The Prime Importance of a Happy Number
Sam Fleming
The world learned a new player had arrived with the Vanishing of Swindon’s infamous Magic Roundabout one sunny August Saturday. The Wiltshire and Berkshire Canal, upon which the roundabout had been built, reinstated itself over the course of seventy-nine seconds, replacing England’s most ridiculed junction with a seven-metre-wide stretch of churning, foetid, muddy, oily water containing twenty-three surprised frogs and one shocked heron. There were seven fatalities, thirteen seriously injured, and nineteen walking wounded.
It had been months since any decent villainous activity, years since a début. It was trending within the hour: #goodtrick and #uphissleeve.
The Internet, everyone agreed, could be a cruel place.
Criminal Intelligence relayed a request to Wiltshire Police in a somewhat awkward telephone call, asking them to scan camera footage looking for anyone making “abnormal physical contact with the pavement.” Unfortunately, Swindon Town Football Club had been playing Bristol City at home. The pitch was a skimmed stone away from the roundabout. It was impossible to tell if anyone was fondling tarmac in a suspicious manner or merely one of the casualties of too much celebration spilling from the nearby pubs.
Someone leaked the e-mail with predictable results, although even Criminal Intelligence had to admit it was funny.
In a small office in the corner of a building in Edinburgh’s Canongate, at the very moment the first frog blinked in amphibian bewilderment, a woman shuddered under the cold, hard, shivering-slick weight of fulfilled prophecy, and bent to her stack of origami paper with renewed focus.
Her name was Audrey.
* * *
The following week came the Miniaturisation of the Eiffel Tower for twenty-three hours, twenty-three minutes, and twenty-three seconds. News outlets fed greedily on the bait-ball that was 383 tourists trapped inside an edifice shrunk by a factor of 103 in less time than it had taken the frog to blink. The pictures showed suspicious dark stains glistening under the feet of the structure and seeping into jagged cracks where the ground had given way.
Just as the pundits had worked themselves up into full, frothing moral outrage and were using it as a mêlée weapon, and the French President was preparing his speech, the tourists reappeared at the Louvre, huddled together like a gaggle of geese, unharmed but subdued and suffering from shock. The dark stains had been no more than water from a sudden rainstorm that morning.
They popped back into existence outside the glass pyramid, which sent the conspiracy theorists into a frenzy. The rest of the Internet was content with #happyprime, #pi22decimals, and #definitelyuphissleeve.
Interpol relayed a query to the Direction Centrale de la Police Judiciaire at 11, Rue des Saussaies, Paris; unfortunately, CCTV failed to record anyone massaging the metalwork. Various anti-terrorist networks erupted in a flurry of desperate questions and data analysis, but the only thing they could agree on was that this could not be religious extremism. Magic was involved. Powerful magic. That went hand in hand with megalomania, not ideological fanaticism.
If only they knew.
* * *
Audrey looked up when Athelstan brought her a new box of paper and a mug of coffee. She stared right past him, but he was used to that. She did it to everyone.
“Is there anything I can do?” he asked.
“It’s starting,” she said. “Kenneth said it would. I can’t let it play out like last time. I can’t.”
She slid the box across her desk and split the seal with her thumbnail.
“You’ll be all right,” Athelstan said, seeing the tremor. “You’re ready.”
But Audrey had already sunk back down into the dark depths of her focus from where she would not or could not respond.
* * *
The mainstream media began making comparisons with the major villains of the last four decades, but only the male ones. Faced with ridicule, commentators observed that all previous supervillains making a spectacular appearance had been men; women tended towards Machiavellian manipulation and subverting traditional male roles in organised crime. This generated yet more arguments, a rash of doxing, and seventeen Kickstarters from both women and men wanting to prove that, with the right training, they could be major supervillains or beat the Mafia Witches at their own game.
#notallwizards happened.
Everyone agreed, should this supervillain turn out to be a woman, then of course she would be treated exactly the same way as all the male supervillains had been.
