A Problematic Paradox

by Eliot Sappingfield

  The Event Horizon was something like an all-purpose gathering place. There was a counter that sold fast-food-style meals, and another section with full restaurant service. Around the huge space were game tables, video games, pool tables, a two-lane bowling alley, dartboards, and several soundproofed study rooms that would be ideal for group projects. We made a beeline for the fast-food counter and ordered a breakfast burrito for me and a garlic butterscotch muffin with olives for Hypatia.

  When we returned to the table, there was a flash of greenish light, and the baby sitting on Ultraviolet’s shoulders had become a full-grown teenager with spiky green hair, huge combat boots, and an outfit that was glowing in strange colors from head to toe. The two of them were suddenly more than the chair could hold, and it collapsed over backward immediately, bringing them both down onto the concrete patio with a thud. The situation was very upsetting to teen Fluorine. “Ow! Watch it! What’s your standard deviation, kid?”

  When this happened, I noticed that Hypatia noticed that Tom only barely noticed that Ultraviolet had fallen at all. He was more concerned with the spandex-clad blonde in the comic book he was reading than the actual furious blonde lying on the ground next to him. He grunted in what could have been amusement or faint concern.

  Ultraviolet noticed this—both the fact that Hypatia had noticed it and the fact that I had noticed Hypatia’s noticing it. That made her even madder, and she began battering teenage Fluorine with renewed vigor, trying to free herself from their entanglement. A second later, Fluorine, who had since become a very old woman, was standing over Ultraviolet, trying to help her up and making it harder by being in the way.

  “They sure grow up fast,” I said.

  Ultraviolet looked at me with what I can only describe as pure hatred. “What’s so funny? Maybe you need a mirror, since you’re rumpled and . . . shabby!”

  After that, there was a major temper tantrum, at the end of which an incensed Ultraviolet and a mildly confused Tom had exited the restaurant. Despite all that had happened, including the notion that I might be a spy, I think it was then when I officially decided I was going to like attending the School.

  I sat down next to Bob and took a bite of my burrito, which had gotten cold. “So what’s it like, seeing forward and back in time like that?”

  Bob smiled politely, picked up his tray, and left.

  Maybe it was a smell thing. I smelled my breath and underarms. Nothing. I was about to go grab Bob and make him answer for his rudeness when Hypatia scooched over and demanded to see my schedule.

  My schedule looked more like a star chart than a list of classes, days, and times. There were clear class names and locations, but they were connected by webs of thin lines that said things like material availability: iridium. I had absolutely no idea how to read it. After a little experimentation, I realized it was actually rendered in three dimensions and the only way to see the whole thing was to tilt and pivot my screen, which must have made me look really cool.

  Hypatia explained that while some schools use the same schedule every day, and others hold classes on alternate days, the School uses a 211-day cycling calendar that varied from day to day and could be altered by things like the weather, the availability of rare elements, subtle variations in background radiation, the fluctuations of gravity in our arm of the Milky Way, and the whims of staff members. Basically, when you had homework, the teachers told you when you’d most likely need to hand it in, and if you wanted to know what class was next, you consulted your tablet.

  “Your best bet is the schedule forecast,” she explained, opening a different app on my tablet. “It’s not completely reliable, but it gives you a pretty good idea what is coming and how likely it is to change.

  Reading through the schedule forecast, I saw that there was a 99 percent chance that my next class was Temporal Management Theory in the Yorba Family Law Center. Following that, there was an 84 percent chance I’d be attending Practical Quantum Mechanics again.

  Before long, I spotted Warner riding through the park on his newly repaired bicycle. Strangely, even though he was clearly riding as fast as he could, Majorana was keeping pace on foot without seeming to really put forward an effort—it almost looked like she was walking. Another trait she and Dirac shared.

  “They’re brother and sister, right?” I asked Hypatia.

  She nodded. “Twins, actually. The hairstyle is the only way I can tell them apart.”

  I wondered if Warner and Majorana hung around with each other often—they looked to be pretty familiar with one another.

  “Are they dating?” I asked.

  “God, no! Parahumans aren’t that weird!”

  “No, Warner and Majorana.”

  “Oh . . . not that I’m aware of. Warner and Dirac room together, so that’s probably how they’re friends. Besides, Warner is human, remember?”

  I’d almost forgotten that was a thing.

  Hypatia grinned. “Why are you asking? Were you—”

  “No,” I snapped.

  “We should get going,” Hypatia said, checking her watch for the ninth time that minute.

  Sooner or later, she and I would need to have a talk about how some people hate being early just as much as she hated being late, but I sensed this was not the time for it. I stood, got my things together, stole a big bite of her muffin, and said, “Let’s go.”

  By the time I had finished washing my mouth out with orange juice (fun fact: garlic butterscotch muffins with olives taste just as bad coming up as they do going down), my tablet was sounding regular alarms informing me that I was LATE FOR CLASS. I arrived at the Yorba Family Law Center several minutes late, winded and a bit perturbed that Hypatia hadn’t stuck around, considering it was her muffin that had poisoned me. The Yorba Family Law Center office was a drab waiting room and reception desk without a receptionist. There were three uncomfortable-looking chairs and a wooden door with a brass plaque reading CLASS IN SESSION. QUIET, PLEASE. I opened the door a crack and peeked inside.

