The Unspeakable Unknown

by Eliot Sappingfield

  Hypatia and I watched Mr. Marconi stop them before they could take their seats, shaking his head and pointing at the door. The three of them entered into a debate while the rest of us watched with interest. Dirac and Majorana kept showing the teacher their watches, but I couldn’t hear what they were talking about.

  Hypatia, who was still playing her game, pointed them out. “Dirac and Majorana Fermion. They tend to think each other’s thoughts when they’re close together. Their dad, Oscar, works for the Old Ones.”

  That got my attention. “Really?” I said, remembering how inflexible Dirac had been on the subject of the Old Ones.

  I recalled Fluorine’s tale about her parents and what Warner had said about family money. “So how many parahumans are working for the bad guys? Seems like it’s a lot of them.”

  “Not as many as you might think, but then again, you never really know for sure because some of them do it in secret. Dirac and Majorana are really sensitive about their dad, so don’t bring it up unless they do first.”

  Finally, Mr. Marconi seemed to have had enough of whatever debate he had been having with the Fermion twins, because he raised his voice enough that I could finally hear him over the din of the other students. “I do not care what they do. You do not look even close to regular humans, and regardless of how well they function, people will still know that something is not—”

  Dirac and Majorana threw simultaneous conspiratorial glances at each other and at once pressed small red buttons on their watches . . .

  I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t checked my email! I pulled out my tablet to see if any information about my dad had come in. My inbox was empty, so I set about finishing an essay assignment for Home Macroeconomics class.

  Finally, when the bus was almost full, in stalked Warner. He glared up and down the aisle in an obviously tired and ill-tempered fashion. Eventually, when he caught sight of Hypatia and me, he seemed to perk up slightly and nodded as if to say, I suppose I’ll associate with the likes of you.

  Hypatia leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Warner’s dad owns an alligator farm in Florida. His older sister is stationed in Germany with the army, and he is a virtuoso at anything robot related. His dad doesn’t approve of his going to school here, because it’s too expensive. He wants him to come home and help with the farm instead.”

  I tried picturing Warner with a slimy hunk of meat in his hand, shaking it to tempt the appetite of a ravenous reptile, and smiled despite myself.

  Finally, just as we were almost ready to depart, I felt Hypatia go so stiff with perfect posture that she nearly vibrated. Her not-crush Tom had just fallen up the bus stairs, without his snooty, too-perfect girlfriend Ultraviolet in tow (and free of robotic legs).

  “I wonder where she is,” Hypatia said, more to herself than me.

  “Probably getting her chromosomes polished,” I said.

  Hypatia laughed and poked me playfully with her elbow. “That’s rude,” she admonished, grinning furiously.

  I had visited malls many, many times before coming to the School, so the level of excitement on the school bus was completely, well, alien to me. It quickly became clear that this was a big deal. The air of barely suppressed enthusiasm on the bus was enough to make a girl dizzy. That could also have been all the cologne and perfume everyone was wearing. There was so much alcohol in the bus that a spark might have burned us all alive.

  “Do parahumans go out in public very often?” I asked Hypatia.

  “From time to time. It depends on the individual. Some of us like to stick to smaller communities like the School where we can be ourselves.”

  “I’m surprised we don’t hear about it more,” I said.

  Hypatia knitted her brows. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the only alien sightings I ever hear about involve flying saucers and little gray men with big black eyes. You’d think the human race would have at least gotten the general description right.”

  She laughed. “We think those are hilarious. Aliens don’t steal cows; we collect Nobel Prizes. Honestly, why would an intelligent race go halfway across the universe to swipe someone from their bed, take their temperature in some unpleasant way, put them back in their bed, and then come back again the next week? How inefficient is that? Why not just keep the human locked up for as long as you need them? It’s preposterous.”

  “So you’d keep your abduction victim?” I asked. “Doesn’t seem neighborly.”

  Hypatia’s eyes paled a bit. “I would never do something like that, but if someone has so little respect for humans that they make a habit of ‘borrowing’ them from their homes or automobiles, why on earth would they go to such trouble to set things right afterward?”

  I had other comments, but at that moment the flesh-toned makeup one of the students had been wearing malfunctioned, turning him an eye-burningly bright green color for several seconds before he was able to fix it.

  “At least you don’t need to bother with any kind of disguise,” I said to Hypatia.

  “I do use a semiopaque lenticular device to conceal certain characteristics,” Hypatia said, rummaging in her purse.

  “Come again?” I asked.

  “Sunglasses, dummy,” she said, sliding on a pair so large they made her look like one of the little gray men we had just been talking about. “The eyes give me away.”

  “What about everyone else?” I asked. “Like where did Juan’s third arm go?”

  “One part cloaking device, one part baggy sweatshirt.”

  She was right. His shirt looked a little wrong somehow, but the moment I had the wrongness in my sights, something else seemed wrong, and then both were gone. It’s hard to explain.

  At that moment, from somewhere very close by, nobody did not say, “We made distractors last night, and they work great.”

  Hypatia looked at me. “Did you say something?”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “What?” Hypatia asked.

  I would have replied . . .

