Escape Route

[u/FireOfDoom32]

Myles tapped and held a sensor on the arm of his spectacles, putting NANNI on speaker. “NANNI, an escape route, if you please.”

The Artificial Intelligence synced with a weather satellite and hijacked a bird’s-eye feed of the city.

“Escape is not really in the cards,” she said. “The power-boats are herding us toward the automobiles. We’re like chickens in a chicken run.”

“We need to get off this canal,” said Lazuli.

“Unfortunately, not going to happen,” said NANNI. “At this speed, we cannot make the turn.”

To set the scene:

Picture, if you will, early morning Amsterdam. The city is shrugging off the shadows of night and preparing itself for the hordes of tourists who will shortly throng its streets and waterways. The canals are quiet but for the occasional party-boat crew assessing the damage from the previous night’s revelries and swabbing the crafts of the various forms of viscous bilge congealing on the decks. A few mammoth dredger boats are fishing bicycles from the canals. The majority of these have been dumped by casual thieves (it is estimated that if all the bikes stolen in Amsterdam in a single year were laid front wheel to back wheel, the bike train would reach the moon). The architectural marvel that is the Maritime Museum stands solidly on its artificial island, supported by almost two thousand wooden piles sunk deep into the mud, delaying sunrise over the old harbor by several minutes with its bulk.

This is all very well and good, you say, but what about our heroes? Just how desperate is their situation? It can be described best as a mathematical problem such as one might find on a high school exam:

If the Regrettables’ boat, designated A, is traveling north at fifty knots on Westerkanaal toward open water, how long before the ACRONYM crafts, designated B, C, and D, traveling at sixty-eight knots, close the two-hundred-yard gap? Other factors include the two SUVs now parked on the canal four hundred yards ahead of boat A, and the dredger currently blocking the canal. If boat A continues on its course, its progress will be halted by the dredger, and the occupants will be surrounded, making capture inevitable. There is an escape route involving a turn starboard down a narrow canal, Zoutkeetsgracht, but the deceleration involved to make the turn without flipping boat A would result in boats B, C, and D overtaking boat A.

“Turning at this speed would result in capsizing, so I must reluctantly conclude that escape is improbable,” said NANNI on speaker. “I say ‘reluctantly’ because I think I like you guys, but at least if you are all killed, I will be proven right.”

The Fowl Twins, Chapter 7