The Wightlink ferry out of Portsmouth had been crossing the Solent for twenty-three minutes, and Miss Castling had not let go of the case.
Miss Castling — Detective Inspector, Metropolitan Police — stood at the upper deck railing, one hand gripping a small titanium case the size of a hardback novel, the other holding her wig against the wind. Purple sequinned coat. Eight-inch platform boots braced against the deck. Blonde wig fighting for its life against a gust that had no respect for beauty.
“Whisky, WHY are we on a ferry?”
Beside her, and considerably lower, Sergeant Whiskers — officially Serial Unit 09 of the Metropolitan Police Autonomous Investigation Division, an AI-powered robot cat, though Miss Castling just called him Whisky — stood on his hind legs with his front paws resting on the lower railing. A British Shorthair model, ten kilos of dense blue-grey plush covering a titanium-alloy frame, standing just under two feet tall on his hind legs. His ears, soft to the touch but packed with directional microphones, were flattened against the salt wind.
“Because the Isle of Wight is an island.”
“I KNOW it’s an island. I mean why couldn’t they send it by Royal Mail?”
“The component in that case is a Class 7 restricted part. Hand-delivery by an officer of inspector rank or above is required.”
Miss Castling looked down at the case. Looked at Whisky. Looked at the case again.
“So I’m carrying your broken organ across the Solent.”
“It is a faulty resonance module removed from my lower thoracic housing. The Applied Technology Lab requires it for analysis, and a replacement is waiting on-site.” Pause. “It is not an organ.”
“But it came out of you.”
“Yes.”
“And you can’t carry it yourself because — ?”
“Contact with my own extracted components triggers a forced system lock. A design precaution.”
“So you’d just… freeze.”
“Shut down. Completely.”
“On a ferry.”
“…On a ferry.”
She clutched the case tighter. “Wonderful.”
The Isle of Wight appeared through the haze like a green postcard someone had dropped in the sea. The ferry docked at Fishbourne. Miss Castling stepped onto the terminal with the titanium case under one arm and her wig still marginally attached.
“Right. How far to the lab?”
“The Applied Technology Lab is located twelve minutes south of Newport.”
Twelve minutes. Easy.
They took the A3054 towards Newport. Whisky drove. Booster seat, ten-and-two, regulation speed. Miss Castling rode shotgun, the titanium case on her lap, watching the countryside roll past. Green fields. Stone cottages. The kind of England that made you want to buy a cream tea and give up on ambition entirely.
And then she saw it.
“STOP THE CAR.”
Whisky braked. Smoothly. Precisely. The brake of a machine that does not panic but would very much like to know why it has been asked to stop.
“What is the emergency.”
She was pointing out the passenger window. Her finger trembled.
On the left side of the road, set back behind a low stone wall, was a building. Long, white, industrial-but-cheerful, with a chimney releasing a plume of sweet, warm steam.
“Whisky.”
“I see the building.”
“That’s a marshmallow factory.”
“I can read the sign.”
“That’s a MARSHMALLOW FACTORY.”
Whisky looked at the sign. Wight Mallow Co.: Artisan Marshmallows Since 1955. A painted marshmallow mascot, round, white, smiling, waved from the corner of the sign with the relentless optimism of something that didn’t know it was food.
“Miss Castling. The Applied Technology Lab is expecting us.”
“Five minutes.”
“No.”
“Five minutes, Whisky. I just want to look.”
“You said ‘five minutes’ at the vintage stall on Portobello Road. We remained for forty-three minutes and you attempted to purchase a jacket.”
“This is different. This is marshmallows.”
“How is that different.”
“Because marshmallows are essential.”
Whisky blinked. Once. A long one. The blink of a machine that has calculated the probability of winning this argument and arrived at a number too small to display.
“…Five minutes.”
“FIVE MINUTES!”
She was out of the car before the engine stopped.
The factory tour was not five minutes.
The woman at reception, a cheerful person in a white apron who introduced herself as Jan, had made the catastrophic error of offering a tasting.
Miss Castling had both hands full of marshmallows. Wight Mallow’s signature pure white vanilla in the left, pale rose raspberry in the right. She was working through them with her eyes closed, cheeks stuffed. Her face wore an expression that Whisky’s emotional recognition software classified as “spiritual experience.”
“Whisky.”
“I am here.”
“I have found heaven. And it is on the Isle of Wight.”
