Disclaimer: NOW that I'm venturing into Stephen Baxter's territory, I'll start with the disclaimers. The GUTdrive, GUTships, and the opening of the solar system are Stephen Baxter's. Michael Poole is his too, but most of Poole's smart-mouth comments are mine. Holly Short, Trouble Kelp, Julius Root, Foaly, and Artemis Fowl II are Eoin's, but they don't appear in this story. The LEP is his, though. Holly's brother is mine. (But he doesn't appear in this story either.) Lotus Short, Nigel Kelp, Octavius Root, Aquinas, and Artemis Fowl the Fortieth (Artemis Fowl) are mine. But who cares what is whose?!
secret history II: of how the fairies came to be
IV: Stellar Acuity
c.A.D. 3600
"Butler, how many beggars did we pass on the way here?"
"I lost count, sir."
"You lost count?"
But Butler did not respond. That was a question he could not answer. He knew that of the five hundred and ninety-two they had passed, his master despised each and pitied none. That was how rich children grew.
He was accompanying his father to an important meeting. Julius (A/N: Fowl, mind you) had called it a convention; Artemis disagreed, thinking it more an expo – an exposition, for there was only one thing there worth seeing. He never spoke up, though. Silence and compliance was a small price to pay for unending riches.
For the Fowl family was the richest family in Ireland, all of the United Kingdom, and some said the entire Western hemisphere. It was relatively easy for a corporation helmed by the great Artemis Fowl the Second to become a global juggernaut, especially with almost half a ton of gold as capital. Those he could not outcompete – a privileged few – the succeeding generations of Fowls had bought up one by one. The only economic field left ripe for plunder was the Eastern world, with its rapidly rising stock.
And they said this was the man behind it.
Michael Poole stepped up to the podium within the grand convention hall. It easily fit twenty-five thousand people on a good day; but today was not a good day, and even with dignitaries willing to share two chairs to three people, the hall was packed and overflowing. So important, that man was. But Artemis' solitary question was, Who is he? For Artemis had not been one to pay interest to news and daily events. The name, had he known it, would not have been matched with a face. Poole was not an imposing man: short, stocky, and with a thickly obscuring accent that Artemis settled on describing mentally as a cross between the accents of an American and an overdrive guitar. His pale white pate shone with reflected light, and Artemis imagined that if he jumped, the remaining strands of whitening hair would flop up and down with a childish indignity.
"Mankind has dreamt of the stars for ages. And today, more than ever, they are within the reach of our grubby hands…"
"Tell me exactly why I am here?"
"Lotus, you know that I can't trust my data mining programs anymore. They are far too inefficient. Centuries of isolation from the humans has left it dry of data with which I can optimize their searches."
"So you send a scouting team into an unsecured hostile area. How pleasant of you."
"Well, bearing responsibility for the continued superiority of the People's technology is not pleasant."
"I still don't understand though."
Lotus and Nigel hovered at twice head-height in the cramped hall, shielded, watching the unfolding show as Michael Poole kept talking onstage. "How," Nigel asked again, "did the Mud Men catch up on us?"
"Our technological expansions rapidly reached their limit. You know that our ionic modulation technologies have only ever been able to exploit the inherent chemical properties of the 92 naturally occurring elements – "
"Shhh," Lotus said.
"…stars. Yes, stars. Those big flaming balls out there, with unlimited space for humanity to grow and mature. Interstellar exploration has never been plausible. Even today, it is still a thing of the future. But now it is more than just a pipe dream, the interminable ranting of the science-fiction geeks. Now it is…"
"We didn't come here to hear you yap, Mike, we came to see you fly."
Laughter throughout the hall. "Fine. But we have to go, if not to the stars, at least throughout the Solar system. Another small step for mankind."
"Yeah, getting out of the way of the next big rock."
"The next dino killer. Maybe it's wandering in on its way from the Belt right now, with all our names written on it." A pause for dramatic effect, gaining none. "But hey, enough of my propagandizing. I'm not here for your votes, just your beer money, right?" More laughter. More prattle.
"…who have had to deal with limited resources on a finite ground surface, forcing their technology out of a punctuated-asymptotic trending rut – "
"Aquinas, I hate to say this, but between you and Mike, he's the nicer geek," Lotus suppressed a giggle.
Artemis suppressed a yawn. He was annoyed when his father had laughed along with the rest of the hall to Michael's lousy jokes. So he looked up, twiddling his fingers.
"But quantum physics has taken a quantum leap – " a little laughter, then embarrassed silence – "since the days of frizz-haired Einstein and E equals emm cee squared. General relativity is a kids' toy now since the high-dimensional approximations and mature M-theory have come around. I can't tell you exactly how this works, for much of it can't even be described in words. Any more than I'm telling you now and you'd al go psycho. But basically we've managed to throw some order into chaos in a certain application of the Kelvin-Riemann complex parametry by imposing a Skibosh matrix on some sixth-order dimensionality variables..."
Artemis stifled a laugh. He was Arnold Skibosh, a pseudonym thrown up over the Internet to conceal the fact that the world's top expert on semi-chaotic quantum logic was a 14-year-old boy.
"Wasn't that crystal clear? Simply put, the compression chamber at the heart of this revolutionary drive technology compresses low amounts of mass at enormous densities to form a complex mix of protons, electrons and force-carrying particles, which approximates the near-Big Bang state of the universe where our Grand Unified Theory holds, allowing us to liberate great amounts of kinetic energy with complex quantum interactions."
Michael was beginning to sound interesting. How had the matrix led Michael to such a disparate – but was that patch of ceiling funny?
There was a cloth covering a big box in the center of the grand stage. "Hey, Aquinas."
"But aren't we overdue for such a revolutionary – "
"AQUINAS!"
"Wha – yes, Lotus?"
"Can you scan that cloth thing there?"
"Actually, that was the first thing I scanned when you entered. Can't penetrate. At any radiation frequency. That thing looks practically impervious – "
When it slipped out of the cloth. And before the audience had time to process the event, the cloth had sagged to the ground, not in the slightest bit dragged by the box – that thing – that had effortlessly glid across the stage. Before the audience had time to gasp, the box was now behind Michael at the far right of the stage, and as it stopped, the shock wave of its movement pushed Michael into the podium.
"Whoa. Did you see that? That was a psol speed – "
"Psol? Aquinas, some English?"
"Percent speed of light. I can't believe it. That thing has forty psol. "
"Some perspective?"
"The old airspeed record, held by Julius Root, is just 0.6 psol."
The elves were struck speechless. Below, Michael recovered and spoke into the mike, "Ladies and gentlemen, the GUTdrive." Wild applause from the audience, who had never imagined anything could move that fast, not even Superman.
But suddenly Nigel found reason to speak again. "Aquinas, who's that boy?"
"Oh, him? Hmm… what do you know? He's a descendant of the great Artemis Fowl, forty generations down the line."
"Great? Don't you mean – "
"Shh, Lotus, don't look now, but he's staring at us."