Food for Thought

By Jim Johanson

If you can't afford food, do you give up and starve, or do you steal just to feed yourself? Or do you sign up for Agritecture's "Food for Thought" initiative, a program resulting from the government's allowance of privatized food stamp issuance? Do you allow a corporation to install nanomachines in your blood and your brain to harness your brain's electrical energy for their own gain, just to feed yourself when you have few other options?

And what becomes of those people who refuse to succumb to starvation, but also refuse to take part in a Machiavellian corporation's desire to reign supreme over the sources of human nourishment?

In Food for Thought, a collective of hackers and ecoterrorists find an exploit in Agritecture's plan, though in doing so manage to cause potentially irrevocable harm to themselves in the process, resulting in a climactic battle of the individuals' souls versus the oppression of the conglomerate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jim Johanson
• Release date: Jul 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311685636

Jim Johanson

An intrepid researcher of the human mind, Jim seeks to find a greater understanding of human existence and to depict his findings in fiction. With a true appreciation for anything new and unique, Jim refuses to rehash old stories in his writing, rather does he prefer to expound on weird and otherworldly things that humans so rarely experience, and in the case of his horror genre writing, hope never to experience themselves.

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Food for Thought

Jim Johanson

JimJohanson.com

Published on Smashwords

Copyright 2015

Chapter 1: The Repurposing of a Bird

For six months, before everything began to fall apart, my television would turn itself on automatically at 10:00 a.m. every Saturday. For the next three hours afterward, it would display nothing but a constant stream of advertisements, pausing automatically when I left the room. It allowed for up to twenty minutes of personal break time before it began to dock my earnings. A colorful little ticker at the top right hand of the screen kept of how much money I’d earned. According to my contract, my compensation was that in exchange for watching three hours of advertising every Saturday morning, I would be compensated up to the full amount of my monthly apartment rent. I figured the reason that the company didn’t just pay out cash directly was because they didn’t want their target audience to be primarily comprised of drug addicts and deadbeats. Though despite their best efforts, I wholeheartedly believe that drug addicts and deadbeats probably constituted the vast majority of their loyal fan base.

No one wants to watch advertising. Not a single person who has ever lived has ever benefited by watching advertising, and no sane person would intentionally schedule three solid hours of advertising into their weekend, not even a drug addict who needs money to get a fix. They might start doing it, but they won’t enjoy it, and quickly they will give up and find better and less tedious methods of making money. I wouldn’t have considered myself an addict when I enrolled in the TV advertising program, and at the time I was certainly not insane. Despite these handicaps, I still found myself signing a contract to enroll in the program.

The great deciding factor was calculating how much I would be earning comparatively if I was being paid for working an hourly job. My apartment, though modest in size, was fully outfitted with a dishwasher, laundry machines, and a shiny new stainless-steel microwave. My living space, with all of its modern conveniences, came with an exorbitant monthly price tag. I reasoned that if I spent three hours watching advertisements, four days a month, which would equal twelve hours of my personal time spent per month. My rent, divided by twelve, was a very decent hourly rate, far higher than what I was being paid by the part-time job that I had when I first considered signing up.

A few days after signing a lengthy contract, a team of three guys wearing dirty blue jumpsuits arrived at my apartment. Each of their name-tags had the company name and Installation Specialist printed on it. With them they had brought a gargantuan flat-screen television. Though it looked like a fairly standard high-definition TV, this particular television had a motion sensor built into it that was designed to track the eye movements of the person watching the TV. The information was then sent to the marketing research division of a company called Veracom, which could analyze what best caught the user's eye when watching the preprogrammed advertising they delivered to the TV.

Veracom also provided me with a tiny device to strap to my wrist while watching the programming. It was made up of a little piece of rubber and microchip embedded somewhere inside for measuring my heart rate and endorphin levels. They told me that it was designed to track which advertisements or products excited me on a biological level. Though, honestly, no specialized Saturday programming provided by Veracom that ever barged its way into my apartment on the looming eyesore of a free television ever really made me feel all that excited.

