furtl Read online

  furtl

  strobe witherspoon

  furtl

  copyright © 2014

  ISBN-10: 0692338772

  ISBN-13: 978-0-69233877-3

  published by Strobe Witherspoon

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  contents

  reviews

  preface

  chapter 1

  chapter 2

  chapter 3

  chapter 4

  chapter 5

  chapter 6

  chapter 7

  chapter 8

  reviews

  Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Books of 2014 Selection

  “the nonstop invention and wit spare neither the left nor the right…Witherspoon keeps the narrative as lean as an iPad and resists the gimmick of writing the thing in text-message shorthand..Sharp-toothed and Bluetoothed—gigabyte-size political and social satire for the wired generation.” KIRKUS REVIEWS

  “Paranoid nonsense. The author creates an absurd world where the government is dysfunctional, extreme partisan politics is the norm, and privacy is no longer possible. Witherspoon sounds like an out of touch Luddite with a superiority complex and I have deep concern for his mental state.” Mitch Witherspoon, Strobe’s son.

  “Almost as good as my first novel.” Horace Witherspoon, Strobe’s uncle and author of Are There Chicken Nuggets in Heaven?

  “Serious and silly, earnest and cynical. A clarion call to all of us who think clearing our Internet history is enough. As politics, technology, and commerce continue on their collision course, this book asks: ‘are we ready’?” Amber Witherspoon, Strobe’s cousin and founder, bookjacketquotes.com.

  “I have no son.” Richard “Tricky” Witherspoon, Strobe’s Dad.

  preface

  The majority of this book was written between 2010 and 2012. It was a simpler time. Edward Snowden lived in Hawaii. Gas was expensive. Most people watched television on their television. By the end of 2013, the near-future I was writing about started to resemble the present faster than I had envisioned. As such, I decided to release furtl into the wild. The response exceeded all of my expectations (I had low expectations).

  As 2016 approaches, I find myself marveling at the naiveté of 2010-2012 Witherspoon. The expectation of online privacy has become a quaint artifact of a bygone era. Whooping cough and measles are on a comeback tour in California. And as I write this, presidential candidates are getting criticized for not being bigoted enough. Furtl’s 2032 US presidential debates no longer feel like an absurd, race-to-the-bottom extrapolation, they feel like an improvement.

  S. Witherspoon.

  1 December, 2015

  For my dear son Mitchell,

  apologies for 2006

  chapter 1

  The beat disappeared. Three young ladies sat still with anticipation as their Lexus Furon sport utility vehicle made its way down the interstate. A guttural male voice on the radio broke the silence and the ladies sang along in unison: “Icht!” The reverb on his voice trailed off and there were four beats of silence.

  “Icht!” More silence.

  “Icht!” One last time the word resounded in the car, followed by an extended silence several beats longer than the others.

  Then the German vocalist yelled, “Wundersplat!!!!”

  The beat returned. The speakers vibrated, struggling to contain the pounding bass drum. The ladies pumped their heads and hands to the chorus: “Icht! Icht! Wundersplat! Icht! Icht! Wundersplat!” The chorus repeated many times, and then a girl no more than ten years old squealed, “Hunde sheisse” (dog shit). The young ladies in the car screamed along with the young girl. German-gibberish house music was quite popular with American teens, particularly when peppered with profane child squeals.

  Melahnie, in the driver’s seat, bobbed her head and raised her shoulders in time with the beat. Her head bobbing was, however, lackluster compared to the others.

  “Yo, this jam was ridonkutron at the clurb last night!” Britny said, bobbing with purpose in the passenger seat.

  Audrina stuck her head into the front compartment from her station in the backseat. “For serious. That bridge is da truth every time.”

  “That used to be my jam with Harrison,” Melahnie said after turning down the music. She grabbed her makeup case and turned the rearview mirror so she could use it to apply mascara.

  “Isn’t your jam these days Trent?” Britny asked.

  “There is some jamming going on with Trent, but I miss Harrison.”

  Britny and Audrina glanced at one another and rolled their eyes in tandem, for their friend Melahnie, the self-proclaimed “hottest bitch at Sedgwick High,” changed the object of her affections on a regular basis.

