A Problematic Paradox

by Eliot Sappingfield

  Another note: Are you understanding this?

  I shrugged and whispered, “Kinda.”

  Before I could get to work on changing that “kinda” into “absolutely,” a pale white hand rose from one of the seats just in front of us. Mrs. Bellows turned and addressed the questioner, “Yes, Ultraviolet?”

  “Ma’am, sorry, if you could repeat that last bit, I’m having problems hearing over Nikola’s chatter.”

  “I don’t mind at all,” Mrs. Bellows replied. “Nikola, if I’m unable to hold your interest, maybe you aren’t being challenged enough. For our next class, I’d like you to bring in a graphical analysis of junction point theory as it pertains to the time-travel scenario on pages 304 through 495 in the supplemental textbook. Your analysis should make it clear just what the paradox risks are for exposure from the moment of arrival until the junction point, as well as any explanations of major shifts. You can email it to me by Monday. Perhaps Hypatia can assist if you have questions.”

  “Yes, ma’am!” Hypatia said brightly, eager to get back in her good graces.

  But Hypatia’s whitening face told me this was a shockingly large assignment. Not much can land a person on my enemies list, but using homework as a weapon definitely counts. I glared at Ultraviolet, while she smiled back at Mrs. Bellows and took down the crucial information she had missed. As soon as the teacher had gone back to the board, Ultraviolet took a moment to cast a triumphant smirk in my direction.

  I swore at that moment that I would have my revenge. If it took the rest of my life, I would make sure Ultraviolet VanHorne was brought to justice for her shameless manipulation of the educational system. I would not rest until—

  “BRADLEY’S ARMS WERE HEAVILY MUSCLED, NOT UNLIKE THE THIGHS OF AN ARABIAN STALLION, AS HE LIFTED MONICA INTO THE CARRIAGE,” a deep, manly voice intoned at a very high volume. “MONICA KNEW AT THAT MOMENT THAT THE JOURNEY SHE AND BRADLEY WERE ABOUT TO UNDERTAKE WAS NOT ONLY A JOURNEY TO HER MAJESTY’S SUMMER COTTAGE BUT ALSO A JOURNEY TO A LAND OF RAW, HORSELIKE—”

  “Whose tablet is that?” Mrs. Bellows inquired.

  A quick glance around revealed a lot of confused students and one student who was tapping madly at her tablet, pressing all the buttons, and generally trying everything short of smashing the thing to get it to shut up. In any other context, I would have felt bad for Ultraviolet, but—no. Sorry, I wouldn’t have felt bad for her under any circumstances. It was too hilarious. A minute later, she managed to get it shut down, but not before Bradley and Monica had done several very “raw and horselike” things to each other in the carriage. She mumbled about “a virus or something” and tried unsuccessfully to melt into her seat.

  For her impromptu entertainment of the class, Ultraviolet earned an even larger assignment than I had gotten. I glanced at Hypatia to bask in the irony, but she was already hard at work on her own assignment and barely acknowledged anything that had happened.

  Maybe this kind of thing was commonplace, I thought. She didn’t seem even surprised. I hazarded a glance at her assignment to see if she was making progress, but what she was working on appeared to be a list of all the IP addresses of every wireless device in the room, and a brute-force password-cracking application that looked years ahead of anything I’d ever used. Her interface also showed that there had been a recently downloaded audio file.

  When Hypatia returned my gaze, the expression on her face said, Hey, friend! Are you ready to do some more learning? But her bright orange eyes said something more like All who singe me shall burn.

  I was starting to suspect I might have the best roommate ever.

  The rest of Temporal Management Theory was breathtakingly complex. By the time class ended, I had a vague idea of how the calculations were done—it all centered on a kind of calculus I’d never seen before—math that used rules your average MIT mathematics professor would call witchcraft or the products of a diseased mind. It was lucky I was starting to catch on; my next Temporal Management class was in March, and the assignment due that day was to read the entire textbook and work out all 2,118 problems, in addition to the work from our supplemental textbook.

