by Eoin Colfer
There was, however, an Achilles’ heel in this system, as the twins were about to discover. This Achilles’ heel was the twins’ own decency and their reluctance to unleash the villa’s defenses on anyone.
On this summer evening, the twins’ mother was delivering a lecture at New York University with her husband in attendance. Some years previously, Angeline had suffered from what Shakespeare called “the grief that does not speak,” and, in an effort to understand her depression, had completed a mental-health doctorate at Trinity College and now spoke at conferences around the world. The twins were being watched over by the house itself, which had an Artemis-designed Nano Artificial Neural Network Intelligence system, or NANNI, to keep an electronic eye on them.
Myles was collecting seaweed for his homemade hair gel fermentation silo, and Beckett was attempting to learn seal language from a dolphin just offshore.
“We must be away, brother,” Myles said. “Bedtime. Our young bodies require ten hours of sleep to ensure proper brain development.”
Beckett lay on a rock and clapped his hands. “Arf,” he said. “Arf.”
Myles tugged at his suit jacket and frowned behind the frames of his thick-rimmed glasses. “Beck, are you attempting to speak in seal language?”
“Arf,” said Beckett, who was wearing knee-length cargo shorts and his gold necktie.
“That is not even a seal. That is a dolphin.”
“Dolphins are smart,” said Beckett. “They know things.”
“That is true, brother, but a dolphin’s vocal cords make it impossible for them to speak in the language of a seal. Why don’t you simply learn the dolphin’s language?”
Beckett beamed. “Yes! You are a genius, brother. Step one, swap barks for whistles.”
Myles sighed. Now his twin was whistling at a dolphin, and they would once again fail to get to bed on time.
Myles stuffed a handful of seaweed into his bucket. “Please, Beck. My brain will never reach optimum productivity if we don’t leave now.” He tapped the right arm of his black plastic spectacle frames, activating the built-in microphone. “NANNI, help me out. Please send a drobot to carry my brother home.”
“Negative,” said the house system in the strangely accented female voice that Artemis had selected to represent the AI. It was a voice that both twins instinctively trusted for some reason.
Myles could hear NANNI through bone-conduction speakers concealed in the arms of his glasses.
“Absolutely no flying Beckett home, unless it’s an emergency,” said NANNI. “Mother’s orders, so don’t bother arguing.”
Myles was surprised that NANNI’s sentences were unnecessarily convoluted. It seemed as though the AI was developing a personality, which he supposed was the point. When Artemis had first plugged NANNI into the system, so to speak, her responses were usually limited to one-word answers. Now she was telling him not to bother arguing. It would be fascinating to see how her personality would develop.
Providing NANNI doesn’t become too human, thought Myles, because most humans are irritating.
At any rate, it was ridiculous that his mother refused to authorize short-range flights for Beckett. In tests, the drone/robots had only dropped the dummy Becketts twice, but his mother insisted the drobots were for urgent situations only.
“Beckett!” he called. “If you agree to come back to the house, I will tell you a story before bed.”
Beckett flipped over on the rock. “Which story?” he asked.
“How about the thrilling discovery of the Schwarzschild radius, which led directly to the identification of black holes?” suggested Myles.
Beckett was not impressed. “How about the adventures of Gloop and Angry Hamster in the Dimension of Fire?”
Now it was Myles’s turn to be unimpressed. “Beck, that’s preposterous. Fish and hamsters do not even share the same environment. And neither could survive in a dimension of fire.”
“You’re preposterous,” said Beckett, and went back to his whistling.
The crown of Beck’s head will be burned by the evening UV rays, thought Myles.
“Very well,” he said. “Gloop and Angry Hamster it is.”
“And Dolphin,” said Beckett. “He wants to be in the story, too.”
Myles sighed. “Dolphin, too.”
“Hooray!” said Beckett, skipping across the rocks. “Story time. Wrist bump?”
Myles raised his palm for a bump and wondered, If I’m the smart one, why do we always do exactly what Beck wants us to?
