Shrunkation

Prologue

Sasha

Two years ago

One didn’t go to college with the intention of getting a degree in minion.

In fact, Sasha Acosta studied biomedical engineering at Stanford, which she considered to be one of the most upstanding studies she could obtain a degree in.

“Sasha is busy being both a doctor and an engineer,” her mother said to anyone who happened to ask after her.

Rosa never bothered going into more detail, as if this was impressive enough.

Regardless of the number of times Sasha explained the particulars of her career, her mother still didn’t understand what her occupation actually entailed or why she couldn’t diagnose one of her father’s complicated ailments caused by long COVID, thereby saving her parents a trip to the doctor.

Despite her parents’ pride in her accomplishments and the excitement at being personally recruited by Dr. Cutchin, a mentor of hers, to work for the technology-forward company Mankind2Mars, she soon developed a sinking feeling about her new job.

Every day at work brought new red flags, but she had yet to gather enough courage to ask her co-workers, Are we the baddies? It was a downer topic to introduce during after-work drinks.

Her first hint should have been during salary negotiations when twenty-four-year-old Sasha was offered a number so large, she couldn’t fake aloofness, agreeing to take the job on the spot.

Being able to put a serious dent in her bloated student loans became a real possibility.

Who knew being a minion paid so well? It certainly explained why super rich movie villains seemed to have an endless supply of henchmen.

The biggest flag to date, one so red it could draw every bull in the country, was when Zack Massey, billionaire and largest shareholder of Mankind2Mars, gave a TED Talk-type presentation to VIPs, one that was later emailed to every employee.

Zack with his pasty skin, shaved head, and one ugly signature hoodie after another always conveyed the gravitas of being on a different level than the rest of mankind.

As though his wealth was the reward for brilliance, his success the result of being all-knowing.

His family’s old money, giving him the leg up on the rest of society, was merely brushed aside for more grandiose bootstrap narratives.

This most recent presentation was waiting for Sasha when she arrived at work.

Yawning, while pushing her glasses out of position to rub an eye, she clicked on the YouTube link.

She didn’t plan on watching the whole thing.

Who had time? She didn’t even put in her contacts today or do anything more than wrap her thick black hair into a quick messy bun.

Regardless of what Sasha’s intention was, she watched the whole thirty-two-minute video, mostly in a state of shock, with her mouth ajar and forgetting all about the blueberry muffin sitting on a nearby stack of documents.

She wondered if her boss, Dr. Cutchin, sat in his office slack-jawed while watching the same video.

They’d had a single meeting with Zack Massey regarding some exciting developments in research, and he’d already packaged it with the slickest presentation money could buy, as if everything was a sure thing and he’d had a personal hand in the discovery of it.

If this presentation showed anything, it was that his actual understanding of the subject matter was elementary at most, latching on to the flashiest of hooks.

Sasha’s mistake was expecting more self-control from Zack.

She and Dr. Cutchin had presented to him the latest discovery, in which a group from MIT had figured out how to shrink items to nano-size proportions through the use of optogenetics, utilizing a standard laser.

Though Zack didn’t understand all the implications, he’d realized the news was significant enough for there to be some future possibility for making money and increasing his reputation as a genius visionary.

Dr. Cutchin and Sasha were also giddy with the study because it was an exciting scientific breakthrough in its own right.

It could be one aspect, among many, that would help Mankind2Mars achieve its goal of establishing a living colony on the red planet before any other agency, and guaranteeing more governmental contracts.

“They’re calling it implosion fabrication,” Dr. Cutchin had said, while playing with a pen cap and being encouraged at Zack’s increasing interest in the subject.

“The entire structure of an object can have a one-thousand-fold reduction, which is even more than expected. They don’t even need a clean room or specialized deposition equipment to pull this off.

If we can replicate their studies, there’s no reason we can’t transport more resources and equipment than we ever thought possible in order to get a colony established at a much faster rate, because everything can be squeezed in the limited space available on a standard rocket.

Then direct expansion can be used to increase the size again when needed. ”

“I don’t like the phrase implosion fabrication,” Zack had said, leaning back in his Monte Blanc leather office chair and using lazy quote fingers.

“It makes it sound dangerous. We need something snappier, more marketable. Discoveries are nothing if no one wants to buy them. If I don’t want to buy implosion fabrication, I won’t be able to convince anyone else to.

” He swiped his hands through the air as if suddenly hit with devine inspiration.

“What do you think of Zip-M? It’s like were creating a zip file of the future.

Plus the letter M goes with Mankind2Mars. Yeah, I like it.”

Sasha found his comments odd, considering their team’s job was merely to work on the science.

They had nothing to do with marketing, which was a whole other minion level in itself.

A look at any study in a scientific journal demonstrated that the last thing scientists thought about were snappy, marketable titles or names.

In fact, the specific name for the MIT study was 3D Nanofabrications by Volumetric Deposition and Controlled Shrinkage of Patterned Scaffolds.

It wasn’t a title that rolled off the tongue or got normal people excited.

But Sasha wasn’t normal, and this particular study captured her attention like a gynnidomorpha alismana (moth) to a fuel-plus-oxygen-resulting-in-combustion (flame).

She’d scanned the article with her hand clasped across her mouth like she was reading the most exciting thriller of her life.

Sasha wanted to jump up, race over to random people, and push the article in their face and exclaim, Have you read this?

! There were few people who would truly appreciate this advancement in technology and all the different applications it could apply to. Luckily, she worked with most of them.

But, unknown to her and probably Dr. Cutchin, Zack was already making promises and optimistic predictions on what Zip-M and Mankind2Mars were capable of, as if achieving the goal of having a thriving, established colony on Mars within the next few years was on the cusp of becoming reality.

At least that’s what he was telling fellow board members, shareholders, and everyone else who was on the receiving end of this email.

At this point, it had probably made its way to social media, Reddit, and all areas of the great internet frontier because this was exactly the type of exciting, chaotic marketing Zack thrived on.

Thank God she and Dr. Cutchin had at least done enough to convince him that the MIT discovery only applied to objects and couldn’t be used on people…

yet. Having to use basic terms to explain why it was a bad idea to dehydrate something that consisted of sixty percent water was not something she expected to do, especially to a person found on a HuffPost listicle of The Top Fifty Most Brilliant Minds.

But she didn’t push herself to be at the top of all her classes simply to make a living turning people into mummies.

For a minion, Sasha had a very weak stomach.

Except, when pushed by Zack, she may have been a touch overeager in possible theories about how all of it could happen.

In his presentation, he boiled it down to changing the frequency of the laser to remove and push atoms closer together, which didn’t get people to nano size, but they’d still be very, very small.

And, yes, that was essentially what she had said to him, but she had described it with more depth and eloquence and in a way that wasn’t market tested and flashy.

The one good thing resulting from this was Zack Massey throwing a lot of money into their department. They were able to get whatever they needed, no questions asked. And maybe having anything and everything had gone to her head a little.

So much so, Sasha didn’t notice her complete transformation into a full-fledged minion.