Report 3: South Hanenrow University, Interview 3: Shelby Bill

            I was surprised when I finally returned to my office at Techilogic after hopping across the country for interviews to find a message waiting for me on my answering machine from none other than Shelby Bill from Hanenrow University.  She expressed a desire to contribute additional commentary to her portion of the interview.  Apparently, my last-ditch effort of handing her a card as she walked way after her session with the professor was not in vain.

            As my issues with certain of my superiors here at the company have continued despite my previous case with the Lindons being a sort of peace offering to their image-conscious sensibilities, I ensured to take the call with Shelby after normal business hours in the comfort of my apartment, in order to minimize curious ears that might want to wander in.  At this point, I’ve concluded that the fewer people I have trying to get a good look at my study before its completion, the better.

            Shelby picked up the phone after just one ring.  Her voice sounded tired, but with an undeniable air of determination.  I had a suspicion that research would be required during out conversation, so I had my computer and a number of files I keep copies of at home pulled up at my desk for examination, should it come up in the discussion.

TC: Hi, Shelby.  It’s Howard Taylor.  I appreciated you giving me a call.

Shelby: Hey.  Yeah, it’s okay.  I… needed to be able to talk about all this somewhere.

TC: Well, I’m certainly glad you used my card, then.

Shelby: I guess this probably seems kind of weird, right?  That I need to talk about the PMRD to someone without Taggert knowing what I said, and I go right back to a guy from the same company who made the freaking thing?

TC: I admit I did found it a little curious, but regardless-

Shelby: (cutting in) Before I talk about anything, though, there’s something I want you to know.

TC: Yes?
Shelby: I’m out of it now.  Patience, energy, all of it.  Honestly, I’m losing my direction for everything.  I just can’t anymore.  Whatever I have left of it now has to go toward this.  And so even if everything I say to you right now gets funneled straight back onto Taggert’s desk, well… I don’t give a shit.  Because it’s time it got said, even with that possibility.  Have you got that?

TC: Yes.  But I assure you, I have no intention of doing anything that will put the subject of my studies at risk.

Shelby: I know, and I want to believe you, which is why I called you.  I looked you up, and I like the things you’ve said.  For shrunken rights, I mean.  Ethical treatment and all that.  I just wanted you to know that first.

TC: Fair enough.  Shall we begin?

Shelby: Sure.  I’m guessing we don’t really have to do this like an interview anymore, do we?

TC: We can do it however you want.  If you want me to ask you about it, I will.  If not, you can just talk.

Shelby: Sure, yeah.  Well, you probably already have an idea of what I think of all this, after what I said right before Taggert stuck me back in her… um…

TC: Yes, I think I can guess, but if you don’t mind, I’d like to get it in your words.

Shelby: Well, at this point, I might as well throw it out there, right?  About the Shrink Act.  It’s messed up.  The whole thing is a completely massive wipe.  From the ground up, it’s flawed, and the further you go up in it, it just gets worse and worse.  It’s like it’s poisoned.

TC: Could you elaborate?

Shelby: Yeah.  Look, it’s a replacement for prison, right?  I know it’s working for some people, and sure, maybe people aren’t getting shivved in the gut on a house arrest.  But if anything, it’s made the problems we should have with prisons even bigger.

TC: How so?

Shelby: It’s like going into a vacuum.  And for what?  Look, I was a fucking idiot for what I did.  I admit that.  I don’t mind in the least standing for what I did.  But what I’m having to do because of it now?  It doesn’t line up.

TC: I had a similar wonder about it when I visited your school.

Shelby: And as for shrunken house arrests.  Yeah, you’re living with people you know… usually, but do you know how much they can get away with on their own?  How much trust gets placed in them just because they personally know the person- specifically, a person nobody else wants to have to handle?

TC: A great deal of it.

Shelby: That’s an understatement.  They’re supposed to report to a board about behavior, they’re supposed to take notes about the progress of it all for a report, and they’re supposed to be open to occasional “randomized” checks to ensure a good environment for personal growth and development, but do you know how often those checks get done?

