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  “Too big? Nonsense,” Kurt said. “Your little computer program may have started all this, but we made this company into the juggernaut it is today with sweat equity, synergistic calibration, and vertical cross reintegration.”

  “I don’t know what any of that means, Kurt,” Manny said, whose one semester at Southwest Minnesota State hadn’t equipped him with the business school jargon into which Kurt frequently lapsed.

  “We can fix this,” Kurt said. “That’s what I’m saying, Manny.”

  Manny gave an economical nod. “I agree.”

  “We’ll need to sell some assets if we continue this revenue free fall and want to remain liquid,” Stan said.

  “Then we sell assets,” Kurt said while pounding his fist into the glass table, causing the graph on the table’s built-in screens to flicker.

  “What’d you have in mind?” Manny asked, leaning forward.

  “Our most valuable asset,” Kurt said.

  “I thought that conversation was over.”

  “In business, no conversation is ever over.”

  “Huh?” Manny asked.

  “We have no choice.”

  “I have veto power,” Manny insisted, lowering his head, pushing his unkempt hair out of his face, and staring at Kurt.

  “We are over-leveraged. The Soash, the ‘world’s premiere social network,’” Kurt said sarcastically, “set us back $190 billion. And that was supposedly a bargain.”

  “I still say no,” Manny replied.

  “Then this little company of yours, Manny, your baby that you have put all your energy into and that has been your entire life for the last twenty years, will be destroyed.” Kurt looked closely, seriously, at Manny. “Sometimes in business you have to make difficult decisions. Manny, I am appealing to your sense of duty, your honor, your legacy.”

  “Thank you. And no,” Manny said.

  The room was silent.

  After the meeting, Manny walked down the long furtl hallway. The halls, all painted the company’s signature electric blue and bright green, were full of young people socializing. Few of them paid any attention to Manny as he passed. Since he had dedicated himself to cracking the Holospace code, he had receded from the day-to-day activities of furtl and detached himself from the revenue generating activities that were now the primary focus of the company. Turnover at furtl was substantial in the last few years, so much so that Manny hardly knew anybody not on the executive board.

  Manny pulled a small brick – his “furtl Foldable” tablet from the back pocket of his jeans. He unfolded the device four ways from the center to reveal a nine-inch by six-inch tablet computer. Before the HoloTablet hit the market, the furtl Foldable had been the best-selling tablet in America for the first half of the 2020s, utilizing the company’s patented Flexifold™ polymer construction.

  As Manny tapped on it, Susie Mays walked up behind him. At 5-foot-11 in heels and 125 pounds, IT professionals were typically uncomfortable in her presence. She was aware of this. “Manny!” Susie yelled.

  Manny stopped. “Hey, Susie.”

  “G’job in there.”

  “Thanks,” Manny said.

  Susie looked Manny in the eye. “I appreciate you taking a stand, and I support your position.” Her Midwest accent was in full force, which meant she needed something from Manny.

  “Thanks.”

  “But, as communications director here, I need to manage the message we are sending to the public.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s no secret that we’re having money problems. And the street’s starting to talk about a ‘vision’ issue between you and Kurt.” Susie’s air quotes were never delivered for positive reasons. “Everyone knows you two don’t see eye to eye on the Chinese import tariff stuff.”

  “We have to remember our motto,” Manny said.

  “I know. Don’t make me say it.”

  “OK, but if we lose the people’s trust we lose everything.”

  Manny and Susie walked past a group of employees staring listlessly at a full-size Holospace computer. Full-size referred to the volume of the tactile hologram, in this case six feet by six feet by six feet. The computer itself was no larger than a shoebox.

  One employee, Justin, tickled a hologram of a giant panda. As he did this, hundreds of holograms of pandas shot out of the tickled panda’s eyeballs. Justin, a recent college grad working in the Location Tracking Ad Optimization (LTAO) department, pulled his arm back and swung at the panda, hitting the hologram in the head and pushing it over. The panda exploded in bright colors and then the image reformed as a poodle playing a saxophone. Saxophone-playing poodles were trending on the HoloNet. After the crescendo of the poodle’s passionate solo on Billy Ocean’s “Caribbean Queen,” Justin rubbed the holographic dog’s belly.

  “Ridonkutardalicious, my man!” Justin exclaimed.

  Justin’s LTAO colleague, Aaron, watched this exchange from behind Justin. “I need to update my resume,” he said.

  Beth-Ann, a member of the Social Photo Aggregation (SPA) team, nodded. “Wo ye shi,” she said. Translation: “Me too.”

  Not long after Manny and Susie passed the Holospace colloquy in the hall, they entered his office. Manny’s metal desk was free from paper but cluttered with a large screen on it flanked by three tablets and a dismantled Holospace machine. Half of a hologram of a grilled cheese sandwich flickered in and out of focus.

  Susie closed the door, then grabbed Manny. “A quickie? Close the blinds,” she said with conviction.

  “Not now,” Manny said.

  “I need it. You’re stressed out; you need it,” she said, moving her hand from his backside to his crotch. Manny let it happen for a few moments. Then he pulled her hand away.