  But it suddenly occurred to me that I had absolutely no idea what the ingredients in a Bundt cake were! It was crucially important to look it up on the Internet at that very moment. How had I gone my whole life without knowing?

  Typing the search term into my tablet was difficult because nobody was not slipping something onto my wrist.

  A moment later I realized that I had completely failed to notice several things. For instance, Majorana Fermion was standing over me, looking silvery and triumphant in her metallic-botanical ensemble.

  “I’d say that’s a pass?” she said.

  An intense headache nearly overcame me and dissipated just as quickly. When I looked down, I saw I was wearing a cheap jelly bracelet I hadn’t seen before. Majorana was also wearing something on her wrist, but I could barely make it out, because it wasn’t there. But it was. Whatever it was, it reminded me of how much I wanted to think of anything else very urgently.

  That brought me back to my own new bracelet. “What’s this?” I asked.

  “So we have people to talk to. Now put this one on so you can see Dirac, too.”

  “Oh, he should have come. I bet he’d love to see that outfit. It’s really something.”

  Then I slipped on a blue jelly bracelet Majorana handed me and realized Dirac was also standing over me, his hands braced on the seats.

  Majorana handed me a small paper bag with several pink and blue bands, instructing me to share them with the others. Eventually, I managed to persuade Hypatia, Warner, and a few other nearby students to slip them on. All were amazed when they realized they had simply not noticed two students standing right there in front of them.

  “Invisibility is difficult,” Dirac explained in response to all the questions, “but crude brain manipulation is easy. The distractors make people forget everything about us in r
eal time whenever they look in our direction. The real trick was coming up with the immunizing bracelets—otherwise we would have failed for not showing up. Now we have witnesses.”

  12

  HOW TO FLUNK A FIELD TRIP

  After a tedious and noisy hour-long journey, we found ourselves at the DiPiney Mall, which looked a lot larger than the few malls we had in North Dakota. Before releasing us, Mr. Marconi gave us our instructions for the trip.

  “This bus will depart, whether or not you have returned, at promptly 3:00 PM. Because you are no doubt aware how difficult it can be to locate the School, missing the bus amounts to something like an expulsion, so take that deadline seriously. As today’s field trip constitutes an examination, students will be expected to conceal their more unique qualities at all times. Failure to do so will mean failure and possible dissection at the hands of the humans. Everyone, please activate your monitoring apps at this time so your work can be graded later. Make sure your tablets do NOT connect to Wi-Fi or human cell networks. Only connections to other school tablets are allowed here. Weapons, wormholes, and intelligent machines of any sort are not allowed. If you have brought any of these prohibited items in error, leave them here, or you will fail the test and have to take the remedial class. Those purchasing contraband on this outing will have it removed from their possession and distributed among the staff via our yearly contraband raffle. So if you have it in your head to purchase a bottle of wine or a box of cigars, for heaven’s sake, get something good. Ah, I think that’s it. Have I forgotten anything?” he asked.

  “You forgot to threaten us about being rowdy,” Dirac offered.

  “And you forgot to tell us we’re representing the School, and how we should always comport ourselves properly,” said Majorana.

  “Ah, yes, thank you, Dirac, Majorana. It’s a shame you two couldn’t make it today,” Mr. Marconi said cheerfully.

  Mr. Marconi became suddenly serious. “I will personally deal with any troublemakers who fail to live up to the high standards this school demands of its students. You may be here covertly, but you are representatives of the School and will behave accordingly. If you have to ask yourself if Homeland Security would be interested in what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be doing it.”

  As soon as all of us had turned our weapons and other forgotten contraband over, we were released on the unsuspecting public.

  As we walked into the mall, Hypatia was going on and on about the various things she wanted to buy. “And you get to stuff your own bear and dress it however you want, and you can put in a thing that makes noise, but it only makes one noise, so it never develops an attitude problem like the one I ordered from the bookstore—Oh! Taco Bomb!” A second later Hypatia was gone, leaving only a cloud of dust where she had been a moment before.

  Something you should know about parahumans: they’re freaking crazy about fast food, and they’re especially crazy about the Taco Bomb restaurant chain in particular. It’s the one place humans and parahumans can agree on. Humans love the beefy, cheesy goodness of inauthentic Mexican-ish cuisine, and parahumans love the preservatives, artificial colors, inorganic filler materials, and “flavor enhancement chemicals.” It’s the perfect food.

  While Hypatia quizzed the cashier about which meals had which kind of disodium and monosodium additives, I perused the menu, gravitating toward the NachoSplosion Platter, when I felt something buzz in my backpack. My tablet. I’d forgotten to turn off network access when we left the bus.

  Quickly, I stepped out of line and moved to where I could not be easily seen. I pulled the tablet from my pack and discovered the notification that had triggered the alert.

  It said: 1 new email message. I was about to turn it off when I got a better look at it. The message was from Melvin Kross. Subject: hello from your parent. My dad had emailed me! Maybe he’d escaped. Maybe he needed help . . . Trembling just a little, I pretty much forgot the rest of the universe existed and opened the email.

