Fifteen-year-old Mandi made her way to the basement where several washing machines were going. She walked over to the water heater and touched her hand lightly to the warning label.
She pulled her hand back to reveal a pinpoint of blood forming. The rectangle sticker glowed green, growing brighter until the words were no longer visible. Then suddenly it returned to normal. Silently the water heater began to lower into the ground, revealing a dark hallway. She descended a few stairs until she came to another wall, this one with a plaque reading:
Linus M. Conner's Center for Orphans
It was eye level to her and she gazed at them a moment before the undetectable light had scanned her eyes. As she waited, she whispered a password to the walls to let her in, and they did. The wall began to move to make a doorway for her, leading into a room full of busy people.
When Mandi Huttle walked through the once solid wall, no one noticed her. No one ever noticed Mandi, just like no one had ever noticed that Linus M. Conner's had built a few extra rooms underneath his Orphanage.
A man in a long white coat bumped into Mandi Huttle. "Oops! Sorry!" apologized the twenty something man.
"It's ok Spencer." The man looked down at the girl, realization dawning on his face.
"Well, well, well, what are you doing coming out of there? Decided you would try to make your job feel a little more interesting by using that old passageway?"
She held up her wrist showing a simple faux gold watch. "Actually I couldn't get a hold of anyone down here, or anywhere for that matter."
"You weren't using it in any extremely populated places, were you?" he asked, folding his arm in mock scolding as if she needed to be reminded not to use it in public.
She ignored him and began to walk off.
He didn't see the seriousness of the matter."I'm sure it's just a glitch." He assured her.
She spun around abruptly. "I made these watches. My stuff doesn't get glitches." She said like a dirty word.
As Mandi continued on her way, she tried to ignore the frustration and anxiety building up inside of her.
Someone had done something to her watch. No one ever did things to her devices unless she wanted them to.
As she reached her destination, a small room equipped with a television and instruments to play various devices, a man with flyer goggles over his eyes joined her.
"Hello there." greeted the man.
"Hi." She said, examining him without moving her eyes.
"And to what do I owe the pleasure?" The goggles made his eyes look beady and his breathing patterns told her he was nervous.
"These watches..." she said slowly, choosing her words carefully.
The man gave her a puzzled expression. "Your watch is broken?" he took it from her hands and examined the face. It had stopped at exactly four twenty. "Maybe the batteries need changing." He suggested.
She didn't answer. Instead she caught hold of the man's wrist in a firm grip. She brought it to her face and moved back the sleeve, revealing a silver watch set with emeralds. It was dead, the hands pointing directly to the four and the twelve.
"What a coincidence." She looked back at the man with a chilling glare.
The man looked uncomfortable. "Maybe there was a-an electromagnetic pulse."
She raised an eyebrow. "That was powerful enough to affected both of our watches but not your pacemaker?"
He swallowed hard. "Then perhaps the computers you hooked them up too..."
"Oh I supposed that all twenty of them malfunctioned at exactly the same time causing a big enough wave disturbance to knock our watches out."
It was true that most of the watches were connected to one or more or the company's supercomputers placed around the world but what this man didn't know was that hers was on a closed circuit and would not have been effected even if such an unlikely event had taken place.
In order for something of that scale to happen there would have to be a team of hackers working on each computer after completing the daunting task of locating the machines. They are some of the most secure databases in the world, which made them an ideal choice for her when she needed a reliable machine to keep all of the watches updated. The watches were extremely dependent on the function of those computers so theoretically if all of them were to simultaneously shut down it could shock the watches into failing. That or there was a mistake in the watches.
Mandi did not make mistakes.
"What do you know?" she asked the frightened man. She hadn't let go of his arm yet.
The man frowned "I didn't think this was possible, not after all of the security you put up."
"But..." she prompted, ignoring his compliment.
She released him and he closed and locked the door. He slipped a disc into a DVD player and watched as a picture of a boy her age came onto the screen.
"Artemis Fowl." She thought to herself. Her mind raced before he spoke to his record and capabilities.
"Hello Miss Huttle."
She was a bit surprised but listened intently.
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