A Tale of Little Cities (Chapter 3) (Patreon)

It was a city.

Inside her shoe.

Laura Weaver had spent the last ninety seconds staring without blinking interruptions into the shadowy hovel of her stylish athletic trainer shoe. Her fabric insole, still puddled with patches of dark, salty sweat, was partially sunken under the burden of an object. Or rather, a series of objects, knitted together by stone and steel, and crafted into the shape of a miniature metropolis, complete with buildings, streets, cars, and microbial people.

Or at least it was. The remains of the place made it hard to tell after, Laura now realized, she’d walked all the way to Tara’s house under flaring sun and stomped, smashed, and drowned the little city beneath her naked sole. Crumbled buildings lay on their sides. Weedy flecks of microscopic offices and skyscrapers were dotted like thorns up the plush black wall of the footwear. The major thoroughfares were damp, flooded with sweat. And was that a replica of the Eiffel Tower?

“What is taking so long, Laura? Get up here; you gotta see some of this crazy shit on the TV!” Tara bellowed from upstairs.

“C-Coming. I’m coming,” Laura promised semi-drunkenly, still holding the shoe’s opening up to her face for closer inspection. However, the stench of her aromatic secretions was beginning to get to her; God knew how anyone living in the city might have survived, if there actually were real people in there. So, she reticently set the shoe down by its partner and hurried up the stairs to Tara’s room. The mystery would have to wait for later.

There were many questions running through Laura’s head: primarily, what a hyper-realistic micro-city was doing in her shoe, of all places. With all its minute detail, it looked incredibly expensive. She just hoped someone wasn’t going to be pissed that she’d accidentally trounced it continually under her ruddy, summer-swollen sole.

Because whatever the city was, it was thoroughly destroyed now, courtesy of her carefree gait and barefoot sneaker habit.

Dr. Weaver rummaged frantically through his notes while his computer booted back up. Stewing in his own flop sweat, he flipped between the news channels, hoping the subject would change and confirm that the disappearance of Paris was just a giant practical joke. But he received no such luck. On every station, the gaping crater where once stood France’s capital filled the screen. Military forces were already in motion to investigate the site, but reporting no signs of bombing. In fact, the ravaged earth was so peaceful, it might well have existed that way for hundreds of years.

There was no mistaking it, then. Dr. Weaver recognized those parabolic patterns in the earth from the satellite images on the television. He’d seen them whenever he ran tests, transporting an object on a solid platform through the pod. This was his doing. Paris was gone, somewhere, because of him.

The computer was back online. Dr. Weaver slapped at the keypad, reviewing his figures and hoping for a miracle solution to present itself, allowing him to work his way backward. After several minutes, he thought he spotted it. A pattern of irregular code which aligned with his original miscalculation. So, ravenous to prevent any further harm, he turned the key and repeated his earlier act, praying for a stroke of good luck this time.

And then he spotted the second mistake amongst the code. One he’d made long before, in the early planning stages. While Dr. Weaver had fixed one error, a much larger and more critical one was still in effect. The result would mean he hadn’t locked onto Paris’s former location, or its final destination. He was way, way off.

Perhaps even as much as six hundred and fifty-five miles off. As such, the transport vector gave Dr. Weaver plenty of reasons for amplified horror. His target location wasn’t even Paris’s original destination, but in fact a point comparatively nearby. The numbers were still spinning on screen, but the man knew that the problem was only getting worse now. What’s more, he wasn’t even sure the machine had finished supplying power. He ripped the wires from the wall behind the pod, severing the electrical connection, yet the metal monstrosity still hummed with life. Whatever it was doing, it was still doing it.

Another flash of incoming news. Dr. Weaver halted in his desperate attempt to reverse the disaster and stumbled toward the TV, blinking rapidly and clinging to the hope that he could shut his eyes and make reality swirl back to normal. But he couldn’t. And now the anchors weren’t showing images of Paris, but Berlin.

Or rather, the crater where Berlin used to stand.

