The Last Smartphone in John Stoian's Front Closet, Part III

This is the third part of the first of two short stories I've written which take place in the same "universe": one possible near future, in which a collective consisting of technologists and creatives has carved out a niche for themselves in a world of diminishing opportunity.

She found the power button, an abnormally long, white bar just above the bright red LED at the top. Pressing it made the screen burst to life, going straight to an unfamiliar start layout. This must have been some flavor of Linux for mobile. It looked intuitive enough, but after a couple of seconds staring at the screen, a password interface popped up. She tried a few obvious possibilities: "benevolent", "password", "opensource", but eventually the system locked her out with a screen that said, "Naughty human, trying to break into someone else's personal property. In the event you're not a naughty human, you get one call to get your password straight. Make it count." A dialer interface appeared.

Lucy considered her options: call Chung or dial the map service. If Chung had gone to the conference already, there was a possibility that he wouldn't answer. If the GPS on the phone wasn't connected, Google might not be able to give her directions. As she stood deliberating, she heard a shout over the distant noise. "Hey, anybody need more gas? You wanna come do a pump jump?"

Lucy had no idea what a pump jump was, but she was clearly a lost woman in wild territory and she didn't want to stick around long enough to do any anthropological surveys. She opened the backup phone and meticulously copied the numbers for the map service to the smartphone and hit the Send button. A roar from the sidestreets emerged and approached. From a street to her left, Lucy could see a flood of light in the air, and soon spotted individual headlights growing brighter and larger. She could barely hear the artificial voice repeating, "Please wait while we determine your location." She would not be waiting while they determined her location. Mounting the scooter, she could feel the electric zing of her motor and of her nervous system. She didn't have time or access to pair the headset to the new phone, so she steered with one hand and held the phone with the other. It was dangerous and, under certain interpretations of the law, illegal, but probably worth it.

Lucy parked the scooter alongside the bike rack and in what amounted to a very rare moment of security-mindedness, fished the long lock out of her bag and secured the little vehicle. Maybe this phone is more trouble than it's worth, she thought briefly. She was instantly reminded of Chungy's frequent complaints that she wasn't scientific enough about these sorts of things. One experience is not a trend, he used to say, ad nauseam, until one day she informed him that she found it insulting.

If she was going to give the phone a chance, it would be nice if it used her number, so she pried open the back of the smartphone's translucent chassis and grabbed the dumbphone to get her SIM card. A piercing beep erupted from the phone, so she turned it over to see what was the matter. Bright red text flashed WARNING, with the following message: "I'm afraid I can't let you do that, Chief. You see, if you stole this phone, and I think you did, taking out the SIM card means we'll never catch you. And we so want to catch you. So, no pulling out the card, or I'll fry it up nice. Kthxbai."

"Damn it!", Lucy shouted again. She hopped on the computer and sought out Chung again. Somehow, he was connected to instant messaging.

hey chungy, hows it going?

Pretty good Johns about to start his pres. You?

not great, honey. stupid phone locked me out. password plz?

Well, I don't know it, but I bet John does.
Hold on...
aw, crap
Hold on again...
Yeah, john is up now. I'll see if I can get Dan. I bet he knows it.

k

Nope, Dan's in a different session.

seriously?

I'll see him right after John's talk, ok? If you can't wait till then, there’s a backdoor. I’m not sure I recommend it.

what is it?

It’s a game, or at least that’s what Trish says. She’s telling me that Dan puts a backdoor on each of the phones, it’s some sort of game. They call it “Project ICE”.

a game?? what kind of demented psychos are you guys? i neeeeed this phone nooooow. i’m soooo tired
literally and metaphorically

Well, the game is apparently really fun, but also really hard.

iiii dooooont waaaaant toooo plaaaaay a gaaaaame. i just want this damn phone to work now

I just asked Trish and she said that if you’re good, the game only takes 15 minutes.

and if i suck? then the game takes what? 3 hours? and then i don’t get any sleep and botch all my interviews and die poor and alone
and you run off with trish
wait
its just you and trish in the session right now isnt it?
don’t run off with her - she’s hot, but she’s trouble, ok?

