I’m surprised at the vitality Brian is able to muster as he lunges like a rabid wolf onto Arthur Goodwin, but I can certainly relate with his violent sentiment.  The pair tussle over one another, rolling through the dust and spitting, but riding on a pure adrenaline kick, Brian easily puts down the rebellion and latches his hands around the throat of the creator of the shrinking device that’s stolen away years as well as a number of entire lives.

                I’m even more surprised when I find myself rising up and bearing down on them, not to help pry Brian off Arthur, but to aid in restraining the latter on the ground.  The haggard genius inventor, obviously very far fallen from the stature he once enjoyed, is lean and wiry, probably with a strength advantage over Brian, but the madness is strong in my friend who’s lost his sister, his lover, and quite possibly his daughter to the same teenage goddess.  After a final squeeze on the man’s whitened neck, Brian releases his grip.

                Gasping for breath, the disoriented Arthur squirms against us, slamming his shins into our hips, but Brian and I are working too quickly, and in seconds we have the guy rolled over and immobilized, with his hands twisted across one another in our grip.

                “Don’t… hurt him,” Kelly suggests softly as she walks toward us, though she says it more as someone with something to lose if Arthur’s lungs should collapse, and on this we agree.

                Oddly, as I sit on the man’s back, pinning his wrists at an angle too awkward for him to escape, I realize my fury isn’t conjured from his invention of the cursed instrument.  Regardless of whether or not the creation of the PMRD was a damnation on our eternally self-defeating species, it’s older than me, and out of my hands.  Julia is still the enemy.

                It’s really just that I’d like an awful damn lot to know why he’s here, in this house, at this size, and I have a feeling Brian and Kelly share my wish.

                “So this is what I get for shutting your mouths and making sure you don’t starve.  Glad to know humanity’s about the same as it was last time I saw some,” he says knowingly, heaving the dusty air to regain himself.  “By the way, little lady, I just go by Goodwin, since we’re starting off so friendly-like.  Who the fuck are you?”

                “Just start talking,” Brian instructs.

                “Get the hell off me,” Goodwin hacks, frothing at the mouth.  “You don’t get it.  You just don’t fucking get it.”

                “Then maybe you can help us fucking get it,” Brian snarls, smacking our captive on the back of the head.

                “I don’t say a word until you get off of me,” he responds, shaking his head.

                “Gonna have to beg to differ,” Brian says.

                “Hey, I’m not the one with a twenty-four hour clock on my goddamned head now,” Goodwin croaks, and at this threat, he receives another conk on the back of the skull that smacks his mouth back into the ground.  I flinch, but can’t say I disagree completely with Brian’s rudimentary tactics at this juncture, with the seconds ticking by before we’re all made into lunch meat.

                “You can have a lot shorter one than twenty-four hours if you want,” Brian says with eerie calmness, and looking up, I realize Kelly is handing something over to him she’s scooped up from the nearby junk pile.  The light is behind them, so I can’t quite make it out, but it glistens with a silver sheen, and has a point sharp enough to make just about anyone pay attention.

                “Fuck you,” Goodwin curses, pressing his forehead to the ground as Brian clasps the razor tip against the man’s neck.

                “Just talk to us, and then you can move,” Kelly says with tentative geniality.

                “Real convincing,” he chokes out.

                “What the hell are you doing here?” Brian demands.

                “What the fuck do you think?  Same reason you morons are here.  I was just minding my own business, then God took a dump on me and little Miss Satan puts me in her fucking dollhouse.”

                “Not good enough,” Kelly barks, then leans in closer to his face, softening again.  She extends an accusing index finger, but her hand is shaking too much to keep it up.  “I remember now.  From my book.  You… you sold out the company almost twenty years ago.  Tried to sell your designs to terrorists.”

                To our shock, Arthur starts laughing: not just a sarcastic little chuckle, but a full-blown barrage of huffing snorts.  He sounds like a hyena crawling up toward the white light.

                “What?” Brian demands after this carries on for several hysterical howls.

                “You really believe everything you read, don’t you?” our captive sputters, and then goes right back to cackling, as though this is all we’d need to hear.

                As tough as it is to buy such a flimsy defense, Goodwin is backed up by the incredibly unlikely happenstance of his presence in this house, so we’re at least willing to stave off more drastic action a little longer.

                “So why are you here, then?” I ask, breaking up the flustered pause.  “How did you find Julia?”

                Against all odds, Goodwin exhales heavily, relaxing despite still having a shiv leveled against his jugular.  He rests his head on the ground, probably as a pre-emptive defense against another smack from Brian.

                “Come on,” Kelly says.

                “I… didn’t find her, she found me,” he manages bitterly.  We seem to have broken through some kind of wall with him at last.  I can tell the next sentence is difficult for Goodwin to get out, and not just because Brian’s threatening to slit his neck open.  “I was selling unlicensed PMRDs.  Jail-breaking them.  Black market shit.”

                “So you were trying to-”

                “No, I didn’t sell the designs to terrorists or the mob or whatever those cocksuckers made up about me,” he cuts in.  “I’m not a fucking traitor.”

                “What are you, then?”
                “Unlucky,” he spits.  “And stupid.  Techilogic set me up.  I never had any plans to try selling the goddamned things to anyone else before they walked me into a phony sale and then pinned the whole thing on my head.  I shouldn’t even still be alive.”

                “What do you mean?”

                “What do you think I mean?  They tried to KILL me!”

                “Why?” Brian presses a little louder.

                “I knew things about the corporation, okay?  Everybody in it, too.  I was in there at the deepest level.  I was washing all their dirty laundry.  Closer than anybody, but they still needed me because nobody else could do what I did.”

                “Like…” Kelly drawls.