TC: Infrequently.

Shelby: Like, never.  And when they do, they all pass with flying colors, way more than makes sense before you even know the statistics of it.  They only fail the check when the situation is so bad that the shrunken people are malnourished or need to go to a hospital and those things get hushed up real fast.  Nobody wants to have to look into it once the sentence is down.  And I think I know why.

TC: Why?

Shelby: Well, you probably already know what I’m going to say.  Techilogic’s got its mitts in every pot, and its money in enough places that… well, I’m not saying they’re paying people off or whatever.  I have no proof of that, so I won’t go there, because I want you to take me seriously.  But let’s face it, they’ve been working really hard for a decade now bolstering certain places higher than ever before and giving them chances they didn’t have to reach people.  Law enforcement, the justice department, international trade relations.  Hell, every important building in DC.  Who’s really going to want to mess with their system if it’s doing this much good?  Or what looks like good, anyway.  They let them do their thing, the streets stay cleaner, people are quieter about the penal system, and they get to keep swimming in Techilogic’s pool of magic money.

TC: I see where you’re coming from.  It’s a big statement to make.  You’re right, it’s tough to say anything without proof, but you are correct.  Techilogic has a far reach.

Shelby: I know.  I know I can’t just go throwing things like that around definitively yet.  But you want to know the sad thing about all that stuff?  Even if Techilogic doesn’t have to hide anything or at least make it look less obvious that, well… that the system itself is just openly fucked up.  Sorry.

TC: Go on, please.

Shelby: Here’s the thing.  The caretakers, or supervisors, or whatever?  You know, the people in charge of watching the shrunken people?  If they angle things right, they can do… anything to the people.  Anything they want.  Doesn’t matter who they are.  I don’t have to tell you, because you were there to see it.  You talk too much, and a professor can make you an inch tall and stick you under her fucking toes in her shoe while she sweats all over you and walks around on top of you if she wants, and every other step could break an arm or something if she doesn’t know what she’s doing.  Maybe worse than that.  Like, does nobody care about that?  At all?  That people can just do that?

TC: Some do, but I suppose there’s not enough of a movement to get a change happening yet.

Shelby: No kidding.  Would something like that have flown at all, say, twenty years ago?  Before all this blew up?  I don’t think so.  Look, I know I’m beating around the bush, and I said I’m sick of not being open about it to someone, so I’ll just say it loud and clear so you have it in your record, okay?

TC: Okay.

Shelby: Abuse.  It’s goddamned abuse, and it’s criminal.  The Shrink Act and shrunken house arrests are mandated abuse.  Taggert is a criminal.  Professors, bosses, teachers, parents, aunts and uncles, siblings.  They’re all criminals, every single one of them, who do something to a shrunken person without any kind of authority they have to answer to.  I don’t care what they do, who they are, how much money they have.  If they’re autonomous in what they’re doing, they’re the bad guy.

TC: Go on.

Shelby: They can hurt people, you know.  It’s not in the rules, but there’s enough that any idiot can read between the lines and figure out how to do it.  If they end up hurting the shrunken person a little, like as an accident, at most they get a little slap on the wrist if they can just make sure it gets taken care of okay.  And coincidentally, who gets to actually even judge if it was an accident to begin with?

TC: The caretaker.

Shelby: Bingo.  The Shrink Act just hands lives over to people, okay?  That’s what it does.  They hand people a fucking inch-tall living toy that they can play with however the hell they want, like they’re not even a person anymore.  Like they don’t have rights.  Not even people in prisons have it like that.  And yet nobody bats an eye anymore because Techilogic’s people can just pour money on whatever the problem is or send out somebody to give a speech if anyone starts asking too many questions.  But people like me aren’t even the ones with the worst of it.

TC: Who is?

Shelby: People who have to live with their families, obviously.  See, I can drop out of the school if I want to escape that shit with Taggert, but I stay because I’ve got four rec letters riding on my graduation that’ll set me up for life afterward, but for God’s sake.  The number of people that have nowhere to go if things aren’t working out?

