• A lightweight nonexplosive and nonradioactive weapon.
• Your tablet and preferred vocal communicator.
• Water-resistant boots and any other hiking equipment you wish to bring along.
• Money, if you wish to purchase souvenirs. (Note to self: Find out if forests have gift shops before sending this.)
The bus leaves at 7:00 AM from the courthouse. Be on time or be prepared to walk several hundred miles.
I love you,
Ms. Botfly
P.S. NOT YOU, MARK.
P.P.S. If you do not have one or more of the items on the list, feel free to stop into my store during normal business hours. Mention this email and receive a 2 percent discount!
I looked to my friends, expecting them to be as excited as I was, but they all looked like they had been assigned a month’s worth of toilet-related chores.
“Ugh, a field trip?” Warner said. “I was going to study for my Situational Nihilism test tomorrow.”
“That’s a shame. Can you ask to take it later?” Majorana asked.
“Eh, that test won’t really matter anyway. The class was optional,” Warner said noncommittally.
At my old school, a field trip was something you looked forward to for months. “You guys seriously don’t like field trips?”
Dirac sighed wearily. “Not Botfly’s. She’s dangerous enough here in town, where she can be supervised. Did you hear about how Ben Rufkin got lost in her store last week? She installed an unlicensed spatial extender to increase her square footage, but it ended up creating a non-euclidean aisle.”
I’d never heard of such a thing. “A what?”
“An aisle that doesn’t obey the rules of geometry. The south end was accidentally connected to the north end, even though it was straight. Because of that, there was no way out. To make matters worse, it was connected upside down, so every time he went through, he fell on his head. That woman is a serious danger to students.”
Ms. Botfly was one of my favorite teachers precisely because of how she never got very uptight about safety. “A little risk can be educational,” I said.
“I told her I needed an AI calculator for math class, and she tried to sell me a magnetic singularity,” Majorana said.
This earned a gasp of horror from Dirac and Warner. The fact that someone somewhere was insane enough to even make a magnetic singularity device was the only thing more astounding than the fact that Ms. Botfly had tried selling one to a student.
Hypatia and I exchanged a quick glance. In that second, we reached a silent agreement that neither of us needed to mention that I’d actually bought one on my first day at the School, without knowing that a magnetic singularity was an incredibly dangerous device that created a near-infinite magnetic force for a short period of time.
In my defense, it was shiny and cheap.
“She was probably testing you to see if you knew what it was,” I said. “Magnetic singularities are against school rules, aren’t they? I doubt even Botfly would have sold you one.”
Majorana scoffed and took another bite of her bear claw, which she had soaked in hot sauce. “That may be, but I’m not sure I trust her anyway.”
“How often do we have field trips?” I asked. Being relatively new at the School, I didn’t know what a “normal” schedule of field trips looked like.
“They’re irregular,” Hypatia said. “We only have them when there’s a good reason to leave town. That will be two this month, which is pretty unusual.”
“Two?” I asked.
She nodded. “The Urban Camouflage class is planning a trip to the mall. That one should be fun, at least. It’s part recreational and part test, to see if we can blend in without getting spotted. That’ll be a cakewalk compared with whatever Ms. Botfly has planned. Sounds like we’re going to see some action.”
Dirac groaned. “Can’t they count my chronic laziness as a disability so I can stay here?”
“It won’t be so bad,” I said. “Arkansas is lovely this time of year.”
“Really?” he asked.
“If you like frigid weather, freezing rain, and mud mixed with snow, you’re going to love it.”
3
TUESDAY
Just then my tablet beeped so loudly that I almost choked on the last bite of my waffle. A message read: You have an urgent code-red last-minute emergency French class beginning in ten minutes.
I clicked OKAY to let Mademoiselle Hernandez know I was on my way.
Personally, I didn’t think anything related to French class could be considered an emergency, but I got there in a hurry just in case. When Mademoiselle Hildegaard Hernandez comes up with a great new way of explaining irregular verbs, she needs to let the world know, pronto.
After that, I was back to my normal abnormal class schedule, which was never the same from one day to the next and occasionally had one-off classes I’d attend and never hear about again. That was one of my favorite things about the School: you never got sick of the daily routine because there was no routine.
* * *
“Shoes!” Dr. Hoffman cried at each student who crossed the threshold to her Xenopsychology classroom.
Proper shoe removal and storage were Serious Business in Dr. Hoffman’s classroom. But then again, many things were Serious Business to Dr. Hoffman. For the world’s leading expert in both human psychology and the psychology of alien races, Dr. Hoffman tended to be . . . a little unusual.
According to Hypatia, when Dr. Hoffman was in private practice and running her own research project, she’d invented an empathy generator, which allowed her to try out the neuroses and irrational fears of her patients so she could experience them firsthand. Her hope was that it could give her insight into the root causes of common phobias. It was a great idea, but unfortunately, her primary discovery was that irrational fears were far more difficult to get rid of than she had anticipated.
Because I arrived with Hypatia and Dirac, Dr. Hoffman made sure to shout “Shoes! Shoes! Shoes!,” pointing at each of us in turn.
