A Problematic Paradox

by Eliot Sappingfield

  “Gallium,” Dirac said, noticing my expression. “It’s like candy for us.”

  Warner hadn’t even glanced at his burger. He was staring at me, looking agitated. “Nobody says no to the Old Ones. Not without years of training. You don’t need to lie to impress us,” Warner said with finality.

  I don’t mind being called out on a lie when I’m lying, but being accused when I’m being honest really pushes my buttons. “Listen, haircut,” I said. “You aren’t on the list of people I want to impress. That Tabbabitha, whatever she is, abducted my dad and destroyed my home. I’m not making this up as I go along. You can get bent, too, for all I care.”

  Hypatia looked distinctly flustered. “Nikola, you have class, and the five o’clock beam is going to sing soon. We’d better—”

  “No. I ordered a steak with extra fries and a milk shake, and I’m not leaving till I finish it,” I said, chopping off a sizable chunk of the meat and tossing it into my mouth with my hand.

  “What did she look like, then?” Warner asked.

  “Huh?” I asked, my mouth full.

  Warner’s smirk was starting to annoy me. “You were close enough to talk to one, so what did she look like?”

  I swallowed, suddenly glad I hadn’t left. The steak was the best I’d ever had, by a mile. “She had blond hair, in pigtails,” I said.

  Warner shook his head. “Don’t tell me about her hair. What did her face look like? Did she have a big nose? Bushy eyebrows? You should know, right?”

  “Ah,” I said. “I . . . I don’t exactly remember. I remember teeth.”

  “You must remember something. Did she even have a face?”

  Had she? She must have. I would have noticed if she hadn’t, but I couldn’t recall if there had been a face at all or just a blank where a face should be. “I don’t remember, okay? I remember she had these crazy long arms and short legs, and she was kind of shaped like a mailbox. Oh, and she smelled awful, like rotten meat, but much worse. One of those smells that gets in your clothes and you feel like you need a shower after.”

  This was followed by another silence, which gave me the opportunity to hack off another chunk of steak.

  “I take it back,” Warner said after a moment. “Maybe you aren’t lying.”

  Hypatia cleared her throat a bit. “The smell, that’s a warning from your brain. It can’t handle what it’s being asked to understand, and it converts that to a smell. Like how people having strokes smell burning toast sometimes.”

  “There’s a grainy black-and-white photo of an Old One in the hazardous materials storehouse, and even it smells,” Dirac said. “You’re lucky she didn’t show you her true form. Just seeing them without a disguise can kill people.”

  “So what’s their point?” I asked.

  “Poin a whaa?” Warner asked, his mouth full of cheeseburger.

  “Why are they doing what they do? Kidnapping people, causing trouble. What’s their goal?”

  “They want to rule the world,” Hypatia said simply.

  “God,” I said, “it’s so cliché. Do they watch alien invasion movies for inspiration?”

  Warner was between bites. “It’s not like that, exactly. They don’t want to rule the world as it is now. They want to destroy civilization. Everything people have built with our intellect—cooperation, morality, our sense of justice, our ability to trust science, the creation and appreciation of art, our empathy and willingness to help each other out, everything that has made humanity stronger—they want to get rid of it. Once they do that, they won’t have to take over, because they’ll already be in charge.”

  Dirac held up a finger. “That’s a theory, and one not everyone believes. Some people think they’re trying to raise their own destruction god from the dead so he can rule over them.”

  “That’s not incompatible with the societal degradation theory,” Warner said. “He could help hurry that along—turn a generations-long decay into a matter of a few years.”

  Dirac had finished cleaning the mustard spill and was now using the stains to add color to his work, which was no longer a calculation as much as a work of art. A wheat field, from my angle.

  Something had stuck out to me. “What did you mean when you said if civilization fell they would already be in charge?”

  “Humans have been just as smart as we are now for fifty thousand years,” Warner said. “You could yank an early human through a time warp, drop him off in Florida, and he’d get along fine, after he learned about baths and not murdering people. But despite that, the first traces of civilization didn’t show up until the last ten thousand years or so. Why do you think there was a forty-thousand-year gap?”

  “Learning curve?” I asked.

  “It was a dark age. There was fighting, superstition, and sacrifice. People couldn’t work together for their common good because it would displease the Old Ones. Look in any ancient text—the really old stuff before modern religions—and there are echoes of what came before. Stories about petty, vindictive deities that fight among themselves, who torture people for sport, demand sacrifice, conquest, and absolute blind allegiance.”

  “So you’re saying . . .”

  “The Old Ones wouldn’t be seizing power. They would be returning to power. When humanity exists in a state of anarchy, that’s their kingdom. They ruled the earth for forty thousand years and kept us in a state where we were barely more than animals the whole time.”

  “But remember, that’s only a theory—nobody knows for sure,” Hypatia inserted.

  “If they were so powerful, why aren’t they still in charge?” I asked.

  “Well, according to the theory,” Warner said, looking at Hypatia, “something disrupted them. Personally, I think some of the early parahumans managed to kill their patriarch or whatever it’s called. People have civilization: That’s our unifying bond. The Old Ones ruled when they had their father around.”