Myles asked himself this question a lot.
“Now, brother,” he said, “please say good night to your friend, and let us be off.”
Beckett turned to do as he was told, but only because it suited him.
If Beckett had not turned to bid the dolphin farewell, then perhaps the entire series of increasingly bizarre events that followed might have been avoided. There would have been no nefarious villain, no ridiculously named trolls, no shadowy organizations, no interrogations by a nun (which are known in the intelligence community as nunterrogations, believe it or not), and a definite lack of head lice. But Beckett did turn, precisely two seconds after a troll had surged upward through the loose shale at the water’s edge and collapsed onto the beach.
Fairies are defined as being “small, humanoid, supernatural creatures possessed of magical powers,” a definition that applies neatly to elves, gnomes, sprites, and pixies. It is, however, a human definition, and therefore as incomplete as human knowledge on the subject. The fairies’ definition of themselves is more concise and can be found in the Fairy Book, which is their constitution, so to speak, the original of which is behind crystal in the Hey Hey Temple in Haven City, the subterranean fairy capital. It states:
Fairy, faerie, or faery: A creature of the earth. Often magical. Never willfully destructive.
No mention of small or humanoid. It may surprise humans to know that they themselves were once considered fairies and did indeed possess some magic, until many of them stepped off the path and became extremely willfully destructive, and so magic was bred out of humans over the centuries, until there was nothing left but an empath here and there, and the occasional telekinetic.
Trolls are classed as fairies by fairies themselves, but would not be so categorized by the human definition, as they are not magical—unless their longevity can be considered supernatural. They are, however, quite feral and only slightly more sentient than the average hound. Another interesting point about trolls is that fairy scholars of their pathologies have realized that trolls are highly susceptible to chemically induced psychosis while also tending to nest in chemically polluted sites, in much the same way as humans are attracted to the sugar that poisons them. This chemical poisoning often results in uncharacteristically aggressive behavior and uncontrollable rage. Again, similar to how humans behave when experiencing sugar deprivation.
But this troll was not sick, sluggish, or aggressive—in fact, he was in remarkable physical health, all pumping limbs and scything tusks, as he followed his second most powerful instinct:
REACH THE SURFACE.
Trolls’ most powerful instinct being EAT, GOBBLE, DEVOUR.
This particular troll’s bloodstream was clear because he had never swum across a chromium-saturated lake and he had never carved out his burrow in mercury-rich soil. Nevertheless, healthy or not, this specimen would never have made it to the surface had the Earth’s crust under Dalkey Island not been exceptionally thin, a mere two miles and a quarter, in fact. This troll was able to squeeze himself into fissures that would have made a claustrophobe faint, and he wriggled his way to the open air. It took the creature four sun cycles of agonizingly slow progress to break through, and you might think the cosmos would grant the fellow a little good fortune after such Herculean efforts, but no, he had to pop out right between the Fowl Twins and Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye, who was lurking on a mainland balcony and spying on Dalkey Island through a telescopic monocular, thus providing the thi
rd corner of an irresistible triangular vortex of fate.
So the troll emerged, joint by joint, reborn to the atmosphere, gnashing and clawing. And in spite of his almost utter exhaustion, some spark of triumph drove him to his feet for a celebratory howl, which was when Lord Teddy, for diabolical reasons that shall presently be further explored, shot him.
Once the shot had been fired, the entire troll-related rigmarole really got rigmarolling, because the microsecond that NANNI’s sensors detected the bullet’s sonic boom, she dispensed with her convoluted sentences and without a word upgraded the villa’s alert status from beige to red, sounded the alarm Klaxon, and set the security system to Siege mode. Two armored drobots were dispatched from their charging plates to extract the twins, and forty decoy flares were launched from mini mortar ports in the roof as countermeasures to any infrared guided missiles that may or may not be inbound.
This left the twins with approximately twenty seconds of earthbound liberty before they would be whisked into the evening sky and secured in the eco-house’s ultrasecret safe room, blueprints of which did not appear on any set of plans.
