Myles interrupted. “Perhaps, but it is a testament to Dr. Fowl’s ingenuity and foresight that he engineered a revolutionary way back.”
“Artemis died!” shouted the twins’ father, pounding the desk. “Not Dr. Fowl. Artemis, your flesh and blood. Only he isn’t your flesh and blood, not the current version, anyway. He’s a clone possessed by Artemis’s spirit. Do you even hear what I’m saying, Myles? Do you even know how those months crushed your mother and me when we thought we’d lost one of you?”
“I can hypothesize,” said Myles. “Common side effects of grief are lack of appetite, insomnia, and depression, due to elevated levels of certain neurotransmitters.”
Beckett helped out his twin. “You were heartbroken, Dad. Mum, too.”
“Precisely,” said Artemis Senior. “And Artemis is not even the first Fowl to be lost in the war to protect fairies. Do you remember the hall of portraits in Fowl Manor?”
Myles presumed this was rhetorical and did not answer.
“Everyone on the left side of that hall died because of the fairies. Fowl and fairy, friends forever. That’s our secret motto, right? Well, it cost us. My own brother. My grandmother. Two uncles. My stepsister gave her own life for a squadron of LEP paratroopers. My mother lost an eye. I lost a leg.”
“Technically, the fairies saved you,” said Myles. “Blaming them for the loss of your leg is not logical.”
Artemis Senior was on the point of exploding, but he calmed himself with a breathing exercise that, ironically, he’d picked up from Myles.
“Everyone. On. That. Wall. Died,” he enunciated quietly. “Because of a promise Red Peg Fowl made to the People centuries ago. I didn’t remember any of this, because they mind-wiped me years ago, but Artemis stimulated my hippocampus before he left. And I realized that the fairies were attracted to us because of the residual magic in the Fowl estate.”
“Which was the real reason you sold the estate,” Myles deduced.
“Exactly. The only thing on those grounds now are organic vegetables. Not a single prospective Fowl mastermind in sight.”
“Magic carrots!” said Beckett, who still didn’t quite grasp how deep in the organic manure the twins were.
“That’s right, Beckett,” said Artemis Senior. “That’s about as much as I’m prepared to give the fairies from now on: magic carrots. This family will not spill one more drop of blood for the People.”
Myles decided to make what he thought was an important point. “If all Artemis’s stories are indeed true, and they do appear to be, then, if I recall correctly, it was the fairies who saved your life when a, quite frankly, ill-advised scheme of yours went disastrously wrong in Murmansk.”
Artemis Senior had reached his tolerance level for Myles’s interruptions.
“Stand up straight, boy!” he barked. “Both of you. Up straight and no fidgeting.”
This was perhaps the first time in their lives the twins had been spoken to in this manner by Artemis Senior, and some instinct snapped them both to attention before their conscious minds could fully digest the order.
Artemis Senior circled them like a sergeant major.
“I do not want to be the person I was in my previous job,” he said. “But it seems that reason does not work with sons of mine. So, if reason won’t work, we’re going to have some rules, and you two are going to abide by them. Is that understood?”
“Yes, Dad,” said Beckett, and he meant it at the time.
“Of course, father mine,” said Myles smoothly, not meaning it for a second. His plan was to press on with his quest for knowledge but be a little sneakier about it.
“So, rule number one: No contact with the fairies whatsoever. Commodore Short and I have had several video chats in the week since you returned home from your last adventure, and the LEP have agreed to lift their surveillance in exchange for me reining in my sons. They wanted to mind-wipe the pair of you, but Holly managed to talk them out of it. So, no fairy-related antics. Say ‘Yes, Father.’”
This was a hard pill to swallow for both boys. Beckett would miss his friend Lazuli Heitz, while Myles would sorely miss the access to fairy technology, so neither spoke until Artemis Senior repeated in a more insistent tone.
“Say ‘Yes, Father!’ Like you mean it.”
“Yes, Father!” shouted both boys.
“Good. Next: You no longer have access to NANNI.”
Myles actually shrieked. “You propose to deprive me of NANNI? But she’s superintelligent.”
“It’s no proposal, my boy. I’m simply doing you the courtesy of letting you know. And anyway, you are more than adequately superintelligent without her,” said Artemis Senior, holding out his hand. “Now give.”
Myles made no move to hand over his eyeglasses, and so his father plucked them right off his face.
“I feel better already,” said the twins’ father, folding the spectacles with decisive double clicks. “From now on, your eyeglasses will be just that. Glasses.”
Artemis Senior waved a hand over his desk to activate the smart surface and allowed the camera to scan his iris. Then he ordered NANNI to deactivate herself until further notice.
Once Myles had recovered from the initial shock of losing NANNI, he realized that the AI was loyal to him, and it would only take a few minutes to work around Father’s security and reactivate her. Also, Myles had hidden some NANNI lites in the area. They wouldn’t be superintelligent, but they would be smart enough.
“When I reboot the island’s systems, NANNI won’t be a part of them,” Artemis Senior announced. “You’re probably thinking So what? I can hack in anytime I want.”
Myles didn’t bother denying it.
“And undoubtedly you can,” continued his father. “But you will choose not to.”
Myles did not like the sound of this prediction.
Artemis Senior continued to roll out the new Fowl order.
“Third, there will be no more excursions off the island. You will not so much as take a swim in the channel without parental supervision.”
“The dolphins will be worried,” said Beckett, which was not as outlandish a statement as one might think. As a side effect of being possessed by a fairy ghost some years previously (see LEP file: The Last Guardian), Beckett had become a trans-species polyglot, or, simply put, he could communicate with any human and most animals with a few exceptions, one being cats that probably understood him but didn’t care to answer.
“The dolphins will get over it,” said Artemis Senior. “They’ll moon about for a while but then move on. That’s how dolphins are.”
“It’s true,” said Beckett. “Everyone thinks dolphins are all smiles, but that’s just the shape of their faces. They can be fickle friends.”
Myles felt exposed without his glasses on. “How long do you intend to maintain this cruel regime, Pater?”
His father barked a short humorless laugh. “Oh, you poor boy. You think that’s all of it?”
“There’s more?!” squeaked Myles, who would have committed quite grievous bodily harm to someone for a few red gummy snakes just about then.
“There’s more.” Artemis Senior counted off the rules on his fingers. “No internet. No access to any vehicles. No field trips. No plots. No plans. No accidentally leaving the island. No devising any linguistic or theoretical workarounds to get out of following my orders. No firearms. No weapons of any kind. No using common household objects as weapons. No cluster-punching—that one is specifically for you, Beckett. No climbing of any structures. Both of you must read a book every day.”