  He didn’t get to add anything more because the sonic cannon had just fired its beam into the platter, and for a moment all any of us could hear was that lovely sound. The sonic cannon bell was still jaw-droppingly impressive to me, particularly since from where we were sitting we could see it in action. I knew the beam we could see was a harmless byproduct of focused sound waves, but the fact that it looked like the laser zappers you see in just about every cartoon space battle made me glad it was pointed in the other direction. The orange beam bathed the town square with a bright golden glow. Somehow that one note seemed to contain all the other notes in the world, played at just the right levels and in perfect harmony. I decided that one note was my favorite song. It did seem a bit louder than it had before, but it was still wonderful.

  Dirac and Hypatia must have noticed it was louder, too, because they gave each other a quizzical look. “Does it sound a bit off to you?” she asked him.

  Dirac furrowed his brow and said something, but neither of us could hear him over the ringing. It was growing steadily louder, and the tone seemed to be dropping. There was also a distortion in the sound that increased along with the volume. Before long, it sounded more like the lead guitarist for the world’s loudest death metal band.

  Hypatia was yelling something, but I heard nothing above the noise, which had become the lowest, shrillest, and noisiest noise I’d ever heard. Dishes vibrated off the tables, and windows around the square shook like flags in the wind. My water glass cracked and started leaking. Hypatia gave up shouting and pointed across the square to the metal gong-plate. It had gone from bright orange to white. The edges were melting down the front of the building. She looked scared. This was not supposed to be happening.

  The beam from the sonic cannon moved. It slid down the front of the office building, cutting a slender gash down the center like it was nothing. A second later the entire building had been cut neatly in two, and with an almost frightening suddenness, the cannon had simp
ly turned itself off, with the barrel end resting on the lawn, pointed away from us. My ears rang, and everyone seemed to be in a state of shock. Dirac, Hypatia, and I all stared at one another and at the glowing orange fissure of melted rock and metal that ran down the teachers’ building like hot lava. Where was Warner?

  Dirac opened his mouth in awe. “Holy—” he started to say, but was cut off by a new sound from the cannon. It was like someone decided to hit the world’s loudest death metal guitar with a sledgehammer. The noise was so loud and so sudden that Dirac and I were actually knocked completely off our seats, and Hypatia’s chair tipped over backward. All the windows in the square shattered at once, causing a glittering snow of glass to rain down everywhere. The noise was accompanied by a blinding flash, and after my eyes adjusted, I saw a gaping hole in the center of the teachers’ office building so wide you could look directly through it. Once again, the cannon twitched, dropped to the lawn, and was dormant again. The tube in the middle of the cannon was still glowing, but the light faltered and flickered slightly. I had a suspicion the crisis had ended just as inexplicably as it had began.

  I was wrong.

  With a pained whir, the cannon sprang to life, raised up off the lawn, and started spinning wildly around in a circle, pointing up and down as it rotated. “It’s going to fire again!” Dirac shouted.

  I pulled Hypatia closer to me under the table, and Dirac tipped it over to make a kind of shield.

  The cannon fired three times, slicing a spectacled gargoyle off a corner of City Hall on the third shot. It paused and resumed firing, faster and faster.

  One blast came in our direction—obliterating a major portion of the building next door in a hail of stone and other shrapnel. The terrible noise ceased once again, and when I peeked around the edge of our shield-table I could see it had stopped just when it was pointing our way, and was again laid down flat on the lawn, which was on fire here and there. I felt intense heat flash across the back of my head, and when I looked up, the top half of our table was gone.

  Hypatia tried to say something again, but with the noise of sections of buildings falling and the sound of people shouting and screaming, I heard nothing. She was grabbing her own arm—no—it was her wrist. Did she want to know the time? She pointed at my wrist—the agar bracelet!

  I slipped the bracelet off, threw it above my head, and thought how interesting it would look when it spread out over us and made a protective dome of particles so tightly bonded to one another that no sonic blast could dislodge them. The bracelet turned white again and seemed to pop open like an umbrella. A second later, Hypatia, Dirac, and I were sitting in something like a big white plastic igloo without a door. I was still unable to hear them shouting at me, which made me wish the agar shield was soundproof. I elected to observe that it was, and there was silence, except for the occasional rumbling of the earth beneath us. A couple times I could tell the beam hit close to us because I could see dim flashes of light through the shield and felt chunks of concrete and other debris hitting it, but our space was undamaged.

  “Does this happen often?” I asked.

  “Never! They’ve been using it for years,” Dirac said.

  “Maybe the warranty expired,” I said.

  “If it keeps going like this,” Hypatia said, “it’s going to overload and blow the whole downtown area sky-high. I know the design. It’s meant to go off once in a while, not constantly like that. The core will rupture at this rate.”

  “How soon?” I asked.

  “Five minutes, maybe. Do you have the gravitational disruptor you just bought?” she asked me.

  “In my bag,” I said.

  “That thing is too big,” Dirac said. “Shooting it would be like a squirrel hitting you with a nut.”

