I thought I’d try a mini-man story, very loosely inspired by the magnificent art of NKS Volkov from whom (with permission) the illustrations come.
Mini-men? Oh dear, are you from one of those awful countries where popping hasn’t yet
been legalised? There’s really nothing wrong with it, nothing to worry about. Not for us women, anyway. Just settle back, my dear, while I explain. If you want a drink or anything else to make you comfortable just announce your wishes loudly – there are plenty of little helpers around who will be only to pleased to scurry off to satisfy your every whim.
So…where to begin?
First of all, obviously, no actual ‘shrinking’ is
involved. That would contravene the laws
of physics. When a guy goes into the
chamber and a mini-man pops out, the remaining matter can’t just disappear (or
be converted into energy – no matter how useful that would be). No: if a six foot tall man goes in and a four-inch
mini-man comes out, then there’s a lot of matter left. How much?
Well, the mini-man is only a third of a foot, so he’s 1/18th
of the height of the original guy. But
that’s not the right answer. The volume
(and the mass – that is, the weight) of a man – or any other object – is
proportional to the cube of its length.
So, the mini-man is 1/18th the height of the original man, he
has 1/324 of the area of the original and he has 1/5832 of the volume and also
1/5832 of the mass. Of course, the
actual ratios will vary – anything between about 5500 and 6500 is possible, but
6000 is usually the working assumption.
That’s a lot of little people.
So: your newly-popped mini-man is not unique. You can pop about 6000 mini-men out of one
original. Not all at once, thank
goodness – imagine them all swarming all over the floor, squeaking away! – but
once a man has been processed, you can keep popping up to that limit. The rest of his body will be held in a sort
of stasis. There’s no going back. You might think you could just pull him back
out having lost only 1/6000th of his body mass but it just doesn’t
work like that. Something to do with
quantum entanglement states, the scientists say. Whatever.
For the rest of us it’s just one of the mysteries of the process – like
why it only works for men, not for women.
There was a lot of scientific interest in that, at first, but they never
really worked it out and no one cares much any more. It’s just one of those things.
No going back. In
fact, one of the advertising slogans for the first commercially-available
devices was “Once you pop, you just can’t stop!”. Which was intended partly to warn users about
the irreversibility of the process, of course, but nowadays just reminds us how
much easier, wealthier and just plain fun the whole mini-man process has
made all our lives. Who could imagine
going back?
Easier? Of
course. I’m sitting here dictating this
article to the very latest MM-autowriter.
Like an old-fashioned computer keyboard but with extra-large keys, with a
mini-man straddling each group of five. Ankles, wrists and nose each attached to a key, by a tiny metal chain
I could snap with a near-effortless tug, each has to push down with all his
might – and in precise harmony with the others – when I say a word containing
one of his five letters. Every sentence
produces a frantic ripple of activity. I
have the keyboard laid out so that D, W, E, A, R and N are worked with their
heads. So when I say “Andrew” they all have
to bash down hard with their little faces.
‘Andrew’ of course, being the name of my dear sweet husband, from whom
all these little treasures popped.
Andrew.
Andrewandrewandrewandrewandrew.
And down by my feet, a little line of mini-men – more Andrews,
so many Andrews (oh yes, that’s right my dears, faces smacking down on those keys!) – are wearily
scrubbing the floor. So much more
precise and effective than a big silly mop – and so what if it takes a bit
longer? If I really wanted it done
quickly I suppose I could pop a few more out, but why bother when it can be
polished to perfection in just a few hours by these little toilers? Twelve’s plenty and in fact, now I think
about it, I suspect that if the number were quickly reduced to eleven, those remaining
eleven would work so extra hard, they could do it just as well. Even having to clean up the mess that used to
be number twelve – isn’t that right, my dears?
I wonder which of you will be number twelve? We’ll see – keep scrubbing.
And on the rug, there, four of them with baskets on their
backs, wearily picking up every item of fluff.
Of course a vacuum cleaner could do it better but where would be the fun
in that?
