Fic: The Twelve Labors of Sean Parker [The Social Network][1/3]

[antistar_e]

Here's a riddle for you.
Heart, mind, and body walk into a bar.
They raze it to the ground.

| now |

In the fall of 2004, on the same Saturday morning that (you might remember this) some record-breaking seven thousand joggers take to the autumn-limned street to race for the cure, Sean Parker wakes up in handcuffs.

It's earlier than his throbbing, protesting skull would like it to be, but a combination of biological clock and his insistent bladder forces him into consciousness, face-down on cheap, gritty carpeting and his hands hooked uncomfortably in the small of his back. The left side of his face is numb, hatched in a pebbly texture when he finally peels it away from the carpet, feeling it flush red with sudden blood flow.

He opens his eyes and his mouth in the same beat.

Where am I? he asks the handcuffs, confused.

The only light there is comes from the cracks around the doors, illuminating grainy outlines of seatbacks and blacked-out windows, and his visibility doesn't grow any clearer as he blinks the gumminess from his eyes. He's in the back of a van; when he touches it with his mind, it huffs back at him, hostile. Its engines are still warm, giving its ignition a spark of bad temper that stabs Sean right behind the eyes.

We're under orders not to tell you that, the handcuffs reply bitingly, in a tone of pure steel, giving no head-way under the twist of Sean's wrists.

Dude, Sean retorts. Uncool.

And that's when it finally occurs to him to be afraid.

Okay, whatever, Sean's opened a book or two in his lifetime, and he's done his research, because shit like this is kind of pertinent to his life.

There's this one in paricular. It's one of his favorite stories, although the book itself disappeared a couple moves ago and his idle forays into second-hand shops has yet to unearth another. It's an old Jaina tradition, originating from the sky-clad ascetics of southern India and passed word-of-mouth for generations, until a second-century poet was so struck by it that he wrote it down. Eventually, it got incorporated into canonical Jaina doctrine, and followed the people in their diaspora from India during British occupation, and finally a copy of it found its way into Sean's hands at an impressionable age.

It's a story, right, about cosmology, and it says the whole of the universe and all the things in it are divided into two categories: the jiva, the things with soul, and the ajiva, the things without.

In the beginning, all the jiva spoke a common language. The trees talked to the wind, the wind told stories to the dancing fire, the fire laughed up at the birds cartwheeling in the sky, and the birds told the man about the grass and the seeds and the small earthy worms.

One-by-one, though, jiva forgot and fell silent and had no more to say to each other, choosing instead to speak only to their own kind about their own things. Their words were swallowed by ajiva, which filled the cracks between the smallest spaces and can best be found in the awkward silences that fall in the middle of family dinners. The language was lost to the ceaseless march of time.

But, it's said, all things remember what it felt like to speak the fluid, silvery jiva language, and -- somewhere in that soft, dark space of our hearts, the space we're only aware of at our most vulnerable -- each of us long to speak it again.

And sometimes, just sometimes, a baby will be born and there will be a silver word underneath that baby's tongue. With that word kept safe in that place, the baby will grow and be able to whisper to the fire, or the trees, or the birds in the vast, quiet sky. And, depending on the word, those things will be able to talk back.

So the story goes.

Of course, silvertonguing was never illegal in India, so there's a whole wealth of different legends about its origins, fed to growing children right alongside Mickey Mouse and stories of the great devas, as natural as anything.

When Sean Parker was born, he was red and wrinkly and probably really gross, although he tells people he came out throwing up devil's horns or a middle-fingered salute, depending on the audience and whether or not he'll get quoted online, because come on, badassery is in the Parker blood and haters are just going to have to hate.

Anyway, it was this blustery, cold day sometime at the tail end of September, right as the weather started its nosedive towards winter. His mom was there (well, duh,) with huge pit stains under her arms and her legs akimbo and a nurse saying questionable things about her vagina (dilation is a weird word, okay?) She only remembered to send someone to fetch Mr. Parker right towards the end, so when he arrived, he didn't even have a chance to get worked up. He beelined straight for his wife's side and grabbed her reaching hand with his, completely forgetting the umbrella he was holding in the other. He was this tall, thinning man with a black coat pulled over a Green Bay Packers sweatshirt and loafers, holding an open umbrella right in the middle of a delivery room like it was going to start raining on their heads any second.

So yeah. This is who greets Sean on the other side of the vaginal canal. He doesn't remember it, but it was probably kind of an underwhelming welcome.

They cut the umbilical cord and, even before they wrapped him in swaddling clothes or whatever, they handed him all slippery and slimy to the nurse off to the side, and she tilted down so as to better put her ear right over his mouth.

Mr. and Mrs. Parker watched ... well, not nervously, because nervousness implies some sort of complicit guilt, but carefully. They watched carefully, because, because ... sometimes it runs in the family. Not that anyone's saying silvertonguing is a dominant trait in the Parker genetics, it's really the exact opposite, honest, it's just that you can never tell sometimes, and it's important to know. That's all.

But the nurse adjusted her ear trumpet, lifting her head and giving them the practiced, professional, reassuring smile of all medical personnel the world over, and she said, "He's just fine."

Mr. and Mrs. Parker breathed out simultaneously. It wasn't that they were worried, because everyone knows silvertongues are rare. The government says so, and hospitals only report maybe two or three a year.

It's just better to know these things for certain, you know.

As for how Sean came to be handcuffed in the back of a van, well, now, that's an interesting story.

No, really, this shit is going to have mileage.

And it begins, as most of these kinds of stories do, with a girl.

| then |

Her name's Amelia Ritter. She's from Orinda, her dad's in commercial real estate (which you'd think would be a fairly safe, average thing to be, right? God, Sean can't stop yawning just bringing it up,) and she goes to a school she's too smart for, because Stanford is crazy whack and turned her down. She's majoring in French and taking every assorted class under the sun, even the ones Sean can't pronounce, simply to prove she can do it all.

In the beginning, when she was still fresh off the high of owning her own place and good-natured enough to put up with Sean's unceremonious residence on her sofa, he genuinely had no idea she was a silvertongue.

