The Unspeakable Unknown

by Eliot Sappingfield

  It wasn’t electronics, I realized. It was chemistry! There must be something dangerous somewhere! As the Old One tried to untangle itself from the same desk that had ensnared me, I ran to the shelves of chemicals lining the walls, searching for something toxic or unstable.

  I found hydrochloric acid—not dangerous enough.

  A tentacle slid forward and almost got me around the waist, but I ducked under it and dodged another right after that.

  Another bottle. Chlorine trifluoride—WAY too dangerous. I wanted to kill the Old One, not everyone in the neighborhood.

  Finally, I found a glass canister of golden metallic liquid with a tiny, flaking label that read CESIUM. It would have to do.

  I grabbed it and took cover behind the sturdy teacher’s desk as another explosion ripped apart the floor in the center of the room. The kids, hunkered down behind overturned tables, shrieked and cried. It didn’t sound like any had been injured . . . yet.

  Step five: execute the plan. I took the canister, which held about as much liquid as a can of soda, and lobbed it over the top of the Old One. As I had hoped, it caught the canister in one of its many tentacles.

  The good thing about gravitational disruptors is that you don’t have to be a good shot.

  My first shot missed the canister entirely but was still close enough to shatter it. Glass fragments and chunky metallic liquid sprayed all over the Old One. Its skin smoked and bubbled ominously everywhere the element touched.

  Here’s the deal with cesium. It’s an alkali metal, and not one of the friendly ones like sodium or potassium. Alkali metals are fantastically unstable. Every atom has these desperate and lonesome single electrons just begging to hook up with any eligible atom or compound they run into. For instance, when combined with water, alkali metals produce a large amount of hydrogen and heat very quickly in what chemists call a vigorous exothermic reaction.

  “Vigorous exothermic reaction” is chemistry-talk for BOOM.

  The teacher’s desk had, among a bank of slider controls, switches, and dials, a single lever labeled SPRINKLERS, which are essential in any chemistry classroom. I pulled the lever, and sprinkler heads dropped from the ceiling and began spraying.

  I barely had time to duck when an immense explosion broke out the newly repaired windows, knocked several students against the walls, and reduced the recently sturdy teacher’s desk to a pile of scrap wood and sawdust.

  I was surprised to find that I was not seriously injured, apart from a few cuts and scrapes here and there. A quick glance through the smoke told me the Old One had been thoroughly vanquished. A shredded, smoking pile of tentacles was writhing on the floor, looking mostly dead.

  But . . . something didn’t smell right. Or rather, something didn’t smell wrong. The room smelled like a burning chemistry classroom usually smells, which is to say it didn’t stink like Old Ones are supposed to.

  The Old Ones aren’t really built to exist in our dimension, and so they manipulate our brains to see them as something they aren’t. Our brains can’t exactly handle the manipulation, which produces a telltale side effect: the impression that you’re smelling one of the worst things you’ve ever smelled in your life. But the Old One twitching and moaning on the floor of the chemistry classroom? This one just smelled like . . . nothing.

  Also, the Old Ones are not fragile. I shouldn’t have been able to take one out completely with an explosion of any size (at least one that didn’t involve plutonium). When hurt, they tend to slip back into that other dimension and return later when the coast is clear. I’d been hoping to drive it out of the area, not kill it.

  Still, a dead Old One was a good thing.

  Climbing over the remains of the desk, I discovered several of the tentacles were burning and twitching. One was ripped apart, revealing a robotic skeletal framework that reminded me of one of our projects in Creative Robotics class the previous week. I kicked it, and the machinery whirred sadly in reaction. It had been a fake Old One? Who would—

  Somewhere inside the pile of tentacles, I heard a zipper grumble. A charred and bruised woman climbed out from inside the imitation Old One.

  “A little much, don’t you think?” asked Ms. Botfly, my eCombat teacher. “Still, you performed well. Let’s call it 98 percent?”

  “Ninety-eight?” I asked. “What do you mean? That was a TEST?”