A lot can happen in twenty seconds. And a lot did happen.
Firstly, let us discuss the marksman. When I say Lord Teddy shot the troll, this is possibly misleading, even though it is accurate. He did shoot the troll, but not with the usual explosive variety of bullet, which would have penetrated the troll’s hide and quite possibly killed the beast through sheer shock trauma. That was the absolute last thing Lord Teddy wanted, as it would void his entire plan. This particular bullet was a cellophane virus slug that was being developed by the Japanese munitions company Myishi and was not yet officially on the market. In fact, Myishi products rarely went into mass production, as Ishi Myishi, the founder and CEO, made quite a lot of tax-free dollars giving a technological edge to the world’s criminal masterminds. The Duke of Scilly was a personal friend and possibly his best customer and had most of his kit sponsored by Ishi Myishi so long as the duke agreed to endorse the products on the dark web. The CV bullets were known as “shrink-wrappers” by the development team, and they released their viruses on impact, effectively wrapping the target in a coating of cellophane that was porous enough to allow shallow breathing but had been known to crack a rib or two.
And then there is the physicality of the troll itself. There are many breeds of troll. From the ten-foot-tall behemoth Antarctic Blue, to the silent jungle killer the Amazon Heel Claw. The troll on Dalkey Island beach was a one-in-a-million anomaly. In form and proportion he was the perfect Ridgeback, with the distinctive thick comb of spiked hair that ran from brow to tailbone, and the blue-veined gray fur on his chest and arms all present and correct. But this creature was no massive predator. In fact, he was a rather tiny one. Standing at barely eight inches high, the troll was one of a relatively new variety that had begun to pop up in recent millennia since fairies were forced deep in the earth’s mantle. Much in the same way as schnauzer dogs had miniature counterparts known as toy schnauzers, some troll breeds also had their shrunken varieties, and this troll was one of perhaps half a dozen toy Ridgebacks in existence and the first to ever reach the surface.
Not at all what Lord Teddy had been expecting. Having seen Brother Colman’s scars, the duke had imagined his quarry to be somewhat larger.
When the little troll’s heat signature had popped up in his eyepiece like an oversized gummy bear, the duke had exclaimed, “Good heavens! Could that little fellow be my troll?”
It certainly matched Brother Colman’s description, except for the dimensions. In truth, the duke couldn’t help feeling a little let down. He had been expecting something more substantial. That diminutive creature didn’t look like it could manufacture enough venom to extend the life span of a gerbil.
“Nevertheless,” muttered the duke, “since I’ve come all this way…”
And he squeezed the trigger on his sniper’s rifle.
The supersonic cellophane slug made a distinctive yodeling noise as it sped through the air, and impacted the toy Ridgeback square in the solar plexus, releasing its payload in a sparkling globule that quickly sprawled over the tiny creature, wrapping it in a restrictive layer of cellophane before it could do much more than squeak in indignation.
Beckett Fowl spotted the cartwheeling toy troll, and his first impressions were of fur and teeth, and so, consequently, his first thought was Angry Hamster!
But the boy chided himself, remembering that Angry Hamster was a sculpture that he himself had constructed from chewed paper and bodily fluids and therefore not a living thing, and so he would have to revise his guess as to what this tumbling figure might be.
But by this time the troll had come to rest at his feet, and Beckett was able to snatch it up and scrutinize it closely, so there was no need for guessing.
Not alive, he realized then. Doll, maybe.
Beckett had thought the figure moved of its own accord, perhaps even made a squealing noise of some kind, but now he could see it was a fantasy action figure with a protective plastic coating.
“I shall call you Whistle Blower,” he whispered into the troll’s pointed ear. The boy had chosen this name after barely a second’s consideration, because he had seen on Myles’s preferred news channel that people who squealed were sometimes called whistle-blowers. Also, Beckett was not the kind of fellow who wasted time on decisions.
