Chapter 1: Oil and Entropy
The garage was warm with late afternoon sun, the kind of golden light that turned dust motes into drifting sparks and made the oil stains on the concrete floor look like polished obsidian. Renae was halfway inside the engine bay of his old pickup, whistling something that might have been AC/DC once. A socket wrench clattered against the block.
At his crowded workbench against the far wall, Mattius adjusted a dial. His hands, grease under the nails from helping Renae last weekend, looked out of place among the delicate circuitry. The device was a nest of copper wire and humming capacitors, a prototype he’d been puzzling over for months. A self-contained spacetime fold, theoretically. A localized distortion. On paper, it was elegant.
In practice, it was currently emitting a low, persistent hum that was climbing in pitch.
“Hey, Matt? That thing supposed to sound like a pissed-off mosquito?” Renae called out, his voice slightly muffled by the engine.
“It’s… fine. Probably harmonic feedback from the step-down converter.” Mattius didn’t look up. He nudged a wire. The hum dipped, then spiked into a sharp, penetrating whine. A visible shudder went through the air above the device, a heat-haze ripple.
“Mattius.”
“Just a second.” He reached for the main power coupling.
The ripple bloomed. It wasn’t a light. It was a wrongness in the space of the room, a silent concussion that traveled outwards in a wave. It washed over the tool chest, over the half-disassembled lawnmower, over the crescent wrench Renae had just set down on the fender.
It washed over Renae.
The world didn’t shrink. It expanded, violently, in every direction at once. A nauseating lurch, a sense of being yanked backwards through a tunnel of blurring color and sound. The roar of the distant refrigerator became a jet engine. The scent of gasoline and old grass clippings thickened into a chemical fog.
Renae stumbled, his boots slipping. Not on the concrete floor. On the giant, familiar ridges of his own crescent wrench. He was standing on it. The wrench was now the size of a city street.
His breath hitched, a tiny, sharp sound that was lost in the cavernous echo of the garage. He looked up, and up, and up.
The ceiling was a distant sky, crisscrossed with wooden rafters lost in shadow. The fluorescent lights were blinding suns. And the engine block of his truck, right beside him, was a vast, greasy cliff face of iron, dripping with condensation the size of his head.
A shadow fell over him. Cold, total dread gripped his spine.
Slowly, dreading the scale, Renae turned his head.
Mattius’s face filled the world. His familiar, worried face, with the shaggy black hair falling from its tie and those dark blue eyes wide with a horror so complete it was paralyzing. He was a mountain range of pale skin and stubble, a planet looming from the chair. His pupils were black tunnels large enough to fall into.
“Renae?” The voice was a universe-filling rumble, a bass vibration that shook through Renae’s entire skeleton. It wasn’t a shout. It was a normal word, earth-shattering in its volume.
Renae’s legs gave out. He sat down hard on the cold, gigantic metal of the wrench. He could feel the texture of the steel through his jeans—his still-fitting, miraculously shrunken jeans. A hysterical thought bubbled up: Thank god my clothes came too.
“Renae! Where are you?!” The colossal head scanned the workbench, movements terrifyingly swift. A hand, the size of a freight train, swept over the area where Renae had been working. It passed through the air above him, the gust of wind from it nearly blowing him off the wrench.
“Here!” Renae screamed, pushing every bit of air from his microscopic lungs. “Matt, I’m here! On the wrench!”
The planetary head stopped. The galactic eyes focused, narrowing. They zeroed in. The expression of dawning, devastating comprehension on that familiar face was worse than the initial shock.
“Oh, no. Oh, god, no, no, no.” The rumbling voice was a whisper now, but it was the whisper of a landslide. Mattius’s hand—caution itself, moving with impossible slowness—descended. Fingers that could wrap around a tree trunk hovered just above the wrench. Renae stared up at the whorls of the fingerprint, canyons and ridges of skin.
“Don’t move,” the thunderous voice breathed. “Just… don’t move.”
The finger came closer, blotting out the light. Renae fought every instinct to run. He squeezed his eyes shut as the tip, warm and slightly calloused, gently touched the metal beside him. It wasn’t a grab. It was a reference point. An anchor.
Renae opened his eyes. Mattius’s eye was right there, an amber-flecked blue lake peering from an impossible distance. The fear in it was raw, but beneath it was a frantic, calculating focus.
“Can you hear me?” Mattius rumbled, each word a deliberate, careful quake.
