furtl Page 8

  “Still herding rice.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “Is he married?”

  “He is. Eleven kids.”

  Francesca was silent for a long moment as the rest of the group looked on with fascination. Manny could see that he was winning them over.

  “Well, good for him,” Francesca said, breaking the silence. “We were from two different worlds. Untie him, Osgood,” Francesca said, motioning to the ponytailed older man. Francesca then exited the room and the group followed her into the large living room area, Manny bringing up the rear.

  There were more beanbag chairs – many of them leaking their insides onto the warped hardwood floor – and candles in this room. The walls were decorated with colorful political banners, including:

  CAPITALISM/CAPITALISN’T

  TAKE YOUR LIFE OFFLINE

  YOU CAN HAVE MY INFORMATION BUT YOU CAN’T HAVE MY HEART

  FURTL ALLOWS HURTING

  Francesca introduced Manny to some of the group. Sabrina, the woman Manny followed into the compound, was Francesca’s assistant. Paul was her boyfriend. Muffin Top was a large middle-aged man wearing a snug red velour sweat suit that was unzipped halfway, revealing no undershirt and a forest of chest hair. Muffin Top, Manny was informed, was the head chef and social chair. He poured Manny and the others a cup of tea. More people showed up and were milling about, curious about the new visitor who had infiltrated their ranks.

  Over the next hour, Manny recapped the last six years of his life once again. When he told them who he was there was noticeable consternation within the group. They all looked at each other warily. An awkward silence ensued.

  “So you just let them take over your company?” Francesca asked.

  “It was a setup,” Manny said.

  “Why didn’t you fight?” Sabrina asked.

  “I didn’t think I could.”

  “I don’t think we can trust him,” Sabrina said, interrupting his story.

  “Look, I was against selling user information from the beginning,” Manny insisted.

  “I think he’s a plant,” Sabrina said to the group.

  “How do you figure?” Francesca asked.

  “I can just tell. Once a corporate stooge, always a corporate stooge.”

  “I want to fix what I have done.”

  Francesca interjected, “You can understand that all of us here are a little reluctant to trust anyone, let alone someone…Well, someone like you, actually.”

  “I don’t completely understand,” Manny said. “What exactly is it you do here?”

  Francesca looked at the others, who all looked at one another. Manny realized that the group was making some tacit decision about how much to tell him.

  Francesca looked at Manny closely. “Fourteen years ago, I sent an email to a friend saying I favored higher taxes and more regulation on the banks. All well and good, right?” Francesca asked in an exasperated tone. “Well, I also said I was willing to fight the Man to get what I want. Your company sold that email to the government. Three years ago, they gave me six months of fulltime cultural education support for ‘suspicious literature.’ For an email I sent fourteen years ago. When my ‘dorm stay’ ended, I got rid of all my devices that had GPS or furtl, took myself off the grid, and opened up the Virginia chapter of the Leftea party. And here we are.”

  “The Leftea party?” Manny asked.

  “Yes. Virginia chapter. Third largest in the country,” Francesca responded with pride.

  Francesca proceeded to explain to him that the Leftea party was a loose network of resistance groups scattered across the country opposed to the Corcoran administration’s policies. Francesca, in spite of being the head of the Virginia chapter, had only occasional contact with other chapters, usually to coordinate interstate rallies or attacks. Infighting over agenda and philosophy created deep schisms within the party, she told him, as the communist chapters tended to clash with the wiccans, who clashed with the atheists, who clashed with the anarchists, who clashed with pretty much everybody. After Francesca explained this to Manny, she assured him that the Virginia chapter and their guiding principles of militant Buddhism would be a good home for him. Also, his expertise, and his money, if he so wished to contribute to the cause, were welcome as well.

  Manny said he would think about it and asked to hear more stories about the administration and furtl’s privacy invasions.

  “I ‘liked’ an article one of my friends posted on the Soash supporting the construction of a Hindu cultural center near the Pentagon,” Sabrina said.