“You want all of us to take our shoes off, or just them?” I asked.
“Yes! All of you!” she replied with a burning passion I could not summon about any subject that did not mean life or death to me (and several subjects that did).
I went on. Ruffling Dr. Hoffman’s feathers had become a favorite sport of mine because she never saw through it or ran out of steam. “I mean, I know every class session, every student needs to take off their shoes, put them in one of those airtight bags, have all the air sucked out of the bag, and then make sure the shoes are kept in the vacuum chamber, where they can be irradiated during class, but I was wondering if today you maybe wanted all but one student to remove their shoes.”
Dr. Hoffman rolled her eyes from the front of the room, where she stood behind an inch-thick panel of bulletproof polymer. “Your casual approach to footwear is deeply concerning. There are things on shoes you can’t imagine! Listening devices, mind-control microbes, spider eggs, GERMS, just all kinds of things!” she said, growing louder and more upset as she mentioned each increasingly horrifying possibility.
“You’ve got me in such a tizzy! Look at me—I’m shaking!” she exclaimed. “Are my pupils dilated? Margie, dear, can you see if my pupils are . . . NOT so close, please. Mind the line!” Margie had gotten dangerously close to the line that extended 3.14 feet in all directions from where Dr. Hoffman’s podium stood. “I don’t need your teenager microbes all over the glass. No offense, Margie. I’m sure your germs are lovely.”
“Thank you, Dr. Hoffman!” Margie said.
“Not at all, dear.” And to me, “Shoes please, Nikola.”
Dr. Hoffman looked amazingly well put together for such a nut. That’s why I never judge people on looks. Some people who look like they are nice, upstanding, and respectable are actually conceali
ng serious mental issues. But then again, so are some of the people who look crazy. Dr. Mary Hoffman, a parahuman version of the first type, wore a thick off-white cable-knit sweater beneath a formidable light tan scarf that obscured her face below her nose. She’d gotten a haircut recently, and her do was now a dark blond wedge that looked really cute on her, even if the combined effect of her low bangs and the high scarf made her look a bit like Pac-Man. At first I’d thought she was wearing jeans with decorative stitching, but on closer inspection I saw they were covered from the knee up with countless little notes jotted upside down in ink. Tilting my head, I could see that one of the larger notes said, Buy milk or vitamin D supplement. Another simply said, EAT. So maybe she didn’t look 100 percent normal.
“Who can tell me a mental illness that can be described as a normal aspect of Old One psychology?” Dr. Hoffman asked, once she’d checked the room for listening devices and had ensured her video camera was recording her presentation for analysis later.
“Narcissistic personality disorder!” several students suggested.
“Of course!” Dr. Hoffman said. “While we don’t have much in the way of interaction with the Old Ones, thank god, we do know that nearly all of them are incredibly full of themselves. This may be a side effect of membership in a hive mind where every individual shares knowledge and memories. Research has suggested that can contribute to an increased sense of self-importance. Or it might just be them. What else?”
“Sociopathy?” I suggested. That hadn’t been in the textbook, but I’d actually met an Old One, and she had been an obvious sociopath with no concern for right or wrong.
Dr. Hoffman shook her head. “It seems like that, but we’re only observing that they don’t conform to our morals and ethics. They may have their own set of rules they adhere to closely, and we just don’t know what those rules are. For instance, the Old Ones are reported to consider any kind of independent decision-making to be a grave immorality. Psychology tends to evaluate individuals on their own cultural norms.”
Someone else raised a hand. “Psychopathy?”
“Yes, correct. They have no regard for right and wrong and will use violence—”
I didn’t usually interrupt, but: “How are they not sociopathic but they are psychopathic?”
Dr. Hoffman thought this one over a moment. “Well, you see. There’s a subtle . . . Look, it’s not just because I say so. The book says the same thing.”
“But you wrote the book,” I said, holding up my copy, which had been suspiciously overpriced at the bookstore.
Challenging teachers was not only allowed at the School, it was also encouraged. Despite that, Dr. Hoffman decided she’d had enough. She leaned close enough to her glass wall to fog its surface faintly, even through her thick scarf. “Why are you persecuting me? Who put you up to this? Was it them? The Shriners?”
“The who?”
“Never mind,” she said, flipping her hair with a carefree gesture and returning to her upright posture. “There are subtle but important differences between sociopaths and psychopaths. And that’s going to be your next research topic, so I’d rather not spoil it just yet. Now, who can tell me how the Old Ones perceive their individuality?”
Warner, who never sat near anyone he knew, in case they distracted him from his quest to be the best student at the School, had an answer. “They consider themselves fundamentally linked individuals. Like fruit on a tree. An apple is separate from the tree but is part of it.”
“All correct!” Dr. Hoffman said, narrowing her eyes. “Did you know I was going to ask that?”
“Um,” Warner said, looking slightly less triumphant than he had a moment before. “Maybe? It was in the reading.”
“Oh, the reading!” Dr. Hoffman exclaimed, tossing her head to one side with a breathy laugh. “I’d forgotten about that. I’m sorry.” She glanced around the room, addressing us all in general. “Do you still like me? Please say you do.”