  Susie, realizing her advances were not getting any traction, shifted back to business. “I need you to okay a press release.”

  “Lemme see it.”

  “My tablet is acting funky. Can I bring it up on your computer?”

  “Sure.” Manny put his thumb on his biometric thumb scanner and his computer turned on.

  Susie walked to Manny’s computer and picked up a wireless keyboard. “Open my network folder,” she ordered the computer.

  Kurt Sturdoch poked his head into Manny’s office. “Manny, I think we aren’t as far apart on this issue as you think. Come into my office. Let’s work this out.”

  “Fine,” Manny said.

  “Open press release,” Susie said to the computer. “The press release is on the screen,” she said to Manny. “Just let me know when you’ve looked at it.”

  “Got it,” Manny said as he walked out the door with his trademark languid gait.

  The inside of Kurt Sturdoch’s office was a throwback to a bygone era: framed and signed poster of the band Matchbox 20, Blu-Ray movie player, life-size Gordon Gekko bust, and a set of antique dolphin spears. Kurt’s prized possession was a fax machine circa the mid-1990s that he used as an excuse to regale people with stories about the good old days when he was a young banker living the dream at Bear Stearns in New York City.

  Manny sat down in a vintage Aeron ergonomic desk chair as Kurt reclined in his vintage forest green microfiber La-Z-Boy.

  “Manny, I know you’re a pragmatic man. Surely you understand disruptive technology theory. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “We need money, and we have a very lucrative and mutually beneficial offer on the table,” Kurt said, swiveling his La-Z-Boy parallel to his desk and pulling back on the wooden handle by his side to enter into partially reclined mode.

  “It’s unethical, Kurt,” Manny responded.

  “It’s our only choice,” Kurt said, staring out his corner office window.

  “Turning over user information is what did the Soash in.”

  “They did it wrong.”

  “It is wrong.”

  “They didn’t finesse it like we will.” Kurt was now fully reclined and relaxed, in stark contrast to Manny’s tightening shoulders.


  “They didn’t choose their buyer correctly, like we have.” Kurt stuck an electronic cigar in his mouth and puffed. Vapor protruded from around his mouth and nostrils, and a blood red LED light flared at the end of the oversized e-cigar as Kurt looked out the window.

  “Have?” Manny responded incredulously.

  “As we will. Excuse me. “The morons running the Soash sold user information to the wrong people at the wrong time.”

  “And these buyers are the right people?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about IPACT?”

  “That’s ancient history. AFACT will take care of that.”

  “You want a repeat of what happened last decade?” Manny asked.

  “Now you’re being silly,” Kurt scoffed, still peering out into the manicured greenery that lined the furtl campus’s main square.

  “You do realize that furtl owes at least part of its success to what happened to those companies back then?” Manny asked.

  “I thought furtl owes its success to your unparalleled expertise on mobile search algorithms?”

  “Yes,” Manny said, disregarding Kurt’s sarcastic tone. “But we also weren’t tainted by the scandals. We threw our support behind IPACT after metadatagate.”

  “Metadatagate” unfolded during the mid-teens and set off a spate of congressional inquiries and public debate about the proper balance between security and freedom, between the prevention of attacks on US interests and the preservation of the fourth amendment’s protection against illegal search and seizures.

  “You’re not goin soft on me, are you Manny? You know the Chinese aren’t shy about this stuff.”

  “And we need to protect ourselves from that. But that doesn’t happen when you give the government carte blanche to do whatever it wants. We decided that furtl cooperates on the general search queries and the subpoenas when there is extraordinary evidence or imminent threats. But we don’t give them unfettered access.”

  “The Chinese government has carte blanche.”

  “They also have a tenuous stranglehold on their citizens. Some day that’s going to weaken. When it does… ”

  “Maybe that’s why they beat you. You can’t match their machine. Now they’re gonna get into our living rooms with these Holospaces. We have to accept this offer. To protect this great country. To protect this great company.”

  “Nothing great about this plan.”

  “You lost Manny. There are cyber-terrorists that want to destroy this country. These Holospaces make us vulnerable. AFACT will take care of this threat. Time for us to play by the new rules or die.”

  “These intel agencies need parental supervision. Remember Operation Meatgurls?” How was that good for our national security? IPACT gave us that oversight. Now you are telling me we need to abandon that?”

  After the early days of metadatagate, some cosmetic changes to governmental data collection were made that went into effect in 2015. The privacy debate then fell off the public’s radar until 2020. Afraid of being labeled soft on terror, newly elected President Neil Dechais – a Democrat from California – came to power promising to thwart international cyber-terrorists by whatever means possible. When pressed on the issue he argued that internal oversight mechanisms in place effectively prevented misuse of the cell phone monitoring and the aggregated search and email data collection that the intelligence community carried out. But his ability to hold this line deteriorated almost overnight when the National Security Agency (NSA) group, codename “Meatgurls,” was revealed to be using personal data to seduce and extort sex from women on the Internet. Then there was the group, codename “BULLY PULP IT.” This group of high clearance holding information technology specialists used their access to personal data to destroy the lives – e.g. ruin credit scores, plant child pornography on computers – of bullies that had tormented them in high school.