Shoe-cleaning is a particular pleasure to watch, of
course. It can’t be so much fun for
them. I live in a green, leafy suburb
where many of the paths are quite muddy, I’m afraid. And when I do walk on the pavement, there’s
all manner of grime and filth my shoes can pick up. I even trod in some chewing gum, a few days
ago! Quite disgusting – some people have
no consideration for others! Thank
goodness for mini-men – I gave four of them little nails to use as scrapers and
after just a couple of hours the sole was spotless again! I also love to put them into the shoes and
have them sponge the damp inner soles for an hour or two, when I come in after
a long day. I don’t know if it does much
good, but the sponges and the mini-men certainly give off quite a pong when I
shake them out again, so it must be better having that out of my shoes rather
than in! A foot-fetishist’s dream, I
suppose – what a pity for Andrew he’s not at all that way inclined. In fact, one evening soon after we were
married he complained about how he could smell my shoes just after I’d taken
them off and put my feet up for the first time, after a long day! So
inconsiderate! I like to remind of of
that, as I pick him up and attach sponges to his tiny wrists and ankles, before
dangling him over the gaping black hole that is the top of one of my well-worn
boots. Perhaps if he hadn’t been so tactless,
I wouldn’t make him do this. I wonder if
he thinks about that, down there.
So…life is easy. And
I think I mentioned ‘wealthy’ too?
Why? Oh, simple enough. Lots of people think that a mini-man must
produce less than his full-size equivalent.
But so little of our modern economy depends on physical strength these
days! That’s why women were increasingly
economically dominant even before the mini-man technology came along but
now… Why train 100 software developers,
when you can train one and pop out six thousand? Or engineers, machinery operators, remote
vehicle drivers… it’s been estimated that 60% of all jobs can be done by
mini-men. And of the remaining 40%, at
least half are highly-skilled positions best carried out by women, so really
only 20% or so of all jobs need to be done by the remaining full-size men. Simple, manual tasks requiring nothing more
than brute strength and close supervision.
Of course, the recent changes in our political arrangements have helped
ensure that the right jobs go to the right people, so to speak.
The politics? Oh,
that’s simple enough. Males have no
rights, obviously. That was an
unexpected side-effect of the minimising process, actually. Initially, there were these wild notions that
mini-men would be treated as fully competent human beings – but that was
obviously unworkable. I mean, can you
imagine? Any male could be popped to
produce 6000 extra voters! As women
couldn’t follow suit, that was obviously going to lead to male domination of
our political society very quickly!
Fortunately, in most countries where mini-man technology was legal, the
danger was recognised quickly. Women
voted in a coherent bloc, while the male vote was largely split because many
men were sympathetic to our feminist arguments that it wasn’t fair for women to
be outvoted – the sweet, trusting little
dears – and mini-men lost the right to vote.
There was a brief suggestion that they should each get 1/6000th
of a vote but as the leader of the Female First party so rightly said “Oh come
on – why bother?”. And then with such a
large proportion of the male population being converted as business clamoured
for mini-workers… well, it was straightforward enough to complete the great
work started by our suffragette sisters at the start of the last century and
remove all civil rights from males.
About time too.
Not all countries managed to see the danger in time to take
such bold political steps, of course.
Some left it too late – and had to suffer a period of domination by the
swarming numbers of mini-men.
Fortunately, it was precisely the more patriarchal males who had
themselves converted – if even mini-men can vote, then any ambitious politician
is quickly going to pop out 6000 of himself, just before election day. They hadn’t really thought through the
consequences of how to actually enforce their democratically-achieved mandate
on the numerically tiny but physically massive remaining female
population. Most such mini-men
governments fell rather quickly to domestic rebellions… those that didn’t were
helped along by invasion from more enlightened regimes. Most military equipment, after all, is rather
more suited to being wielded by full-sized soldiers than by squeaky little
imps. Although, as General Sally Curtis
remarked, after the ‘Two day war’ that put an end to the last of these nasty
little nests of male privilege: “The most effective weapon a soldier can deploy
against an army of mini-men is her pair of tough leather boots.”
Ah – I suppose that brings me on to the topic of ‘smooshing’
doesn’t it? Yes… smooshing. ‘Squishing’ some people call it. I suppose it is a bit cruel, really, but it
does help keep the remaining little dears focused on their work. And it is such fun!
I suppose we’ve all become accustomed to it now. It was a little shocking at first, I suppose,
when women began to realise that with all those silly civil rights taken away
from mini-men, there was no longer anything to stop them. The first mini-man I smooshed was a complete
stranger, oddly enough! I remember it
well – I was at a party at a friend’s house.
