunken people kept inside the cassettes are the clones of real existing people? And so - height aside - their equals when it comes to all things mental and emotional? Imprisoned against their will with no way out or even a place to hide? At the mercy of their captors, against whom they’re entirely powerless, without any chance of holding them responsible? And instead of giving them an end as swift and painless as possible, she wants to have a bit of fun at their expense?

“So, what do you say?” Natalia pressed her friend on.

Matylda reflected briefly on the point of view of the microscopic people; on the events that took place multiple times in the past when Natalia, unbeknownst to her, took the matters literally into her own hands; on how mighty and powerful she must have felt when entire city blocks were staring right at her face; and on how pleasurable it must have been for her to nonchalantly take lives away from hundreds if not thousands of strangers, without a care in the world, just because she felt like it, as if she was an ancient greek deity and not your ordinary girl from Wilda.

“Nata, how do you do it? I can always count on you to come up with a cool idea. Of course I’m in!”

“Yeah! I knew you would be interested,” Natalia was delighted by her younger colleague’s enthusiasm. “Just give me a moment, I’ll prepare the station.”

Natalia accessed one of the consoles again and used it to slide the microscope and the cassette back into their original places. The rest was up to the robotic arm, which she programmed with just a few taps on the touchscreen, commencing a sequence meant to transfer the objects of interest from the working stand to one separated by a kind of an airlock which could be easily accessed from the outside. It took a while, but soon everything was ready. All that was left was to open the hatch embedded into the side glass wall of the station and… manipulate the cassettes to your heart’s content.

While the silicon assistant was busy working, Natalia took the opportunity to locate a magnifying glass in one of the drawers.

“It’s not, admittedly, a microscope, but it will come in handy if we decide to take another look at the inhabitants,” she explained.

After taking out a scalpel as well, which she would soon make use of, she got to work. Standing at her side, Matylda observed her friend's actions closely, waiting for a chance to play with the shrunken city herself.

“Which one do we choose first?” Natalia asked.

“How about the one we’ve just had a look at?”

Matylda’s mentor opened the hatch and gently slid out the relevant cassette. She put it in the adjacent workspace, just as she had done it many times in the past when she was preparing research material for pickup and processing. She slid a stool over and, having sat down, cut through the clear seals made of thin plastic with her scalpel.

“Are you ready?” she asked, turning her head toward her friend.

Matylda nodded, raising her eyebrows and clenching her lips in an excited agreement. The gaze of both women rested on the cassette. Having pried off the lid slightly with the use of the scalpel, Natalia removed it completely and put it aside, revealing the impossibly detailed, microscopic buildings and streets that Matylda had recently marveled at under the microscope. The young apprentice had never seen anything so finesse and filigree. The tiny city appeared as if it was ready to crumble into even tinier pieces under the weight of the brute reality it was surrounded by, like a pile of dust in stormy weather. Indeed, not everything managed to get through the shrinking process intact - it was only now that Matylda got a chance to take a look at the edges of this square cutout of Poznań. Here and there, they cut right through buildings and other major structures, or rather - through their remnants. Halved, or worse, they were unable to survive the sudden change in load distribution. Even when ruined, they were still a thing to marvel at. Matylda just wished she had been there to see their spectacular - for something so tiny - and authentic death. She swore to make appropriate amends in the near future.

Natalia decided to swap the scalpel for the magnifying glass and inspect the condition of the miserable, pocket-sized Poznań more closely.

“Look. Do you see all the commotion?” she asked, handing the lens to Matylda.

“I guess,” she replied, though still unsure of what she should be seeing. She found an answer soon enough: “Are you talking about all these… people?” The last word didn’t quite fit the barely visible specks that began to gradually appear on the sidewalks, squares, and streets, but that was exactly what they were.

“Yup.”

“What’s the reason?”

“They do this every time. I assume they’re astounded by the sudden disappearance of their artificial, cloudless sky. After all, they have grown quite accustomed to it, not having seen a sunset in a few days!”