Warner turned beet red, and a few scattered students nodded.
Fortunately for all of us, Warner knew his way around Dr. Hoffman’s tangents and went right into the next topic. “So . . . they’re individuals, but not. As long as they stay connected to the hive mind, they’re part themselves and part other.”
“And what happens if they get disconnected?” she asked. “What happens if one of those apples is cut from the tree?”
“They lose their memory and die, or go into hibernation.”
“Very good, Warner. You’re always prepared for whatever might come up, aren’t you?” Dr. Hoffman said, her eyes narrowing.
She made a mark in her book and went on. “It is rumored the Old Ones forcibly disconnect individuals as a punishment on occasion. It’s said to be their harshest form of punishment, their version of the death penalty. I’m going to assign a supplemental reading I came across recently. It’s an account of the only known capture of an Old One. Although technically, it was more like managing to transport one without waking her up. Still, she talked in her sleep and . . . I don’t want to ruin the surprise.”
* * *
His nose sufficiently browned, Warner was slightly more insufferable than normal for the rest of the day. In literature class we were comparing the poetry of Robert Frost and Blackheart Murdergrace-Deathperson Jones, a famous parahuman poet of the same time. Warner could not shut up about how dark Frost’s work was compared with Jones’s, like everyone didn’t already know.
He was even worse in Spontaneous Engineering, where he insisted he could do a group project better if he was allowed to work alone and openly scoffed at the talents of the other people at his table. The challenge had been to create, during class time, a device that could locate water and bring it back to the lab. He’d done pretty well. As soon as it was switched on, his machine scurried out into the park on its six wheels and immediately started drilling for groundwater. He’d have taken home best project once again, if my project with Hypatia had not been a machine specifically designed to destroy and steal water from whatever Warner made.
We only got 80 percent credit because Dr. Dell reckoned that went against the spirit of the competition. “It should be a zero,” he said, “but I’ll be darned if I don’t love seeing one machine bust up another.”
One thing I’d learned since coming to the School was that even though classes didn’t assign grades, they were still keeping score, and our scores on tests and assignments seemed to have a direct effect on our schedules. Even so, it was worth getting partial credit if only to take a bit of the wind out of Warner’s sails.
“You’re always trying to take the wind out of my sails,” Warner complained that night at dinner with Hypatia and me.
“That’s ridiculous and self-centered,” I said. “You should be ashamed to accuse friends of treachery like that!”
Here’s the thing: Warner needs a good friend to undermine him from time to time. When I first came to the School, almost nobody would speak to him, precisely because he was the best student in school. He was so competitive that you couldn’t talk to him about anything without him trying to beat you at something or reminding you of something he’d already beaten you at. One time he defeated Hypatia at a conversation about the weather. But I like to think I’ve been able to challenge and derail his self-serving egotism here and there. I haven’t been the best at everything, but losing once in a while has actually made his personality a bit more tolerable.
“Yeah, okay. Sorry,” Warner said. “I think I’m catching paranoia from Dr. Hoffman.”
“I’m not very offended,” I said. “You can make it up to me by lending me your extra fusion transmitter for the field trip tomorrow.”
Warner and Hypatia both looked shocked. “You can’t take a fusion transmitter into the woods!” Hypatia said. “You’ll start a forest fire for sure.”
“Ms. Botfly only said to bring a nonnuclear weapon. I’m su
re she’d allow it, since it’s technically nonnuclear.”
Hypatia shook her head. “If you judge what is and is not a good idea based on what Ms. Botfly thinks, you’ll be dead before you’re twenty.”
She had a point. “Fine, I’ll just bring my disruptor. What are you guys bringing?”
Hypatia’s eyes lit up like only hers can, because they can literally light up and glow a bit when she’s excited. “I got this last week—look!”
She produced a pastel-pink cylinder with a few buttons on the top.
“It looks like a water bottle,” Warner said.
“It’s a superstring slicer. Very subtle. It creates a wave of anti-energy and temporarily immobilizes the target by making them fail to exist for a short period of time.”
“Whoa!” Warner said. “I’ve heard of those! Can I see it?”
“Careful, I tried it on Nikola after I got it, and—”
“WHAT?” I asked, unaware I’d been a test subject.
“And it . . . it . . . didn’t work,” Hypatia said, taking the slicer back from Warner and hastily concealing it in her purse.
Something occurred to me. “Was that why they canceled last weekend?”
“What?” she said, flustered. “I don’t know, but we should be thinking about heading down to—”
That wasn’t going to work. “I should have known they didn’t cancel Saturday and Sunday. You literally blasted me into the next week!”
“Okay, yes! But it was YOUR IDEA!”
“I think I’d remember that,” I said.
“Yeah, but I also think you’d remember a weekend you spent hovering over the kitchen floor inside a localized semiexistence bubble I couldn’t figure out how to deactivate. But you don’t remember that, do you?”
Sometimes you just have to decide you can trust a person.
The Unspeakable Unknown Page 3