No one could specify what this was. No one actually knew what had happened to any of the supervillains. Apart from the Magpie. Everyone knew what had happened to him. It had been all over the newspapers, because he’d been all over the street.
Certain offices that did not exist sent messages to other offices that did not exist, using couriers who did not exist. Meetings did not take place and were not minuted. While this wasn’t happening, the villain—now referred to simply as “the Prime”—Transformed St Peter’s Basilica into an aquarium, complete with resident sharks. Nineteen of them, naturally.
Twitter said #jaws and #watnolasers #pewpewpew. The Pope asked the Internet for help in finding the 2,039 lost souls, while marine specialists and UNESCO archaeologists tried to work out how to remove the water and the sharks without damaging anything.
The Corpo della Gendarmeria dello Stato della Città del Vaticano received no request for information. How would they distinguish someone making the necessary contact for magical transformation from the merely devout?
Thus far there had been none of the usual demands: money, land, a private moon base, a place for a secret experiment on the next Mars mission. Talking heads asked the question, “What could someone with that kind of power actually want?” Pop psychologists suggested acceptance, respect, some kind of revenge for having his inner nerd rejected by his mother. The Internet consensus was #becausehecan.
An office marked as a broom cupboard on the third floor of an unremarkable building in London’s Docklands dispatched a handwritten note, affixed with a second-class stamp under which were inscribed certain runes, the Royal Mail having proved more reliable than pigeons. It landed, three hours later, on the doormat of a partially reconstructed castle in the wilds of western Sutherland, where a Jack Russell called Spare, in defiance of its magical protection, attacked it.
Spare’s owner, Kenneth Mackenzie, was much older than the spry seventy he looked. He retrieved the missive, now damp and smelling of Pedigree Chum, and took it to his study, where he finished Spare’s attempt to open the envelope.
The note was brief and to the point. He spent a few moments staring at his tall, wispy-haired reflection in the window and the unsettled waters of Loch Assynt beyond, aware of the concrete weight settling around his heart.
Kenneth, also known as the Brahan Seer, or Scotland’s Nostradamus—although no one had called him that in years, at least not to his face—poured himself a large Talisker. Audrey, her brother, and her parents spiralled around his Sight as they had done for the best part of two hundred years, only now it was guilt and regret that brought them, not prophecy. He’d been too old for the front line when somebody young and fresh would be there anyway.
The Sight hadn’t told him how young. How fresh.
How desperately close she would come to utter disaster.
He’d promised himself then he would not put her through another major début alone, but his Sight hadn’t told him how old and tired he would feel when it happened.
He picked up the phone and dialled a number from memory. Four hundred years really was too old. “Tell Audrey I’ll be in this afternoon,” he said to Athelstan.
He sipped the Scotch while he composed a reply to the Secret Service, detailing instructions in the neat roundhand he had learned as a boy. He sealed this inside a plain brown envelope, put runes where the stamp would go using a single hair from a weasel’s tail and ink made from iron gall, and dropped
it off in Lochinver post office on his way.
Mairi, the postmaster, gave him a sympathetic smile. “Have they called you in, then? We were wondering if they might.”
“Och, I’m retired,” he said. “Have been for years.”
The land up there grows canny folk. She wasn’t fooled. “You said that last time. Drive safely, a Coinnich.”
* * *
Speeding up the journey of a man is harder than that of a letter, and there were some aspects of living in the future for which Kenneth lacked all want. Flying was but one of them. It was a good three hours before he reached the office, even taking liberties with physics, the law, and the theoretical top speed of his Austin Healey Frog-Eyed Sprite.
Within two minutes of arrival, he was behind his desk with a pot of tea, a plate of custard creams, and Spare not quite Banished to his basket in the corner.
“Audrey,” he said to Athelstan, his secretary. “How is she?” He was almost afraid of asking.
“Origami,” said Athelstan. “Seven months now, nonstop. I’ve never seen anyone develop focus as precise as hers. As long as she has a supply of paper, she’s golden. We tried taking it away from her to give her a break, but gave it back when she blew up the coffee machine.”
