In the YEAR TWO THOUSAND:
"Telemarketer Defense Farming" has become a viable way for corporations to make money. Unable to fend off the ever-increasing maddening frequency of telemarketing phone calls alone, beleaguered consumers forward their holo-phone addresses to Telemarketer Defense Farms.
The TDF is a monthly subscription-based service where people in cubicles answer your phone calls in eight-hour shifts, brusquely put off telemarketers in your stead, and weekly forward you a terse, text-only digest of the two meaningful calls you received.
"HUSBAND CALLED - ON WAY HOME WILL PICK UP HAMBURGER FOR DINNER THURSDAY."
"YOUR CREDIT CARD INTEREST RATE HAS BEEN SLIGHTLY INCREASED TO 88 POINT 75 PERCENT."
This is a successful service for almost a decade until telemarketers retaliate, discovering a foolproof way of remotely causing near-fatal epileptic seizures in call recipients.
In the YEAR TWO THOUSAND:
Telemarketing firms shift focus, opting instead for pushing more lucrative "Anti-Seizure Protection Plans" - a monthly subscription-based service wherein the consumer must pay monthly to the corporation or face random holo-phone seizure calls, the consumer having little choice in the matter after the collapse of the TDFs.
Eventually all holo-phones are disconnected and Publisher's Clearing House goes back to telling the elderly that they have won a million dollars through the mail.
In the YEAR TWO THOUSAND:
Youths recreationally use hand-held devices known as "Chuckle-Boxes," technically illegal but in practice almost never regulated, designed to produce near-intolerable agony in the user. These devices are available at most mid-size or larger malls and grocery stores for seven million dollars each, when they are not completely sold out.
In the YEAR TWO THOUSAND:
A revolutionary breakthrough in publishing comes when a cheaply manufactured, trivially duplicated device is invented that, when embedded into the paper of a book's page, will play loud, high-quality sounds of the author's choosing when pressed slightly with a finger. The battery lasts for upwards of ten years and is easily replaced.
The first application of this technology, an experimental novel entitled "The Earth is Just a Hunk of Rock (But Worn Into a Home for God)," is actually very good and becomes a universally read classic, a best-seller on and off for years after.
This technology immediately takes off as a result of its success, and the "SoundBooks," rather than seeming like toys for children, gain a certain sophistication. Books without the "Press Here for Eerie Owl Sound" feature eventually become somewhat frowned upon as pedestrian.
Libraries sort of peter out.
In the YEAR TWO THOUSAND:
Pranksters, recording industry plants, and the gullible combine to render the modern incarnations of peer-to-peer file-sharing services fully unusable due to the proliferation of fake files, spam files, junk files, seizure files, and leaked government files.
Bizarrely, however, the most popular of these networks simply renames itself "VirusShare" and becomes a repository of trojan horse viruses and other undesirable programs, which the nerds of the future will use as a sort of digital museum or Pokédex of malware, competing to see who can "catch" the highest number of differing strains of a single virus, or the most esoteric collection of antiquated spyware. BonziBuddy, once again, becomes fine art.
In the YEAR TWO THOUSAND:
As an experiment, semi-amateur cybernetic programmers at a prestigious university code a small logic module. This set of routines is designed to sit above and encapsulate a regular program. Any time a branching decision in the main program is made, a call to the encapsulating routine results. Its purpose is to evaluate branching choices as "good" or "bad," on a scale incorporating a little logic about instruction efficiency and eliminating unnecessary steps, and a great deal of sheer nutty randomness.
In a twist, this subroutine is developed to have no actual effect on the execution of the underlying program whatsoever, having only an ability to pronounce near-meaningless "judgments" upon it. This results in the first program that isn't conscious but thinks that it is.
The difference between the two proves later to be nonexistent.
In the YEAR TWO THOUSAND AND ONE:
After months of exhaustive effort, telecommunications researchers invent at last a convenient way to thwart the "seizure call" attack, re-enabling the global holo-phone system. However, it is discovered that the vast majority of holo-phone users have become addicted to the seizures, using a gray-market device to convert their dormant holo-phones into "seizure machines."
The restoration of actual holo-phone communication is met, largely, with ambivalence.
The hot new experimental book, the scratch-and-sniff porno novel, is a total flop.
