by Wen Spencer
“Who are you,” Louise asked, “and what have you done with my sister?”
Jillian stuck out her tongue. “I know that Esme is still alive out there someplace, but it’s like she’s dead. She’s gone and never coming back, and that’s a lot like dead and buried. Taking Fritz would be like destroying him, too.”
“I would take him. I would want the company. My kid can get her own blanket.”
Jillian laughed and waved the odd piece of metal. “Well, that explains this box then. She took all the cool stuff and only left us this garbage.”
Louise held out her hand, and Jillian gave her the mystery item. “I think it’s an old computer part. They used to have all sorts of cables and plugs and things.” She took out her phone and took several photos of it. “I’ll run it through Whatsit.”
Jillian spread the 2D photographs out onto the bedspread. They were portraits of three men, two boys, and a woman whose eyes had been masked by black Magic Marker. Between the glossy photos was a folded scrap of paper. Jillian unfolded the note and read it. “Beware the Empire of Evil. They will destroy everything you love to get ahold of you.”
Louise shivered. “That is seriously creepy.” She picked up the photo of a man in a space suit, patches identifying him as one of the NASA astronauts, apparently from before the Chinese took dominance in space. The patches were too small to read no matter how hard she squinted at them. “Wow, these are old. There are no digital tags to identify these people. What you see is all you get.”
“There’s writing on the back,” Jillian said.
Louise flipped the photo over. “How low tech. She went into space when?”
“Eighteen years ago. What does it say?”
“‘The King of Denmark, Neil Shenske.’ I think this is Esme’s father. Her bio said that her father was an astronaut. This is our grandfather.”
“We’re Danish princesses?” Jillian was obviously wavering between fantastical possibility and the logic that princesses weren’t born from abandoned embryos. Louise was riding the same emotional rollercoaster.
“Nothing on Esme said anything about her being a princess.” Louise forced herself to point out the most logical evidence they had.
They both did searches, racing to find more information.
“American astronaut, inspired by Apollo Moon shots, flew two space-shuttle missions.”
“Born in Ohio. Went to MIT. Married Anna Cohan. Had two daughters, Lain and Esme.”
“He was killed in a drive-by shooting at a science fair at an inner-city school. Esme was four when he died.”
“I’m not finding any reference to him being the king of Denmark.”
“He’s not even Danish.”
Louise flipped the photo and frowned at the words. “Maybe it’s some kind of code.”
“What do the others say?” Jillian picked up the photo of a dark-haired young man who looked like a movie star caught in a candid moment, his focus intently on something off-camera. Jillian read the back and giggled.
“What does it say?”
“‘Crown Prince Kiss Butt of the Evil Empire.’” Jillian giggled more. “It also says, ‘Yes, you’re smarter, but he’s sadistic and short-tempered. Don’t get snarky with him.’ Esme must have thought we’d be snarky as well as clever. We’re not snarky.”
“Elle Pondwater thinks we’re snarky.”
“Elle is rarely right about anything. Besides, snarky is not genetic.”
Louise rather thought it might be but didn’t want to argue the point. The two blond boys were more average looking. There was, however, a strong family resemblance with the crown prince. “Flying Monkey Four and Five. Where are one, two, and three?”
Jillian shrugged, and they made sure there were no other photos, either still in the box or somehow stuck to the others. Esme had drawn black Magic Marker across the eyes of the woman and trailed it off so the line nearly looked like cloth ribbon blindfolding her. Louise studied the photo, trying to understand their mother. What was the point of a photo if they couldn’t see all of the woman’s face? The black line did emphasize the woman’s elegance. Her mouth was flawlessly defined by lipstick into a perfect bow that nature hadn’t blessed her with. She had a strong, determined chin. Every hair of her pale blond bob was in place. She wore a black silk blouse and an amber teardrop necklace. The back of her photo read: “Queen Gertrude of Denmark, blind to her husband’s crimes led to Hamlet’s death. Careful, lest her blindness lead to your capture.”
“Hamlet?” Louise said. “Like the play? Do you think she’s an actress?”
“I think you’re right. It’s some kind of code.”
“Some code. Hi, I went off to space and left you in the fridge, here’s a nice puzzle to hurt your brain.”
Jillian giggled and then sobered. “She probably left the box for Alexander, not us.” She pulled up the digital photos of Alexander. The one of her labeled “nine years old” could have been Louise with her blast-shortened hair. “We really don’t look like Esme or her father at all.”
“Crown Prince Kiss Butt and the flying monkeys look like brothers. They have the same cheekbones, and their eyes look vaguely Asian.”
Jillian nodded in agreement. “There’s no flying monkeys in Hamlet, though. At least none that I remember.” She struck a dramatic pose. “To be or not to be, that is the question: whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them.” Jillian paused in mid-dramatic gesture. “Oh! I wonder. Hamlet’s story is about him trying to deal with the murder of his father—the King of Denmark. The odds are so stacked against him that he pretends to be insane for a part of the play.”
“It ends badly for Hamlet?”