It was rather daunting for Matylda to realize that she was being watched by so many people, but her timidity was replaced in no time by excitement. The young student was beginning to feel like a star; the last time she had an audience of more than a few people was back in middle school, during the recital of ‘Ordon's Redoubt’. This time by no means did she intend to stop at mere words. Her upcoming performance would consist primarily of actions.

“Wanna go first?” Natalia asked.

“I’m not sure what to do.”

“Whatever you feel like doing.”

Matylda returned the magnifying glass to her friend and tentatively extended her hand toward the city, eventually leaving only her index finger uncurled. It hovered over the city center, looking for a place suitable for the inaugural touchdown, before resting in the vicinity of the Imperial Castle. Matylda had always been fond of this building; its thick stone walls had always seemed remarkably durable and resilient. She was curious to see how its miniaturized version would perform.

The tip of her finger met only the slightest resistance before the roofs and ceilings began to crumble, soon followed by the frame and walls, spilling over the neighboring streets, squares, and parks, and making the castle seem like nothing more than a few drops of dried up mud. Feeling the clock tower, once mighty, break in half, and hearing the beige debris it turned into crunch night silently along with the rest of the ruins whenever her trembling hand made the merest movement, Matylda could do nothing but let out a voiceless snicker and smirk at its pitifulness, not without a dose of smugness. There was, however, no denying that a certain pleasure was to be had in this kind of finale as well, one reminiscent of popping bubble wrap or getting a biscuit to shatter under your finger.

Only after the deed was done did she realize that it was no mere model she was playing with. Were there any people inside? Instinctively, as if she was looking for evidence in a crime scene, she took her finger away and checked its tip; the only thing she was able to see was the remains of the roof, stuck between her fingerprints.“It’s a cool sensation, isn’t it?” Natalia broke the silence and, having raised the magnifying glass to her eyes, added: “Here’s the reaction I was expecting. Now’s my turn!”

What Matylda’s mentor meant by “reaction” was the panic that ensued among the tiny Poznanites, who were no longer filling the streets, full of hope and curiosity, but were instead leaving ground zero in a hurry or simply freezing in place if they weren’t in direct danger from the collapsing castle.

While Matylda was still looking for words to reply to her friend with - which turned out to be unnecessary as it was a rather rhetorical question - Natalia, having set aside the magnifying glass, leaned right above the biggest crowd she could spot and…

Spat.

It wasn’t, in all honesty, the kind of forceful and aggressive spitting that she would sometimes do on the football field in her childhood, but a portion of saliva, prepared in advance, did undoubtedly leave her mouth. Two or three drops, foamy and slightly stringy, filled and completely consumed a rather large street crossing, sparing not the roofs and facades of nearby tenements and flooding adjacent streets like a monsoon river. As it came tumbling down onto the heads of the townspeople, it crushed some of them immediately; some were, however, left to meet their end by drowning. The ensuing panic was even more hectic than before.

“Oh my God, did you just spit on all these people?” Matylda asked, left in disbelief.

“Sure did!” laughed Natalia.

“I didn’t know you could do that. You’re so cruel!”

“Now’s your turn,” she replied, signaling Matylda with her head.

“Mine? Alright.”

Leaning over the city and holding back her long, wheat-colored hair, Matylda inspected this rather representative section of Poznań and went through the available options. The streets themselves had already been mostly deserted, but the tiny inhabitants, reluctant to seek refuge inside the buildings after seeing how prone to collapse they are, gathered outside, near walls, trees, vehicles, and bus or tram stations. What made the task of finding shelter difficult were the powerful gusts of wind that Matylda inadvertently brought about every time she breathed out through her nose.

The idea of coating the central administrative building of her own university with a layer of saliva seemed to her particularly amusing, and so, even though there was barely a speck around her chosen spot when it came to people, she decided to go with it. Soon, the entire Collegium Minus along with everything in its direct vicinity came under the assault of an absurd amount of spit, which crushed its roofs and started spilling inside the offices of the institution’s officials, giving those who decided to wait out those uncertain times within their safety quite the surprise. Matylda took care of her annoyingly stringy saliva by anchoring it onto her finger and wiping it off the nearby park - the one she had seen the stranger run into before Natalia took out the cassette. A bit embarrassed, but nevertheless satisfied, she took a good look at the sacred institution she ravaged with such brutality, wishing that there was some way to see for herself the despair in the face of the tiny rector, or at least to confirm that he was there to experience the whole thing. After all, it had hitherto been unimaginable for him to treat the university’s students as his equals, and a scenario in which he would be spat on by a Gen Z girl and treated like nothing more than a piece of chewing gum stuck to the pavement - if such a scenario even found its way into his mind - had simply seemed like a bizarre nightmare and certainly not like his unavoidable fate.

