Now, she thought. Now the rapture begins, as I remake myself in my own image. I am my own god.
And, with only the power of her mind, Opal reassembled herself. Her appearance remained unchanged, for she was vain and believed herself to be perfect. But she opened and expanded her mind, allowing new powers to coat the bridges between her nerve cells, focusing on the ancient mantras of the dark arts so that her new magic could be used to bring her soldiers up from their resting place. Power like this was too much for one body, and she must excise it as soon as her escape was made, or her atoms would be shredded and swept away like windborne fireflies.
Nails are hard to reassemble, she thought. I might have to sacrifice my fingernails and toenails.
The ripple effects of young Opal’s murder in the corner of a field were more widespread than even Artemis could have imagined, though in truth imagine is the wrong verb, as Artemis Fowl was not in the habit of imagining anything. Even as a small boy, he had never nurtured daydreams of himself on horseback fighting dragons. What Artemis preferred to do was visualize an achievable objective and then work toward that goal.
His mother, Angeline, had once peered over eight-year-old Artemis’s shoulder as he sketched in his journal.
Oh, darling, that’s wonderful! she’d exclaimed, delighted that her boy had finally shown some interest in artistic creativity, even if the picture did seem a little violent. It’s a giant robot destroying a city.
No, Mother, Artemis had sighed, ever the theatrical misunderstood genius. It’s a builder drone constructing a lunar habitat.
Angeline had ruffled her son’s hair in revenge for the sigh and wondered if little Arty might need to talk to someone professional.
Artemis had considered the widespread devastation that would be caused by the spontaneous energy exploding from all Opal-related material, but even he was not aware of the saturation levels Koboi products had achieved in the few years before her incarceration. Koboi Industries had many legitimate businesses, which manufactured everything from weapons parts to medical equipment; but Opal had also several shadow companies that illegally extended her influence to the human world and even into space, and the effects of these tens of thousands of components exploding ranged from inconvenient to downright catastrophic.
In the LEP lockup, two hundred assorted weapons, which were scheduled for recycling the following week, collapsed like melting chocolate bars, then radiated a fierce golden light that fried all local closed-circuit systems before exploding with the power of a hundred bars of Semtex. Fission was not achieved, but the damage was substantial nonetheless. The warehouse was essentially vaporized, and several of the underground city’s load-bearing support pillars were toppled like children’s building blocks.
Haven City Center collapsed inward, allowing a million tons of the earth’s crust to cave in on top of the fairy capital, breaking the pressure seal and increasing the atmosphere readings by almost a thousand percent. Anything under the falling rock was squashed instantly. There were eighty-seven fatalities, and property damage was absolute.
Police Plaza’s basement collapsed, causing the bottom three floors to sink into the depression. Fortunately the upper floors were bolted to the cavern roof, which held firm and saved the lives of many officers who had elected to remain at their posts.
Sixty-three percent of fairy automobiles had Koboi pistons in their engines, which blew simultaneously, causing an incredible synchronized flipping of vehicles, part of which was captured on a parking garage camera that had somehow survived compression. It would in future years become the most viewed clip on the Underworld Web.
Koboi shadow labs had for years been selling obsolete fairy technology to human companies, as it would seem cutting-edge to their shareholders. These little wonder chips or their descendants had wended their way into almost every computer-controlled device built within the past few years. These chips inside laptops, cell phones, televisions, and toasters popped and pinged like kinetically charged ball bearings in tin cans. Eighty percent of electronic communication on planet Earth immediately ceased. Humanity was heaved back to the paper age in half a second.
Life-support systems spat out bolts of energy and died. Precious manuscripts were lost. Banks collapsed as all financial records for the past fifty years were completely wiped out. Planes fell from the sky, the Graum II space station drifted off into space, and defense satellites that were not supposed to exist stopped existing.