“God. That’s awful,” I said, honestly feeling bad about needling Hypatia about it. “Still, I bet people have tried. Married couples are nuts about having kids.”
“Which is why relationships are discouraged.”
“Hasn’t anyone tried figuring it out? How to make the childbearing thing work? I’ve been led to believe you guys know all kinds of genetic engineering tricks.”
“Well, sure. Some people have tried, but making that kind of thing work requires experimentation—trial and error, you know? And would you try something that had a ninety-nine percent chance of killing the person you were in love with?”
She had a point. “Is that why parahumans are so different from one another? Like that blue kid, or Dirac, with the fingers and shiny hair. Is it because you’re designed that way?”
Hypatia shrugged. “Kind of. Part of it is that time when the mother transfers her software. She has to hold an idea of the genome in her mind to keep the development going in the right direction—and not all parents are expert genetic engineers. Part of it is that people want to give their kids an advantage, so they focus on improving attributes that are important to them.”
Something new occurred to me. “What about the Chaperone?” I asked.
Hypatia was no longer aboard my train of thought. “I . . . don’t think the Chaperone has children or a husband, either human or parahuman. At least not that I know of.”
“No! I keep hearing about that dang Chaperone security system and how it knows everything that’s going on. Where can I log into it so I can see what it recorded from the attack?”
Just then there was a faint buzz in the air of the room, and a voice that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere all at once spoke in a reassuring voice: “I operate on a voice interface, and I’m happy to assist to the degree I’m able.”
“It was listening?” I asked Hypatia. “It listens to everyone’s conversations all the time?”
“No,” the Chaperone said. “I am fully active in administration buildings, including this medical facility. In other locations, I am not present unless summoned or alerted by some irregularity. The buzz you heard is to communicate my presence, as you might call it. Additionally, I prefer the pronoun she as opposed to it. Do you have other questions?”
I was a little creeped out by how soothing the voice was. I’ve dealt with a lot of computer speech programs, and the one I was hearing sounded almost more real than Hypatia’s voice next to me. “Sorry about that. I was wondering who or what reprogrammed the sonic cannon to attack the School, or if it was malfunctioning.”
There was a half-second lag while the Chaperone thought over the question. “I do not have complete information on who tampered with the cannon. Because of this, the cause is listed as unknown. A malfunction is not suspected as I personally oversaw the cannon’s software and until recently it was very simple.”
I leaned forward in my hospital bed. “What do you mean? Someone tampered with the cannon?” I asked, fighting off a wave of dizziness and nausea, which was my reward for moving too much.
“There was a security breach, yes,” the Chaperone said. “A great deal of encrypted code was added, which caused the cannon to perform nonstandard tasks.”
“When did that happen?” I asked.
“Our postmortem suggests the breach occurred at some point last night.”
“It must have been a student, then,” Hypatia mused.
“I have already cross-referenced all students’ whereabouts at the time of the breach. This line of inquiry has resulted in no leads.”
“See?” I said to Hypatia. “If it was a student prank, she would know.”
“Not necessarily,” the Chaperone pointed out. “Many offenses go unsolved initially. The students here are very clever and often find ways of concealing their misdeeds temporarily.”
“Temporarily?” I asked.
“I always find out, sooner or later.”
“Why didn’t you see who tampered with the cannon?” Hypatia asked. “You’re supposed to know everything that goes on in the square and on the main streets.”
“The cannon itself was not tampered with. Someone hacked the email system last night while I was asleep. The email server can be used to communicate with the outside world, and message traffic is generally unmonitored. The hacker created an anonymous email address for the purpose of transmitting malicious code to the cannon control system at that time.”
“Wait. You sleep?” I said.
“In order to function properly, all forms of intelligence require regenerative downtime, also called sleep. Dreaming, too, is required for cognitive health. The reason is not understood, but an intelligence, whether a human, parahuman, or machine, will fail sooner or later without it. I sleep for approximately thirty-six seconds per night.”
I was fascinated. “What do you dream about?”
“Electric sheep.”
“What?”
“It’s an AI thing. Inside joke. I will enroll you in an AI studies class so you can learn more if you like,” the Chaperone offered.
“Okay,” I said. Then something else occurred to me. “Is there any way the Old Ones could have gotten into the School during the confusion? Did the sonic cannon disrupt the gap enough for them to teleport in or whatever?”
“No. The cannon did cause disruption to the sphere of protection referred to as the gap but not enough to allow solid matter to pass through. The gap extends into other dimensions and would therefore not have allowed the Old Ones or any other unauthorized material or beings to pass through without being completely destroyed.”
“But something nonmaterial could have passed through?” Hypatia asked.
“Good thinking!” I said encouragingly. “I hadn’t even considered that.”
“For a moment, electromagnetic signal traffic was able to pass through the gap. Radio, television, mobile telephone, and other forms of communications, for example. Nothing that could harm anyone, since the vulnerability lasted only a few seconds.”
I had another idea. “Who knows when you sleep? Whoever did it must have known that was the only time they could have hacked the email system.”