“Yes!” Renae yelled again, his throat already sore. “What the hell did you do?”
“An accident. A localized field inversion. The fold… it encapsulated you. Your bio-signature stabilized it.” The big words tumbled out in that world-shaking murmur, Mattius’s way of clinging to logic. “You’re not physically reduced. Space is… folded around you. Scaled differently.”
“I’m two inches tall, Matt! Call it whatever you want!”
A faint, almost imperceptible tremor ran through the giant finger beside him. “I know. I’m so sorry. I’m going to fix this.”
“How?” The question was pure, naked vulnerability. From his vantage point, the trip back to the workbench looked like a migration across a continent, over terrains of dust bunnies that were now hillocks, past splinters the size of logs.
“I… I need to recalibrate the emitter. Run a reverse harmonic. Your presence inside the fold is the key. I just need to…” Mattius’s other hand appeared, the pinched fingers holding a tiny, precise screwdriver. To Renae, it was a gleaming silver pillar. “I need to adjust the housing. It’ll be okay.”
He said it like a prayer. Renae believed him. He had to. The alternative was the vast, indifferent landscape of the garage, a single spider’s web becoming a deadly nylon net. He believed the intensity in that giant, familiar eye.
“Okay,” Renae said, quieter now. He wrapped his arms around his knees, making himself small on the vast plane of the wrench. “Okay. Do it.”
Mattius’s eye blinked slowly, a shutter of skin closing over the blue. A gesture of gratitude, of terrifying responsibility. “Don’t move from there. I’ll be right back.”
The hand and the face receded, the sudden shift in perspective another gut-drop. Renae watched the colossus of his best friend stand up, the ceiling groaning in protest a mile above. Each footstep was a minor earthquake. He saw Mattius pick up a multimeter, the device like a small building in his grip.
Renae looked down at his own hands. Normal hands. Just… impossibly small. The grease under his nails was the same. He could feel his own heart hammering, a frantic rabbit-kick in his chest. The trust was absolute, a quiet, stubborn rock in the middle of the terror. He trusted Mattius with this, with his life at this scale, as instinctively as he’d trusted him with a spare key years ago.
A sudden shadow, different this time—cool and fast. A draft.
Renae looked up.
Across the chasm of the garage floor, the door to the house was swinging open. A figure stepped into the doorway, silhouetted by the kitchen light.
It was Mrs. Gable, their elderly neighbor, holding a baking dish covered in foil. “Hello? Boys? I made a lasagna, I thought you might…”
Her voice was a booming, friendly foghorn. She took another step inside, her sensible shoe lifting, then beginning its descent.
It was coming down right where Renae sat, a continent of practical rubber sole blotting out the world, descending with the gentle, inevitable force of a falling sky.
The sole filled the sky, its patterned grooves now deep canyons rushing up towards him. Renae froze, every muscle locked.
“Mrs. Gable! Watch your step!”
Mattius’s voice wasn’t a shout. It was a controlled, friendly bark, startling in its normal volume. The sole halted, a vast black eclipse two feet above him. It hovered.
“Oh! Mattius, dear, you startled me.” The shoe pulled back, vanishing. Mrs. Gable’s kindly, wrinkled face appeared in the middle distance as she leaned over, her glasses glinting. “I brought lasagna.”
“I see it. Thank you.” Mattius’s voice was closer now. He walked around the front of the truck, his movements deliberately casual, placing his own body between the doorway and the wrench. He blocked the light. “You’re a lifesaver. I just dropped a tiny… bearing. Really tiny. Right there where you were about to step. Might have rolled.”
“A bearing? In all this?” She chuckled, a sound like rocks in a dryer. “You boys and your mess. Well, I’ll leave it on the step. You’re sure you’re alright? You look pale.”
“Fine. Just… deep in a calibration. Thank you, Mrs. Gable.”
“Don’t work too hard!” The silhouette retreated. The door sighed shut.
The moment it clicked, the casual pretense evaporated from Mattius’s giant form. He exhaled, a gust of wind that ruffled Renae’s hair. Then, with a slowness that was almost painful to watch, he crouched.
His knees popped like distant gunfire. He filled Renae’s world again, but now his expression was pure, unvarnished urgency. His hand, steady as a stone bridge, came down. The fingers didn’t go for Renae. They settled on either side of the crescent wrench, enormous pillars of flesh and bone.
“Get to the center of the wrench. Now.” The rumble was soft, but it brooked no argument.