Keep your thoughts on the programming. Try not to let your mind wander. An unfocused mind makes for skewed results, they told me.

Their system could account for small, natural variations in pulse and mood, but any external source of excitement would affect the data in such as a way as to make it unusable. I was instructed not to exercise or engage in any unnecessary bodily movement while watching the commercials. If I, for instance, had an attractive woman give me a back massage as I watched Veracom’s three hours of fumbling and embarrassing attempts to capture the twenty-to-thirty-year-old, post-college consumer demographic, the effects that the pleasurable massage had on my body would have a negative impact on Veracom's ability to gather informative consumer data. If the data was unusable, then I would not be paid, and I would have watched three hours of advertising for nothing.

Just sit back, get comfortable, and watch.

After two or three weeks of waking up at nine in the morning every Saturday and watching three full hours of concentrated electronic banality, I started to become a bit weary of the whole agreement. That is not even to mention the fact that there was something about the idea of my eye movements being tracked by a motion sensor in my television that didn’t exactly turn me on. I wondered if the sensor functioned even when it wasn’t Saturday, when I wasn’t watching their prescribed dose of advertising. It could have been watching everything I did, trying to figure out my thoughts by tracing my eye movements. I tried to imagine what it would look like in the eyes of the people reviewing the data:

Sam Barnette spends thirty minutes every day spacing out, staring at his coffee table.

Sam Barnette spends sixty seconds every two hours staring at his clock.

Sam Barnette spends thirty minutes every day watching porn on the Internet.

Business Analysis: Raise prices on porn, place advertisements on tables and clocks.

The thought gave me a sickening feeling in my stomach, but the feeling was not as sickening as the one I felt when I remembered the insurmountable student loan debt that I owed. The feeling was nothing compared to the churning I’d feel in the bottom of my stomach when I looked at the amount of interest charges I was paying every month on my credit cards.

The credit card company was kind enough to include a pie chart that showed me how much I had spent in each different category of purchases with my monthly statement with suggestions on how I could reduce my spending. This month, you spent X dollars on gasoline, and X dollars on groceries. These were your highest spending categories. It was almost as though they wanted to say Selling your car and not eating will dramatically improve your spending habits. I wondered how much they paid the guy who came up with that pie chart. I wondered what his personal pie chart looked like.

Despite my uneasiness toward what the program was really hoping to do with my information, cessation of the program was not an option, though neither was I content to abide by the program’s terms. My television had become a witch that I no longer would allow myself to suffer. I direly needed a remedy to the situation. Inevitably, through some careful experimentation and plotting, and in near desperation of avoiding another Saturday morning spent in front of my television attached to a rubber-coated electrode wishing that I could do anything but watch commercials, I figured out a solution.

The first step was taking a trip downtown to the corner of Crane Avenue where Bigsby’s Pets was located. I was greeted unfavorably by an employee of the pet store. He had coarse wiry hair, thick black glasses, and a nasally, gristly voice that could strip the paint from a wall. He carried an air of superiority and seemed immediately suspicious of me from the moment that I’d walked through the door, though maybe I had simply imagined this, and really it was just my own guilt getting at me. As if he already knew somehow that I had ulterior motives for purchasing the bird, he forced me to sit through a solid five minutes of lecture on proper bird care before he allowed me to purchase the bird. As part of his speech, he told me that bird was a melopsittacus undulate, or as commonly referred to, a parakeet. I already knew this, because there was a tag on the side of the cage written in big bold letters that said Parakeet, and below that was written in italics "melopsittacus undulate".

