Cleaning House (Chapter 1) (Patreon)

Lucy dragged her mop over the lab floor. The young Russian woman’s every muscle ached, having spent most of the night shift standing on her tired feet and scrubbing down mysterious scientific equipment. As there were few other workers around during the dead of night to report her, she broke the uniform dress code by wearing a shorter dark skirt that showed off her ample sun-tanned thighs, and had foregone normal shoes for rubbery flip-flops that would hopefully allow her poor bare feet and toes enough room to breathe, though even these perks couldn’t stave off the exhaustion of working night after night in London for precious little pay and a sad future.

She was nearly done however, and looking forward to arriving home for a long sleep just as the sun arose. It wasn’t an ideal life, having to be a night owl just to barely make ends meet, but Lucy was also one rent payment away from being thrown out of her already-trashy apartment. So, she swallowed her pride and desperate need for rest, and carried on. All she had left to do was finish wiping down the lab. She moved to polish a machine in the corner of the room. Metal tubes crisscrossed in the shape of a massive brain, with a barrel like an air cannon affixed loosely to the end. It looked like a work-in-progress, something in its early stages of development, and so Lucy was relaxed as she worked on cleaning, balancing on her tip-toes to reach the top and then caressing her rag through every nook and cranny. The girl was so tired, and so sick of this blue-collar night-shift life in England, and so painfully sore in her ruddy wrinkled naked soles, that she failed to notice a series of indicator lights blinking on the side of the unusual machine.

When at last she attended to the long barrel itself, Lucy’s eyes were half-opened, her groggy focus exclusively paid to the cylindrical shaft. She yawned, closing her eyes for just a moment, and ready to cheer that she’d finished her shift. When she reopened her lids, though, the display from the machine could no longer be ignored, nor could the whirring emanating from inside. Lucy took a tentative step away, her heart pounding, right into the path of the barrel. A beam of dizzying light belched from within, whiting out the girl’s field of view entirely. In her state of temporary blindness, Lucy stumbled back. Even removing her glasses didn’t clear the void. A ticklish sensation washed over her smooth skin, from the tips of her toes up to the top of her head and even through the sleek strands of her dark-chocolate hair. Vaguely, Lucy became aware of another more tangible feeling, as though layers of solid objects were being shattered against her back and limbs like pieces of styrofoam, far too brittle to make her body flinch in the slightest, though she noticed the subtle impacts nonetheless.

Rubbing her eyes and shaking from anxiety, the bewildered cleaning woman watched the whiteness turn to blurry smoke, then to a sight of cloud-like atmosphere she had only seen once in her life, during a cross-country flight from Russia that nearly emptied her bank account, right outside the plane window. But of course it was ridiculous to compare her altered surroundings to a region high above the Earth, when Lucy’s feet were still firmly planted on the ground; that was impossible. Shell-shocked, as she waved away the last of the smoke, the girl couldn’t help but feel dread twisting her gut; her eyes watered with pre-emptive sadness, already preparing herself for the huge trouble she’d be in for having caused a piece of laboratory equipment to malfunction. She could imagine it already: she’d be fired, if not also sued, then run out of money, and be kicked out of her apartment onto the cold streets.

But when the smoke at least cleared enough for Lucy to lay eyes on her environment again, she saw immediately she was no longer in the futuristic stainless-steel lab, but inexplicably surrounded in a lush tapestry of mossy greenery, puddles of water, and patches of prickly concrete. In the middle distance, the blue stretched onward through the mist like a pond’s edge. Now more puzzled than ever, and getting a serious headache from all this worry and doubt, Lucy knelt down to her haunches.

Her bare heels arched out of her flip-flops, her creamy soles flexing off of the matted rubber slab, while her ring-adorned toes splayed in all directions. Then, pressing both hands into the mushy ground, Lucy steadily lowered her face down and down, closer and closer to the odd terrain. She squinted at what she saw. This multicolored ground didn’t look so much like the outdoors she knew, but more like a satellite image, taken from miles above, and what’s more, it lacked the hardiness of real grass-and-rock, instead smearing into a mess with the first smash of her flip-flops or even the merest touch of her fingertip. The ground behaved more like cake frosting than earth, bending to Lucy’s slightest will.

She scooped up a dollop of the ground from the largest zone of metallic needle-texture, which spanned an area just barely wider than Lucy’s height. Only in this moment, when the maid held up the cluster of silvery gunk upon her thumbpad right up to her dilating pupils for examination, did things start falling into place. Marooned on that blob of green-and-grey debris, she saw trees the size of pinheads, cracked streets turned to ashen powder, and buildings like thin metal teeth, all chaotically scrambled together and in flames, from her rough handling of them with only a single finger.

One touch, and Lucy had obliterated the architecture and life alike within that sample, plus everything below her palms, knees, and flared flip-flops. Looking down again at the area as a whole, Lucy’s addled brain started to process the insane yet undeniable truth. She hadn’t been transported away from the lab; in fact, she was still technically at the site of the lab, only crouched above it, and touching many other locations as well, for by activating the machine, Lucy had grown to an inhuman scale of many miles high: seventy miles, to be exact, though the math-challenged young lady couldn’t have estimated herself. The feeling of gentle breakage she’d experienced right after the accident was no illusion, but in fact the sensation of her growing body shattering its way through the reinforced steel of the laboratory, likely leaving it a hollowed shell among the rest of the wreckage left in her wake as she enlarged and swelled to godlike stature.

Unharmed, and feeling strangely ordinary in every other way except her newfound size and mighty strength, Lucy blinked; her lips hung open in disbelief. Her fingers trembled as she attempted clumsily to smush the sample of city from her thumb back into the crater she’d ripped when picking it up, hoping to repair the damage, though in doing so, she only made the place look worse. It appeared like a child’s messy fingerpaint drawing, and Lucy understood now that she’d committed horrible atrocities only semi-consciously upon London itself with but a few innocuous movements of her fingers and feet.