  She nodded, her graying hair falling from the unkempt bun that restrained it. She adjusted the pair of spectacles on her nose, and the spare pair on top of her head slid off onto a burning tentacle, where it melted and joined in the burning. “I told the entire class to expect a pop quiz. I’ve killed six of your classmates so far this morning.”

  “Killed?”

  “Oh, don’t be a ninny. They got better. Help me out of this blasted suit, dear.”

  I pulled her up and out, wondering if she’d meant blasted in a literal or expressive way. “You’re doing this to everyone in class?”

  “That was the plan until you ruined my suit. Those take months to assemble, you know. Very expensive.”

  She was guilt-tripping me? “I didn’t ask you to assault me. You’re lucky you didn’t attack me somewhere with better armaments.”

  Ms. Botfly threw back her head and laughed, launching another spare pair of spectacles I hadn’t seen before out of the nearly repaired window.

  She surveyed the damaged costume. “You’re lucky I didn’t bring my good bombs. My error was that I forgot you have had direct exposure to undisguised Old Ones and can function around them without being reduced to terror. Everyone else ran away, which was the goal. A tactical retreat.”

  I shrugged. “Sorry about the damage.”

  She shook her head. “I was running low on explosives anyway. I’ll have to come up with something better for the rest of the students. Is your generation still frightened of zombies, or are we done with that yet? Oh! That reminds me—”

  She whirled suddenly and stuck an accusing finger at a particularly meek student who had been sidling toward the door. “YOU’RE NEXT, MARK!”

  Mark, a redheaded kid with freckles and a perpetually startled expression that I vaguely recognized from eCombat class, squealed in terror and fled.

  “I’ve always hated that kid,” mused Ms. Botfly. She shook her head as if to clear it. “Incidentally, since you’ve passed the quiz, you’ll be allowed to take the full test, which will occur tomorrow morning.”

  “Another ambush?” I said.

  “No, well . . . not really. You’ll get a message later with the details. Now, get out of here. I hear Dr. Filamence climbing out of her hidey-hole, and she will not be pleased that you’ve squandered her entire supply of cesium on the staff member who bought her Secret Santa present at a dollar store last year.”

  I left, and before I was more than a few feet down the pavement, the sound of another explosion found my ears—this one vocal in nature. It was the sort that occurs when the element known as an OCD chemistry teacher encounters unexpected damage to her classroom, supplies, and daily routine. I hoped Ms. Botfly had saved a couple of bombs for her getaway.

  2

  BREAKFAST AT THE IMAGINARY NUMBER

  Goodness gracious!” Hypatia cried the moment she caught sight of me entering the Imaginary Number, my new favorite breakfast joint. At first I thought this was just her reaction to my being several minutes late, but it occurred to me that having been in the same room as a rather large explosion or two might have taken a toll on my personal appearance.

  Hypatia started to say something else and then stopped.

  “Yes?” I asked, after a pause.

  “Well, I don’t mean to be insensitive,” she said. “Is . . . that just how you look today, or did you have an accident?”

  It is probably some kind of comment on my grooming habits that my closest friend and roommate could not discern the difference bet
ween “normal Nikola” and “recently survived explosions Nikola.” I made a mental note to start spending a little more time on my hair in the mornings and otherwise ignored Hypatia’s insulting attempt at politeness.

  Honestly, I couldn’t take it personally, even if I tried. Hypatia was so compulsively neat that to her, I probably looked like a disheveled slob every day. Compared with Hypatia, everyone in town looked like a tornado victim who just crawled out from under muddy wreckage.

  Hypatia herself was looking about four times as cute as a button, although I never understood how the button became the standard unit of cuteness. What was a puppy? Eight-point-four buttons?

