A Problematic Paradox

by Eliot Sappingfield

  “Shucks,” I said.

  “Don’t feel bad. It’s not your fault. Let’s go, then!”

  We walked back through the lobby. “This is City Hall, as you probably noticed,” Hypatia said. “It’s the administration building and all the teachers’ offices, and other important stuff is here. The defense department is located in the basement, so if there’s ever a tornado or bad storm, or some kind of attack, this is where we assemble.”

  “How often are we going to be attacked?”

  Hypatia thought it over. “Depends on what you mean by ‘attacked.’ The Old Ones are constantly probing the gap around the school, looking for a way in. That’s an attack, in a way. If you mean to ask how often a bad person ends up running around trying to get people, that’s never happened. Security here is very strict, and we still run drills and take defense classes to prepare for if something does happen, and to be ready for when we aren’t at school anymore.”

  Dr. Plaskington had talked about that. “So someone who is a student here is more likely to get attacked out in the real world?”

  She shrugged noncommittally and held the door open for me, nodding in a hurry up kind of way. “The Old Ones tend to leave normal people alone—to them, regular humans are more like cattle or potential servants, but once you’re linked with the parahuman community, they consider you a threat.”

  Great, I thought. Now I get to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder. Maybe that was why Dad had never sent me to the School. If I had a kid, would I let them in on a secret if I knew it might be dangerous?

  Hypatia took my arm and led me away. “I can tell you all about the Old Ones later. We just completed a unit on them in Xenopsychology class.”

  “Xenopsychology?”

  Hypatia flounced down the stairs and onto the sidewalk, tossing her hair like they do in shampoo commercials. “The study of alien psychology. How other intelligent life-forms think.”

  “Does this town have a name?” I wondered, hoping she hadn’t been too serious about holding all questions.

  “Well, it used to be called Fair Plain, but after Dr. P. bought it, she renamed it after her great-great-grandfather. The official name is unpronounceable to humans and translates as a grave insult to parahumans. We usually refer to it as the School Town.”

  “Dr. Plaskington’s great-great-grandfather’s name is a grave insult to parahumans?”

  “It is now. Can we get moving again? Time’s wasting.”

  As we walked past City Hall’s front lawn, a twelve-foot square of grass slid under the ground, and from where it had been, the gigantic laser cannon rose from the darkness and pointed itself at the target across the street. It was a little more disconcerting to see the thing operating up close, but I played it cool and only screeched a little.

  After it had done its thing, Hypatia explained: “It’s a sonic cannon, focused sound waves, like a laser beam but without all the heat. The light you see is molecules in the air excited by the vibrations,” she said. “It was built with defense in mind, but right now it’s set on its lowest possible intensity and lets everyone know when class is over. Like a bell you can hear everywhere in town.” She saw my concern. “It’s perfectly safe. You could stick your hand in the beam and it would only tickle or give you a headache.”

  I watched it lower back into the lawn. “What if it was set on medium?”

  “Then it could cut a battleship in half like a hot knife through butter. It would certainly hurt your hand then, so I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  “What would happen if it was on high?”

  She appeared to ponder this. “Probably something very bad. And very loud, I’d guess. Shall we go?”

  “Why not use a bell as the bell?”

  Hypatia sighed. “Not all species hear the same sonic spectrum, do they? Some parahumans prefer hearing a multifrequency chime like the cannon produces when it strikes the resonating platter. Plus, it’s way cooler.”

  The firing of the sonic cannon had signaled the end of a class period; by the time we reached the street, scores of kids were streaming out of buildings. I recognized the girl who had introduced herself earlier. She was deep in conversation with a brown-haired teacher who must have been in her thirties. They were arguing. A boy sporting a full beard, who looked like he might have been more at home in Siberia wrestling bears for money than in a classroom, strolled down the street hand-in-hand with a girl. She was pretty enough to charm a bear so you wouldn’t need to fight it, so I guessed they made a good couple. A particularly handsome boy, who might have been of Native American descent, was cruising down the street on something that wasn’t exactly a skateboard. It wasn’t a skateboard, because where a skateboard has wheels, this board was covered with legs, like a millipede times a hundred. He flashed a winning smile as he passed and, in what I assume was the deepest voice he could muster, said, “Ladies . . .”