Fine, yes, there were signs, but they're only the kinds of signs that Sean notices when he's looking back on it. The contacts, for one, because he was pretty sure she was always careful to have them in when he was around, even when he caught her self-consciously tossing back eyedrops like they were crack candy for her eyeballs. For another, she got these thick, manila envelopes in the mail at least once every two weeks, which she filled out secretively and always tucked into her backpack when she left the next morning.

In hindsight, he bets she's got beast-speech. Statistically, it's the most common kind of silvertongue.

Or, at least, the most commonly registered.

The deal with beast-speech is that not a lot of animals are patient enough to slow down and talk to humans. The ones that live with them as a matter of course -- domesticated dogs, cats, hamsters, goldfish, frat boys, so on and so forth -- have had the gift of speech tamed right out of them, and a lot of the wild beasts still remember why all the jiva things stopped talking to each other in the first place, so they're a fat lot of help. Even Dustin, who's arguably the most practiced beast-speaker Sean knows ("You may call me ... the Beast Master!" he often proclaims, flipping his hood up over his head and masking his eyes with his hands like a ninja, and okay, so he's the only beast-speaker Sean's ever spent large amounts of time with, as far as representative samples go,) communicates with a just a small handful of the animals out there.

"Horses are clearest," is Dustin's thoughtful assessment. "Although you don't get a lot of them just trotting around the city, outside of police on horseback, and L-O-L, I am not going to try talking to a cop's mount while he's sitting on it."

"Why do I get the feeling you've tried?" Sean deadpans.

Dustin points at him warningly, but otherwise ignores the comment. When Sean first met him, he was trying to get three Canadian geese to help him tie a zip-line to the neighboring building. Birds, he says, are the easiest animals to talk to outside of horses, and they, at least, are everywhere.

So, no, Sean isn't really sure Amy's got beast-speech, but he kind of likes the idea of her being able to throw her windows open and whistle a merry tune and have, like, a shit-ton of sparrows and canaries and jaybirds come flocking to sing back to her, like she's one of those cartoon princesses Sean and his brother grew up on, back before the major networks censored them for suggestive themes.

But he does know she's a silvertongue, and it's kind of a shock to the system. He's spent so many years learning about silvertongues, mostly through the lens of textbooks and pamphlets at the doctor's offices, that for one to come out of a completely unexpected direction -- it feels a lot like he's been studying a foreign language and didn't realize how incompetent he really is at it until he meets a native speaker. Amy leaves one of the envelopes out one morning, askew underneath a plate of Eggo's and the sun coming in through the enormous bay window. Sean Private Behavior is a Relic of the Past Parker steals a bite of waffle and catches the glimpse of the US government postmark.

It's just a simple questionnaire. He takes one look (please quantify your last paycheck) and knows this is how they keep track of registered silvertongues. This is how the Bureau of Internal Affairs reassures the average populace that silvertongues aren't cheating, aren't using their speech gifts to get ahead, aren't terrorizing their children on the playground or whatever hell-raising scheme normal people are afraid of this year.

This ... actually explains why Amy got rejected from Stanford.

He's still staring at it, Eggo softening in his mouth, when he hears Amy's scuffle of bare feet on her hardwood floors and then she's in the doorway, hair curler in one hand and her eyes on the questionnaire.

He starts chewing quickly, because the sooner his mouth is free, the sooner he can start talking. If there's one thing Sean Parker is really fucking good at it, it's talking people to distraction.

The hand holding the curler falls, leaving a single loose ringlet against her cheek. The rest of her hair is straight, crimped in the back from where she usually has it in a ponytail.

Her eyes flick from the paper to him and then past him, to the window.

She takes a breath. "You know, I think we all secretly hold onto the hope that it's not always going to be like this. We're all waiting for the day when it's okay. Like," she makes a gesture with her hands. "If we keep our heads down and play along, the rest of the world will wake up one day and suddenly not hate us anymore."

Sean swallows.

Amy says, "But we're so busy waiting that nobody's fighting. That's the problem, isn't it? We've all just been trained to take a step back and expect someone else to be vocal for us, and nobody is. A hundred thousand voices, and not a single one of them will come out and say that silvertongues are human, too."

"I've seen those websites," Sean tips the fork in her direction in acknowledgement. The dot-orgs that try to speculate on the state of silvertongue's souls (read: basic existence, as if somehow the state of your tongue makes you something else entirely,) which is probably another reason why Sean prefers the Jaina view of things: at least in those stories, their kind are created equal with the fire, the water, the wind, and the man.

The smile that pulls at the corner of her mouth is a sad one. "All this speech, and nobody's saying a thing."

There's a resonant kind of significance to that remark, and Sean almost points at her and says, that's good, that's good, we can use that, but he bites his tongue, because that would reveal himself, and it doesn't matter if Amy just basically came out to him, some things are completely hard-wired into him, and the art of being brash, obnoxious, and loud to keep people from looking too close is one of those things. There's, like, poetic pain in that, or some shit.

Later, though, when she breezes out the door on her way to biochem with the questionnaire dutifully postmarked in her backpack, her computer says to Sean, I have something that might help her, if you want.

It's so quiet he almost misses it, and then he startles. As a general rule, other people's appliances are slow to warm up to him, even the ones that have gone from owner-to-owner for longer than Sean's been alive. Everything talks, and things get so used to babbling at their owners without ever getting a reply that Sean coming along makes them clam up, like preschoolers with overwhelming stage fright.

I've been doing some searches, see, on the Internet, the computer continues, and pulls up a browser window. Sean doesn't even have time to have a minor heart palpitation over the thought of there being a record of those searches before the computer hastily adds with a furious whir of its processors, Don't look at me like that, I know how to be discreet.

He crosses the room, settling into the chair and drumming his fingers across his lips.

I'm listening, he allows, and the cursor leaps to life.

Which is how Sean Parker finds the Harvard Connection.

Now, this is a heavy-handed, doom-and-gloom outlook on the whole thing. Sean's kind of fond of making it sound like the Salem Witch Hunts, like they're rounding up silvertongues in the street, because it makes for a good story and if Sean can't dramatize a good story out of it, then what's the point.

In actuality, it's nowhere near that exciting. For the most part, silvertongues don't have a substantial impact on everybody else's daily lives. Nobody wants to be a silvertongue, sure, or to give birth to a silvertongue, but it's the same way couples hope in a vague, nebulous way that their baby is born with all the right parts in the right places and doesn't have Down's Syndrome. Babies born with a word detected under their tongues are registered, absolutely, but that's just for the common good, kind of like the sex offender registry. If there's a kid in your neighborhood that could start a fire in your backyard with a single whisper, you'd want to be sure that kid was carefully kept in check, too.