Renae scrambled, his boots slipping on the smooth, curved metal. He reached the central pivot, the cold valley between the giant’s thumb and forefinger. The air grew dark and warm. The fingers closed, not on him, but around the entire wrench. There was a sickening lurch of elevation as the ground fell away.
Renae clutched the wrench’s metal, his knuckles white. He was lifted through the dizzying air, past the cliff-face of the truck door, over the mountain range of the workbench. The journey was terrifyingly smooth. Mattius moved like he was carrying a glass of water filled to the brim.
The hand settled. The fingers uncurled. They were now on Mattius’s own workbench, a familiar landscape of circuit boards and component bins, but now rendered alien and vast. The wrench was laid down with exquisite care beside the humming, offending device. Renae stared at it. Up close, it was a jagged sculpture of solder and wire, pulsing with a faint, ugly green light.
Mattius’s face descended, resting his chin on the bench so his eyes were level with Renae. The proximity was staggering. Renae could see the faint scar through his eyebrow, the individual lashes, the pale blue capillaries in the whites of his eyes. The warmth of his breath washed over the entire wrench.
“Okay,” Mattius breathed, the word vibrating through the Formica. “You’re okay. You’re here.”
“Yeah,” Renae managed, his voice a mouse-squeak in comparison. “No thanks to Mrs. Gable’s size nines. That was… strategic.”
A ghost of a smile touched Mattius’s lips, there and gone. “Had to get her attention. You were in the blind spot.” He blinked, slow. “I need to touch you. To move you. Is that alright?”
The question, asked with such solemn care, undid something tight in Renae’s chest. “Just don’t flick me, Gregor.”
Mattius’s hand came back. The tip of his index finger, the print a swirling landscape, extended towards him. It stopped millimeters away. Renae, his heart hammering against his ribs, reached out and placed both his hands against it. The skin was warm, slightly dry. Solid as the world.
With a tenderness that made Renae’s throat close up, Mattius used his thumb to gently coax him from the wrench onto the flat of his fingertip. The world tipped, then settled. Renae sat in the cup of the giant fingerprint, cradled in a living, breathing hand. It was the most vulnerable and safest he had ever felt.
Mattius lifted him, bringing him eye-level with the device’s main array. “See that crystal oscillator? The silver cylinder?”
Renae nodded, staring at the component the size of a water tower.
“It’s cracked. The field pulsed irregularly. That’s what… did this.” Mattius’s voice was thick. “I have a spare. But the soldering points are microscopic at your scale. I can’t do it without you. I need your eyes. Your guidance.”
“You want me to talk you through soldering while I’m sitting on your hand?”
“Basically.”
Renae let out a shaky laugh. “Okay. But my rate just tripled. And I want a bigger share of the lasagna.”
This time, the smile on the giant face stayed. It was a fragile, worried thing, but it was real. “Deal.”
Mattius turned his hand, slowly, so Renae had a perfect view of the cracked component. With his other hand, he selected a new oscillator from a bin, the tiny metal canister looking like a silo in his grasp. He picked up the soldering iron, its tip a lethal-looking glowing spire.
“Alright, mechanic,” Mattius murmured, his voice a soft thunder directly above him. “Tell me where to go.”
Renae took a deep breath, the air smelling of ozone, hot metal, and the familiar, comforting scent of Mattius’s skin. He focused on the tiny, charred solder pads. “Move the tip in. Closer. A little to the left… your other left. Right there. Hold it.”
The iron descended. A wave of radiant heat bloomed. From his perch on the giant, steady hand, Renae guided the world back together, one microscopic connection at a time.
The world became the smell of hot solder and the sound of Mattius’s controlled breathing, a vast bellows above him. Renae’s entire universe narrowed to the two tiny points of molten silver.
“You’re drifting right. A hair back. Just a touch.” Renae’s voice was hoarse from shouting over the ambient noise of the giant’s body—the rush of blood, the groan of tendons.
The soldering iron, a glowing monolith, adjusted with infinitesimal precision. A perfect bead formed.
“Good. That’s it. Let it cool.”
Mattius’s other hand, the one not serving as Renae’s observation platform, worked with a patience that felt like a physical force. He didn’t tremble. His focus was absolute, a laser cutting through his own panic. Renae could see it in the tight line of his jaw, the slight flare of his nostrils with each exhale. He was holding himself together for both of them.
