I thought it was natural that he would turn to me. We had a connection, you see - child prodigies bound by fate to share in the secret of the hidden world below us.
Twenty-three years before the death of Artemis Fowl.
Professor Paradizo was a chalk-and-talk kind of lecturer, an increasingly rare sort in the age of PowerPoint. She currently stood in front of an old lecture hall in Building 35 of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the elevated and steeply-sloped seating section before her almost made it appear as if she was looking up at a wall composed of her audience and their red-backed chairs.
"As we discussed last time, when extremely-low-probability space-time warps occur, a tachyon emission occurs. Emissions of such particles would send them simultaneously into the past and to the future."
She quickly drew a pair of plot axes on the board.
"These emissions can give us information about a warp event before it occurs."
She began filling in the plot with a set of elegant curves in yellow chalk. The curves traced around and around the confines of the plot, drawing out a pair of connected diagonal spirals that resembled butterfly wings.
"In the classical Lorenz system," she said as she continued to trace the contours of the plot, "we can get a reading here." The professor pointed at a seemingly random location on the left spiral. "But we do not know where the corresponding warp will appear. Current measurement precision and dynamical models generally only limit a detectable emission to a warp that would occur somewhere within about thirty light years and the next five millennia. In other words, we know something big is going to happen, but we have no way of pinning down where or when it will happen. This makes the technique slightly less useful than a crystal ball."
A smattering of chuckles sounded from the audience.
Minerva was about to continue when a motion in the back of the room caught her eye. A dark-haired man in an impeccably fitted, black Armani suit quietly closed the door behind himself as he came in, sliding gracefully into a chair off to the side.
Her eyes widened a bit in surprise, and she paused, staring a bit longer than she had intended. The man smiled, and she could have sworn she saw him wink at her.
'You sure have interesting timing…' she mused to herself as she swept her eyes back to the rest of the classroom and got back to the subject.
"We were stuck with this crystal ball gazing - making grand claims without any serious precision - until the Paradizo-Fowl method was developed." Though tempting, she decided not to immediately draw attention to the man who had arrived late to her talk. Instead, she started drawing another plot to the right of the first one.
"It is a method that allows us to transform what we see in the usual phase space into a much more tightly constrained set of space-time coordinates." Minerva swept a series of arrows over from the first plot to the second, but though they started out in different places on the left, they ended up at the same point on the right.
"Instead of light-years and millennia, we now can pin these warps down to meters and seconds."
She paused to let that sink in. Meters and seconds - that's how accurate she and Artemis had independently gotten the demon appearances before the Hybras landing down to.
"In case you were wondering," she said with a smirk, "while the Paradizo-Fowl method was simultaneously discovered by Dr. Artemis Fowl and myself, we came to an agreement about the naming of it after realizing that the alternative name of Fowl-Paradizo could be construed in an unfortunate way in English."
There was another bit of laughter in the audience.
"But perhaps," she said with a sigh, "in some ways it is still unfortunately named, since I am French, and we flip our nouns and adjectives compared to the English. There may be a lesson in there about how you choose to win your battles."
"What is it that you say in English? 'Fancy seeing you here?'"
Minerva reached forward to give Artemis Fowl a light hug, and a brief kiss on each cheek. Age had filled out Artemis somewhat. He stood a few inches taller than Minerva, and was slightly more broad-shouldered than he had been as a teenager. Some things didn't change though. His skin remained pasty-white, and his raven hair was still neatly combed back as always. Both eyes appeared blue though. Minerva remembered when he had taken to wearing contact lenses in public to avoid the extra attention.
Fowl smiled and shrugged his shoulders a little.
"I happened to be at a conference on the other end of campus, and just remembered you were here on sabbatical."
The professor rolled her eyes. Rare was the day that Artemis Fowl "just remembered" anything.
"I may have also come by to chat about something else," admitted Artemis more seriously. "Perhaps we can talk over lunch?"
Minerva grinned mischievously.
"Is that a date then, Dr. Fowl?" she asked, lowering her head and batting her eyelashes quickly.
Artemis froze. Highest tested IQ in Europe or not, he was still at a loss at that one.
Minerva laughed. "Je plaisante, mon cher. You are far too amusing. Yes, lunch, my treat."
She pulled her bag over her shoulder and smiled at the Irishman as she gestured towards the door.
"Shall we?"
Space-time magic, it seemed, was really mostly just about probabilities. Minerva Paradizo knew that it was possible for wormholes to simply appear, seemingly out of nowhere. She had spent a good amount of time hunting them down when she was looking to capture a demon. Physics said it was absurdly, terribly unlikely that such a thing would happen, but powerful fairy warlocks seemed to be able to reach out to the extreme ends of the probabilities and pluck an event out into existence. Hence, teleportation, time travel, and maybe even healing.