Absorbed by images of the reaction of her university’s administrators to this extraordinary event that her mind birthed, made no less vivid by the dubiosity of their presence, Matylda did not immediately notice her friend’s hand, outstretched towards the city. She went for the Okrąglak high-rise, which stood at a height of no more than a centimeter. Grabbing it between her fingers, she began to curl them around it and fondle with it as if it was a loosened screw. It wasn’t long before it crumbled into tiny pieces, unable to handle such a treatment. Natalia wiped her fingers against one another, getting rid of most of the remains stuck to them, and spoke of her sensations:

“Touching it feels really good! Too bad it’s so fragile… Hey, why don’t you try grabbing Collegium Altum,” she challenged Matylda. “Maybe you’ll manage to pick it up.”

The golden-haired student located the red skyscraper, considered by those who count the height of the spire as the tallest building in Poznań, and grabbed it the same way Natalia grabbed Okrąglak, making sure not to get pricked by it. While the iconic metal facade bent and came off, giving way without any fight whatsoever, the frame of the building itself turned out strong enough to be worthy of her fingers’ continued attention. She twisted it a bit, tried prying it off gently, bent it one way, then the other, and kept going until something snapped and came undone and she was left with a small, beaten up brick in hand, thinner than the original and suffering from the lack of several lower floors.

“Nicely done! It was quite tricky, wasn’t it? I don’t always get it right myself. All that is left now is to print out a stand and put it on your desk-- well, not really, I’m just joking. You’re not allowed to take anything that was shrunken out of the lab,” Natalia said, adding afterwards: “Yet.”

“This Collegium Altum of mine doesn’t look so good… but imagine having a section of Poznań filled with epoxy resin. Wouldn’t that look amazing,” Matylda got lost for a moment in a daydream.

“That’s a cool business idea. Mantelpiece models, jewelry, and keychains.”

“See? I’m already thinking like a member of your team.”

“You sure are! It would be great to have you there. Sadly, it’s not just up to me.”

The skyscraper held by Matylda was put to rest on its side somewhere in a nearby park, causing the waters of the shallow pond it impacted to splash and spill all over the area. She then looked towards the western end of the city cutout.

“This might sound funny, but have you ever held Bałtyk in your hand?” she asked her friend, Bałtyk being the name of both a high-rise and the Baltic Sea.

“I would be surprised if I haven’t.”

“It seems to me that it would be rather easy to pick up in one piece. Maybe you could even roll it around, like a die, if that’s okay with you.” Before Natalia had a chance to reply, she added: “Look, couldn't we just use the scalpel for this?”

“Sure, here you go.” Matylda’s mentor came to the realization that her younger colleague, without a doubt, got into the swing of it; “it” being the shake-up worthy of Le Corbusier that was currently underway in the miniature Poznań. “The blade will probably get dull, but whatever, it’s meant to be single-use.”

Now scalpel-equipped, Matylda commenced the extraction surgery of Bałtyk. While neighboring structures offered no resistance, the building’s foundations required a bit of patience and careful filing. It was all worth it in the end, though; apart from the very bottom and a few broken windows, the resulting object came out looking remarkably intact and resembling a Monopoly player token.

“Now that’s something you could put on your desk,” she concluded while having a very close look at the building she was holding between her fingertips. It seemed to her for a brief moment that there was someone inside, but she was unable to confirm her suspicions. Perhaps they fell out and landed in the city below after she rotated the structure around; or perhaps they never existed at all.

