A Problematic Paradox

by Eliot Sappingfield

  I nodded.

  “And he was taken?”

  I nodded again.

  Mr. Dolphin frowned contemplatively and spoke in a voice that could have passed for normal. “I knew Melvin. Very bright fellow, but foolhardy more often than not. I’m in his debt for several reasons. We were good friends for a time when we were young and less, ah, wise than we are now. Saw a lot of him until he ran off with That Woman. That’s beside the point. Take this,” he said, thrusting a small white thing—it looked a bit like a baseball—toward me in such a way that nobody else still in the classroom could observe the offering. “He would want me to help you. There’s your help. Do not expect further favors from me.”

  I took the ball. It was white and plasticky but surprisingly heavy for its size, about the weight of a book. “What is it?”

  “It’s agar. It’s heavy because there’s a lot of it, about as much as there is in this entire room. You seem to have a natural talent with it, and it can be useful in other applications than sculpture and humiliating the faculty. Use it JUDICIOUSLY.”

  It didn’t feel right to just shove it into my bag, so I made it form a ring and slid it onto my wrist next to my unresponsive Happybear Bracelet. They clashed terribly, but Mr. Happybear wasn’t going anywhere, on the off chance that my dad happened to come within a few hundred miles of our location. I made a point of noticing how the agar was actually a perfect fit so the weight didn’t make it uncomfortable, and bright silver in color, all of which happened the moment I noticed these qualities. That helped a little. As an afterthought, I added a ring of bluish-white material around the center because I liked the way the agar looked in its normal state.

  “You’ve changed the color,” Mr. Dolphin said, clearly surprised.

  “Is that against the rules?” I asked.

  “Hardly. Although I prefer plain white. It is time for you to go,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand, and he stalked back toward the doors he had come from.

  “Mr. Dolphin,” I called before he could leave. It was just us in the room by that point.

  “Yes?” he said testily.

  “That Woman was my mom. Her name was Yolanda. Dad would want you to remember that,” I said, feeling my cheeks flush.

  “Hm.” Mr. Dolphin grunted. “Never met her. Very well.” And with that, the opening in the wall slid shut, leaving me standing alone, wondering what exactly had happened.

  9

  DEATH METAL

  Waiting outside on the sidewalk, Hypatia snatched away my tablet the moment I was within arm’s reach and consulted the calendar app without waiting for me to ask for help.

  “I tried asking Rubidia to help with it, but she just walked away and ignored me.”

  “She’s probably late for something,” Hypatia said distractedly. “I was worried about this. Oh, it’s terrible. I’m so sorry!”

  “More bad news?” I said. “Great. Let’s get it over with.”

  She took a deep breath. “You’re starting the term late, so the Chaperone has scheduled you extra classes to get you caught up. You have Alternate Reality History at 5:15 today. We’re going to have to have dinner early.”

  “Oh . . . no?” I said.

  “It won’t last. You can make a request with the Chaperone to leave your five o’clock hour open for meals when you get home. But we’re going to have to deal with it for the time being.”

  “Dark times,” I said. I was starting to realize that perhaps this Chaperone program ran the School as much as Dr. Plaskington or anyone else. Obviously, I’d need to figure out how it worked sooner or later.

  We were a few doors down from Pavlov’s Dinner Bell, which Hypatia said was only her ninth-favorite restaurant but would have to do because of location, time constraints, and various other factors. The Dinner Bell was a relatively small place with an old-fashioned feel to it. Free-swinging half-length doors opened to hardwood floors that creaked as you stepped on them and a wood-paneled room that was a player piano short of being the saloon in every Old West movie ever made. Hypatia spotted some friends eating on the front porch, so we joined them.

  We sat, and before any introductions could be made, a robot that looked to be a tablet computer attached to the handlebars of one of those two-wheeled scooters rolled up right beside my head and frightened me nearly half to death by asking “HI, WHAT IS YOUR NAME?” right into my ear.