  “I did a furtl search for the Anarchist’s eCookbook four years ago,” Muffin Top said. “I deleted my browser history, but they still got me. Had everything I had ever written going back 15 years. Everything. Our fchats, our fmail, our fphone calls. They had GPS coordinates for all of our activities, thanks to your company. Your company said we could turn the GPS feature off. Your company said we could check the ‘do not track’ box and expect our computer not to track our every movement. Your company said we could turn off our phones and the GPS tracker wouldn’t stay on. Your company lied.” Manny noticed that the entire group was glaring at him as these last words were spoken, and he felt a tingling sensation at his throat as if he could feel several pair of hands reaching for him at once.

  Then Osgood, who seemed less annoyed with him than the others, chimed in. “I stored a number of photos of a young Stalin on my furtl cloud account. I got fired from my job as a kindergarten teacher and sentenced to six months’ of cultural education.

  “Stalin?” Manny asked.

  “Have you seen a picture of young Stalin? He was delicious!”

  Chadwick, a mohawked punk rocker, passed through the room holding some musical instruments. He stopped just long enough to add his story: “I started a group called the Negative Growth Center, the premise being that economic growth is the root of all our problems and that we should move toward a steady-state economy.”

  Then Benson, a burly elderly man, spoke. “I left a voicemail on my friend’s phone. That person had furtl voice transcription. It sent him a message that the voice transcription transcribed incorrectly. The message read ‘Capitalism is a failed experiment, and it’s time to return to caring agrarian community structures which redistribute the wealth of the land to the workers,’” he said, trailing off.

  “What did you actually say?” Manny asked Benson, pondering what he could see of the elderly man’s neck tattoo of a serpent.

  “That it’s time to return to caring agrarian community structures that redistribute the wealth of the land to the workers. Everybody knows that which is not the appropriate usage.”

  “It’s not?” Manny asked.

  “We have all experienced this kind of harassment in one form or another. Now we’re all off the grid,” Francesca said. “Nobody that lives outside the gates does anything interesting on the Internet these days because they think the DCS is going to come after them. Metadatagate was nothing compared to this.”

  “The DCS doesn’t have to tell nobody ‘bout nothin they do. No courts, no consent,” Muffin Top said.

  “So the Christian websites and the cat videos are safe,” Francesca said. “But you can’t buy anything, because it’s all garbage. So most people just smuggle it in from Mexico.”

  “The major news outlets are owned by furtl in some form or another,” Osgood said. “The rest are either focused on entertainment news or so afraid to criticize furtl or the administration that it barely even matters that they’re independent.”

  Manny’s stomach churned. He agreed with the lefteas – these infringements on personal privacy made last decade’s debate over metadata collection look quaint by comparison. “And voting them out of office?” he asked.

  “They control the levers of information, and even those who long ago stopped buying into this nonsense, which is most folks by now, are too afraid to shake things up,” Francesca said.

  “Democra
cy is dead. Long live democracy,” Muffin Top said.

  4.6

  Manny awoke to the sound of feet kicking a sack. He slept pretty well otherwise. His six-foot by six-foot two-person Ozark Horizon tent and burlap sleeping mat reminded him of his humble Bhutanese dwelling. Nobody told him when he was choosing his spot, however, that it was in front of the hacky sack pitch. This resulted in early morning human-on-tent interaction, as Chadwick’s flying foot kicked the bright green nylon tent wall so hard that the stake dislodged from the ground and a medium-sized tear appeared in the fabric.

  Manny could have chosen a few other plots of available space in the makeshift city, but there were fifty or so other tents, yurts, and teepees on the premises, and the good spots were taken. The remaining spots were either too close to the fire pit or the compost station or the drum zone. So Manny settled for the occasional hacky sack interruption.

  Manny got out of his tent, stretched, rubbed his eyes, and made his way into the house. At the long wooden dining table in the kitchen were stacks of homemade beer bottles from the night before, and around the table sat a number of people painting Leftea party banners bemoaning “crapitalism.” Osgood, standing by the stove, motioned to Manny. “You want some soysage?” he asked.

  “Do you have any coffee?” Manny responded.

