She was giving me an out. “Yeah, that’s right!”
“Very good,” she said. “Don’t forget that’s what happened, in case anyone asks. One of my old friends works in the Department of Defense. I’ll have her arrange for a malfunctioning missile to accidentally blast that part of the forest to splinters.”
“But she’s not one of them,” I said, dropping the ruse.
Ms. Botfly nodded and picked up the torture device again. “Doesn’t matter. As a rule, we can’t trust the Old Ones, no matter how trustworthy they are. Trustworthiness is one of their most useful disguises.”
“How did you know we met her?” I asked.
“You know that monitoring app I had you all activate on your tablets? It’s surprisingly good at monitoring things: audio, video, temperature, background radiation, police radio bands, heart rates . . . very comprehensive. Something about your story seemed just a little bit cockamamie, so I went through the recordings. You really have a way with the Old Ones, don’t you?”
“Guess so,” I said, feeling a bit ashamed that I hadn’t remembered the FieldTrip app was listening the whole time.
“Honestly, I don’t know what this orphan act she was putting on was supposed to be, but I’m not terribly interested. It may even be true. I’ve read accounts of an Old One being exintegrated and living. Although calling them accounts is a bit generous. Legends and rumors might be more accurate,” Ms. Botfly said, typing something on her computer terminal.
As if an idea had occurred to her, Ms. Botfly stopped typing and looked at me over the rims of the pair of glasses that were on her nose at the moment. “Question: What did she smell like?”
“That was one of the weirdest things about her!” I said. “She didn’t smell bad at all. She smelled like fresh-baked bread. It made me hungry, more than anything.”
Ms. Botfly frowned appraisingly. “Whatever the case, she’ll be vaporized about ninety minutes from now, and we can forget all this ever happened. Make sure not to talk to anyone about this. If word got out . . . that’s more than enough time for someone to get away. Worse, if she happened to leave behind a tentacle or tooth she wasn’t using, the cleanup crew would find biological traces of her and conclude the strike was a success. Do you understand?”
“Okay,” I said, trying not to sound surprised. She was giving me another out. I was starting to suspect Ms. Botfly might be a reasonable person.
“You said she was exsanguinated?” I asked.
“No, exintegrated. It’s a word for when they banish one of their own from the hive mind. Exintegration is an unspeakable horror for them. It’s like having their memories ripped out of their head, being forced back into infancy, and abandoned with no way to fend for themselves. Almost makes me feel sorry for her.”
“What was the legend you heard?” I asked, hoping my sympathy for Darleeen wasn’t too obvious.
“It’s our oldest legend,” Ms. Botfly said. “Long ago one such Old One is supposed to have become the first parahuman. But it’s been a few hundred thousand years since then. Maybe there have been more. Who knows?”
I had more questions, but she flapped her hand at me dismissively. “You’d better get to class. Also, could you please try not to commit any felonies for a while?”
I grabbed my bag and headed for the door. “I’ll do my best, but I can’t promise anything.”
“At the very least, don’t get caught,” she added. As I left, I could hear her muttering something about “rookie mistakes.”
* * *
After I left the bookstore, I fired off a brief email to Darleeen suggesting she might leave an old tentacle at her cabin. (I just assumed that was an option for them.)
Then I had Comparative Reality Studies with Mr. Moravec, a class I’d never even heard about until just then. We worked with computer-simulated universes as big and as complex as the actual universe we live in. It was tons of fun at first. Everyone created their own big bang, and you got to wear virtual reality goggles and go zooming through whole simulated galaxies at triple-infinite speeds.
The goal was to locate simulated planets where simulated intelligent life had formed and built little simulated civilizations. We were then supposed to make observations about what their simulated cultures turned out like, and whether they ever figured out science, art, sitcoms, taxes, and other things like that.
I was overjoyed to be the first person in class to discover an intelligent species. They looked like snails with flexible bony shells that could turn transparent to soak up the sunlight if they got hungry.
They had just discovered radio a few generations before, so I tuned into their radio chatter and got to hear them wondering about their place in existence and debating whether there was other intelligent life in the universe. They even had radio programs about snail-things from the stars who came to attack them with laser beams and high-tech salt cannons.
That was a little weird, so I sped up time until they were building spaceships and supercomputers. On a whim, I looked up a research institution where a group of simulated snail-things were actually using their own supercomputer simulation to look at their own even smaller simulated universe.
“It looks so real!” one of the snail-things said in snail language that my computer translated for me. “Do they know they’re not real?”
A bigger snail-thing slurped and burbled condescendingly at such a silly question. “Certainly not! Their universe is as real to them as ours is to us,” it said.
The first snail-thing discolored its lower thoricatellum pensively. “Do you think it might be possible that we’re simulated like they are?”
Well, that must have been the funniest thing any of the snail-things had ever heard because they all burbled and glormphed with absolute glee at such a silly concept.
“Don’t be absurd! I think we’d know if we were a simulation,” said the bigger simulated snail-thing.