“We are now fourteen minutes behind schedule.”
“Try one.”
“I do not eat.”
“Just smell one.”
“I do not smell recreationally.”
She opened her eyes. She looked at Whisky with the deep, sincere pity of a woman gazing upon someone who would never know the glory of marshmallow.
“You poor, poor machine.”
Jan appeared with another tray. Salted caramel. Passion fruit. Toasted coconut. A limited edition lavender that was only available on the island.
She made a sound that Whisky’s audio processor flagged as “outside normal human vocal parameters.”
“I’ll take twelve bags.”
“Miss Castling.”
“Fieldwork, darling.”
Jan beamed. While she went to pack the bags, Miss Castling wandered deeper into the factory floor. Vats of marshmallow mix bubbling gently. Conveyor belts carrying rows of perfect white pillows. The sweet, warm, sugar-cloud smell of industrial marshmallow production filling every molecule of air.
“This…” she announced at full volume, arms spread wide in the middle of the factory floor, sequins catching the fluorescent light, “is the most beautiful place I have ever been.”
“You said that about the New Bond Street Chanel boutique.”
“That was before.”
“Miss Castling. We need to leave.”
“One more taste—”
“Now.”
The Applied Technology Lab sat at the end of a lane half a mile from the marshmallow factory. No sign, no markings, a large converted barn. Old stone walls under a slate-grey roof fitted with solar panels. Satellite dishes sprouted from every gap like self-seeding mushrooms. One more added whenever the last one wasn’t enough.
The door was already open.
The inside was vast. High ceilings. Stone walls lined with workbenches, monitor arrays, and equipment racks. At least a dozen researchers moved between stations, soldering, calibrating, arguing over schematics, the hum of machinery constant beneath it all. At the centre, a large glass-walled room housed banks of computers and servers, with more researchers working inside.
And on every surface, chaos. Beautiful, confident, unapologetic chaos. A half-built speaker cabinet sat on a workbench with its guts exposed, wires trailing to an oscilloscope. Next to it, a piano keyboard, not a computer keyboard, an actual keyboard, whose internals had been replaced entirely with vacuum tubes, glowing amber in neat rows. The work of someone with strong opinions about analogue warmth. On a shelf above, suspended between two electromagnetic coils with no visible means of support, a pumpkin floated. It rotated slowly. No one appeared to find this remarkable.
Miss Castling stared at the pumpkin.
“Don’t ask,” said a passing technician without breaking stride.
Something small and grey darted between the workbenches at floor level. A mouse. Mechanical. Sleek silver-grey body, tiny black eyes, a tail that served as an antenna. A tweed bow tie at the throat.
It stopped at Whisky’s feet. Looked up.
“Sergeant.”
“Sleepy.”
“Been a while.”
“It has.”
The mouse, Sleepy, twitched its whiskers once, turned, and scuttled back into the chaos of the lab.
“Was that a mouse?” She looked down at Whisky. “You’re a cat. And you’re colleagues with a mouse?”
“The Applied Technology Lab does not discriminate by species.”
From the back of the lab, a voice.
“Ah! Sergeant!”
Dr. Arjun Hyde emerged from behind a bank of monitors. Tall. Lean. Dark hair silvered at the temples in a way that suggested his brain had been running too hot for too long and the cooling system had started venting through his scalp. White lab coat over a shirt buttoned to the collar. Round spectacles. Behind the spectacles, eyes that moved too fast. Processing, cataloguing, disassembling everything they touched and reassembling it in a configuration only he found logical.
Head of the Metropolitan Police Applied Technology Lab. The man who had built Whisky.
Dr. Hyde wrapped both arms around Whisky. The expression on his face was unmistakably warm. The expression of a man looking at something he’d made and still marvelled at.
“How are you? Any drift? Any latency?”
“Minor frequency drift of 0.003 per cent in the secondary array. Negligible.”
“Nothing about you is negligible.” Dr. Hyde smiled. Then he looked up at Miss Castling. “And you must be the Inspector. You really didn’t have to come all this way. Royal Mail would have been perfectly fine.”
She glanced at Whisky.
Whisky’s ears went flat. “The component is a Class 7 restricted part. Regulations required hand-delivery by an officer of inspector rank or above.”
Dr. Hyde looked at Whisky. “Did they?” He smiled vaguely. “Well. Thank you for bringing it.”