I can’t have popped more than fifteen or twenty Andrews at that point
and I was still treating them almost as if they were people – I had a couple
with me, in my pockets you know. Anyway,
my friend had her mini-husband running around pulling carts with drinks on and
that sort of thing – I remember feeling quite excited about how powerful it
made us all seem, ironically enough. I
say ‘ironically’ because my idea of exerting power over a mini-man at the time
was to put him up on a shelf for some quiet time and similar (Andrew squeaked
huis little head off the first time I did it, too, but I left him up there all
night). And then, my friend Yvonne,
who’d been getting more and more cross with them all, just got up from her
chair, strode across the room and – STOMP!
Well, the room just fell absolutely silent… then one of the girls
giggled. I couldn’t laugh I was… not
horrified, exactly, but I was quite shocked.
And excited – but it wasn’t obviously excitement in a good way, you
know? My heart just started
thudding. And I remember noticing what a
mess it made – she’d stamped hard, so he’d burst and there was blood all
around, you know. Not like a slow crush,
when you steadily break the bones from the feet up. And all these little mini-men scurrying to
clean it all up… as if their lives depended on it. For good reason.
Well, later that night I was walking home. I’d decided to walk rather than take a taxi,
because my mind was still buzzing about what I’d seen. And we were still just getting used to the
almost total absence of crime, so like a lot of women I loved walking alone
after dark, feeling totally safe as I did.
I was walking up a quiet side-street, no one around, and this mini-man
just ran out in front of me, coming out from behind some bins. I don’t know whose he was and what he was
doing there but I just reacted instinctively.
I shrieked “Ohh – horrid thing!” (such a feminine stereotype, rather
like a 1950s TV housewife seeing a
mouse, I’m afraid!) and I just stamped on it, almost without thinking. I remember afterwards puzzling over whether
I’d realised it was a mini-man, or whether I’d thought it was a cockroach. I thought it odd that I couldn’t remember,
until I had the revelation: it didn’t matter.
One of the Andrews had been watching out of the edge of my
pocket. I picked him up and stared at
him… he was white and shaking with terror.
I blew him a kiss and put him back and we all went home. I smooshed my first Andrew the very next day.
It’s funny how you get used to things. Smooshing used to be something you did
secretly, for the most part – that’s why seeing Yvonne squishing her husband so
brazenly was a shock. But we women like
to gossip and we pretty soon realised everyone was doing it. And nowadays… have you ever watched Rapist
Release? They’ve got all the males who
were convicted of sexual offences stored up, and they have these special
enclosed courtyards where they’re all popped at once. I often go and watch and I’ve been lucky
enough to win a ticket to take part three times! You all assemble in the courtyard – about
eighty women, typically? Mostly quite
young, but I’ve seen old aged pensioners there, all booted and waiting for the
release. Then you get a short film about
the prisoner and what he did – they don’t usually dwell on the awful details,
it’s supposed to be a fun evening out after all, but they tell you enough to
get everyone fired up and ready for the action.
At this point, the prisoner himself doesn’t know what’s going to happen
– he’ll have been in stasis since the days before the female take-over, after
all. I’ve heard they even tell them
they’re going to be ‘released’ which is true, of course, but not in the way
they think it is. And then they pop all six
thousand, all at the same time, and they come scurrying out of these little
passageways. There are passageways over
the other side of the court signed ‘Exit’, so once they’ve got their bearings,
they usually go pelting off towards those.
It’s not quite the ‘exit’ that they might hope for either, as the few
that make it discover, but I suppose it’s nice for them to have something to
try for, in the last moments of their miserable lives.
It must be quite a shock for them, especially those who were
put into storage before the whole mini-men thing happened, suddenly to run out
with a bunch of other men who look just like you, into a gigantic cavernous
space full of these huge, towering women…. And then when you realise what those
towering women are doing – when you see first one, then another of your
doppelgangers converted into a patch of red mush on the bottom of a boot, and
then when you look up to see that same boot – with perhaps some of the mush
just starting to peel away and drop off it – raised above you, and beyond it an
excited, grinning young pretty face!