And as for those cases where the nurse doesn't hear a word even though there's one there, well ... those are probably really rare, right?

Around the time Sean is four or five and just starting to, like, get really involved in eating worms and glue and all that exciting shit, the silvertongue issue suddenly makes it to the forefront of media attention, after centuries of enduring a blanket ban on their existence with little fanfare. The practice of silvertonguing has been illegal in most Western civilizations since even before some colonists got it into their heads to vandalize a couple East Indian trading vessels in the Boston harbor, but it was never illegal to be one.

(Nor, however, was it illegal to discriminate against silvertongue applicants on employment, housing, schooling, etc, so that was a double-edged blade.)

The most publicized case happened in upstate New York in the late eighties, when a pair of twins born to a middle-class couple were both determined to have whispers of silver under their tongues.

Their mother politely refused to have them registered. The hospital insisted. Their mother said that it was within her right as a patient to deny any legislation or treatment the hospital wished to give her, and that right included filling out anything besides a birth certificate for her newborn children. The hospital called the state.

Albrecht vs. New York became absolutely landmark.

Like, Roy Raymond, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Victoria's Secret kind of landmark.

First, not only did it demonstrate just how desperately in need of updating most laws involving silvertongues were, but registering "silvertongue" as a disability was so widely accepted up to that point that, to most mainstream Americans, it'd never occurred to them that it could go any other way. Albrecht vs. New York was an eyeopener and a wake-up call.

The state won, of course, but it set the stage for the era to come, an era that was supposed to be about discussion and acceptance.

Sean learned about it in the eighth grade, sitting in a desk by the window and listening to the pencil sharpener grumble about the pencil shavings caught in its nether regions. It was almost summer then (which he remembers less by actually remembering it and more because it had to have been; they only talk about recent developments at the very end of any elementary social studies course,) so he wasn't really paying attention. All that batshit craziness, and nobody mentions what happened to the Albrecht babies after the lawsuit was over.

They grew up, he supposes, and are out there somewhere, tagged by the government and trying to get by, filling out questionnaires and waiting for somebody else to do something first.

The Harvard Connection turns out to be a row of grungy, anonymous office buildings clustered in a huddle behind a strip mall, down at the seedier end of Brooklyn.

Sean's level of surprise at this development is so nonexistent it would probably have most fifteenth-century cartographers totally convinced that it's flat enough to sail right off the edge. There's a structure to these kinds of things, anyone can tell you that. If you want political reform, you go to DC; if you want to change the world, you go to Silicon Valley; if you want social reform, then you either start in New York City or you go home.

Double-checking the street address, he steps out into the road.

It's so cold out that the air burns going into his lungs, and makes his nostrils stick together. It gets foggy and chilly in California during the winter, sure, but he forgot how East Coast winters make you go cold all the way to your bones.

There are three buildings, side-by-side, standing together like cookie-cutter copies of each other; they could be any cluster of insurance companies or telecommuting offices that Sean's ever seen, the kind of place that has him thinking of cubicles and fake potted plants and telephones that sigh tiredly all the time and live in perpetual fear of being slammed.

Puffing warm air onto his hands as he approaches the front door, he rubs them together and cups them against the glass window, peering through the glare.

It's empty inside. The only features seem to be a vacuum cleaner propped up against a wall, next to a small row of paint cans with a tarp thrown over them. It's like they finished the place and then never bothered to move anybody in.

He frowns and steps back. He glances up again, even though he knows the frosted street number is going to match what's written on the inside of his arm. This doesn't exactly look like the headquarters of a game-changing underground movement, the way he was lead to believe from their website. Granted, though, office buildings would be a classy choice -- they're a step up from abandoned warehouses or meeting in somebody's garage, because technically, offices are a lot more anonymous than any of the other places, because who really looks at office buildings?

Sean turns around, and as he does, his eyes catch on something curious.

It's a cheerful "welcome to" plaque, inlaid into the low stone wall caging in the winter-bare landscaping, except whatever was underneath has been scribbled over and replaced with a scrawled, graffitied, MT AUBURN STREET, BITCH, and underneath that, an angry emoticon with heavily emphasized eyebrows, like somebody hadn't gotten the memo that you don't need to use emoticons in real life. >:]

There's an arrow underneath that, faded into the brickwork but still visible, and he follows it around the corner of the building, into the alleyway between it and the one next to it.

And he laughs.

There's a delivery entrance for big trucks, set below street level, and the snow piled at the top of the stairs has been worked into slush by foot traffic; big bootprints and the quick-stepping shuffle of slippers. The windows to the basement have thick prison bars on them, frosted so he can't seen through them. Clambering over the snowdrift, he descends the stairs. On the front door, there's another spray-painted MT AUBURN STREET, faded like the aboveground arrows. Someone's attached a flyer that says, "Merry Christmas to all our aunts and uncles! Thank you for all you do! :)" in haphazard Clip Art style, and right underneath it, another sign, this one handwritten, that says, "CHANUKAH SAMEACH, LOSERS. love from da eastside," accompanied by an angry-looking menorah making a gang sign with its outermost candle-holders.

Sean is still studying these when, without warning, the door opens.

He plasters himself back against the wall in alarm.

The doorway is filled with the breadth of a man who looks like he could fold Sean into a knot like a cherry stem. He's got thick quarterback shoulders and muscles like bungee cords, and his eyes narrow in suspicion when he takes in the sight of Sean, standing there with his hair greased back and his stylish leather coat that's too thin to protect him against the weather.

Oh shit, says Sean's survival instincts.

"Hey, big guy!" says his mouth, which never listens to his survival instincts, and turns up his grin. "What's up?"

The big guy's eyebrows tick up.

"So, hey, I don't know if there's some special handshake or super-secret password I need in order to get in, but I'm looking for the Harvard Connection. Is this it?"

"..." says the big guy.

Sean isn't really a big fan of getting knotted up like a cherry stem. "Um," he says, million-watt smile beginning to falter. "Okay, I'll just ..."

