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Angela was bored. Her life as a governmentoffice typist was beginning to seem mundane, and she yearned forfor something exciting to happen. She was very attractive;perhaps not as pretty as in the heyday of her twenties, but nowin her early thirties, she remained extremely demure andcommanded much male attention from her co-workers.

As the minutes seemed like hours, her mind wandered; she wantedto be in control, to be looked up to. It was Thursday, anotherdesperately slow day at work, when, out of the blue, she receiveda phone call from her old schoolfriend, Michelle."Wow!" she answered excitedly. "It must be abouttwenty years since we last spoke".

They arranged to meet for lunch, and suddenly the morning seemedto fly by as Angelaanticipated the reuinion. They met at a chic cafe in town;Michelle had worn equally as well as Angela who was impressed byher elegance and expensive looking clothes. They went through thestandard lines, the "you are looking well"s and the"it's been such a long time"s.

After they had pecked at their light lunches, both women acutelyaware of their slender figures, the conversation became rathermore serious. "So, what did you do after high school then?"Michelle asked. "Well, you remember Andy..." "Oh,the guy you dated in fifth form?" "yeah, I married himwhen I was twenty one. A year later I had Michael, he's my son,and since he started school I've been working as a typist invarious Government departments. It's all a bit dull really"Angela sighed. "How about you Michelle?" "Well it'sa bit of a long story. After I got the A level results I wanted,I took a couple of years out then accepted an offer of a geneticsresearch degree at Cambridge University. The first couple ofyears were much as I had expected, mainly background stuff, andall this resulted in me getting my degree. It was only when Iwent on to post graduate studies that things began to get reallyweird." A wicked grin began to form at the corners ofMichelle's mouth.

"Well go on, don't keep me in suspense, what happened?"Angela was curious.  "It was June last year. We had been working for abouteighteen months on tissue regeneration, and needed to testcertain theories that we had formulated." Angela interrupted. "We?". "Oh sorry, yes, I wasworking with another girl called Cindy. She's great, you'd loveher.

Anyway,there were dozens of experiments in progress involving DNA invarious solutions and some with electrical currents and so on. Aswe monitored the various experiments, something absolutelyextraordinary happened. We had to repeat the specific experimentabout a dozen times before we actually beleived what washappening. It appeared that the DNA was reacting to one of thesolutions and was beginning to contract causing entire pieces oftissue to become smaller whilst retaining all the geneticinformation." "Hang on a sec," Angela interjected, "are yousaying what I think you're saying?""Yes" smiled Michelle, "we had taken mammaliantissue and reduced it in size without affecting the compositionin any way. The amazing thing was that the tissue was stillliving after it had been reduced.""That's absolutly amazing" said Angela, still notentirely sure about what all this meant. "But what use isshrinking genetic material when you are trying to create tissueregeneration?" "Don't you see?" laughed Michelle,"if the solution acts on the DNA, any tissue can be reducedat will, including tumour and cancer cells." Angela wasstunned for a second. "So why haven't I heard about thisbefore? This is potentially one of the most important breakthroughs in medical history!""Ah. Well this is where things got really interesting. Cindywondered what we should do with the information, and we agreedthat all we could do would be to tell Proffessor Stanley who wasin charge of the whole project. Well we got him into the lab toexplain what we had discovered. When the magnitude of our discovery hit home, he started laughing.He kept ranting on about how finally he would get the recognitionhe deserved and about how rich it was going to make him.""That must have really pissed you off!" Angela seemedoutraged.

"We said to the professor that surely we would get somecredit for our work, and perhaps even a share of any proceedsgenerated by our discovery. Well the old bastard just startedlaughing again, and explained that only the head of the researchdepartment would be creditted for the work. As we were onlystudents working on 'his' project, we didn't deserve to get apenny and he was going to make sure of that.""Unbeleivable! What did you do next?" Angela was on theedge of her seat.

Michelle took a deep breath and sat back. "Cindy wasn'thappy, to say the least. She suddenly went ballistic and screamedsomething about if we didn't give him the formula he couldn't doanything. Then she started smashing some of the experiments.Eventually she got to one of the experiments where tissue hadbeen shrunk. She looked the professer straight in the eye, andtold him that if he wanted the formula, he could have it."She threw it at him. As it was a fairly large beaker ofsolution, the professor's face and chest were soaked. He waslivid. He screamed at both of us about how he'd get us thrown outand about how much money he'd make out of our discovery. That'swhen it happened." "What did?" Angela was bemused."You didn't hit him did you?" "No" saidMichelle. "By the time he had stopped shouting, everythinghad gone quiet. None of us were sure exactly what was happening,but the proffessor seemed to be looking up at us. He wasn't allthat tall to start with, about 5 feet 8, but it seemed so strangebecause he must have shrunk several inches in the first fewseconds. As we looked at him, the process began to speed up.Suddenly, he was only about four feet tall. It was like watchinga snowman melt as his clothes slumped to the floor. Smaller andsmaller, the whole thing was totally surreal. I looked at Cindywith a mixture of surprise and delight and she suddenly burst outlaughing.

As he got shorter and shorter, we both laughed hysterically untilhe was only about three inches tall and was desperately trying tocrawl out from beneath his clothes. Once he emerged, he tried tocover his nakedness with the collar of his formerly well fittingshirt. It was such a pathetic thing to do in the circumstances. Iremember Cindy saying something about having several pairs ofshoes with heels much taller than him and we continued to almostwet ourselves with laughter.

"Eventually, we stopped laughing at him and thought aboutwhat would happen. We had not expected the solution to work on aliving specimen let alone have such a dramatic effect on a fullsize person. The Professor made for a miserable weakling as hecowered on the floor, begging not to be stepped on. Cindy lockedthe lab door, by now we were ignoring him completely.

"We discussed what to do next; we wondered whether theprocess was reversible andwhether the effects would wear off naturally. It seemed anobvious experiment, so we took an old cage out of one of thecupboards, the type that mice are kept in, and placed thediminutive professor inside. We thought that we could observe thereduced creature for a few days to see what happened. As wecouldn't allow anyone else to know what we had done, (we werescared of getting arrested you see), we waited until everyoneelse had gone home, then smuggled out the cage and the proffessor'sclothes and went back to Cindy's place."

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