  For a short email, it took forever to load. As it took its time, I checked the header information. In this case, it told me bupkes. No list of dozens of mysterious government email addresses. This one was just for me. Finally, the message appeared.

  i am your father and i miss u alot, ROFL. wish i could come n see u. where u at kiddo?

  I read it a few times, but to my shock, every time it said the same thing. I was baffled. Dad had always been the sort of guy who would rather cut off his fingers than type u instead of you. One time I emailed him a joke, and his response was, Your humor was greatly appreciated by me and prompted an involuntary vocal expression of mirth.

  That’s how Melvin Kross says ROFL.

  I figured he must have been short on time, in danger, or they had given him drugs to make him stupid or something. Maybe he was on the run. Most humans could not handle being around the Old Ones for long periods of time—perhaps his mental condition had deteriorated. All I could think was that if the Old Ones had turned my dad into the kind of person who said “where u at kiddo,” I would not rest until I removed each and every one of their heads (or whatever the Old One equivalent is).

  I considered my options and composed a reply, trying to keep it as brief as he had, in case time was a factor.

  At a mall in Iowa. Where are YOU? I’ve been worried sick! Are you okay? What’s happening?

  I sent the message and left my tablet on to receive a reply. Deciding it was best to go on with things as normal, I composed myself, took a few deep breaths, and purchased a soft-shell taco and a soda. Hypatia, the Fermion twins, and Warner had taken up residence at a big round table and were already demolishing their food with voracity. It turned out I hadn’t needed to buy my own food, because Warner and Dirac had pooled their money to purchase the X-Cessive Family FiestaCrate and were actually having trouble finishing it.

  Hypatia was sucking on a soda. “I love, love, love soda pop. I wish they’d let us have it at school.”

  I realized I’d never seen a soda fountain or machine at the School. “Yeah, why don’t they?” I asked.

  Warner sighed. “Carbonation—the bubbles make parahumans super hyperactive.”

  Hypatia nodded. “That’s true but I don’t think it’s all that obvious when I get hyper it’s just that I have a little more energy and it wakes me up I think they should sell soda at the cafés maybe just in the morning because everyone needs a pick-me-up in the mornings and coffee makes me sooo sleepy I’m like super sleepy and slow when I have coffee but soda is really good in my opinion you want to try a drink of mine?”

  “No thanks,” I said.

  Something at the table beeped. Warner reached into his pocket and removed his school tablet.

  “Uh-oh,” Hypatia said. “You’re not supposed to have that connected to the Internet here. You could get into a lot of trouble.”

  “Yeah, but everyone does it. Dirac has his connected, and I saw Nikola with hers a little bit ago.”

  Hypatia glared accusingly at me. I shrugged.

  “Besides, I love public Wi-Fi honeypots. They’re soooo bad,” Warner said.

  I hadn’t heard that term before, at least when not referring to pots of honey. “What’s a honeypot?”

  He was about to answer when he said, “Ah! Got one. Okay, listen, everyone! Listen! This one is from my ‘sister.’” He stood and took a deep breath, reading in a falsetto voice to sound like a woman.

  Yo what’s shaking Brofessor Fancy, it’s your sister checkin’ in with a little BREAKING NEWS, hit me back with your 411. Big trouble—sorry to harsh your mellow but dad ate a mushroom and died.

  Everyone at the table erupted into gales of laughter. Well, everyone but me.

  “I can’t believe anyone would fall for that,” Majorana said between gasps. “Do the Old Ones really think that’s how people communicate?”

  “Have you gotten one yet, Nikola?” Warner asked
me.

  As soon as he saw me, the smile died on his face. “Oh no.”

  He probably thought I was almost going to cry. Because worrying your dad might have been executed for sending you an email and then temporarily finding out he is alive, and then being told it was a lie and you just fell for a really obvious trick might be upsetting to some people.

  Warner shook his head. “You didn’t reply, did you?”

  Everyone’s eyes were on me, and Hypatia spoke up. “Of course she did! They probably used her dad, and nobody warned her their messages would look like they’re from family!” To me she said, “You need to let us know—what did you tell them?”

  Reeling from disappointment and feeling like the dumbest person in the world, I said, “Um, I just asked where he was.”

  “See?” Hypatia said. “The IP address will only tell them what part of the state we’re—”

  “And said that we were at a mall,” I finished.

  Simultaneously, Warner, Dirac, and Majorana all started up the monitoring app and pressed a button in the corner of the screen that said EMERGENCY.

  I heard a faint alarm tone all around me. An alert was sounding on every student’s device.

  “Field trip is over,” Majorana said. “Back to the bus.”

  The four of us stood at once and headed for the door, but Dirac jumped in front of us and blocked our way. “They were going to park the bus on the other side of the mall. It’s faster to cut through.”

  We changed direction, and Warner took advantage of the momentary delay to dash back to the table to collect the remnants of their X-Cessive Family FiestaCrate. After reclaiming it, he spun around and crashed into a young woman who was pushing a stroller between the tables. What resulted from the impact gave the term Taco Bomb a whole new meaning: 100 percent USDA choice beef, the freshest produce, and select herbs and spices went everywhere. The woman and her baby were completely covered in a unique southwestern flavor experience.