“I’ve just realized that lasers would do wonders here,” Natalia shared her observations, the tone of her voice reminiscent of a seasoned researcher. “Well, it’s not like we’ll be selling custom keychains during the midsummer fair any time soon, but the ability to cut out specific parts of the tiny city may come in handy in the near future."

Matylda nodded and commenced carrying out her original plan. In a stark contrast to the professionalism of her friend’s words, she cupped her hands with Bałtyk inside and shook it around. Having imbued it with momentum nigh surreal from the point of view of the shrunken townsfolk, she launched it onto the railway tracks located in a largely open space devoid of any high-rises. To her satisfaction and thanks to its initial speed, the building did roll over once or twice. It stopped only after striking the Uniwersytecki Bridge and obliterating it in the process.

The young women’s playfulness must have filled the microscopic people with nothing less than ineffable dread. After all, notwithstanding those who had already said their prayers and were fully prepared to meet their maker, everyone had fled the streets and went into hiding, making it impossible to spot a single living soul, even under a magnifying glass.

Since playing with such a lifeless city wasn’t as much fun, Natalia took it upon herself to swap the cassette for a new one. Prior to it getting closed up and put aside, Matylda left her final, farewell marks, swiping her finger across a couple of city blocks and enjoying the sensation of feeling them crumble at the slightest touch of her hand. Finally, she couldn’t resist knocking over the five high-rises that made up the Alfa complex and were neatly lined up in a row, but -- much to her disappointment -- she was unable to start the domino effect she was looking for and had to topple them individually.

“It’s been a while since the last time I had so much time,” she said, waiting for Natalia to get the next section of Poznań ready. “You know what this reminds me of? SimCity. In particular the part where you can initiate disasters -- a meteor shower, for example. Have you ever played that game?”

“Sure did! I know exactly what you mean. I got this feeling when I first looked inside one of these cassettes, too.” She cut through another set of seals and examined the contents. “Hey, this one has the Old Town!”

Along with the sudden appearance of Natalia's face in the place hitherto taken by the artificial sky, the tiny Poznanites imprisoned within a square kilometer of the pocket-sized historic core of the city -- to nobody's surprise -- began making their way through the narrow alleys and gathering en masse near the Town Hall in order to find out if this perplexing occurrence augurs a desperately awaited rescue.

Encouraged by the presence of her younger friend, whom Natalia -- knowingly or not -- took great pleasure in surprising, the senior laboratorian greeted them in a quite unconventionally direct way. Having licked her pinkie, she stuck it relatively gently and carefully right in the middle of the amassed crowd, inadvertently demolishing some of the nearby buildings in the process. She then raised it up to her face and took a very close look at her catch, flicking away any particularly big piece of debris while making sure not to disturb the microscopic people that managed to survive the trip without major injuries and became adhered to her fingertip. She showed her finger to an equally scandalized and impressed Matylda, and slowly swiped it across her tongue, transferring the captured persons, all confused and powerless, right into her mouth, which seemed from their point of view unimaginably large and expansive.

“Will you be fine?” Matylda asked, worried about her friend rather than the tiny people whose destiny was tied to a waste disposal box anyway.

Natalia instinctively tried to reply, but doing so with a tongue already occupied by a different task turned out to be difficult. Her own clumsiness amused her; covering her wide smile with one hand, she raised the index finger of her other one to indicate that she needed a moment. She took her microscopic visitors on a tour of her mouth, delighting in the torments her body inflicted upon them and letting up only after the nigh imperceptible sensation of being touched by the dozens if not hundreds of people trying not to drown in the continuously inflowing saliva got prosaic enough for her to decide to gather them all in a single spot and swallow them in one confident gulp, as if she was swallowing a pill.

"How was it?" Matylda asked, smirking. "Any words of recommendation?”

“To answer your previous question first: nope, I’ll be fine -- as long as I don’t eat the buildings by the handful, that is. The only thing I might want to watch out for is accidentally inhaling the tiny crumbs of debris. Some of them are as sharp as moondust and can damage your lungs,” Natalia explained in a single breath. “When it comes to my snack, well, you won’t be surprised if I tell you it’s not exactly the flavor that I’m after. They are way too small for me to taste anything. That doesn’t change the fact that it feels incredible to know that there’s literally a crowd of people inside your mouth. The way they try to fight their way out and free themselves; the way you become their whole world; finally, the way they disappear without you knowing what exactly happened to them… It’s hard not to feel like you’re the most important woman in the world.”

