One Year Later... Shrunken First Semester: Teacher's Pet chapter 7 by maximally

Rolling over on her back for a big stretch, Veronica sighed with satisfaction. Her new California King-size mattress was worth every penny she'd paid for it, and the high-thread-count sheets and luxurious pillows on top were just the icing on the cake. The ten-bedroom, fifteen-bathroom Palo Alto mansion around it was a far cry from the dorm housing where she'd spent most of her 20s and 30s. Having a billion dollars in the bank did a lot to change that. So did last night's Mexican takeout, still making itself known.

 

brrraaaappppppppp

 

Under her, nestled between her cheeks in his usual place, her shrunken test-subject-turned-assistant Max was in the process of being gassed awake. Twelve months as her live-in butt boy had done much to help him adapt to the realities of life in her ass. Not that it made her farts smell any better. It had not made him blank, either. The haze was a climate. Under it, he could still count.

 

"Ahem."

 

He knew the sound. He gritted his teeth and pressed his mouth to her asshole and kissed it until the muscle flexed in acknowledgment.

 

"That's better." She rolled out of bed with a little giggle that still did not suit her and never would. "Good morning, Max."

 

"G-good morning, Veronica."

 

He went limp when she peeled him out of her crack and shuffled into the bathroom. That was not surrender so much as conservation. She set him on the marble countertop and settled herself on the toilet. Putting aside all the things she'd put him through in the last year, he felt thankful she still had the baseline compassion to remove him from her ass when she went to take a dump. The rule had survived the move, the money, the logo. He hated that it still mattered.

 

Several dozen wipes and a shower later she was downstairs in a kitchen that could have hosted a seminar, coffee in one hand, mail in the other, already angry at a man on the other side of a screen. Running a company came with more correspondence than running a house and a department, and she never wasted a chance to put the extra on him. Even when the full-sized underlings let her down, she could count on Max to absorb whatever came out of her and keep the designer pantsuit clean.

 

BBBRRRAAAAAAAPPPPPPP

 

She ripped a coffee-fueled one into his face while she typed, grinding the chair in a slow circle that mashed him into the seam. Today's problem was male. A few more mistakes, she thought — and he could feel the thought in the way her glutes timed the next push — and she would relegate him to R&D.

 

Max knew what R&D meant now.

 

Coffee finished, she took the elevator in the house down to a six-car garage and a silver Rolls that had been a birthday present to herself after the second round of funding. A year ago the company had been a folder in a Minerva desk and a bench behind a faculty door. Then a coworking loft in Palo Alto that still smelled like other people's kombucha. Then this: a skyscraper in the financial district with their name on the top thirty floors, LEDs big enough to read from a mile off.

 

Door to door, the drive took about fifty minutes. Plenty of time to empty the tank into the assistant before the early meetings. He rode where he always rode. The first one hit before they left the driveway, a long rolling bbbbrrraaaaaaap that made the leather seat creak and his eyes water. The second came on the freeway, wetter, Sunday night still in it. By the third he was in the familiar catatonia — not empty, just too high on her to give the old thoughts a full sentence. The haze thickened until thinking was something he did in flashes between cheeks.

 

MAXCORP.

 

Every time Veronica saw it on the drive to work, she couldn't help smiling — and today was no different. Of course, the name was a play on her last name, Maxwell. The fact that it was also her assistant's first name was pure coincidence. That was the line. He felt her cheeks plump around him when the letters filled the glass, and he knew she was waiting to see if he would flinch in there. He did. A half-second late. That's my name on her building, which was not the same as having one. She enjoyed that too.

 

Security waved the car through. Reserved spot. Executive elevator off the garage. She clenched.

 

"You awake back there, Max?"

 

He kissed the hole. His mouth knew the job before he finished thinking it. Enthusiasm was a resource. He spent what the morning required.

 

"Good. Big day."

 

She started in R&D, same as most Mondays. After they had cornered the first ugly version of the market she had poured money into the next compounds and into recruiting the brightest, sloppiest Minerva girls who would follow a former dorm mother into a tower. It was early yet. The halls were white and empty. Her personal lab at the end of the testing floor still looked like Saturday behind the chemistry-building doors, except the toys were bigger and the jokes had staff.

 

The favorite joke was a terrarium.

 

Ten feet by ten feet. Pastoral villages with thatched roofs. Several hundred men at a millimeter, former interns and, if the running line in R&D was true, every male employee who had ever gotten on her nerves. She had never bothered to kill the rumor. Nightly mist: a proprietary rider she had coded New World. Memory first. Then a thick, trained reverence. By now most of them had no long-term past. The world ended at the glass. They had a goddess.

 

Veronica stepped to the edge and smiled when they bowed.

 

Max, still wedged in the crack, saw more than bowing. He saw a scrap of motion in the nearest village that his year-trained eyes did not want: a way of putting a hand through hair that Derek something had used in a lab at Ventus, scaled down past sense, already bending. Maybe it wasn't him. The mist was good at making faces into a type. The type was enough. The destination of every man who had not been "useful" was a lawn under glass.

 

She turned, hiked her skirt, and gave them a gift.

 

BBBBRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAPPPPPPPPPP

 

A five-second fart blasted out of her and washed over the terrarium like a sulfuric tide, blowing thatch off roofs and knocking a few hundred of them flat. The smell hit the glass and then the lab; even from the crack Max felt the pressure wave through her cheeks. Then the rest of Sunday night's Mexican takeout and Monday's coffee arrived as architecture. Each log was a little over eight inches long and a full inch and a half wide — cruise-ship scale to the people in the grass, dropped with the casualness of a woman emptying a tank before a meeting. When she turned to survey the damage he could just hear them, a thin cheering, thank-yous shouted at the top of lungs that barely existed, grateful for the gift.