“I’m glad I came!” she said, holding up one of her twelve bags. “I found a marshmallow factory on the way.”
Whisky turned to Dr. Hyde with the urgency of a cat who has just seen something fall off a shelf. “The delay in our arrival was caused by an unscheduled stop at Wight Mallow Company. It was not an authorised operational visit.”
Dr. Hyde was looking at the bag. “Is that the lavender?”
“It IS the lavender!”
“Exceptional, isn’t it?”
“EXCEPTIONAL!”
Whisky’s ears cycled through three positions: forward, sideways, flat. And stayed flat.
“Now,” Dr. Hyde said. “Let’s have a look at that module.”
Dr. Hyde cleared a space on the main workbench, shifting a stack of circuit boards, a coil of copper wire, and a kettle that had been modified for purposes no kettle was designed for.
She placed the titanium case on the bench. Dr. Hyde opened it. Inside, nestled in foam, was the faulty component. Small. Silver. About the size and shape of a domino. Silent. Whatever hum it had once produced was gone.
Dr. Hyde held it up to the light. Turned it. His too-fast eyes went still, just for a moment, the way they did when something genuinely interested him.
“Mm.” He set it aside. “I’ll take a proper look later. For now: the replacement.”
He opened a drawer beneath the workbench and produced a second component. Identical in shape, but this one was alive. A hum, so faint it existed more as a sensation than a noise. Like pressing your fingertip to a wine glass and feeling the ghost of a note that hadn’t been played yet.
Dr. Hyde turned to Whisky. “On the bench, please, Sergeant.”
Whisky jumped up with a single, precise leap. Sat. Ears forward.
Dr. Hyde opened a panel in Whisky’s lower back, a seam so fine it was invisible unless you knew exactly where to press. Inside, a cavity. Empty. The place where the module had lived.
He placed the new component into the cavity.
Click.
The hum changed. Deeper. Fuller. The component settled into its housing like a key turning in a lock that had been waiting.
Whisky’s ears twitched. Both at once. A full-body recalibration rippled through his plush. A subtle shiver, there and gone.
“How does that feel?”
“…Complete.”
Dr. Hyde smiled. “Good. Quick diagnostic. Fifteen seconds.”
He reached for the console.
“Initiating.”
The ground shook.
Not the console. Not the lab. The ground. A low, heavy tremor that rattled the tea mugs on every workbench and made the floating pumpkin wobble on its axis.
Everyone in the lab stopped. A dozen heads turned towards the windows.
A second tremor. Longer. Deeper. Accompanied by a sound. Distant, rising, like the earth had eaten something it deeply regretted.
She ran to the window.
Down the lane, half a mile away, the Wight Mallow Co. factory was bulging. The white walls breathed outward. The chimney, which had been releasing a polite plume of steam, was now ejecting marshmallow. Great iridescent lumps of it, firing into the sky like slow-motion fireworks, rising, expanding, tumbling down onto the roof and the surrounding fields.
Then the front door burst open.
Iridescent marshmallow. Not falling. Not flowing. Blooming. Expanding from the door like a living thing, enormous and unstoppable, billowing outward in all directions, swelling, doubling, doubling again. The car park vanished. The stone wall vanished. The road vanished. A rainbow river rolling across the green countryside with the cheerful, mindless determination of something that had no idea what it was doing but was absolutely committed to doing more of it.
Dr. Hyde appeared at the window beside her. Spectacles reflecting the sweet avalanche. Eyes wide. Mouth slightly open.
“…Fantastic.”
A technician behind them: “Sir, is that the marshmallow factory?”
“It is indeed the marshmallow factory.”
She pressed her face to the glass. “It does look delicious, though. Is it just me, or is that a lot of marshmallow?”
“It is an extraordinary amount of marshmallow.” Dr. Hyde was beaming.
Whisky appeared at the window. On his head, Sleepy sat, tiny, grey, perfectly balanced, watching the vast marshmallow advance with the calm black eyes of a mouse who had seen stranger things in this lab.
“Dr. Hyde. Shall we deploy?”
Dr. Hyde’s smile faded to something more focused. “The new module’s frequency may be resonating with the factory’s production system. Same frequency, different equipment: sympathetic vibration.” He looked at Whisky. “Which means you stay here, Sergeant. If you get closer to that factory, it gets worse.”
Whisky’s ears went flat. “Understood.”