“Very badly. But there’s no monkeys—flying or otherwise.”
Louise trusted Jillian to know any trivia connected to Hamlet. She tried searching the other direction. “Most of the hits for ‘flying monkey’ are for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It’s about a young girl who is swept up by a storm and deposited on another world filled with magical creatures.”
“Maybe that’s a reference to Elfhome.”
“You know what’s odd?” Jillian studied Anna’s photo and then the boys who might be brothers. “Neil and Anna are the only ones that are looking at the camera. The rest of these seem to be taken without the person aware that they’re being photographed.”
Louise checked the last photo. The man was sitting at a table in a large sunroom, reading a paper, steam curling up from a cup in front of him. He was striking to look at, with unnaturally white skin and odd amber eyes. His coloring made him seem unreal, like he was a vampire or something. His hair was white, as if he was old, but his face was unlined, making it impossible to guess his age. He was reading an old-fashioned newspaper and seemed unaware of the camera. “I think you’re right. They’re like stalker pictures.”
“What does that one say?”
Louise flipped over the picture of the man with the newspaper. “This one says: ‘Ming the Merciless of the Empire of Evil.’”
“It’s another literature reference.” Jillian frowned at the screen of her tablet. “Ming is an evil emperor from a movie series called Flash Gordon filmed in the mid-1900s. Ming has a large army with everything from death rays to robots poised to take over Earth. But he doesn’t look anything like this guy.”
Louise stared at the photos. “Our genetic donor was weird.”
* * *
Whatsit identified the item in the box as a “flash drive” with a “USB connector” and had diagrams on how it used to plug into the side of the clunky computers which were common at the turn of the century.
“It could have anything on it.” Louise read through the description of the technology’s development. Assuming that Esme used the most advanced one she could buy at the time, it could represent a large amount of data. “Photographs. A video blog.”
“But we don’t have any
thing to plug it into!” Jillian growled.
“We could buy an old computer . . . or something,” Louise murmured. They couldn’t be the only people who had had this problem. It turned out that it had been a common difficulty shortly after computers started to use wireless connections exclusively. Adapters had been made so the flash drives could be plugged in to a transmitter and accessed. They would need to download emulators so their tablets could run the decades-old software, but it was just juggling data once a connection was made.
She found several places still selling adapters and whimpered at the price. It wasn’t expensive, but it still was a lot more than she had left in her mobile payment account. Louise checked Jillian’s account to see if they could pool their money. “We don’t have enough money.”
Jillian winced. “It’s going to take weeks to have enough with our allowance.”
“If Mom and Dad don’t dock us for the cost of the playhouse.”
“Shh!” Jillian whispered. “Don’t give them ideas.”
“Maybe we can sell something.”
“No,” Jillian said. “All we have left after the fire is our video-processing equipment, and we’re not selling that. We don’t know what’s on the flash drive, and it might be useless crap.” She glared at the photos, the flash drive, and the scrap of paper with the cryptic warning. “Our stupid genetic donor.”
They had an older sister. Better yet, she wasn’t some beauty-pageant poser like Elle Pondwater; she was a super-cool gearhead. She lived on Elfhome. She probably knew Elvish. And their grandfather understood magic, so she might even know some real spells. She couldn’t get more perfect unless she also had all sorts of interesting pets. She could own an elfhound. Or a horse! According to April and old satellite maps of Pittsburgh prior to first Shutdown, the hotel where Alexander lived could house an entire zoo.
It was at once terrifying and intoxicating to think that they could actually call their older sister and talk to her. Maybe she could figure out a solution to how to save their baby siblings.
Every thirty days, the Chinese turned off the hyperphase gate (invented by their male genetic donor) and Pittsburgh returned to Earth. Initially Shutdown had been the first of the month. While the thirty-day cycle had worked for September, April, June, and November, all the other months and a half dozen leap years pushed Shutdown to some illogical date currently falling in the middle of the month.
They maintained a website for their production company, Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo. Since their parents forbid them from using the website for any true advertising or promotion, they simply had a counter counting down to the next Shutdown. They used it for an interesting, self-imposed deadline for their videos. Louise sighed at the ticking numbers. While it would only be a few days until they could contact Alexander, it seemed like forever.
And there was the niggling problem that they didn’t have a phone number for Alexander. Apparently at some point Tim Bell had changed his phone number, and April had taken it as a sign that she was not to call his house. Trying to find any information out about Pittsburgh was much like being a jewel thief. Even the most mundane of information was locked away. They had to routinely hack into secure databases to get what they needed for their videos. They usually copied anything they could get away with, but up to this point they hadn’t needed a telephone list.
Louise glanced at her alarm clock. She had ten minutes until their mother expected them to be eating breakfast. She might have time to find a copy, especially if she got lucky and it was on one of their favorite sites. A band of anonymous hackers ran a data haven, posting information on Pittsburgh they’d “found” in undisclosed locations. As always, she made sure that she couldn’t be traced before dropping into the forum.
The first post made her heart jump. The heading was “Looking for Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo.” She sat staring at it with fear. Should she read the post? Who in the world even knew that they visited this forum?
