Category: Future News

February 3, 2047
NASSAU–In a bid to cut costs and enhance security the House of Representatives voted Tuesday to approve a Senate bill relocating both Congressional bodies to an unnamed offshore banking and tax haven. “The move is sure to result in immediate cost savings to the American people,” notes Senator Janet Rent (D-Calif). “By moving to a tax haven we can cut payroll costs dramatically because we can reduce salaries without reducing take-home pay.”

Following in the footsteps of the Supreme Court’s relocation to Nassau, the Bahamas, the plan calls for Congress to take advantage of offshore banking and corporate secrecy laws to enhance security for top government decision-makers. “Just the way the Court set up blind trusts for each of the justices to protect their identities, we’ll do the same for congresspeople and key staffers,” explains Senator Rent. “My seat will technically be held by the ‘First California Senatorial Seat Trust, IBC’ and, during my term, I’ll act through the Trust’s registered agent as an anonymous, controlling shareholder. If nobody knows who we are nobody can threaten us.”

The plan further calls for establishment of a special, standing committee within the Federal Election Commission to oversee the administration of blind trusts representing candidates for major offices. “The Commission supports this initiative as a way to disincentivize smear campaigning,” notes FEC General Counsel Renee Majeur. “When your opponent is the Democratic Candidate for the Fifth District Trust you’ve got no real way to engage in negative campaigning. All you can talk about are the issues.”

Operating offshore for the past four years, the Supreme Court reports few difficulties and has announced preliminary plans to begin moving Federal appellate courts offshore in the spring. “Being offshore has done wonders for our independence as judges,” reports The Chief Justice Trust, IBC. “There were a few kinks at first, just working out the logistics of communication through the agents for the Trusts, but now we are truly free to offer neutral, disinterested rulings unaffected by improper political pressures.”

Not to be outdone by the legislative and judicial branches, two executive agencies have indicated interest in moving operations offshore, including the Internal Revenue Service, which sees in the move a chance to engage tax-evaders on an equal footing. “They’ve been complaining for years about the use of offshore shells to hide and launder taxable revenues,” notes Senator Rent. “Now [the IRS] will benefit from the same level of secrecy.”

Critics of the offshore migration point reasonably to the threat it poses to public accountability. “Is there really such a thing as accountability when I don’t know the real identity of my elected representative?” asks Democracy First spokesman Manuel Jig. “How will we even know that the same person controls an elected Trust for the whole term? This is the birth of a secret, faceless government, a government no longer of the people.”

October 24, 2001
NEW HAVEN–Citing recent weakness in networking and telecommunications equipment spending and a market for IT products “softened by a general downtrend in corporate earnings and by increasing uncertainty about the near-term future,” Futurefeedforward CEO Redroe “Red” Boudaine announced Wednesday that the company plans to “pursue the world’s first trans-temporal corporate restructuring” in an effort to “return the revenue pyramid to an upright posture.”

Noting that the company is currently in sound financial shape, Mr. Boudaine went on to explain that undisclosed financial events some 50 years in the future necessitate a pre-emptive restructuring. “Our proprietary temporal network affords us access to key information about future developments both inside and outside the company,” explained Boudaine. “Today’s announcement is just our management leveraging our own technology to make sound business decisions.”

The bizarre plan calls for the Connecticut-based start-up to layoff some 18,000 workers who have not yet been hired. “The cuts come largely from upper management,” noted Boudaine. “They’re spread over about a dozen years and concentrated in our fast-food and consumer amusement divisions. Frankly, I was shocked to learn that we’ll be entering the fast-food business at all and wanted to take steps now to keep us out of it.”

The company broke the news to workers by mail, in many cases notifying parents that their as-yet unborn children, and in some cases grandchildren, are being laid off by a company they didn’t even know existed. “It was pretty strange,” admitted a Des Moines insurance adjuster who received a notice earlier in the week. “This letter said that my daughter ‘Janey Marionatti’ was being laid off by some computer company or something. I don’t have a daughter. I don’t have any kids. I don’t even have any plans to get married. The severance package was attractive, though, and they offered a scholarship to ‘retrain’ my kid before she goes into whatever line of work she was going to go into. All-in-all it’s a pretty nice way to lose your job.”

Responding to questions about the restructuring, Futurefeedforward CFO Emily Efou emphasized the company’s commitment to “progressive, fiscally sound labor practices, including job re-training and pre-emptive out-placement. This restructuring also allows us to take advantage of a paradigm-scale inefficiency in financial markets,” noted Efou. “This gives us an opportunity to pay out severance and restructuring costs in present dollars. In the near-term that appears inefficient, but, once markets adjust to our technology and future dollars surpass present dollars in value, we’ll be sitting pretty.”

Asked about recent disruptions in the company’s publicly-disseminated weekly newsfeed, Boudaine admitted that delays in the service were the result of “small-scale, sympathetic work stoppages by future-side employees” and sought to reassure clients and investors that the company remains fit and focused: “There’s no need for any doubt or discomfort,” exclaimed Boudaine. “Our vision is deep and resilient. I’ve got the future in my pocket. You know that all-seeing eye on top of the pyramid? That’s me up there.”

