((ooc: Continued from Pax.))

One would think a doctorate in the social sciences would imply some manner of caring, in such matters as these. One would underestimate the comforts of the mundane.

Slate was at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, in Belgium. He had been here a few months ago to speak at a roundtable discussion on the future of mutants and humanity. At that time, Professor Engle had been quite outspoken, to the point where he had to take a deep breath while the technicians adjusted his volume’s microphone. The squeals of feedback had been somewhat undercutting his oration.

“There is no way forward but together,” he had passionately argued. “As humans, we cannot ignore these new quirks to our genetics—we cannot pretend they are the same as us, nor can we safely label them the ‘other’. History has shown us what we do to the ‘other’—Hitler was very fond of them. As human beings, it is our decency to recognize them as our brothers, sisters, and equals: our future in this world is shared.”

“Are you sure you don’t want any?” Dr. Engle accepted the teacup from his graduate student; the boy went back to his cluttered table in the corner of the man’s office, and kept grading term papers with a despondent red pen. “It’s coca tea; imported from Colombia. Have you ever had it?”

The blue-eyed teenager had a cup of it yesterday. In Colombia. It was, perhaps, the jetlag speaking, but he felt the need to question: “Isn’t that illegal to export?” It was, after all, made from the same plant as cocaine.

The professor gave a good-natured chuckle. “Some laws make no sense. Who was it that said it’s our responsibility to disobey unfair laws?”

It was a very loose paraphrase of Martin Luther King, Jr’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. The Revered had been quoting someone else, in his turn. The idea sounded familiar to Slate. He searched his memory for a moment, but all that came to mind was fragments of a dictionary he’d once read.

(n) a person who pretends to have moral standards or opinions that they do not actually have.

He sat in the chair across from the professor’s weathered old desk, and stated simply: “You are a hypocrite.”

The professor’s cup clicked against its saucer. “And you’re naive. What do you think I could really change? We are in Belgium. I am a citizen of England. This Registration Act? It is happening in Romania. They are a sovereign nation: I am a university professor. I do what I can. I make speeches; I write papers. What more do you expect of me?”

Slate’s hands curled into fists on his lap. The clock above the grad student’s head ticked. “Schedule a press conference. Bring the other professors together. Speak out.”

“What would it do?” A benevolent smile twitched on the man’s mouth. “A table of moldy old men, saying they don’t like how the world is changing? Even if the press humored us, who would care enough to flip the channel off of their precious sitcoms?”

“I don’t know.” Slate said. “But you cannot stay silent. Everyone else is. You can’t.”

The professor raised his cup, and blew across it. “I’m honored that you thought of me. This thing, however, this law—it is bigger than us. Perhaps it’s because you’re a mutant; you’re used to doing extraordinary things with your own hands. I am human. I fear I must be a realist.”

“...Thank you for your time, Dr. Engle.”

“A pleasure.”

As the door shut behind the American teen, the graduate student fidgeted. “Sir? Can I take my lunch break yet?”

The professor eyeballed the pile of graded papers, weighing it in his gaze against the mound of ungraded ones. “Half an hour.”

“Thank you, Sir.”

“A press conference.” Dr. Engle repeated, as the student grabbed his bag and fled the room. His finger traced around his teacup’s handle; a repetitious loop. “Hmph.”

“Mr. Swartz. Slate Swartz! Hey, wait up!”

Slate blinked over his shoulder. The grad student, despite his long legs, was not very fast. It took him quite a bit of time to trip between the flocks of undergrads, and make his way across the campus lawn. His ratty backpack bounced on his back.

“May I help you?”

“Ah, yeah. That is to say—” Here, the twenty-something year old paused to rest his hands on his knees, and catch his breath. “Damn, you walk fast.”

The teenager gave a patient blink.

“Heh. So. You’re American, right? What are you—twenty-one?”

“Nineteen.”

A low whistle. “Wow. That’s even worse.”

Slate began to walk again.