“What did you do about that?”
“What do you think? This place runs on caffeine. We bought a new one. It’s much better than the old one. Audrey signed for it.”
“Good. Are she and Fiona getting on?”
“Getting there. We’re providing counselling. Fiona knows Audrey protected her from much worse. It was just hard for her, coming to terms with the fact her wife is—”
“A counter-villain Thaumaturge.”
“It’s a bit different from Health and Safety manager, and there’s that whole thing of Audrey being Audrey when she’s tapping her talent. She’d done a good job of hiding it until the Magpie got too lazy to avoid collateral damage. If he hadn’t taken her by surprise, Fiona would still be none the wiser, but you don’t really expect to see number three on the supervillain most-wanted list absconding from Jenners with three hostages and a backpack full of diamonds while you’re doing your Christmas shopping, do you?”
“Fiona was damn lucky Audrey was there!” Kenneth exclaimed. “As was everyone else, apart from the Magpie and the street cleaners. Would she be happier if Audrey were running the Mafia? Maybe it’s time we explained to Fiona what really happened to her wife’s family.” He scowled for a moment. “Anyway, I’m only here as a distraction.”
“Hagakure’s Inverse Importance Gambit?”
“Aye. We’ll need Matthew and Laura. Neither of them is after, you know …”
“Doing an Audrey? No. At this point, I think we can safely say they have neither the talent nor the ambition.”
“That’s a blessed relief.”
A young woman Kenneth vaguely recognised, her smartly tailored tweed suit and rock-hard bun marking her as one of the formidable admin team, entered and flicked on the flatscreen television on the wall with a disapproving expression. She left before Kenneth could say thank you.
The screen showed the latest trends, one of which was #pipipipigeons. Athelstan watched several of the linked videos, all of which were varyingly short films of various pigeon flocks, mouth moving as if he had something stuck between his front teeth.
“They’ve used the right ones. The numbers are good,” Athelstan said. He would know. He was as talented with numbers as Audrey was with the other.
“Then he should be here soon, unless he’s potent enough to fill cathedrals with fish, but his numbers come from Wikipedia.”
“If he turns up today, we may have a problem.”
“Let’s hope he doesn’t. Gather the troops.”
* * *
The Prime arrived the following day. Athelstan fetched him from reception.
Kenneth took his place in the conference room, feeling more ancient than ever. The years sat in his bones as if they were petrified wood, and stretched away around him like an endless city inhabited by ghosts and flickering memories. He could think of a thousand things he would rather be doing at that very moment. A thousand thousand.
But some things he couldn’t refuse, no matter how old he felt. At least, not more than once, not if he valued sleeping at night. Audrey needed him for the talking, for the distraction. It wasn’t a big ask, considering.
Not that she had.
She sat beside him, busy folding paper aeroplanes from a stack of paper taller than her coffee mug. She was thinner than she had been when Kenneth last saw her, pinch-faced and pale, hazel eyes bright with restless exhaustion. She’d hacked at her grey-sprinkled ash-brown hair with a straight razor; it stood up in ragged tufts. Kenneth could see her talent seethe and bubble, barely controlled, held in check by the act of turning paper into darts. It reminded him of the Corryvreckan tidal race, fizzing and churning with the power of a remorseless ocean facing down an uncaring gale at spring tide. Her fingers worked incessantly, quick and nimble, folding each sheet precisely before dropping it on the floor and taking another. She was already ankle deep.
When he touched her arm, she could give him no more than a brief smile before returning her focus to her planes. He could only hope this was a good sign.
Ambrosius Wilt, as he introduced himself over a perfunctory handshake, was tall and gangly, with an unruly crop of ginger hair, freckles, and hands that were far too large. When he sat down after examining the chair for booby traps, the furniture seemed too small for him.
Matt and Laura appeared shortly after, bringing cups and tea and coffee and biscuits before sitting on the side of the table nearest the refreshments.
