Paige came to groggily, and slowly got to her feet. The room seemed back to normal, except...
She could barely see over the top of the workbench next to her! To her astonishment, everything had doubled in size!
Or, as the sinking feeling in her gut informed her, she had shrunk!
The black box was up there, but the light was no longer blinking. She tried to pull herself up onto the table, but she lacked the arm strength, after weeks of inactivity. She walked over to Zane's computer desk, and pushed his chair over. Climbing up onto the chair, she was able to reach the box, but pushing it's button had no effect.
She slumped and sat on the chair, her feet dangling over the edge, far from the floor. In her mind, she did the math. 5' 6" is 66 inches, half that is 33 inches, which is...2' 9" tall. She'd been reduced to the size of a toddler!
So this is what Zane had been working on. It all made sense now. His company, AetherBlue, had been working on a solution to overpopulation; leave it to Zane to make a shrinking machine!
Reduced to half height, humans would require half as much food, air, water, and living space. Of course, it violated every physical law, as Paige understood them.
But now she had a much bigger problem, so to speak. She was, for all intents and purposes, stuck at this size. The only people that could help worked at AetherBlue. If she contacted them, they'd steal Zane's work for sure...but if she didn't...how could she survive at this size?
What could she do?