  The Temporal Management classroom consisted of several long wooden tables with students seated at each. The instructor’s back was turned, so I took the opportunity to slip in and claim the nearest unoccupied seat, which turned out to be right next to Hypatia.

  “Thanks for waiting,” I whispered.

  She smiled sheepishly. “Sorry. Can’t be late for this one. Tardiness makes Mrs. Bellows go absolutely ape—” She stopped speaking because the instructor was no longer at the board. It took a moment for me to pick up on the fact that she had somehow materialized between Hypatia and me and was listening in on our conversation.

  An obvious parahuman, Mrs. Bellows had gigantic eyes that were at least twice as large as a regular person’s. Her nose was also much larger—for that matter, so were her mouth and ears. She essentially had a giant face somehow fitted to a normal head, which made her look like one of those caricature sketches you can get at a theme park for five dollars. That said, the look somehow worked on her. It held the attention of the class, at least—every face in the class was turned our way. Either that, or they suspected we were about to be embarrassed in some spectacular fashion.

  Mrs. Bellows leaned in closer and pulled us together, like we were three best friends sharing a secret. “You were saying that I go absolutely ape . . .”

  Hypatia gazed off into the middle distance for the briefest of moments and regained her composure almost immediately. She smiled warmly. “I was going to say that it makes you aperiodic, which is to say that it disrupts the normal flow of events in class.”

  Mrs. Bellows suppressed an appreciative laugh. “Nice recovery, Hypatia. I’ll let that one slide. As for you, miss . . .”

  This was my cue. “Nikola Kross, new student, and I promise I’ll never, ever be late again.”

  She smiled, and I counted one more blessing. “I expect you to hold to that commitment. I do not
take kindly to tardiness. Time is fragile and incredibly temperamental. Those who do not respect it often find themselves wishing they had, or that they had never been born.” She stood, patted me once on the shoulder, and wrote infractions on the whiteboard at the front of the room. It took me a moment to realize this was something that shouldn’t normally happen. I’d only taken my eyes off her for a moment. If she’d run that quickly, there would have been a breeze or a noise, maybe a minor sonic boom.

  “The threat posed by temporal infractions are not to be taken lightly. In a society such as ours in which most individuals have the means and ability to travel in time, we must be quite careful not to . . .” She kept talking, but I’d stopped paying attention. Had she said . . . ?

  Suddenly, I was aware that she was looking directly at me. “Do you have a question?”

  That bugged me. The entire class was still leering in my general direction, totally ignoring Mrs. Bellows, so why was I the one picked out for being inattentive?

  I decided to ask the question I’d been thinking. “Did you say time travel? You talked about it like it’s commonplace.”

  “Commonplace no, but possible yes. The parahuman community has been capable of time travel since the very beginning. It is an integral part of what made our previous feats of interstellar travel possible. Any student in this classroom could assemble several devices that alter, bend, warp, or allow travel through time, and you will be doing the same before long. This means you need to be acutely aware of the extreme dangers involved in sloppy temporal management. There are three dangers you face when manipulating time . . .” As she turned to write on the board, and I was able to look away from her face, I saw once again that the entire class was frozen in rapt attention, staring at me like a new animal at the zoo. One that can talk and is in the process of eating a zookeeper.

  I leaned over to Hypatia. “What is their problem?” I whispered. But she wasn’t paying attention. Instead, she was smiling in the same faintly smug manner as she had when Mrs. Bellows had complimented her quick thinking. In fact, she was still looking at where Mrs. Bellows had been standing. I waved a hand in front of her face. Nothing.

  “Put it together, have you?” Mrs. Bellows asked.

  “You froze them,” I said.

  “No. Time is still moving at a normal rate. Much less energy involved in just speeding time up for you and me.”

  “So we’re moving super fast?”

  “Yes, fast enough that our conversation will appear to have taken place within a fraction of a second and at supersonic tones. You can’t expect the whole class to sit and listen while I review basic fundamentals a second time. This is a relatively harmless way to take a time-out without manipulating events too heavily. Because it’s just the two of us, and we aren’t technically traveling in time, the paradox effect is so low that it’s measured in microbrowns.”

  She drew a convoluted symbol that resembled a capital B on the board. “The brown is the unit we use to measure how much we mess things up when we play with time. No matter what the manipulation, we trigger a disturbance in the ‘fabric’ of time, as it’s often called. Anything above one kilobrown becomes dangerous. Thus, a disturbance of a few microbrowns is relatively harmless so long as we do not spend a month in here or leave the classroom. Once I’ve finished bringing you up to speed, we can return to normal time and pick up where we left off. May I continue?”

  “Ah, sure,” I said.

  “The most dangerous form of time manipulation is actual time travel, which is when some person actually moves to a different time. To do this is spectacularly dangerous and almost always ends in disaster. It is only to be used in the most extreme circumstances. I believe you might have had some experience with a student who was a victim of a paradox in one of her classes?”

  “Yeah, a girl named Fluorine.”