TC: I’ve run into a few cases like that before, yes.  I know what you’re talking about.

Shelby: The caretakers answer to nobody.  Fucking nobody.  And you’ve got no direction to go in, once you’re in that house.  Your ass is theirs.

TC: I gather you know a little about those numbers, then.

Shelby: You could say that.  The law’s new enough that we can’t even hear from the people in the longer term ones yet.  You know, the ones with more security and a longer chance for the caretakers to do whatever they want?  So who knows what the hell those will look like when they’re done, but I can’t imagine it’ll be pretty.

TC: A fair prediction.

Shelby: But even the ones on really minor offenses that are already out on probation.  Some of them are talking out about them.  Not a lot, but enough to at least pay attention.  When I was looking around, I found maybe fifty or sixty accounts, both anonymous and identified, from people who got out of shrunken house arrests and were reporting abuse of some kind.  Either sleep deprivation or withholding food and water, sometimes stuff worse than that, and more direct.  They were getting… played with.  However their caretaker wanted.  And I wasn’t even looking for those for that long.

TC: I’ve seen those reports too.  I agree that they’re troubling.  Most people don’t put as much stock in them, on the off-chance that they hear about them at all, not just because they’re coming from “criminals,” but because of how quiet they’ve become.

Shelby: That’s not the half of it.  I wasn’t kidding when I said these people are in a vacuum.  Prisoners in a penitentiary, in addition to having at least some protection from just being dropped down a fucking hole for their entire sentence, you can at least hear what they have to say if you go through the right channels.  You’ll find somebody who’ll talk to you.  Somebody.  But with this?  Almost nobody.  Well, what am I doing, talking about that to you?  You already know it with what you’re doing now.

TC: I do.  Finding the willing cases that I did wasn’t the easiest.

Shelby: And you’ve still got connections because of Techilogic that must’ve helped get you in.

TC: Right.

Shelby: See, most other people who try to get interviews or at least get a glimpse of the kind of life these house arrest wards on are?  Nothing.  Zippo.  Nobody gets to see or hear anything at all.  The stray ones that do get out are obscure at best.  You have to infer half the information.  If you really want to make sense of any of it, you just have to know people personally.  And those accounts exist, too.  People trying to raise their voices over family members, friends, significant others, students, employees, whoever it is getting abused by a caretaker, but not much happens because those caretakers are safe behind a wall of legal defenses.  There are even entire awareness groups, protestors, people writing letters and putting together cases around the clock, and still nothing moves.  You don’t hear much about them, do you?

TC: You don’t, though I am aware of all this that you’re saying, like those protest groups.  And since we’re already having this kind of conversation, and I’m grateful for your willingness to speak to me, I’ll let you know that I agree with you.  That it’s wrong.  The way it’s set up is wrong.

Shelby: Good.  Thank you for saying that, Mr. Taylor.  And hey, look.  I know I’m just kind of going crazy with this thing right now and taking the lead, but it’s all important.  Please.  You have to believe me.

TC: I understand.  Say as much as you want about any of it.

Shelby: I had some notes I made I wanted to share with you, if that’s all right.

TC: By all means.

Shelby: Well, you know, I’m a debater.  I don’t just let things drop without researching them until I know as many of their dirty secrets as I can, or at least guess at.  Trying to do that for Techilogic was a little harder, though.  Even for me.  And I’m pretty damn good at it.

TC: Techilogic likes to keep to itself.

Shelby: Yeah, I noticed.  That was okay, though.  That just meant it took more like… six days straight of looking for their stuff instead of a few hours.  Nobody can hide every last scrap of information that well.  Not from me.

TC: I suppose not.  You’re saying you found something?

Shelby: Well, not exactly.   I didn’t find “something.”  I don’t have anything that I could just come out and say something definitive about them.  I have some thoughts, some stories that don’t really line up, and a lot of numbers that I can’t even fully read myself.

TC: Just back up whatever you have as well as you can and we’ll talk.

Shelby: Okay.  Just to start, then.  How much do you know about a guy named Arthur Goodwin?

