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.