February 14, 2008-March 1, 2008
"Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title."
--Virginia Woolf
Alyssa put the key in the lock and started to turn it.
It was Valentine's Day. In an odd way, that bothered her. It was one year to the day since Ryan had proposed to her.
Saying yes to a psychotic narcissist is enough to cause one to question one's judgment forever.
She sighed, pausing before she turned the key. Sam would be waiting for her—and she loved Sam.
She really did; he was kind and smart and he was obviously willing to risk everything for her.
But in the months since he'd come to her rescue, he'd entered a rut—content, it seemed, just to hang out in her apartment. It wasn't that she minded. He didn't cost much. And he provided more than a few services that allowed her to significantly cut her entertainment budget….
Still, it wasn't right, she thought. He was ossifying. He was becoming a shadow of a person he couldn't even remember.
And if she did love him, as she knew she did, she couldn't let him. She had to force him to move on, and that meant bringing up the message he'd told her about—and insisting that they figure this out, once and for all.
Maybe if he regained his past, he could accept his future. Because if she loved him, she wanted to build a life with him—and she wanted him as a partner, not an accessory.
She turned the key.
The apartment was dark, save for the flickering of candlelight.
"Sam?" she called out, nervously.
"Over here," came the tiny reply from the kitchen.
She turned left and gasped at the tableau. "How—"
"Judy delivered the food," he said, gesturing to the Thai takeout that had been neatly piled onto two plates—though the amounts varied significantly. "But I took care of the candlelight and the card."
Alyssa saw it on the table, a folded piece of 8½ by 11 paper, with a poem written on the cover—"When you love you should not say/'God is in my heart'/But rather,/'I am in the heart of God.'" She smiled.
"That's from The Prophet, you know."
"No, I don't," chuckled Sam. "But I could remember it, and it seemed right somehow. Read inside."
Alyssa turned the page. "Alyssa, I am so grateful for your love and shelter. I will always love you, now and forever. All my love, Sam."
"That's sweet," she said, bending down and kissing his forehead. "I love you too, Sam."
Alyssa sat down at the table, and regarded her tiny boyfriend. There would be a time to discuss unpleasant things.
But not yet, O Lord. Not yet.
She picked him up carefully, and smiled.
And throwing caution aside, she dumped him down the front of her blouse.
She wasn't sure why she enjoyed him being under her clothes so much; maybe it was just that it was something he alone could do. It was novel. It was different.
It was erotic as all get-out.
From below her chin, a small voice asked, "So, I guess dinner's going to wait a bit, then?"
She laughed. "It doesn't have to."
"Oh, no—it can wait. Trust me," said Sam, as he skootched down through his girlfriend's cleavage, enjoying the soft undulation of her breasts as he dropped through them toward his ultimate destination.
He rode the sharp slope of her stomach to the point where her blouse was tucked into her skirt; it wasn't an easy squeeze, but he'd done it before—and she shifted herself enough to make his life easier.
He slid into her panties and got to work.
◘ ◘ ◘
An uncertain amount of time later, the two lay together on a bed that was, to one of them, a sprawling plateau whose veneer was full of whorls and eddies and dominated by a living, moving, beautiful mountain, and to the other of them just a bed.
Sam rested against the mountain's left arm, looking up at her, far more troubled than he had been letting on.
"Alyssa," he finally called.
The mountain moved toward him sleepily. "What is it?" she replied.
Sam looked down at his feet. "I love you," he said.
"I love you too. What's wrong?"
He looked up at her. "Alyssa, I've been putting this off for too long. I have to start trying to figure out who I am."
There was an audible sigh of relief. "About time, Sam. What can I do to help?"
"That's why I've been putting this off."
Alyssa looked down at Sam. "Oh?"
"Alyssa, I don't know much, but I know that whomever shrunk me wasn't messing around. I have to figure out who I am, but…."
"…But you're afraid for me. That's sweet, Sam. Stupid, but sweet."
"Stupid? Alyssa, do you want to end up like me—not even sure of your own name? Dependent on others to do for you because you can't yourself? I wouldn't let that happen to you."
Alyssa sighed again. "Sam…you saved my life once. I'm living on bonus time. And it's great bonus time—I've met a man I love, I've gotten rid of a man who was utter crap, things are good.
"But tell me—why did you risk your life to save me?"
"Not to get you killed down the line, I'll tell you that much," shot Sam, petulantly.
At this, Alyssa rolled her eyes, and slid her hand under her tiny boyfriend, lifting him quickly to eye level.
"You saved me, Sam, because you loved me. And that's what you do when you love someone.
"I love you. And I'll be damned if I'm not with you every step of the way."
"And what if you die?" Sam said, looking at her. "I'd never forgive myself."
"If you didn't, I'd haunt you," said Alyssa. "Look, you said it yourself—you're dependent. How much time will it save to have a normal-sized person looking stuff up? A ton, that's how much."
"I don't know that it's safe."
"I know it isn't," said Alyssa. "But nobody gets out of life alive. And tell me—are you sorry you got shrunk? Truly?"