  This might have come across as suave if he had not also jauntily tossed his backpack over his shoulder. Adjusting his backpack might have gone fine except for the fact that a pen had fallen out when he did it. Losing the pen wouldn’t have been a big deal if he hadn’t noticed it and said, “Whoa, dropped something,” in an absentminded fashion—which is, of course, a harmless sentence except when you’re riding a skateboard with a thousand legs that are apparently trained to come to a dead stop when someone says “Whoa.”

  Long story short, the skateboard stopped and the boy kept going, which sent him tumbling painfully down the sidewalk. Personally, I find it hilarious when boys hurt themselves by being stupid, but Hypatia was deeply upset. She ran to his side and was already hard at work nursing him back to health before he had a chance to finish injuring himself. “Tom! Tom! Are you all right?” she was saying. I figured she either had a huge crush on him or a tendency to freak out over the smallest problems. (Spoiler alert: the answer is both.)

  She knelt at his side and pulled out her phone. I wondered if she intended take pictures or call 911, but instead she started an app and pushed a few buttons. Then she reached into her book bag and produced a white pouch that said FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE’S UNIVERSAL NURSING POWDER. She tore the packet open and dumped a liberal amount of white powder onto the cut. Then she pointed her phone at it and pressed a button that said CUTS AND ABRASIONS in a list, right below BALDNESS (MALE PATTERN), CANCER, and COLLAPSED MUTAGENIC CARTILAGE DISORDER (PARAHUMAN), and right above DETACHED RETINA.

  The stuff must have done something, because Tom started making a lot of noise—it was clear that whatever was happening under the powder was a lot less pleasant than face-planting on the concrete had been—but not thirty seconds later, the rest of the powder fell off and not a single visible injury remained.

  He grinned broadly. “Thanks, Hypatia!”

  Hypatia was about to respond when he called, “BOARD!” and his skateboard-thing scrambled over to his side from where it had been sunning its solar panels on the grass. I noticed that some of the tiny legs were rusty and a few were broken and hung limp. This board had seen a lot of action.

  “Naughty board,” he admonished, shaking a finger at it.

  The board made a forlorn beeping sound and drooped a bit. Tom stepped back on and was off before Hypatia could call “You’re welcome!” to the empty street.

  “What was that white stuff?” I asked, interrupting her wistful stare at the corner around which Tom had disappeared.

  “Oh, that—just a project I made for Health class last semester. Cellular repair nanobots, microscopic robots that are supposed to fix infections and patch wounds. It got me a B-plus.”

  “Only a B-plus? But that’s amazing!”

  Hypatia shrugged. “It doesn’t work on anything serious, and there are some, ah, side effects. Works on scrapes and bruises pretty well, though. Besides, assignment grades don’t count toward anything.”

  I was shocked at her modesty.
“Hypatia, that stuff could change the world! You could sell it for millions.”

  “When the world is ready, we might sell it. But it still needs work, and humans aren’t ready for serious nanotechnology yet. Weaponized nanobots could kill everyone on Earth in a month or two if they self-replicated, plus they’re too small to see individually, so you’d never see them coming.” She shuddered.

  I hadn’t realized until then that she was a parahuman, too. “You know,” I said. “You parahumans seem to have a pretty low estimation of us standard-model humans. We’re not all murderous goons.”

  “Of course you aren’t. Some of my best friends are human, but all it takes is one bad egg.”

  That didn’t seem fair at all. “You honestly believe that if you shared that nursing powder with normal people that they would just automatically start killing people with it?”

  “It’s happened before. One parahuman has a few drinks and tells a few jokes about nuclear fission reactions, and five years later you all have figured out how to make a bomb out of it. We do share plenty of things. Just not the really advanced stuff. That’s how we pay for all this.” Hypatia gestured to the town in general.

