It’s just been reported that the Gesture Bank was robbed, and officials tell us that everything is gone. The complicated security measures, the armed guards, the thick metal walls, the alarms, the hidden cameras and the lasers were all overcome in this daring daylight robbery. Some form of military-grade explosives were used in the dramatic breach of this highly-secure vault. Local law enforcement officials, however, speculate the perpetrators were amateurs, “when we arrived on the scene, there were gestures everywhere. Man, they were scattered from hell to breakfast. It doesn’t look like they actually got away with much.”
Thousands of ordinary Americans had deposited their hard-earned gestures into accounts using the portable attention recording equipment supplied by the bank. The promise of fungible gestures growing tax-free in their accounts fueled dreams of early retirement and a life of leisure for many.
In recent years, the Gesture Bank had faced controversy with its compulsory attention collection proposals. A number of politicians and advertising executives believed that achieving critical mass in the gesture market was a necessary step in transitioning to the new economy. Deposit growth was falling short of projections and some felt stronger measures were required for the safety and security of our nation.
Gesture experts have been puzzled by evidence at the crime scene, it appears all the gestures that have been recovered have been uniformly sliced into 140 character strings of hypertext. The recovery has been very difficult as the gestures seem to be re-absorbed into the the network through the web, IM and SMS. The gestures that have been traced inside the network seem to have formed into a continuous stream of 140 character units; investigators provided this visualization for the media.
Gesture Bank officials are concerned that it will be impossible to identify all these gestures and connect them back up to the people who originally made them. “What people don’t seem to understand is that without a bank and accounts, there’s no way to know who made what gesture.”
Some believe that the Gesture Bank robbery was an inside job, that the unidentified suspect wasn’t working alone. There’s a growing political movement that believes gestures should not be kept in vaults, that gestures should be out in the world and circulating among the people. Highly-placed sources within the bank have reported that this new political idea was spreading like a virus at the highest levels of the organization. One member of the Board of Directors hasn’t been seen around the plush executive suite in many months. Some felt that he signaled his intentions when left this image pasted to the door of his office as a final gesture.