  “Yes, poor thing. I had a few choice words with the staff after that happened. They tried to blame it on an experiment in my class—sending Ping-Pong balls forward and backward a few seconds. Preposterous—there’s no way it could cause that kind of reaction. It must have been something she did on her own time—she’s more than capable. Still, she was incredibly fortunate. Being unstuck in time, also known as Pilgrim Syndrome, is the best possible outcome when one gets on the wrong side of a paradox. A paradox can maroon a person in a single moment for eternity, it can cause the rest of your life to flash by in a moment, or it can erase your very existence. Think about that. Nobody would even know you’re gone because nobody knew you were there in the first place.”

  She had a point—that sounded pretty terrible.

  “I don’t mean to frighten you, Nikola, but my point is that a paradox is an incredibly dangerous and unpredictable event that leads to a terrible fate more often than not. At the same time, temporal manipulation is an important technology, and because we use it so heavily, it is important to know the risks and effects. Thus far, we have calculated mathematically the effects of changing a first-degree event at a temporal distance of one hour. Sooo . . .”

  With that, she slid a finger along an unusually fat ring on her left hand, and the rest of the class was suddenly reanimated. They turned toward the front of the room in unison, unaware anything had gone on in the past . . . what? The past nothingth of a second?

  Mrs. Bellows continued, “So, class, who can calculate for me the severity of a paradox caused by going back one hour and triggering a minor time-violating event, such as telling your past self to change their shirt?”

  Someone in the front of the room raised a hand. “Six kilobrowns, assuming you didn’t involve another intelligent being.”

  “Very good, Noodle,” Mrs. Bellows said. She touched the whiteboard with her marker, and it instantly filled with a single, incredibly complex equation. “You’ll notice Noodle stipulated that another intelligent being was not in observance, as intelligent beings are the only beings that can be affected by paradoxes. Can someone name an intelligent being that is not affected by paradoxes?”

  A girl’s hand popped up. “Yes, Sucrose?”

  The girl’s voice was high-pitched, and she wore an absurdly large pink bow in her hair. “The Old Ones are not affected. They have a defense mechanism that wipes their memory when they encounter something wrong in the timeline.”

  “This is correct,” Mrs. Bellows said. “If you told an Old One how to bet on a horse race, they would forget that you told them the moment they tried to place the bet. This protects them, but it also makes it difficult for them to move through time because they tend to forget why they wanted to do so in the first place. We should all be thankful about that.

  “Now let’s complicate things. Warner, what if instead of telling yourself directly, what if you told your cousin’s sister to send you a text message telling you to change your shirt?”

  He thought it over. “My cousin’s sister is also my cousin, so she’s related to me with two degrees of familial separation. That destabilizes the potential paradox by a variable amount, so it’s somewhere between . . .” He worked on his handheld a moment. “Point one kilobrown and three point four million kilobrowns, assuming she wasn’t adopted.”

  Mrs. Bellows nodded. “Which is why we never involve relations and close friends in time travel. You make one wrong step and there’s no telling what will happen. Who gets the blame in this situation?”

  “The cousin’s sister,” someone called out. “Because she was the last one to share the information, and she shared it with the person who would cause the infraction.”

  “Right! Paradoxes are like playing Hot Potato,” she said, mostly to me. “The universe is trying to correct an infraction of the timeline and wants to do it in the simplest way possible, which means the last person to touch the information gets burned.”

  To illustrate this, she produced an actual potato from her podium and tossed it to me. I caught it, and from then on, I ha
d a potato.

  “Next question! In the same situation, if the subjects are not related by blood, but a dog is observing, and you are in a swing state during a presidential election year, what is the potential effect for the same infraction?”

  Intense mental and computer calculations occurred across the room. Several minutes passed.

  “What kind of dog?” someone asked.

  The teacher nodded approvingly. “Excellent question, Mr. Coney. Let’s say the dog is a border collie or full-sized poodle, take your pick.”

  More fervent calculations. Finally someone called out, “Two point two three million kilobrowns.”

  “Correct!” she called. “Last question: What if you went two hours back in time and gave yourself a letter instructing yourself to go back in time two hours later?”

  At this, the class groaned in unison. Warner raised his hand again but didn’t wait to be called on. “That’s a self-causing paradox. Infinite browns.”

  “Of course.” The teacher nodded, almost apologetically. “Just wanted to drive that one home. Kills people every year. You’d be surprised how easy it is to . . .”

  As she spoke, I gazed at the equation on the board. Not only was it incredibly complex, it employed symbols I’d never seen before—spirals, concentric circles and squares, and one that looked like an eye. I tried to work it out without knowing all the variables and came to the conclusion that I had no idea what was going on. It was something I’d never encountered in school before, not understanding. The experience was dizzying and a little terrifying, but at the same time it felt good, knowing I had work to do that I couldn’t do in my head faster than just writing down the answer. I was actually going to learn things at school—things I didn’t already know. It was pure exhilaration.

  Hypatia nudged me and slid her tablet between us. Did you get in trouble? it read.

  So I wasn’t the first to experience a little private time window with Mrs. Bellows. I shook my head, which seemed to relieve her greatly.