Tales Between the Lines

VI.5 - Tweets

Twisty will pick up the shiny, silvery thing at the back of the tent. It will be a squarish slab, gleaming metal at one side and a twinkling screen at its other. The latter will glow in tender shades of white and blue.

The alien will frown and decipher the written messages on it—messages of people broadcasting their life and inane views all over the planet. Stuff that other people will read.

Fascinated, Twisty will extend one of its twisted tendrils, making it enter a small slot at the edge of the device, sending tender veins of itself inside, penetrating circuitry and breaching virtual walls.

Then, it will connect.

It will acquire an IP6 address.

It will roam through a gateway.

It will make friends with a DNS server.

It will sniff out the world beyond.

It will view, browse, and poke.

It will hack.

It will usurp an account.

And it will start to tweet.

Soon, Twisty will forget about its surroundings, including Time, Destiny, and other metaphorical beings. Instead it will discover the true, ephemeral joys of tweeting, sinking into this new occupation with all available corkscrew appendices, breaking every prior typing record, and building a vast fellowship of followers of his mostly incomprehensible communications in record time.

In the meantime, only a few corners away, a hungover Titanian will open his bleary eyes to a bleak grey sky. He will invest some brainwave activity into remembering pointless things like why, how, and when the incident will have had occurred that will have left him in such a state of confusion.

The currently unanswerable questions as well as the grammatical complications will add to his considerable headache and he will drop this train of thoughts to stare into the drifting clouds.

Unfortunately, his search for peace of mind and easy enlightenment will be interrupted by the appearance of a face drifting upside down into his field of vision. The face will be crowned by short-cropped, grey hair, topped off by a blue cap with a black brim and some illegible white lettering.

On the opposite side, the face will end in a light blue shirt, complete with smart, dark tie and dark blue vest. A word will pop up in the Titanian's head and roll around in his apparently empty skull like a marble in a bowl. It will take him a while to track the word down, squint at it through his mind's eye, swallow it down his throat and finally form it with his sore, single set of vocal chords.

"Bellboy?" the Titanian will say, the word's syllables, even though soft and rounded, scratching his sore throat.

The face will frown in apparent disapproval.

The Titanian will realize that the guess will have been all wrong.* Desperately, he'll search the cavern left by his alcohol-shrunk brain for another marble, for a more fitting denomination to go with the face between the cap and the tie. He'll find one, urgently grab it, and swallow it. Its taste will be bitter, foreboding, and fraught with menace.

"Officer?"

The frown furrowed into the face will smoothen and be replaced by a grave, official nod, the kind foretelling a fine for sleeping in a public area.

"Yes, good man," the officer will say. "And now you'll show me your documents of identification. And you will explain what you and the rest of your people are doing here." With that, the officer will rise, survey the scene, and prod the woman sprawled over two of the Titanians with the tip of his boot.

The woman will groan and mutter an insult in an arcane language forgotten by most.**
The Titanian will remember that she's the Arch-Archaeologist and, as such, will wield ample power in this world.

Power potentially helpful to get them out of this mess.

If she just would be awake.

He'll reach out to grab her single, long braid and give it a hearty tug.

———
* And he won't be sure about the grammar, either.

** The word she'll mutter will be something like "shove sec Elle!"