Nineteen-sixty-one. A long, arrow-straight highway lances its way through the Mojave Desert toward a distant singularity, a razor-thin needle of grey piercing though endless acres of sweltering orange sand and a sunset sky swirling cerulean, scarlet red and uncanny emerald green like an alien drug trip. We see Nancy Archer, a young woman wearing an irritatingly short laboratory coat, sporting glossy black hair, crimson painted lips, and dark green eyes glaring nonchalantly into the infinite, barren landscape beyond her windshield, piloting a convertible in dusty, washed-out pink.

A commercial crackles from the car’s radio, with the following to say:

After the commercial concludes, the radio station’s DJ cuts in to introduce the song he is about to play. A brief clip of music plays - but only a split second is heard. Almost immediately, Nancy turns the radio off, trying her best to maintain her stoic, pursed-lipped facade, trying hard not to allow frustration, bitterness, anger to get the better of her. As she clicks the radio’s dial off, under her breath she venomously ejaculates:

Fucking NO-MA’AM.

You just know once they’ve shamed all the girls who’ve got the audacity to be a couple inches taller than the average man into shrivelling away to wisps, all they’ll do is run along and find a new deviant group of women to assimilate into their ideal of femininity, as nature intended. Female fatness, female strength, girls with flat chests, girls with penises, girls who love girls, girls who would rather just not fulfil their womanly duty and have kids than spend a week every month in crippling agony. Undesirable. To be eradicated. To be normalised. And they won’t stop until every single woman on the planet is an exact perfect clone, a tiny, blonde, big-titted subservient little sex doll: easily ignorable, with no desire to take up any space of her own or ever get in her man’s way. Existing solely to titillate and serve his every waking need.

They’ll start you on their Growth-Stunting treatment if the doctor thinks you’ll be taller than five foot nine by the time you’re a grown adult. According to the National Organisation of Medics Against Amazonian Masterhood, that’s the absolute biggest a woman should have any right to be. Well, if they think a girl of five foot nine’s a perversion of the natural order, God knows what they’d make of one who’s nearly five foot twenty-four. A woman who makes mere perversions of nature look positively petite. A sublime, sky-scraping she-demon of sexual inversion and insanity, hell-bent on annihilating American society in all its carefully crafted heterosexual perfection: emasculating its men, eviscerating the nuclear family, converting all the girls to gays, castrating all the boys.  I’m like that otherworldly creature sneaking up through the bushes on that open-top Pontiac parked on Lovers’ Lane, licking her gruesome lips with anticipation as she plucks the big, tough jock in his Letterman jacket and his sweet little girlfriend from the back seat and swallows them whole as they scream for their lives. A horrific, humongous, unholy B-Movie abomination ready to be rendered in blood-soaked celluloid. Her name suspended loud and high in blinding neon white beaming miles across the desert from above the drive-in, capturing Chevrolets and Cadillacs in their hypnotic tractor-beam. Upstanding citizens of America, run for your lives! The Seven Foot Woman’s on the rampage, and Hell hath no fury! Cower in fear as she stomps her way down Main Street in her humongous size-thirteen shoes. Quake in your boots as you go to confront the obvious man in ill-fitting drag, lumbering towards the girls’ bathroom, and realise only once you’re right on top of them that you’ve picked on a woman whose fault it is not she’s this oversized, whose fault it is not they won’t make any well-fitting outfits for anyone within a foot of her height, and your frazzled head goes into overdrive trying to reject the reality of the situation and reason your own: anyone that big must be a man, because men are big and women are small and that’s just the way things are.

