furtl

by Strobe Witherspoon

  Later that day, the core strategy team met in the dining room to plot next week’s activities. Francesca was at the head of the table. “Thank you for joining us, Manny. Shame you missed out on this morning. Unfortunately, we bombed two empty anti-abortion group headquarters. Turns out they were bombing an abortion clinic at the same time. Let’s not dwell on that. We did manage to plant some of Sri Chin Vanderweiss’s literature in a number of cars parked outside the DCS. And we painted them green. That should teach ’em. Let’s talk about getting you back into the mix. And getting your money back into the mix, K?”

  “Can we hold off on that conversation for now?” Manny asked.

  Francesca looked confused. She sighed deeply and began to address Manny in her now familiar patronizing tone. “Manny, you made a valiant effort out there, but you’re back here with us now. We accept you. Militant Buddhism, Volume III says, ‘We beat them at their own game, with our own game, but in the shape of their game.’”

  “In what universe does that sentence even make sense?” Manny asked.

  The rest of the group was now transfixed by Manny and Francesca’s back and forth.

  “Do you remember smallpox, Manny?” Francesca asked.

  “Do I remember it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I remember that it was eradicated decades ago.”

  “Well, we have it,” Francesca said, raising her eyebrows as if she had just blown Manny’s mind.

  “You’ve contracted smallpox? For fuck’s sake, there’s a vaccine for that!” Manny sprang up from his chair.

  “No. We have access to it. One of our comrades in Russia bought some on the black market and got it into the US. We’re all very excited.”

  “What are you gonna do with it?” Manny asked.

  “Infiltrate the administration and take them out before the election.”

  Manny could only sit there.

  “It’s been weaponized. None of them fancy vaccines they are always talking about will even work on this strain. We can put it in the subways and air ducts in DC.”

  “It’s simple. We unleash it, and when they all die or become sick, we sweep into office and save the day,” Muffin Top said.

  Manny found his voice. “The stupidity of that plan astounds me.”

  “How is it stupid?” Muffin Top interjected. “We can take out the administration so easily.”

  “First, if you release weaponized smallpox into the environment, you will kill many more people than just the members of the administration.”

  “You gotta break a few free range eggs to make an organic omelet,” Muffin Top said.

  “Secondly, who is going to elect you after you spread a deadly disease throughout the nation’s capital?”

  Just then Chadwick walked into the room. He was so enthralled by the HoloTablet he was playing with that he walked right into the table, spilling kombucha everywhere. “Sorry, everybody. This thing is unfreekinbelievable,” Chadwick said, cleaning the kombucha from his pants.

  Francesca glared at Chadwick. “Where’d you get that?”

  “The limo we spray-painted green at the DCS. I grabbed it outta there. I haven’t seen one of these in years.” Chadwick brought the tablet to the table and everybody’s face, including Francesca’s, hovered over its bright holographic home screen with expressions of pure wonder.

  “It’s beautiful,” Muffin Top mumbled.

  For the next few minutes, the team watched Chadwick navigate his way through a number of hologram images of political events from their picture folder.

  “Any videos on there?” Muffin Top asked.

  Chadwick rifled through some file holograms and came upon a file that said “Videos.”

  He opened the file. Manny’s jaw dropped when he saw a person he knew well lying in her bed and talking to the camera. “Susie?” he whispered in disbelief.

  “The Secretary of Cultural Security?” Francesca asked.

  “Should I know her?” Chadwick asked.

  “You got the Secretary’s HoloTablet?” Francesca asked.

  The table went silent again as Susie started playing to the camera, unbuttoning her blouse with slow, seductive aplomb. “You like that?” she said to the camera, getting closer, her hologram getting larger.

  From off camera, the group heard, “Yes I do.” It was Mindy’s voice Manny heard, and he grabbed the tablet and shut it off.

  “Enough of this,” Francesca said, grabbing the tablet from Manny. We can’t let this technology into our lives.”

  Manny sat there, stunned. The meeting lost steam and everyone ambled out of the room. There was a distinct possibility of a nap in their future.

  6.2

  Manny took a shift out in the infirmary, where a number of children were suffering from a recent diphtheria outbreak. When he decided to return to the Leftea compound — or rather realized he had nowhere else to go as he wandered the highway in the cold — he told himself that he would dedicate his time to tending to the sick children who had fallen ill because of the Leftea’s anti-vaccination positions. He decided to figure out a way to bring vaccines back into the mix for the rest of the children on the compound. It wasn’t a grass roots revolution to save democracy, but it was something.

  When he made his way into the infirmary, he met Basil, a slight, older man with unassuming black-rimmed glasses who had just joined the Lefteas. He told Manny he had no interest in politics or revolution but also had nowhere to go since the DCS shut down his stem cell research center. After a series of warnings, his DCS research certificate was revoked and his office was raided and destroyed for “suspicious, culturally reprehensible activities.” Francesca admitted Basil into the group on a probationary basis and told him that he would need to work in the infirmary while they assessed his membership status.

  Basil was also the bearer of bad news. Louie, the former head nurse from the infirmary, died two weeks earlier from a mutated strain of whooping cough that he caught from one of the kids.