“No, I—hey, wait up!” The grad student settled an elbow on his shoulder. Not a hand: an elbow. This did not improve Slate’s opinion of him. “Twitter.”

“What?” Slate asked, to be polite. He kept walking.

The elbow followed him, riding high on its perch. “Twitter. You know—Twitter. Why did you even bother with an old fogey like him in the first place? That’s not how you’re going to get things done. You’re nineteen and you didn’t think of Twitter? Or are you already doing something there?”

“...Twitter is what?” He choose this sentence construction because it suited his mood more closely than ‘What’s Twitter?’ would have.

“You’re nineteen, and you don’t know...? Okay, so. What kind of cell phone do you have?”

Slate gave a small shrug. The elbow resettled, as if to make itself more comfortable. “I do not have a cell phone.”

“You’re an American teenager, and you don’t have a...? Okay. PDA? Netbook? Anything?”

He gave a more pronounced shrug. The grad student seemed to interpret this as ‘no’, rather than a ‘please remove yourself from me’. The elbow, indeed, moved: unfortunately, it only sunk far enough to latch itself around his arm. The grad student changed direction, rather abruptly. So did Slate’s biceps. The rest of him, after a brief time delay, stumbled after.

“Where are—?”

“Computer lab.”

Computer lab, indeed. Slate was not quite certain how he came to be sitting down. It had involved more manhandling.

“Twitter,” the grad student declared, as Slate blinked at a cartoon blue bird on the screen. How very... sophisticated. “See the tending topics? Click RomanianReg. Behold: Twitter.”

The grammar was appalling. The pound signs were pervasive. Names involved an unwieldy amalgamation of letters and numerals. The time stamps were listed, against all desire for conversational context, in ascending order. Truly, there did not appear to be ‘conversation’ at all.

But there was a topic.

And there was a lot to be said, for that.

[/b][/i][/ul]

“This is your audience,” the grad student said, with a broad sweep of his hand. “Dr. Engel does what he can, but he does it like it’s still the nineties. It’s almost two thousand and ten. Twitter isn’t one Englishman in Belgium—this is thousands of people all over the world. They’re listening. You want to make a change? Try it here."

Slate blinked at the screen. “Can I access this from my blackberry?”

“You have a—?” The grad student ran a hand through his hair. Dead-pan facial-twitch style. “Yes. Yes, you can access this from your blackberry. What, you need to leave?”

“I have another plane flight soon.”

“All right. Hang on—I’ll give you my e-mail. I’ve got ideas: you’ve got motivation. I think we could make a good... Okay. That look on your face. Tell me you know—”

“How do I use e-mail?” Slate asked, with a blue-eyed blink.

Words cannot express a wordless scream. Technological face fault head desk parse error. “...How long until you need to be at the airport?”

“Approximately an hour and a—” Slate’s arm found itself moving again. The rest of his body had to hastily vacate the chair, lest his appendage leave without him. “Where—?”

“The Com Sci tutors. I need backup.”

“I—”

“Now.”[/color]

“My theory,” the grad student continued, undeterred by the fact that no one appeared to be listening, “is that people are inherently good, but lazy as all pardonable French.” His long legs tried to swing under the table, but ended up just scuffing at the carpet. His name was Emile Verhulst. Twenty-five years old. Currently pursuing a Masters in International Relations. Blood type: O. A Virgo. Single, for the record.

“What does ‘CC’ stand for?” Slate asked, pointing at the screen again. He was careful not to actually touch it. The Com Sci majors had reacted poorly to that.

“That’s ‘carbon copy’—you can put other e-mail addresses there, if you want; they’ll also get a copy of your message.” The black-haired one explained patiently, over the teenager’s shoulder.

“Kind of useless, though,” the brown haired one chipped in, as victorious pinball music streamed from his laptop. His feet were up on the desk, near Slate’s mouse. Tables, Slate had observed, were not subject to the same sacred standards as computer monitors. “It does the same thing as just typing all the addresses into the usual send field. BCC, now—” A pause: a riotous clacking of keys. Level-up. “—BCC, that’s blind carbon copy. Any address you write in there won’t show itself to the receivers.”

