Merritt started making even more preparations. One of the things he did was straight from page 372 of the 405 page Chronivac manual. The manual outlined a simple procedure for a transformation for the user's Chronivac. It didn't change it but it made it look like a stack of magazines. Merritt went through the steps to enact this transformation. Sure enough, the second he closed the top on the laptop, it was, to all the world, a stack of magazines an inch high.
Merritt touched it. It felt like glossy magazine paper, not the plastic top of his laptop. He fanned his fingers through the area where the black cube, the guts of the Chronivac itself, plugged into the side of the laptop. He felt nothing even though he knew the black cube was still there. But when he lifted up the top magazine, he was suddenly opening the top of the laptop and there was the black cube off to the side of it. Per the instructions of the manual, he set this up as an instantaneous transformation, something that he could enact at a moment's notice.
He also set up some transformations of himself as instantaneous, being miniaturized and becoming a housefly among them so that, if somehow there was trouble, he could hide right away if need be.
To his surprise, it was needed within days. Merritt was having a little trouble with his car and brought it to a dealership. Wanting to keep the records of his actions to a minimum, he asked if he could pay cash. They said sure. The dealership was just a few miles from his apartment so Merritt paid them, in advance, and then walked home. He cut through the woods and entered the building from the back door but just went up to his apartment and didn't turn on anything. He was reading a Ross MacDonald detective story when suddenly he became aware of the slightest scratching sound at the door.
Merritt bolted up from his chair and glided silently to the door with every bit of grace from his ballet classes. One quick glance out the peep hole showed two guys dressed in black, one with a taser in hand the other with something, Merritt couldn't tell what.
Fuck! Merritt glided back to the living room and turned on the laptop. He debated turning them both into frogs but it would take too long to have the Chronivac read them and get them into the system.
Across the apartment, he saw the brushed nickel doorknob turn slightly one way then the other. It would only be seconds now!
He got into the Chronivac program and went straight to the security tab. Click-click-click. That was done. The Chronivac would now look like a small stack of magazines. Merritt looked to the door. The knob was turning more now, the door heaving back and forth.
Merritt slammed his fingers on the laptop keys as fast as he could. Click-click. START. Click. Are you sure? Click!
Instantaneously, he went from being six foot one in his chinos and white shirt to being 8 inches tall and wearing a tiny dance belt dropping from his former center of gravity to the leather seat surface below.
With a small bang, the door was shoved open and two guys, one big , one average sized, both with ugly faces used to doing ugly things, came charging in and closed the door quickly behind themselves.
Merritt wasn't watching them. He had jumped up from the chair where his little 8 inch tall body had landed onto the desktop. He clambered up onto it and then grabbed the laptop cover. He first hung on the edge with the meager weight of his little body and then, with the cover part way down, pulled it down while standing in front of it. Finally he actually jumped on the edge of it, once, twice and a third time before it was closed.
Instantly, it looked to Merritt like he was standing not on the laptop but on the cover of an old issue of Sports Illustrated with a swimmer pictured whose image was the same size as he was now. Naked except for a tiny dance belt perfectly suited to his miniaturized body, Merritt ran to the back of the desk just as the larger of the two men breaking in turned the corner by the desk. Merritt dove down the hole in the wood where the laptop power plug went and was out of sight when the larger man looked that way.
Merritt caught himself with the tangle of wires behind the desk and slowly lowered himself to the floor as he listened to the two giants who'd invaded his apartment talk and watched them from behind the front right leg of the desk and a tiny hole in the blanket that he'd laid over the adjacent couch and let hang down to the floor.
"What're we lookin' for, again?" shouted the smaller one, only 150 times Merritt's present mass, from the kitchen.
"Eyes wide open for anything," the nearby one responded in a deep grumble, his foot just inches from the desk leg behind which Merritt was hiding. "They booted this guy's ass out and they think he might be working with that old man now. Anything even slightly suspicious for the wildest reason is enough."
Merritt could hear, 3 lengths of his body, just two feet above him, the bigger one meticulously moving things around on his desk.
"Come on, Chronivac security camouflage, do your thing!" he muttered under his breath by reflex for, tiny as he was he could have spoken at normal conversational volume out loud and neither thug would have heard him.
It seemed to work as the thug snickered, "Who the hell still reads magazines?" and turned away from the desk and went to the bookcase across the room.
"Profile says 'Boyscout' is more than a little bit of a nerd!" he heard from the one in the kitchen.
"A nerd who takes ballet. What's that tell you?"
Merritt grunted. "Jeez, always with the comments about ballet," though glancing down he realized again that he was wearing a dance belt.
From behind the blanket edge, Merritt saw the smaller one move into the living room and join the other one in going through every book and shelf space of his bookshelf. He stopped to look at a picture of Merritt from college, running track, and the one beside it of him next to Etta at a club. "Hottie," the smaller one declared.
"See if you can wait till we leave here to rub one out fantasizing about him."
"I don't remember trying to stop you from commenting about women's pictures on jobs."
"You're wasting your time any way. Reports say he's got a great big one but he can't get enough from her."
Hmmph, thought Merritt. How detailed are the reports these guys have on me? And to whom do these reports go? But, he looked down at the bulging front of the dance belt fitted snugly around his less than 1 inch waist. It's not a great big one, right now.
"Yeah, the honeypot says she didn't have to coax this one at all. Straight as an arrow," said that bigger one as he and the smaller one kept going through every book on the shelves of Merritt's bookcase, looking at every single one, hold it binding high and riffling through the pages to see if anything was stored their.
Down below, at the level of their feet, the party against whom they'd trespassed, temporarily standing only 8 inches tall, steadied himself with an arm against the desk leg beside him. That he's been forced to miniaturize himself into an 8 inch tall version of his body had not shook him. That these thugs, maybe connected to the corrupt people in the NSA had reports on him had not shook him. It was their uttering of that one word. "Honeypot".
Merritt took a deep breath. "So that's how fucking far this goes?! Holy shit!"