“This is Audrey,” Kenneth said. “She runs things when I’m not around.”
Ambrosius made no attempt at hiding his doubt, not even for politeness.
“This is Matt and Laura. They do bits and bobs and such.”
Ambrosius nodded, uninterested.
“I’m—”
“I know who you are,” Ambrosius said. “You’re Kenneth Mackenzie, the Merlin of the North. I’ve wanted to speak with you for years.”
“Does anyone know how to make that paper aeroplane that’s made of two hoops joined together?” Audrey asked. There was a moment of silence, then Laura and Matt began chatting about something they’d seen on television.
“I’m flattered, I’m sure,” Kenneth said. Audrey dropped her latest paper dart and took another sheet from the pile. “What cause is at you for speaking with me?”
“Everything! How ugly and banal and stupid the world has become! How blind its people are. Look at us! We’re men of means, you and I. We can do things most people lack the imagination even to contemplate, and what do we do with it?”
“In your case,” Kenneth said, “turn cathedrals into shark tanks.”
“That was just to get your attention.” Ambrosius gave a dismissive wave. “I’d already tried less interesting demonstrations. Everyone thought I was aiming to be the next big thing in street illusion. I was compared to Derren Brown. I was compared”—he leaned forwards, complexion reddening with fury—“to David Blaine. I’ve had an invitation to join the Magic Circle, would you believe?”
Kenneth gestured to Matthew, who poured him a cup of tea. “Did you accept?”
“What? No! Why would I? I don’t want to waste my time with pointless tricks and chicanery.”
“I see.” Kenneth sipped his tea. Matthew and Laura were still quietly discussing the previous night’s episode of some Scandinavian crime drama. He gave no impression of minding. “Are you any good at matrix algebra?”
He took a sugar cube from the bowl and tossed it at Ambrosius, who caught and examined it as if it might bite.
“I can manage. I derived your address from the pigeons, didn’t I?” Ambrosius pointedly dropped the sugar cube into his coffee.
Laura broke from her conversation and wrote this down.
“What about the chemical formula for hydro
carbon combustion?” Kenneth threw another sugar cube. Ambrosius set it alight, making it explode in a puff of dull orange-black, acrid burnt-caramel smoke.
“Really, though,” Audrey said. “Does anyone know how to do that paper plane that’s made of hoops?”
Kenneth and his staff ignored her. Despite the intensity in her eyes, Ambrosius took his cue from them. “I don’t, no,” he said. “Things burn just fine nevertheless.”
Laura noted this, too. Kenneth pondered for a few moments. “How do you feel about custard creams?” he asked.
The others fell silent. Even Audrey stopped her incessant origami and listened, as if there were no more important question in the world.
Ambrosius broke the stillness with a single word. “What?”
“For or against?”
“I can’t say I’ve ever thought about it. Against?”
There was a murmur of disappointment. Laura made more notes. Audrey’s fist clenched tight around the half-finished dart, crumpling it into a ball. She started a new one.
Kenneth heaved a sigh. “Fetch some more tea, would you, Matthew, please?” he asked. Matthew nodded and left. “Then I’m left with asking you what you want, as if it makes any difference.”
Ambrosius rolled his eyes. “At last! I want to prove to you I have what it takes to work for you. Work with you. You’ve seen what I can do. I have the talent and skill, I’m self-motivated and ambitious. With your help, there’s no limit to what I could achieve. Global warming? I could fix it. World peace? A bit more training, and there will be no war anywhere ever again.”
“All very laudable, I’m sure.” Kenneth finished his tea, taking his time, deconstructing a custard cream into two halves and licking the filling away before nibbling on the biscuits with exaggerated enjoyment. Laura drew an exceptional likeness of Spare.
Matthew returned, new cups and a fresh pot on a silver tray. He had almost put it down when Kenneth asked if he’d remembered the biscuits. As he turned, the tray followed a trajectory that should have seen it smack forcefully into Ambrosius’s head; instead, it slid off, cups barely rattling.
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