            I paused for a moment here, thrown off and wondering where Shelby was going with this.  A career-long grudge fought its way to the surface of my consciousness, but I ignored it for the sake of staying even-keeled.

TC: A fair bit.

Shelby: Like what?

TC: He was the primary inventor of the Mark 1 MRD, and got the device to work on the handheld scale.  He cracked the organic matter identification processor.  He created the internal refraction system of the device in its first version before it was completely redesigned to be more secure for general public use.  He was also one of the sole programmers for its first “smart” OS.

Shelby: So… I guess you know a lot.

TC: As much as anyone who works at Techilogic, yes.

Shelby: Then I’m guessing you also know how that story ends.

TC: Yes.

Shelby: Compare notes?

TC: All right.  About ten years into the continued development of the technology, he was caught trying to sell a shipment of three dozen unlicensed PMRDs that had their identification systems modified, allowing the devices to be used on any target.  Rumor was the buyers were a combination of Irish mobsters, a hitman or two, and even a couple of lower-tier terrorists.  The kind of move that’ll warrant burying you in a hole for the rest of your natural life even if it’s not Techilogic you’ve tarnished.  And he’d personally done the damage on all of them, because he knew how to bypass the system that corrupted their processors if tampered with.  So essentially he was willing to put lives at risk in order to fund an early retirement.

Shelby: Right.  And then?

TC: They didn’t get him.  He somehow made off, slipped past them, and they ran him right out of town.

Shelby: More like right off the grid.  You probably know, then.  There’s… nothing on him after that.

TC: The Techilogic stance on Arthur Goodwin is that he escaped before he could be formally prosecuted for what he’d done, and that each and every one of his unlicensed devices had been retained and destroyed before they could become a danger to anyone, and that as long as he wasn’t in a jail cell somewhere, they would continue to aid in whatever way they could in capturing him.

Shelby: Right.  Except that was, what, like twenty years ago that he disappeared off the face of the earth?  Still nothing showed of him, ever?

TC: I would guess he managed to hide for all that time under an assumed identity.  He certainly had the money to do it.  In fact, he wouldn’t even be that old now.  You probably know from reading about the work he did for Techilogic, but he was an unmitigated prodigy.  He was out of MIT at the top of his class and working on the early stages of development for the MRD by the time he was 20 years old.

Shelby: See, that’s what I was thinking at first about where he went, too, but…

TC: Yes?

Shelby: Somebody like him?  Well, like you said, he was smart.  A genius, actually, was what a lot of people called him.  A lot of people way back when were saying he’d taken the program and the science behind it ahead forty-plus years in a tiny fraction of that.  He had that shit down pat.

TC: And?

Shelby: Well, look what happened to him.  Do you know how he was caught, exactly?  I’m guessing you’re fuzzy on it, because nothing, anywhere, talks about it clearly.  As if somebody didn’t want people thinking about it too hard.

TC: I know, again, as much as Techilogic willingly lets out.  That he was trying to make a transfer out of a shipping bay at the main production facility when the authorities and special units arrived.  He set fire to the warehouse and managed to escape, and they recovered all the tampered PMRDs.

Shelby: Basically.  So think about that for a minute.  A guy with brains like that?  Just up and selling them right off from the facility itself, in broad daylight, with no back-up, no contingency, not even a team helping him?  And then, once he’s promised a heck of a lot of good stuff to people who probably wouldn’t hesitate to put a few bullets in his skull if he backed out at the wrong time, he just runs off.  No thought of the haul being lost, no hesitation, he just cuts his losses fast enough to get away without a scratch and without a trace.

TC: I see your issue with it, sure.  Where are you going with this?

Shelby: The way I see it, there’s two possibilities here, and when you’re willing to see it the logical way, really just… one.

TC: Okay.

Shelby: First possibility: Goodwin tampered with enough PMRDs just to act as decoys and keep people off his ass, allowing him to make the getaway when he did and get to a stash of the real merchandise somewhere else he then sold off to the shady characters.  A stupid, stupid way to do it, because after that he’s ruined and can’t even have the same kind of access he did before to keep selling them, but it’s a possibility nonetheless. 

