A Problematic Paradox

by Eliot Sappingfield

  “Oh no,” I said. It was the last thing I heard—the sound of the blast that hit the shield as I held it was so immense I could feel something in my ears explode. The pain was unimaginable. I was flying up and out of the hole like I’d been hit by a truck and landed on the lawn well outside of the trench where I had been sheltering. Hot, sticky blood ran down the sides of my head, my ankle screamed in pain, and my vision swam like I was seeing the world from underwater. It was all I could do to get up on my good foot and retrieve the agar shield, which had landed a few paces from where I was. If the weapon caught me without it, I’d be nothing more than a smoking crater on the grass.

  I was too far away again. The cannon was about fifty feet off. I limped forward as quickly as I could, no longer attempting to be cautious. Being newly deaf, the absence of noise made it a little easier to think and act. Besides, I knew I was done for if it hit me again, shield or no. A few blurry seconds later, I was close enough.

  I formed the agar into a sphere about the size of a baseball and threw it at the cannon—or, to be more exact, just above it—hoping the wild flailing of the cannon wouldn’t bat it into the next county like a grand slam. It took all the concentration I had to imagine it slowing enough as it flew over to spread out and form another dome, this time directly over the cannon’s nest on the lawn and then into a complete sphere, encasing it below the ground as well. I couldn’t see it underground, but in a way, I could feel that the gap had closed below it. What remained was a large white globe standing on the lawn of City Hall where the cannon had been.

  I watched red-hot patches bloom on the surface of the white agar shell. The town square still looked like a battlefield, but to me, there was nothing but utter silence. My head swam with pain, and I wondered if I would ever hear music again. Dizziness overwhelmed me, and I nearly tipped over before reminding myself that I needed to concentrate on the cannon and the shield around it. If I lost consciousness, it was game over for me and anyone who was still downtown.

  It took all the willpower I could muster. The red blotches had started turning black and were becoming streaks running around the inside of the ball, like comets projected from within. The black color must have meant some of the agar substance was breaking down under the force of the weapon. I started imagining the agar repairing itself and getting stronger when the entire ball suddenly turned coal black, projecting a shock wave outward that was so powerful I could see it in the air. Sidewalks buckled. A major portion of City Hall was blasted off its foundation, and I was once again thrown back to the ground. It was grass I landed on, but the force of the impact was more than I could handle. The last thing I saw before I blacked out was the agar shield disintegrating around where the cannon had been, revealing a smoking, charred mound of melted and torn metal.

  10

  THE CHAPERONE

  A bell rang—or was it the ringing in my ears? A blurry cat shook convulsively while a mouse suspended in air held a large bell over its head and clanged it furiously. The image and the noise, not to mention the pain in my ears, made me wish I wasn’t awake anymore.

  I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, I was staring at a television screen. Bugs Bunny was dressed up like a girl in a Viking helmet and riding the world’s fattest horse up a flowery hill. I almost laughed, then wondered: Was this the afterlife? If I was dead, so was Dr. Plaskington, because she was hovering over my bed at the moment, grinning like a madwoman. She said something—I could see her mouth move.

  I heard nothing. The television was silent as well. My god, I was deaf.

  “Oh no!” I cried.

  This scared the bejeezus out of me, because I actually heard my own voice. That’s right. I scared myself with my own voice. “What?” I said, testing my ears. Could I hear just myself?

  Dr. Plaskington started giggling audibly.

  “I’m not deaf!” I said, slumping back down on the bed. As soon as I stopped moving, I was drowning in the most bizarre feeling—it was like tingling, but painful. It was not the kind of pain you can feel; it was more like I knew it was there, but I couldn’t get a good look at it. I know that doesn’t make sense, but that’s as close as I can come. My ankle, side, and ears were the main focuses, but the weird sensation didn’t stay there. Instead, it snaked all over and just made me feel generally irritated and a little creeped out.

  “No, no, no,” Dr. Plaskington was saying, “but you’ve been talking in your sleep. You kept saying ‘Am I deaf? I can’t hear!’ I happened to see that you were coming around when I passed by, so I muted the TV and thought I’d play a little joke on you. Pretty clever, huh?” she said, giggling some more.

  “I bet you get kicked a lot,” I said.

  She considered this. “More than your average academic administrator but less than a soccer ball.”

  “Just checking. So I’m alive, then.” I was still in my clothes, though they were blackened here and there with burns. My Happybear Bracelet was still intact, although the quantum agar bracelet was gone.

  “Yep. Our doc fixed you up good as new. He’s the School’s miracle worker. You’re in our hospital, by the way. Our medical facilities are unmatched the world over. Ah! Here he is now,” she said, pointing to the door. “Say hello, dear.”

  In the doorway stood a guy who couldn’t have been older than twenty-nine. He had curly, close-cropped black hair and sported a lab coat over a fashionable shirt and tie. His name tag read DR. FOSTER.

  “Hello, dear,” he said to Dr. Plaskington.

  “Was anyone killed?” I asked.

  “Oh yes. Thirty-four students died in the . . . accident, but we were able to revive them all,” she said.

  “You can bring people back from death?” I asked.