They moved to the next connection. Then the next. It was a painstaking ballet of shouted instructions and minute adjustments. The intimacy of it was staggering. Renae, seated in the warm canyon of Mattius’s life line, had a view of his concentration no one else ever had. He saw the pulse in Mattius’s throat, the way he bit the inside of his lip when a joint looked questionable.
“Your hands are shaking,” Renae observed, not as a criticism, but as data.
“Adrenaline dump,” Mattius rumbled, the sound vibrating up through his palm. “It’s passing. I’m okay.”
“You’re doing great.”
The words, small as they were, made Mattius’s gaze flick down for a millisecond. That giant blue eye held a universe of gratitude. He didn’t say anything. He just gave the tiniest, almost imperceptible nod and returned to the work.
The pair worked in an easy rhythm for over an hour, Renae taking several breaks to get some fresh air. This meant Mattius would carry him to the open window above the workbench, setting his hand down on the sun-warmed sill. Renae would climb off and walk a few paces along the painted wood, the breeze at this scale a exhilarating, powerful river of scent—cut grass, distant asphalt, the neighbor’s flowering lavender. It was terrifying and beautiful. The ground was a lethal, distant plain. But the sky was endless. He’d take three deep, cleansing breaths, the ordinary air feeling miraculous, then turn and wave. Mattius would be watching, his face a sculpture of protective anxiety, his hand waiting like a loyal stone chariot to bring him back to the task.
During one of these breaks, Renae sat on the sill, legs dangling over the deadly drop. “You know,” he called out, his voice barely carrying over the breeze to the giant ear four feet away. “If this is permanent, I’ve got some ideas. A little harness from paperclips. You could wear me on your shoulder. I’d be a hell of a conversation starter.”
“It’s not permanent,” Mattius said, his voice low and firm. It wasn’t optimism. It was a decree.
“Yeah, but if it was. I’d need a tiny wrench. You’d have to file one down for me.”
“I’ll file down a whole set. After I fix this.”
Back at the bench, the final connection was the worst. A hair-thin filament of wire needed to be re-anchored to a post no wider than a pencil lead to Renae, but invisible to Mattius. It required the tweezers.
The steel points descended, a pair of polished skyscrapers closing in. Renae’s mouth went dry. One slip, one tremor, and he’d be shredded.
“Easy. Easy. You see the broken end? It’s curling to the left.”
“I see it.” The tweezers were shockingly steady. They closed, millimeters from Renae’s perch. He heard the faintest snick of metal on metal.
“You’ve got it. Now, swing it twelve degrees toward me. The pad is right there, it looks wet, that’s the old solder.”
The world tilted as Mattius pivoted his wrist. The filament came into position. The soldering iron moved in.
“Now.”
Heat bloomed. The silver flowed. The filament held.
Mattius set the iron down with a final-sounding clunk. He let out a breath that ruffled Renae’s hair and sent loose papers on the bench flying. For a long moment, he just stared at the repaired device. The ugly green pulse had steadied into a gentle, rhythmic blue.
“The theory is sound,” he muttered, more to himself than to Renae. “The field should be stable enough to generate a reversal harmonic. But it needs the original bio-signature to key into. That’s you. You have to be at the epicenter.”
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“Meaning I need to put you down on the activation plate.” Mattius finally looked at Renae, his expression grim. “And then I have to trigger it remotely. From over there.” He nodded toward the far wall, where a secondary control laptop sat on a stool. “The reversal pulse has significantly more energy. If you’re inside the field when it initializes… it should work. If the crystal alignment is off by a fraction of a degree, or if the harmonic resonates wrong…”
He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to.
Renae looked from the device—a chaotic metal flower with a central, coin-sized copper plate—to Mattius’s worried face. He thought of lasagna on the step, of Mrs. Gable’s giant shoe, of a lifetime of this terrifying, intimate scale.
“What’s the alternative?” he asked quietly.
“Weeks,” Mattius whispered, the word thick with despair. “To build a dampening chamber, to recalibrate from scratch with you inside a shielded container… weeks. At this size, Renae. A leaky pipe becomes a flood. A misplaced coffee cup is an acid ocean. A spider…” He stopped, his throat working. “I can’t protect you for weeks. Not perfectly.”
The truth of it settled between them, vast and heavy. Renae looked down at his own tiny, calloused hands. He trusted Mattius with the soldering. He trusted him with his life. This was just one more step.
“Okay,” Renae said. He stood up on the warm palm, squaring his shoulders. “Set me on the plate. Let’s go home.”