TC: Except…

Shelby: (cutting in) Except of course he didn’t do that.  If he had really wanted to sell it to those people?  It would be all over the place.

TC: Why’s that?

Shelby: Trust me.  He had the know-how to make it work.  I’m guessing this is something you didn’t know much about him, but Arthur Goodwin had a juvenile criminal record in his teen years you wouldn’t want to scoff at.  Frankly, it shocked me he made it into MIT, when he was just sixteen.  I guess it was just on the grace of the fact that he aced every goddamned standardized test and genius aptitude exam they put in front of him and could put together engines blindfolded more complicated than a team of PhDs working around the clock.  That’s not the point, though.

TC: I can’t say I was particularly familiar with his past beyond the fact that he had a juvenile record.

Shelby: Well, then, listen close.  Not all of this was directly linked to his name because of some clean-up I’m sure Techilogic had to do, but believe me.  The dots connect.  He started when he was in middle school egging houses and spray-painting buildings.  He moved to stealing cars by the time he was thirteen, most of them so he could put them back together into whatever contraption struck him that week, but still, he was doing it a lot.  There was a year before he got into college and collected three degrees in under four years where he went off the deep end.  Drug dealing, petty theft, even assault.  He was making himself into a teenage kingpin and he couldn’t even legally drive a car yet.

            I had to pause in my note-taking and scrolling through digital files at this moment to process Shelby’s comments.  It was all a lot to take in, even for someone in my line of work.

TC: Really.

Shelby: Obviously, those are the kinds of things you wouldn’t have seen many places after he was hired by Techilogic, but they exist still.  He was playing the system like a violin and making tens of thousands a week without even trying, and he was doing most of it just so he could have the funds to build rocket computers in his garage.

TC: Wow.

Shelby: The point is, this wasn’t some poindexter spinning in his chair at work who one day up and decided to try and make a few million dollars off what is potentially the most dangerous tool in warfare this century.  He knew what he was doing, and he had for a long, long time to get good at it.  If he had done this, truly done this, we’d hear about it from mobsters, assassins, terrorists, or whoever, and do you know why?  Because there’d be a fucking warpath of destruction across the globe.

TC: But there’s not.

Shelby: Exactly.  Just quiet little trails of people with zero evidence for their claims talking about how someone shrunk them and threatened to eat them unless they emptied out their bank account.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful that’s all it is, when it might’ve been half the government getting shrunken and snuffed out to throw us into chaos.  The world might’ve been so much different if things hadn’t gone like this.  But still, like…

TC: It doesn’t add up.

Shelby: No.  So that leads me to the other, and I think, only real possibility.

TC: That being?

Shelby: You’re not at work right now, are you?

TC: No.

Shelby: Would Techilogic be listening to your home phone?

TC: They could, but I have ways around that.  We’re safe.  Please believe me.

            Shelby took a deep breath here before sighing anxiously.

Shelby: I’m this far, I might as well go all in.  I don’t think Arthur Goodwin did what Techilogic and everybody else says he did.  I think somebody set it up to get him out of the picture as fast as possible, and I think you know who I’m saying that is.  Who knows, maybe he did try to sell some tampered PMRDs?  A record like that, maybe he was still involved somehow.  Maybe he succeeded at least in part, which is why there are enough people whose lives were completely fucked over by it all, but definitely not on the scale he’s accused of. 

TC: I’m guessing you heard about some of those stories, too, then.

Shelby: Of course.  They were harder to find, and considering the kinds of accusations they were making, they were quiet as mice and buried under a heap of falsified names, old files, and Internet garbage, but I found enough of them that I had to take notice.

TC: People who claimed they had a PMRD used on them without authorization, right?

Shelby: Right.  They get pushed to the way back, but when you hear what some of them were saying… I mean, Jesus fucking Christ.  Sorry.  But Jesus fucking Christ.

TC: I know.