  After a few seconds, I made a little transparent spot in the shell and looked out. The cannon was still blasting the heck out of the downtown and the sky above. People had trickled out when it first started going off and were now trapped in various places just as we had been, except that they didn’t have nice agar shields like we did. It was chaos. We watched a group of maybe fifteen students running from the weapon almost get blasted to oblivion with a single shot, only to fall into the deep gash it cut into the earth in front of them, not far from us. They were trapped in a trench, which led straight to the cannon’s nose at one end and ran who knows how far in the other direction.

  “We need to get to them!” Hypatia said. “Can you move this with us?”

  “Yeah,” I said, knowing I could because I’d said so. “On the count of three, we run to the trench and slide down. Ready?”

  “Wait!” Dirac said, but the decision had been made.

  Hypatia held up a hand. “One! Two! Three!” she shouted, and I shrank the shield to a smaller size I could run with. Immediately drowning in sonic chaos, we bolted for the ditch, dodging blasts that were coming faster and faster. At first, I didn’t see Dirac running with us, but I noticed him slipping into the trench with the kids before Hypatia and I had even reached the street.

  After what seemed like an eternity but must have been just over nine or ten seconds, Hypatia and I reached the trench and slid down the steep walls onto a pile of very upset younger students. With a flick of my wrist and a few observations, I was able to reestablish a protective dome that not only covered that part of the trench but also dipped down to block the opening that faced the cannon. The sudden absence of the deafening barks of the sonic cannon were replaced by the wails of frightened and injured students. Hypatia set about putting her packets of medical powder to work, and within seconds, the white powder was floating all over, repairing the kids as we watched.

  I needed information, so I picked out a girl with eyes far too large to be human. She looked a bit younger than the rest but appeared to be somehow calmer and more collected, despite a large gash on her arm that had only partially healed.

  She said they had been in a history class when the cannon started going off. The beam had torn through the building. Part of the floor they were on slid out, and they were dumped from the second story onto the sidewalk.

  “Is anyone else in that building?” I asked.

  “The afternoon youth classes—I think there are a couple other classes in there—some in the art building, too,” she said.

  I drew a deep breath, getting ready to say something stupid. “We need to help them.”

  “WHAT?” said Dirac. “That’s noble and all, Nikola, but you can’t put a dome over the whole town.”

  I thought about it. He was right—I couldn’t shield the whole town, but I might be able to manage it on a smaller scale. I opened a portal in the side of the shell that faced away from the cannon. It looked like the land sloped down about a block away, which meant the trench would end somewhere on the downslope of the hill. “Okay!” I said, once everyone was healed as well as they were going to get at the moment. “When I say ‘go,’ Dirac, you and Hypatia lead the kids down the trench and get them as far away as you can.”

  “What are you going to do?” Dirac wanted to know.

  “I’m going to stop that cannon,” I said, hoping it didn’t sound as crazy to them as it did to me.

  “Are you crazy?” Dirac said. “Let me do something. I can get over there faster.”

  “What’s your plan for shutting it down?” I said.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I figure I’ll . . .”

  The year I turned eleven, my dad was trying to enrich some uranium using a new process he thought would work a lot faster and be much safer than the traditional method, but he was only right about it being faster. That had resulted in an accident that would have killed us both if we hadn’t had a large amount of lead plating handy. The year before that, he spilled some hydrofluoric acid that could have led to an evacuation of the whole town. Another time, we had federal regulators wanting to inspect the particle accelerator wh
en it was not up to code and we had to . . .

  What I’m saying is that this wasn’t my first emergency, not by a long shot. At the same time, something told me this was Dirac’s first emergency. His plan to get into the middle of things and then come up with a plan on the fly had all the earmarks of unnecessary heroism.

  I stopped him. “No. I know what I’m doing. You need to help the others.”

  “I’m not going to let you—” he started.

  I poked his chest with my finger. “Listen! This is not a debate!”

  “STOP ARGUING AND HELP!” Hypatia shrieked over the insane din of the cannon. She grabbed Dirac’s sleeve, dragged him to the exit, and placed a child with a broken leg in his arms.

  “Go . . . now!” I shouted, and enlarged the shell enough to cover them as they made their way to the hill and into cover.

  Then it was just me, a big white shield, and the cannon. Its rate of fire was stepping up. The destructive blasts had been going off every ten seconds or so when we got to the trench, and now it was going off every two seconds, if my counting was accurate. Fortunately enough, more than half the shots it was taking appeared to be directed almost straight above it. It would fire three or four times straight up, then wheel around and blast the heck out of a couple places before shooting at the moon again.

  I had little time. Hypatia thought the sonic cannon would blow in about five minutes. Again, I made the agar into a shield I could carry and pressed forward along the trench as fast as I could. The weapon continued spinning wildly and randomly. If I could just get close enough . . .

  I was there, close enough to hit the cannon with a rock, but not so close that its spinning barrel could clip me. All I needed was for it to point the other way or start firing in the sky so I could make my move. I made another small transparent section in the agar and peeked through, which gave me a great view of the cannon right down the barrel.