  Osgood pointed. Manny headed for the pot and poured himself a cup. Even in Bhutan he was unable to shake his addiction to caffeine, taking in around ten to twelve cups of Bhutanese tea a day. As he leaned against the peeling laminate countertop and inhaled the aroma of his coffee, Muffin Top was preparing some brownies next to him. “You like Ketamine brownies?” he asked.

  “Ketamine, like the horse tranquilizer?” Manny asked.

  “Well, we like to call it our mood reversalizer.”

  “That’s not a word.”

  “These brownies work wonders on your spirit animal. I’ll save one for you. You’ll like it.”

  “Where’s the milk?” Manny asked, unable to even humor Muffin Top in his groggy early morning state.

  Muffin Top pointed to a saucer of milk and Manny poured it into his coffee. The milk was notably thick and creamy.

  “Is this cream or milk?”

  “It’s RAWDICAL milk. Farm fresh. Antibiotic and hormone free. Raw and unpasteurized goodness.”

  “And the coffee is Fair-trade from Guatemala,” Osgood said. “You’ll taste the difference.”

  In recent years, fair-trade had come to mean the opposite of what its name implied. All coffee imports from Central America were deemed “unfair and anti-American” by the department of commerce in 2020, and since then the only legally available coffee was the single cup disposable coffee canister (C-Cups) by Appalachia Farms, a company that prided itself on growing and selling all of its coffee in the United States: “American from bean to cup.”

  After the fair-trade ban, Appalachia Farms cornered the US coffee market. Profits were initially quite high. So high, in fact, that the company bought up most of the real estate on the island of Barbados and used it as a dumping ground for all of the empty disposable canisters. In return, citizens of Barbados were treated to a month’s worth of the company’s North Carolina dark roast, the sixth most popular blend, each year.

  Unfortunately, three years into the deal Appalachia Farms stopped giving out the free North Carolina dark roast to the citizens of Barbados. It turned out that most of the arable land in North Carolina, and the United States as a whole, was not hospitable to coffee bean cultivation. A couple of bad winters created severe coffee shortages in the US, and the under-caffeinated public lethargy that followed damaged productivity in the American workplace. Coffee prices skyrocketed, displacing gas prices as the most volatile and sensitive political issue in America. Two years later, even after two government funded bailouts, Appalachia Farms went out of business, and the Corcoran administration, recognizing the risks of an under-caffeinated population, began turning a blind eye to illegal fair-trade imports from Central America.

  Osgood, who was passing around a plate of soysage, offered some to Muffin Top.

  “No food for me,” Muffin Top said. “I’ve got three more days left on my sea salt and vinegar cleanse.”

  Manny didn’t want to ask, but he did. “You’re just eating sea salt and vinegar?”

  “Yes. Well, sea salt and vinegar potato chips and nothing else for three weeks. It’s good for spleen health, memory, and something else pretty important. So, yeah, it’s pretty great.” Muffin Top shoveled a big handful of chips into his mouth. He then lit a joint and smoked it. “For my glaucoma,” he said while winking. “You want some?”

  A group of screaming children ran into the room and Manny swiveled in his chair to keep from spilling his coffee in the melee. A five year-old boy ran up to Muffin Top and tugged on his joint-holding arm as he tried to smoke. “Is it time for school yet?” the boy asked.

  “Okay, get your hula hoop and your kickball. School is in session!” Muffin Top replied as another one of the kids licked the ketamine brownie batter off a spatula.

  “We homeschool all of our kids round here,” Muffin Top said. “There are about fifteen ‘little Lefteas’ getting ready to be Sri Chin’s next generation of warriors. They are our future. Unfortunately, two of them died last month from whooping cough.”

  “Whooping cough?”

  “Yeah, very sad.”

  “Vaccines aren’t available?” Manny asked.

  “Oh no, we don’t vaccinate our precious little bundles of joy.”

  “You don’t? On purpose?”

  “Are you kidding? Chemicals!”

  “I’m not following,” Manny said.

  “Do you have any idea what is in those vaccines?”