Shelby: Thirty-eight different names I saw come up of people saying they were shrunken, kidnapped, and held for ransom.  A lot of them brutalized, raped, even maimed, and yet they couldn’t prove anything.  Their word against another who miraculously produced an alibi from out of nowhere.  Another twenty-two who say they were shrunken and interrogated, or made to hand over life savings or social security numbers.  A scattering of them, maybe ten or eleven, that even say they were… well, tortured.  The person didn’t want anything from them besides them… tiny, shrunken, helpless.  Some by family members or acquaintances from work, some by total strangers.  Some of them for weeks, months.  A couple cases even said… years.  Fucking years.  And those are just the ones that tried so hard to make sure their voices were heard that I had to work this long to find anything on them.

TC: You’re saying you think it’s on a bigger scale even than this, then.

Shelby: Yes.  Definitely.  It’s just like with that one brother and sister over thirty years ago.  It’s a cycle, and nobody will realize it.  People talk about things like that as if they were ancient history, but it’s still going on right under people’s noses.

TC: I see.

Shelby: And that’s just what I could find with some hardcore snooping.  But those aren’t even the numbers that bother me the most out of that whole thread.

TC: You’re talking about the ghosts, aren’t you?

Shelby: Exactly.  The number of people in circumstances just so that, well… it was a possibility.  That they were shrunken and then never heard from again.  Probably dead, and if they’re not dead?  That might be even worse, actually, depending on who has them.  Who knows?

            I had a growing lump in my throat that was making it increasingly difficult to avoid interjecting into Shelby’s informational unloading, but it was vital that I get the most unencumbered version of her account and findings as possible.  It was my turn to sigh as I continued checking up on her claims with my files.

TC: So you’re saying that Techilogic framed Goodwin.

Shelby: I don’t know.  Maybe I’m saying that.  I don’t have enough to say it, nor does anyone else.  I bet even Techilogic doesn’t have enough to say it, because they probably burn anything that even slightly implicates them in any way before anyone has a chance to take a good look at it.  But here’s the thing.  Goodwin designed the first version of the PMRD, right?  The one that could be tampered with if you knew how?

TC: Right.

Shelby: How long can something like that hang over a company?  A giant liability like that, an elephant in the room with the potential to start large-scale conflicts, just sitting there.  How long can they go before they need a reason to tie it up like a noose and wrap it around someone’s neck to keep their own asses covered?  And even if that wasn’t it?  He had to know things.  If he was that deep, he had to know something so bad that they couldn’t afford to even keep their smartest guy on the streets.  I just don’t know what it could’ve been yet.

            I could hardly bear to keep back now.  All while Shelby talked, I’d been scrolling through my computer, confirming as many of her notes as I could.  Most of it I was managing to at least find inklings of within a few minutes of specific searching, and I could gather that with more focused research, particularly utilizing my increased reach into the Techilogic files, even more of it will be uncovered.

TC: Shelby, I’m wondering something now.  What do you expect from all this you’re saying?  I follow everything you’ve pointed out.  I even agree with you on some of it, and the rest of it… I can at least entertain it until I see more.  But nobody will be able to listen to this.  This won’t hold up in a court or get things moving.

Shelby: I know.  Which is why I’m saying it to you, someone with more access than I can get for myself.  I was just hoping.

TC: Hoping what?

Shelby: Hoping you’d want to find out for yourself.  Hoping you’d hear enough of the truth in what I’m saying, even if half of it is bullshit, to at least look into it.  Because even if I’m totally off on most of it, you have to admit that there’s something going on here under all the paperwork, shiny suits, and big grinning faces giving speeches about “shrunken rehabilitation.”  There’s no way around that much, at least.  Something is happening.  And I think it’s something big.

            There was another pause here, on my part.

TC: I agree.

Shelby: Really?

TC: Yes.  I don’t know how much of it I can completely believe yet, but you are right.  I do have ways to find out more.  So I guess I should thank you, Shelby.

Shelby: For what?

TC: For giving me direction again, even if you think you’ve started to lose your own.