  “Well, not literally. They were bad enough that human doctors would have given up on them—that’s what I mean. Most are back in class at the moment, although Hubert Planck will be a bit stiff for a while.” She grinned and waited. I got the joke but didn’t have the energy to pretend it was funny.

  “Of all the students, your injuries were the most concerning,” she continued, undeterred. “Ruptured eardrums, broken ribs, fractured tarsal bones, perforated spleen. Spleens, I don’t know why you bother with them. There were more problems, but we regrew, repaired, and sorted everything out. If this were a human hospital, you’d be dead and owe us several million dollars at this point.”

  “Are Hypatia and Dirac okay?” I asked.

  Dr. Plaskington thought about it. “Are they students here?”

  “Yes! Hypatia was in your office when I arrived?”

  Her face lit with recognition. “Oh! Yes, the girl with the extra foot.”

  I gave up and looked to Dr. Foster, who mouthed “They’re fine” to me.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “You were brought in about thirty minutes ago,” Dr. Plaskington said. “Not yet bedtime, but I can’t wait for it. I’m exhausted.”

  “Wow,” I said to Dr. Foster. “You work fast.”

  He took a seat on a stool by my bedside and spoke in a voice that sounded deeper than you’d think from looking at the man. “I’ve been doing this for a long time and have any device or tech I can wish for at my disposal. Your friend Hypatia’s powder helped a lot, too. She was able to administer first aid shortly after you collapsed.”

  “You know what always cheers me up after being gravely injured?” Dr. Plaskington asked. “Signing liability waivers! As it so happens . . .”

  “Did you know they’re serving bacon-and-egg ice cream with nacho cheese at Pasteur’s Dairy this evening?” Dr. Foster asked her.

  “I did not,” said Dr. Plaskington, and she was actually gone before she finished the three-word sentence.

  Something occurred to me. “She called it an accident just now. It sure didn’t feel like an accident.”

  Dr. Foster rolled his stool over to a com
puter. “I understand what you’re getting at, but an official investigation came to the conclusion that the incident was caused by a routine software bug.”

  “Some bug,” I said, not at all convinced of the thoroughness of an official investigation that is over faster than you can get a pizza delivered.

  “Yeah,” Dr. Foster said, sounding as convinced as I was.

  “Do you think it was the Old Ones?” I said, wondering if it was a coincidence that I’d almost been murdered twice in as many days.

  “If they had been able to enter the School Town, I doubt they’d be content with making noise and causing property damage. Besides, the gap didn’t go down completely, so there’s no way they could have gotten in in the first place. My money is on it being a malfunction or maybe even a prank gone wrong. That said, if I know the students, some of them will still whisper about any rumor they can get their ears on,” he said. “Ignore all that. And rest. You’ll be ready for class tomorrow.”

  “Seems pretty dangerous for a prank.”

  He attached a blinking circular device about the size of a quarter to my forehead and pressed a button. Around me the world went black and white, and everything seemed to vibrate. “You’ve got me there,” he said, sounding very far away. “But small jokes can lead to big consequences. Maybe they didn’t mean for it to be on full power.”

  He pulled the device away and looked at its digital readout as color swam back into the world around me. “When the Old Ones are a threat, people tend to assume they’re behind every unexplained incident. It’s almost a joke with parahumans. When you run out of butter, you say the Old Ones must have gotten to it. But the reality is, there’s usually a more logical explanation.”

  “So what if they—”

  He cut me off with a wave of his hand. “I need to get going, I’m afraid. Your final test results should be completed within the hour, and you’ll be good to go. I asked your roommate to escort you home, no detours allowed. Oh, by the way”—he stood, and retrieved something from a cupboard—“I have a couple things for you. First, this is yours.” He was holding a large tin bucket filled with dirt, chunks of metal, and bits of black ash, concrete, and grass.

  “Other girls get flowers when they’re in the hospital. I get a bucket of compost.”

  “It’s your quantum agar. Dr. Plaskington feels that you should have it back. I don’t agree with this, given how dangerous it can be—not to mention that it is strictly prohibited, but you seem to know how to handle it.”

  I stared at the bucket. Just like I could somehow feel the agar under the ground, I could feel the agar in the bucket. “Thanks,” I said.

  I visualized the agar in the bucket coming together and moving toward the surface. It did, but I could tell a lot of it had been burned up when the cannon had blown. Perhaps half the original amount remained. I shaped it back into a bracelet and slipped it on. It was lighter than it had been, but that didn’t bother me at all.

  “Very impressive. I could never get it to do anything more complicated than simple shapes. If I hadn’t seen your lab results, I’d think you were parahuman.”

  “Humans can be extraordinary, too,” I said.

  “That’s not what I meant,” he said. “Humans don’t tend to be good at that kind of thing. Your dad never got the hang of it.”

  “You knew my dad?” I asked.

  “He was in here a number of times when he was a student. I must have repaired, rebuilt, or replaced every part of him at least once. I remember him asking me to check out the spatial relationship center of his brain, because he could never make the agar do anything. Some humans just can’t manage it. Maybe it skips a generation.”

