Mr. Dolphin pushed on the top of the podium, and it sank back into the floor like it had never existed. When he spoke again, he eyed me in a way that made me understand why deer freeze in the headlights of oncoming traffic. “Quantum events occur in the tiniest ways, all over, all the time. They occur more often in certain materials, and in certain places. Quantum events in the eyes of birds allow them to perceive magnetic fields. Quantum events determine the progress of nuclear reactions. They occur inside your BRAIN, assuming you possess one. And particularly within the quantum agar from which this chamber is constructed.
“If I set a stone at your feet, it will likely remain there. In fact, if you were to watch it from now until the end of time, it will most likely do the same thing for eternity—that is to say, NOTHING. This is despite the fact that every atom and molecule of any material is shivering around all the time, in constant motion. Some of these motions are governed by quantum events, which means that a particular rock molecule really goes two directions at the same time, depending on HOW you observe it and WHETHER you observe it at all.
“Some of you may remember our Schrödinger’s cat experiment from last week. We change the outcome by DETERMINING the outcome, which we do by OBSERVING the outcome in the right way. Your shivering rock molecules make no difference on a certain scale, but they make a big difference if you take them all at once. If you were to attempt to OBSERVE each of these moving in a particular direction in the same moment, that rock might move”—he lowered his voice to a whisper—“it might jump or twitch or even . . . EXPLODE.”
In one far corner of the room, a girl I had not noticed up until then flashed a quizzical expression and raised her hand just a fraction of an inch before reconsidering and putting her hand back down. But Mr. Dolphin was too sharp. “MISS CURIE, what is your QUESTION? Speak quickly, if you’re determined to interrupt.”
“Er,” she said, before taking a deep breath and plunging in, “does that mean we could move rocks or other things if we practiced—”
“No!” Mr. Dolphin barked. “The rock was an illustration. Rocks are BORING and are made of boring stuff. Very few unstable events going on in there, not nearly enough to make one move. If your pitiful excuse for a chair is any indication, you might have trouble moving a rock even with a handle attached. Does this answer your question?”
“Yes,” the girl mumbled sheepishly.
“The point is that your observation of the event creates the outcome. Normal humans, as well as some DUNDERHEADS in this class”—he glared at Tom—“are less capable of the kind of observation that can create meaningful changes but can use equipment and software to conduct the necessary observations. Parahumans are born with the ability to comprehend these events on a scale that can be useful, if you’re willing to put your mind to it and construct the appropriate theoretical operations at the time of observation. Most superintelligent humans can get a sense of it as well and have been known to be very inventive, as I have been in constructing this room, but it will be an uphill battle. I’ve attempted to make it as easy as possible for you. The quantum agar in here is made ENTIRELY of a material that moves and reacts according to quantum events, making it easy to manipulate. At least, that’s the idea,” he said with a rakish wink.
“On Monday, I asked you to compare and contrast Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Schrödinger’s observer effect, and Mindy Bloopindo’s quantum manipulation protocol. I have been grading these papers and have begun to realize that, in general, your understanding of quantum manipulation is like the children’s end of a swimming pool: SHALLOW, TRANSPARENT, and probably filled with more WASTE than we like to imagine. To manipulate quantum materials, you must have an almost automatic comprehension of these core principles and how they interact. Otherwise . . .” He gestured at Tom’s lopsided chair, which he was trying to get rid of but which only quivered and sagged as if it were ashamed of itself.
He turned to the rest of the class. “Your test this hour will be to create something, ANYTHING, with the abundant agar in this room, and then to cause me to WITNESS your creation of said thing. Points will be awarded for complexity and stability. In case you missed my usage of the word test, I feel compelled to point out that you are now taking a graded and timed exam. GO!”
Immediately, students produced their handhelds, smartphones, and tablets, and set about poking and staring at them. Here and there, the floor wiggled, and some spots rose a bit before falling. I realized that the chairs and other things I had seen at the beginning of class must have taken a considerable amount of effort to produce. There was not much success to be seen, but here and there, a few students were finding themselves able to raise up parts of the floor.