  I hate describing people, because I already know what they look like. So it feels weird to just slip in that Hypatia was just under five and a half feet tall, with long blond hair styled into improbable golden spiraling curls, which bounced adorably whenever she so much as blinked. The whole hairdo situation was ornamented with an oversized ruby-red bow that was nothing short of offensively adorable. At the time, her eyes, which changed color with her moods, sparkled green with faint slivers of violet. She wore a green cardigan over a polka-dotted white skirt, and I noted that the trim on her socks matched the trim on her skirt (of course).

  Ugh. I’m serious: you could literally freeze Hypatia on any random day, shrink her down to three inches tall, and place her on your shelf, and people who visited would be like, Oh my goodness, that’s adorable! Where did you get it?

  And then you’d have to tell them about freezing and shrinking some innocent girl, and your friends would probably call the authorities, you sicko. What’s wrong with you?

  I told Hypatia I’d just taken my eCombat quiz, and as usual, Ms. Botfly had gone a little overboard. This earned me a motherly pat on the shoulder. “Our table is over by the windows. Come on.”

  As soon as we’d started frequenting the Imaginary, Hypatia had done some calculations and scoped out the ideal table, the location she determined was the best for aesthetic and practical reasons. Her choice of table had nothing at all to do with the fact that the boys’ ballistic Frisbee team practiced immediately across the street on the town square under the leadership of one Tom Gillman, a human that my parahuman roommate absolutely did NOT have a crush on.

  Are you comfortable with sarcasm? If not, huge chunks of this story aren’t going to make a lot of sense.

  I actually did a pretty good job of not teasing Hypatia on the subject of her human boy crush. In parahuman communities, dating between humans and parahumans is strongly discouraged—not because of some irrational prejudice, of course, but because if things went well and the couple got married, they could never have children, since it would kill the mother and the baby. We aren’t exactly the same species, after all. There’s also the matter that parahumans live about two to three times as long as regular humans, so weird age differences can arise, and the fact that many parahumans go into long periods of hibernation starting in their midthirties.

  I still had a lot more I needed to learn about parahumans, but I hadn’t taken the parahuman health class yet.

  I was about to give Hypatia a thrilling and barely embellished replay of my heroic actions that morning when a male voice spoke from the entrance. “Did you have that eCombat test today?”

  I turned and caught sight of my friend Warner. He took a long, indulgent look at my lightly damaged condition, smirking obnoxiously. Knowing Warner, he had probably been planning to brag about how easy the test had been and how only an idiot could have had problems with it.

  “Only an idiot could have had problems with that quiz,” Warner said. “How did you do, Nikola?”

  Some of the human kids at the School get a little insecure about their abilities at times since they’re, well, human. It can make some of them act like hypercompetitive jerks. There was a time when I figured that was Warner’s problem. But over my first few months at the School, as he, Hypatia, and I became better friends, I discovered that Warner was actually a hypercompetitive jerk by nature, and he didn’t really mean anything by it. He just couldn’t help himself.

  “Don’t start with me, Warner,” I said. “It’s been a long day.”

  Warner ran a hand absently through his dark mop of hair. He always looked like he’d just rolled out of bed, but the kind of just rolled out of bed look that requires $22 in hair-care products and forty-five minutes in front of a mirror to get just right. His jeans were torn in strategic places, and his shirt was just wrinkled enough to give the impression that he was the sort of guy who had better things to do than laundry. “It’s not even eight AM yet,” he said, a bit wearily.

  “Right,” I said. “That means today is pretty much guaranteed to get even longer, so why make it worse?”

  He joined us as a robotic cart rolled past with various breakfast foods for us to choose from. I grabbed a waffle and was about to dig in when I got a clear look at my reflection in the waiter’s belly and realized how much restraint Hypatia and Warner had been showing.

  Normally my hair takes the form of a brown mane-like halo surrounding my head, where it resolutely refuses to do anything but hang around, making me look like someone trying to hide in a furry shrub. THAT would have been fine. What alarmed me was that I had an actual smoking hole in my hair. The hole was about two inches across and ran just past one of my ears. If I didn’t clean myself up, people were going to start offering me medical attention. I excused myself and slipped off to the bathroom, half wishing it was socially acceptable to bring waffles into the can.