Matylda listened closely to her friend's personal insights -- just like the thousands of terrified people down below, who had just learned, thanks to these descriptions, drastic from their point of view, about the very real possibility of ending up eaten alive -- and unexpectedly got so aroused that she… sneezed. Despite its peculiarity, such a reaction was but by no means unexpected on Matylda’s part as that was exactly what tended to happen whenever lewd, obscene thoughts popped up in her mind. She covered her mouth in time, but couldn’t avoid spraying the tiny inhabitants with a sizable mist, which escaped through her nose, as well as startling everybody with a deafening acoustic wave.

"Bless you!"

"Thanks. Sorry,” she got a bit embarrassed. “It must have gotten to me. Your words, I mean.”

“Why don’t you give it a go yourself?” Natalia suggested.

“I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right to give them such a death.”

“At least try it out! We’re getting rid of them today anyway,” she attempted to persuade Matylda.

When the only thing stopping you from doing what you feel like doing is a weak conviction of it being inappropriate to do so that withers away after only a few words from those you hold in high regard, or a relativist, ambiguous morality, temptation usually reigns supreme; such was also the case with the young apprentice. Seeing that the crowd, stupefied by recent events, had not yet managed to completely disperse, Matylda conscientiously repeated her friend's actions and soon managed to amass a sizable group of people at the tip of her little finger. She examined it closely, trying to identify men and women, young and old, among the microscopic debris, but the only conclusive observation she was able to make without a magnifying glass or microscope was that the sample she collected appeared very diverse. The saliva on her finger was starting to dry up; trying to prevent her captives from falling off and getting wasted in the process, and feeling a great dose of awkwardness while staring into the eyes of those she was about to eat, the fair-haired student -- unaccustomed to playing either the role of the goddess Venus or an antagonist straight out of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale -- hurriedly put her finger in her mouth and thoroughly cleaned it off every single thing that her spit was holding in place.

Having experienced a sensation comparable to the feeling of having a multitude of tiny seeds appear on your tongue, but with each of them trying to inform you through their frantic movements that they were no mere seeds at all, Matylda recalled Natalia's words from less than half an hour ago; back when she mentioned that perhaps a shrunken copy of her was inside one of those tapes, too. Has she been to the Old Town in the past week? What if she was, by some fateful coincidence, holding herself in her own mouth? Well, not that she ever needed to worry about being on the receiving end of such a treatment -- from what she could understand, no person was actually getting shrunk for real since all the people she was interacting with in the lab were just microscopic copies of full-sized individuals possessing the same memories and personality -- but she found it hard not to empathize with them to some degree. The only thing that helped her not get caught up in an overtly compassionate anguish was the knowledge that neither her nor the tiny people could ever find themselves in any other circumstances, and personal dreams of either party or their notions of ethics or morality could never change the fact that their fate is already sealed. This kind of thinking allowed her to impose on herself an obligation of some sort to savor the moment -- so that the suffering of those unfortunate souls doesn’t go to waste! -- and transform her empathy as well as all their pain and fear she herself felt whenever she thought of the bigger picture instead of just her own point of view into something surprisingly closely related - erotic pleasure.

Controlling the crowd didn’t come as easy to her as it did to her friend. Unwilling to swallow anything just yet, she let her saliva slowly fill up her mouth and run down her tongue, picking up all the tiny people it came across along its way. Some of them ended up under the tongue itself, others got stuck between her teeth or simply crushed by them, while yet another group found itself caught in the folds and crevices of her lips and cheeks in the same places one often finds those small, residual pieces of food after eating a meal which can sometimes be hard to get rid of -- that didn’t really bode well for Matylda’s captives, whose size, comparable to the size of a coma printed in a densely printed drug leaflet, meant that they would be stuck there for a long time. With so many of them dispersed within her mouth, she was forced to swallow multiple times, and even that didn’t assure her that no tiny stranger stayed with her a little longer before finally succumbing to the lung-crushing pressure and suffocating humidity. After all, it was impossible for her to tell individual people apart or even feel them touch her body.