  “Things that keep children from dying from whooping cough?” Manny asked.

  “The immunity a child receives from getting a disease naturally is far superior to the immunity from chemical laden anti-drugs.”

  “Presuming they aren’t dead,” Manny said.

  “You obviously don’t get science,” Muffin Top retorted.

  Osgood interjected to defuse the rising tension. “Have you been vaccinated?”

  Manny nodded his head affirmatively.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Muffin Top said.

  “On the bright side,” Osgood said, “you can work in the children’s infirmary and not worry about tetanus or diphtheria.”

  4.7

  Manny finished his shift in the infirmary located in the first floor of one of the unfinished McMansions, washed his hands, and cleaned up his station.

  An older slight man named Louie ran the infirmary. When Manny arrived, Louie gave him the rundown of how things worked. There were roughly ten children of various ages and illnesses in the infirmary, he told Manny. There was oral rehydration therapy available to the kids with severe diarrhea and other intestinal issues, but there was no medicine available to treat anything else. If the pain got too bad, however, there were pot brownies for them.

  Manny lacked any real medical training, but six years at the orphanage made him more comfortable around children than he had been previously. But he was more camp counselor than caregiver in Bhutan, and this new activity felt foreign to him.

  Tinsley, a long-haired blonde boy, no older than seven, forced a lip quivering smile as Manny pressed a wet cloth on his forehead in an unsuccessful effort to bring down his fever. Mellon, a frail three year old, was having trouble keeping any of her food down. The rest of the children’s woes were similar in nature.

  On his way out of the infirmary, Manny stopped to talk to Louie, who was on a break in the McMansion’s unfinished foyer. “Isn’t there anything else we can do for these kids?” Manny asked.

  “Wish there was. We just don’t have access to the medicine, but a lot of these kids’ parents wouldn’t let us use it on them if we did,” Louie said, leaning against an unfinished wooden handrail at the base of an unfinished staircase to nowhere. “Muffin Top is trying to
organize a dolphin-assisted therapy retreat with the Florida Lefteas. That’s what we’re dealing with.”

  “Dolphin what?”

  “DAT. Please don’t ask me to describe it.”

  “Are you a doctor?”

  “No,” Louie said.

  “How did you end up here?”

  “Oh boy, that’s a long story. Let’s just say I ran afoul of the wrong people.”

  “You don’t have to go into details if you don’t wan–”

  “Well,” Louie interrupted, “I was a researcher in a lab at Evergreen University. On the side I had a blog that included a section I used to call ‘Fun with Evolution’ where I posted about developments in evolutionary biology. One day it was shut down, and the next day I got a visit from the DCSF. The head of the department of ‘Creationometrics’ sat me down and told me I couldn’t publish my ‘heathen scriptures’ on the Internet anymore. I laughed in his face. I may have called him a quack. They hit me with six CRADs and then threw me in the dorms for six months. On the inside, I met someone who told me about this place. Been here ever since.”

  “That’s terrible,” Manny said, just as he doubled over onto his knees in pain.

  Louie bent over so his head was near Manny’s and put his hand on Manny’s back. “What’s wrong?”

  “Little stomach rumble, probably noth–” Manny tipped over. He was now in the fetal position on the ground and felt as if someone was hammering his intestines with a mallet.

  “Let’s get you onto a bed.” Louie helped Manny to his feet and onto the closest cot. A river of sweat streamed from his forehead. Louie placed a warm washcloth on his neck. “You drank the milk, didn’t you?”

  “No, why?”

  “Campylobacteriosis. Common in unpasteurized milk around these parts. Tends to take out the newbies when they first get here.”

  “Wait, I think I had some in my coffee.”

  “Lemme get you on some oral rehydration therapy. Should have you outta here in 12-24 hours. You’ll be fine. But get ready to shit your brains out.”

  4.8

  On his way back into the house after a not-so-comfortable nineteen hours of projectile defecation in a poorly ventilated compost toilet, interspersed with fitful cold sweat-filled naps on a cot big enough for an undersized 10-year-old, Francesca approached Manny.