  Melahnie felt compelled to disrupt the awkward silence. “Trent did send me a picture of his love muscle yesterday. I guess that means he likes me,” she said nonchalantly.

  “Let’s see it,” Audrina said.

  “It’s on my phone. It doesn’t make my top ten.”

  Melahnie dug between her legs for her phone. After failing to retrieve it, she removed her seatbelt and turned around to inspect the crevice of the driver’s seat. The car negotiated a curve.

  After recovering her phone, Melahnie held it in one hand and lowered her free palm about six inches over the screen. She turned her palm perpendicular to the phone and slapped the air over the device. “Okay. I just forwarded it to you,” she said.

  Britny, Melahnie’s plus-sized sidekick, stopped primping her unnaturally long eyelashes and pulled her phone from between her legs. She looked at it for a moment. Turned it sideways. Poked the screen with her finger. Pressed a button. Pressed another button. Flicked her fingers on the screen to zoom in. Then she moved her head closer to the screen. “Looks pretty much like all the other love muscles I’ve seen.”

  In the back seat, Audrina held up her wrist to her eyes and squinted into her one inch by one inch watch screen. “I can’t see crap on this. Hold on.”

  Britny shoved her phone’s screen in Audrina’s face. “Peep my screen.”

  Audrina leaned in, squinted at the image, then pulled her head back. “Meh-diocre. What does Harrison look like again?”

  “You can furtl him. His all-county lacrosse highlight reel is super yay,” Britny said, looking at Melahnie to gauge whether her Harrison compliment was received well.

  Audrina removed her head from the front seat area and slouched back into her seat. She tapped and flicked at her watch like she was mad at it. “Screw it, lemme get my tab.” Audrina pulled out a tablet from her alligator skin handbag to her right. The increase in screen size seemed to increase her device-related anger as she was now letting out a hybrid squeak/grunt with every impatient flick and swipe of her long, emaciated fingers. “I swear, if this thing freezes one more time I’m heavin it out this window.” Audrina’s rainforest wood bracelets clacked against the bottom of her tablet in unison with her incessant tapping. “Yeah, you messed up. Harrison was more fetchtastic,” she said, throwing her tablet back into her gator bag, slouching back into her seat, and eyeing her fresh manicure.

  Melahnie was going from sad to mad. She knew that Audrina knew what Harrison looked like. Melahnie had heard through the grapevine that her so-called friend had been sending him pictures of her buttocks. This would no doubt lead to other types of body part texts, Melahnie feared.

  Many boys agreed with Melahnie’s self-proclamations of superiority. However, Audrina’s plan for her upcoming sixteenth birthday concerned Melahnie – augmentation of the breasts and lips. Melahnie knew that plan well. She executed it eight months ago on her sixteenth birthday, the minimum legal age for these elective cosmetic procedures in the United States. Melahnie, therefore, could ill afford to disregard this potential future threat. She pinched he
r nose and squinted her eyes as if a putrid smell just penetrated her nostrils. “You are still using furtl? What is this, 2020? My quadriplegic grandma doesn’t even use furtl no more.”

  Audrina got defensive, poking her undernourished face between the two girls in the front seat and blurting, “My mom said my eleventh grade completion present will be a HoloTablet!”

  Britny asked Melahnie, “Do you love yours?” Britny knew the answer but also knew that Melahnie would gladly take the opportunity to put Audrina in her place.

  “I totally do,” Melahnie said. “I love my HoloTablet. My HoloPhone. Can’t wait to get my HoloWatch when that comes out!”

  Audrina poked her head into the front seat again. “My parents better hook this sister up real soon or I’m gonna be mad face emoticon. I am so, so, so sick of this furtl crap! Takes forevuh. And doesn’t even do the 5D thing.”

  “Colon open parentheses for me, too,” Britny said.

  Holospace technology became so popular so quickly that it exposed the minor class differences between Melahnie and her friends the same way that hands-free driving technology had a few years back. Hands-free driving was no biggie now, but the resplendence of the Holospace phone still generated the most sought-after teenage capital: Jealousy.