This particular parakeet's name was Mr. Crackers, on account of how much he liked eating crackers. He also enjoyed breaking them apart and tossing them all over the floor of his cage. Mr. Crackers, I soon discovered, also really liked watching TV, and he didn't even seem to mind the tiny, rubber-coated pulse sensor that I attached to part of his wing. I took some scissors and trimmed the sensor down to make it bird-sized. It actually looked kind of cute on him. Mr. Crackers was now unknowingly a participant in Veracom’s advertising study. In exchange for his participation in my human-to-bird outsourcing program, Mr. Crackers got the very best, high quality, top-shelf bird food available, and he also got the most innovative and cutting-edge bird entertainment toys as yet developed by pet-scientists. I bought a new toy for him at the pet store every other week or so. I figured that this was the least I could do for him, considering that he was now unwittingly paying my rent for me.

At first I was concerned that the bird's pulse would read differently than my own, given that he was roughly a hundredth of my size. Some research revealed that a bird of Mr. Crackers’ size has a heart that beats almost three hundred times per minute, compared to a man's meager average of seventy-two. Fortunately, Veracom was kind enough to have built in a hidden USB port underneath part of the plastic paneling in the back of the TV for their tech support teams to use if they ever needed to recalibrate the measuring devices or otherwise tinker with any of the TV’s settings. Rather than hire a team of skilled and highly educated computer programmers at a high rate of pay, Veracom had decided to implement a simple interface that any humble repair man could configure just by connecting their company-issued laptop to the USB port. Without much effort or technical knowledge, they could customize the program by changing a few variables in the system. The end-user isn’t supposed to be able to open up the TV, nor presumably are they permitted to modify the TV’s settings to allow a bird to watch the programming for them. This was not a concern for me. Philosophically and ethically, I have always subscribed to the belief that you can do anything you want until someone tells you specifically not to do it. At that point you either stop doing what they don’t want you to do, or you start looking for other loopholes.

Fortunately for myself, my ethical guidelines allowed for a lack of concern for Veracom’s multi-billion dollar conglomerate interests, and so fortuitously I not only figured out how to make it look like Mr. Cracker's pulse rate was really my own, I discovered a way to make it look like he, and effectively I, were really excited about swallowing our weekly dosage of advertising. Every Saturday we were positively ecstatic about frying our brains out on corporate, American-manufactured idiocy. We wanted every product they wanted to push. We wanted to empty our wallets and rain down money on every stupid idea they had. Our dollars were sweating and ready to leap out of our pockets at every second of every day. We had a feverish obsession with the latest and greatest. We became Veracom's best customers.

Naturally, having achieved this victory over corporate America, I became obsessed with trying to apply this same process to other aspects of my life. I signed up to have advertising placed on my vehicle so that some other company would pay for my gasoline. I signed up for mobile advertisements that paid my phone bill. I sold advertising space on everything I owned. The mobile advertising company sent ads to my phone that were supposedly relevant to my interests: HUGE DISCOUNTS at local restaurants; BIG SALE announcements at hardware stores; TIME RUNNING OUT on my FREE TRIP TO HAWAII. I almost felt bad keeping the phone in my closet, never actually reading anything they sent to it, but I wasn't about to ask them to stop paying my phone bill for me. Besides, I figured, they would probably just keep sending the ads anyway even after they stopped paying out, even after I told them to stop. The person who sent the ads probably worked in a different department than the person who paid the participants’ phone bills. There would be no communication between them, and the ads would keep coming even after the phone bill stopped being paid. Even if my conscience had started to bother me, reading the ads wouldn't have done any good. There was no reason for me to read the ads, because I didn't want to buy anything that I didn't already own.

My apartment, aside from the gigantic, glaring television from Veracom, was starkly minimal. I kept a modest desk wedged into the corner by the window. Someone left the desk out on the curb for the garbage man, and I dragged it for two blocks back to my apartment. I was proud of that desk. I went out and bought a can of black paint and repainted the desk a solid coat of black. The grain pattern of the wood showed through the black paint. I assumed that the appearance of the grain pattern meant that I should have put an additional coat on. Or maybe it was primer that I was supposed to use. I never bothered to learn what primer was or whether or not it would have helped, so the desk stayed as it was. This was not a great concern for me.