I nudged Hypatia. “I thought they don’t assign grades?” I asked.
Hypatia’s gaze did not stray from her screen. “Some teachers like to assign grades for individual assignments so you have an idea if they consider your work passing. A class will just stop showing up on your schedule when they figure you know it well enough.”
I glanced at her handheld. She was constructing what looked like an amazingly complex mathematical formula; elements of symbolic logic, various applications of trigonometry, and calculus were at work. As a result, she was managing to draw a cylindrical object from the floor. The blue boy was already sitting on a newly formed Adirondack chair that was growing larger and larger as he calculated and appeared to meditate over his work from time to time. Next to him, a disheveled-looking brown-haired boy was struggling to make a rocket launch itself into the air, but the rocket only farted and fell over.
Hypatia was in the process of squaring some of her variables, and her form had started looking a bit like a snowman in reaction. Ultraviolet had made a small car she was trying to push around unsuccessfully.
“Cars should ROLL, Miss VanHorne; keep working,” said Mr. Dolphin as he passed.
I had no idea what to do. Beside me, Rubidia had set aside her handheld and was waving her hands over the floor like a wizard, with no luck. I nudged Hypatia again. “How do you do it?”
She glanced in my direction. “Hm?” The moment she did this, the snowman she had been concentrating on fell over and melted. “Ugh. Just . . . create a mathematical depiction of a form that represents the object you want to create—whatever properties you want it to have should be present. Then stare at it, and try to imagine it—er, observe it behaving in the manner you’ve described. Try sticking to simple geometric shapes at first. It helps to draw up an equation that represents a fluid filling a void of your chosen shape.”
I stepped a few paces away and seated myself cross-legged above my own patch of real estate. The floor wasn’t hard, but it wasn’t soft, either. Nor was it hot or cold, smooth or rough. It was just there, really. As the students who could manipulate it were working, I noticed that some of their constructions were definitely smooth, and even shiny, so I figured some of the floor must be shiny in parts. The moment I looked for a shiny spot, I found one, right under my finger. It hadn’t been smooth there a moment ago. I knew smoothness was determined by how the molecular structures were aligned on the surface. This spot had been nothing, but now it was smooth.
I had just changed it—just like that. Next I tried feeling around for a cold spot, and sure enough, the whole area beneath me was cold. It was so cold I suddenly wished I was wearing fur pants. Again, I’d found a place where atoms were doing what I wanted—their constant vibrations had slowed down, which also meant that they were cold. I thought about looking for a hot spot but thought better of it. After the day I’d had, I didn’t want to make matters worse by sitting on a frying pan.
“Tammy,” Mr. Dolphin called out. I went on feeling the floor, “finding” rough spots, prickly spots, places that gave me shocks like static electricity, even a spot that was kind of like a white goo, almost as thin as water. I stuck a finger in. It was only about an inch deep. I was amazed to think that the gia
nt throne had come from such a small amount of stuff. It must be able to expand and contract.
“TAMMY!” Mr. Dolphin shouted again. I felt sorry for Tammy, whoever she was. I was about to try finding a patch of floor that was taller than the rest in order to see about making it larger, when I noticed a pair of very old, very worn brown shoes standing right where I was about to check.
Crap, I thought, I’m Tammy. “Mr. Dolphin, I’m sorry, I forgot. My name is Nikola, Nikola Kross.”
He bent down and stared into my face. “Miss Kross, do you plan on petting the floor like a kitten for the next thirty minutes or do you plan on bending it to your will? We are not attempting to practice magic, and we do not romance our materials. Create a schematic or you will find yourself unable to construct anything more than a WASTE OF MY TIME.”
“Actually, I was kind of getting a feel for it. Getting to know it. I think I might be able to—”
His voice went suddenly sweet, like he was talking to a baby. An ugly, evil baby. “Maybe you should get to know inanimate objects on your own time and take this particular time to COMPLETE THE TEST. You are getting off to a bad start, a very bad start indeed. The semester is a month old at this point, so as far as I’m concerned, you are a month behind. STEP IT UP . . .”