“They really suit you,” Natalia broke the silence, which she kept the entire time she was vigilantly watching her younger friend.

“Huh?” replied Matylda, busy wiping the corners of her mouth and not really catching the drift.

"That's exactly the thing I'm talking about. If you were as self-confident as you are cute right now, perhaps others wouldn't walk over you so often.” Matylda got embarrassed and developed a blush.

“Way to leave me speechless, haha, but you have a point. I really do feel more comfortable around tiny people than I do around the real ones,” Matylda concluded. “There’s not as much social pressure. That doesn’t mean I’ve gotten fully comfortable with toying with them, though. It’s still somewhat awkward, especially if I can tell they’re looking, all distressed, right into my eyes. Dealing with buildings is a bit easier in that regard.”

“Don’t you find it interesting? Their minds are just like ours but in spite of that, you seem hardly stressed out. That suggests appearance -- or size, in this case -- is the main factor for you.

“Are you trying to tell me that instead of imagining my audience naked, like they often say, I should act as if they were tiny?”

“I guess? Hey, if someone’s getting on your nerves, we can always try to find them here so that you can practice conflict resolution.”

“Ha!” Matylda found this idea intriguing but impractical. “I don’t even want to imagine how long that would take.”

The discussion died out, but only temporarily. It offered a moment of respite for those few persons who hadn’t found their way down Matylda’s throat yet and were violently flung around while she was speaking. The women’s attention once again focused on the shrunken city.

Matylda and Natalia spent the next half an hour being no less creatively destructive than during the previous thirty minutes. Before swapping the cassette for a new one, they ostentatiously desecrated the old town -- to break the taboo mandating that history be respected -- by crushing its buildings and structures between their fingers. It allowed them to give genuine, though unpunishable and inconsequential, vent to their intrusive thoughts; the ones we all get every now and then that involve destructive and misanthropic fantasies.

When holding the city in the grasps of their hands and french kissing the townspeople farewell got a bit old and lost its novelty, Matylda and Natalia moved on to search for other, more interesting ways to interact with the tiny Poznań. One of the cassettes became the test subject of an experiment involving a small magnet they found in a drawer that managed to attract all loose or freestanding metal objects the size of a scooter or smaller. Another had an earphone put against it so that the ladies could visually observe the propagation of the sound waves and the effect they had on the crumbling infrastructure when playing their favorite songs. In yet another, a deluge was staged by releasing water droplets onto the city using pipettes. When they reached the last, still untouched cassette, however, they decided to take a bit of their time to consider both their craves and their options in order to plan a climactic ending to their session. It wasn't an area particularly rich in unique buildings that could offer opportunities for some fun activities, but there was a facility near the edge that caught Matylda's attention, namely the high-rise housing the city’s biggest university dormitory.

So far the young student had come in contact only with shrunken strangers; the odds that she would come across someone that she had had a few words with in the past were virtually zero - or at the very least, there was no way of confirming that, and that was all that mattered. However, the dorm - now located literally at her fingertips - as far as she knew, was home to hundreds of students, many of which she saw regularly on campus or outright spoke to directly every now and then. What's more, these people were of her age; they were brought up in the same world and era as her, and she felt not much different from them. Wholly aware of this and convinced that even if she doesn't manage to recognize any familiar faces among the microscopic dust herself, it will surely not be a problem for them to recognize hers and haunt her conscience, Matylda came up against a tough nut to crack. She had to somehow make a decision: pretend they don’t exist or the contrary - try something new?

"Have you ever met someone here that you knew personally?” she asked Natalia.

"Sure have, a few times."

“What did you do?”

"It depends on whether I liked them or not.” Having noticed that all her friend did in response was nod, she added: “Why do you ask?"

"Do you see this high-rise?" Matylda pointed it out with her finger.

"You mean the Akumulatory?"

"Exactly. There's quite a lot of my friends in there. Well, maybe not very c l o s e friends, but enough to… you know."