I kept my laptop computer on top of the desk. The roll-out platform for the keyboard was stuck in place when I found it; eventually I got tired of it and bashed it with a hammer until it fell out. More room for my legs.

The desk had one tiny drawer on the left side that I did my best to keep full of bottles of wine, though since it only held three bottles I would run out once or twice a week. This became an ipso facto method of keeping track of the passage of days without needing to own a calendar or pay attention to the rise and fall of the sun. If I went shopping on Saturday and put three bottles of wine in my desk, then by the time they were gone, in all likelihood it was either Wednesday or Thursday.

Next to my desk was a stand that held my guitar, and next to that was my old guitar amp with its dead power light. The amp worked fine, but with the power light not functioning I had to listen to hear if there was a buzzing sound coming from the amp to know if it was on or not. If I woke up in the morning with the stale taste of wine and unbrushed teeth in my mouth, and dried wine stains in the cracks of my lips, and I heard the buzzing coming from the amp, I knew that I had been drunk enough the night prior to forget to turn the amp off. That usually meant that I was going to be hungover, but on this particular day I felt pretty close to normal. Pretty close to okay.

I’d fallen asleep on the couch. It was easier sometimes just to pass out on the couch, rather than bothering with the bed. Getting into bed involved disrobing, moving sheets around, trying to get comfortable, trying to be the correct amounts of warm and cold in all different parts of my body. The couch did not require all this preparation.

Falling asleep drunk on the couch was comfortable, but I’d always wake up sweaty and sticky with a general malaise, my muscles and tendons feeling like they’ve spent the night crashing into each other like rocks in a washing machine. It took me a long time to figure out what was causing me to be in so much pain all of the time. After years of searching I eventually found a doctor who diagnosed me with spinal stenosis, which is a progressive narrowing of the canal in the spine where a massive column of nerves is housed.

The worst part isn’t the pain, but the lack of understanding by other people.

No, I’m sorry, I don’t want to dance.

No, I can’t help you move.

Yes, it is a big deal for me to carry that for you.

Really, I’m not lazy. I promise.

I learned to self-medicate at an early age, which is part of what led to my desk drawer being used primarily to hold wine bottles. Since the bottles took up the majority of the space in the drawer, there was no room in it to keep my pain-killers. I kept the pill bottle on top of my desk in the far right corner, pushed as far away as I could get it from the laptop while still keeping it within arm’s reach. Sometimes I felt like the bottle of pills was watching me from the corner of my desk, just like the eye scanner in my television. The bottle stared me down and served as a reminder that my back was not ever going to be like everyone else’s.

I kept a whole lot more pill bottles underneath a floorboard that I’d loosened when I first moved into the apartment. Each of those bottles got refilled once or twice a month. Doctors can be so generous when they don’t know that there are two or three others providing you with the same prescription. I learned this trick at an early age too.

I grabbed a cup from my kitchen cabinet and opened my brand-new, ultra-high efficiency refrigerator to pull out a bottle of diet cran-grape juice. I dumped the remainder of the bottle of juice into the cup to fill it almost completely to the brim, then I tossed the empty juice bottle into the garbage bin. It made a clanking noise as it knocked against some empty wine bottles. Probably 80% of the garbage I created at the time was just big glass bottles with teeny tiny little bits of dried wine left in the bottoms of them.

I let out a long and pleasurable sigh as I set myself down in my desk chair, setting the sugar-free cran-grape juice down on the desk in the process. The nice thing about having furniture that acquired for free, was that there was no need to worry about using coasters to protect the finish. If it got bad, I would just repaint it. Or not. I could just leave it as is, with the cup-sized circular rings formed from the moisture on the glass permanently etching themselves into the surface of the desk. Maybe, I thought, if I did that enough times, and with careful precision, I could make the desk into an art piece with strategically aligned cup rings all over, in the shape of a fractal design or something moderately interesting.

I moved the computer mouse around to wake up my laptop. When the screen clicked on, I saw that my audio recording program was still running. It had gone