It’s a lot of fun to take part – and it’s quite a lot of fun
to watch, too! I was at a special the
other night, when they did three men in succession. Oh – when the third was popped, it was crazy! The floor was so slippery from the twelve
thousand smooshed predecessors, so the girls were slipping and sliding around,
and clinging onto each other while they shrieked with laughter, trying to get
the third batch. Quite a lot of the
participants ended up on the messy wet floor, often in each others’ arms – and
some of them quite lost interest in smooshing the mini-men at that point, if
you get my drift! As did some of us in
the audience: I found myself in a tight embrace with this complete stranger,
and we ended up going home together.
There was something about the shrieks of horror from the third batch,
even higher-pitched than usual, if you can imagine such a thing.
I suppose that brings us on to the topic of sex. To be honest, despite a few wild lesbian
episodes like that one, I do still enjoy a full-sized penis from time to time. But there are plenty of full-sized male sex
workers for hire and they’re not expensive – it’s one of the few jobs they can
do, after all. But the sexual
possibilities that mini-men provide… well, there’s a lot more to them than the
microscopic penis that remains to them, after all. I’ve got one of those dildo holders – you
know? Like an old-style vibrator, only
with a open-ended hollow base. You put a
mini-man into a tight rubber tube – you just roll it down – to keep him fairly
rigid, then up he goes, head-first. OK,
four inches isn’t much but that’s why there’s the base of the dildo behind him. Most of the best toys on the market have a
vibrate function and an electric shock option to make him squirm around by
himself. They’re quite safe – the
electrodes go up inside the rubber tube so you can’t shock yourself. Of course, he can’t breathe up there but be a
stroke of luck, they don’t need to very often.
Something to do with surface area to body mass ratios – I don’t really
understand the science to be honest, but I know that a mini-man can last ten to
twelve minutes without taking a breath.
Which is usually long enough for me, especially as he is squirming
around frantically for the last two or three as he suffocates. Anyway, if I’m not quite there I can usually
get off on what’s left of him – or I have another ready, if I’m feeling like
I’m likely to be slow. Half the time,
though, I come so quickly that he’s still alive when I’m done! I’ve got one who’s managed it six times! I call him my ‘champion stud’ and keep him in
the dildo draw. I swear he gets better
every time, so who knows how long he’ll last?
I suppose we have all become more callous about, well…
killing them, I suppose, although most of us don’t like using that word. But it just sneaks up on you. Take my friend Amy, for instance. Such a sweet little thing. She married a guy called Leo, quite a few
years before everything changed. She
must have been very young at the time she married – nineteen at most? And I think Leo was a few years older and the
only bread-winner, so I think he was very much in charge in their marriage, you
know? He was a young lawyer and doing
quite well, but then mini-men came along and all of a sudden there were hordes
of fully-qualified mini-lawyers chasing the work that one used to do. So although they didn’t want to, they agreed
to have him processed and pop out ten or twenty Leos, however many were needed
to bring in as much money as before.
That went OK for a few years, I think: she treated her Leos
as if they were still proper people – seems quite creepy now, but a lot of that
went on in the early years. She even
bought one of those devices that brings the pitch of their voices down so you
can understand what they have to say.
But of course, she’s surrounded by images of mini-men being smooshed,
and punished and enslaved and all that… it must have been hard to come home and
try to treat these squeaky little things with respect. I’m proud to say that I had a part in her
eventual conversion, though. We were
shopping together and we saw a pair of Asphyxiknicks – you know? Pairs of rubber panties with a thick but
stretchy gusset, lined with a very strong rubber hem around the tops of the
legs. They were all the rage a few years
ago. I have a pair somewhere but I
generally prefer the dildo – I like to feel something inside me. But I use them from time to time. Anyway, Amy saw them and she couldn’t tear
her gaze away – she seemed fascinated – so I explained how they’re used.
She looked so confused – the dear, innocent thing! I remember her asking me “But how does he
breathe?” and then looking horrified when I explained that not only can’t he
breathe, the frantic writhing when he realises that he can’t breathe is the whole point of
them.
It took a bit of persuading, but we walked out with a pair
of Asphyxiknicks in Amy’s shopping bag.