Sam looked at his girlfriend, and shook his head. "I'm sorry about parts of it. If I could have met you a different way…but I couldn't, and I'll take it."
"So it's settled. Where do we begin?"
◘ ◘ ◘
It took some time, of course.
Sam's memory was spotty, and though he'd worked hard to memorize the clues he'd presumably left himself, he still found himself tripping over some of them, uncertain if it was "sam30173" or "sam3O173," or whether it was "culdesacfever" or "cul-de-sac-fever." He still couldn't make sense of the initial alphabet soup, though he remembered it started with "qwe." Alyssa suggested it might have something to do with Qwest, but that didn't seem right.
While Sam tried to make his brain behaved, Alyssa decided to do what any attorney would do; she turned to WestLaw, and started searching for the term Sam had remembered—amphisize.
It wasn't long—a day or so later—that she got the hit she was looking for.
United States Patent 11,423,297
Mallory, et al. October 26, 2005
Mutodynamic condensation polymer
Abstract
A new fibrous material comprised of a combination of condensation polymers containing the ester functional group (commonly referred to as "polyester") and long-chain carbon molecules sensitive to permutations in a wearer's morphogenetic field, which will alter its size and shape to match the size and shape of the wearer.
Inventors: Mallory; Simon A. III (Minneapolis, MN), Matthews; Jane (Eagan, MN), Peterson; Theresa (St. Paul, MN)
Assignee: Laughlin Laboratories Holdings LLC (Mendota Heights, MN)
Appl. No.: 11/742,913
Filed: July 8, 2004
There was more—much more. Alyssa had been lost after the word "mutodynamic." Sam, for his part, read it in interest. It didn't make sense, exactly—but it seemed like it should.
While Sam read the abstract, muttering about how he could almost see this thing in his head, Alyssa sat at the computer, searching.
She worked her way backward from the present, and soon was humming idly as she took in the information. Laughlin was a major player in the new size-change industry, that was for sure. Contracts with the Society, contracts with Fletcher, contracts with the government. They'd changed hands a couple times; the latest incarnation had been a four billion dollar transaction. They didn't manufacture, they invented—and they were doing a bang-up job.
And then, as she was working backward, she reached August of 2006. And let out a short yelp.
"Alyssa!" Sam cried, jogging across the computer desk to her. "What's wrong?"
"I found…."
"What?"
"I found you, Sam."
MINNEAPOLIS (AP)—Police in Minneapolis are no closer to finding missing scientist Simon Mallory, according to sources close to the investigation.
Mallory, a senior researcher at Laughlin Laboratories in Mendota Heights, was reported missing in late July.
In an interview on CNN, Mallory's father, Nobel laureate Simon Mallory, Jr., pleaded for his son's safe return.
"All Simon ever wanted to do was make life better for people. Who would kidnap him?"
Police have theorized that the scientist's disappearance may be the result of a robbery gone bad, but have thus far failed to find any evidence to substantiate that theory….
Sam looked at the screen, at the picture of himself. For it was surely him—his face, his smile.
"Does it say anything else about me? Who I am?"
Alyssa was ahead of him; she was already heading to Wikipedia. She remembered, vaguely, the case of the scientist who disappeared; his father had pleaded for his release, and since his father was sort of famous, it had been big news for a little while until that rape victim killed her rapists on video, and then the cable channels had rushed to cover that and the scientist had just sort of drifted away. (Damn girl's name had been Alyssa, she remembered. That got her some needling from friends.)
But any story at all notable seemed to show up on the internet, and soon, Alyssa was looking at another page, a biography of Simon Alistair Mallory the Third, complete with photo and résumé and—Alyssa finally exhaled at this—a line noting that he was not married and had no children.
Sam—Simon—whomever he was, he exhaled at the same line. He loved Alyssa. He didn't want to find out that he had to leave her for someone he didn't know.
◘ ◘ ◘
"So where does all this leave us?"
Alyssa drummed her fingers, staring blankly past her dinner. "It leaves us nowhere. All we've learned—other than that I've been calling you by the wrong name since the day I met you—is that your former employer is tied to every major group we might go to for help."
Sam—he refused to change his name in his internal monologue now—laughed. "Well, at least that makes it simple. I can't trust anyone."
"You can trust yourself. We need to figure out what you were saying. The only thing you wrote that even looks like words is 'culdesacfever.c.' What the Hell is that? A program?"
"I don't know. Maybe we should go back to the computer and search for that term in a website. Maybe with Laughlin."
"Maybe," said Alyssa. Then, she smacked the table in surprise, lifting Sam (as she also continued to call him in her internal monologue) a good inch up and depositing him on his behind. "Website!"
"Careful," said Sam. "If it's a bad idea…"
"It's a fantastic idea! It's not culdesacfever.c. It's culdesacfever.com."
Sam opened his mouth, and closed it. "Why would I use a stupid URL like that?"
"Why wouldn't you? Nobody would want it. Come on," said Alyssa, proffering her hand and taking her boyfriend back to the bedroom.