  That might have explained Dad’s rejection of the whole field of quantum physics. I added that to the list of things I’d ask him as soon as I saw him again.

  “You were the doctor here when my dad was a kid?” I asked. I would have guessed his age at thirty or thirty-five, tops.

  “I’m older than I look. Parahumans age slowly, particularly natural healers like myself,” he said.

  I resisted the urge to ask exactly how old he was on the off chance that it was a rude question.

  “I have one more thing for you,” Dr. Foster said, and presented me with a small, flat wooden box.

  “What is it?”

  Dr. Foster smiled. “Open it.”

  Inside was a gold medallion and a wide yellow ribbon for it to hang from. The medal was much heavier than its size suggested and was engraved with depiction of a mop in a bucket. “A . . . mop medal?”

  “Yes. The incident has been officially classified as an equipment disaster. The janitorial services award is the highest disaster-cleanup award a student can receive.”

  “Wow,” I said. “What an honor.”

  “Not really. It’s a mop and it’s not real gold. You can throw it out when you get home if you like, but it’s the closest thing we have to an actual heroic-type award—which is what you’d be getting, if we had one.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Hypatia came just after the doctor left. “Hey there, hero,” she said.

  “Hey,” I said. “You’re alive.”

  “Me? Oh, I was barely scratched. I actually thought you were going to have some permanent damage. You should have seen what you looked like earlier. You were all filthy and bloody. It was really gross.”

  “No need to worry. I’m very difficult to kill. They’re going to have to try a lot harder next time.”

  “They?” she asked, looking genuinely confused.

  “I think it was the Old Ones,” I said. “That’s twice they’ve tried to get me.”

  Hypatia’s eyes went a light golden color I hadn’t seen before. “If someone wanted to get you, they would have pointed the cannon at you right away when we weren’t expecting it.” She sighed and ran her hands through her hair. “That isn’t what the doctor said, was it?”

  “No, Dr. Foster and Dr. Plaskington both said it was an accident—or maybe a prank gone wrong.”

  Hypatia nodded succinctly, as if this settled the matter. “See, there you go.”

  “Maybe it was a distraction,” I wondered, unconvinced.

  “From what?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. We were distracted.” This made sense to me, but it was clear nothing but actual evidence would work on Hypatia. Some people can be so irrational.

  The good news was that once I got Hypatia talking, she was happy to trade conspiracy theories with me. I needed answers. If I was right and the Old Ones were involved, it could be related to my father’s abduction. Maybe I could learn something about where he was taken or at least learn a little more about how the Old Ones operated.

  We talked about the buildings that had been hit most, in case that revealed some clue. Most of the damage had been to City Hall, but this didn’t help us, unless the saboteur wanted to destroy last semester’s grade records or a decade’s worth of teacher pay stubs.

  After I basically ordered her to pretend to believe something foul was afoot, Hypatia’s theory was that the saboteur was Ultraviolet VanHorne. “It’s just a feeling I get. A premonition. Something isn’t right about that girl.”

  I asked her if Ultraviolet would be as suspicious if she was dating someone other than Tom.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she wanted to know.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  But Hypatia was outraged. “I know you’re new here, but the implication is a little insensitive. I DO NOT have a thing for him. If I did, I would be trying to get rid of the thing I had for him as fast as possible.”

  “Okay, okay, sorry,” I said. “But let me ask you one question, and you have to answer honestly. Just yes or no, okay?”

  “Whatever, okay,” she said airily.

  “Have you ever, at any point in your entire life, writte
n down the name ‘Hypatia Gillman’?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Does typing count?”

  This girl was hopeless. “No. Typing does not count.”

  “Then no! Ha!” she crowed. “Shows what you know! Besides, I told you, he’s a human.”

  “Yeah, I know, but the heart wants what it wants.”

  She sighed a little wistfully. “Humans and parahumans don’t get married, and they don’t form romantic relationships. It never happens.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “Love is all about overcoming obstacles. You should know that, considering your extensive Bosoms of Fire collection.”

  “I told you, they’re called ‘Blossoms of Fire,’ and I only have a couple. Anyway, let me explain,” she said. “For starters, there’s a cultural aspect. Humans aren’t great at explaining to their extended family why their fiancé has gills, or why they like to snack on chunks of gallium.”

  “That is a little weird.”

  She went on. “We also age at different rates. The average parahuman life span is somewhere in the two-to-three-hundred year range, but it fluctuates wildly. Plus, having children is not an option.”

  “Because it’s frowned upon?”

  “No,” she said. “Because it kills the mother and the baby. Your DNA is naturally grown, a random combination of the parents’ DNA. Ours is designed during pregnancy. On top of that, the mother passes along memories, emotions, and system-critical software.”

  “Software?” I asked.

  “Yeah. If the baby is half human, our brains’ basic programming can’t be transferred, and the baby’s brain never figures out how to develop properly.”

  “And the mother?”

  “The mother’s brain, if she’s a parahuman, keeps trying to link up and can’t. That causes a brain reaction in the mother, which is also fatal. If the father is parahuman and the mother is human, then they also tend to die during the pregnancy. We’re not really sure why.”