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If only it were true…

The company known as FutureWorld is a lie, giving their clients a way out of paying catastrophe insurance, while simultaneously forcing them to listen to possible futures that they will never believe will happen, and yet they do.

Yet this is only a skin deep analysis, beyond this there is a great deal more.  To start, there is the FutureWorld logo, an open window with the curtains blowing out.  But why are the curtains blowing out?  During almost all weather phenomena, the wind would blow inward.  The greatest exception to this is a pressure drop prior to a large amount of rain, which would suck air outwards, but this seems far too prophetic…

Beyond this, the character Charnoble is clearly hiding something.  He has hired three new employees, and they all share one trait, they are easily manipulated.  Tewilliger is the easiest example of this: she is an old style secretary who was trained to follow the orders of a man (in this case Charnoble), and she is also considerably old, making her considerably less powerful.  Next we have Jane, a woman originally from suburbia, whose family wishes she were more like her child bearing sisters.  Her strategy is very different than Mitchell’s, she has her clients want to protect her, and while this is clearly manipulation, she demonstrates this characteristic again later when she calls Mitchell asking him for protection, and in this instance she is not being facetious.  She most likely has an inferiority complex, as her family views her as a failure, and this gives her the drive that led her to Princeton, but blinds her to Charnoble’s clear manipulation.  The last employee is of course Mitchell, who is intelligent enough to recognize Charnoble’s manipulation – but doesn’t care.  His use of worst case scenarios as a way to hide from reality and the money from FutureWorld, do not blind him like the other characters, but instead he reveals himself as the weakest character, seeing through Charnoble, (he is even “OK” with Charnoble calling him a “terrorist”), but failing to do anything.

Charnoble has disappeared twice during the course of the book.  The first was of course the incident mentioned by Austin during class, where he was nowhere to be found, when supposedly using the intercom through his office.  The second and much more noticeable event occurs during the flooding, after his call to tell Mitchell not to leave, but to visit a client.  Charnoble is not seen throughout the rest of part two.  Charnoble clearly has another agenda, beyond taking client’s money through what could be considered insurance fraud.  Perhaps he wanted Jane and Mitchell to stay behind in the destroyed city to remove evidence, but this doesn’t seem like enough of a motive.  Another possibility is that he knew of the storm way before it occurred, and this would explain the logo, but this is also incredibly unlikely.  It seems only reading onward might provide the only answers.