"To feel embarrassed? Haven't we just concluded that there's no point in caring about what they think? Whatever words of protest they might want to voice, these have no bearing on your real-world relationships." Natalia fell silent for a moment, but then spoke again with twice the enthusiasm: "You know what? That's it. I'm going to give you some homework. I'll break the rules just for you."

She stepped away towards the first aid kit, but before reaching it, she turned back around and corrected herself, as if she was being monitored by management:

"I mean bend. Bend the rules."

Inside the medical locker she located a roll of bandage tape and brought it back to the central workstation. Not planning to reveal her plans to Matylda just yet, she grabbed a scalpel, and, without saying a word, gently used it to tap on the dorm building in an attempt to flush out those too timid to leave on their own just to check what happened to the sky.

"Nata, what is it? What are you doing?" Matylda asked impatiently while her friend was waiting for the crowd to gather around the high-rise and preparing a small, rectangular piece of tape.

"Just a moment. I don't want to spook them."

Natalia got the ends of the tape to adhere to her fingertips, creating a handy and portable, sticky trap for students as a result: whenever she brought her fingers together, the strip bent, snatching everyone it touched. Using this technique, she managed to secure a sizable group of people in a matter of minutes that consisted primarily of the university dormitory's tenants.

"A set of Matylda's friends. Collector's Edition," she said, showing her work to her labmate. "What do you think? Are you interested? Or should I chuck them back in?"

Matylda took the strip of tape into her hands, gazing at the numerous students of both sexes stuck in place. She realized that it was too late for secrecy and covertness, and understood that her failing to keep up appearances in front of the shrunken clones of people she meets on a daily basis in the university’s halls that she was just a random and innocent witness to their troubles relieved her of the need to care anymore about not just their feelings about her, but even their fate in general.

“What should I do with them?” she asked.

“Take them with you. Learn it yourself that they’re just copies,” Natalia explained, the tone of her voice making it sound as if she was trying to persuade her friend as well as her own self. “I bet that having them by your side while strolling through your college and not coming across anyone that would complain to you about the things we did here today will make you realize that."

The young student felt a bit uneasy listening to her friend’s slightly too enthusiastic words, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t quite happy to take “care” of the guys and gals gathered on the sticky bandage tape. All the anxiety she had recently felt had by now turned into a kind of aversion; Matylda was in fact a bit upset that she allowed to be manipulated by those tiny specks that couldn’t even survive getting lightly blown on. To keep them near her body; to remind herself of their existence whenever she felt small; finally, to find motivation in owing both them and her own normal-sized self a life lived to the fullest and in not wanting to metaphorically end up in their place - that is what she wanted. The most intoxicating thought, however, was the idea of meeting in real life the same people whose shrunken copies she had in her possession. She wouldn’t obviously be able to fully confirm whether that was the case or not since she had no idea who exactly found his or her way onto the tape, but this kind of uncertainty could just make the intimate, dominant feeling stronger with each sighting of an Akumulatory tenant. There was also nothing stopping her from going there on her own and spiritually taking in the view of her personal fiefdom. And so she made her final decision to take them, though there was still one matter that required some deliberation.

“Where should I keep them?” she asked Natalia.

“In a discreet location, so that nobody notices them. Otherwise we could be in trouble.”

“But… w i t h me or o n me?”

“Well, what do you prefer?”

Matylda could stick them inside her handbag or her wallet, but she was looking for something more personal. Maybe her thigh? Or her arm? Or…

In a place nobody would ever look at. On the bottom of her foot.

Ever since this idea crossed her mind, she was unable to ignore it. It left her wondering why it was that whenever she had to make some kind of decision about these poor souls, her mind always raced towards the most evil and wicked solutions. Was it because there was nobody around to stop her? Was she really this sadistic?

“Alright then,” she said, like there was no going back from what she was about to do. “Let me sit down first.”