 

"Enjoy that, you bugs." A chuckle. A wave. "I'll be back later."

 

Max shuddered, and this time it had a name. For all the things she had done to him, she had never made him forget he'd ever been a person.

 

The next enclosure was a jar.

 

A few feet across, three feet high, glass thick enough to hold weather. Airtight except for a single one-way duct on the lid the size of a golf ball. The men inside were his size — not millimeters, not toys, his size — naked, shining with condensation, already looking at the hole in the ceiling like a mouth they knew. When she came they rushed the walls. Palms squeaked. Someone was crying and smiling at the same time. Someone else had his face mashed to the glass as if he could lick his way out to her.

 

"Easy," Veronica said, almost fond. "You know the drill."

 

She peeled Max out and set him on the table beside the jar so he would have to watch. Cold lab air after the crack felt like a slap. Through the glass a man with his same skinny build met his eyes for half a second and then looked back up at the duct, because the duct was the point.

 

She climbed. The bench complained. Skirt hiked, underwear hooked aside, the dark ring of her asshole lowering over the only opening in their world. Seal. Soft, wet, complete. Max saw it from the side: a 300-pound chemist sitting on a bottle of men.

 

ffrraaaaappppppp

 

Tame next to the terrarium. Not tame inside the jar. The blast packed the cone of glass the way Saturday's flask had packed around him — heat first, then the smell as a physical thing, a yellow-gray weather that rolled across the little bodies and stuck. Men dropped to their knees in it. One of them opened his mouth on purpose. Two of them crawled toward the falling cloud like it was food. The crying one stopped crying and just shook, grateful.

 

The rider on this batch was Fart Breath. A few weeks in and they were already high when her gas landed, anxiety sliding off them like a coat. She watched the slack faces and smiled the way she smiled at a chart that had gone the right direction. A second, smaller one followed, a lazy pppfffooooot she didn't even have to push for, and the jar fogged at the top. Condensation ran. The smell leaked around the seal just enough that Max, on the table, got a ghost of it — coffee and ass and the particular sweet-rot her body made when she was pleased — and his own lungs reached for it before he could stop them.

 

Top seller. She could feel it. He could feel her feeling it.

 

She had not put that one in him. Early company, a couple of ugly trials, then a decision that an assistant was rarer than a rat. He did not feel lucky. Same size as the men clawing the glass. Different hole. Same woman on the lid.

 

She lifted off. The duct sucked a thread of clearer air that none of them wanted. A few of them still had their faces tipped up, mouths open, waiting for a third that didn't come.

 

"Later," she told the jar, and stuffed Max back into the crack while he was still watching. The pucker closed on him warm and familiar and, after the table, almost kind.

 

She went to the laptop.

 

The last project in the current roster was still numbers, and it was the one that made the tower make sense. Reverse the process that had made him — not for men. The same dose, in the other direction, on a woman, and the math kept saying ten times. Twenty. Fifty, if the binders held. She intended to be first in line. She had told R&D that like a joke and meant it like a calendar.

 

"Some day, Max." A clench, fond and proprietary. "We're gonna look back on all of this as the beginning of something really, really incredible."

 

Under her, he understood it better than he had on a Minerva bedspread. He would not be three inches in a crack forever. He would be dust under a shoe that had outgrown shoes.

 

A few minutes later she was in the office on the top floor, dialing.

 

Helen. A pharmaceutical spine that had started the year talking about buying MaxCorp and was going to spend the afternoon learning the sentence the other way around. Infrastructure. Distribution. Serums in more bathrooms than Ventus had ever dreamed of stocking mixers.

 

pfffooooooootttttt

 

"Helen. Veronica." She leaned back in the chair and grinned at the silent-but-deadly squirm against her asshole. "Let's talk."

 

Max did his job. Virtual meeting, real gasket. Partners did not have to smell her. She did not have to hold anything in. If he failed, there was a jar two floors down that would be happy to explain the difference between assistant and product.

 

It was not glamorous. He took a strange pride in it anyway, the same pride that had started on a cotton pad in a locked dorm room: her power had run through him. All of it. The sign on the building. The villages. The jar. The file that said she could grow. She had never given him a sentence that admitted that, and she never would. His life, from the outside of her ass, had not changed in any way that would photograph well. He knew it could have been worse. He knew exactly how. He had watched how for twenty minutes of a Monday morning and then been put back in.

 

Helen said something about timelines. Veronica laughed, a short professional sound, and crossed her legs.

 

Max kissed what he could reach because the day had a shape and the shape still started that way. The clear thought, when it came, was small enough to fit in the dark with him.

 

The purpose was real.

 

He was not in it.

 

Except as a hole in a name on a building, and as the first copy, and as the reason a woman who had once graded problem sets now scheduled a giant formula like it was a product launch.

 

Friday, she had told a director in the elevator. Offhand. Calendar.

 

Max shut his eyes against her skin and did not scream. House Minerva was a year and a state behind them. The kettle would still click there on weekday mornings. Zeke would still have a roommate-shaped hole and a story he did not believe. Somewhere in the glass two floors down, men with no past were rebuilding a roof she was going to take off again after lunch.

 

Veronica Maxwell talked acquisition in a voice that could have been a lecture.

 

In the crack, her assistant stayed.

 

THE END