  The rest of the day went better. I avoided getting murdered by Mr. Dolphin in Practical Quantum Mechanics, avoided getting killed in art class (we were painting with high-powered paintball guns), made it through French class without falling asleep, and avoided tasting any nonhuman food at dinner with Majorana, Rubidia, and Fluorine. Fluorine was just a bit younger than the rest of us for almost the entire meal, so I actually got to talk to her a little bit. She’s funny and clever, but bossy. She insisted on choosing all the music on the jukebox. I like being the bossy one, and I’m not a big fan of punk rock. After that, I met Hypatia in Eastside Park, and we split the cost of renting a panda named M.C. George Gershwin to play with for a couple hours before heading home for homework and crappy reality TV shows.

  On the way home, I made an end-of-day summary in my head. I’d started out half convinced that an Old One would leap out at me from the nearest shadow, but as the day wore on, that fear had faded. I’d been worried about getting along with people, but I found myself liking more people than I disliked. It felt like something had changed for me during the day—but I couldn’t quite put a finger on it. I still had a long list of problems, and so far not a single solution. Maybe what changed was that for the first time I felt like I wasn’t alone in looking for one.

  14

  CODES AND CIPHERS

  The next two weeks of school were a whirlwind for me. There was so much to learn and so little time to learn it in that it felt like I never stopped moving. Sometimes the Chaperone wasn’t dead accurate or cut corners for the sake of making everything work, so some of my classes actually started before the previous one had ended. I had to check my schedule every day for revisions, pop quizzes, and additions, even on weekends. There were single homework assignments that demanded more of my attention than my entire combined educational history had up to that point.

  Looking back, I think staying busy was good for me. Whenever there was so much as a moment to relax and think, I would start pacing around my room, working myself into an anxiety feedback loop about my dad, what I was going to do next, what the Old Ones really wanted, and why they even cared about my dad and me. It would get to the point where I felt like I was going to explode out of my skin, and then Hypatia would knock on the door and “politely” remind me I’d “agreed” to attend some function, meal, or sporting event with her. After a while, I decided that just biting my tongue and going to these was easier than convincing her I’d never consented to attend a drone race, ballistic gardening club, or whatever.

  School wasn’t the only thing I had to figure out. Learning how to be friends with parahumans was a full-time job those first weeks.

  I continued to have major problems with how randomly and shockingly rude people could be. One Sunday, Majorana invited me to join her in a game of accelerator golf to celebrate my first week at the School. I suspected Hypatia had put her up to it to keep me from spending all day playing video games on my bedroom wall. Did I mention the screen was 3-D?

  Anyway, after golf, we stopped off at Forbidden Planet to grab a couple smoothies. Forbidden Planet had become one of my favorite hangouts—they had amazing pizza and smoothies, the room was dimly lit, and they had these supercomfy egg-shaped chairs that blocked out sound so you could sit right next to someone and have a conversation or lean slightly back and steal a midday nap—a necessity at a school where classes began as early as 4:00 AM and ran as late as 10:00 PM.

  By that point, I was starting to re-evaluate my impression of Majorana. She was a fascinating conversationalist and had tons of stories about the parahuman community in the Rocky Mountains, where she and Dirac had grown up. Eventually, she asked about North Dakota, and I filled her in on life in West Blankford. She asked what my school had been like, and I tried to explain it as fairly as
I could without running down the school or students too badly. Then she asked me about my dad. She wasn’t the first to ask about him. My dad was famous in the parahuman community in a low-rent kind of way—I’d compare his fame to the level of celebrity the weatherman for the second-rated newscast in an average town might experience. Because of that, I’d dodged more than one question from different people, but Majorana seemed like a good listener, and I kind of felt like I could talk about him without my throat feeling all tight, so I leaned back in my chair to avoid eye contact and just let myself talk. I described my dad’s standoffish and distant personality and how important that made the rare instances when he exhibited traces of affection. I told her about the year he forgot every single holiday and tried to make up for it by forcing them all into the week between Christmas and New Year’s. I also told her the story of how, after months of prodding and emotional manipulation, I’d managed to get him into a portrait studio to have our family picture taken—the only picture he ever willingly posed for. As evidence, I pulled the extremely awkward photo from my jacket pocket and offered to let her see—if she promised not to laugh. But Majorana didn’t laugh, because she had simply gone home at some point, and I’d been talking to nobody for who knows how long.