The first snail-thing agreed it was being silly. Then it looked up at the ceiling where I was looking down on it invisibly, almost like it was looking right at me.
Just then, I got a notification that it was time to delete our simulated universes and report our findings.
I took off the headset and looked up at the ceiling of the converted tanning salon that served as our classroom. Nothing was there.
“Do you have a question?” Mr. Moravec asked.
“Not one I want an answer to,” I said.
* * *
My second class was Creative Nucleonics, where we were supposed to be making francium do unnatural things like not decay instantly, and where I was able to apologize to my temporary lab partner, Dirac, for not listening to his advice the day before. (Although I did fail to mention that both Hypatia and I had warned Darleeen.)
“I’m glad you came to your senses,” he said. “I was sure she had gotten into your head. Every one of them is a potential threat, and pretending otherwise is just foolishness.”
“Yeah, but everyone everywhere is a potential threat,” I said, feeling strangely perturbed and a bit insulted at his unwillingness to trust my judgment over his own preformed opinion. “Potential is a pretty big word.”
“I guess, but we’re safer if we follow the rules, and the rule is that they’re all a danger. You can’t just go around making friends with rogue Old Ones. If one of them is being nice to you, it’s because it wants something.”
I was in the process of formulating a response when a tap on my shoulder interrupted my train of thought.
The person tapping my shoulder was Ultraviolet, Hypatia’s archnemesis and general fancy-pants bad egg. She was holding a neutron stabilizer and looking very pleased with herself. Dirac and I had been sitting at the back of the room, so I’d assumed we could talk with some level of privacy. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten some of the supplies were stashed in a bin right behind us. How long had she been standi
ng there?
Ultraviolet flipped her hair and smiled. She was a gorgeous human girl who was at the School mostly because her superrich parents had hired some parahuman doctor to perform quasilegal genetic engineering on her before she was born. I guess it’s possible for very rich families to pay to ensure their children turn out genetically perfect. I wondered if being an awful person was a side effect of the treatment.
“What are you two talking about?” she wanted to know.
“Ah, you know . . . francium stuff . . . ,” I said, once again proving that I’m not very good at lying under pressure.
Ultraviolet arched her perfectly formed brows. “Is that so? It sounded to me like Dirac was saying you shouldn’t have made friends with an Old One. I heard you all came back from that field trip with a lot of pretty wild stories, but I couldn’t have imagined you were covering for something like that.”
At least I knew how long she’d been standing there. “Listen, Ultra, you probably misunderstood. We were just talking theory, you know? Sometimes when you eavesdrop on people, you hear things out of context. Right, Dirac?”
I looked to Dirac to back me up, but he only sighed grouchily and went back to the atom he’d been working on. Thanks for the help, pal.
“Oh, you’re probably right. Context is so important,” Ultraviolet said in a kind, understanding tone that told me I was in serious trouble. “I’m just a kid. We should probably let the authorities sort this out.”
Crap, crap, crap. “Wait a sec, Ultra. It’s not like—”
Ultraviolet raised her hand. “Mrs. Perey! Please come quick!”
Mrs. Perey, a very elderly parahuman with long dark hair and a serious unibrow shuffled over as quickly as she could.
“Yes? What is it?”
Ultraviolet shot me one last gleeful smile and put on a deeply concerned expression that almost could have fooled me. “I was just back here getting some supplies, and I overheard Dirac and Nikki talking—”
I’m just going to stop the story here for a moment. Under no circumstances possible in this world or in any possible universe is anyone ever permitted to call me Nikki.
Ultraviolet went on. “And what I heard, well, I’m frightened, Mrs. Perey. I think we may need to call the principal.”
Mrs. Perey looked very tired and faintly irritated. “About what?”
“Dirac told Nikki that she shouldn’t have . . . Dirac was saying it was bad that she . . . Oh! You know what I mean. At some point, possibly during the field trip yesterday she . . . What’s the word for one of those . . .”
I’d heard the same kind of speech before when Warner tried telling Radia about our meeting with Darleeen. She’d put a bug in his brain that stopped him from telling anyone about it, but Darleeen hadn’t been anywhere near Ultraviolet. Had Ultraviolet somehow caught the same mental block just by overhearing the information? Maybe Darleeen made it so if one of them slipped up and someone else overheard, the new person couldn’t tell anyone, either.
Mrs. Perey was looking significantly more tired and irritated than she had a moment before. “Go on, girl. Spit it out. I haven’t got all day. Someone’s probably irradiating themselves as we speak.”
Ultraviolet shook her head, trying to clear it. “I think Nikola made contact with . . . She found a . . .”
I wondered if the other part of Darleeen’s mental tampering had transferred as well. Only one way to find out. “Ultraviolet, are you talking about how I found a deer turd in the forest and brought it back home to study it, but you mistook the turd for a chocolate muffin and ate the whole thing?”
“Yes! That’s exactly what I remember! I ate the whole thing!” Ultraviolet said, overjoyed. She shot me a triumphant look that meant something like, Ha, I sure showed you.
A few students giggled but were immediately silenced by a truly radioactive glare from Mrs. Perey. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked angrily.