Laura entered her best friend’s bedroom and did her best to push away her puzzlement over the inexplicable shoe-city. Her friend was waiting with a couple of iced teas on the side table and all of her social media pulled up on a tablet. Tara’s blonde highlights beamed in the glow of her pink-tinted lamp shade, as did her actual smile. She leaned back in her beanbag chair, crossed one sandal-clad foot over the other, and combed her elegant fingers through her hair.

“Hey, what happened to your parents’ no-shoes-in-the-house rule?” Laura joked, indicating to her own nude feet, one of which she lifted off the ground to cheesily bare her sole at Tara. “You gonna explain those strappy things you’ve got on?”

“These are my house slippers, doofus!” Tara laughed. She swatted her friend’s foot back to the floor and patted an open section of the expansive lilac-purple beanbag chair, Laura obliged. “C’mon, girl, take a load off. The news is still coming, and everybody on Twitter is going full-on crazy, I’m telling you. It’s wild.”

“What?”

“You seriously didn’t hear?” Tara scoffed.

“I told you, I didn’t! Come on, say it already.”

“It’s Paris!”

“What about it? Was… there an attack?”

“No! Well, yes. Sort of. They’re not sure.”
 “What is it?” Laura demanded again, getting increasingly worried. After all, she had some family over there who might have been affected, not to mention the investment of her father’s work attempting to transport matter from America to Europe. “Stop trying to make me freak out and just-”

“It disappeared!”

“What disappeared?”

“Paris.”

“You mean…”

“The whole thing, yeah. Gone. And they don’t know where.”

Laura joined in friend in the same look of bewildered shock now, but for entirely different reasons. While Tara labored under the same oblivious confusion as the rest of the world, Laura was among the exclusive group of people on the planet who had any notion what was happening. Her gaze shifted to the doorway of Tara’s bedroom, in the direction of the stairwell.

That Eiffel Tower looked awfully detailed. As did the city blocks and the parks and the cars. And the thousands of miniature human bodies floating through the crushed streets on a river of her warm sweat.

No.

No.

NO.

Launching herself upward, Laura bounded for the stairs. Her bare feet slammed upon the carpet with each stride.

“Where are you going?” Tara called after her, not bothering to follow as she took a sip from her iced tea.

“I have to… call my dad!” Laura lied. “We’ve got… people over there, and… and…” She didn’t finish, as she was already down in the foyer and stooped over the shoes. Gingerly, Laura lifted the tennis shoe back to her face and held her breath in avoidance of the soupy smell. With all the delicacy in the world, she reached in and pinched her thumb and forefinger around a cluster of fallen buildings and lifted them to her face. Already sopping with moisture and weakened by the destruction of her ever-mashing sole, the buildings came apart like dust in Laura’s hands. Only then, as they crumbled, was she able to truly see the creatures within.

Hundreds of bodies, splayed across the infinite gangplank of her curled fingertips. The blonde quivered with fright over her discovery, accidentally causing a couple buildings’ worth of rubble and mass graves to tremor right off the spirals of her fingerprints.

Logic. Think through it. Just like her dad taught her. What was the most rational explanation?

This couldn’t be a coincidence. Laura didn’t know much about her father’s work, but she did know the basic concept of his proposed genius: to reduce the matter in objects for transport through open space, then re-enlarge them at the destination. Was it impossible, then, that the second step was miscalculated? Greatly as it pained her to realize, Laura knew her father was responsible somehow for the accidental transportation of the miniaturized Paris into her shoe.

God, her shoe. Everyone in Paris was surely dead now, all thanks to her father’s mistake, and her own negligence in slipping her athletic bare foot inside for a thorough pressure-cooking in the summer sizzle. A whole city and its poor souls gone, with no evidence other than what was inside this trainer and ingrained in the flesh of her wrinkled sole. Upturning her ankle against her thigh, Laura confirmed this suspicion; a variety of urban hues, smashed to a fine powder, painted the length of her foot’s underside. She felt like crying.