Billy beams into a classroom filled with 300 students, looks at the teacher talking and then the clock “8:00.20.”
“Ugh, not again.”
The teacher stops mid-sentence, “Late again? How hard is it to get out of bed on time?”
Billy walks over to his seat and enters his meld.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you, young man.”
Billy exits his meld and stares in contempt at the teacher.
“Good, maybe now you can listen. You were a whole twenty seconds late for class today, which is unacceptable for a kid your age.”
Billy hangs his head then looks back up trying to think of an excuse besides his desire to sleep, “The teleportation terminal was congested this morning.”
Most of the class exits their mind melds excited to hear one of their peers receive a verbal lashing except one kid playing flying apes in his meld.
“How dare you come up with an excuse like that? You will have detention for a month, but for now enter your meld and pay attention.”
Billy tears up and enters his meld while rest of the class mutters amongst themselves about their classmate.
“Don’t just cry about it, it was your own fault and you should deal with it.” The teacher says turning to the other students, “And back to work for the rest of you as well, I will not have any more class time wasted.”
Billy stops crying and sits silently in his mind meld waiting for the instruction of his teacher.
“Good, now that you have successfully disrupted my lecture I can get back to teaching,” she looks at the clock and enters into her mind meld, connecting with all the students. “Before we got interrupted we were talking about the theories of gravity.”
In the meld, pictures of Aristotle come into existence with spectacular clarity. “Aristotle is the originator of gravitational theory writing his theory down in the 4th century BC that Earth elements are attracted to the center of the Earth because that is their natural place and fire elements move towards the heavens because that is their natural place.”
The pictures of Aristotle fade to pictures of Galileo with equally spectacular clarity. “This is Galileo, who said that everything accelerates equally quickly due to gravity,” The pictures change to that of Isaac Newton, “Only later would Isaac Newton ‘mathematically’ prove Galileo’s theory.”
One of the smarter kids in the front chuckles about this. The other smart kids think that he is one of them for seeing the humor in the teacher’s statement. While the remaining kids think that he was stupid for laughing at something that clearly wasn’t a joke. The teacher gives him a smile of approval for getting it.
A goofy looking picture of Albert Einstein takes the place of the rather serious one of Newton and the kids on both ends of the spectrum laugh. “I know this looks like a goofy photograph, but this is one of the smartest men to ever live. His theory of general relativity survived as the basis for scientific understanding until 2384.”
A picture of Jean van Chance appears on the meld. “This man van Chance is the originator of modern gravitational theory.”
A rather studious looking child in the back of the room raises her hand and is promptly called on, “What was his theory?” The other kids in the class sigh contemptuous of their over eager colleague.
The teacher smiles, “Excellent question,” the girl feels proud but the rest of the class just doesn’t care and feels angry about the continuation of the lecture. The picture of Aristotle appears again, “the same thing Aristotle already figured out over 2000 years earlier. There really are only four elements which have properties that dictate the world.”
“But then what about all those other theories, where did they come from?” Again the rest of the class mutters disapprovingly.
“Men who sought to take a simple phenomenon and distort it because they couldn’t accept that some things really are just that simple.” The teacher looks back over at Billy effectively recognizing his lie and the dumb mob looks down upon their smarter colleagues.