And gaze upon her, frozen in terror, as you try to pick up that sad little wallflower sitting all alone in the corner at the high school dance, but when she goes to stand up, and you realise she’s still bent double yet she’s looking you straight in the eye, and her head keeps rising, and rising, and rising over acres of inhuman, elongated flesh stretching to the sky, and you realise she’s a crush who could actually crush you like a bug with just a fingertip, you petrify, your skin turns cold and the colour in your face slurps away; you shiver, you stare, you can’t take your eyes off her, you can’t help it; you want to scream; you want to charge out of there as fast as your puny little legs can carry you, but you just can’t move a muscle until all that fearful fright penetrating your very soul swells, and swells, and swells until it cannot swell a second more, and then, at last, you run.

And you scream aloud as you run, as a warning to the world of what she is. ‘Monster… She’s a monster…’

And you leave her there. Alone. Awaiting punishment. Awaiting condemnation to the Ninth Ring of High School Hell for the crime of being different. Waiting for dagger-sharp, flick-knife fingers to surround her in their ring of torment. For the venomous barbs of a thousand teenage tongues to scythe their way through the sweltering air and slash her right across the soul. The amazon freak. The man-eater. The…

Normal teenage girl.

The normal teenage girl, who’s just the same as every other teenage girl in America, with normal teenage girl dreams and desires and fears and sad little fragilities, who just happens to be six foot ten.

Torn to shreds by the rabid Wildcats of J. Edgar Hoover High. Leaving nothing behind but a stripped and devastated husk of skin and bone.

You know, I try to love my body, every eighty-some inches of it. But it’s just impossible when you’re the absolute antithesis of what the world believes a woman should be. Looming over the men that Gender’s Rulebook says should be your masters. Men who would much more happily take a hacksaw to your tibia than confront their own Napoleon complexes. A metaphorical chemical one or a real one. Their choice.

Nancy continues to gaze listlessly out at the bare, barren desert landscape stretching out before her. A few singular signs of human civilisation — a diner here, a Mom-and-Pop gas station here — start to pop in and out of existence along the way like visions from a fever dream you couldn’t ever tell were real or just fragmented figments of a fucked cerebral cortex playing tricks on your eyes: squeezing, slithering out from between the infinitesimally narrow lips dividing neon from neon, fluorescence from fluorescence, radioactive glow from glow, dividing hissing orange sand from ensnaring velvet sky, before slipping on by like they were skating frictionless on drifting desert waves. Further in the distance, a collection of small steel boxes, of a dull peroxide colour, begin to crest the horizon. Science laboratories.

I work in a military laboratory deep in the heart of Death Valley. Nondescript. Windowless. Pale white as a Tylenol pill. Just another boring little plastic box perfectly camouflaged amongst the mind-numbing monotony of twentieth-century America: strip-malls surrounded by a thousand flattened Paradises smothered by parking lots, acres of phoney cardboard mansions middle-managers and their stay-at-home wives resided in to con people into thinking they were somebodies and the American Dream was real, sprinkled over dying desert plains either side of the interstate. Another block in a hypnotic landscape never deviating from its ever reproducing pattern, mile after mile, Oklahoma to LA, suffocating the senses until they submit, and learn to love the tasteless mush of life in Flyover Country. Nothing about its appearance could possibly pique the curiosity of even the most wildly imaginative of people. This place where we play with the very fundamental forces of nature like they were as malleable as putty was no Area 51. No secret base surrounded by endless lengths of barbed wire. By fifty-thousand volt electric fences. By silent, stony, stern-faced men wearing shades so dark you wondered if there were even eyes behind them. No-one would ever know we were here. No-one would even suspect we were here.

In other words, it was the perfect place to conceal all those clandestine experimental projects the Department of Defense could not have anyone know existed.

Here it was, hidden in plain sight: the frontline of the Cold War. The burning heartland of American technological supremacy. The laboratories of DARPA – the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Home of the biggest bunch of genius whack-jobs anywhere in the world. A place where a girl like me wasn’t half as much of an anomaly as she definitely was in the civilian world. In one respect, at least.

