THE MEMORY FILES
By (D'ARVIT) TYRANNY

(unspecified gesture of greeting)

A FEW AUTHOR'S NOTES:
Motive: The completed fic will be submitted to Criminality (criminality.popullus.net) for the March-April Challenge. The challenge is to write an original fic that involves Foaly looking in on Artemis' memories. Obviously post-EC.
Status: Chaptered story in progress, final chapter (2 or 3?) will be posted before the end of April. HOPEFULLY. It's already April 25 today, and I seriously doubt that I can finish it. If I can't, then it won't be submitted to Crim. I'll do my best. (Wish me luck, people. Or hire me a set of Time-Stopping Warlocks.)
Dedication: For all the brilliant individuals I've met throughout my life, but forgotten. I probably miss you.
(unspecified gesture of affection)

(thanks and hugs a few random people, including a teddy bear named Chix)

(directs reader's attention away from disclaimer and to Chapter 1 below)

[DISCLAIMER: I hereby disclaim owning/selling/etceteraing anything Artemis Fowl. They are all property of Eoin Colfer. I can't believe you actually read disclaimers, you reallyboredperson, you.]

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CHAPTER ONE: RUMMAGING

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Haven City, The Lower Elements

Foaly the centaur, after working seven straight days in the Ops booth, was on his way home. He was getting two whole days off work. A paycheck for sixty ounces of bullion was resting in his chest pocket. Inside the slim, password-protected, booby-trapped, reinforced steel wallet. Foaly patted it fondly. At least Root paid him the overtime. Generously and promptly, too, which Foaly noted, was a first.

There had been a massive disturbance the week before, when a gang of goblins from the B'wa Kell triad broke out of Howler's Peak. All because the newly employed and apparently nearsighted caretaker mistook 'Cell 4R' for the 'cellar'. Needless to say, it had been hectic business for the LEP to recapture the thirteen rogues, and Foaly had been plastered on every officer's screen and buzzing in every earpiece, doing his... Foaly thing. Everyone was on overtime. The whole fiasco was only solved this morning. That particular caretaker had been duly sacked. Foaly offered the despondent elf an alternate identity and a one-way transit to Atlantis. The elf took it. Foaly pitied him, but not enough to resist sending the elf on a shuttle that flooded up when you flushed the toilet.

Foaly gave a morbid chuckle. Frond, he was tired.

He coasted down the floodlight-lit street on his centaur-sized, motorized scooter. Another one of his inventions. This one, however, was exclusive. It ran ultra-smooth thanks to a pump of xenon in the wheels. The handles were perfect height and gripping size. The control panel included a GSP, enemy radar, and Packman game. There were hoof massagers. Foaly loved it. He named it Cootie.

It was early in the afternoon. Foaly was and his prized Cootie were gliding down Westbrook tunnel, which was uncommonly quiet. The rush hour had yet to kick in. A few young fairies were drifting their way home from school, walking in clusters of two or three, chattering like chipmunks. When Foaly whizzed past them, the children looked up at the centaur in awe. Centaurs were a rare sight, even in a city like Haven. A centaur on wheels was an altogether rarity. And Foaly, being the hermitic LEP Operations Booth controller and Cootied ponyman that he was, was an once-in-a-lifetime sight. Which was saying something, since most fairies lived a millennia.

Foaly felt magnificently conceited. Passing by another group of young ones, he smiled loftily, lifted a hand, and gave it a regal wave. The little fairies hushed and waved back shyly, their eyes shining. Foaly was gleeful. He felt like a parade spectacle. Miss Lower Elements of the Year.

Foaly chucked to himself again. This time, it sounded truly demented.

Frond, he needed some sleep.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Fowl Manor, Dublin

Artemis Fowl the Second woke up in his bed. He sat up. He glanced at the luminescent LED numbers on his digital clock by his bedside table. It read 5:29 AM. Artemis had only been asleep for about four hours, but his assiduous subconscious ticked with such accuracy that alarm clocks were a mere precautionary. For that occasional one-minute, two-minute lapse. His metabolism was already taking an upwards swing. Artemis got nimbly off his antique four-poster and turned the clock off before it heralded in 5:30 with its high-pitched bleeping.