It would have probably helped if she had simply asked a warlock about such magic, but Minerva had the feeling that she wasn't the People's favorite Mud Woman, and even if she was, they probably wouldn't have told her anyway. She also had some suspicion that the People didn't quite understand the magic themselves, or else - peace-loving races or not - it would have been fairies, and not humans, who ruled the surface of the Earth.
So as it was, Minerva had worked for a number of years now, trying to blur the line between science and magic. It was just such a pity that the major verification of the work that she and Artemis had done - the prediction of demon appearances before the return of Hybras - had to be presented to the scientific community as pure theory, to avoid any mention of the People.
At the moment though, Minerva was more focused on working on her coffee, which was a light brown affair: three sugars, two milks, and a palm tree pattern made of foam on the surface up until about a minute ago.
Lunch had occurred at The Miracle of Science, a small establishment a few blocks north of the main campus of the Institute. The pair took seats by the west window, through which the traffic on Massachusetts Avenue could be seen whizzing by. A waitress had just cleared away their plates, leaving each person with just a drink.
"You are proposing that we detect disasters in their natural timelines by their tachyon bursts." Minerva fixed Fowl with a stare, which Artemis returned evenly.
"Mass deaths, to be more precise," said the man. "My calculations show that the death of a lifeform in a timeline should produce a small tachyon burst - a sort of marker at that point not all that different from the warp bursts we predicted from the Hybras event. A large disaster event should produce a proportionately large burst."
Minerva stared at her coffee for a long time as she tried to process Artemis' proposal. After a while, she took a sip, and sighed.
"Je ne sais pas, Artemis," she said as she wrapped her hands around her mug again, before turning her eyes up to look at the man across the table, "the Hybras appearances were just so much more powerful. They cut into our timeline rather… savagely… which was why it was so easy to see them even months or years in advance. While I admit there is some merit to the appearance of such tachyon bursts, what you want to look for… this is just too subtle of an effect."
Artemis made a sound that was almost a snort. Technically, Minerva was right. At a space-time level, the tachyon burst released by the kind of event he was thinking of would barely register as a blip in the past if it happened within its natural timeline.
Still, it felt a little wrong to talk about mass deaths as a "subtle" event.
"Of course," agreed the Irishman, "but you still haven't taken into account the personal component. It should make not only detection of these events easier, but also the transport of a person to the event quite possible."
He ran his fingers through his raven hair and bit his bottom lip in thought, a habit that Minerva found extremely, and very pleasantly distracting. He probably had no idea.
"There is, somehow, in all that mess of quantum soup, some kind of connection…" he continued, "an affinity, or an entanglement of some kind that makes space-time magic personal," he continued. "For the most powerful feats of magical transport to be done, there has to be some sort of connection between the person being transported, and where he or she ends up. I suspect that the more powerful the connection, the less energy is required. Otherwise, any magical being would just be zipping to and fro across time and space without issue, but it's clear that they don't do that. Or at least, as far as we know."
"But then what about Hybras? Surely the demons didn't have a connection to Limbo." asked Minerva. It always came back to Hybras. Everything always came back to Hybras for her.
Artemis waved a hand dismissively.
"They had a volcano. That's access to more energy than they knew what to do with. That, and the spell was poorly constructed to begin with. Qwan once told me that more of the complexity of the spell went into dissipating the volcano's energy than what actually went into sending the island to Limbo. If it were me, I would have put the island on the moon. Much more energy-efficient, and the demons have a natural lunar affinity anyway. But with so much energy, it was probably like firing a cannon with too much gunpowder - no aim, all bang, and you accidentally rip a hole outside of time while you're at it. It's a miracle they survived at all."
Minerva leaned forward, some of her loose golden curls swung down and just missed her coffee. She moved her coffee to one side. No need to embarrass herself in front of Artemis.
"But that's just it," she said, "It does require huge amounts of energy, and it is imprecise, as far as we can do it. The last man-made event that might have been able to trigger a detectable temporal ripple was the Tsar Bomba test purely because of the energy. Even if we could send something, or someone into the future with this technique, odds are, they'll just end in the middle of some explosion. I know you think it's some kind of personal entanglement effect, but I just really don't see how we can quantify a 'connection,' as you say."
Minerva wanted to believe him, she really did.
"There are stories," said Artemis, "of twins, and siblings, and couples, where one was somehow able to sense the suffering of the other, even when separated by continents. I believe we can not only pin down the basis for this effect, but also see it ahead of time."
The woman nodded.
"Oui, c'est vrai, I have heard these stories as well," she agreed, though part of her still felt like it was a wild goose chase. She saw the intensity in Fowl's eyes and felt herself getting excited despite her doubts. It had been a long time since she had seen that from Artemis. She patted his folded hands with one of her own, and smiled what she hoped was a reassuring smile. "If anyone can figure it out, it shall be us."