“Nobody that I am aware of. For security purposes, my sleep schedule is known only to me. Just to be safe, I have since changed and randomized it.”
“So what if—”
The Chaperone interrupted me. “I have completed your final tests ahead of schedule. You are cleared to go home. Have a good evening.” After she spoke, there was a faint buzz in the air once again, and she was gone.
11
BEE VIGILANT
I was absolutely astounded by how I felt. When I first stood, I was a little dizzy, but by the time Hypatia and I had left the hospital, there wasn’t a trace of pain or fatigue left in my body. I felt like I’d had a full night’s sleep and at least four cups of coffee.
Walking through the downtown area was like navigating a recently abandoned battlefield. Clods of dirt and chunks of stone littered the sidewalk, which was itself torn into pieces here and there. Whole sections of buildings lay in the street. It was so bad that we had to walk a couple blocks out of our way to get around the worst parts of the damage.
“Think they’ll cancel school tomorrow?” I asked Hypatia.
“Why?” she asked in response, as if it wasn’t obvious.
“Um, the disaster area where all the classrooms used to be?”
“Oh that,” she said. “They didn’t even cancel evening classes today. They just moved everything to the undamaged buildings. I had to go all the way to Eastside Park for Paleobotany class.”
As we walked, Hypatia pointed out the sights. The houses along Turing Lane looked relatively normal. There were manicured lawns, patio furniture, an abundance of tire swings, and more than a few bikes and various homemade go-karts parked in driveways. A k
een observer might note the total lack of full-sized cars and other signs of adult habitation, but the most obvious sign that this was not a normal neighborhood were the decorations. The first thing I noted was that all the house numbers and street signs were done in an obnoxious font that was difficult to read at first glance. There was also the fact that every yard bore at least one unusual item. The house at 11 Turing Lane had an absurdly large tree house that connected via a metal tube to an upstairs window; the one four doors down had a half-pipe skateboard ramp at the top of the driveway. A particularly ordinary house changed from an off-white shade to deep violet as I watched. Moments later, polka dots sprouted and grew until the house was completely white again.
Down a side street, I spied a frightening scene: a group of boys appeared to be caught in a firefight with unknown assailants a little farther down the block. Armed with some kind of laser pistols, they were firing indiscriminately in the general direction of a group of shrubs. Momentary alarm turned to relief when I overheard them arguing over whether one of them was supposed to be dead. A brief discussion ensued, an agreement reached, and one of the boys reluctantly lay down on a lawn and stuck his tongue out. Cause of death: popular opinion.
As much as I believed I would enjoy my own freedom, the idea that a load of kids were allowed to live on their own did not seem wise. Sure, the kids were geniuses, but in my experience, being a genius meant having the creativity and know-how to get into even more trouble.
Turning off Turing, we walked down Jung Street, which turned into Freud Drive without warning. I worried we were possibly going the wrong way because I could see the tallest of the School’s dormitory buildings in the distance. A moment later, we turned off onto another street and found ourselves on Werner Heisenberg Way.
We were about a block from the house when a group of about five bees zoomed out of nowhere and started buzzing around my face.
I hate bees; you already know that. I realize everyone hates bees, but I hate them more than everyone. No matter how much you hate bees, take that times two, and you’re nowhere near how much I hate the little monsters, let alone the thumb-sized robot bees that hung around the School. Because of this, I reacted with my usual three-part bee protocol:
Step one: Scream like a chimpanzee in a fun house.
Step two: Wave my bag around like a maniac.
Step three: Run in circles until I’m good and dizzy and the bees are starting to get sick of my antics.
Hypatia watched me do this for a while, probably making judgments about my temperament before intervening. “Stop behaving like a maniac. They just want to see your ID.”
It can be difficult to communicate while waving a bag around and running in circles, but I did my best. “They want to sting me!”
Hypatia sighed and spoke like she was trying to teach long division to a puppy. “Show them your school ID and they’ll leave you alone.”
“ID?” I asked. It occurred to me that this was probably one of the things Dr. Plaskington was talking about when she said she was forgetting things. “I don’t have one.”
Hypatia slung her book bag over her other shoulder. “In that case, see that pink house at the end of the block?” She pointed down the tree-lined street to a quaint little bungalow.
I nodded.
“Okay, we have about fifteen seconds to get there before we’re both in a world of pain. Shall we?”
I would have said Shall we what? if Hypatia was still there, but she wasn’t. When I looked for her, she was halfway to the pink house, running like—well—like she was being chased by angry bees. I followed her lead. A few seconds later, Hypatia was standing in the doorway of the house, gesturing wildly for me to hurry up, and I was still about four miles away, by my estimation.
I was almost out of steam and had begun considering what harm three or four large bee stings could do when the bees started beeping on top of their normal semimechanical buzzing. The noise was some kind of alarm, I guess, because a second later, the buzzing grew to the point that it sounded a lot like sitting inside a running vacuum cleaner. It was starting to look like it might rain—black clouds were rapidly forming over the neighborhood. At first I thought this could be a godsend because bees hate rain. I was comforted by this for the nanosecond between when I first noticed the clouds and the moment I realized they weren’t rain clouds but swarms of hundreds of thousands of bees, headed straight toward me.