He then went over to his desk and touched the cursor pad of his laptop. The screensaver dissolved.

Five months ago, Artemis, frustrated with the ineptitude of Internet search engines, had programmed The Hunter 1.0 - a mammoth, multilingual search tool that delved into every nook and cranny of human cyberspace. Not a byte was left unscanned. Not a trace of the searcher's IP address or digital residue was left either.

Of course, Artemis did not disclose this type of technology to the world in general yet. There was still debugging to do, and a company had yet to present to him a reasonable offer. He was also contemplating giving version 2.0 the power to hack into hard drives. If that were to happen, the program wouldn't be finished for at least another year.

Artemis particularly liked the subtle allusion of The Hunter to his own name. Artemis, goddess of the hunt, from Greek mythology. The name came to him as something of a deja vu, as if he'd used it somewhere before. He had racked his memory and remembered nothing. A slight lapse within his own mind, perhaps. Artemis hoped not. One could not afford a mind lapse at a time like this.

The Hunter was running on the twenty-inch LCD screen. 965 billion gigabytes scanned. 18 billion gigabytes left. Estimated time: 1 hour. Results: 2,105.

Artemis sighed, pulled off his pyjamas, and put on a set of cotton Polo pants and shirt. He wanted coffee. Butler was no doubt still asleep. Juliet too. He'd have to get the coffee himself. There were over two thousand sites to sort through later. Manually. One thing Artemis still hated about computers - they were stupid, illogical robots. They were unable to think for themselves or make deductions from a set of data or a passage of text. Computers did the gruelling work. Humans did the analyzing stuff. They were complements of a whole. Partners in crime.

Artemis mused. A cognitive computer. Now, there was a billion-dollar idea.

He glanced again at the screen.

Results: 2,106.

No. He needed coffee first. Artemis walked to the bedroom door.

A faint 'ding' sounded from the laptop's internal speakers. Artemis rushed over. A window had popped up. New e-mail. Artemis read the subject heading and grinned shrewdly.

An answer from Limerick. It was about time.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

East Bank, Haven City

It was Saturday morning, if you could call it morning, living underground. There was no sunlight. The dim, orange glow from the city lights outside still shone like it always did. At any rate, the clock read 8:55 AM, and thus morning by fairy standards.

Foaly yawned and stretched luxuriously in his bed. He had slept for fifteen hours. Uninterrupted. It must have been a record. He hugged his pillow, still groggy from over-sleeping, and buried his face into its downy softness. How he missed his nice, nice bed. How he missed those days when his consciousness wasn't under the tyranny of caffeine. How he missed these supposedly work-free weekends.

Foaly hadn't taken a full two days off work for a decade. He came close, several times, though. Just last year he came home for the weekend and made it to Sunday morning before Root rang in. A street fight in downtown Haven. Several casualties, many escaped delinquents, illegal drugs, and a troll involved. Ah... It was close.

9:00 AM. Still Saturday. If Root was going to force him back into the Ops booth ahead of schedule again, as usual, he'd better make the best of whatever time he had.

Foaly kicked off the covers and rolled off his bed, landing unceremoniously in a heap on the floor. He rearranged his many limbs and stood up languidly, then cantered over to the washroom. There, he liberated his bladder, shaved, and got clean. It felt good to use toothpaste again.

Breakfast was a pleasant affair of fruit juice and glazed carrot cake, fresh from the bakery delivercraft. Foaly savoured each and every morsel and even licked his fingers. He laughed inwardly at what his mother would say if she could see him now. Eating off the phone. His mother, Marey, was one of those food pyramid, rubber glove mums. But once a button presser, always a button presser. It was a fact. Foaly sighed contently, walked sluggishly to the dishwasher, and pressed a few more buttons.

Then, the phone rang. Foaly groaned. He checked the time. It was Saturday morning, 10:20 AM. Root was truly a nefarious little autocrat. Foaly clip-clopped slowly to his desk, and put on the cordless headset with much trepidation.

"Hello," Foaly said with an annoyed, hostile tone he usually reserved for telemarketers.

"FOALY!" Root's voice boomed at him in greeting.

Foaly clenched his teeth. "Do you know how much I hate hearing your voice on my home phone, Julius?" he said quite brazenly.