  In the bathroom, the mirror told the whole story. The girl in the reflection might have been a regular, somewhat plain-looking geeky girl in unfashionable glasses on a normal day, but today she looked like she had also been through a war zone or two. I grinned, and the girl appeared to snarl at me, blood between her teeth.

  I looked like a madwoman or a homicidal maniac. But my hair wasn’t smoking anymore, so that was good, at least.

  I dunked my face into the running water, trying to scrub the black smudges off my skin without getting soap in my eyes.

  A second later, I straightened up and saw the reflection of a gorgeous girl staring back at me with soulful blue eyes and a distractingly handsome and serene expression. Her glass-straight hair was so blond it was almost silver. Naturally, I jumped and nearly killed myself by slipping on the puddle my shortcut shower had made on the floor.

  Another student had lined up behind me. I couldn’t see my own reflection anymore because the mirror was a video screen designed to show only one face at a time. They’d been installed in a lot of the girls’ bathrooms on campus and were supposed to keep people from crowding around mirrors, which was both sexist and occasionally necessary, in my opinion.

  “Morning, Majorana,” I said. Majorana Fermion and her twin brother, Dirac, were both parahuman and had been among my first friends at the School.

  “Good morning,” Majorana replied dreamily. “I like the hole in your hair. Interesting concept.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “It was probably burning shrapnel or a glob of cesium. Can’t be sure. You should have seen it. There was this huge . . . ”

  I trailed off, seeing Majorana had stopped paying attention and was instead rooting in her bag, mumbling distractedly.

  This is common etiquette among parahumans and requires some getting used to. If a parahuman loses interest in a subject, they typically just stop listening or walk away, and nobody takes it personally.

  But Majorana hadn’t gone anywhere. She was searching for something. “I have just the thing here . . . somewhere . . . Ah! Here it is!”

  She removed a jeweled barrette with a flourish and affixed it next to the hole in my hair without asking permission. Then she stepped back so the mirror would display my reflection again. Attached to the clip was a small woodpecker. The bird blinked with a faint mechanical click and tapped at the hole. Perfect.

&
nbsp; Back at the table, I found Dirac had joined us as well.

  A silvery-blond artist with disproportionately long, slender features and an aloof, disaffected personality, Dirac was every bit a twin to Majorana. His only difference from his sister was that he was male. There was also the fact that they never agreed on anything.

  “I ordered for you,” he said to Majorana. “You’re welcome.”

  “What is this?” Majorana asked, jabbing a fork at a pastry as if some sort of diseased vermin had wandered onto the table and died on her plate.

  “It’s a bear claw,” Dirac said. “Traditional human breakfast. Try it. You’ll love it.”

  “Did you forget I’m a vegetarian?” Majorana asked testily.

  Dirac sighed. “It’s named for the form, not the contents. See the shape?” To illustrate, he held it up, growled, and threatened to scratch her with the pastry.

  It was a little weird to see a group of parahumans all eating something that wouldn’t put me in the hospital from severe vomiting. For instance, the previous morning Hypatia had ordered “spicy oatmeal,” which was blended wood pulp soaked in concentrated vinegar with chunks of habanero peppers and tapioca.

  I’d finished about half my waffle when my computer informed me of a new email from Ms. Botfly. I was momentarily worried that she might want me to reimburse her for the cost of her Old One costume, until I saw Hypatia, Warner, and Dirac had all gotten a message, too.

  To all Electronic Combat students:

  Those of you who were able to pass the pop quiz administered yesterday and today will have a previously unscheduled off-site practical exam session tomorrow. Our destination is the Ozark Foothills in northern Arkansas and possibly southwestern Missouri (depending on how things go). Please bring the following supplies:

  • Human-appropriate winter clothing and any personal camouflage you require. If memory serves, February can be quite cold outside school grounds. Students who freeze to death will need to retake the examination.