"Woah, woah, woah, no, hey!" The voice belongs to a girl, who skids in underneath the big guy's arm on sock feet, catching herself against the doorframe. Her hoop earrings swing erratically. "He's good, Bobby, let him in. We're letting out all the warm air."

Sean beams, clapping the big guy on the shoulder when he steps back, letting him in. The door shuts behind him, deadbolts sliding into place. The big guy gets a long-suffering look on his face, like he's thinking about grabbing Sean's forearm and snapping it like a toothpick, which is more Sean's speed; most people look like that around him.

"This is Bobby, the door guy," says Christy. She lets Sean lean in for a showy kiss to the cheek, and pinches him hard in the ribs in retaliation, her nails sharp and manicured.

"Hey, Bobby," says Sean cheerfully, making a face at Christy behind his back because seriously, did she have to do her nails up like Edward Scissorhands?

"..." says Bobby.

"You're late," says Christy, lifting her eyebrows. "The boss-man doesn't appreciate tardiness."

Sean frowns back at her. "You told me he wanted to meet me."

Her lips peel back off her teeth, grinning. "Oh, he does, don't worry. It's not the boss-man you're going to have to win over, though. Come on!" she gestures sharply, so he falls in behind her and she takes off, gathering momentum and sliding the rest of the way on her socks on the stone floor, rounding the corner like a batter running for home base. Her hip-hugging jeans are candy-red, the bright color of Christmas cherries.

The whole place is a windowless warren, a labyrinthian maze of low concrete corridors and naked light fixtures, like the basement of office buildings the world over. Personal touches have been added everywhere; strings of red-and-green Christmas lights snake along the walls (and in one hallway, inexplicably, a row of portraits of the Harvard presidents dating back to before the United States was even an independent country,) and everything smells like industrial-strength floor cleaner, frying bacon, and, bizarrely, a little bit like wet dog.

"Living quarters are that way!" Christy says cheerfully, gesturing down one corridor when they pass it; it ends in a T junction, and Sean can just make out the signs that point left and right, one saying "boys" and the other saying "LADIES!", with exactly that emphasis. On the girl's side, there's a taped-up print-out of Jessica Rabbit. The boy's side has Peewee Herman.

Sean's 99% certain that's Christy's handiwork.

"Rec room!" Christy says, popping into another doorway. Around her outstretched arm, Sean sees a ring of couches and a television with rabbit-ear antennae, which is tuned into a college basketball game. Someone's asleep on one of the couches, blanket tucked up underneath her chin, but on another couch is -- "That's Cameron and Tyler. They're practically furniture in this room," Christy goes, dismissive, and when the two identical men, both of them Bobby's shape and size, turn their heads in her direction, frowning, she adds quickly, "Although very handsome, good-looking furniture, please don't beat me up."

"Ha," deadpans the twin on the left, around the toothpick tucked into the corner of his mouth.

Neither of them have their contacts in, so their eyes are naked, colorless and fogged over like a misty morning on the Potomac, their pupils all but obliterated. Sean stares, thrown off for a beat, because he's never met a silvertongue comfortable enough with themselves to take out their contacts.

"Water-walkers," he breathes, and when Christy gives the twins a sardonic salute and pulls him away, he leans in and whispers, "They're both water-walkers."

"Yes," she acknowledges. "The white eyes give them away. Like yellow eyes on a fire-talker and red eyes on a beast-speaker."

Sean's fascinated. "Do twins usually have the same type of speech?" he asks.

"You know, I don't know. I think it's more likely for identical twins to have identical types of speech, like Cameron and Tyler, but I don't know about fraternal twins. I'd assume they'd have the same likelihood of being silvertgonues as any regular sibling pair. You should ask Divya, he likes to research that kind of stuff. Here's the computer lab!"

She doesn't need to announce this last one; Sean can already hear them, a cheerful, chattering mass of hard drives and California-made processors, buzzing in his ears like an energetic kindergarten class even before she throws open the door to show him a cluster of consoles, the majority of which look like donated, boxy Windows monitors, but Sean did just spend the last year or so floating around Silicon Valley, so he might be biased.

"That's Lucy in the corner, she's mine," says Christy helpfully. "I'm majoring in Computer Science; there's a group of us, actually, I'll introduce you sometime."

Sean nods. She's the webmaster of the forum that Amy's computer told Sean about -- it's how he found the Harvard Connection, although it took him at least three weeks to convince Christy to set him up a meeting with her boss-man, and he almost asked if they could meet on an abandoned playground just for kicks. Sean Parker is absolutely that creep mothers tell their children to watch out for on the Internet.

Hello, Lucy, he says to the computer, and from the doorway, he can hear the way its processors hiccup in surprise. He grins.

"I was in the same geographic location as Bill Gates once," Christy tells him, wistful, pulling the door shut again. "He was delivering a lecture at Harvard, but," she shrugs, her smile turning rueful around the edges. "I'm registered, and they check those kinds of things very carefully." Before Sean can quite figure out an appropriate response, she stops him in front of another door, saying, "And this is it."

"How do I look?" Sean asks her, cheeky.

She looks him up and down. "Like a used car salesman," she deadpans, and raps out a song of sixpence on the door. "Hey, boss-man?" she pokes her head in. "Sean Parker finally showed up."

Inside, the whole room is done up like a university professor's study; dark, bold colors and wooden bookshelves, lined up close enough to each other to present a possible fire hazard, soaking up all the light and leaving everything steeped in shadows. A desk is the room's centerpiece, its sole feature a small, battered-looking laptop and a bottle of Heineken, sitting three inches off from the coaster it's supposed to be resting on.

There's even an armchair, high-backed and upholstered in a rich red, all Godfather and shit, and in it, is --

Sean's first thought is diminutive.

His second thought is really fucking young.

Mark Zuckerberg, self-fashioned crime lord (fine, fine, "entrepreneur"), is an angular-faced man with fingers as thin as pipecleaners, steepled in front of him, and eyes the blue-grey color of winter seas. He can't be more than a year or two out of high school. Neither can the girl with her legs drawn up on the broad arm of the armchair, twining a length of thread around the tip of her index finger; she has brown hair down to the center of her back and long shins like a colt, and standing at attention at the back of the room is a second man, dressed up in a ridiculous suit like he watched too many James Bond movies growing up, and Sean would have overlooked him completely if it wasn't for the sharp, biting voice of his gun, tucked into its holster inside the jacket, close to the warmth of his heart. Bodyguard, Sean assumes.