  When Manny emerged from the tent that evening, the typical festivities — drum circles, drug circles, meditation circles, etc. — had subsided, suggesting to Manny that he had been in the medical tent into the early morning hours. He walked into the headquarters to get a drink of water and noticed a familiar light coming from the computer room, but it wasn’t computer light. Someone was using the HoloTablet, he surmised. He walked to the door that was missing an upper hinge and afforded Manny a two-inch gap through which to see into the room. Francesca was mesmerized by the holograms. When he opened the door all the way, Francesca turned around in surprise and embarrassment, trying to suppress the hologram by placing both of her hands over the machine as if she was trying to smush a sleeping bag into its carrying sack. She was unsuccessful in covering up the hologram launch portal on the machine, thus letting Manny see what she was watching: a hologram of a cat stuck in a cardboard box going for a ride on a robotic vacuum cleaner while an infant chased after it, continuously falling on its face to the unending delight of a number of adults off-screen.

  “Just doing some opposition research,” Francesca said. As she moved her hand away from the hologram, the cat on the robotic vacuum turned around on the robot and gave the impression that it was heading straight for Francesca’s chest. Francesca once again stopped talking to Manny and stared at the hologram, mesmerized and unable to contain her enjoyment. She turned around and looked at Manny again. “But seriously, how cute is that?”

  “Super cute,” Manny said.

  “Manny. I know I never shared this with you before,” Francesca said, “but the DCS’s cuts run deep in me. Mr. Dinkleberry was my cat, the best cat. Would just stick her butt right in my neck at night, nuzzle up in there, ya know? Soundest sleep you ever had when you have a purring Dinkleberry pillow to keep you comfy and warm. So when they put me in cultural education camp, they took her from me. They said she would be taken care of. When I got out, I was ready to get on with my life when they told me they couldn’t find her.
Didn’t even care. I called. I yelled. I waited. Nothing. I had the GPS coordinates from his microchip. I HAD THE COORDINATES! The DCS lost Mr. Dinkleberry. And if it’s the last thing I ever do, I will make them pay for it.”

  Manny walked into the room. “So, what else have you found on this machine?”

  “There’s a lot on here. I think I know where Susie lives. Perfect target for our next mission.”

  “My ex-wife lives there also.”

  “Two for the price of one.”

  “What else you find?” Manny asked.

  Francesca brought up the folder holograms. “Well, I’m not that good at navigating these things, and I got a little sidetracked by the cute kitties.”

  Manny stepped to the machine and started navigating the Holospace folder system, reaching around Francesca to do so. He flipped through a number of folder holograms with titles like Vacation, Taxes, and Downloads. He then came to a folder titled Massage.

  “Massage?” Francesca asked.

  “I don’t think I wanna look at that,” Manny said, staring at the folder.

  “Yes you do,” Francesca said. “Maybe it will help you understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “Understand what it is they have together. You shouldn’t suppress your feelings, Manny. Suppression is regression without succession – Sri Chin volume 4, chapter 2.”

  Manny stared at the folder. He presumed it would be some type of tantric yoga massage involving Susie and Mindy. His anger and resentment at Mindy was rising. After a few moments of this, Francesca moved her hand over the folder hologram, pressed her thumb and middle finger together, and flung her hand up, initiating the folder open operation. To their surprise, a number of other folders appeared with titles like Jergens (D) vs. McGraw (R) and Pines (D) vs. Burston (R).

  Instead of lesbian tantric massage videos, Manny found a number of documents and exchanges between Susie and Kurt. They were coordinating their “massage” activities for congressional elections at the local, state, and federal levels using the electronic voting machines that they controlled. The documents contained information on who would win (usually a Republican), why (they were graded one to ten on a “team player” scale), and what the spread of the election results should be. This treasure trove of documents proving election fraud was the smoking gun Manny had not even dared dream of finding. Manny also learned from Susie’s correspondences with Kurt that she was using a HoloTablet to store all of this information to reduce the likelihood that it would be hacked by outsiders or leaked by members of her team or the administration.

  Over the next several hours, Manny went through all the folders on Susie’s HoloTablet, piecing together the nature of the scheme, the players involved, and the process. The extent to which Susie, in conjunction with Kurt and furtl, were sculpting the political landscape floored Manny, who did not think he could ever be surprised again by the manipulation efforts of his former company.

  As the sun rose, Manny came upon the final piece of the puzzle – plans to massage the presidential election. Kurt and Susie discussed the margin of error necessary in the polls to make a massaged election not look too suspicious. They never massaged a presidential election before, it was clear, but they were hopeful it could be done. Before they were able to sabotage Fiona’s debate performance, they thought rigging the voting machines might be their only hope.

  Kurt’s ace in the hole was the company that owned the electronic voting machines, Libold LLC. Libold’s CEO, Morris Trundle, was married to Susie’s half-sister, and he was a significant contributor to the Field campaign. Susie and Kurt were confident that he would be comfortable with massaging the presidential election the same way he helped them massage congressional and state senate elections. It wasn’t complicated, particularly since the Internet database that stored all the voter tracking and verification information was housed on furtl servers and communicated through furtl-encrypted information networks. All that was required from Morris’s end was some rejiggering of the Libold machine voting compilation algorithm to turn some, but not all, of the Mathis votes over to Field.