Natalia, who had had her curiosity captured, stood up to free up the stool by the workstation. Matylda did not inform her about her plans using language, of course; she teasingly opted instead for Natalia’s favorite technique - demonstration. Holding the piece of tape in her fingers, she used her free hand to untie the laces of her sneaker, which combined the aspects of OSHA-approved footwear and a comfortable, sporty shoe. She took it off, overcoming the resistance near her heel, and revealed a white sock. After stretching her toes, now freed from the prison of her shoe, she got rid of it as well, turning it inside out in the process. Matylda lodged the sock temporarily into the discarded sneaker, and rested her bare foot on her thigh, sole-side up.

Just a day before these events, it would not be appropriate to write a description of Matylda’s foot longer than a few words. Thanks to Natalia's invitation, however, it was soon to become the most popular foot in history by number of people who it had contact with, as well as the last thing most of them would see. It was a bit larger than an average one - Matylda herself was in the upper percentiles when it came to height after all - and looked quite nice, though it was, rather understandably, not free of some minor blemishes. The young student wasn't one to frequently show her feet in public and preferred to hide them within her footwear, which caused her to pick up small blisters and calluses. This also obviously meant that she tended not to paint her toenails, though she remembered to give them a trim every now and then and keep them in good health. However, the thing that could catch the most attention after she took off her sock was the color of her sole, reddened after a long period of standing up. In a nutshell, her feet were as natural and genuine as she was, and the only thing she used them for was walking. In spite of this, one of them was about to find a new application.

With the shocked gaze of hundreds of eyes fixed on Matylda, one could suspect her of being about to break under the pressure and stress if it wasn't for the fact that she was instead clearly overcome by bratty and enthusiastic mischievousness. She brought the piece of tape down to her foot and took a bit of time to find a suitable place it could be stuck onto. She didn't want to squash the tiny mob too quickly; she therefore decided to choose the section which doesn't tend to bear much weight during walking, namely the arch. Grabbing the both ends of the tape, she stuck it in the chosen place, and slid her finger along it for good measure.

“Honestly, I wouldn’t be able to come up with something like this. I guess only a newcomer could be this direct,” Natalia shared her carefully worded thoughts.

“Are you saying I shouldn’t have done that?”

“On the contrary! I think it’s the perfect solution. Discreet and… blunt. So, how does it feel?”

“It’s still hard to say. All this is so absurd and ridiculous, not to mention messed up, that I feel like I’m about to burst into laughter, but still I try to fight it since I know it wouldn’t be appropriate - not while I’m doing what I’m doing to these guys,” thrilled and emotional, Matylda was in a rush to verbalize her spontaneous, somewhat contradictory thoughts. “I don’t even want to imagine what they’re feeling right now.”

“Fortunately, you don’t have to,” Natalia added.

“That’s true. I can focus on myself.” Matylda took a look at the piece of bandage tape adhered to her sole. “Nata, maybe what I’m about to say is stupid, but I have to confess that as long as I don’t let my empathy take over,” she lowered her voice, “being so big and powerful feels addictingly good.”

“I know, right?” A slight smirk appeared on Natalia’s face. “You know, there’s statistically at least one person among them for whom a close contact with your foot is something very pleasant, too.”

“Oh no, please don’t say that.” Matylda found this idea quite grotesque. ”Even if that’s true, I feel like he’ll have changed his mind by the end of the day.”

Having slid her finger once more along the tape and giving the students hidden underneath a farewell glance, the golden-haired lab assistant clothed her foot back in a sock, and put her sneaker on - with some degree of gentleness - to seal the fate of the microscopic young men and women.

“Well then,” Natalia concluded, “I guess that’s it for today.”

After hearing these words, Matylda got up from her stool. Still limping a bit for obvious reasons, she approached her mentor and embraced her tenderly.

“Thank you. It was wonderful.”

“Don’t mention it!” Natalia hugged her back. “Just don’t take the band-aid off before seeing me again, alright? So that you don’t leave any trails.”

“Sure. I can’t come in tomorrow, but we’ll definitely be able to meet the day after that.”

“We could have a look to see if anyone survived before we throw it away.”

The discussion between the two friends died out in a natural manner. Consequently, Natalia got started with the proper portion of the procedure for disposing of shrunken material; she picked up the pile of cassettes and chucked them into the biomedical waste bin.