                “I put together ninety percent of the size modification puzzle for them.  The entire goddamned science is mine.  None of them at the top had a whole brain between them, but they gave me a lab and a nice coat, so I worked out everything on the Mark 1 design they just couldn’t crack.  The processor that identifies organic matter.  The internal refraction design.  Revamped the whole operating system,” Goodwin explains.

                “That still doesn’t explain why they wanted you dead,” Brian murmurs angrily.  The lethal metal remains clenched in his quivering fist.  “What did you do?”

                “It’s not what I did, it’s what I saw,” Goodwin relents.  “You see enough of the shit I’ve seen, it just gets more convenient to cut you off before you can tell anyone.  Like gangrene.  They had everything they needed from me.  Enough people understood how the system worked by then.  I was expendable.”

                “Then what the hell did you see?” Kelly asks, gentler now.

                Goodwin tilts his chin up high enough to look Kelly in the eye.  “I don’t suppose Ms. Bookworm or any of you here has read enough to know about what some creative son of a bitch called the Carly Incident?”

                All three of us jolt, the air poisoning our lungs and our bloodstreams curdling.

                To people who’ve spent the last two years the way we have, he might as well have asked if any of us have heard of the atomic bomb.

                “Of course,” Kelly says, her voice wavering with apprehension.  We happen to be special cases, but anyone with a functioning nervous system has at least a cursory knowledge of this thing that would’ve passed into urban myth if it didn’t also happen to be alarmingly true.  Any given record of criminal activity covering the last twenty years would be obligated to include it, but more important even is where it sits in scientific history.  “That family.  The… the Artons.  The first known size-changing event.  And the guy, J… Jack, right?”

                “Yeah,” I answer for her.  “It’s Jack.”

                The coincidence of our names has occasionally found its way into my consciousness over the past two years, not to mention the similarity of our situations, or at least what I know of his.  There’s always been distance in my mind to the Carly Incident, like comparing myself to a Shakespearean tragedy.  Two opposing planes of existence.

                Yet here my friends and I sit, freed, and just as much a prisoner as he was.

                “Jack and… Carly, his sister, she… found him… shrunken, and…” Kelly mumbles uncomfortably.  “Five years…”

                “Okay, fan-fucking-tastic, you know the stuff the internet likes to make a big stink about,” Goodwin grouses.  “I don’t suppose you can tell me what happened after they finally saved the little shit from her, though?”

                Another chilly silence falls.  None of us have a real answer, and it’s never occurred to me before to wonder if that’s an odd thing until now.

                “I… thought she went to prison,” Kelly offers, unsure of herself.

                “I did too,” Brian says.

                “Well, wouldn’t that have been just the prettiest picture for everyone?” Goodwin says.  “Carly goes in a cell, her brother goes off and has himself a goddamned lovely life, and Techilogic builds a fucking empire on top of everyone’s shoulders.”

                “But…” Kelly mutters.  “They… they caught her.  She-”

                “You really think that people as crazy as her will just let themselves be put in a box forever?  Happily ever after?” he simpers condescending.  “Good to know some people still believe in fairy tales.”

                We all pause again, not totally convinced by Goodwin’s cryptic nonsense, but sufficiently thrown off of our pre-conceived notions to pause for agonized contemplation.  I begin to relax my weight on Goodwin, and Brian’s hand gripping the shiv finally falls away from the throat of our host, who notices, but pays it no mind.

                My mind is racing at a full sprint, trying and failing to process all this while still grappling with the mounting nausea swelling in my stomach like a weather balloon: gut-rending terror for Gina and the baby, as well as the little fact that in all likelihood, this is going to be my last day alive.

                “Okay, look, none of that matters now.  Why were you selling the PMRDs, then?  How does that make you any different from the people they say you were giving them to?” Kelly orders from Goodwin, diverting our attention squarely back onto him.

                “Because I figured that was the only way to bring Techilogic down,” Goodwin sighs.  “I didn’t just get them to anyone.  I was thorough.  Did background checks.  I thought if they could just trickle out there, it would make enough of a mess to burn Techilogic to the ground.”

                “So Julia was…”

                “An opportunity.  At least I thought at first,” he groans.  “Those parents of hers, they’re-”

                “Lawyers,” Kelly says, realization dawning.

                “Not just lawyers.  I wouldn’t have even let there be a conversation with her if they weren’t fucking titans.  I didn’t think they’d be enough to take down Techilogic on their own, but if something went wrong while their kid had one of my jail-broken babies, like I knew it would have to, and they turned on the company because of it, well…”

                “It would’ve killed the market,” Brian says.

                “Bingo, Copernicus.  So see?  I didn’t fucking sell anybody out.  All I wanted from Techilogic was-”

                “Revenge,” I answer for him.

                “If that happened to be part of it, sure,” he snaps shamelessly.  “I don’t have to defend myself to you fuckers after what they did to me, or to anybody else.  I just had to make things right.  Even.”

                “Those aren’t the same things,” Kelly snarls.

                “Not to mention how convenient it must’ve been for your wallet,” Brian says.

                “I was never in it for the money, you fuckwad.  I just wanted to survive.  That was what I’d always had to do when I was younger, before Techilogic tried to civilize me,” he fires back.  “That’s the only reason I’m still alive.  I can think ten steps ahead of everyone else.”

                “But not Julia,” I point out.

                I can feel him shuddering beneath the pressure Brian and I are exerting on him, like he wants to hit me.  Can't say I blame him.

                “Well, it’s not like I need to tell you,” he grumbles.  “She walks up real close to you and sticks a knife in your gut before you even have the chance to look her in the eye.”

                We all share a silent nod.  No further explanation is required.

                Everything we wanted to and didn’t want to know is ours in pure, crystalline clarity, and it aches just as much as I expected it to.

                After all, the end is, in all likelihood, just as close as it was a few minutes ago.