The Fowl Twins. Eoin Colfer

GOODIES (RELATIVELY SPEAKING)

       DALKEY ISLAND, DUBLIN, IRELAND

       THREE WEEKS LATER

      Behold Myles and Beckett Fowl, passing a late summer evening on the family’s private beach. If you look past the superficial differences – wardrobe, spectacles, hairstyles and so on – you notice that the boys’ facial features are very similar but not absolutely identical. This is because they are dizygotic twins, and were, in fact, the first recorded non-identical twins to be born conjoined, albeit only from wrist to little finger. The attending surgeon separated them with a flash of her scalpel, and neither twin suffered any ill effects, apart from matching pink scars that ran along the outside of their palms. Myles and Beckett often touched scars to comfort each other. It was their version of a high five, which they called a wrist bump. This habit was both touching and slightly gross.

      Apart from their features, the fraternal twins were, as one tutor noted, ‘very different animals’. Myles had an IQ of 170 and was fanatically neat, while Beckett’s IQ was a mystery, because he chewed the test into pulpy blobs from which he made a sculpture of a hamster in a bad mood, which he titled Angry Hamster.

      Also, Beckett was far from neat. In fact, his parents were forced to take up Mindfulness just to calm themselves down whenever they attempted to put some order on his catastrophically untidy side of the bedroom.

      It was obvious from their early days in a double cradle that the twins did not share similar personalities. When they were teething, Beckett would chew dummies ragged, while Myles chose to nibble thoughtfully on the eraser end of a pencil. As a toddler, Myles liked to emulate his big brother, Artemis, by wearing tiny black suits that had to be custom-made. Beckett preferred to run free as nature intended, and, when he finally did agree to wear something, it was plastic training pants, in which he stored supplies, including his pet goldfish, Gloop (named for the sound it made, or at least the sound the goldfish was blamed for).

      As the brothers grew older, the differences between them became more obvious. Myles grew ever more fastidious, 3-D-printing a fresh suit every day and taming his wild jet-black Fowl hair with a seaweed-based gel that both moisturised the scalp and nourished the brain, while Beckett made zero attempt to tame the blond curls that he had inherited from his mother’s side of the family, and continued to sulk when he was forced to wear any clothes, with the exception of the only article he never removed – a golden necktie that had once been Gloop. Myles had cured and laminated the goldfish when it passed away, and Beckett wore it always as a keepsake. This habit was both touching and extremely gross.

      Perhaps you have heard of the Fowl family of Ireland? They are quite notorious in certain shadowy circles. The twins’ father was once the world’s preeminent crime lord, but he had a change of heart and reinvented himself as a champion of the environment. Myles and Beckett’s older brother, Artemis the Second, had also been quite the criminal virtuoso, hatching schemes involving massive amounts of gold bullion, fairy police forces and time travel, to name but a few. Fortunately for more or less everyone except aliens, Artemis had recently turned his attention to outer space, and was currently six months into a five-year mission to Mars in a revolutionary self-winding rocket ship that he had built in the family barn. By the time the world’s various authorities, including NASA, APSCO, ALR, CNSA and UKSA, had caught wind of the project and begun to marshal their objections, Artemis had already passed the moon.

      The twins themselves were to have many adventures, some of which would kill them (though not permanently), but this particular episode began a week after their eleventh birthday. Myles and Beckett were walking along the stony beach of a small island off the picturesque coast of South Dublin, where the Fowl family had recently moved to Villa Éco, a newly built, state-of-the-art, environmentally friendly house. The twins’ father had donated Fowl Manor, their rambling ancestral home, to a cooperative of organic farmers, declaring, ‘It is time for the Fowls to embrace planet Earth.’

      Villa Éco was a stunning achievement, not least because of all the hoops the county council had made Artemis Senior jump through just for planning permission. Indeed, the Fowl patriarch had on several occasions considered using a few of his old criminal-mastermind methods of persuasion just to cut through the miles of red tape, but eventually he managed to satisfy the local councillors and push ahead with the building.

      And what a building it was. Totally self-sufficient, thanks to super-efficient solar panels and a dozen geothermal screws that not only extracted power from the earth but also acted as the building’s foundation. The frame was built from the recycled steel yielded by six compacted cars and had already withstood a hurricane during construction. The cast-in-place concrete walls were insulated by layers of plant-based polyurethane rigid foam. The windows were bulletproof, naturally, and coated with metallic oxide to keep the heat where it should be throughout the seasons. The design was modern but utilitarian, with a nod to the island’s monastic heritage in the curved walls of its outbuildings, which were constructed with straw bales.

      But the real marvels of Villa Éco were discreetly hidden until they were called upon. Artemis Senior, Artemis Junior and Myles Fowl had collaborated on a security system that would bamboozle even the most technically minded home invader, and an array of defence mechanisms that could repel a small army.

      There was, however, an Achilles heel in this system, as the twins were about to discover. This Achilles heel was the twins’ own decency and their reluctance to unleash the villa’s defences on anyone.

      On this summer evening, the twins’ mother was delivering a lecture at New York University with her husband in attendance. Some years previously, Angeline had suffered from what Shakespeare called ‘the grief that does not speak’, and, in an effort to understand her depression, had completed a mental-health doctorate at Trinity College and now spoke at conferences around the world. The twins were being watched over by the house itself, which had an Artemis-designed Nano Artificial Neural Network Intelligence system, or NANNI, to keep an electronic eye on them.

      Myles was collecting seaweed for his homemade-hair-gel fermentation silo, and Beckett was attempting to learn seal language from a dolphin just offshore.

      ‘We must be away, brother,’ Myles said. ‘Bedtime. Our young bodies require ten hours of sleep to ensure proper brain development.’

      Beckett lay on a rock and clapped his hands. ‘Arf,’ he said. ‘Arf.’

      Myles tugged at his suit jacket and frowned behind the frames of his thick-rimmed glasses. ‘Beck, are you attempting to speak in seal language?’

      ‘Arf,’ said Beckett, who was wearing knee-length cargo shorts and his gold necktie.

      ‘That is not even a seal. That is a dolphin.’

      ‘Dolphins are smart,’ said Beckett. ‘They know things.’

      ‘That is true, brother, but a dolphin’s vocal cords make it impossible for them to speak in the language of a seal. Why don’t you simply learn the dolphin’s language?’

      Beckett beamed. ‘Yes! You are a genius, brother. Step one, swap barks for whistles.’

      Myles sighed. Now his twin was whistling at a dolphin, and they would once again fail to get to bed on time.

      Myles stuffed a handful of seaweed into his bucket. ‘Please, Beck. My brain will never reach optimum productivity if we don’t leave now.’ He tapped the right arm of his black plastic spectacle frames, activating the built-in microphone. ‘NANNI, help me out. Please send a drobot to carry my brother home.’

      ‘Negative,’ said the house system in the strangely accented female voice that Artemis had selected to represent the AI. It was a voice that both twins instinctively trusted for some reason.

      Myles could hear NANNI through bone-conduction speakers concealed in the arms of his glasses.

      ‘Absolutely no flying Beckett home, unless it’s an emergency,’ said NANNI. ‘Mother’s orders, so don’t bother arguing.’

      Myles was surprised