Dr. Hyde reached down. Sleepy hopped from Whisky’s head into the breast pocket of the lab coat. Two tiny ears and a silver antenna poked out of the pocket like a very small, very alert periscope.
“Harris, Okonkwo, Chen, with me. Everyone else, monitor from here.” He looked at Miss Castling. “Inspector. Care to join?”
“Darling, I wouldn’t miss it.”
They took the lane at a run: Dr. Hyde, three technicians, and a drag queen in platform boots, marshmallow advancing towards them from the opposite direction.
The factory had surrendered entirely. Marshmallow poured from every window, every vent, every crack. Slowly, steadily, in rhythm with the vats, manufactured and overflowing, not rising up like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters. Just oozing. Jan was standing on the roof of her car. Apron white. Hair lavender. She was trying to work out what she’d done wrong in the factory her grandfather had started. No answer came. The rest of the workers stood around in marshmallow-covered overalls, watching. No one appeared injured, but no one could agree whether to call the police or the fire brigade.
“IT WON’T STOP! WE CUT THE POWER AND THEY’RE STILL GOING!”
“The machinery’s caught in a resonance loop,” Dr. Hyde said, more to himself than to anyone. “We need to get to the main production console and shift the operating frequency. That’ll break the cycle.” He looked at the factory entrance. Marshmallow was chest-height in the doorway and still growing. “The console is at the centre of the factory floor. No human is getting through that.”
Dr. Hyde reached into his breast pocket.
“Sleepy.”
The mouse looked up. Whiskers twitched.
“Inside the main production console. Access the frequency control board. You know what to do.”
Sleepy climbed out of the pocket, ran down Dr. Hyde’s arm, and dropped to the ground. For a moment, the tiny silver-grey body was still, assessing the wall of marshmallow ahead.
Then Sleepy ran.
Straight into the marshmallow. Gone. Swallowed whole. A mouse-sized tunnel appeared briefly in the iridescent mass and sealed itself behind. Somewhere inside the factory, a very small robot with a very specific skill set was navigating the interior of a machine that had lost its mind.
“Will he be alright in there?” she asked.
“Sleepy has operated inside active jet engines,” Dr. Hyde said. “A marshmallow factory is a holiday.”
Miss Castling stood at the edge of the field behind the factory, waiting. The marshmallow was knee-deep here. The sweet vanilla smell was so thick it was almost visible.
A sound. Tiny. High. Barely there.
She looked down.
At the base of an oak tree, half-buried in marshmallow, a nest had fallen. And in the nest, a red squirrel kit. Covered in white, sticky, vanilla-scented disaster. Tiny. Eyes barely open. Soaked in marshmallow, its russet fur matted and gummed. Alone, tiny limbs flailing, reaching for a mother who wasn’t there.
“Oh no.”
She knelt. The kit was shivering. A sound came from its mouth that was barely a sound at all. The smallest possible protest against the largest possible catastrophe.
She didn’t think.
She reached up. Pulled off her wig. The blonde wig. The signature, the armour, the thing that completed her. She held it open like a nest.
Gently, very gently, she scooped the kit from the ruined nest and placed it in the wig. The tiny body sank into the blonde curls. Marshmallow-sticky paws gripped synthetic hair. The shivering slowed.
“There. You’re alright. You’re alright, little one.”
She stood. The kit was buried in blonde. Barely visible. Just a red nose and two dark eyes peeking from a cocoon of wig.
The kit sneezed. A single piece of marshmallow flew from its nose. Miss Castling melted.
A hum, deep, resonant, passed through the ground. Then stopped.
The rumbling stopped. The marshmallow stopped expanding.
Quiet.
From the factory entrance, a tiny silver-grey shape emerged from the marshmallow. Sleepy trotted across the car park, weaving deftly between rivers of flowing marshmallow, and stopped at Dr. Hyde’s feet.
Dr. Hyde crouched down.
“Status?”
“2.4 gigahertz. Stable.”
Sleepy jumped onto Dr. Hyde’s shoulder and said it again.
“2.4 gigahertz. Stable.”
Harris stared. “…Wi-Fi?”
Okonkwo snorted. Chen covered her mouth. Harris was already laughing.
Dr. Hyde looked up, smiling. That warm, unbothered smile of a man who had solved a problem and was already thinking about the next one.