She got to the destination circuitously; a WHOIS search showed it registered to Moonlit Amaryllis Rails in Lipson, Maine. Both stared until Sam laughed.
"It's an anagram," he said. "It's me—but not obviously."
Alyssa shrugged, and satisfied that it at least wasn't a Department of Defense website, entered in the URL.
It brought up a simple page with a login request.
"Well," Sam said, "here goes nothing. Userid is sam30173—"Simon Allistair Mallory, March 1, 1973. My birthday."
"And the password?"
He sighed. Q-W-E…he looked at the keyboard, and suddenly laughed. It was so dang easy! "q-w-e-1-2-3-!-@-#."
"Sure?"
"Certain."
She entered in the code, and clicked "enter." And they waited.
Suddenly, a video applet began to load.
"Should I let it load?" said Alyssa.
"It could destroy your computer," Sam said, "but I don't think it can do worse than that."
And then, the applet launched, and Sam was on the screen.
"Hello," he said. "If you're watching this right now, you're watching for one of three reasons. First, you're me, and you've been dosed with micromemor and you have no idea who you are or why you're just a few centimeters tall.
"Second, you may be with me, helping me out. I may be there with you or I may be dead, having passed this information on to you before I passed. If that is the case, I must give you a warning now I was unable to before: this is very dangerous territory you're steering into. If you want to shut this down now and pretend you never met me, I understand—though I would counter that the information contained here is important enough that I have risked my life for it.
"The third possibility is that you're one of my enemies, and you've won. If so, then I wish you a short life filled with immense pain.
"And now, without further ado, I give you the information I have gleaned from the past three months of my tenure at Laughlin Labs. I ask you to guard it well, and use it to protect the world—for it soon will need protecting."
The applet closed, and a prompt to click to continue appeared. Before Sam could object, Alyssa had clicked.
And then came a torrent of information—files and data, audio and video, detailed to the nth degree. They moved through the site in silence for hours. Neither spoke. Neither had to.
◘ ◘ ◘
Twenty-four hours later, they sat in the tactical operations center at the Society's Chicago headquaters, under guard by two tough-looking defenders.
Sam was full-sized; that had happened shortly after his arrival there. Alyssa had driven through the night, and headed straight for the Society. The information Simon had left himself was clear and sobering. And the Society saw it exactly the same way.
"We need to go ASAP. Now. Yesterday. Seriously, Master Ceres, we can't pussyfoot around—this is the goddamn League we're talking about here!"
"I am quite aware of the danger the League presents, Commander Garcia. Believe me, if anyone in the Society understands, it's me. But we can't go charging in half-cocked."
"Patience, Ana," counseled a calm man reading through a ream of paperwork. "We have the advantage here. They have no idea we know a thing about this."
"Master Chelgren, I understand, but—Dr. Mallory, the information you've given us is clear and compelling. But it's over a year old. They're already on the move."
"Wollstonecraft, simmer down. We have enough information about Laughlin that we know they haven't implemented a quarter of this. We can't wait months, but we can wait twenty-four hours to get ourselves together. Now, Doctor," said Ceres, calmly, "is there anything else we need to know?"
"I wish I could remember more than I've given you," Sam said, quietly. "But even with the antidote you gave me…well, my memory will probably always be swiss cheese, right?"
"Sadly, yes. But it could be worse. Your memory from dosing to the infinite horizon should be just fine. And it at least appears you have the makings of a good life ahead of you."
Alyssa blushed, and smiled at the handsome, man-sized man at her side. But then she sobered. "Look, I don't know what Sam and I—Simon and I—"
"I'm sticking with Sam."
"Well, my dear friend Dr. Mallory and I will help however we can. Frankly, I don't care who it is, whoever hurt Sam deserves to pay dearly."
"Amen to that," said Chelgren. "And we're going to need you, Sam. Your memory may be dicey, but it should have some limited use, and we've got almost nothing to work with tactically. We're going to need you on-site, if possible. Back and at the command post, but—"
"I don't need protection," Sam said, firmly. "I'll be wherever you need me to be."
"You're not an operative. I'd like you at the command post. But I appreciate that—and we'll keep this in mind."
"I'm going too," said Alyssa.
"Darling, you—"
"—I'm in this for the long haul, Sam."
Chelgren chuckled. "You're not going to win these arguments, Sam. Best to accept it now. Alyssa, you can come—but I want you back off site at field tactical HQ. Okay?"
Alyssa nodded. She suddenly realized that she'd possibly overstepped, given that a paramilitary operation was being planned around them—but Chelgren simply continued on.
"All right, T.O.E.—Sarah, you ready?"
"Yep. Start at the top—MOS Ceres, commanding; MOS-A Kensington-Chelgren commanding Alpha squad; MAD Chelgren commanding Bravo squad; TCH Smith commanding Charlie squad. Scott, you want that loose cannon Garcia as your second?"
There was laughter from the group, even from Commander Garcia. But Sam noticed it was a nervous laughter.
He hoped his delay hadn't cost these people their best chance. He feared that it had.