I could tell he was working up into some kind of epic tirade. The other kids in the class clearly thought so, too, and were turning to witness the upcoming verbal carnage. Suddenly, I was angry. After everything I had endured in the last twenty-four hours—losing my dad, my home, being attacked by aliens, swarmed by bees, and almost blasted to bits by detonating chess pieces—this clown wasn’t willing to cut me even an ounce of slack?
Then I said it. The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them: “If you want me to work, then maybe you could shut up for a minute?”
Every single person in the room, including me, gasped. Every eye was on Mr. Dolphin and me. Had his face been that color red before? I didn’t think so. My hands covered my mouth involuntarily, as if they might hold in the next disastrous comment.
He pointed a long, spotted, bony finger at my face, the tip of it almost touching my nose. He spoke in a snarling whisper: “I don’t know what error brought you into this school or whether we have lowered our already questionably low standards, but if your name is Kross, then I assume you arrived clutching the coattails of a previous graduate. MY OFFICE, NOW.”
Something you should know about me. When I’m frightened, there’s a part of me that imagines the worst possible thing that I could do in that situation. It’s the sort of thing Miss Hiccup would have called “poor impulse control.” I mention this because while I was sitting there, preparing to be killed or eaten alive, something occurred to me. I thought it might be funny if a particular thing happened. Specifically, I thought it would be funny if the white goop on the ceiling turned into liquid and spilled all over the volcanic Mr. Dolphin. It was just a passing notion, but when I looked up at the ceiling, I realized that what I had imagined observing was actually occurring.
It happened too fast to warn him. An entire section of the white stuff on the ceiling just . . . fell. It spilled straight onto Mr. Dolphin’s head like a giant bucket of gooey white paint. Worse, the floor did the same, and as his shoes sank into the goo, the surrounding floor rose up, and in two seconds, he was completely encased in a thick white shell. It was kind of like a chocolate Easter bunny, except that Easter bunnies are made of milk chocolate and filled with air, whereas my creation was made of an exotic material and was probably filled with pure rage.
Suddenly terrified, I tried to imagine the stuff going back to how it had been just a moment before—less gooey, more solid. If this ever happens to you, here’s a tip: that’s the wrong move when someone is trapped inside.
I scrambled to my feet. The other students were still agape in horror. I doubted anybody had ever talked back to Mr. Dolphin before, let alone drenched and then imprisoned him in parts of his own classroom. I struck the white stuff, clawed at it, but nothing worked. It was now as hard as stone and as shiny as glass. I tried to calm down, to manipulate it again, but I couldn’t straighten my brain out enough to do it, not with certain doom awaiting me if I succeeded. I was about to ask if anyone could call for help when the stuff cracked here and there and fell away from Mr. Dolphin like freshly raked leaves.
I closed my eyes and braced myself for what I was sure would be my expulsion from school, and possibly the living world, but nothing came. When I worked up the courage to open my eyes, I saw that he was just standing there with his arms folded.
When he was sure he had my attention, Mr. Dolphin said, “Please refrain from using my quantum agar as a weapon against me.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Go . . . help one of the others,” he said, not shouting or growling for the first time. His face was contorted in a new way. At first I thought he might be in pain, but I realized that it might just as likely have been a smile. It was either that or he had to go to the bathroom and was trying to forget about it until class was over. He turned on his heels and stalked over to the wall, where doors opened and he disappeared once again.
I grabbed my bag and moved back over to where Hypatia and Rubidia were working. “How did you do that?” Hypatia asked. “I didn’t think it was possible to change it into a liquid or move it that quickly.”
“I don’t know. It was an accident, I guess. Let me try something.” I bent down and patted the floor in front of both of them. “Feel it—it’s cold here.”