  The cherry on top of that particular smoothie came a second later—when the check arrived. Majorana had already paid for her own ticket and three dollars of my jumbo Haywire Hybrid fruit smoothie with extra raspeachberries. It was like she picked up part of my order to compensate for depriving me of her company. Some nerve, right? Acting on impulse, I immediately transferred the three dollars back into her account through the school financial app, along with an extra penny for interest.

  I wasn’t always the victim, either. Later that same day, I’d been having dinner with Warner and Dirac in the Social Function Café (which is amazing if you’re careful to order from the human menu). It was uncomfortably hot in our portion of the dining room, and I mentioned in passing that I might ask the manager to turn down the heater. Dirac and Warner looked at me like I had flowers coming out of my ears, and simply hacked into the climate control system through their tablets. A few malicious commands later and it had malfunctioned to the point that several components would need to be replaced before the heater would work again.

  “You guys just vandalize things like that?” I asked, a bit astounded. “Can’t you get in trouble?”

  “Get in trouble?” Dirac said, taking a bite of his crunchy cucumber, coconut husk, and crab shell pizza. “For not enjoying discomfort? It was too hot.”

  “You broke the heater, though.”

  “Yeah, and they can repair it. It’s their fault for having the temperature up too high and using basic encryption on their wireless network. What else did they expect?”

  A few minutes later, Dirac had gone to class, and I was settling in to an assignment while Warner studied a blueprint and compared it to something on his tablet.

  “What is that? What are you looking at?” someone said.

  I looked up, and Stephanie, a pretty, dark-skinned girl with long braids done up with iridescent beads, was standing at the table, peering at Warner’s blueprint.

  “Oh, I was studying the new layout for the next Electronic Combat class,” he said, blushing a little.

  “Not that. That,” she said, indicating something on his tablet.

  “That’s an ad for a theme park. See how the family’s trying to look all happy? It’s a scam, if you ask me. You spend a thousand bucks on admission to a place, you’re going to pretend you had a good time no matter—”

  “Your family dead or something?”

  Warner twitched at the abruptness of the subject change. So did I. “No . . . why do you ask?”

  Stephanie arched an eyebrow. “Sometimes negativity is used to mask suffering.”

  “No,” Warner explained. “I’m just skeptical. When a major corporation purchases a toxic waste dump, covers it in concrete and—”

  Warner stopped talking because Stephanie had already walked out the front door and was gone.

  Warner went back to his work as if nothing had happened.

  “People here can be so rude sometimes,” I said.

  “What are you talking about? That?” he asked, nodding at where Stephanie had been.

  “Yeah, it’s like everyone has a randomly occurring chip on their shoulder,” I said.

  Warner squinted at me like he was pretending to read my mind.

  “What?!” I finally asked.

  “Did they schedule you for the human socialization seminar yet?”

  “Never heard of it,” I said.

  He remembered something. “Of course they haven’t, Dr. Haahee has been in hibernation for the last four months! You must be going out of your mind with how they all act.”

  It was starting to look like Warner thought something was very funny, and I didn’t care for it at all. “Let me ask you: Have seemingly nice people just blown you off or maybe asked really personal questions like it’s no big deal?”

  “Or just abandoned me mid-conversation?” I said.

  Warner nodded. “Normally, new human students take a special class to learn how to get along with people here. Parahumans, they have different social rules, you see. They don’t have the same definitions of politeness and rudeness we do. Regular etiquette is inefficient and wasteful, so they just . . . skip it.”

