The Unspeakable Unknown

by Eliot Sappingfield

  I took a second to look him over a little more closely. He looked very much like I remembered, although he was thinner and seemed to have an almost imperceptible limp when he walked. The only scar I spotted was a long-healed wound on his left ear, partially concealed by his hair.

  Warner was smiling in spite of himself as he led the way to the cafeteria. “Is he always like that?”

  “No,” I said. “Sometimes he gets really distracted.”

  The deep colors and soft surfaces of the lobby were even more present in the dining hall. This was complemented by soft jazz music wafting over unseen speakers, huge luxurious booth benches, gleaming silver cutlery, and warm stained-glass lamps here and there. The effect was completely ruined by four plastic card tables, which were pushed together to make one big table at the center of the room. All four tables were collectively piled at least three feet high with a gargantuan mound of lukewarm Pizzatillos.

  Between the card tables, threadlike rivulets of grease drained onto the floor, where glistening orange lard stalagmites had formed.

  If you aren’t familiar with them, Pizzatillos are oily scraps of moist tortilla-like substance wrapped around various other substances that have been colored and shaped to resemble the sorts of things one might find on a pizza. They’re amazingly salty, faintly disgusting, catastrophically unhealthy, and ridiculously popular.

  “Oh, I LOVE those!” Hypatia said.

  The “table with the thing” was on a far end of the room, behind a low wall. In other days, it might have been the restaurant’s smoking section. I could tell the table with the thing was the “table with the thing” because someone had affixed a comic-book cutout of an angry orange rock-man to the wall above it with clear tape. It was the only addition to the restaurant’s decor, apart from decades of neglect.

  Dad waved a hand impatiently at Hypatia. “You, grab me a plate. From the top of the pile, if you please. The ones on top are colder, but a little less compressed.” He pointed to Warner. “You, in my bag is a packet of antacids. Have them out and ready to go should they be needed.” He pointed at me—well, near me. “And you, Nikola. Sit. I may need someone to take notes. I’m working out subatomic particle behavior in different metamaterials and how the ways in which one manipulates them changes them, or rather fails to change them, according to scale. Eventually, we may be able to influence them on a macro scale using certain types of electromagnetic fields outside the lab. The particles that make up an atom have an influence on how it behaves, so it’s a bit like chemistry and a bit like nuclear physics. Terribly fascinating. Can we cause a Higgs boson to behave like a tachyon particle? Maybe it does already! How many particles do you have to tweak in, say, a lemon or a fish to produce observable results? Can you imagine the implications?”

  I loved the way Dad talked about science. The thought that someone wouldn’t understand whatever it was he was going on about never occurred to him.

  “Would doing that affect the object,” he continued, talking faster, “or the rest of the universe in relation to the object? If you’re taking a relativistic view of things it could be either. Not that the distinction is terribly relevant in this context. Really, why do you have to bring an abstraction like that into it in the first place?”

  Instead of sitting, Dad was pacing back and forth, which he likes doing while he’s thinking. “I got tied up with that myself, but I don’t think it matters. The effect is the same. If I’m on a train moving away from you, and we see ourselves moving apart, does it matter if the train is standing still and the earth is moving away from underneath it? Of course, nothing is a pure abstraction, because to consider which is happening at any scale is an abstraction in itself, and I’m not even sure there’s an—”

  He paused, frozen in his tracks.

  I smiled at Warner, who had the antacids ready to deploy. “There it is.”

  Dad resumed talking, but more slowly. “Not sure there’s an . . . observable answer . . . that we could make . . . from our vantage point. Nikola, how did you get here?”

  “We hitched a ride with an Old One named Jakki.”

  His eyes widened in outrage. “That one. Listen, this is no place for children. You and your friends are to return to school immediately. I’ll be along as soon as I can work out how to leave.” He ran a hand through his scraggly bowl cut, leaving it standing on end. “No. I see the dilemma there. Not here by choice, then. You’re okay, though?”

  “More or less,” I said.

  “Good. I knew they hadn’t taken you because you weren’t here,” he continued. “And if they had hurt or killed you, they certainly would have told me, just to see me suffer, but . . . well, I’ve been worried in any case.”

  “Well, I’m fine. I’ve been having a good time, really.”

  He patted me on the top of my head in an excessive show of affection that left both of us feeling a little self-conscious. I’ll admit it—I blushed a little.

  “I’m glad . . . I don’t think I could tolerate . . . I mean . . . emotionally speaking . . .”

  “I get it, Dad. Glad you’re okay, too.”

  He came close, reached out, and shook my hand warmly.

  I overheard Warner mumble something to Hypatia about “robots hugging,” but I was too happy to take offense.

  We sat down, but before we spoke any further, Dad produced an electrical cord from his jacket pocket and plugged it into a power outlet conveniently located on his rolling suitcase. Under other circumstances I might have asked why he was wearing an electric lab coat, but there was too much to talk about.

  “Who are your friends?” he asked.

  “Oh, sorry, I didn’t introduce everyone. This is Warner,” I said, giving them time to shake hands, “and this is Hypatia. They’re classmates from school.”