  Melahnie took out her phone again and went in for the kill. “Check out the same movie you just watched using Holospace,” she said. “Five-dimensional Tactile Holograms! I don’t know what those words mean, but it is ridiculously more ridic than your warbly-ass furtl phone.”

  Melahnie’s hand moved as if she were conducting a symphony. With great pride she pressed her palm into the air space six inches above her phone screen, first parallel to the screen then perpendicular. Bright, colorful holograms formed around her hand as she worked her way through a variety of virtual files projected from her phone. She settled her hand over a hologram of a file labeled Harrilicious. The file bulged and shook when it recognized Melahnie’s hand hovering above it. Pinching her two fingers together over the hologram, she lifted it up with elegant aplomb, her razor thin eyebrows rising in faux surprise like a magician playing to the crowd.

  Above the device a sea of lights blossomed into the shape of a teenage boy. The boy, Harrison, elbowed a defender in the throat then executed a 360-degree spin en route to a leaping backhand goal against Buckley High. The lacrosse ball propelled itself out of the phone right up into Audrina’s face. She flinched then pretended not to have been startled by the image. Harrison’s hologram engaged in a full speed chest bump celebration with his holographic teammates followed by a wistful flip of his shaggy, sweaty hair. The three girls watched with rapt attention.

  Britny, who moments ago showed notable disinterest, was now awestruck. “Ridonkukong,” she whispered, her face frozen, transfixed.

  Though she seemed to be trying to suppress her reaction, Audrina’s eyes were wide with amazement and she seemed to be having trouble finding words, a rare thing for her. She slowly, softly, said, “That…is…so…wundersplat.”

  Melahnie was pleased. A firm smile appeared on her face as she looked at Audrina. She was proud of her HoloPhone and proud of herself, so much so that she hadn’t felt her thigh press against the steering wheel, overriding the hands-free operation of her sport utility vehicle and sending it into an oncoming truck. Wundersplat

  chapter 2

  Phil Aarons wanted to be anywhere but this particular board room at this particular moment. He knew what was coming. He knew it was bad. He knew that all he wanted to do was retire. Next year he was going to be thirty-five. He no longer had enough money to buy an island in the Caribbean, but he was pretty sure he could still afford one of the remaining islands in the Maldives. That would have to be enough. But thoughts of hammocks swinging on remote stretches of sand did not change the fact that he had to get through this meeting.

  As the chief technology officer at furtl, he was a star. Was. At twenty-five, he could do no wrong. With his long unwashed blonde hair, he wowed the older generation with new ideas about aggregation, optimization, and location-based advertising. By thirty he was content overseeing tech startup acquisitions and thinking about vesting his stock and purchasing islands. He had been able to hide behind these acquisitions for a few years – funsquatz (exercise motivation software), InStApOUNd! (nonstop violence on-demand video channel), and Blimpspot (fat person shaming website), to name a few. The most significant acquisition of his career was The Soash (pronounced like SOCIAL, without the IAL), the once-dominant social network that revolutionized the way people interacted with each other and the world.

  With that acquisition, furtl achieved its longstanding goal of becoming the leader in social networking, email, voicemail, videomail, tablets, phones, retail proximity payments, global positioning software, near-field communication, geospatial informatics, geospatial activity synergy, and cat videos.

  But furtl’s annual revenue started to free-fall shortly after the Soash acquisition, down 35% to $1.3 trillion after only two years. The writing was on the wall. Rather, the writing was on the Holospace.

  Phil wasn’t listening to Stan Arinow’s 2026 second quarter revenue update. He was watching Stan’s body language. Stan didn’t sweat much, but he was sweating today, and wearing a pressed suit, which was also rare. At forty-eight years old, Stan was the second oldest person in the room. He was surrounded by screens on every wall and built into the glass table.

  Phil ran his hand through his now closely cropped hair and focused on the screen below him. That way he wouldn’t have to make eye contact with anybody as the red line on the revenue chart moved from left to right on a steep downward trajectory.