Both of them did as I asked. Rubidia’s mouth dropped open. “How . . . ? I mean, I’ve only ever seen people move it, never changing its physical state or properties. You must be some kind of savant.”
“I think anyone can do it, really, if you think about it the right way,” I said. “Both of you just did.”
Hypatia shook her head. “You made it cold. We just touched it.”
“Negative. I touched it and said it was cold, but I didn’t actually do anything. Both of you changed its properties when you expected to observe that it was cold.”
“That’s amazing!” Rubidia exclaimed. “Have you used this stuff before?”
“No,” I said. “My dad actually hates the whole field of quantum theory. Says it’s new age hokum. Everything I know about it is from him complaining about things he’s read.”
I was sitting and moving parts of the floor around like sand. It was calming. I don’t like admitting it, but up to that point, I’d been starting to think I might have gotten in over my head. It felt good to help others with something—even if I didn’t completely understand how I was doing it.
Rubidia grinned and set about feeling parts of the floor as I had, but was unable to get it to move. Hypatia tried for a minute before giving up. She re-created her snowman and went cautiously over to Tom under the pretense of helping him locate an error in his calculations that was causing the tree he was making to grow sideways from the wall.
By the time the bell sang, marking the end of class, most students had completed their work, and several parahuman kids were attempting to change the agar into liquid as I had done, with little success. The blue boy managed to get it to drip, but it was clear that it was only a solid moving like a liquid, and he was just steering it with an equation describing an oblate spheroid. For my project, I made a polar bear, and for no reason at all, a representation of a taco for him to munch on. It looked like mine was the only project that could move on its own. It was surprising to me just how easy it was for me to work with the agar. It felt almost weightless, so I could move it around if I needed to, and almost anything I could imagine, it could do. I hoped all the tests for my other classes came this easily.
A little while later, Mr. Dolphin returned to the room and took a look around while making marks on a small clipboard. If he was impressed at all, he did not let it show. “You have been busy. If I did not
know better, I would suspect some of you may have learned something. TOMORROW, we will be observing how to entangle separate pieces of the same particle. Read about quantum entanglement in your books and be ready to speak INTELLIGENTLY on the subject. There will be no further HORSING AROUND. NOW, GO AWAY!”
This meant class was over, I guessed, as everyone allowed their creations to disappear back into the floor and gathered up their things. I pulled out my tablet to check my schedule, which appeared to be as complex as the calculations I’d seen Hypatia working on. Rubidia was hurriedly stowing a few items in her backpack, so I tapped her on the shoulder, holding out my tablet. “Hey, could you tell me what class—”
She glanced at my tablet and, without changing her expression, stood and walked out of the room.
My mouth dropped open. I’d been thinking things had gone well, and Rubidia had seemed so nice. What if the agar incident made me a pariah? At most schools, someone who upset a teacher was an instant hero, if only for a while, but I didn’t need any reminders that this school did not operate on anything like the social rules that I was familiar with.
Hypatia was nowhere to be found, and I felt suddenly invisible as the kids around me shuffled out in twos and threes. It was a feeling I’d been used to at my old school, so I was surprised by how much it stung just now. I shouldered my bag and was about to leave when Mr. Dolphin raised a hand and signaled that I should approach him.
I walked over as slowly and calmly as possible, wondering if he was about to demand an apology for the trouble I had caused. Once I was in front of him, he seemed to change his mind a few times about what he was going to say. I stood and politely waited, if only to show that I was capable of being polite from time to time.
Finally, Mr. Dolphin’s face hardened, and he spoke. “Two things. First, you do not receive a passing grade for today’s project.” He raised his hands to silence my protest. “The task was to construct a mathematical representation of a thing and to then observe it in physical form. You did not do the first part, despite your ability to accomplish the second on what appears to be an instinctive basis. I don’t understand how, but that is beside the point. Because you are new, I will afford you the opportunity to accomplish the task properly. You will need to work on it at home this evening. I suspect you are more than equal to the task. Second: Melvin Kross is your father, is he not?”
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