Root laughed maddeningly hard on the other end. Foaly balled up a fist and took a furious swipe at the air. Instead of venting off his anger, he only managed gain too much momentum, propel himself off-balance, then crash and topple over a CD rack. CD cases cascaded over his head, shattered against the floor, and the CDs themselves wheeled deviously away to all sorts of impossible places like under the sofa and in the cracks between adjacent bookshelves. It did not help that Root kept laughing. Foaly shook off the broken cases with a clatter and collapsed onto his specially modified swivel chair.

"What in the name of Frond was that?" Root asked.

"Oh, ah... just the film projector," Foaly replied breezily, picking out a piece of plastic that got lodged in his forehead. "I'm watching old Atlantis Radicals Board Meeting tapes. Surprisingly entertaining stuff. You should come over and watch them together with me sometime."

"Actually, Foaly..." Root began.

"And that reminds me!" Foaly interjected before Root could utter his excuse to bully Foaly back to the Police Plaza, "I have a shuttle that leaves for Atlantis in five minutes and I won't be back until Sunday. Midnight, most like. Sorry, Julius, but I'm going to be late. I'll talk to you Monday, shall I? Please do enjoy your weekend!" he finished sweetly, then terminated the conversation.

Perfect, Foaly thought, waltzing towards the kitchen for a carrot. A weekend of online snooker and singles' chatrooms awaited him.

The phone rang. Again.

He went back to his desk and, this time, wisely chose to check the caller ID beforehand. 'Lo and behold: Root. Foaly snickered, tutted through buckteeth, and scarpered back into the kitchen, letting the answering machine take the call.

The machine clicked, then bleeped. Root's ungainly voice filled the room.

"Foaly, you donkey!" Root bellowed in extreme decibels, "I wasn't going to force you to weekend shifts simply for my perverse amusement this time around!" In the kitchen, Foaly gasped melodramatically, slipped on the checkered linoleum, and clutched the counter for support. "I was about to ask you to find a couple of your videos - not that Atlantis Radicals rubbish - and I'll come over tonight with Ariel and a flagon of brew. Thought you might enjoy a night getting drunk with us, but if you'd rather wallow behind your anti-social Plexiglas and mooch through singles' chatrooms- "

Foaly had put on the headset by this time and turned on the line.

" -then that's fine by me, so don't blame me when- "

"Julius!" Foaly interrupted, a maudlin grin on his face, "I never knew you cared!"

"Huh? Oh, hello. And I never knew you were daft enough to keep calling me by my first name, you ass. That sixty-ounce check can still be made void by me at any moment."

Foaly laughed evasively and then cleared his throat. "Well, anyways, I'll find the videos. You and Ariel come over at six, alright?"

Root grunted in agreement.

"Excellent. I'll call for food too. Do you guys prefer Dacheepo's or Larichie's take-out?"

"Whatever's fine with me. Ariel is allergic to seafood, though, don't forget."

"Dacheepo's it is, then. Marigold gives me a ten-percent discount there, so all the better. Anything else to be arranged?"

"Real vids, Foaly. Not the sleazy stuff I know you buy at retail prices."

Foaly remained unabashed. "You're developing a sense of humour, Julius. I never would have believed it possible a while ago. Just goes to show that spending quality time with remarkable people like myself pays off, doesn't it."

Root snorted. The sound was rolling rush of static over the phone.

"You keep your wise cracks to yourself, now. You don't want me to invent a disaster for you to attend to."

"You wouldn't."

"Try me."

Foaly pursed his lips, contemplated the chances, and then decided that with temperamental people like Root, the risk wasn't worth taking.

"I'll see you at six, then, you lovely thing," Foaly said.

"At six, donkeyboy."

They hung up. Foaly laughed to himself. Forgetting about his mid-morning carrot, he skated about on the chair on his belly, fishing the disks off the ground. He dumped them onto the empty kitchen counter and sorted them carefully back in their cases. There were a few worthy DVDs here, but none of them fell exactly in the category Root called 'real vids'. Foaly thought it might be fun to play one of the sleazier ones, just because Root said specifically not to.