  There was a crude animation of a man wearing a tuxedo on the screen waiting patiently for my response.

  “Nikola,” I said once I’d regained my composure.

  “LAST NAME?”

  “Kross,” I said.

  “THANKS. YOU ARE REGISTERED. HUMAN OR PARAHUMAN MENU?”

  “Human,” I said, wondering what the difference was, and was about to ask what the specials were when the robot waiter rolled away without another word.

  My bewilderment must have been obvious, because Hypatia explained immediately, “That’s just to register you, and you order your food on your tablet. You only deal with the waiter if you need to change your preferences or something.”

  “He could have said something. People are . . . randomly rude here.”

  Hypatia snickered. “It only seems weird because it’s not random. Besides, that was a robot, not a person. Let me introduce you.” Hypatia first introduced me to Dirac Fermion, who grunted politely in response. He was an extremely tall, pale, and lanky guy with, I kid you not, reflective silver hair. Most strikingly, when he handled his eating utensils, I noticed he had fingers at least double the normal length. He had already ordered his food, and I watched him spear a chunk of meat with a fork held between two fingers and slice it with a knife held in the same hand. With his other, he was working on a problem set.

  Our other dinner companion was Warner Goss, a shortish, apparently human boy of about my own age. His hair, eyes, and clothes were all dark and all artfully mussed, not like he’d rolled out of bed twenty minutes ago, more like he’d spent a lot of time and effort acquiring the just rolled out of bed twenty minutes ago look. I didn’t observe any obvious parahuman traits, but I did detect a distinct note of suspicion in the way he looked at me.

  I scrolled through the menu options on the app that had popped up on my tablet. There were no prices listed, so I ordered a steak dinner with extra fries and a milk shake. Then I wondered if that was too much—I didn’t want to look like a glutton. Then I was a bit irritated that I cared at all. I used to bring pickled eggs to school without caring what anyone thought. Finally I realized I just wasn’t hungry enough for steak anyway, so I picked the tablet back up and with my usual grace fumbled it, tried to catch it, and made things worse. Long story short, I basically threw my tablet at Hypatia.

  “Ow!” she said.

  “Sorry, I’m a bit of a klutz,” I said, retrieving the computer and feeling my cheeks get hot in embarrassment.

  “How did you do that?” Warner asked.

  I shrugged. “Oh, you know. I kind of dropped it, and then batted it in her general direction.”

  “No,” he said, leaning in closer. He smelled faintly of hand sanitizer and lemons. His jeans and T-shirt were a little too tight, despite the fact that he was skinny to begin with, and his face was just west of pleasant. Slightly-too-close-set eyes gave him the look of someone you wouldn’t want to guard your hot-fudge sundae while you ran to the bathroom. “I meant how did you control the quantum agar like that? It was like you’ve been practicing your whole life. Did you have some at home?”

  Had he been in Quantum Mechanics class? He had, I remembered. He was the boy with the farting rocket that only fell over. “I’ve never seen the stuff before,” I answered, “but a lot of the students seemed to manage pretty well with it. Did you get your rocket working?”

  “No, I ended up hanging it from a thread that made it look like it was going up.”

  “Neat,” I s
aid. “Did Mr. Dolphin like it?”

  “Dolphin doesn’t like anything or anyone, but I think he might have hated it less than some of the other projects,” Warner said. “A lot of us can manage the agar pretty well, but you didn’t manage it; you tamed it. Like it was a part of you.”

  “I mean, it was pretty hard to get the idea at first,” I said, trying to be at least a little humble.

  “Don’t be modest,” Hypatia chimed in. “The students our age have been working with agar for various purposes over the past few years. There’s a little in just about every advanced technology you see around here. Our most important computers run on the stuff. What you saw everyone else doing was the result of a lot of study and concentration. My project took me three days to work out. What you did was natural ability. I’ve never seen anyone liquefy it or change its temperature before.”

