FICTION

Government Approved Overcrowding Solution #26

When solving overcrowding creates a world where size is the least of your problems

Photo by Ансплэш Степана on Unsplash

When Derek opened his eyes, he stared up at the sky. He lay on his back in the road, unable to recall how he got there. He sat up. Nothing looked familiar.

He spotted a distant town and walked toward it, trying to piece things together. He remembered working last night, delivering pizzas. At least, he thought it was last night.

He went to make a delivery. When he arrived, he noticed an Uber Eats bag already outside the front door, which he thought was a little odd. Maybe they were having a party and needed a lot of food. After knocking a few times, he waited, but there was no answer.

He opened his app to see if he could contact the person who had placed the order.

Amanda Hugenkis. Great, a phoney name. Most likely a prank call. He turned to leave when the door creaked open… and everything went black.

Derek was trying to remember what happened next when he walked past a billboard. It had been spray-painted by someone recently.

Population = 15.

Then he heard movement behind him. He turned and saw a rabbit. Except this rabbit was the size of a car and was nibbling on grass at the side of the road.

Derek screamed and ran into the main street of town.

It looked like a normal country town, but everything seemed just a little bit off. Almost like it was all just a little bit too small. Steps felt short, doorways looked like they could be a foot taller, even though everything else looked in the right proportions. Derek wasn’t a big guy, but he felt like everything around him had been shrunk just a bit.

He reached the park in the town centre and finally saw some other people.

They all appeared to be normal people, but they were also a bit off. Their proportions were normal, but they varied in size from only coming up to Derek’s thighs to towering a head taller than him.

The mismatched group of people looked up as he ran up.

‘Looks like we got a new experiment,’ said one of the taller people.

‘His size doesn’t look too different from some of us,’ said another, this one about Derek’s size.

‘Who are you? What’s going on here?’ he panted. ‘What’s with the giant rabbit?’

‘Oh, you met Bessie! She won’t do any harm,’ replied a third person, about half the size of Derek.

The crowd cleared a bit, and a man in a lab coat stepped out.

‘Hi, I’m Dr Smith. Welcome to Smallsville.’

Derek looked confused.

‘Like the show?’

‘Haha. No. The name is just appropriate. We are here because the government was experimenting with shrinking people to address the current overcrowding problem. That way we could fit more people in a smaller area.’

He gestured around him.

‘But you can see they are having a few issues with scale.’

Derek looked around again. That was why everyone was slightly different heights.

‘It’s a balancing act,’ said one of the others. ‘People need to be small enough to not take up too much room, but big enough so that they don’t have to re-engineer everything we currently use in life.’

‘And why are we here?’ asked Derek. ‘Why did they pick you?’

‘I think for most of us, it was just a case of wrong place, wrong time,’ said a guy still dressed in his pyjamas.

‘Except for me,’ said Dr Smith. ‘I was against this project, as I said we need more field testing. And so they shrank me and told me to go field test as much as I want.’

‘So how do we get out of here?’ Derek asked.

Everyone laughed.

‘There’s no getting out of here,’ said Dr Smith bitterly. ‘You’re a failed government experiment now. No one will ever know what happened to you.’

Derek stared in horror. This couldn’t be his new normal. He couldn’t live in a world where death by rabbit was a real possibility.

A rabbit…

‘Hey Doc, is there a way to reverse this shrinking?’ he asked.

‘They didn’t think it was necessary, but I was working on a reversal agent. Just in case.’

‘Great.’

Derek gathered some more information and quickly outlined his plan.

‘It’ll never work; it never does,’ sighed Dr Smith.

But it was too late. Derek had already grabbed some rope and was off to catch Bessie and escape.

Over the next few months, the residents of Smallsville watched as Derek tried plan after plan to escape and get to the antidote. First, he tried to catch Bessie. When that failed, he tried sneaking onto the truck that delivered food to the miniature village each week. After this plan didn’t work, he attempted hiking across the countryside until a fox chased him back.

Dr Smith helped him come up with new plans, but he had long become resigned to the fact that this was their life now. With no new residents arriving, it appeared the government had also given up on this experiment.

Eventually, Dr Smith got a ladder and the spray paint and updated the sign at the entrance to the village.

Population = 16.

He watched Derek trudge back into town, dragging a broken kite from his latest failed attempt.

Prompt: In the near future, Earth’s population has exploded, and space on the planet is running out. Colonising other planets isn’t in the cards, so scientists start working on a new idea: Shrinking everyone and everything to a smaller size. After a routine test goes haywire, you find yourself trapped in a prototype neighbourhood, and you soon discover you’re not the first person this has happened to…

Prompt provided by Bradley Ramsey, as part of Flash Fiction February.

If you enjoy darkly humorous stories about flawed systems, strange worlds, and unintended consequences, you might also like my other flash fiction exploring the absurd side of everyday life.

[embed]We Will Eat Like Kings ‘Tonight’s the night.’medium.com

If you’d like more stories like this, you can explore my collections on Gumroad.

I regularly publish short fiction here on Medium. You can also read more of my stories on Substack.