Trish laughed at that, and said you have nothing to worry about.
Kinda hurt my feelings :)

good.

Well, you can wait or you can play. That's basically the whole list of options.

i'll let you know which one i pick. thanks love, gonna go cry now.

Aw come on baby, it's not as bad as all that. You're gonna do fine. If you need me to, I'll stay up all night and be your personal map service.

thanks, chung, you're the best. love you.

I love you too. Goodnight.

Lucy clicked the bar button at the top of the phone. A screen popped up that said, "ENTER PASSWORD OR HOLD POWER BUTTON FOR OTHER OPTIONS."

Let's do this, thought Lucy.

She depressed the button for three seconds, then the screen blanked. A light gray terminal font showed the following message on a black background, "Would you like to play a game?" After a brief moment, a sound terrified Lucy. It took her mind a few seconds to register that it was a truly awful speech synthesizer, reading the text back to her. She knew it was some sort of joke she didn't understand.

Sure, she thought. Let's see what you got. She typed "yes" with the onscreen keys. More blocky text rushed from the top of the black screen. It said: "Available games:

Tic-Tac-Toe
Chess
Global Thermonuclear War
ICE"

> Global thermonuclear war

"How about a nice game of chess?" The terrible synthesizer croaked again.

Fine. ICE.

The Last Smartphone in John Stoian's Front Closet, Part II

 This is the second part of the first of two short stories I've written which take place in the same "universe": one possible near future, in which a collective consisting of technologists and creatives has carved out a niche for themselves in a world of diminishing opportunity.

Part 2 of 4

 The streets were as familiar as the faces of loved ones. Here, an abandoned liquor store, still completely empty, and the rest of the strip mall awaiting redevelopment that may never come. There, a fabbed apartment complex, brightly colored with unnatural geometries, in the modern style that Chungy liked to call “Rio favela chic”. He also liked to remind her that they weren’t really fabbed. Just the concrete infrastructure and the drywall. Everything else was still put there by a worker. Just so you know.

As she headed north, the main drags became less familiar, and more residential. The old strip malls had largely been replaced by flag lots with new, modest-sized houses and shops, some of which adopted the favela chic, toned down slightly for the discriminating palate. All of them looked happy—physically happy somehow, and though the paving in the lots was a bit haphazard, the miniature neighborhoods seemed so much more healthy and alive than the older homes on the sidestreets.

She popped off the scooter on one of these sidestreets, in front of a large, cookie-cutter house that appeared to have been built during the 00s housing bubble. Beige, tan, gray. Stucco everywhere. Rounded corners. It was a sight. She never thought someone as edgy as John Stoian would live in a house without, you know, edges. She called Chung again.

“Hey, I’m here.”

“Alright,” then in a muffled voice, “John, Lucy’s at your house. Can you buzz her in?” then back to Lucy, “OK, you should be in.”

Lucy tried the door. “Perfect, thanks love.”

The inside of John’s house was spooky, silent, gray. Lucy found a light switch that revealed an intriguing (to her, at least) lack of decor. Directly to the left of the entrance, there was a door which was likely a walk-in closet. She opened the door to find jackets and a small bookcase, which held a wide variety of technological artifacts in various states of repair. On the top shelf, there was a lone brown cardboard box.

The phone on the inside was very odd looking. The body was uncolored, translucent and matte-finished. There was a small sticker with a serial number near the top, by the front camera, but there were no logos, or branding of any kind. It looked like it must be a prototype of some sort. There were various unfamiliar accessories in the bottom compartment of the box, which Lucy decided she would explore when she returned to the apartment.

“Hey, Chungy, I got the new phone. This thing is so...badass,” she said, “Do you not realize how much money you all could make just by selling these things? It’s like I’m holding some kind of secret government phone or something. Anyhow, I love you, and I’ll let you get to your conference. Call you tonight your time, while I’m on my way to the meetings. Bye!”