He takes all this in, and then addresses Mark. "You must be Mark. And you," he says to the girl. "Must be --"

"Erica," she finishes for him, tilting her head. The thread around her finger unravels, and she ignores it in favor of dropping her hand to Mark's shoulder, which he immediately covers with his. Sean pretends not to see the gesture; she must be who Christy meant when she said win over. "I'm Erica Albright."

"Nice to meet you," Sean smiles. "Good job with all this. I almost didn't find it."

"Pleased you could join us, Mr. Parker," she returns.

"Your reputation precedes you," and that's Mark. Sean still can't get over it; this is so not living up to his Godfather-level expectations for a mob boss. He wouldn't be surprised if he used to chase this kid around the gym during high school games of dodgeball. "You founded Napster when you were nineteen."

"Yes, I did," says Sean modestly.

It hadn't been that hard, to be honest. He'd been young and on his own for awhile at that point, and scrappy, and his best friend in the world was an early-model laptop with no tolerance for Sean's bullshit and a secretive habit of ripping things from the Internet without paying for them and giving them to Sean like a cat bringing back dead birds as presents. It's from that laptop that Sean became attached to the idea that music is a condition of the human soul, and therefore must be as free as speech. Thus, Napster.

It'd seemed like a good idea at the time.

Mark tilts his head. He has heavy eyebrows like a caveman, Sean notes, and eyes that slit as thin as dimes. "You never went to court," he says. He doesn't say it like it's a question, but Sean hears one there anyway.

"I was being sued by everybody who's ever been to the Grammys," he smirks, because that's a fun story. "And my talents didn't lie in the music industry. I couldn't afford to fight lawsuits all day, and I didn't want them looking too closely at me, so I folded up shop and left."

"Why? Why didn't you stay and fight?"

Sean spreads his hands, palms up in a gesture of surrender. He's turned paranoia of the government into an art form. He'd accept bankruptcy and homelessness over bureaucracy any day.

"You're broke," Erica extrapolates, before he can come up with something quippy to say, and he bites back the urge to scowl. She is throwing off his groove. "And so you've come to us."

"Hey," says Sean, with what he considers to be great dignity. "I'm just a fan who came to say hi."

"Are you really?" says Mark without a change of tone.

You're a people-speaker, Sean realizes, the thought jolting through him like missing a step in the dark, and he knows he's right. People-speech is, arguably, the most dangerous kind of speech -- well, second; Sean likes to think that he's the most dangerous kind there is -- and therefore, obviously, is the most blatantly abused. People-speakers are hard to resist, difficult to argue with, and are capable of eerie levels of persuasion, though of course none of them can outwardly claim it's because of their people-speech.

Most of the world's most famous politicians, prophets, and revolutionary leaders were people-speakers. At least a third of Congress are probably hush-hush people-speakers; maybe not the same amount that are millionaires, but it's a possibility.

And some of them, like Al Capone, were criminal masterminds, too.

"Well," he drags it out. "Let's just say I really think you could use my talents. It'd be a shame for you to pass me up."

Mark leans forward in the armchair, dislodging Erica's hand from his shoulder. "Why is that?" he wants to know.

Never let it be said that Sean Parker doesn't have a flair for the dramatic.

"Because," he says, pauses deliberately, and then smiles. "I'm an unregistered thing-speaker."

At the back, the bodyguard guy jolts, an involuntary shift forward onto the balls of his feet, and he truly looks at Sean for the first time. Erica's eyebrows lift, not looking nearly as impressed by this as Sean thinks she should.

Slowly, slowly, like he's enjoying a very good joke, Mark begins to smile.

| now |

Sean really needs to pee.

It's gone from that vague 'oh look it's morning' kind of need to a 'mayday, mayday, your bladder has reached critical mass' kind of overwhelming urgency, and he's trying damn hard to ignore it, because never let it be said that Sean Parker isn't stalwart in the face of hardship.

Trying to distract himself, he rotates his wrists in the handcuffs, searching for any loose give. There is none; the cuffs growl as such at him, pointedly, but he keeps twisting, drawing his knees up and pushing against the carpet with his shoulders. With his hands behind his back, he can't quite lever himself up into a sitting position, so he stays like he is, face plastered to the carpet and his butt high in the air. It is the least dignified position he's been in since that one time with the stripper in Laredo.

He's still there, humming a little bit of the tune from the Great Escape, when there's a sound like the whole world being ripped apart, as sudden and roaringly loud as the oncoming apocalypse, making him jolt like he's been shot at.

Light pours in, blinding him completely, and it's only when he hears somebody grunt, derisive, does he realize that the noise must have been the van door rattling open on its track.

He thins his eyes to slits, trying to peer through the glare of sunshine, and reaches out with his mind in the meantime. There are two men, silhouetted in the open doorway; neither of them have guns that Sean can hear, but one of them has an EpiPen tucked into his breast pocket and three sharp, titanium pins holding his knee in place. Their suits are the same expensive kind that Eduardo likes to wear, except they actually seem dignified and settled on these guys, where Eduardo always looked like somebody in a school play, all stage make-up and flash.

Fabric retains memories longer than most metals do, becoming soft and worn with them, so Sean greets their clothes first, antsy. He gets no reply.

He makes one futile attempt to sit up and only manages to flop himself further along the floor of the van. This earns him a snort from one of the men, and then the guy says, "So nice to see you again, Mr. Parker."

Sean's stomach sinks. He knows exactly who that is.

He squints. "Which one of you is Roth?" he goes, because nobody had thought to gag him. Come on, Kidnapping 101 -- never let Sean Parker run his mouth if there's an alternate option. "No," he corrects himself. "Manningham? Mitchell Manningham?"

"You do remember us!" says one. "I was beginning to worry. He didn't send me a Christmas card," this is aimed at the other agent. "Did you get one, Roth?"

"I didn't." Roth's features come into focus. He's got a stomach that sags over the front of his slacks, forming deep wrinkles in his shirt, and a face shaped like a pear, with a large, protruding double chin. He's the one with the EpiPen and the knee replacement. Sean touches at them with his mind, wanting to learn something, but they keep quiet.