  Dad nodded at the two of them and addressed me again. “It does me good to see you making friends. I should have sent you to the School ages ago. It’s just that I felt you were safer at home. A father’s first mistake. Who’s the victim?”

  He was, I realized, speaking of Gus, who was lurking in a corner.

  “He’s a special friend of Jakki’s. She called him her husband, but I’m not sure he ever said ‘I do’ on his own. Do we need to worry about him listening?”

  He shook his head. “They’re no good for spying once they’re . . . when they succumb to their . . .” He tapped his finger on his temple. “He has, hasn’t he?”

  “Very much so. Is there any way of fixing it?”

  He shrugged and shook his head.

  “He’s supposed to blow us up if we try anything funny,” Warner said.

  “That could become an issue,” Dad said. “We will almost certainly be trying several funny things.”

  I waved Gus over, and he complied readily. “Gus, you’re supposed to kill us if we try leaving, right?”

  Gus nodded emphatically. “Yes!”

  “No!” I said, remembering something.

  “Yes?” Gus said, sounding less sure of himself.

  “Jakki said you should keep an eye on us, remember? She didn’t say anything about you stopping us from doing anything.”

  Gus looked confused and made a face, as if he didn’t know how to answer.

  “Do you want to kill us, or would you rather let us live?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Gus said unhelpfully.

  “Do you want to leave here?” Hypatia asked him.

  “Yes!” he said emphatically.

  Warner interrupted, gesturing with a shiny Pizzatillo. “Instead of killing us, if you help us escape, we can bring you along, okay?”

  Gus thought this over. “Yes.”

  “That was easy,” Dad said. “So tell me everything that has happened since I last saw you.”

  So I told him everything that had happened since the Old Ones had taken him, in the greatest detail I
could manage, while skipping a few irrelevant details a parent might not understand, like insulting the principal, making friends with an exintegrated Old One, and escaping school property to rescue the same Old One from mortal peril.

  When we were finished, Dad’s first question was: “Do you know what the area of inquiry is?”

  “Whose area of inquiry?” I asked.

  “The Old Ones. What do they hope to uncover about your brain?”

  I shrugged. “Well, Jakki was a little vague about it. I’m immune to a lot of their brain-scrambling and mind-control stuff, so it could be that. I see right through their disguises, too. They want to control people without ruining their minds, I guess. No idea how having my brain helps with that.”

  “I suppose they think I engineered that trait in you intentionally. Or perhaps they suspect a more exotic explanation.”

  I shrugged. “I guess? Did you? You know, engineer me to resist them in some way?”

  Dad shook his head. “No. Too difficult to do it right. Besides, I never liked seeing people mess around with how their kids turn out. You change too much, and they aren’t your kids anymore, are they? They’re constructions, artificial.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Hypatia said.

  Dad popped one of the Pizzatillos into his mouth and shuddered as he swallowed it like a pill, without chewing. “No offense intended. Parahumans have to do all kinds of engineering to make things work right in the first place. Totally different situation.”

  Hypatia mumbled but didn’t really reply.

  “You killed Tabbabitha, you say?” he continued. “That’s quite an accomplishment. That miniature gap generator you three came up with to contain and kill her is quite innovative. You ought to patent it before someone else comes up with it on their own.”

  “Who else could?” I asked. “You have to have a giant megasupercomputer laying around to make one work.”

  That gave me an idea. “Is there a computer like that down here? Maybe we could figure out a way to use it on Jakki.”

  “Not one able to maintain a carefully balanced hole in space-time. Besides, I don’t think you’d get as lucky with Jakki. She’s Queen Mother, you know.”

  “What’s that?” I said, remembering what Jakki had called herself while she was talking with Darleeen through me.

  Dad fiddled with his tablet. “Living down here, you get an idea of how they rank themselves. Queen Mother pretty much runs things. She’s immensely powerful. You literally have no idea what she’s capable of.”

  “She doesn’t smell as bad,” Warner pointed out.

  “Oh yes, she does,” Dad said. “She’s just able to make you ignore it almost instantly. It’s like a biological, olfactory version of that gadget your parahuman friend used to distract people.”

  I remembered something else. “Hey, did you get in a lot of hot water down here for sending that SOS?”

  That surprised him. “The emergency transmitter I stuck in old Paul Merchar’s briefcase? You mean it worked? I haven’t heard a thing about it. Why on earth haven’t they sent in SEAL Team Zero or something?”

  “I guess he used a kind of transportation they don’t know how to trace yet,” I said. “I think that’s how we got here. It’s a bit like being in a tornado and being bombed at the same time.”

  “Hm,” Dad said thoughtfully. “Was anyone able to get good information out of him?”

  “No, the Old Ones melted his brain before he could say anything.”

  Dad nodded without looking up from his email and said, “You don’t say . . .” with all the concern he might have expressed upon hearing a neighbor’s car broke down.

  “They didn’t know it was you?” I asked.