“Standard frequency. Should have been on it from the start.” He picked up Sleepy and placed the mouse back in his breast pocket.
Jan climbed down from her car roof. “Is it… is it over?”
“All over.” Dr. Hyde straightened up. “Your factory is in perfect working order. Better than before, actually.”
Jan looked at the marshmallow. The road. The fields. Her factory, half-buried in its own product.
“…Right.”
The island’s red squirrel conservation team arrived within the hour. A woman in khaki took the kit, still in the wig, with the careful reverence of someone who understood exactly what had been sacrificed.
“We’ll look after her.” She looked at the wig. “Do you want this returned?”
She looked at the wig. Marshmallow. Tiny claw marks. A squirrel clinging to the wig.
“…Keep it. She seems to like it.”
The woman smiled. The kit, nestled in blonde curls, had fallen asleep.
The Wightlink ferry pulled out of Fishbourne at half past four.
Miss Castling stood at the upper deck railing. No titanium case this time. No wig. The wind caught the edge of her wig cap, and the neatly braided hair beneath, pinned flat in tight rows of bobby pins, glinted in the afternoon sun. At her feet, twelve bags of marshmallow. The operation’s sole survivors.
She pulled an instant matcha latte sachet from the Notting Hill tote, got hot water from the ferry café in a paper cup, and floated four Wight Mallow marshmallows on top. White vanilla, rose-pink raspberry, glowing orange passion fruit, and tawny salted caramel. A rainbow archipelago adrift on a green sea, slowly sinking into the matcha deep. She took a sip. Exhaled.
Below, a family of four was staring at her. The children were whispering. The mother was pretending not to look. The father had given up pretending entirely.
She adjusted her sequinned coat, lifted her chin, and stared straight ahead as if wigless ferry travel was something she did every Tuesday.
The Isle of Wight shrank behind them.
Not entirely. The hills were still green, the harbour still grey. But across the middle of the island, where the fields and the roads and the factory had been, a vast iridescent blanket lay draped over the landscape like icing on a cake that nobody had ordered.
The island looked as if a marbled cloud had fallen onto it, transformed into a different postcard from the one they’d arrived at.
Whisky stood on his hind legs beside her, front paws on the lower railing. His bright blue eyes surveyed the retreating island.
“Miss Castling.”
“Hmm?”
“The Isle of Wight has a population of approximately one hundred and forty-one thousand. Current marshmallow coverage is estimated at eighteen per cent of the island’s total surface area.” Pause. “The island is full of marshmallow.”
She looked at the island once more. Looked at Whisky.
“And then there were M.” She chuckled and continued. “Christie would have a fit. I’m going to dream about marshmallow ghosts tonight. The kind that keep growing no matter how much you eat.”
She drained the last of the matcha latte. It had turned almost purple.
Silence. The ferry engine hummed. The Solent stretched grey and flat in every direction.
She picked up the bags. Twelve bags. Salted caramel, passion fruit, toasted coconut, lavender limited edition, vanilla, raspberry.
“Come on, Whisky. London’s waiting.”
She walked towards the stairs. Wigless. Marshmallow-stained. Sequins dimmed but shoulders straight.
A queen doesn’t need hair to make an entrance.
TO BE CONTINUED
Next Episode: “Sea urchin or chestnut? That is the question. Whisky in mortal peril.”
Today’s Miss Castling
Her Favourites:
- Coat: Purple sequinned, full-length
- Wig: Blonde, shoulder-length
- Lashes: Faux mink
- Foundation: MAC Studio Fix, three layers
- Boots: Eight-inch platform heels
Today’s sacrifice:
- Wig: donated to a red squirrel kit (returned wearing wig cap & bobby pins only)
Whisky’s Log
- Reunion with Dr. Hyde at the Applied Technology Lab (Isle of Wight)
- Reunion with Sleepy
- Dr. Hyde and Miss Castling bonded over lavender marshmallows
- Module replaced: lower thoracic resonance unit (faulty → new)
- Frequency drift post-installation: 0.003% secondary array (negligible)
- Anomaly detected: resonance synchronisation with Wight Mallow Co. factory machinery
- Resolution: Sleepy, internal access, 2.4 GHz
- Island marshmallow coverage at departure: 18%
- Class 7 component transported by inspector-rank officer per regulations. Post-incident observation: Royal Mail would have sufficed. Noted for future reference.
“This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.”