“Fuck me man.” I kicked an empty, already dented miniature can of Pepsi.

“You know when we shrunk this damn city to save it I thought that it would happen by magic so one second it’s big and the next it’s small. I didn’t realize we were going to have to watch it shrink street by street, structure by structure.” I stepped around a very small pile of red tiles that matched the ones on the roof of the teeny house next to me. The house was sagging to the right, the wooden boards that covered the outside of it buckling from the transition. They looked like damn Lincoln Logs. A bunch of crushed Planks for a small boy who is afraid to leave his stoop.

Gerald nodded. “At least we evacuated the city first.” He was moving aside a bunch of very small, overturned trash cans with his boot. Who knew refuse could be that cute. Were we going to have to sort the trash from the recycling with tweezers? I wondered.

“Well we got all the people out.” I corrected him as I pointed. A Doberman in the yard of a house up the street had begun barking at us. “Yip! Yip! Yip!” I giggled. This was so dumb it sounded like a hamster.

Gerald scowled at me, “The Transition is no joke.”

I gestured to a tiny billboard 5 blocks over that read “BIG SAVINGS at TONY’S ELECTRONIC WAREHOUSE.”

“Big Savings at Tony’s Tiny Electronic Warehouse is very funny,” I said “imagine how small those computers are right now. Oh my god and the keys on the keyboard! You would need a toothpick to send an email!”

Gerald continued up the street clearing the way with his foot. And by that I mean we were roughly standing in the same place because to move would be to crush something so he swung his boot in a wider and wider arc for us to pass.

“Finding the Black Box is going to be a needle in a city stack.” I said after a long pause where he didn’t laugh at my very funny joke. He didn’t laugh at this one either.

I leaned over and tried to take the top off of a house like it was for dolls. The house ripped out of the ground and the furniture clattered everywhere.

“Do I just shake it and see if the box falls out??” I asked holding the domicile up to him.

“Please put that back.” His voice was stern. I sighed.

“Fine I’ll be more gentle with our baby town.”

Had shrinking the town so that everything was miniature and falling over been the right call? Probably not. But it was the only technology we had access to on short notice and when the dam was threatening to break we didn’t have time to think of a better plan. It was have everything underwater or everything be tiny. And we chose tiny.

Now, though, Gerald and I had to find the Black Box schematics for the damn dam in a crumpling Lego metropolis. How the fuck were we going to do that?