Aug. 31, 2064
ATLANTA–Officials at the Centers for Disease Control released Wednesday a set of guidelines for the treatment of ad pox suggesting that consumption of certain popular consumer products may offer remedial treatment of some of the disease’s symptoms. “Though we don’t yet have a full epidemiological understanding of ad pox, we have confirmed clinically that use of the listed products offers at least temporary relief from some symptoms,” explains CDC Director of Home Cures, Dr. Evan Tripe. “Since these products are already routinely used by most Americans, we have no concerns about recommending their use for treatment, even at this early stage in our research.”

CDC reports indicate that as many as 1 in 7 American children between the ages of 6 and 12 are affected by the disease, while infection rates among adults have continued to climb, with as many as 1 in 12 expressing symptoms while an estimated 1 in 5 are infected. “This disease has spread with alarming rapidity,” notes Dr. Tripe. “We’ve known about scattered cases for years, but because the condition is relatively mild and non-fatal, we couldn’t justify dedicating resources to it. Now that infection rates have reached these levels, though, we’re taking a serious look.”

Ad pox symptoms include headache, mild nausea, and sporadic, marginal fever, but the disease is best known for its characteristic sores, blisters and rashes, commonly thought to take the form of popular advertising logos and slogans. “I’ve had a very itchy outbreak of hives in the shape of the AOL pyramid thing,” explains one sufferer. “And I can’t tell you how many weeping Nike swooshes and Coca-Cola logos I’ve been picking at for weeks. At one point a rash on my thigh clearly said ‘You’re in Good Hands.'”

Companies whose logos and slogans have been associated with ad pox uniformly deny that their products have any connection to the disease. “This looks to me like the work of a bioterrorist with an axe to grind against successful American companies,” opines Gerri Cracken, McDonald’s VP of Public Information. “We certainly don’t want our brands associated with skin irritations of any kind. In fact, we plan to pursue trademark and copyright claims once the ad pox engineer is identified. Though, if you ask me, none of the sores I’ve seen really look anything like our Golden Arches.”

CDC guidelines suggest consumers use branded products associated with the logos and slogans in which they break out. “It’s quite a simple treatment methodology, and we have noticed significant reductions in swelling, weeping, and itchiness when it is followed,” explains Dr. Tripe. “People afflicted with lesions they identify as Nike swooshes experience notable relief while wearing Nike shoes and sportswear. The same goes for other sores. In many cases relief is just a Coke and a Happy Meal away.”

The origins and mechanism of the disease have yet to be understood. “The fact that the suggested treatment guidelines work suggests that ad pox may be an unprecedented disease,” notes Tripe. “What symptoms caused by a conventional infectious vector could be relieved by watching TV? Well, that’s what happens with the NBC Peacock rashes. How can using AOL remediate boils and blisters? This disease is a challenge to our understanding of disease itself.”

Dec. 12, 2042
WASHINGTON DC–In only the second national election since implementation of new voting rules under the Unborn Voting Rights Act, heavy Republican voting among embryos and active embryonic stem cell lines may have determined the outcome of a presidential election. A special committee formed by the Federal Election Commission to analyze voting in President-elect Bush’s November victory reported Wednesday that embryos and open-source stem cell lines cast nearly 27% of votes in the presidential race. “Our analysis indicates a much greater than expected turn-out among newly-enfranchised single-cell and single-neuron voters,” noted committee chairman Arnold Pusse. “This is a watershed moment in the evolution of the American electorate.”

Discussing the specialized polling equipment designed to predict voting preferences of single neurons and small-cluster embryos, the committee noted that the equipment functioned well within error margins and offered few use or implementation problems at local polling stations. “We were really pleased with the ease-of-deployment of the Microsoft solution,” explains Florida Director of Elections Maryanne Freebie. “Handheld devices enabled scanning of petri-dishes and test-tubes for headcount and DNA-signed voter-roll checks, while simple, self-positioning filament leads allowed us to link voting cells to the full NT-hosted vote-extracting models.”

Though praising the Commission’s rapid deployment of standards-based technical solutions to fulfill its obligations under a new and untested law, the committee acknowledged a number of formal, public complaints about the computer models behind the vote-extraction technology. “By choosing a private-sector vendor like Microsoft, the Commission effectively shielded key parts of the technology from public view,” notes VOTE! executive director Elaine Just. “The computer model is doing a lot of the work, hypothesizing the full mental process involved in voting, sometimes on the basis of a single neuron. We need to know that that model is non-partisan.”

The committee’s conclusion that nearly 89% of single-cell and single-neuron voters supported Ms. Bush has fed speculation that Democrats will mount a legal challenge to the Act and the Commission’s rules. Though not ruling out the possibility of litigation, Terrence Limp, speaking on behalf of the DNC, dismissed rumors of court action as “premature.” “We understand that there may be ideological reasons that embryos tend to vote Republican. We certainly aren’t interested in disenfranchising anyone because of how they vote. But it’s important that we get the technology right.”

Reviewing its findings on embryo voting in the context of declining non-embryonic turn-out, the committee projected dramatically declining average-brain-cell-per-voter counts over the next three election-cycles. “As average voter-neuron counts decrease, we anticipate a greater and greater ideological skew. Single-cell organisms appear to vote Republican in overwhelming numbers.”

Responding to recent charges of embryo voting irregularities, the committee concluded that rumors of concerted efforts among Republicans to “get out” the embryo vote by growing and registering thousands of embryonic clusters in the weeks leading up to the election are “unfounded and unsupported by any available evidence.”