See, whatever godless sack-of-shit devil put me on this earth knew a body as grotesquely gargantuan as mine needed an enormous brain to match, and fuck me, they delivered. Admitted to Stanford aged fifteen. Biochemistry doctorate aged nineteen. Second doctorate in Genetic Engineering aged twenty-one. Not even to mention all the secret experiments I did after dark. Sneaking around the labs late at night. Doing the kind of shit the Ethics Board would never have let me do in a million years, not that I ever gave a lab rat’s ass about them at the best of times. Somewhere in a dark, lamp-lit lab in Palo Alto there was a giant maverick genius making Nature her absolute bitch, and you better believe she was making that dirty old voyeur Uncle Sam horny as hell.

Oh, I knew he was watching. I wanted him to watch. To edge his Little Boy to the cusp of nuclear ecstasy. The DOD have ears to the ground everywhere. Operatives in every school in the country. They know who the nation’s greatest young scientific talents are and they know exactly where to find them. They spy on you like hawks. Gauging your potential. Your ability to help this great American nation tighten its stranglehold on the free world and throttle the communist scourge to death. By any means necessary. And if they wanted someone perfectly willing to just squat down and drag their metaphorical dick right across the face of trivial things like ethical concerns, well then, I guess I was just the psycho this country needed.

I remember the night they first brought me here.  Three a.m. on a muggy, midsummer night in Palo Alto, and I was slipping through the Stanford shadows, preparing to pick the locks to my lab: lurking, concealed deep amongst the palm trees, beneath the panopticon gaze of the looming, loathsome Hoover Tower whose all-seeing eye knew I wasn’t alone. Knew who was lying in wait for me behind those laboratory doors left off the latch. Mysterious men in black. Ready to intercept me. Conscript me. Whisk me away to the trenches of this White Heat warzone of wits. This battlefield of brinkmanship and brains.

And they’d take you out back to a shimmering black van tucked away right at the back of the parking lot. This mean, intimidating boxy black bull of thick, Pittsburgh steel, its fire-breathing grunt of a grille snorting, growling, gagging for a gathering of socialists or civil rights activists to get in its way so it got the chance to do what it relished more than anything else: to bulldoze, pulp, devour the flesh and blood and hearts and minds of the nation’s enemies within. Once you were inside, they’d explain to you that you were not to tell anyone what was said within those confines, by pain of swift and brutal disappearance; you’d say you understood. And then they’d give you your first assignment. Your mission, should you choose to accept it.

It could be anything, really. Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara truly was a very strange man indeed. God, he had DARPA operatives working on some mind-blowing shit. It’s like that crazy motherfucker didn’t just want to wipe Moscow off the map, he wanted to do it in style. He had people working on warheads buried in high-speed tunnelling machines, ones that could churn through the planet’s crust from Chesapeake Bay to Mother Russia in less than a week. People working on satellites carrying space lasers powerful enough to melt the Kremlin into a pool of lava and zap any retaliatory nuclear hellstorm out of the air before it had even cleared the Iron Curtain. People working on capsules full of chemicals that could turn the most staunchly sane minds mad, to be strategically dissolved in reservoirs all across the Eastern Bloc in the hope of transforming Krushchev and his cronies from calculating masters of the Marxist empire into mindless asylum patients who might easily be convinced to detonate those big, white fireworks sitting in silos all across Siberia over Red Square, and show the Soviet people the greatest and deadliest pyrotechnic display in history.

As for me… well, the boys from the Pentagon were so impressed with me that they told me to name my project and name my price. I can’t say I was surprised. Not really. I mean, the stuff I was working on at Stanford was the stuff of most army generals’ wet dreams.

