"Tastes kind of weird, don't you think?" Trish asked sheepishly. From her standpoint, ‘weird’ was too weak of a word. She just didn’t want to rain on Liv’s parade. Her friend had been absolutely elated about every single thing that happened today.
Olivia shrugged and gulped down another portion of her smoothie. She was clearly enjoying it a lot more than Trish; she was already half-done with it. Trish swirled her own – identical, fruity-electric-blue – smoothie around. The lunch was given to them in a small plastic pouch with a straw. She maybe had a couple of small sips. Her mouth felt like the insides of it got coated with honey.
"Well, it's quite sweet", Liv noted. "As you'd expect".
"You'd think the sugar-free just wouldn't be sweet", Trish sighed. "This is, like, pure aspartame taste on top of something... earthy. Like if they made this of pureed green lentils and sweetened them up. Why not just season them with something else? I'd prefer my lunch savory".
Olivia turned her smoothie pouch around. "Huh. I don't see the contents listed anywhere. But, if it's actually lentils, I'd say it's pretty good. Lentils are a superfood".
"Superfoods don't exist".
"You know, I thought so too, but then I saw that video on YouTube... I've gotta show it to you..."
Olivia downed another quarter of the pouch’s contents in one giant, drawn-out gulp. Trish sighed.
"Come on, Trish. Just try a different flavor the next time. Don't let the lunch spoil your day".
With another defeated sigh, Trish puckered her lips and suckered some more of the smoothie into her mouth. Liv was right. Outside of the lunch, their first day interning at Hamilton Inc. has been pretty good. Intimidating, for sure, but good.
They had arrived in the morning. There was a quick and streamlined check-in process; the man at the front desk had been nothing but reassuring. "Always nice to see people thinking for themselves", he had told them while preparing their paperwork. "There's so much negative press about Hamilton these days. We've had people calling off their applications last minute". While he talked, Trish couldn't draw her eyes away from the man's coworker; a shrunken woman in a table-top cubicle. She was bent over her desk, relentlessly typing something up on a tiny keyboard in front of her. "That's going to be us", Olivia said, following the direction of her friend's gaze.
Hamilton Inc. was famous for a controversial method of revolutionizing the workplace - the company made use of the recently commercialized Shrinktech products to reduce some of its workforce in size. The critical nuance was that the resizing system was gendered. At Hamilton, the women were made tiny, and the men - most of them - remained their normal size. Some news sources slammed Hamilton over this approach, citing sexism and drawing connections between the company and ultraconservative politicians; others discussed it in a more of a neutral light, asking whether there might, in fact, be some benefits to such an arrangement. The company was constantly running aggressive ad campaigns; its higher-ranking executives (all of them male) were often on TV, praising and explaining why Mr. Hamilton decided to do it this way. It was mostly about being smart with available office space and making sure that the workplace was collaborative and harmonious. Arguments ranged from seemingly sensible ("our studies show that women take shrinking better") to anecdotal ("this way the men won't compete over pretty girls - all women look the same at a couple of inches tall!").
Trish would have never done this if Olivia hadn't persuaded her to. Liv had always been out there looking for a new challenge. She was a person who always needed to try and do something new. "I wonder what's it like to build a career as a woman at Hamilton", she had told Trish, pacing across their apartment. "You know? It'd be really cool to do so. Make the guys listen to you despite not even reaching above their ankles. Besides, if you discard the woke press, Hamilton gets shit done. They are involved in everything. They keep growing, keep hiring... You want to be a part of a company like this, you want to hop in and become part of the family, Trish, and then, as the company gets rich, you're getting rich too. Mr. Hamilton is our day's Henry Ford. The Atlas-That-Shrugged. He just does whatever the fuck he wants and the society benefits from it. America needs a figure like him right now. I want to be part of it all".
"If you say so", Trish had replied meekly. From her own research, she came across disturbing accounts of how some women were treated at Hamilton. She remembered reading an anonymous post from a clerk, who complained that at her building the women's offices were literally built right into the floors, and the men walked right above them all day. "They make them of some reinforced plastic, which should be safe, but it creaks and groans, and, like, it's clear, so sometimes you look up and you see a shoe sole pressed against the roof", she had written. "And, like, they sometimes have dirty shoes, so you see like a squished bug sometimes, or a cigarette butt, and it's just... really weird. Also, I swear, some guys get a kick out of this. You say something wrong to one of them and he'll make a point of stomping super heavily right on your cubicle. I couldn't take it for long. Took me a couple of months to leave, though, because they do make it hard to leave. And don't even get me started on trying to unionize there, they stamp that shit right out. Literally. It’s cheaper for them to kick you around and pay your medical bills than let unions happen".
Still, Trish trusted Olivia, and so they decided to intern at Hamilton for this one summer before their final year at college. And this morning really turned out okay. She hadn't seen anything horrifying. After checking in, they were taken to a shrinking room, and, once tiny, they were shown a special network of in-building 'sidewalks' for the tiny employees; usually, these ran by the edge of the corridor, and were marked with bright green color. They spent the morning getting acquainted with their workplace. Their mentor was a shy middle-aged woman named Shauna, who was really jumpy for someone who’d worked at the company for a while; any time a man passed them in the corridor or in the working spaces, she fidgeted and pulled her head into her shoulders.
She dropped them off for lunch at around noon and promised to be back in just half an hour.
And there they were - eating the electric-blue smoothie, which was one of today's choices for the female employees. The dining hall was split into two unequal halves with colored markings and signs that directed workers to their respective areas. Olivia and Trish could see the men eating in the distance; they seemed to have a much nicer menu. But, Trish supposed, it's much harder to make shrunken normal food.
And, to be honest, lunches really weren't that important.
"Is it what you imagined it to be?" she asked idly.
Olivia was almost done with her smoothie. "Oh yeah. Don't you feel it, Trish? Look at all those guys. They are super into it all".
"But what about you?"
"Hell yeah, by extension! I mean, it's great to work around people who are so… focused, so professional. I've overheard some guys saying they managed to get a patent on a new nuclear waste recycling tech; I mean, how cool is that? And Hamilton started as a fucking online bookstore! Trish, I really hope I get to work on something related to that nuclear waste. Did I tell you that the school Jade goes to has a tiny nuclear reactor? Like, for teaching purposes?.."
Trish nodded. Jade was Liv's overachieving sister.
"Also", Olivia switched topics, "I really like how organized everything feels. Super professional. Really just shows you how much the media blows everything out of proportion. Like, imagine - in September our school newspaper will definitely ask us how this was, right? And they'll expect us to say something horrible, like, I dunno, Mr. Hamilton himself rides around on a chariot drawn by a million shrunken women in chains".
Trish thought that was a weirdly specific mental image, but didn't say anything.
"Don't you feel it? This sense of corporate freedom and unity?" Olivia rocked side-to-side on her chair. "Damn it, Trish, I can feel these three months are going to be fucking awesome. And then, in a year, I'll return and work my way to the top. Just watch me".
"You'll flip it all on its head? Have the guys shrunken?" Trish giggled. Olivia's expression changed to a confused one.
"What? No. They got studies, right? That it's better to shrink the girls..."
Trish nodded.
"Yeah. But, maybe I'll get to a bigger size. Some of their branches are trying that out. Have workers ranging from like an inch to like three feet tall. And the normal-sized men, of course".
"I've heard of that".
"So watch me make my way up the size hierarchy and corporate ladder at the same time..."