  “In conclusion,” Stan said, “the Soash acquisition substantially diminished our liquidity position. If revenue generation continues to decline, our financial situation will become very tenuous very quickly.” Stan fidgeted with the silver cufflinks on his too long shirtsleeves, as his voice trailed off toward the end of the sentence. Usually, he had a strong voice, prone to loud single-syllable verbal exclamation points like YUP, BAM, BOOM, and DONE. Today there would be no BOOMs or BAMs. Just declining revenue and asset write-downs.

  Kurt Sturdoch, seventy-year-old CEO/furtl elder statesman, seemed to relish the attention he got from the slow grinding squeak his office chair made as he leaned forward. Behind his back, people called him the “Meatball lettuce wrap,” a creative, if mostly inaccurate, way to describe a robust, round torso flanked by a thin and flimsy top and bottom (i.e., petite lower body and flat and small head). Meatball lettuce wraps were the breakfast items of choice for weightlifters in 2026. What remained of Kurt’s hair was slicked back so tightly that it looked more like a tattoo. Indeed, it might have been a tattoo. Hair tattoos had a short-lived run of popularity in the late teens before the genetic scalp engineering (GSE) revolution of 2021.

  Kurt looked to his right and snapped his fingers. “Walt! Zoom in on this screen. Show me what’s up there and get rid of the other screens. They’re distracting me.”

  His nervous assistant, Walt, a diminutive 20-something in a tailored blue suit, jumped out of his seat, flicked the screen a few times to conform to his boss’s wishes, then jumped back into his seat. The room sat in silence and almost complete darkness as Kurt examined the figures. Sparkling dust mites jumped off Kurt’s screen, as if they too were escaping the chart’s bad news.

  “Where are we with our Holospace thingee?” Kurt asked.

  Phil took his turn on the hot seat. “Our engineers tell us we are still about eighteen months from a working prototype.”

  “Eighteen months!? Absurd. Holospace launched their thingee ten months ago. Who can tell me how we were all asleep at the wheel on this one?”

  “We’ve been working on Tactile Hologram Capability for many years,” Phil said.

  “So the entire industry is committing to this freakin’ THC thing, and the biggest company in the world is watching it happen from the sidelines?”

  “The Chinese got there fi
rst; their code is a state secret,” Phil said, his voice rising an octave. “We haven’t even been able to crack the language it was written in.”

  “It doesn’t use Chinese?” Kurt asked, jerking his head sideways and squinting with disbelief.

  “No,” Phil replied. “And as you know, they made it incompatible with our network protocols, and our devices can’t link to anything on their networks. All around the world, companies continue to retrofit old content and create their new content using the Holospace operating system. Almost no computer engineering graduates are developing anything for our networks these days, only Holospace applications.”

  “The Chinamen are beating us? I have a hard time with that.”

  “They took a big gamble on making their operating system incompatible with the furtl OS.”

  “And US consumers are switching over?”

  “At the current rate, everything running on furtl machines and using furtl code is going to be obsolete within the next two years.”

  “Everything?”

  “Everything running on a screen. Holograms will be the norm, and the Chinese will control that ecosystem, the ‘HoloNet.’”

  “So you’re telling me that the chief technology officer at the largest technology firm in the world can’t crack this?”

  “We made very generous offers to their executives in Shanghai. Nothing,” Phil said.

  More silence.

  Manny Kahn leaned back in his chair. This was not news to him. He had been working on his own version of consumer tactile holographic technology for the better part of three years. His efforts paled in comparison to the Chinese technology, and he knew it. Everyone knew it. He, the college dropout technology wunderkind who singlehandedly created the most groundbreaking tech company in American history, had been bested by the Chinese.

  “You gotta hand it to ‘em. It’s that good,” Manny said to Kurt, who ran the company on fear since the board brought him on as CEO three years prior. Manny had been happy to give over some of the business responsibility to Kurt at that point. “A lot of us saw this coming. furtl’s become too big. This isn’t the atmosphere where I came up with the FSAs.” His tired eyes and flimsy, casual posture was a neutralizing force in the room, even when he talked about ancient history like the firm’s first furtl search algorithm (FSA).