  With public trust and the president’s poll numbers, dropping, DeChais flipped his position. After he pushed the Information Protection Act (IPACT) through Congress in 2021, all metadata collection of US citizens required congressional approval, and these citizens were to be informed of any such collection within 24 hours via a new oversight court. During this time, these courts rejected most of the intelligence community’s surveillance requests.

  In the wake of metadatagate, a number of newer companies seized the opportunity to move in on the tech industry’s market leaders that took a reputational hit. The Soash, based out of Tucson, Arizona, made quick inroads into the social networking space. Furtl, working out of Manny’s hometown of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, saw its search and data aggregation algorithms become dominant features on mobile devices in the United States and around the world.

  “We lose the people’s trust, we lose their business,” Manny said. “AFACT hasn’t even passed yet.”

  AFACT – the unwinding of IPACT – was all but certain to pass. The America First Act (AFACT) was being hurried through Congress after a series of coordinated cyber-attacks on U.S. nuclear plants over the course of two hours in New York State. No one died from these attacks, but radiologists estimated that the land two hours north of Manhattan, where the largest meltdown occurred, would be uninhabitable for at least thirty years. One of Kurt’s summer estates in the Pinestone Valley was within the disaster zone radius.

  “It’ll pass. And those A-Rabs won’t be messing with me or my neighbors any time soon.”

  The attack was coordinated via email and text messages between a loosely affiliated group of American and international environmental terrorists known as the Partnership Against Nuclear Energy (PANE). Public opinion of IPACT plummeted. Calls for swift and decisive action against cyber-terrorism flourished.

  AFACT’s primary goal was to re-establish the secret courts that were outlawed after IPACT. These new courts could authorize metadata collection and mining on all individuals – American and foreign – as long as “said activity could produce intelligence on would-be threats to US interests.”

  “You do realize that it wasn’t Arabs that were involved in those attacks?” Manny asked. “One of them was, however, Persian.”

  “You do realize that I don’t, however, give a shit?” Kurt said.

  “This doesn’t move forward unless I give it the okay,” Manny said.

  “The shareholders demand growth. My job is to deliver that to them.”

  “Not this way.”

  Kurt grabbed the recliner handle and propped himself straight up with a forceful jolt. He swiveled back around to face Manny and leaned his ping pong ball of a head forward. “It’s not only the money. We need to squash this Chinese menace. Why? Because your team couldn’t get their act together on the holothingee. Your fault, Manny.”

  “I can get there; we can get there. This is the competition we need to light a fire–”

  “Ten months. Manny. They got there ten months ago. We’re nowhere. Think about it as your patriotic duty.”

  “Kurt, this is the antithesis of…”

  “Enough. I’m gonna write a number on this piece of paper.”

  Kurt took a velvet box from his desk drawer. He opened it and produced a silver ballpoint pen. By writing on paper, Kurt was indicating that this was a secret offer. Manny made the executive decision to outlaw writing implements three years earlier after rogue employees began using pens to smuggle code past the codescanning monitoring tools on their computers and at the furtl campus entrances. Taking a zero tolerance stance on such activity, Manny defended his clampdown against much of furtl’s middle management, arguing that the desirability of this code and the incontrovertible evidence of codejacking from within made such a move a necessity.

  “This is a buyout that is twice the value of your current furtl holdings. Take it now, and this company will thank you. This country will thank you.” Kurt spoke without blinking as he stared straight at Manny, head and body bobbing slightly in time with the recliner’s residual rocking movement.

  Manny looked at the paper. H
e looked at Kurt. Kurt’s confidence in Manny’s willingness to accept the offer was showing.

  “No.” Manny set the paper on the table.

  Kurt stared at Manny, then swiveled his chair around, showing Manny the bulky springs that were exposed by the fraying microfiber on the back of his recliner.

  2.2

  Manny sat at his desk tinkering with a Holospace machine. He still couldn’t crack the code. Nobody could. The undetectable layers of encryption combined with the unknown programming language made this the toughest hack he ever encountered.

  Before he switched gears and focused all of his time on Holospace technology, Manny worked mainly on advertising integration. His last big success came six years earlier when he came up with a new algorithm that improved facial recognition software to drive furtladvideo deployment in mobile devices. It was a big deal in the industry.

  His hacking skills, however, had grown rusty and outdated in the meantime. When he was a teenager in Grand Rapids, he spent days on end cracking code, living on nothing but beef jerky and BOING! ULTRA soda (their slogan: “thrice the caffeine of coffee, none of the taste”). His parents, first generation Latvian immigrants, owned a floral shop in Grand Rapids. They put all their time and money into that store, so much so that they were unaware of Manny’s growing sunlight and nutrition deficiencies.

  Business was good for most of Manny’s youth. But when he was in his early teens, a big online floral delivery operation, FlowerPower.com, threatened to send them straight into bankruptcy. Flower Power was undercutting market prices using complex pricing bots, and they were also paying online commenters to disparage his parents’ shop — Fertile Soil — on user review websites and popular flower blogs of the time, such as eyeheartflwrs.wordsplurge.com and seedsandsoliloquoys.rumblr.au.