  “They don’t have manners?” I asked.

  Warner took a bite of his cornbread and chewed it, looking thoughtful. “They do, but not where curiosity, imagination, boredom, or irritation are concerned,” he said. “If they want to know something, they ask. If you want to tell, tell. If you don’t, don’t. If someone is boring you or you want to do something else, just walk away and they won’t ever take it personally. If someone walks away while you’re talking, that just means they’re done or they got the information they wanted.”

  “They don’t take rudeness personally?” I said, wondering if he was setting me up for a prank of some sort.

  “Watch,” Warner said. He stood and walked over to a nearby table where a group of younger students was working on a project to assemble some small mechanical thing.

  “What is it?” Warner asked without so much as an introduction.

  “Robot hamster,” a boy said without looking up.

  “Which one of you has done the least work on the project?”

  “Jill,” two of them said at the same time.

  The third student looked up from her phone just long enough to say, “Me.”

  “What was the last nightmare you had?” Warner said to Jill, probably because she didn’t look too busy.

  The girl didn’t even bother to look up. “I was in an airplane, but instead of aluminum, it was made out of beef jerky, and my dog kept—”

  “How did it make you feel?” Warner interrupted.

  Instead of answering, the girl lifted her right hand and made a dismissive flicking motion with her fingers, like she was trying to shoo away flies without working too hard at it. I recognized the gesture. Hypatia had done it to me loads of times, as had Rubidia and a couple other students.

  Warner returned to the table.

  “When she did this . . . ,” I said, flipping my hand in the same way.

  He nodded. “They all do it. It means something like, ‘Hey, I don’t mean to be rude or anything but I was wondering if you could go away for a while instead of being here and interacting with me.’”

  “And that’s fine?” I asked.

  “Oh sure!” Warner exclaimed. “You’ll start doing it yourself sooner or later. They expect us to adopt their social rules, of course. Still, a lot of their rules make sense. Ever see a bunch of people laughing and wondered why? Here you can just walk up and ask them to tell you.”

  “And they will?”

  “Unless t
hey were talking about you, probably. It’s hard to tell what will embarrass them. Sometimes they’re super blunt, and sometimes—especially with emotional stuff—they get very uncomfortable.”

  It made so much sense. Rubidia, Majorana—they hadn’t been acting like jerks after all.

  “What about breaking things? Is blowing up the climate control—”

  “It’s supposed to be a more tactful way of—”

  That threw me off. “Did you say tactful?”

  Warner shook his head. “Parahumans hate confrontation. They’ll avoid it in any way they can. Passive aggression is like their native language.”

  “Seriously?” I asked skeptically. “They don’t mind property damage?”

  “From a parahuman point of view, the rudest thing would have been to ask them to turn the temperature down. Direct conflict is a big no-no because it makes them extra nervous. Anyone here can pretty much fix anything, so sabotage is a way of getting the point across without causing too much trouble.” He sipped his drink, considering how to explain. “It’s like . . . if your neighbor is running his mower at six AM on a Sunday, the decent thing to do is to set it on fire or hit it with a little EMP to kill the electrical system. After that, if they don’t get the hint, then you have to do something extreme, like asking them nicely not to mow so early.”

  “None of this makes sense,” I complained.

  “Sure it does. When human society was evolving, we had to establish pecking orders, pick a leader, who would boss everyone around and all that, so we had to be a bit pushy with one another. Parahumans, there are only so many of them, so they had to get along and cooperate with one another at the drop of a hat. Because of that, they have different rules . . . I bet you thought you were going crazy,” Warner said, grinning.

  “Maybe a little,” I said.

  Warner was right about one thing. The parahumans’ tendency to jump into conversations whenever they care to and bail out when they’re done has become one of my favorite things about them. I’ll never understand why the rest of the world doesn’t do it. The other side of the deal can be a little harder to get used to—you can’t be offended or hold it against anyone if you don’t like what they were talking about, even if the conversation had been all about the things they hate most about your stupid face.