Prelude
One hundred and eighty nine years ago the Shrinking Virus was unleashed upon the world. No one knows exactly where it came from or how it was created, but it spread fast and it spread far. Within a week of the first known case the virus had already reached the most remote corners of this Earth.
When a person caught the virus it only took a matter of hours before they shrunk, and the shrinking process took less than an hour to happen. Entire towns and cities were shrunk in one fell swoop with no time to prepare.
However, roughly one out of every two hundred people were immune to the virus. These people were left to pick up the pieces of a society that had disappeared overnight, as well as decide what to do with the vast numbers of suddenly shrunken people that included practically everyone they had ever known. Very interesting events went down in the weeks and months after what came to be called the Great Shrink.
But this is not the story of those events. (A partially written book that is probably never going to be finished IS that story). This story takes place many generations later, 189 years into what is termed the “Duality”; that is, the era in which Big and Small people have existed.
By now, society has adapted to the existence of Bigs and Smalls and new states have formed out of the chaos of the early years. There are only a few million Bigs spread out in clusters across North America, but the Smalls number in the hundreds of millions.
In the years following the Great Shrink millions of Smalls ventured away from the Bigs to live away from them in abandoned buildings and out in the woods. Over the successive generations these Smalls became illiterate, primitive, and feral, living a mean existence off the land in large burrows, fearing and hating Bigs and always setting up traps to deter them from finding their colonies. These are known as the Frees.
Meanwhile, other Smalls stayed with the Bigs. Although they were more or less treated like people who happened to be small at first, each successive generation of Bigs treated them more and more like property instead until it was eventually enshrined within law and tradition. They even began breeding Smalls for specific roles, such as athletics, modeling, or companionship. Owning Smalls with the most prized qualities became a status symbol for Bigs, especially in the larger cities. These Smalls are known as Tinies.
But the virus still lurks in the bloodstream of every human. Immunity is passed down so the child of two Bigs will remain Big. However, there are an unlucky percentage of Bigs for whom the virus will become active at some point in their life, usually between the mid teens and early twenties. One out of ten males and one out of twenty females will shrink within their lives, and when they do it is irreversible; they are just as small as the other Smalls around them for the rest of their lives.
This story is about one such Shrinker, as they are called. He is an eighteen-year-old boy from a well-regarded family. His mother is a member of Parliment in the geographically vast but sparsely populated nation of Gordana, and they live in the nation's capital of Gettysburg. Some might say they are too good of a family to produce a Shrinker—but that is not so.
Paul's mother is a champion of Tiny rights and a protector of those freedoms. But she never thought one of those Tinies would be her own son—and will those highly admirable ideals help Paul out once he shrinks? And how will the other people in his life react? Read on to see...