"I'm devastated," says Manningham, flat and cracked as dirt. "After all we've been through together, Mr. Parker."

"Hey, baby, don't be like that," Sean cracks back, sickly sweet and cajoling. "I didn't know what your winter-themed holiday of choice was, so I thought I'd send flowers on our anniversary. How do you feel about gardenias, Mitch?"

The van cants on its springs when Manningham clambers in, crouching down next to Sean's head. From this angle, Sean can see straight past the beginnings of a cold sore on his upper lip, right up his nostrils. It's not his most attractive angle, either.

"That's Agent Manningham to you, Sean, if you please," he says, his voice as raspy as an old woman who smokes too much. He's as fit as Roth is not, his suit jacket nicely cut over his shoulders and his face smooth, smelling strongly of aftershave. The similarities to Eduardo in terms of his height and sleek greyhound build are not lost on Sean, who thinks he might be looking at who Eduardo might have been, had he not decided that Mark Zuckerberg's right-hand side was the only place he wanted to be.

"Right, right," he manages with a solemn nod, his cheek scraping against the carpet. "How is the good old BIA these days? Still managing to be the government's most incompetent branch for ... oh, how many years running?"

Manningham smiles at him like he's imagining flushing Sean's head down the toilet. Somewhere behind Sean's ass, he hears the driver's side door open, and then the van cants in the other direction as Roth hauls himself in. Manningham braces himself with a hand on the seat back as the van starts up with a dull snarl of its engines and pulls into traffic.

"We're more curious about you," he says. "How is it that a twenty-four year old narcissist like you, who's constantly in the limelight, manages to hide the fact that he's a thing-speaker from the world?"

"Aw, shucks, Mitch, you're making me blush," says Sean, who then promptly begins to panic.

Thing-speaking is the most mysterious branch of silvertonguing. (Not the rarest, though. Technically, the rarest form of silvertonguing is wood-talking; whereas some types of silvertonguing, like people-speaking and fire-talking, were encouraged in early civilizations for their usefulness as weapons of diplomacy and war, respectively, and pointedly bred just to make them more prominent, wood-talking was just never particularly advantageous, and petered out accordingly.

In modern America, especially, nobody can afford to take their time and listen to the slow, pondering thoughts of a tree as it grows.

"That's one theory," allows Stephanie Attis, when their conversation finally meanders its way onto this subject. "Another is that wood-talking is, actually, the most common kind of silvertonguing. So common, in fact, that most people have it without even realizing that they do."

"How so?" Sean frowns. Up until this point, the only thing he knows about Stephanie Attis is that Dustin has a crush on her the size of a small European country, but will probably never admit it out loud, because Stephanie is 5'10", 260lb, has a squarish face that makes her more handsome than pretty, and dresses like a bouncer for a grungy, neo-goth nightclub, with enough piercings to set off every metal detector from here to Long Island. Or that might be the reason why Dustin has a crush on her. Sean has no idea what goes on in that boy's head.

"Well," says Stephanie, soft. "Books used to be trees before they were given words, so books talk to anybody who will listen. Everybody remembers where they were and what they were doing when they read their favorite novel, right?")

Like most everything involving genetics, there's no real way to determine exactly what kind of thing-speaking you're going to get. Some people have very specialized versions -- the stripper in Laredo, for instance, could talk only to car engines, and had a very lucrative business hotwiring rental cars along the Mexico border. And others, like Sean, can make friends with almost any inanimate object he wishes, although he works best with the things that have a little bite to them, like metal: computers and guns and the security checkpoints at airports.

It's this unpredictability when it comes to thing-speaking that makes the government twice as anxious to keep track of them. You can see why, of course: how do you promise a good, law-abiding citizen that they're safe in their beds when their next-door neighbor can ask locks to unlock, or guns to backfire, or computers to give up their passwords?

When Sean was four or five years old -- this was around the time the Albrecht case was a constant scrolling marquee on CNN -- he and his brother were playing on the school playground, waiting for their mother to get off work and come to pick them up. Thomas kept hogging the good swing, and finally, Sean got fed up and asked the rusty, stiff swingset if it would please dump his big nincompoop of a brother onto his face.

Gladly, the swingset replied. I'm getting too old for this nonsense.

The fall knocked out two of Thomas's teeth and stained the entire inside of his mouth red like he'd been sucking on a cherry slushie. Sean was so completely, utterly terrified by the blood and Thomas's tears that it didn't even occur to him to lie. His panicked parents washed out Thomas's mouth and the grit off his face and gave him an ice cube to suck on, and when they asked Sean what happened, he told the truth.

They got very quiet, very fast, which somehow was even more scary to Sean than Thomas's hiccuping sobs.

When his brother got down from the counter, his face still blotchy, and pinned Sean down on the kitchen floor and hit his face again and again with one balled-up fist, they didn't stop him.

That was the first time it occurred to him that not everybody could hear the things that Sean could. This was the first moment the idea of silvertonguing was introduced to Sean's tiny little world.

Never tell anyone, Thomas beat into him with each strike of his fist. Never tell anyone. Never let anyone know you're a silvertongue. Ever.

So Sean grew up to be everything else imaginable, because to say the lesson hit home is something of an understatement: you can be anything, Sean Parker, anything you want. You can be a delinquent or a drunk or a drop-out, just don't be a silvertongue.

He meets Manningham's eyes and holds them steady. He's not afraid of some goons in suits from the Bureau of Internal Affairs, not even if they cuff him in the back of a van.

It takes them about twenty-five minutes to relocate to wherever they're going, during which time the urgent need to pee starts to outweigh even Sean's thin bravado. When they roll to a stop, all Sean can see through the window is sky, and another van in the parking stall immediately next to them. Manningham makes to leave, rolling the van door open without a word to Sean.

He takes a stab before his pride lets the moment go.

"Hey, guys," he says. "Before you throw a hood over my head and toss me in the Hudson, do you think we could stop somewhere? I really need to pee."

Manningham snorts, a dank, chesty sound like a coughing bulldog, and he says to Roth in a musing tone, "That's the problem with the way we're raising 'em now-a-days, isn't it?" His eyes are narrowed and flinty. "We give these kids the world on a silver platter and they just think they deserve more. Just sit tight, Mr. Parker."

