About THE STORY
A loose band of bloggers are forced to leave the safe confines of their Internet bubble when one is shipwrecked on a sacred South Seas isle while others try to keep a manipulative high-tech CEO from gaining control of all information, past and present and future.
One part wry, two parts offbeat, three parts fanciful, Thinks Out Loud goes where no blog has gone before.
Thinks Out Loud—the unconventional novel written in blog form features:
· Isaac, a burned-out blogger who trades in RSS feeds for South Seas adventure and romance
·Tallboy, a former barista with big dreams of blogging for a high-tech startup
·Prime Mover, the charismatic CEO of AltaSystemics, considered visionary by some, diabolical by others, with a penchant for improv
· Emily, a perceptive college student who dares to challenge Prime Mover
·Vaitiare, a Polynesian princess trying to keep her island from becoming the next overrun tourist destination
·The Morse brothers, Word War II vets and amateur physicists who are playing around with a special kind of time travel
·Not to mention the others—students, islanders, Sensates—their destinies interlaced, all centered around the blog Thinks Out Loud.
EXCERPTS FROM THINKS OUT LOUD
Survival 101
Entry No. 538 | Posted: Oct. 2, 2011
Isaac: A surprise. I was storing my personal-sized life raft away from the surf the other day, so I turned the craft over to examine the underside. When I flipped it back, I noticed a small brown object had fallen out. A water-protected book. How had I missed that? Apparently it was lodged in a pocket with a flap. The book: La Livre de la Survivance (The Book of Survival) by Antoine Cabriolet. Granted it was in French, but there were some useful line drawings as well.
Although my French consists of two years of college-level coursework, many years ago, I gave it a try. The “make a spear” section (“Faire une lance”) was pretty rudimentary. The book contained some good ideas. Like “Ne pas panique!” Also, based on a drawing, one afternoon I made a gigantic ‘HELP’ sign in the sand, each letter fifty feet long—in case a plane flew overhead. I also included, to be fair, in slightly smaller letters underneath: “Aidez!” This is funny: I drew the huge letters on the wrong side of the high tide marker, and they were washed away by the next morning.
There was also a section on harvesting coconuts, something I’d been unable to do. Again, the drawing helped. I’d tried throwing rocks to dislodge the fruit, but even when I hit the coconut, nothing happened. Now I learned how to shimmy up the tree, grab a coconut, turn it until its stem broke and then let it fall to Earth. Back home, coconut tree climbing would be promoted as the latest exercise craze: work the whole body!
Question: Do I want to be rescued?
To be continued…
[*Message sent via DrumBeat, island-to-island communications.]
Beyond the cloud environment?
ENTRY NO. 561 | POSTED: October 19, 2011
Eddie: Okay, back. tb has thrown himself into his new job, so I’ll relay what he’s told me. The employees refer to AltaSystemics as The Hive. (Does that mean there are workers and drones? What about a Queen Bee? I guess the Prime Mover guy fits that role.)
Dress is “obligatory casual” which means most of them are in khaki or other light colors. tb says one group is dressed all in white robes. He’s not sure what they do.
tb says he’s impressed by the company’s focused workplace culture and the employees’ unified identity. What he’s still processing is exactly what AltaSystemics does.
I don’t know if this helps, but this is from the company website:
“AltaSystemics: developing sensate clairsentience systems for the ultimate in collective consciousness paradigms.”
“Beyond the cloud environment with quantum/flux engagement.”
“Psychometric applications for post-sapien modalities.”
And: “Incorporating synthesis rather than eclectic derivation to form the basis of our openness to social, cultural and para-digitalistic phenomena.” That one sounds more like it was pulled from academia.
Tomorrow, I’m going to bring up their site in my History of High-tech Seminar and see if anyone can figure out what’s going on over at AltaSystemics.
Time to check Newser.