  “The money from inventions pays for the school?”

  “Some funding comes from that, but most comes from tuition and donations from parents and successful former students. The School only takes a cut if you invent something as part of a class assignment. See that big kid over there?” She indicated the bear fighter I’d noticed earlier. “That’s Percival. He designed the last few GPS satellites that went into orbit, but NASA thinks it was a team of researchers at Stanford University. He put the plans together for extra credit last year. I remember because I spilled tea on his computer and almost destroyed the whole project. One of our graduates, I think her name was Amanda, invented airbags—you know, like when you crash your car? It was a kindergarten arts and crafts project. They were supposed to be surprise party balloons. You could hide them around the house, and when you yelled ‘Surprise,’ they would pop open.”

  “I thought an airbag could take a kid’s head off.”

  “That’s why they’re in steering wheels and not party stores.”

  “So this school brings in all kinds of money, and they charge people to attend. Why isn’t it . . . you know . . .”

  “All golden streets and butler robots and free candy on every corner?”

  “I hadn’t meant that exactly, but yeah,” I said.

  “They spend a lot of money on security. Not just here, either. The Old Ones could cause all kinds of havoc if not for certain programs the School pays for. You know those metal towers you see from the highway, the ones with the red blinking lights on top?”

  “Yeah, radio towers?”

  “Well, most of them really are radio towers, but about one in five is a dimensional anchor that prevents the Old Ones from opening a rift in space-time to suck all the air off the planet to kill everyone. They’re very expensive. Then there’s the scholarship program.” Hypatia moved a little closer and lowered her voice. “I’ve also heard rumors that Dr. Plaskington has a bit of an online gambling problem. I’m sure a lot of the money goes for that, too.”

  We walked, and Hypatia pointed out six or seven restaurants that served as dining facilities. “My favorite is Guido’s Italian Abbodanza, but you should stay away on barbecue night. I also like Forbidden Planet because they have video games and a quiet area. I usually have lunch at 11:05 and dinner at 5:15. You can go to dinner anytime between 4:00 and 7:00, but I’ve worked out that 5:15 is the optimum time for minimal delay in seating and maximum carryover satiation so I’m not too hungry before bedtime. If the scheduled meal is heavier fare, like steak or some other kind of red meat, I’ll go a little earlier bec—”

  “Let’s just agree that you’ve given it a lot of thought,” I said. “So what’s that?” I pointed to a large squarish building, hoping to change the subject before she started talking about when she used the bathroom.

  “Oh, that’s the gym. Since we’re kind of on our own here, there aren’t any interschool sports, so we have our own tournaments. There are football and basketball teams and all that, but the really fun sports are the ones invented here. I’m on the black hole tennis team, for instance.”

  “Black hole tennis?”

  Hypatia got a bit excited. “It’s soooo fun—instead of a ball there’s a miniature black hole, and the rackets are strung with hypermagnetic antimatter fiber, so they can move it without even touching it, depending on what the charge is.”

  “Well,” I said, “that sounds lethal.”

  Hypatia dismissed this with a wave of her manicured hand. “It’s not as dangerous as you think. The ball is suspended in a temporal disruption field, so the black hole doesn’t swallow you up if it hits you; you usually just get kicked out in a couple minutes. Last Thursday night I got hit with a really fast serve and—bang—I was at home and it was time for breakfast. Good thing I had my homework done in advance.”

  “Yeah, it’d be terrible if you were sucked into a black hole and didn’t get your Chemistry finished,” I said.

  “Har-har. You can joke about not taking homework seriously because you’ve been in human schools up until now. Give it a week.”

  I liked that she was able to process sarcasm, but didn’t think it was the right time to let her know that I would almost never take homework seriously. I had a feeling that if Hypatia and I were going to cohabitate without murdering each other, I’d need to use a lot of diplomacy.