Taking a breath, she opened the post. It was breezy in tone, meandering in points, and signed with a name that made her squeak in surprise.
“What?” Jillian called from their bathroom.
“Nigel Reid wants to talk to us.”
“Nigel Reid? You mean ‘I just love Nigel’ Nigel Reid?”
“I never said that!” She respected the filmmaker. He was her favorite naturalist. “But yes, that one.”
Jillian squeaked, too. “Seriously? Talk to us?”
“Yes. Well. Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo. He’s seen The Queen’s Pantaloons and wants to know if the gossamer call is real. He’s coming to New York to do the Today Show, and he wants to know if he can meet us.”
“Meet him? Like in person?”
“Generally that’s what ‘meet’ means.”
“Are you nuts? You know that Mom and Dad would just freak if they found out that we were going to meet some old guy from the Internet. They’ll get him arrested as a pedophile!”
“He wants to meet with a film-production company!” Louise cried in defense. “He doesn’t know Lemon-Lime is just two kids. If he did think we were kids, he probably thinks we’re in high school or college.”
“Pfft, high school is just as bad. Besides, we don’t know if this is really Nigel Reid posting this. It could be anyone. We list him as one of our influences. By posing as him, anyone could hope to lure us out.”
“It would be so cool if it was.” Louise went to Nigel Reid’s official personal site. How could they tell if he was actually the person contacting them and not a pervert using his name? “Nigel is going to be on the Today Show in like three weeks. We could go see the show.” Although “seeing the show” would really be standing on the sidewalk at the corner of 49th and Rockefeller Center with the crowd that gathered daily at the break of dawn.
Jillian considered it. “I don’t know. Feels like a trap to me. How is he going to know we’re really us? A big sign that says ‘Nigel, we’re Lemon-Lime’? And if it’s not him that posted that? Whoever is trying to lure us out would have us cornered.”
Jillian was right. They’d be out in the open for hours, with Nigel probably camping out in a green room. If someone was just using his name to lure them out, they could be in lots of danger. Although, no one knew they were two nine-year-olds. Lemon-Lime could be the group name for fifteen muscle-bound men—who liked Barbie dolls.
But why would someone like Nigel Reid want to meet them? While no one else seemed to realize how the elves were controlling the great living airships, the clues were there if anyone started to look in the right place. All the research they’d done, anyone else could do. They’d sketched out a mock-up of a gossamer call along the lines of a dog whistle, but they had no way of knowing if it would actually work. They agreed that they were probably missing something important in the design. Magic existed, flowed, pooled, and was depleted. The elves harnessed it in countless ways but guarded many of their secrets carefully. Humans still didn’t understand magic well enough to quantify it or even determine its source. If the elves were combining an ultrasonic whistle with magic, then no, the twins’ call had no hope of actually working.
Did Nigel think they had a working gossamer call?
And why would he think that? The only time they mentioned it in their videos had been a throwaway line in a comedic sketch about frilly underwear. Who in their right mind would use that as evidence of a working prototype? It made no sense.
Still, it was Nigel Reid! And yes, maybe she did love him. He seemed really, really nice, and he was always so gentle and kind to the animals he filmed. If there was a chance to talk to him face-to-face, she wanted it to happen.
What they needed was a two-part recognition process. The Today Show would serve to establish that Nigel Reid was the person who posted on the forum. After that they could pick someplace safe to meet.
Like maybe invite him to dinner at their house.
Even though she knew that was impossible, it made her insides go all fluttery with nerves. With trembling fingers, she double-ch
ecked that the forum only had an anonymous e-mail account that wasn’t linked to them in any way. Once she was sure that a reply couldn’t be traced to them, she created a private message and typed in, “This is Lemon-Lime. Say ‘hi’ to us on the Today Show so we know this post is really from you and then check back here. We’ll private-message contact information after the show.”
“What did you do?” Jillian asked.
Louise showed her the post.
Jillian squeaked in surprise. “You didn’t!”
“I did.”
Jillian flung arms around Louise and hugged her tight. “That is so awesome! I can’t wait to meet him!”
* * *
“No,” their mother said simply.
“Neither one of us could take the morning off to go with you,” their father elaborated. “People start showing up for that at like five-thirty in the morning and stand around in Rockefeller Center until nearly noon.”
“We could go alone. We have Tesla.”
“No!” their mother said. “Tesla can walk you from point A to point B, but for standing there for over six hours, you need an adult. And don’t go calling your Aunt Kitty and asking her—she’s got a deadline she’s behind on.”
“Nigel Reid is the guest,” Louise said.
“I know he’s your favorite,” their mother said.
“And he always brings animals,” Louise plowed on.
Their mother laughed as if this was a joke. “Of course he does. He’s a naturalist. That’s what people like him do when they’re on TV shows: bring animals that misbehave in funny ways and scare the daylights out of the hosts.”
“It’s not like he brings dangerous animals.” Louise felt the need to point it out, just in case this was part of their objection.