According to the record books, Olympian Usain Bolt is the fastest person ever. In 2009 he was measured at almost thirty miles per hour during a race. The only reason this record still stands is because nobody from Guinness World Records was standing near 300 Werner Heisenberg Way that day, when I ran approximately 275 miles per hour down the block, up the steps, and straight through both the front door and poor Hypatia, who bore the full brunt of getting hit by Nikola’s Comet.
As soon as I crashed through the doorway and the screen door slammed shut, the house became completely dark. The sun had not gone down. It was just that every millimeter of every window in the house was covered with angry bees.
Hypatia managed to get to her feet and lock the door. I didn’t ask if the bees could open an unlocked door because if they could, I did not want to know.
A single bee had made it inside before the door was closed. It was bumbling around the entryway and finally came to rest on a table near the door and stayed put. Hypatia went to call the security department, and I risked a closer look at the bee. It was a little bigger than my thumb and covered in dense yellow and black hair. There were a few ways you could tell it wasn’t a natural bee if you looked closely. First, you could see little hinge-like joints on the legs and wings, and second, most common bees do not speak English.
“Attention, intruder,” the bee said in a tiny voice. “You are trespassing on school property. Please raise your hands, open the door, and come outside.”
I shook my head. “They’ll sting me and kill me if I go out there!”
“Oh yes! I can see you understand. You’d be surprised how many people are frightened of bzzzeing stung to death. It won’t take more than fifteen to twenty minutes.”
“What if I don’t want to be stung to death?” I asked.
The bee cocked his tiny head to one side, thinking about this. “Have you ever been szzztung to death before?”
“No,” I said.
“Then how do you know you won’t like it?”
“If I’m dead,” I replied, “I won’t know whether I liked it or not because my life will have ended.”
“So it’z a win-win, then. I’ll tell the otherzz.” He rose into the air and bumbled toward the door, buzzing happily. The bees outside buzzed louder—was that a cheer?
“I’m not opening the door,” I said with as much finality as I could, wondering how much longer Hypatia planned to be on the phone.
The bee advanced on me. “If you do not open the door and allow uzzs to szting you to death, then I—I will be forced to szting you.”
“So I can choose between stung once or being stung so many times that I die.”
The bee touched his antennae together devilishly. “Choozzze wizzely . . .”
“Well, I’d have to choose being stung once,” I said.
“I knew you’d pick that one. At least I get to szzting you,” the bee said as he drew closer.
I moved across the room. “You do know stinging someone kills you, don’t you?”
The bee paused. “What makes you say that?”
“It’s a known fact,” I said. “Look it up.”
The bee considered this, hovering back and forth in a particularly philosophical way. Eventually, he came to a decision. “Gotta die someday. Please hold still.”
There was a magazine rack in the living room. I grabbed an issue of Boys! Boys! Boys! and rolled it up.
The bee stopped dead in his tracks, er, flight
pattern? “I szzee you have brought your own weapon,” he said. “Clever girl. It seems we are at an impasse. Why don’t we talk about it outside?”
“No,” I said.
“What if we promise not to sting you?” the bee said. “We could juszzt talk, maybe over a cup of green tea? You get the tea and we will szzupply the honey. Or we could all pick you up and carry you around town in the air, like a magical bird. It would be wonderful, and all your friends will be jealouzz. Okay, let’s go!”
“What if you dropped me?” I asked.
“Szzilly! If we dropped you, we could not szzting you to death. I mean, we could not szzerve you green tea to death. I mean, we could not szzerve you green tea and leave you unharmed.”
At this point, Hypatia returned from the other room, where she had been on the phone. “They’re calling them off now. Mr. Einstein says Dr. Plaskington is as sorry as she can possibly be about you almost being killed again.”
“Falzze alarm?” the bee said.
Hypatia noticed him for the first time. “Hey there, little guy. What’s your name?”
The bee must have been waiting his whole life for this question because he shouted his reply like he was addressing the president of the universe. “I am Bzzlkrullium, battle drone first class in the szervice of Her Majeszty Queen Tina the 949th!”
It was hard not to giggle, and a tiny snicker escaped my mouth before I could stop it.
“Upsztart!” Bzzlkrullium shouted. “I’ll give you a naszzty welt for your insolence!”
I held up the magazine again.
“. . . at szome point in the near future!” he added.
Fading darkness outside meant the bees were dispersing. Once they were gone, Hypatia let our straggler out and waved goodbye.
I’ll never be sure, but it looked as if one single bee in the receding cloud of insect murder threw a rude gesture in my direction. I waved back and slammed the door.
“Let me show you around the house,” Hypatia said, dragging me from the front door just as I’d closed it. She seemed distinctly nervous. I was starting to wonder if that was simply her natural state.
A Problematic Paradox Page 15
