“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 anything 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.”
6: Mermaid Gambit
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.