Eoin Colfer - The Fowl Twins

Perhaps you have heard of the Fowl family of Ireland? They are quite notorious in certain shadowy circles. The twins’ father was once the world’s preeminent crime lord, but he had a change of heart and reinvented himself as a champion of the environment. Myles and Beckett’s older brother, Artemis the Second, had also been quite the criminal virtuoso, hatching schemes involving massive amounts of gold bullion, fairy police forces and time travel, to name but a few. Fortunately for more or less everyone except aliens, Artemis had recently turned his attention to outer space, and was currently six months into a five-year mission to Mars in a revolutionary self-winding rocket ship that he had built in the family barn. By the time the world’s various authorities, including NASA, APSCO, ALR, CNSA and UKSA, had caught wind of the project and begun to marshal their objections, Artemis had already passed the moon.

The twins themselves were to have many adventures, some of which would kill them (though not permanently), but this particular episode began a week after their eleventh birthday. Myles and Beckett were walking along the stony beach of a small island off the picturesque coast of South Dublin, where the Fowl family had recently moved to Villa Éco, a newly built, state-of-the-art, environmentally friendly house. The twins’ father had donated Fowl Manor, their rambling ancestral home, to a cooperative of organic farmers, declaring, ‘It is time for the Fowls to embrace planet Earth.’

Villa Éco was a stunning achievement, not least because of all the hoops the county council had made Artemis Senior jump through just for planning permission. Indeed, the Fowl patriarch had on several occasions considered using a few of his old criminal-mastermind methods of persuasion just to cut through the miles of red tape, but eventually he managed to satisfy the local councillors and push ahead with the building.

And what a building it was. Totally self-sufficient, thanks to super-efficient solar panels and a dozen geothermal screws that not only extracted power from the earth but also acted as the building’s foundation. The frame was built from the recycled steel yielded by six compacted cars and had already withstood a hurricane during construction. The cast-in-place concrete walls were insulated by layers of plant-based polyurethane rigid foam. The windows were bulletproof, naturally, and coated with metallic oxide to keep the heat where it should be throughout the seasons. The design was modern but utilitarian, with a nod to the island’s monastic heritage in the curved walls of its outbuildings, which were constructed with straw bales.

But the real marvels of Villa Éco were discreetly hidden until they were called upon. Artemis Senior, Artemis Junior and Myles Fowl had collaborated on a security system that would bamboozle even the most technically minded home invader, and an array of defence mechanisms that could repel a small army.

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 defences 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 were 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 authorise 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 goodnight 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 organisations, 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 upwards through the loose shale at the water’s edge and collapsed on to the beach.