The teenager blinked amiably. Music filled the stretching silence.

“...Just try it. E-mail yourself. You’ll see what I mean.”

Slate now had not one, but four e-mail accounts—Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail. This was to acquire usernames, he had been told, that would work with Trillian, so that he could IM using Yahoo IM, AIM, and MSN simultaneously. Though Gmail’s chat was better if you wanted the autologs, and both Facebook and MySpace had messages systems of their own. Additionally, his blackberry could send text messages, which were not to be confused with IMs, because they only traveled between phones (though some phones, like his, could also use IM). And he should always, always, always use his Gmail account as his default, because AOL was meh, Yahoo even thought its own mail was spam, and Hotmail—as the name suggested—was a subsidiary corporation of Hell.

Also, ‘spam’ was not a food product produced in Minnesota, but a term for undesirable electronic mail. It was to inboxes what trolls were to message boards, and even-though-he-was-a-newb-he-should-not-be-a-n00b: no trolling. If he wanted to be eco-friendly, he could use Blackle instead of Google (skcik rof, Elgoog esu dluoc eh ro). Ask Jeeves was dead. XKCD was pwn. YouTube was useful, Skype was l33t, l33t was dead, Pirate’s Bay rocked socks, and non-native English speakers were generally more understandable than twelve year olds.

Also, Twitter.

“Since people are good, they want to help,” Emile continued, as Slate switched FireFox tabs to check his Yahoo account. His message sent from Gmail had not arrived yet. Considering it was only moving from one page in his ‘browser’ to another, he was not sure what was taking it so long: it seemed a very short distance to travel.

“But since people are lazy,” the grad student continued, “they don’t want to help that much. Do the thinking for them, though, make it easy to be good, and they’ll hop on your cause. It’s like having an island of baby-eating cannibals. Most people are going to go ‘oh, that’s terrible!’ if you tell them, but they aren’t going to get on a boat and go baby-rescuing anytime soon. If you shove a petition into their hands in support of non-baby-eating-measures, though, they’ll probably sign it.”

Ah, there it was. Slate clicked and stared: the black-haired student patiently pointed his attention to the ‘receivers’ field. Ah. Indeed: the message didn’t show that it had also sent to his AOL and The Devil accounts. BCC. He paused to type a note of this, in Google Documents (which auto-saved three times in the span it took him to chicken peck).

“You, however, are not lazy. You’re like the anti-lazy. You flew on a plane from America just to talk with someone you thought might be able to help: that’s like the opposite of lazy. You, Swartzy—do you mind if I call you Swartzy?—are the guy who goes around starting petitions. So all you’ve got to do now is figure out your plan. Then make it really, really easy, and shove it in front of people. That’s where Twitter comes in: you’ve got thousands and thousands of people, all willing to click at least once for a good cause. Give them something clickable, and they’ll change the world, mindless-multitudes-style. Am I right? Right, right?”

“Did I do that right?” Slate asked, as the screen in front of him turned blue.

“...What did you just push?”

“What did he just push? Wasn’t he opening a Facebook account?”

“...If a fail is possible, a newb will find a way.”

“Yeah. So...” Emile said, rubbing one hand in his hair. “I’m going to get me some vending machine lunch. Who wants ramen cups and caffeine?”

Two hands went into the air. The black-haired student instructively grabbed Slate’s wrist, and hoisted it up: make that three hands. Ramen cups, caffeine, and system reboots for all.

As the airplane waited for its turn on the runway, Slate found his leg moving of its own will: up and down, up and down, up and down. He seemed unable to stop it; after a brief struggle of wills, he simply let it be. The man in the seat next to him eyed it with grave suspicion. The blue-eyed teenager looked fairly respectable. His clothes were business casual and clean; he had the meal tray down, and was intently switching his attentions between a stack of typed notes and his blackberry. He just... wouldn’t stop twitching, though. Was he going to do that for the entire flight...?

Slate had never had a Red Bull before. Perhaps he should not have had two.