Lucy hopped on the scooter, and forgot about dialing Google Maps again. She got herself out to John’s house; she could certainly get back to the apartments.

Soon enough, Lucy was lost, ducking behind a defunct gas station in a terrible neighborhood. She could hear the reports of backfiring gas engines, mixed with what sounded like either fireworks or guns discharging. It must have been drag night in one of the nearby slums.

This is just how things had shaken out in parts of LA and across the country. Politicians had tried, but not very hard, to prevent the massive unemployment and poverty inherent in last decade or so in technological advance, but they fought all the wrong battles. In the end, no one seemed to be able to explain why things had gotten so bad, and no one seemed to be able to turn it around. Those who could freelance did so, and those who couldn't retreated rather desperately into what became suburban slums.

Lucy stood by her scooter, and picked up the old backup slider phone, trying to get the Outboard phone service to pick up on her location. After the third failed attempt, she pocketed the phone and reached into her bag to grab the cardboard box. The translucent body of the device caught a glint of the streetlight.

The Last Smartphone in John Stoian's Front Closet, Part I

This is the beginning of the first of two short stories I've written which take place in the same "universe": one possible near future, in which a collective consisting of technologists and creatives has carved out a niche for themselves in a world of diminishing opportunity.

Part 1 of 4

You may recall that Lucy Fernandez is considered by all who know her to be a smartass. A very confident, loving, capable, and talented smartass, but a smartass nonetheless. And you may know, if you happen to know a kind, decent, usually moral, personable, and gentle smartass, that they usually come across a moment of crisis when they finally recognize the nature of their reputation. It can come as quite a nasty shock, and may result in a more humble and appropriate personality, but that personality is often much less fun.

It was very near this mode in which Lucy found herself, inching internally toward the realization that those around her, if pressed, would have characterized her default facial expression as “too clever by half”, and that the shortest possible description of her might be “smug”, if only because it is one letter shorter than “short”. She also happened to be sitting on a ridiculous white heavy cardboard chair owned, if you could call it that, by her boyfriend José Chung, aka Chungy, aka the Chungmeister, aka José mi amor when she was feeling up to it. Lost in thought, she inched closer to this great and terrible moment of realization, only to be jarred from it by an unfamiliar, digital crashing sound, as though a robotic goose were in distress.

“Damn it!” she shouted, as she saw the flashing error message on the smooth face of her smartphone, reflecting the fading sunlight. She swiped this way and that. The phone was unresponsive. Chungy might be halfway across the world, but he was definitely the man to call. She rummaged around in the desk drawer until she found truly ancient slider phone and swapped SIMs.

“Hey Chungy, it’s the love of your frickin life. I’m calling you from the backup phone ‘cause my phone just decided it couldn’t go on living while you were in Amsterdam. Look, I know you’re probably getting shot down by some tall, blonde, and swanky Dutch babe right now, so why don’t you call me back. She’s not half as good as me. Oh yeah, and tell me how to fix my phone. You do remember about how tomorrow’s the biggest day of my adult life, right? Kinda need that phone. Love you, bye.”

“Hey José, it’s me again. Just wondering when you’ll call me back, you know, so that I can finally get my phone fixed so I can go to my client meetings tomorrow so I can start my business so I can finally have a life. Maybe I’ll get into your cool hackers club even. You know I’m kidding when I make fun of them, right? John’s pretty cool, and Trish is alright too, even if I know you want her business. She’s not even paying attention to you, alright? Anyhow, call me back, help me fix my phone, and be safe out there, alright?”

“Hey Chung. I’m sorry I’m such a moron. I didn’t realize it was frickin...six a.m. there. Bet you have your ringer off. Sorry about that, and I’ll call back in a couple more—oh hey that’s you calling. Bye.”

“Lucy, what’s up, honey?”