If Ultraviolet’s reddening cheeks were any indication, she was starting to realize that loudly confessing to eating a deer turd in front of an entire class really wasn’t showing me anything. Her face had fallen, and she looked deeply confused. “I . . . I’m not sure.”
Mrs. Perey shook her head with deep disapproval. “That makes two of us. I’m ordering you to report to Dr. Foster this moment for a full drug test.”
“I’m not on drugs!” Ultraviolet cried.
“You could have fooled me. Go!”
Ultraviolet stormed angrily from the room without so much as another look in my direction, and Mrs. Perey returned to the front of the class, where one of the students actually had succeeded in irradiating himself.
* * *
After the best Creative Nucleonics class ever, I winged a test I hadn’t studied for in Metabotany, discussed themes of alienation and internal conflict in Gerard the Excessively Moderate’s choose-your-own-autobiography in Parahuman Literature, and learned about meromorphic functions in math class, which would have been drastically boring if Fluorine Plaskington hadn’t started time-jumping like crazy in the middle of class, switching from baby to teenager to adult and back to infant over and over again. You know that game babies love where you hand them something like a pencil and they throw it and laugh maniacally until you go get it for them? Fluorine could play that game on her own.
A younger student dressed in a bright orange sari moved next to me and asked me about it. “Do you know what caused that? Was she breaking rules?” she asked as her eyes widened in delight. Something told me this one liked gossip.
“She doesn’t remember, so nobody knows. Must have been a big one, though, because paradox effects usually aren’t supposed to last more than a couple days and this has been going on for months.”
Her deep brown eyes got even wider, and her dark hair kind of shivered a little bit. She was a parahuman, I realized. “If she was time-traveling when she lost her memory, why didn’t she just stay in the past or the future? How would she know to return?”
“How should I know? Maybe she sent a cell phone or a sports almanac back in time and that caused it.”
I saw that under the table she was scribbling furiously in a notebook without even glancing at it. She saw I’d noticed what she was doing and set it on the table. It was filled with equations, temporal math, bizarre conversion formulas, and theorems I’d never seen before.
She tilted her head curiously. “If she sent a cell phone or an inanimate object back in time, wouldn’t that affect the person who found and used it?” she asked. “In Temporal Management class—”
“What’s your name, kid?” I asked.
She offered a hand and I shook it. “Sophie Ramanujan, theoretical editor of the School’s theoretical theoretical journal. We love unexplained phenomena like this. I’ve been thinking about her predicament for some time, and I just can’t figure it out.”
“What’s to figure out?” I asked.
“Paradoxes affect people based on the Hot Potato principle. When a paradox is caused by sloppy time travel, the person closest to the event is the one affected. If she sent back an animal or object, the paradox would affect whoever found it, not her. If she sent a person, it would affect that person. If she sent herself, she would probably have gotten stuck because of her amnesia. The math only works if she was involved in sending someone who is immune to paradoxes—”
Just then I noticed the teacher had become aware that Sophie and I were chatting about something other than Riemann surfaces. I waved my hand rudely at Sophie in that familiar dismissive gesture parahumans used with one another when they were done interacting. As if by magic, she stopped talking and went back to her work.
* * *
The first couple weeks after our field trip were the busiest I’d ever had while at the School. I’d meant to talk to Hypatia about Darleeen, but life, classes, and Hypatia’s huge list of extracurricular activities kept ge
tting in the way.
I finally decided to fill her in over dinner at Forbidden Planet one Friday evening when we were actually done with classes at a reasonable hour and neither of us had anything planned. I was mustering the courage to bring it up when Hypatia couldn’t take it anymore.
“I can’t take it anymore!” Hypatia cried, flapping her hands madly in the air. Her eyes took on the pale color they usually had when she was panicking overdramatically about something.
“Are you talking about that salt-and-vinegar lima bean smoothie?” I asked, pointing to the half-finished cylinder of pea-green goo sitting on the table before her. “Because I don’t know how you’ve gotten as far as you have, to be honest.”
“No, that’s delicious. I’ve been lying to you, and I have to come clean!”
She stood, sat back down, and grasped the edge of the table like she was afraid someone might try taking it by force, staring at me with frightening intensity through almost pure-white eyes. “Promise me you won’t be mad!”
Fortunately, Forbidden Planet was mostly empty at the time. Most Friday nights the School projected a movie on the sky over the whole town, so it was a great time to get some work done or have a conversation if you weren’t into the movie because everyone else was lying around on the lawn in the park.
“I promise I won’t be mad!” I said, feeling a little relieved. If she’d been lying to me about something, she might not be as mad at me for not telling her about my email to Darleeen.
“But if you are mad, you have to promise to be honest and tell me!”
“Okay!” I said. “I promise that if I break my promise to not get mad, I’ll be sure to tell you.”
She shook her head, and her curls swung in a golden vortex around her head. “And if you do get mad and you don’t tell me, will you promise not to secretly loathe me?”
The Unspeakable Unknown Page 9