She told me later how she’d dithered for days… she’d take them out of
the drawer where they were hidden, feel the rubber, think about what it might
feel like to have a little body pressed against her, writhing inside it, then
quickly shove them back in the drawer with a guilty flush. Apparently, it was Leo himself who helped her
overt the hurdle, silly little thing. He
made his way into her panty drawer – and I wonder why he did that, the little
pervert – and found them and asked her about them. Of course she didn’t give all the details –
and she certainly didn’t tell him they were called ‘Asphyxiknicks’ which might have been a
bit alarming for him – so he agreed to have a go. She pulled him out after just a few minutes,
as she’d promised, his chest heaving. I
understand that when he’d breathed heavily for at least five minutes solid, he
told her he was OK with it. She, on the
other hand, had stopped just at the point when it was getting interesting, so
she went to bed feeling frustrated, her nerves jangling. Typical selfish male.
I won’t give you all the details, but let’s just say that
Amy has learnt to use the Asphyxiknicks in the manner for which they were
designed and Leo’s wishes on the subject don’t get much of a look in. It turns out that she can only really reach
sexual fulfillment when the wriggling stops – when little Leo, down there,
departs this mortal coil. The first time
she got there was by accident – she’d forgotten to set the timer on her phone –
but after that, she was hooked. She was
conflicted, poor thing, because she did still have tender feelings for Leo, but
she had her own happiness to think of too.
She kept the little secret hidden from her existing Leos at first, the
dear sweet angel that she is.
Of course, every mini-man that’s popped out remembers
nothing later than when his original body was processed. So Leo – the latest mini-Leo – pops out
feeling as if he is the only Leo in existence, having last seen his loving wife
bravely smiling at him through the tears as the lid closes on him in the
processing unit. Expecting to emerge –
small but still respected by his wife and society – into a world in which he
will work as a lawyer, enjoy high-quality but microscopic quantities of the
finest food and drink and generally live as before, if rather smaller. Instead
of which, this Amy plucks his naked body out the delivery tray and plonks him
down into a high-sided glass container by her bed, then goes around the room
lighting scented candles. Soft music
plays and there is a glass of full-bodied red wine standing next to the glass
container, which must look odd to the newly-diminished Leo, as it is almost
exactly his height. While lying on the
bed… a pair of black rubber knickers.
Does Leo feel an ominous sense of trouble when he sees
those? Does he think about what that
rounded gusset might be built to contain and does he work out the meaning of
the thicker hems that hold the leg-holes tight – airtight in fact – when the
legs are worn? If he does, I expect he
starts squeaking in concern, then panic.
He probably scrabbles at the high glass of the container, perhaps bangs
on it as hard as his little fists can bang.
It will do him no good. Soon Amy
removes her clothes, climbs up onto the bed and pulls the rubber knickers
halfway up. She reaches over to the
bedside table and Leo shrieks in hysterical fear – then subsides when he sees
her fingers close around the stem of her wineglass. Then has hardly time to scream again when 20
seconds later, the hand that replaces the wine glass on the table reaches in,
grabs him and lifts his desperately struggling body into the air. He has just time for a quick glimpse of her
giant face, lips pursed in anticipation, before he is shoved firmly into the
welcoming rubber and finds himself swiftly jerked up as she lifts her buttocks
and pulls up from the waist – affording Leo a last glimpse of light before the
hem seals the boundary between rubber and flesh and with it seals Leo’s fate.
Ours is the luckiest generation, I often think. Not only do we have the mini-men to enjoy;
they are first generation of mini-men and they are often comically – blissfully
– unaware of their positions. Later
generations will only have mini-men who know full well what awaits them and
will perhaps be resigned to lives that are unpleasant, painful and – like them
– short. The ladies of that far-off day
will still have fun and live lives of ease, of course, but they will never know
the joy of watching a little face screw up in terror or disbelief at what is in
front of him. Successful men, confident
in their citizenship and their positions when they went into the processor
emerge to find themselves… what? In a
plastic box, equipped only with miniaturised computer terminal, exercise wheel,
feeding tray and a sawdust-strewn floor: one of 50,000 workers in a
purpose-built facility powering the service-based economy? Gasping in exhaustion on a miniaturised
bicycle, to power a fan blowing cool air over their lady, on a hot day? Chained together, as a novelty bra, limb
joints stretching and cracking under the weight of the flesh it’s their job to
support? Or just alone inside an
otherwise empty cardboard box, jolting as they’re carried along to the sound of
excited girlish laughter, to whatever might await.
They do say it’s the little things that make life worth
living. They’re right.
Illustrations, once again, courtesy of NKS Volkov.