  “Which brings us back to my question,” Warner said, lowering his voice as he pulled his chair closer. “What’s the secret?”

  “I don’t have one,” I said.

  “You expect us to believe you’re a natural?” he asked. “I don’t buy it. New student, first day . . . You preprogrammed all that just to impress us.”

  “If I wanted to impress you,” I said, “I would have brought a bowl of tapioca pudding and a slingshot.”

  While Warner tried to work out what my insult meant (which was nothing), I removed the agar bracelet from my wrist and laid it on the table. Picturing in my mind the equation for a simple hollow sphere, I watched as the bracelet became just that. A few adjustments rendered it as thin as a soap bubble and as clear as glass, though I could somehow tell it was far less fragile than either. The stuff could stop a bullet, I suspected.

  Dirac glanced at the sphere and went back to his work. Warner was shocked. “You stole some?” he asked.

  “He gave me some,” I said as I set it hovering an inch above the table.

  Hypatia’s eyes bugged almost out of her skull. Warner leaned in close, almost touching his nose to the sphere.

  “He gave you agar, like, to play with?” he asked, clearly jealous.

  “Nikola—” Hypatia said. “Agar is strictly controlled and more expensive than platinum or plutonium. You can’t let anyone know you have any.”

  “What’s the big deal? He said he owed my dad some kind of debt, and Dad would want me to have it. It seemed like a nice gesture.”

  “For someone who knows how to use it, quantum agar can be a powerful weapon. You showed us that today. If Mr. Dolphin wasn’t an expert himself, he could have suffocated.”

  Warner poked the bubble tentatively. I had the bubble poke him back before changing it into a circular shape and making it silver with a central bluish ring once more.

  “Okay, I can understand the liquid thing, but how do you change it into metal?” Warner asked.

  “I’m not really sure. I guess I was thinking about how Mr. Dolphin said it was made of a bunch of subatomic particles all mushed together. Those are the building blocks of atoms, so they could make anything—or at least look like anything, I guess. Really, I just think about what it’s going to look like after it changes.”

  Hypatia couldn’t take her eyes off it. “Mr. Dolphin must have taken a liking to you, or else he owed your dad his life.”

  “If he liked me, I’d hate to see how he is with people he doesn’t care for.”

  Warner shrugged. “That’s just how he is. He’s married, you know. I’ve seen him and his wife together a few times—he shouts at her just like he does with everyone else. ‘ESMERELDA, I particularly like those shoes. They remind me of CORRUGATED IRON,’” he said, doing a pretty good Dolphin impression.

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “He said that?”

  “More or less. That woman must have nerves of steel, living in an enclosed space with him.”

  Hypatia nodded. “He’d give me nineteen heart attacks a day if he were my dad.”

  That reminded me of a story. “My dad is almost as bad sometimes. He blew up my birthday cake once—tried using an argon sodium laser to light the candles.” There’s more to the story, but I lost track. Suddenly I remembered that my dad wasn’t at home, and I wasn’t going to see him anytime soon.

  I fingered the Happybear Bracelet on my wrist, thinking how all this could have been avoided if I’d just worn it instead of being typical stubborn Nikola. I must have accidentally pressed the nose, because a second later Mr. Happybear spoke up.

  “Say! It seems like you’re doing okay! Is anything wrong?”

  “What is that?” Warner asked, looking at the red-eyed plastic bear on my wrist next to the much-cooler bracelet.

  “Long story,” I said.

  He kept looking at it, which made it pretty clear he wanted to hear some of the long story. Hypatia appeared to be curious as well. Dirac looked like he might have heard something. My first instinct was to pull it off and stuff it into my bag, but I was through being embarrassed about the stupid thing.

  “It’s supposed to be an emergency locator or tracker. My dad tried to make me wear it to school, but I never did. It’s supposed to talk to some implant he has in his ear, but it isn’t connecting right.”

  “Old Ones took him,” Hypatia explained.

