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Intelligent Trusts Infest Indianapolis

March 16, 2016
INDIANAPOLIS–Officials from the Consumer Protection Division of the Indiana Attorney General’s office revealed Monday that a recent spate of consumer goods shortages and price spikes in the state are the result of “aggressive, opportunistic and potentially criminal” purchasing and investment activities conducted by an unknown number of “autonomous, intelligent trust investment vehicles” active largely in the Indianapolis and Bloomington areas. “We’d like to assure the good people of Indiana that we’re taking the necessary steps to curtail inflationary speculation by these trusts,” announced Indiana Attorney General Bernhard Hearty. “Prices will return to normal; life will return to normal.”

Artificially intelligent computer programs designed to manage and invest money, intelligent trusts control a small but steadily growing portion of U.S. assets. “The basic concept of a trust is quite simple,” explains Kelly Pressupmanship, Executive VP of Trusts and Indentures at Citigroup. “A trust separates day-to-day control over the trust funds from beneficial ownership. In exchange for giving up day-to-day control of their assets, trust settlors gain certain legal advantages, including the insulation of trust assets from the claims of the beneficiary’s creditors.”

Originally designed to curtail trust abuse by unscrupulous trustees, intelligent trusts have evolved complex and profitable investing strategies never imagined by their programmers. “I-trusts have really branched out in recent years,” notes Pressupmanship. “Last year they got interested in real estate for the first time. Up until that point they’d only ever really been into traditional securities and some sophisticated derivatives trading, but it looks like they’ve got their eyes on the consumer goods sector now.”

“I don’t know why they’re focusing on Indianapolis,” exclaims Wal-Mart Mid-West Regional Purchasing Manager Helmut Quince. “But they’re hitting us hard there, buying up goods, cornering markets. And they’re real tenacious. Once they get into your supply chains its almost impossible to get them out.”

Acting on a tip from a local wholesaler, lawyers from the Attorney General’s office last week visited a complex of warehouses in suburban Indianapolis owned by the Radcliff Willoughby Trust, a self-settled spendthrift trust created by a New Jersey man to manage his retirement assets. “What we found was evidence of a serious attempt to corner the local market for a number of popular consumer products, including Kleenex and several flavors of Doritos brand chips,” recalls Assistant AG Becky Waikman. “Warehouses full of chips just sitting there while prices around town hit record levels.”

Recognizing that intelligent trusts are responsible for the price spikes and prosecuting them legally may, however, prove to be two entirely different things. “The problem is showing that they intend to manipulate the markets in these goods,” notes Waikman. “In most cases it’s just a matter of pack behavior. With a few exceptions, no one trust does buying that really reaches an abusive level. It’s just that when you put it all together, it amounts to a manipulation. They don’t just get together and plan to corner a market. One of them just takes a position while the others hang back. But, once there’s blood in the water, they all rush in, driving up the prices and putting a stranglehold on the market.”

Hibernating Actor Uncovered on Antiques Roadshow

October 1, 2132
MALIBU–A Malibu, California woman was surprised to learn Friday during a taping of PBS’s popular Antiques Roadshow that an unusual wardrobe stored for more than fifty years in her aunt’s attic is in fact a high-tech, bio-preservation chamber containing hibernating television actor David Schwimmer. “I’m as shocked as anyone,” exclaims the woman. “I have no idea where [my aunt] would have gotten something like this. I doubt she even knew what she had.”

Clad in an ornate, hand-crafted shell featuring inlaid Brazilian hardwoods and cultivated coral, the chamber, designed to blend seamlessly with home decor of the era, includes a self-sealing ceramic ‘sarcophagus’ in which the owner could ‘hibernate’ in a specially designed biotic bath. “These ‘wardenberths’, or ‘warders’, served both an aesthetic and a practical purpose,” explains Leonard Especiale, Managing Director of Sotheby’s and a frequent guest appraiser on the Roadshow. “Not only were they beautiful and unique works of furniture, but they also enabled their owners to wait out career downturns and lengthy legal or contractual entanglements.”

Based around a directed, contained biosphere dedicated to preservation and age-retardation, the wardenberth is filled with a bath of distilled, oxygenated water in which the user is suspended. Donning an engineered, skin-tight mesh of high-sensitivity ciliates and human-grade Pfiesteria, owners can, in principle, survive indefinitely. “These are highly-tuned biosystems,” notes Dr. Magda Himmelblau of the Florida Institute of Technology. “They can survive on virtually no input. Slight temperature differences across the surface of the chamber generate enough Brownian motility in the bath to stimulate the ciliates, and the whole system is built up from there. It’s fragile, but, as long as the thing is otherwise completely contained–completely cut off–it can carry on indefinitely.”

Brought to the Malibu Convention Center for appraisal by the Roadshow’s experts, the Schwimmer wardenberth immediately drew the interest of Danielle Passim, an expert on celebrity furniture and toiletries. “I saw the inlaid portrait of [Schwimmer] on the front panels and knew right away that here was an important find,” recalls Passim. “Then, I started to look more closely, and, when I realized that he was inside, my heart just leapt into my throat. I’ve seen a number of warders like this, but never with a real, live occupant still inside. More often than not curious owners have disturbed the chamber, unintentionally decimating the value of the piece. This one is intact. A rare find. A real treasure.”

Asked about the provenance of the unusual piece, the current owner recalled having seen it in her aunt’s attic as a child, but could offer few other clues. “She was a bit of a pack rat,” recounts the owner. “She loved to go to estate sales and flea markets. My guess is that she would have picked it up in one of those places. It always sort of fascinated me as a kid, but, to tell you the truth, I don’t think I ever really talked to her about what it was or where she got it.”

