"Micromen" by Bernard Werber, summary

This science fiction novel continues the sweeping futurological story of artificially shrinking the human body to save civilization from self-destruction and resource scarcity. The work was published in 2013 in France by Albin Michel. The author conceived it during a period of growing global anxiety about environmental disasters, planetary overpopulation, and the depletion of natural resources.

The novel is part of the science fiction trilogy "The Third Humanity" and occupies the second place in it. It continues the plot of the first book, "The Third Humanity" (2012), and precedes the final volume, "The Voice of the Earth" (2014).

Hidden conveyor belt and seven-player chess

A self-aware planet Earth observes its irrational inhabitants. Exactly one year after the rescue of the Fukushima reactors, the Pygmy Prod company in the Fontainebleau forest is commercializing the creation of tiny women. In the Chilean San José mine, baby Emma 103 683 rescues over a hundred adult miners from a rockfall. French President Stanislas Drouhin snorts cocaine from a Tanzanian box at the Élysée Palace and argues with the company’s CEO, Colonel Natalia Ovitz, about publicity. A dwarf woman draws a heptagon with two hundred squares on a board. The figures, in seven colors, represent possible scenarios for the planet’s development: capitalist consumption, religious fundamentalism, robot dominance, an exodus to space, life extension through cloning, matriarchy, and body miniaturization.

Reporter Georges Charat tours the center’s incubators. Biologist David Wells shows visitors a pool with an egg-laying platypus named Nautilus, a terrarium with parthenogenetic geckos, and rows of maturing human eggs. The embryos are radiation-resistant thanks to gamma irradiation. Females of the Homo metamorphosis species develop in six weeks instead of the usual nine. They produce milk, are highly resistant to disease, and grow to seventeen centimeters tall. Ten percent of males born are trapped inside and serve solely as sperm producers.

The glass city of Microland 2 occupies a square of fifty by fifty meters. The creators foster a religious cult of the Great Ones among their subjects: David is revered as the god Vulcan, Aurora Kammerer as the goddess of wisdom, and the pardoned criminal Emma 666 serves as pope in a tiny cathedral. At night, the little ones dig a secret passage out, but stumble upon a concrete foundation.

Sewer Fort and the Vienna Tribunal

David smokes a hallucinogenic pygmy concoction, ma’joba. The plants transport his memory back eight thousand years to the lost civilization of Ha-Mem-Ptah, where seventeen-meter-tall giants clashed with rebellious savages of ordinary human height. The explorer’s son, Quetz-al-Coatl, subjugated the Mayan tribes with gunpowder, magic tricks, and a new religion, forcing them to build pyramids for radio communication with the metropolis.

Fugitive spy Emma 109 builds a fortified fortress in a New York City sewer. She hunts rats with a homemade crossbow, grows mushrooms, plugs a found laptop into the city’s power grid, and writes a treatise, "New Blood."

In Vienna, fourteen-year-old Wilfried Kurz, the son of a plastic surgery clinic owner, rents three miniature surgeons and dissects them with a scalpel to the strains of Wagner. A video of the torture garners thousands of enthusiastic responses. A court in the Austrian capital refuses to recognize the little ones as human beings, equating the destruction of intelligent beings to damaging a rental car, with a fine of thirty thousand euros. An outraged David punches the doctor in the face on the steps of the Palais de Justice, after which the French biologists are deported.

Emma 109 arrives in Vienna in airplane luggage. She enters Kurtz’s house through an open window when the young sadist turns on a live broadcast of the third episode of torture. She sprinkles ground pepper in the tormentor’s eyes, drives a construction nail through his eardrum, and sets fire to the curtains. Together with her freed tribeswomen, the rebel escapes through the pipes into the forest.

Chinese dumping and the cave revolt

The market is rocked by news: a Chinese corporation in Sichuan has launched mass production of cheap, defective mini-humans called Xiaojie for €100 apiece. Thieves previously stole three male clones from Fontainebleau. These Asian clones lack education and vaccinations, and they die quickly, but they are completely replacing certified French products.

David unsuccessfully visits the papal palace, the Academy of Sciences, and the headquarters of anarchists and animal rights activists. Everywhere, the tiny creatures are dismissed as soulless laboratory specimens or genetically modified waste.

Emma 109 frees a group of speechless Xiaojie from a pet store and storms a hearing aid factory. During a raid in an Austrian forest, David rescues the group in a rented SUV and takes the rebels to France. In Fontainebleau, the board of directors refuses to shelter the fugitives. David and Nuxia break off relations with their colleagues and leave.

That night, Emma 109 cuts out the window of Microland 2 and leads five thousand babies to a furniture van. While attempting to apprehend the fugitives with a pistol in hand, the Amazon Penthesilea Keshishian dies, strangled with a silk noose. The truck, driven by the tiny crew, escapes pursuit on the France-Est highway, spilling engine oil and spikes onto the asphalt.

Battle at the volcano and the assault on the headquarters

The column takes refuge in the abandoned silver mines of the extinct volcano Puy de Come in Auvergne. The Little Ones carve a multi-level cavernous metropolis with pointed arches and bridges into the rock. Sixty gendarmes storm the mine, but are trapped in pitfalls and fall asleep under a hail of darts laced with sleeping liquor.

Nuxxia is killed in the firefight. Seventy-five prisoners, including Aurora, Natalia, and Martin Janicot, fall into the hands of the rebels. President Drouin deploys five hundred elite paratroopers with flamethrowers onto the mountain.

The earth echoes with a subterranean rumble. The Puy de Come volcano suddenly awakens, flooding the tunnels with fiery lava. David and Emma 109 rush back into the collapsing caves and drag the bound gendarmes and scientists to the surface. Queen Emma II perishes in a fissure. A scientist in a stolen television van rolls down a slope right in front of an oncoming torrent of molten rock.

From the UN podium in New York, David demands recognition of the right of the little ones to life, but one hundred and eighty-four states reject the project of the two-hundredth nation. Suddenly, Aurora, Natalia, and Martin Janicot burst into the hall. They block the doors with chairs, fire machine gun rounds at the plaster ceiling, and turn on screens broadcasting secret Iranian documents confirming the heroism of micro-humans. At gunpoint, the diplomats unanimously press the "yes" buttons.

The Island of Flowers and the Cradle of Atlantis

The international community hands over the rocky island of Flores in the Azores archipelago to a new nation. In the capital, Micropolis, Queen Emma 109 takes the oath of office under a purple flag emblazoned with an ant. The former founders resign from the government, handing over power to the indigenous people. David and Aurora live openly together; Aurora is expecting triplets.

The research submersible Daphnia descends to a depth of 3,500 meters into a tectonic rift in the Atlantic Ocean. Through a narrow crevice, the young divers Emma 678 912 and Emma 453 223 enter the underwater bubble.

The streets of the sunken Atlantis emerge from the darkness in the beams of lanterns. Swimmers glide past the gigantic skeletons of the first humans, enormous houses, and the stone steps of an ancient tavern. At the top of an underwater pyramid, before the bones of a dead shaman, the beams illuminate an unfinished mural chronicle of an ancient catastrophe. In the bathyscaphe, David holds the hand of the pregnant Aurora. On the floating base, scientists prepare to decipher the stone frescoes of long-vanished titans. Deep within the crust, the Earth shifts, deciding to delay the next devastating blow.