All those unauthorised nights I’d spent in the college labs, I’d been secretly working on ways of genetically modifying the human body. Producing viral vectors specifically designed to splice the human cellular genome with a specially crafted concoction of specific strands of DNA derived from every apex predator, every muscle-bound killing machine you could think of. Designed to release enormous explosions of somatotropin into the bloodstream, hyper-stimulating production of human growth hormone even in supposedly grown adults, swelling their stature and strength overnight. You hear all that shit as a military strategist, and you’re gonna be creaming your boxer shorts. I mean, you throw in promises of bombproof skin that could withstand a direct strike from a mortar rocket, and you’ve got all the genetic modifications you need to create a race of all-American super soldiers. Clean-cut, chisel-chinned, Anglo-Saxon superhumans. Slightly, uncannily unnerving to the eye at first sight. Positively terrifying when you’ve fired every piece of heavy-duty ammunition in your arsenal at them, and they’re still bearing down on you relentlessly, ready to rip you apart like a grizzly clawing at its prey.

But God knows I wasn’t so invested in genetic modification for the sake of the army. Those dumb motherfuckers were just a money-pit to me. I keep telling them I’m on the cusp of a major breakthrough, that we’re only, like, six months away from replacing the entire US Armed Forces with a few hundred thousand Captain America clones, and the Pentagon gives me another few hundred thousand dollars to do whatever the hell I want with. No questions asked. Whatever Uncle Sam wants, by God, he gets, no matter how much cash money he has to piss away to get it.

My real intention, though, was to use my research to take down NO-MA’AM.

Nancy finally arrives at the DARPA labs. She pulls into a parking lot, and enters a vast white warehouse-looking building through a single nondescript steel door. She continues to monologue as she saunters down its long, dimly-lit corridors until reaching her own private room.

The National Organisation of Medics Against Amazonian Masterhood was inaugurated to repress a social aberration. Girls, bigger than boys. Women, bigger than men. Bodies whose very existence threatened the natural law of male supremacy. Bodies which must be corrected. Folded into the lower echelons of the pyramid of patriarchy, into subservience and submissiveness, for their own good and for the good of society. Lest the females of the species wrestle control over this great land from their masculine rulers. Lest the greatest country in the world, this last true bastion of Freedom and Opportunity, fall to anarchy.

But what if Amazons were not anatomical anomalies. What if it were not only common, but normal and expected that a woman should be as big, as strong as the average man — if not more so? We’re not a minority. There’s as many of us as there are men in this country. You can bully a few outlying young women into shrinking and shrivelling away, to conserve your precious patriarchal order, but can you bully a hundred odd million of us into doing the same?

Nancy unlocks the doors to her own private lab.

Remember the whole capsules dissolved in reservoirs thing I told you about earlier? Adding chemicals to Soviet drinking water to turn the Russian leadership insane? Well, I certainly fucking did. It was the perfect distribution model for mass-infecting populations with strategic doses of biological agents, if you were able to concentrate enough of it into singularities small enough to be transported on your person, undetected. Condensed, say, into a tiny, innocuous pocketful of pills, perhaps.

A packet of small, blue pills sits on the island countertop in the middle of the room. She collects them.

Viral interventions that could turn the average civilian in the street superhuman. Bigger. Faster. Stronger. Taller. The boys from DARPA thought they knew exactly what I’d been burning the midnight oil in the Stanford labs trying to achieve, but they hadn’t figured out the whole story. Yes, I was trying to manufacture a human growth serum, but specifically, I was trying to manufacture one that was specifically activated by the heightened presence of oestrogens in the bloodstream. One that was essentially female-specific. One so highly concentrated that just a single fifty-milligram pill could taint the water supply of a town the size of Las Vegas to the extent that every woman and girl in the city would grow as much as six inches overnight. Such that overnight, there would be no difference whatsoever in size and strength between the average man and woman. Such that overnight, the ability of Patriarchy to enforce itself upon America’s women through sheer physical superiority will have all but disappeared.

And they’re ready to ship.

Ready to be plopped in reservoirs from coast-to-coast.

But one particular temptation still cried out to me.