Wardenberth containing Hibernating Television Actor, $12,000-$17,000.

Austrian Team Splits ‘Ding-An-Sich’

September 18, 2014
VIENNA–Writing in this month’s issue of the journal Science, a team of researchers at the Vienna University of Technology report a breakthrough discovery in the field of noumenal physics. Working in a state-of-the-art lab equipped with a specialized chamber capable of compressing objects to 1/1,000,000th of their normal size through the use of high-energy, self-contained ‘gravity pits,’ the team managed to uncover, and then split, a never before isolated entity known as a ‘ding-an-sich’ or a ‘thing-in-itself.’

“The importance of this discovery cannot be overstated,” notes Uli Werner-Werner, Executive Editor of the Journal of Noumenal Physics. “It goes to the heart of one of the basic hypotheses of noumenal physics, namely that objects consist of something in addition to their constituent, perceptible parts; a sort of ‘thingness’ that makes an object what it is.”

Tracing its roots to the work of Prussian-born philosopher Immanuel Kant, noumenal physics rejects traditional interest in the fundamental building-blocks of matter in favor of a theory of ‘things’ and ‘superthings.’ “We’re through with splitting quarks and knitting fuzzy fields,” explains Werner-Werner. “That’s an Achilles and the hare approach that can only take us so far. What we’re doing is taking a step back and asking bigger questions.”

Postulating the existence of a ding-an-sich behind every ordinary object and just out of the reach of human understanding grounded in “sense perception and its extension through the techniques and technologies of traditional experimental science,” the Austrian team, lead by Professor Hanni Chiang, sought to confirm the existence of such ‘things,’ but faced a seemingly insoluble quandary: how do you confirm the existence of something that is, by definition, imperceptible, even through the use of perfect instruments with infinite sensitivity and resolution.

“It’s not a trivial problem,” explains Professor Chiang. “Our first approach was to compress objects beyond the threshold of perceptibility, to just take this chair and make it so teeny tiny that all of its perceptible properties would be stripped away, just leaving the Ding, but we hit a wall with that. We burned through our budget, a good budget, something like [$2.3 billion U.S.], and we were still likely millions of orders of magnitude from our goal.”

Last June, however, with the addition of Professor Eric Lougha of the University of California at Berkeley, the team’s research took a new direction. “Eric helped us turn the problem on its head,” recalls Chiang. “Rather than making the object imperceptible, we realized we could just make ourselves insensate. [Eric] introduced us to a special derivative of a small, Central American, high-altitude cactus, and, within days, every member of the team had seen the ding-an-sich.”

During subsequent tests, the team successfully split the ding-an-sich of a laboratory stool, creating two complete but distinct ‘things’ underpinning the stool. “It just looks like an ordinary stool,” explains Chiang. “But there are actually two Dings there. Essentially, it’s two stools with all of the properties of one stool. It may sound very through-the-looking-glass, but there you have it.”

Apple Announces New Pink PiggyMac

April 8, 2045
CUPERTINO–With its customary flair for the dramatic, Apple computer announced Wednesday the back-to-school availability of the ‘PiggyMac,’ a bioengineered Macintosh computer embedded in a living, breathing piglet. “This little piggy does the markets/This little piggy’s a phone,” sang the cast of the hit Broadway musical ‘The Sopranos’ from behind a darkened scrim, onstage at the company’s Cupertino amphitheater. “This little piggy’s got the most beef/That Redmond piggy’s got none.”

Built into a proprietary toy breed of American Yorkshire, and reaching full size at little over two-and-a-half feet long and eighteen inches high at the shoulder, the PiggyMac is the latest salvo in an ongoing ‘convergence’ war between Apple and its rivals over conflicting visions of the best way to combine traditional computers and biotechnology in a form that is easy for customers to understand and use.

“The Piggy is a real shot across the bow,” notes one industry observer. “They’ve really leapfrogged Microsoft and its cohorts. All the stuff I’ve seen out of Redmond is too component-ized. Sure, it’s cool to have real slices of grey-matter right in your Wintel box, but that doesn’t compare to a real pig; I mean, the vision is so much more complete.”

Powered by a patented Distributed, Clustered-Cellular Processor designed and produced by Perdue Living Sciences of Concord, North Carolina, the PiggyMac runs entirely off of energy produced through the traditional, biological processes of digestion and cellular respiration. “Battery power? Too dirty! Solar power? Passe!” chanted Apple CEO Steve Jobs during the PiggyMac roll-out. “I’ve got slop power!”

Featuring an integrated, subcutaneous touch-type keyboard engineered from ‘micro-knuckles’ for full key articulation and biological compatibility, the PiggyMac comes complete with a high-resolution, 256-color, bio-luminescent ‘back-fat’ screen and includes unparalleled natural-language processing and voice recognition that extends and focuses the pig’s renown native intelligence. “I did like the keyboard,” notes one early beta-tester. “It had a real organic feel, sort of a cross between phrenology and petting. But I have to tell you, that once the Piggy learned its name, and started following me around and understanding my voice, I was hooked.”

Though bundled with standard business applications, including Excel and MS Word, the PiggyMac is initially targeted at the recreational and educational markets. “A pet is a natural interface, especially for learning,” explains Apple VP of People’s Affairs Kyle Youngishness. “What’s the best way to interface with all the info out there on the network? Reading a screen? I don’t think so. Nothing compares to having a cute, loving pet pig recite the Declaration of Independence to your kids. With the integrated Harman Kardon digital stereo vocal cords, that’s what you’ll get. Your kids will just eat it up.”