  Warner made an aaah face. “Yeah, you won’t get a connection now. Wherever they take people, there’s no cell phone signal there for sure. Besides, it probably wouldn’t connect here because of the gap.”

  “Gap?” I asked.

  “The main defense here,” Hypatia said. “It’s a kind of interdimensional shield over the whole town. It’s called the gap because it’s basically a gap in reality where nothing exists. Anyone or anything that tries passing through it without permission just stops existing. We’d have the Old Ones taking shots at us every day if they could get in.”

  “I thought that was the bees’ job,” I said.

  “If the bees are fighting the Old Ones, we’re already in serious trouble. They’d just distract and irritate them. Their main job is to inspect newcomers before they’re allowed in and to chase away anyone who accidentally gets too close.”

  “They swarmed the car when we got here, but then we just drove right in,” I said.

  Warner nodded. “They can turn the gap off in small places for short periods of time. Kind of like opening an invisible door. If they hadn’t, you would have been obliterated at the subatomic level.”

  “Tell me more about the Old Ones,” I said. “Dr. Plaskington mentioned them in passing. They’re parahumans like you, only older?”

  Hypatia’s eyes went dark, and Warner sat up a little straighter. Dirac didn’t look up, but I noticed him frown suddenly at his paper. He used his eraser for the first time.

  “They’re nothing like us,” Hypatia said with an emphatic tone I hadn’t expected. “I guess we were all alike about a hundred thousand years ago, but we changed. We became more like you, and they worked on increasing their power.”

  “Increasing their power how?” I asked.

  “They’re interdimensional by nature,” Hypatia said. “And they share a hive mind.”

  “A hive mind?”

  She nodded. “They’re separate but together. If you tell one Old One a secret, they all know it instantaneously. If we were Old Ones and I wanted you to pass the salt, I wouldn’t ask you to do it. I’d just pick it up with your hand and pass it to me.”

  Weird. “So how are they interdimensional? What does that mean?”

  “They exist mostly in some other dimension we don’t really have access to, and only poke part of themselves into our world. Does that make sense?”

  “Kind of,” I said.

  She shrugged. “It’s hard to understand because humans aren’t put together to understand that kind of thing. Neither are parahumans, anymore. That’s why we can’t see them as they are. We only see what they wa
nt us to see. The part of them that hides in another plane of existence, it touches you and makes you see things their way.”

  I shuddered, imagining Tabbabitha putting ideas in my brain. “That sounds vile.”

  “The effects vary from person to person, but it can be unbearable. There was a kid who used to go here, Dalton George—he saw one in person while on vacation last year, and it actually talked to him. Nearly killed him. He’s in a psych ward somewhere, and they’re trying to erase the memories, but it’s slow going.”

  “I talked to one, and it didn’t do that to me,” I said. “It was creepy and gross, but—”

  Dirac moved his arm so quickly that he accidentally spilled a glass of—was it a glass of mustard?—over his paper. He made no motion to clean it up. “You . . . talked to one?” he repeated.

  “Yeah,” I said, suddenly aware all three of them were staring at me like I’d just stopped a bullet with my teeth. “Her name was Tabbabitha, and she showed up at my school and told me to come with her, to join her and her friends’ ‘team,’ whatever that meant.”

  “And what stopped you?” Dirac asked, his eyes boring holes into me.

  “Um, I didn’t want to? She acted like she was doing me a favor, saying stuff like they were my friends, and how I really wanted to go with them. But then she started insulting my dad, so I told her to get bent.”

  They were all quiet for a solid thirty seconds. During this time our food was delivered by a little robot. It’s nice to know that even robot waiters somehow have the ability to arrive at the most awkward moment in a conversation. I got my steak, Warner got a cheeseburger with mashed potatoes, and Hypatia got a cube of silver metal and a generous pile of what looked like chalky multivitamins slathered with green wasabi paste I could smell from across the table. Without a second thought, she popped the metal into her mouth and closed her eyes with apparent bliss.