secret history II: of how the fairies came to be.
I: Discoveries.
c. A.D. 3600
LEP Central Command had become a very different place than Commander Julius Root, Captain Holly Short, or even Foaly the centaur could ever have imagined. After all, they were already many centuries dead.
The sanctum of the Underground's police force was now simply a hemispherical dome, several feet wide, its walls punctured at evenly spread points with the doors to various locations, above and under ground. It had been reconstructed since the great compound Caucus earthquake a thousand and five hundred years ago that had shook the earth and fragmented the entire continent of Antarctica. Now, it was a gleaming thing of translucent plastic opening to a view of solid bedrock. Half-solid, actually, allowing for the four massive fissures spreading through it that had been the result of the earthquake, making enough debris to bury the original LEP Central Command two miles under ground level.
In fact, it was the Council's meddling ways that had caused the Caucus earthquake. But of course, no Council member would ever admit it. And that's another story anyway.
There were concentric rings of work-desks from the perimeter of the dome walls to the center, each with a terminal at which the fairies could simply plug-in their hand-helds to do their work. At the outermost ring were the "contact" LEP, the ones the citizens interacted with, the menial workers of the LEP caste system. The floor ascended gently like the cone of a volcano, reaching the apex of a 10-degree incline right under the greatest height of the dome. Each ascending hierarchy of workers had less members and a more inner and higher-placed ring, right to the center where twenty-six chairs were placed around an imposing round conference table. But there were no cubicles or walls between workstations; there had been a consensus towards less privacy and better efficiency, and the wireless internal networking signals could not afford to be weakened by cubicle walls. The whole setup looked suspiciously like the way things had been at the Mud Men's NASA of old; but then again, no fairy had ever needed to be there.
But once in a while there would be the press of a button somewhere (which many suspected was big, bubbly and red) and a slow column of gleaming metal would arise from the groove surrounding the central circle. There would already be the leaders of LEP sitting there, and as the column came up to shield their conversations and them from the general view of the LEP, a slow hiss of spreading rumours would run the circumference of the rings.
And today, the column was up.
Within the central column of the LEP sanctum, the LEP Commanders and Captains had gathered. They could look through the material of the walls, translucent from the inside but opaque from the outside, to see the LEP hard at work preserving the world of the People. But when a crisis was so big that Aquinas, the Tech centaur, had to come personally from his R&D labs across Haven, it always seemed as if their work would never avail against the impending catastrophe.
"We cracked the code, Commander Root," Aquinas reported.
"What code?" Commander Octavius Root, as did most fairies living in these times, remembered nothing of the days when a 14-year-old Irish boy had held the keys to exposing the world of the People.
"We cracked the eternity code of the human, Artemis Fowl on the C Cube."
"Artemis? Fowl?"
"That reminds me vaguely of some chapter of History I studied as an elfling," Captain Nigel Kelp commented. "Wasn't he the great genius, the enemy of the People?"
"Yes. He had succeeded in creating a supercomputer from stolen LEP technology that was centuries ahead of the Mud Men's developmental schedule. He had sent a search for surveillance beams that broke through the LEP's defenses, meaning that the supercomputer held all the security data of the People. An unauthorized retrieval was made. But we were not able to access the data he had amassed, for the code he used had been coded to an eternity recombination of his vocal intonation sequences."
"And you broke the code," Commander Root's face turned a rosy shade of pink as his acrid fungus-cigar smoke filled the room. Both talents ran deep in the family. "SO WHAT, AQUINAS?" he roared. "DO YOU THINK YOU WERE COMMISSIONED TO WASTE THE PRECIOUS BUDGET OF THE L.E.P. AND OUR PRECIOUS TIME ON - "
"Hear him out," Council Representative Arch-mage Lotus Short pleaded.
" - on some stupid code a dangerous Mud Boy made up 1600 years ago?"
"The results of his probe have far-reaching repercussions to the People," Aquinas continued as if not interrupted. He allowed himself a little chuckle at the pun. Unfortunately, no one else in the room knew that it was one yet.
"Get on with it."
...Though Artemis did not intend it, the Cube's scan for surveillance beams was to have far-reaching repercussions. The search parameters were so vague that the Cube sent probes into deep space, and of course, deep underground...
"Most of the data that we retrieved was mundane," Aquinas continued, "including a full-scale description of the LEP surveillance system 1600 years ago. What a grand ancestry I've had. That centaur, Foaly. But what really concerns us today is this single data entry, recorded in full video."
A floating mist of water fog took on glowing color from a projector. There was a wall of empty space...
...The seed pod was semi-sentient. It pondered the query and considered what reply would fulfill its mission.
After a discussion at length between its various sentience subroutine processors, it sent back a reply. We are watching. The walls of the seed pod de-opaqued for just the instant needed to record its contents...
Space and a wall of stars, and a grey made thing, a cube slowly spinning about its geometric centre. There was a random burst of white electric sparks across the striations of its textured surface, and then a deep, gravelly voice like an easily-angered, irritable demigod: "We are watching." Then another burst of sparks, but these ordered in their sweep from one corner of the cube to its opposite corner, a grid feet wide on square faces miles across that made the walls transparent where it had passed. Then -
A deep and ominous emptiness within the cube.
"You called us here to watch a big empty box?" Root was irritated, driven by anger – but now also a little fear.
"Wait," Aquinas pressed a little switch on his wristband computer. "Voice command input. Pause visual. Re-center on memory-determined point bit xx8149FA300. Zoom in. Scale factor 10. Scale factor 20."
A few grains of... something, appeared in one corner as Aquinas sharpened the zoom.
"Scale factor 1000. Scale factor 100000. Parallax compensation off. Memory bitmap search..."
The view panned across the vastly magnified area, spiraling as if working in a search pattern for -
"There."
Eight figurines, still so small they looked like toys.
The first person to decipher the images sprung forth from his chair, as if some prank-sprite had put a pin in it. "D'Arvit!" was all he could say before he sank back into his chair with a vicious muttering.
Aquinas gave no commentary until every member there had figured it out for themselves, each similarly shell-shocked.
"An elf, a gnome, a pixie, a sprite, a dwarf, a centaur, a troll, and a goblin. A mini-portrait of the People, framed in an alien thing hovering 400 solar systems from Earth."
"What... what does this mean?" Even Commander Root had surrendered his scarlet complexion in the moment's power.
"Friends, we People are not of this Earth."