I held a source of ultimate power in my hands. Consumed by a hundred thousand women, they would each swell six inches as they slept; consumed by one woman, God only knows how big she’d get. A hundred feet? Five hundred feet? I could stomp my way to NO-MA’AM’s headquarters on Lake Michigan and crush it like a bug under my boot right now. I could storm cross-country to DC in mere moments and demand an end to American Patriarchy. To every institution, system and culture that upheld the supremacy of men over women, enforced the demands gender made upon women to be small, and meek, and weak, and submissive to their man. Or it’s Bye, bye, White House, bye, bye Congress, bye, bye Pentagon.

America’s men might have a hope of upholding their precious Patriarchy against an equal number of women their own size and strength. Or at least, of holding out for a good few months or years. But against me…

Against me, they’d surely fold in seconds.

It’s so tantalising, lying there in my hands. Too tantalising.

Nancy takes the pill.

Instantly, I felt my lab-coat grow tight. Its seams begin to shred. Every one of my muscles seemed to rumble with the fury of a thousand rockets, growling, effervescing, ready to explode. Walls collapsed under the pressure of my rapidly expanding flesh. Concrete pillars shattered to rubble and dust as my colossal limbs crushed against them. Within a matter of moments, the laboratory building where I had spent a full half-decade researching, developing, experimenting, honing my craft was destroyed by the very product of all those years of work.

Nancy, the human skyscraper.

Nancy, the Patriarchy’s worst nightmare.

Nancy, the ultimate Amazon.

Innumerable feet, innumerable tons of woman scorned ready and waiting to destroy-

A pause. Time stops for a second

Nancy's enormous, blood-red boots are hovering ominously above a skyscraper. Prepared to crush that phallic motherfucker into the finest crystal concrete dust you've ever seen in your goddamn life. But as she goes to deliver the devilish death-blow, she suddenly hears laughter echoing from the sky above her. She turns to face the source of the sound. Two lecherous looking men with video cameras. And as she looks up at them, the colour draining from her face, they sneer at her, and say…

Yeah, that’s it, girl. Do it. Crush ‘em all.

I stumbled backwards, terrified. Slipped from my feet. Landed with a thump on the cold hard ground.

The lights came on. Scrambling around, I took stock of my surroundings. Cardboard buildings. Toy cars. What the hell was all this? Where was I?

The men answer her.

Where the fuck do you think you are? You're on a giantess porn set. And you’ve been randomly monologuing for twenty motherfucking minutes now. The pervs who get off to this shit could’ve blown their load to you a dozen times over by now, the amount of time you’ve been fucking yapping away to yourself. Like, God fucking damn, just get on with it and… I don't fucking know. Crush a building. Put a car down your panties. Just do something that’ll get my audience horny. Anything. You got that?

A beat. Following which, Nancy snidely remarks:

Well, that explains Toytown here.

I guess it also explains why I happened to be wearing a bikini underneath my lab coat at work today. And I guess it might explain why that bikini miraculously survived my rapid expansion from seven feet to several hundred feet without snapping, like the rest of my clothes did. Can’t reveal everything too soon, can we? Get her fully naked, have her burst out of her bra only right at the very end. Only once their dicks are right on the cusp of exploding.

I should probably get you little guys out of here too, eh.

Nancy reaches into her bikini top. She pulls from its cups a small collection of model figurines. Tiny people to be crushed between her breasts.

Ironic, isn’t it. How the figure of the giantess is so powerful, yet so weak all at once. How she has the power to end whole civilisations with just the stomp of her boots. To destroy cities and militaries as easily as she breathed. Yet her body is not her own. Her every action is choreographed by the men who fantasise about her for the sole purpose of their carnal pleasure and theirs alone. She has no free will. No ability to affect a positive change on the world, to stand up to evil, to fight for equality and for the eradication of social injustice, discrimination and hate. No ability to do anything at all but serve the sexual fantasies of her fetishists.

Nancy crushes the skyscraper closest to her.

There you go. Are you happy now?