“Chungy, I’m so sorry, I was just wigging out about my meetings tomorrow. My phone died, and I don’t know how I’m going to bus to three different places across town without a real phone. This thing doesn’t even have GPS.”

“Well, first thing is: have you tried rebooting the phone?”

“Yeah, it won’t even turn on. I hold down the button, screen stays black. Hey, wait. Can’t you have John send me one of your hacker-club cars to drive me around tomorrow?”

“The self-drivers? Sorry, babe, they’re all on loan while we’re gone. Whenever all of us are out, we donate them to a good cause until we get back. So, they’re being used by the Red Cross to get supplies for the wildfire victims in Arizona.”

“Hell, Chungy, why do you guys have to be so stupid charitable? Just kidding, I love that about you,” Lucy said in a quick breath. “OK, so how do I get from point A to points B through, like, Q?”

“Print out directions from Google Maps?”

“Well, you see,” Lucy’s tone took on a timbre of faux condescension, which she liked to use when she knew she was being a brat. “I really like my smartphone? And I’d really like to have access to my docs? And, like, you friggin took the laptop with the 6G modem in it, so yeah,” Then she snapped back into a normal voice. “We don’t have money for a new phone, do we?”

“Weeeelllll, we might. But I have a better idea. Let me talk to John and call you back.”

Lucy checked her social media aggregator. To a friend on Facebook who had posted “Going to a show with Death Cab and Decemberists!!”, she responded “How are you getting there, a time machine? :)” She scrolled through a couple of her fandoms on various channels, and was interrupted by the backup phone again.

“OK, Luce, here’s the deal. At John’s house, we keep a closet full of tech. Anyone in the group can just take a keyboard, a tablet, a—”

“—phone? Yes, that’ll work, thank you, thank you love!”

“Yeah, so about that. It’ll be a loaner, and it won’t be very good-looking. And it probably won’t come with a manual, so good luck if you can’t figure it out—”

“—I can just—”

“—no, you can’t just google it, because the phones are made to a spec that’s, uh, unique to the crew, and we probably haven’t gotten around to, um, documenting those."

"José, are they illegal?"

"They're...legal enough. Remember, if you get in a real jam, text me or something, I’ll ask Dan.”

“Dan’s in Amsterdam? Now that I gotta see.”

“Yeah, he offered to go with the cars or stay in his basement in the fetal position for a week, but John figured out how to change his mind. I think it was basically bribery.”

“Watch out Europe.”

“No kidding. Anyhow, can you make it to John’s place before we hit breakfast?”

“Uh, yeah, sure,” then she interjected, talking to an automated agent instead of Chung, “OK Outboard, this is Lucy. Can you text me John Stoian’s address?”

"Damn, forgot this isn't a smartphone." She repeated herself to her computer.

A moderately realistic automated woman’s voice said to both her and Chung, “Information sent via text message.”

“Awesome,” said Chung, “So you don’t need anything else?”

“Well, I need to get into John’s house, of course.”

“Sure, I’ll just have him buzz you in.”

“He can do that from Amsterdam?”

“He could do that from Mars, but it’d take about 8 minutes.”

“Alright, I’ll let you know when I’m there.”

“You taking the bus?”

“Something like that.”

“Aw, Luce, not the scooter again. You know that thing’s unsafe. It’s nighttime there, for heaven’s sake.”

“I’m a very safe driver, thank you very much.”

“Ugh. OK, love you.”

“Love you too, sweetie.”

Lucy repaired to the bike rack, where she had hitched the little electric scooter. She checked the solar batteries. Fully charged after a long, bright LA day with no riding. She clicked the backup phone into the cradle on the handlebar, and popped in her bluetooth earbud. The voice from the phone-in version of Outboard connected to Google Maps and gave her directions based on her address and John’s address, which had taken the speech recognizer three tries to get right. The wind in her hair made her forget the chafing of the invisible helmet around her neck and the tug of her messenger bag. The gentle whir of the motor was the meditative mantra that held it all together. John’s house was, sadly, not that far.