With a deeply disgusted noise, he shoves off and leaves. Roth gives Sean an ironic salute and follows. The van door rattles shut, taking most of the light with it, and Sean turns his face into the gritty carpet and muffles a frustrated moan, one that quickly turns into a half-constricted sobbing noise. His bladder feels like it's going to peel apart. He shifts, tucking his knees up under his body and using his heels to push down like he's staunching a bleeding wound, trying to relieve some of the pressure.

Police brutality, he thinks, desperate. This is police brutality.

Because you can find countless footage of police, completely secure in their own safety, with their batons out or their mace guns primed, turning their weapons on unarmed women, or minorities, or silvertongues, and that kind of blatant abuse makes headlines. There's never any real kind of fallout from it, just some scolding, so cops have just learned to be more discreet.

Sean is on his knees, tears leaking from the corners of his eyes because of how badly he's trying not to urinate on himself, and true police brutality, he thinks, is this: the quiet, senseless stripping away of every dignity, just because they can.

| then |

Living in the headquarters for the Harvard Connection is a lot like what he imagined living in a boarding school or a college dorm might be like, and it's three days before Sean realizes that that's exactly the point.

"It is," Mark Zuckerberg insists. He uses his hands a lot as he talks, gesticulating in sharp, precise movements like a conductor. "It's exactly like college, Sean, except we're the ones in charge. We're the presidents. We teach what we need to teach, we learn what we need to learn, without the lens of prejudicial complacency that the public school platform is always pushing on us. We've taken the entire college experience and we've given it to silvertongues."

"Right, right, I see it," says Sean, who thinks it's brilliant. The whole thing leaves him trembling, because this is exactly what he's been looking for since he was a little boy, pinned underneath his big brother and getting his face beat in for being different.

The Harvard Connection was created to be the social networking platform that kids like them would otherwise be missing; kids like Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the water-walkers, and Christy Lee, the fire-talker, all of whom have the capability to go to Ivy League but will, of course, always be denied the opportunity, just like Amy -- hence the name for the group as a whole, the Harvard Connection, and their headquarters in particular, Mt Auburn Street, which Christy tells him is Mark's way of giving Harvard and the other Ivy Leagues the middle finger for rejecting him, even though he got a straight 1600 on the SATs.

What Sean thought was an underground movement meant to champion silvertongue rights was so much more than that: it's a spiderweb network of programs and opportunities, spread all throughout Brooklyn.

The goal isn't to appeal to the powers that be to change their circumstances. The goal is to do it themselves.

"What did you think we did?" Dustin comments, amused, and hands off a scarlet macaw for Sean to hold while he tends to a squabbling pair of trumpeter swans. Usually, Alice -- another beast-speaker who lives at Mt Auburn Street, with a smile so gorgeous it sets Sean's knees to knocking entirely against his will -- is the one who accompanies Dustin during his educational presentations at the area elementary schools, but she was on holiday for Diwali, so Sean volunteered.

"Well ..." he drags out, after Dustin settles the fight with a series of fast, sharp honks, pinching his nostrils to give it a nasal sound ("the more nasal, the more swan it is. The less nasal, more goose. It's like the difference between cockney and posh English.") The swans look unrepentant, but they settle down, huffily turning their backs on each other. Perched daintily on Sean's wrist, the macaw turns his head to watch the proceedings with one beady eye, looking severely unimpressed.

"Drug trafficking?" Dustin fills in, grinning. He has down clinging to the ends of his hair. "Smuggling of priceless artworks? Assassination? We're not thugs and the Harvard Connection isn't a gang. The true urban battles aren't fought with guns or bribes, Sean, they're fought in schools."

There are anywhere from fifteen to twenty people who live at Mt Auburn Street permanently, but there are always kids trekking in and out, using the rec room and the cafeteria and the activities room. Most of them are high school age, some of them younger and some of them older, but all of them are silvertongues, and all of them are old enough to start to grasp what it means to be a silvertongue, and just how quiet and constant the oppression is going to be from now on.

Trying to get all members of the Harvard Connection together at once is sort of an exercise in herding cats, because most of the time they're out and about: like Christy, a lot of them are enrolled at the community college, and others have work, and when they're not doing those things, they can be found on the basketball courts in the inner city or in the libraries, running programs for kids like them.

The Harvard Connection has dug their fingers in most every extracurricular, after-school activity, because where else are kids like them supposed to go?

"Give them something to do," Mark pushes, relentless. "Give them some way to channel their energy and their talents. Nobody likes being told that they're useless, so show them that they have worth exactly as they are, their types of speech included, and you'll find yourself with a whole new generation of people who don't swallow exactly what they're fed."

"Fuck the system," says Sean thoughtfully.

Mark nods, a firm jerk of his chin. "Fuck the system," he agrees. "And fuck their society. We'll make our own."

Sean tilts his head, studying him. Never mind that he's a nineteen-year-old crime lord (ugh, "entrepreneur") and looks absolutely nothing like the part, Mark completely fails to live up to his expectations of a people-speaker, too. When Sean thinks people-speaker, he thinks Sylvester Malone levels of suave, sophisticated, and instead, here's Mark Zuckerberg, who has the conversational graces of a slug. He's shifty, and doesn't really look anybody in the eye; he's flat, abrupt, rude, or all of the above.

It isn't until Sean sees him actually use his speech to wheedle an extension out of a recalcitrant school principal that he gets it: unlike those who cannot just persuade people into doing what they want, Mark Zuckerberg simply does not see the point in talking to people as anything other than what he is.

"He's never used people-speech on us, and he's never tried to manipulate us for his own gain," Alice tells him, in her quiet way, tucking her shining black hair behind one ear. "It's why I trust him."

Where Mark won't use people-speech on his own kind, he has no qualms about using it on others.

"We have to. A lot of our programs run on the money we can raise or otherwise guilt people out of," Erica tells him on the way home from the basketball court, after saying good-bye to the area kids and promising a rematch -- the same kids that left the "chanukah sameach" on the front door of Mt Auburn Street the day Sean arrived. They call her Aunt Erica, the same way a lot of the silvertongue kids call everyone else Aunt Christy, Uncle Dustin, Uncle Divya. So Sean can't shake the mob family analogy altogether.