  Kurt and Susie discussed ways to get the results to look close, Field squeaking by, carrying the areas that were already considered Republican strongholds and making it look like there was weak turnout in the areas where the Mods had supposedly gained a foothold. “HCC polling bias” would be part of their argument. Once voters really thought about the kind of change and disruption Maria would bring, Kurt argued, they ultimately would revert to the party of strength, the party of security, the party of stability.

  By 10 p.m., other Lefteas began stirring throughout the house. Francesca was propped up on the floor of the computer room, asleep against the wall and inadvertently crumpling the bottom portion of a life-size Sri Chin Vanderweiss poster. In the poster, the 6’8 dreadlocked redhead was adorned in his jorts and weapons belt as sweat dripped down his freckly, muscle-bound torso. Francesca was snoring as Manny continued to go through all of the folders. He was wide awake, wired in fact, by his discovery and a growing sense of confidence that this information, if delivered to the American people, could be a game-changer in the election. He also knew that there was a GPS device in his stomach that would end his efforts the second it was known what he was up to. Whatever his plan, it needed to be swift, and it needed to be decisive.

  The more he dug, the more he found, but when he got to a folder labeled “Voter Tracking Info,” he was stymied. It looked to him like it had an extra layer of encryption on it, a layer he couldn’t figure out. But he was certain it contained what he was looking for – voter contact information as well as registration and verification data keys for the entire American population, which could be used in conjunction with the Libold voting machines on the furtl network to manipulate the presidential election.

  Manny could get to the folder if he could do an end-around the Holospace operating system and then hack into the furtl network. He was confident in his ability to hack the furtl network but not the Holospace. He was in familiar – and terrifying – territory.

  6.3

  “I think I still prefer the smallpox idea,” Muffin Top said, after Manny showed the team what he found on the HoloTablet.

  “This information needs to be presented to the public,” Manny said, with more force in his voice than he had exhibited in many days. “We have evidence of their plans to tamper with the voting machines for the upcoming presidential elections using the furtl network. I have correspondence between administration officials and voting machine administrators agreeing on how to massage the election. And I have surveillance video that they were holding on to just in case they needed to extract more favors from the state election administrators. We just need to get it out there.”

  “But they own the airwaves.” Francesca said.

  “We blast send it out to America all at once. Before furtl can spin it and undermine my…our efforts. I just need to crack the code and get to the voter-info folder.”

  “Will that be enough?” Chadwick asked.

  “If we exposed information, incontrovertible evidence about the administration’s manipulation, I think we can piss Americans off properly.”

  “Isn’t it true that even Chinese people don’t understand the Holospace language?” Chadwick said.

  “It’s true. And access to the voter folder requires a retinal scan ID alongside a fingerprint, a 28-character password, and a unique IV – sorry, initialization vector – for each packet processing code.” Manny paused and looked out onto his confused audience. “Or it requires someone to get into the Holospace from the backend.”

  “We could kidnap Susie and cut out her eyeballs,” Francesca said.

  “That’s one option, but we would still need to extract all of that other information from her,” Manny said.

  “I like that idea,” Francesca replied, “and so would Sri Chin Vanderweiss.”

  “Waterboard that bitch!” Muffin Top said.

  “I can
crack it,” Manny said.

  “You can’t crack the code, Manny – you said it yourself,” Francesca said.

  “Gimme two days,” Manny said.

  Francesca stared at Manny, weighing his conviction. She leaned in, pausing dramatically as everybody else looked on. “Okay, two days.”

  “Destroy that which you create,” Muffin Top said. “You are learning the ways of Sri Chin Vandy. Good for you.”

  6.4

  Manny settled into the supply closet/computer room, ready to put everything he had into cracking the Holospace’s encryption. To recreate the environment of his youth, Manny stocked up on a case of BOING! ULTRA soda and ten bags of all-natural Teriyaki-flavored beef jerky.

  In the waning days of his tenure at furtl when he’d previously tried to hack the Holospace technology, he could take the machine apart to understand its guts. He didn’t have such a luxury this time around. If he was to crack the code, he would then need to use the machine in his possession to execute his plan, and so dismantling it would be too risky. Luckily, he already knew how to get to the back end of the processor without tearing the machine apart. It took him almost a half a day to get there this time, as he needed to dust off old memories that resided in the deep recesses of his brain.

  He spent the next half a day working to transcribe all of the ones and zeros into an operation matrix that would allow him to assign meaning to different commands within the packet processing code. This left him just under 24 hours to crack said code, but the core problem remained. Even if he could figure out what specific commands referred to, he wouldn’t be able to actively engineer an end-around the system unless he knew how the language worked.

  With about an hour remaining on his self-imposed two-day timeline, Manny started to notice something. At first he thought it was a fluke, a mere coincidence of the code lining up to esoteric knowledge. But with only one can of BOING! ULTRA left, he confirmed his intuition was correct.