  “If they did, they didn’t let on, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they didn’t. Running an inescapable prison filled with prisoners who have lost their free will has made them a bit complacent, I suppose,” he said. “Plus all their attention is focused on other matters at the moment. They want a new weapon, and there’s a big push to get it done ASAP. The problem is a lack of motivation among the research and development staff. Most of their researchers are burned out, and I’ve been stalling and sabotaging progress whenever I see an opportunity. I found some old books in an abandoned room here, so I spend a lot of time with those instead of working. Did you know the mantis shrimp can release a blast of water at almost a hundred kilometers an hour at a temperature of over nine thousand degrees Celsius?”

  “Fascinating,” I said. “So they’ve given you the ability to produce weapons? How do they know you won’t make something to kill them instead? Is that even possible?”

  His eyes lit up. “That’s what I’ve worked on, when I wasn’t stalling. Frankly, I’ve been shocked by the lack of oversight here. Many college laboratories are more observant of their residents, and they’re not unwilling prisoners. Well, not literally. Not that I think it’s overconfidence—they don’t have anything to worry about. If we were to zap a couple of them and escape, where would we escape to? We don’t even know how far underground we are. Add that to the fact that the Old Ones are almost impossible to kill and aren’t worried about us attacking them, and you have a recipe for lax oversight.”

  “Almost impossible? So there are ways of killing them that don’t involve interdimensional rifts like the gap?” I said.

  “The most obvious answer is something sudden and catastrophic, like a really powerful bomb. A nuke would do the trick if they didn’t see it coming. I’ve been focusing most of my attention on more novel solutions that might not kill me in the process—things like interdimensional energy streams, localized biomagnetics that keep them from slipping into other dimensions, and toxic materials that can travel with them when they slip. Basically, any way we can attack them while they’re in their true form or keep them from fleeing. But that’s easier said than done. That reminds me, I’ve been working on a portable pulsar—really cutting-edge stuff. I should have it ready in the next couple years, if I hurry.”

  That was interesting, but I was looking for a slightly shorter-term solution. “Do you know any way to escape, even without knowing where we are?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t be here if I did. If I knew exactly where we were, I could establish my own wormhole doorway out of here, but without being able to program it with our own current location information, we’re far more likely to open a door to interstellar space or the earth’s core than anywhere useful. That would be catastrophic, to say the least. Besides, the materials to assemble a wormhole gateway are some of the only items that are forbidden to be acquired or possessed here. I expect they’re worried about us trial-and-erroring our way out, which could work over a few hundred years if you were dedicated enough.”

  Without warning, Dad went back to his simulation. This meant he was done talking for the moment. Hypatia moved to an adjacent booth and lay down, trying to get a little sleep, and Warner distracted himself by reading a book on his tablet. After a minute, I booted up my own tablet and, on a whim, tried to get connected to a network.

  The screen went black and one word displayed. NOPE.

  “Couldn’t we just tunnel up?” Hypatia asked a minute later. “We know we’re below the surface, and we just need to know where we are, right?”

  Dad held up a finger. “Hold on a moment; this thing’s getting hot. No talking for a sec.” He unplugged the electrical cord from his suitcase and gingerly retrieved what looked like an elementary school electromagnet from the pocket of his lab coat. I couldn’t help but notice it had been stored in the pocket with the dangerous-looking burn.

  He raised his head and said, louder than necessary, “But that’s what they get for standing up against the Old Ones. They should have seen it coming!”

  The science project was a partially rusted iron nail driven through a wooden block, which acted as a stand. Around this was coiled a considerable length of
bare copper wire. A power cord that could have come from a clock radio ran from the wooden base. It looked like a fatal electrocution waiting to happen. He sat it on the table and plugged the trailing end of the cord back into the outlet on his rolling suitcase. It hummed audibly and emitted a faint ozone smell. Touching it would be the last bad idea you ever had.

  Warner looked confused. “What is—”

  Dad interrupted him with a wave of his hand. “Simple thing, this. Iron nail, copper wire, five one-eighth-inch N45-grade neodymium magnets spaced evenly in a half-inch radius circle around the shaft and sandwiched in the wood base, and a point-five amp, 312-hertz AC current, and some simple electronics of my own design concealed within the base. You’ll need to make one if you want to talk without them hearing. I’ll forward you the plans. Something about magnetic fields blocks them from being able to monitor us unless they’re in the room. Most of the people down here who still resist carry one, as do some of the willing collaborators. From what I hear, they can still pay attention to where we are, but when they try listening in, they only hear generic human chatter—nothing they can bring themselves to care about.”

  “I have a magnetic singularity, if you want to use that,” I said, pulling my backpack open and digging out the small silvery ball.

  “Good lord! Put that away! You’ll kill us all!” Dad said, alarmed. “Didn’t you notice the walls and ceiling around this place are almost solid iron ore? It might weaken the Old Ones, but that thing could collapse the whole dome.”

  I hadn’t yet assessed the composition of the rock around the cavern but took his word for it anyway. “Fine, sorry,” I said, tossing it back into my bag.

  Dad turned back to Hypatia. “If we tried tunneling, they would know we were leaving in a second. The edges of these caves are laced with sensors to determine if people are escaping. I tried sending a tiny rock-boring drone out of here shortly after I arrived, and it was zapped before it could get more than a few inches. Besides, I’m pretty sure there’s a large body of water directly over us, if my rock sonar readings are correct.”