At Sean's look, she shrugs. "Social revolution costs money, Sean. Apparently, so do empathy and common human decency, and these days, everybody feels a little broke."

Blurting out bald truths like this is one of Erica's habits, which is probably why she makes Sean so uncomfortable.

He's not really sure how much he buys the Hugs, Not Drugs mission statement that the Harvard Connection is pushing on him, because wandering the labyrinth of Mt Auburn Street, it doesn't take much effort for him to hear the whispers of guns in every bedroom; simple handguns and sawed-off shotguns and AK-47s alike. The makeshift living quarters were assembled out of several tiny custodial office spaces with a communal bathroom at the end of the hall, and almost all the permanent residents have their own room. Sean's doesn't have much in it yet, so he mostly just listens to other peoples', which is how he finds the guns. They'll always be able to defend themselves, he supposes, regardless of whether or not speech is an option.

That's not the only thing Sean finds weird; a lot of the appliances at Mt Auburn Street are quiet. This isn't usually the case. All things like to talk, are constantly talking, and even normal people can hear it sometimes -- the hum of a furnace on a quiet winter night or the echo inside of a conch shell, so the fact that nothing in Mt Auburn Street is particularly chatty makes Sean wonder if maybe they haven't had another thing-speaker come through here before.

He thinks about asking, but decides he doesn't really want to know the answer, because if there's another thing-speaker around, then Sean's not as useful to them as he likes to boast.

As for Erica, he just initially writes her off as a mob princess. She's a silvertongue, he's figured that much out, but she keeps her contacts in, so he can't tell what type of speech she has, and asking her gets him nowhere. He thinks about sneaking into her room, except her doorknob is polite enough to tell him that he should probably always knock before entering, because she has a very wide selection of piano wire, strung up along her wall in all the major chords, and she knows full well how to use them.

At which point, Sean realizes he's gotten it all wrong. Anyone can have a gun and use a gun, but the girl who can strangle someone with a piano wire is the one you need to watch out for.

"It's always dangerous when we let those two out to play together," Christy says in an undertone, watching Erica grab Mark by the coat-sleeve and reel him back in so that she can wrap a scarf around his neck. At Sean's curious look, she elaborates, "They feed off each other. One justifies the other's actions."

Erica Albright, it turns out, kidnaps rowdy frat boys.

Kind of, like, just as a hobby.

It's definitely the most mob-like thing Sean's seen any of them do thusfar. She holds them hostage just to mess with them, turn the tables on them and let them feel what it's like to be caught and helpless, which has the added benefit of scaring the shit out of the privileged scumbags and also helps build up the Harvard Connection's reputation on the street.

"Tell me, can you sing a-capella?" says Erica on one such occasion, her hat perched at a jaunty angle on top of her head and the ball of her foot resting menacingly over the groin of her latest catch. "No? Would you like to?"

"P-p-please," the guy goes, waveringly. Sean thinks his name might actually be Bob.

"Shut up," says Erica cheerfully. "Or I'll cut out your dead human tongue."

It's hard for him to believe at first, that this little person with the long brown hair could have it in her, the same way he'd looked at short, twiggy Mark Zuckerberg and laughed at the thought of him running a crime syndicate. But, with a certain amount of aplomb, Erica takes him into the kitchen and shows him how to cut wheels of cheese with a garrote. The wire flashes dangerously in her hand, and it says nothing, and Sean looks at the neatly severed semi-circles of sharp cheddar and swallows against a suddenly dry throat.

The hierarchy within the Harvard Connection isn't hard to figure out.

You have Mark at the top. He doesn't dress like much of a mob boss, with soft, laundry-worn sweatshirts and the same basketball shorts as the kids they work with. Erica is directly beside him on the totem pole, because, she says, "no one man should have all that power." The two of them are a combined entity, and everyone calls them boss-man and boss-lady. Sean assumes they're banging, but that's just how his mind works.

The most powerful person after them, surprisingly, is the bodyguard; the tall, willowy drink of a man with the gun tucked inside his suit jacket like it's no more remarkable than a businessman carrying a phone. After Erica, and maybe Christy, he's probably the most dangerous member of Mt Auburn Street; he doesn't put it past the guy to level that gun against his head should Sean cross Mark or the Harvard Connection in any way. Something tells him he's done it before.

Sean tries to impress him exactly once.

"Fabric has a long memory, you know," he tells him conversationally, sidling his chair over to join him at the cafeteria table. "And it likes to talk to its humans a lot. Even normal people can hear it sometimes: haven't you ever seen someone bury their face in a blanket and breathe in deep, trying to get a sense memory out of it?" It just earns him a single raised eyebrow, and fine, taciturn, Sean can work with taciturn; he's survived Mark so far, hasn't he? "Do you want to know what the fabric in your ... um ... expensive suit is telling me?"

The other eyebrow joins the first. Sean takes it as a challenge.

He closes his eyes and opens his mouth, coaxingly striking up a conversation, pulling away with a story as softly woven as the fabric itself. "Your suit remembers being made," he says, opening his eyes again. "It remembers the man who did it, because he was preoccupied and talking to himself a lot. He was in love with another man's wife. What's worse, though, is that the wife loved him back, but nothing was to be done about it. 'Not all love is meant to be acted upon,' the man said to himself, repeating it again and again, until even the very thread itself could hear him over the roar of factory madness. 'Sometimes it's meant to be kept and grown with, so that every action has the taint and flavor of love in it. Sometimes, it's not a matter of great action done with a little love, but more many, many little actions done with great love.' He decided that's what he was going to tell his children, always and forever. If you're going to do something, little ones, then you've got to do it for love."

"You really like to hear yourself talk, don't you?" is all the guy says, when Sean finishes.

And here's the mind-boggling thing:

The bodyguard hates him.

Like, really. Sean even overhears him once, saying low and fierce in Mark's ear, petulant as a child, "why are we keeping him around, exactly? We don't need him."

Which ... hurts, to be honest.

As a rule of thumb, Sean goes to great lengths to be generally liked by everybody, because it makes him both memorable and forgettable at the same time, and it's the best tool he has at his disposal. For some unfathomable reason, Mark's right-hand man just doesn't like him.

It's ... absurd.

Frankly, Sean can't help feeling just a little bit insulted, because hello, he's basically an Internet rock star.

return to masterpost | part two -->