Jillian shrugged and they made sure there were no other photos, either still in the box and somehow stuck to the others. Esme had drawn a 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 blonde 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 leads 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 scanned photos of Alexander. The one of her labeled “nine years old” could have been Louise with her blast-shorted hair. “We really don’t look like Esme and her parents 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 that 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 on a stone terrace; reading a paper, steam curling up from a cup in front of him. He had a striking look 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, chasing down information on the transition from the flash drives to what they had now. 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.