AS YOU MIGHT RECALL FROM THE LAST PAGES OF
Digging Up New Business: The SwiftPad Takeover, we left
Chubby in a drainage ditch, in a bittersweet mood, looking
up at the rain. he had thwarted the homicidal kidnapping of GG
in the Portland Rose Garden and then finished lopping off the
serial killer’s pecker after GG had nearly bitten through it.
Sometime after that GG left, taking off for Asia on her own,
chasing Chubby’s best friend since second grade, Jim Hunt. Jim,
who helped both Chubby and GG create the most influential
social media platform in the world, was chasing Macy, who her-
self was looking for the Chinese father of her daughter.
Kipling Rehain, Kip, a.k.a. Cornelius “Chubby” Welles (and
soon to be known simply as “K”), let her go. he stayed on his
father’s compound up in the isolated Oregon Coast Range, west
of Blodgett, east of Toledo, and north of Eddyville. his father,
Walt, was dying and Kip devoted himself to the care of his father
and came to a deeper understanding of “the meaning of life” as
his dad drifted away. his earlier struggles with his father and
their mutual misunderstandings suddenly became insignificant.
he and his father shared a sweet sense of regret that they had not
done it sooner.
During this time, SwiftPad was sold to Amazon for about $29
Billion.
Heber renegotiated the original $8.7 billion deal that Kip
had carelessly – but luckily – signed on the wrong page. Legally
Heber was out on a limb, but Bezos really wanted SwiftPad, so he
agreed, causing a temporary selloff of Amazon’s stock that week.
It enriched almost everyone involved, too: GG of course; Walt,
Kip’s father who owned most of the stock; as well as Chubby’s
best friend Jim Hunt. All of the original staff were now million-
aires too, on paper at least. The company’s Board of Directors
and the other original investors such as Harriet Miller, founder
of Cascade Sportswear, did well too.
At first, everything went smoothly, and no one looked this
gifted horse in the mouth, but gradually there were lawsuits
from peripheral players as well as from others who claimed that
their shares were not adequately matched to their contributions.
Heber, the Rehain family’s consigliere, negotiated tirelessly and
handled the distribution issues for the most part fairly, and soon
the majority of the squabbling subsided. When Heber sat Kip
down to explain the details of the sale and of the final distri-
butions, Chubby quickly became bored, and just (carefully this
time) signed the papers.
The SwiftPad crew founded and generously funded a string of related non-profit agencies for the homeless. These agencies were so well endowed, the energy so positive, and the management sosavvy that they would have easily ended homelessness and various other kinds of economic misery in the city – if things had not gotten so much worse. But news of the programs only attracted more and more desperate people to Portland, and because of the dire general situation in the country, the numbers now began to strain the city to the breaking point.
That was all before the new Temp-Prez’s “Thanksgiving Day
Decrees” (TDD).
Although there were many high-profile arrests, particularly
among Silicon Valley execs, it was the mass arrests and persecu-
tion of the Off-the-Grids (OTGs, people who had no social media)
that really shocked the nation. A bill was introduced to make OTGs on par with vagrants, but it died in committee. Still, by order of the Thanksgiving Day decrees, it was essentially illegal not to be connected on at least one of the several designated Social Media outlets. The order was not enforced uniformly, but mostly targeted frequent posters and commenters who suddenly went silent, the assumption being that they must have had something to hide. This led to a huge black market in “burners,” cheap smartphones available anywhere, to project a temporary image of connectedness. Privacy and public Off-the-Gridiness became the universal desire of the era. Virtually impossible to crack “one-time-pad” (OTP) encryption apps were extremely popular.
The new commercially available “privacy techniques” caused
concern for NatSat, but Temp-Prez was too scared to take that
issue on, at least not until the coming election. NSA was too over-
whelmed to keep control.
Back in the Coast Range, about 25 miles as the crow flies
east from Newport, Oregon, the common house that Jim’s
mother Alice was building was near completion. The recycled
dark-green glass walls were mostly sculpted from a fortuitously
unearthed trove of Olympia Brewing’s quart bottles of Rainier
Ale. The mostly subterranean, multipurpose gym/meeting and
dining hall/guest hostel reflected the forest around it like a living
emerald. The sparkle served as a cloak of invisibility that helped
to hide the naturally camouflaged underground split level hob-
bit-like houses that spread out to form mathematically derived,
naturally varying patterns of Mandelbrot’s formulas. You might
have known exactly where the hobbit lairs were located, but they
would still be almost invisible, faded into the foliage around
them, and soon, when the moss completely covered them, indis-
tinguishable from the surrounding flora.
The construction continued throughout Walt’s hospice
care. Slow-moving, pony-sized electric-powered ATVs pulled
soft-sprung wagons carrying dirt, the excavated earth that made
way for subterranean dwellings. Several tunnels were also con-
structed among the structures for foul-weather mobility (and
guerilla defense, if it ever came to that). The wagons hauling the
dirt quivered like a spider on a web, and lightly bounced on very
fat tires. These double-jointed, slinky-like moon-buggies crept
about the forest floor carefully so as not to break up or muddy
the permaculture topsoil.
Jim’s mom, Alice, had once envisioned a community of the
somewhat like-minded, who loved life in all its bizarre permu-
tations, no matter how absurd it sometimes seemed. But more
and more it was mutating into a defensive redoubt, a fortress in
the woods. Fitness for combat slowly became a criterion for com-
mune membership. Walt smiled approvingly. Walt had always
hated the government, but never more than now. “You are finally
learning…” Those were his last words.
Alice held her grief closely because her lifetime of knowing
Walt was not easy to express with any single emotion. When he
finally died, her grief mixed with a great fear of what was coming.
Kip felt that strange, sad, guilty sense of release that sons
sometimes feel when their father dies. After a week of hiking
through the dense, trackless Coast Range, he knew what he had
to do. He had to find GG.
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