  7

  THE BOOKSTORE BOOKSTORE

  Hypatia checked her tablet and gasped. “We have got to hurry. We’d barely have enough time if the bookstore visit was quick, but the Bookstore Bookstore is never quick. Still, they take care of all your supplies, so one stop takes care of everything.”

  “The Bookstore Bookstore? What do they sell? Camping supplies?”

  Hypatia didn’t get the joke. “Yeah, they have a few tents, but they also sell books. It’s one of a few stores in town that actually carry some of what they claim to have—hence the name. Except that instead of trashy romance novels and woodworking magazines, they sell the latest academic and scientific literature, any kind of supplies you can imagine . . . and trashy romance novels,” she said.

  Something told me there was a small pile of these novels squirreled away somewhere in her room. I really wanted to needle her about it, but since we just met, it would be a little rude to accuse her of reading trashy romance novels.

  “Speaking of magazines,” Hypatia said, “I think I read something of yours once, in the journal Nature? You were running computer simulations to predict the frequency of genetic mutations in fruit flies exposed to magnetism?”

  “Yeah,” I said, caught completely off guard. I hadn’t thought anyone other than my dad had read it at the time. I was flattered, to be honest.

  “I remember it because your results seemed cooked to me. I get far more accurate results simulating it on the school computer using my own algorithms, and your predictions are miles off what we get when we mutate them in controlled circumstances in the insect lab. I can show you sometime, if you want.”

  “So how many of those trashy novels have you bought?” I asked.

  Hypatia’s cheeks turned bright red, and she nearly dropped her tablet. “Never you mind, nosy!” she said, holding her bag a little closer to her side.

  I knew pushing her on the subject might not be a good idea. “Because I’ve heard the Bosoms of Fire series is really good,” I said.

  Her blue eyes widened and simultaneously faded into a deep brown. “It’s Blossoms of Fire, and they’re actually historically accurate character studies—Why am I telling you this? We’re off schedule. Let’s go!”

  “Wait,” I said. “Your eyes just changed color.”

  “They do that, yeah. I hate it.”

  “Wh
y? They’re pretty.”

  “Oh . . . thanks,” she said a little sheepishly, her eyes going bright green in the space of a second. “I’d prefer to blend in completely. My folks worked hard at making me as human as possible. I guess they missed the mood ring eyes. Let’s get your books, huh?”

  The Bookstore Bookstore occupied a corner lot on the adjacent side of the town square. In the windows, a number of mannequins were sitting in beanbag chairs, reading novels, wearing PLASKINGTON INTERNATIONAL LABORATORY SCHOOL sweatshirts, and sipping imaginary beverages from school-branded mugs. Another mannequin stood over them, holding a rather frightening-looking firearm that glowed blue from its barrel and rocking a pastel blue polka-dotted backpack. A lady mannequin turned her blank face to me and waved as we approached. She held up a book in her plastic mitten-hand and gestured to it like it was the best thing she’d ever read. It was A New Student’s Guide to the School. The sign by the mannequin’s chair changed to inform me that the book was on sale for just $29.99.

  Mechanical mannequins—not a bad idea. Had it known I was a new student?

  “That’s a terrible book,” Hypatia said. “Completely outdated and overpriced.”

  I can’t be sure, but I think the android mannequin heard her, because she tilted her faceless head back and forth in a sassy way, dropped the book into her lap, and made a get outta here gesture at Hypatia, who ignored all this completely.

  The lady behind the counter called to us the moment we opened the door. “Stop upsetting the display! I just got them calmed down. Last weekend some jerk told them that mannequins are supposed to get minimum wage, and they’ve been threatening to join the artificial intelligence union all week. What’s the point of employing robots if you have to treat them like people?”

  Although I placed the clerk’s age at about fifty, something made her seem much younger. She had three ponytails in her hair, one going straight out the top of her head, where not one, but two pairs of glasses were perched. Her shirt was white and bore a coffee stain down its center. Broad dimples framed her mouth, and her heavy-lidded eyes were at once calm and scrutinizing.