Beckett turned to show Myles his beach salvage, though his brother had always been a little snooty when it came to toys, claiming they were for children even though he was patently himself a child and would be for a few more years.
“Look, brother,” he called, waggling the action figure. “I found a new friend.”
Myles sneered as expected, and opened his mouth to pass a derogatory remark along the lines of Honestly, Beck. We are eleven years old now. Time to leave childish things behind.
But his scorn was interrupted by a deafening series of honks.
The emergency Klaxon.
It is true to say that there is hardly a more alarming sound than an alarm Klaxon, heralding as it does the arrival of some form of disaster. Most people do not react positively to this sound. Some scream, some faint. There are those who run in circles wringing their hands, which is also pointless. And, of course, there are people who have involuntary purges, which shall not be elaborated upon here.
The reactions of the Fowl Twins could seem strange to a casual observer, for Myles discarded his seaweed bucket and uttered a single word: “Finally.”
While Beckett spoke to his new toy. “Do you hear that, Whistle Blower?” he asked. “We’re going flying!”
To explain: Designing the security system had been a fun bonding project for Myles, Artemis, and their father, so Myles had a scientific interest in putting the extraction drobots through their paces, as thus far they had only been tested with crash dummies. Beckett, on the other hand, was just dying to be yanked backward into the air at a high speed and dumped down a security chute, and he fervently hoped the ride would last much longer than the projected half a minute.
Myles forgot all about getting to bed on time. He was in action mode now as the countermeasure flares fanned out behind his head like fireworks, painting the undersides of passing cumuli. NANNI broadcast a message to his glasses, and Myles repeated it aloud to Beckett in melodramatic tones that he knew his brother would respond to, as it made him feel like he was on an adventure. And also because Myles had a weakness for melodrama, which he was aware he should at least attempt to control, as drama is the enemy of science.
“Red alert!” he called. “Extraction position.”
The twins had been drilled on this particular position so often that Beckett reacted to the command with prompt obedience—two words that he would never find written on any of his school report cards.
Extraction position was as follows: chin tucked low, arms stretched overhead, and jaw relaxed to avoid cracked teeth.
“Ten seconds,” said Myles, slippi
ng his spectacles into a jacket pocket. “Nine, eight…”
Beckett also slipped something into his pocket before assuming the position: Whistle Blower.
“Three,” said Myles. “Two…”
Then the boy allowed his jaw to relax and spoke no more.
The two drobots shot from under the villa’s eaves and sped unerringly toward the twins. They maintained an altitude of six feet from the ground by dipping their rotors and adjusting their course as they flew, communicating with each other through coded clicks and beeps. With their gears retracted, the drobots resembled nothing more than old propeller hats that children used to wear in simpler times as they rode their bicycles.
The drobots barely slowed as they approached the twins, lowering micro-servo-cable arms that lassoed the boys’ waists, then inflated impact bags to avoid injuring their cargo.
“Cable loop in place,” said Myles, lowering his arms. “Bags inflated. Most efficient.”
In theory, the ride should be so smooth that his suit would not suffer one wrinkle.
“No more science talk!” shouted Beckett impatiently. “Let’s go!”
And go they did.
The servo cables retracted smoothly to winch the twins into the air. Myles noted that there had been no discernible impact on his spine, and while acceleration was rapid—zero to sixty miles an hour in four seconds according to his smartwatch—the ride was not jarring.
“So far so good,” he said into the wind. He glanced sideways to see Beckett ignoring the flight instructions, waving his arms around as though he were on a roller coaster.
“Arms folded, Beck!” he called sternly to his brother. “Feet crossed at the ankles. You are increasing your own drag.”
It was possible that Beckett could not hear the instructions, but it was probable that he simply ignored them and continued to treat their emergency extraction like a theme park ride.
The journey was over almost as soon as it began, and the twins found themselves deposited in two small chimney-like padded tubes toward the rear of the house. The drobots lowered them to the safe room, then sealed the tubes with their own shells.
