ASN (Author's sister, otherwise known as Ryn's, note): Well guys, it's been a while hasn't it?
AN: It's not that we've not been writing anything...
ASN: It's just that we haven't finished anything.
AN: However, we decided to put this up. This is actually a story we wrote for Criminality's (an AF fanfic archive) March-April Challenge. The challenge was to write a fic about the contents of the disc Foaly saved when he mindwiped Artemis. We won, by the way.
ASN: Modest. But in the interests of keeping it a short story (hahaha) we cut some of it for Criminality's challenge.
AN: So here we are posting the full, UNCUT version of Foaly and the Memory Disc.
ASN: Enjoy! Oh, just in case you didn't know, Artemis and Co does not belong to us. We only imitate and extrapolate.
Foaly positively danced out of the Operations Booth—a tough feat for a centaur, but he managed it. Absolutely nothing in the world could get him to calm down. He only stopped dancing when he almost ran over Holly.
"What are you so happy about?" she asked curiously. "It has to be good to pull you away from your computers."
"It's wonderful!" he sang out. "I'm free! Free of all my worries, all my cares, all my employers—" He shot a mock-glare in the general direction of Root's office. "—free at last! For two glorious weeks!"
"I'm glad for you." Holly told him as she fell into step next to him. "Now that we've determined why you're so happy, tell me—what do you mean by 'free', exactly?"
"It's my vacation time. I haven't had a vacation for over a century, you know. And all Root would give me was two weeks. Two weeks! Can you believe that? And after all I've done for the LEP."
"At least you get a vacation." Holly grumped. "I have double shift tonight."
"I'm sorry." Foaly said sympathetically. "Tell you what; I'll have an absolutely wonderful time tonight for the both of us, all right?"
The look Holly gave him was quite an adequate answer.
"Sorry."
After a few moments of silence, Holly spoke again. "What are you planning to do during your wonderful vacation, anyway?"
Foaly shrugged. "Well, sleep is number one on my agenda. Other than that, I really don't have anything exciting planned. I might throw my weight around and force my way onto a shuttle for a day above ground…but that's a lot of work. I'll probably just sleep."
Holly couldn't help but roll her eyes. "I can hardly stand the anticipation."
"Hey!" the centaur protested. "I can't help the fact I have four feet and stand out in any crowd. Give me a break, all right?"
"Fine, fine." Holly said, holding up her hands. "Have a good time sleeping, all right? Don't get too bored."
"Don't worry about me, Holly." Foaly said confidently. "I plan to enjoy myself immensely."
Exactly one week later, Foaly was ready to go back to work. And stay there. Preferably for the next century. He now knew why Root was so stingy with vacation time. After a week of nothing to do, Foaly was starting to go a little stir-crazy.
The centaur had already read all his computer manuals and every magazine in the apartment. He'd memorized the television schedule, cleaned the apartment three times, slept through Thursday, and called Holly so much she had volunteered for extra duty at the station. He hadn't expected it to happen, but Foaly was bored.
He went to his computer and turned it on, marveling at how long he had managed without it. There, after reading though his entire collection of favorite articles on computer technology (most of which he'd written himself), he read through all his least favorite articles and wrote nasty comments.
In desperation, he pulled up a game of FreeCell and played obsessively for three hours.
"All right!" he exclaimed after losing the same game for the fifth time. "That's enough. I need something else to do."
After a moment, Foaly went to one of the drawers in his desk and opened it. It was filled to the brim with CD-Rs, floppy disks, and other, flashier ways of storing files. He pulled one out at random and read the label.
"A Theory of Human Mind Processes and Reactions. It can't be that bad."
It was. And almost all the other disks in the drawer were just as boring.
Foaly had gone through the entire drawer, and even reread the ones by a Dr. F. Roy Dean Schlippe. That man sounded like he understood what he was talking about a little better than the others. But after all the drawer of human psychology, FreeCell, and even some Solitaire…Foaly still had an entire day of vacation left.
"Enough is enough!" He announced to the empty apartment suddenly. "I'm going back to work. I can't take anymore."
But after thinking it through, he decided to stick it out. After all, Foaly had gone through a lot of complaining to get these two weeks. Root would be so pleased if he showed up back at work early.
"I can't give up now." Foaly muttered to himself. "I wanted a vacation for two weeks, and I'll vacation for two weeks if it kills me!"
He slammed his fist down on the desk for emphasis, and the human psychology drawer rattled. He frowned.
"I thought I had emptied that."
Foaly opened the drawer and glanced inside. A file disk had been pushed up against the back of the drawer, as far as he could tell, and had been rattled loose by his fist. And this was an interesting disk. It had a one word label—
Fowl.
Foaly knew what it was immediately. It was the copy of the memories he had taken from Artemis Fowl Jr. after the Spiro mess, before the mindwipe. He'd kept meaning to glance it over…
So he'd do it now.
The centaur trotted over to his computer and slid the disk into the drive. The computer whirred for a moment, and Foaly pulled up the document quickly. The adrenaline was starting to pump. Finally, he had something to do that wasn't deadly boring.
The document finished loading. Foaly leaned forward.