But then again, pulling that off when Root's ex-wife was around would be utterly criminal. Foaly winced at the thought. And besides, it was still Saturday. Root would have even more reason to order him back to work first thing Sunday morning.

Reasoning outweighed impulse, and Foaly put the offending disks away.

Still on the wheelie chair, Foaly rolled over to a large cabinet beside the film projector. Here was his stockpile of the videos he never watched. In other words, the videos that were rated PG, or rated A for coarse language and violence. Julius Root material. Foaly wrenched open the bottom shelf.

The face of Artemis Fowl the Second suddenly loomed out at him from the shadows. He was staring straight at Foaly. Smiling. With that trademark craft.

Foaly gave a great gasp, and fell off his specially modified swivel chair.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Downtown Dublin, Ireland

Artemis was staring at a centaur. One with buckteeth.

Indeed, Artemis thought to himself, suppressing a sigh of exasperation, has it really come to this?

The car suddenly stopped and Artemis' body lurched forward slightly. His fingers slipped on the Delete button. Annoyed and feeling unsuitably dishevelled, he craned his neck to frown at Butler in the rearview mirror.

Butler, who was driving the Bentley, was wearing sunglasses, but obviously caught the glare. "Sorry, Artemis. The weekend traffic is horrendous in the downtown area. Chock full of tourists."

"Evidently," Artemis replied testily. He turned back to the laptop before him.

Three French girls scuttled out of the way with their shopping bags and the car hastened forth once again.

Artemis took another look at the centaur. The centaur's vapid, grinning face looked back at him. Artemis felt disgusted, and sent the entire HTML document 'Faerie Humbug for the Humbly Gullible' to the Recycling Bin once and for all. All the embedded files shuttled away with it.

There was serious debugging to be done with The Hunter, Artemis thought. The keyword harmoniser was still far too sensitive.

Artemis restored the search window. There were 1,840 webpages left to analyze. It was only Saturday 12:30 PM. At this rate, he would be finished the primary inspection by Sunday night.

Undaunted by the continuous flops, Artemis clicked the next match.

The Bentley stopped again.

"We're here," Butler said, shutting off the engine.

Artemis glanced out the tinted, bulletproof windows. A steady drizzle was starting, and many tourists were dodging into coffee shops and souvenir stores. There was a small restaurant on the corner called The Dancing Leprechaun. Even from across the street, Artemis could make out a man's face - a face Butler had shown him in a photograph, many months ago - staring out from the restaurant window. The man was waiting at a small table for three.

Butler got out first, and opened a large, black umbrella. He then opened Artemis' door.

Artemis quickly saved his search and closed his laptop, then stepped out into the cool Irish rain. They made their way across the street to The Dancing Leprechaun.

The laptop's external covering was smooth and adamant under his fingers. It was the feeling of a hard and assiduous challenge. Artemis gripped it tightly. His mouth was a grim line.

Artemis hoped drearily that this man from Limerick, Calvin Mason, would be more accommodating of factual information. On his part.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

East Bank, Haven City

It was a photo. Foaly gave a shaking laugh, picking up the large, glossy print from his disarrayed position on the floor. Just a photo. Frond, that sure gave him a scare. Since when did the infamous Artemis Fowl take to playing hide-and-seek in other people's video cabinets?

Impulsively, Foaly looked around to see if anyone saw him fall off the chair.

Instantly horrified at doing something as stupid as looking around to see if anyone saw him fall off his chair in an apparently otherwise empty room, Foaly looked around impulsively to see if anyone saw him doing just that.

There was no one. Foaly was relieved, and returned back to the cabinet.

He picked up a boxed set of ten disks that was under the photo. There was a printed label.

Fowl, Artemis Jr., The Memory Files. Eleven years, 2 months - Thirteen years, 5 months. Copy one. Mind-wipe conducted by Foaly the Centaur on August sixteenth, the year 12014 of Frond. Total data: 13 years, 3 months; 613 GB. Sensory functions disabled. Three dimensional enhancement and surround sound.

Foaly rubbed his palms together in anticipation. He fluked a bonanza. If this wasn't considered first-rate entertainment, he didn't know what was.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

A/N: Reviews are extremely welcome, as always. If you could take the time to write one, it would be much appreciated.
Thank you for reading chapter one. (hugs yournamehere)