I was thirteen when my family got our first printer. I was the first in my class to have one at home, so I enjoyed a brief surge of popularity as I invited my classmates over to print little tchotchkes. At first we had trouble printing our WoW characters, but someone on the internet figured out how to break the model's out of Activision's Digital Restriction Management. Someone always did.
At first our parents were thrilled at no longer being begged for $25 action figures from our latest games and web videos, but once enough people had bought printers, Synthetic Genomics upped the price on feedstock (and integrated DRM into the printers and cartridges). After that we were only allowed to print for school assignments, so soon enough the printer was relegated to my Dad's boring office, to gather dust beside the old school paper printer.
Manny was the only one who kept coming to hang out after that. For a while we'd scheme and plot about getting around the DRM, but eventually it got boring.
Manny resented it more than most; his father was a Mafiaa lawyer. Not the romantic kind from late night movies that defended rakish mobsters from authoritarian prosecutors. Quite the opposite. Mafiaa was an old epithet mangled from the names of the industry groups that first bullied their customers when it started getting easy to copy data - Music And Film Industry Associations of America.
Two years later, Manny blew all his savings on the newest model printer, an SG Conductive 101w. He had to beg his bewildered parents to drive him into the city, where he searched dozens of tiny shops for a rev 1.1 model. The 1.0 was buggy and would break after six months, he explained, and the 1.2 had fixed a crucial firmware bug that he actually wanted.
I didn't understand at first, but Manny was good with these things. I'd made sure my parents bought me the specific model notepad Manny had told me to, and he'd done something to it that let me download all the games and porn that Apple and the school didn't want me to have. It even lied to the school network and said I wasn't running my IM client during class.
I'd really only agreed to help him unpack it because I knew it would probably have some of those jumbo packing bubbles that were so fun to pop. It was huge - the size of a refrigerator, and it almost looked like one, complete with black coils winding up the back. He didn't want his Dad helping, because he said he was going to crack the firmware like he did on my notepad. His Dad would give him such a beating if he ever figured out what Manny was doing.
I didn't really understand why he was so excited about a boring old homework printer. You didn't even get bonus marks for making dioramas with them anymore. Even our teachers knew that it didn't really take much effort. Manny was really excited though, and I guess I was sort of curious why.
I sat and popped the bubble wrap while Manny pried the cover off and soldered the end of an old USB cable on to the mainboard. He told me to sit with my back against the door, so he'd have some warning if his dad decided to peak in. I happily obliged him, pop pop popping the wrap contentedly as he pecked away at his notepad, doing whatever indignities to the printer's internal computer.
After a while, he pulled the cable from his notepad and carefully resealed the cover, so his father wouldn't notice if he looked. He had an impish grin as he finished, and pulled a tube of what looked sort of like printer feedstock from his bag, and topped up the "starter" cartridge in the printer.
"Don't ever tell my dad I'm doing this." he told me, suddenly very serious. "I'll have to buy an official cartridge every now and then so he doesn't get suspicious, but for most stuff I can get away with this. And we can make it for nothing."
His grin crept back, dimpling his cheeks.
"Or rather, you can. I'll build you a bioreactor, and you can throw your kitchen compost, garden clippings or whatever into it, and out comes printer goop. You can even use your sister's cat, if you want."
I had to smile at the idea of mulching my sisters mean Siamese into homework, but I still didn't really see the point.
"OK, Manny, it's cheap to print again, but why bother? My parents let me print all the homework I want anyway."
Manny pulled up the ladder page for my level 750 half orc paladin, and pressed print. My brow furrowed. I hadn't granted him permission to access the model files, but the green skin and Alliance heraldry of my toon were slowly being extruded by the print head.
"Well, that's cool. But other than my character, I can't really see myself wanting action figures anymore. We're a little old for that."
Manny just smiled. The figure finished, and he tossed it to me. "This was just a test, to make sure the new firmware is working."
I nearly dropped it when the half orc's arms sprang up and I heard a tinny, quiet version of the half-orc "Rarw!" battle cry. You couldn't print these even if you did buy the rights from Activision. You had to order them, for hundreds of dollars.
"The Conductive can do exactly what its name suggests. It can print chips. It's only supposed to print simple chips, like those, but there's no physical reason for that. It's just more Mafiaa bullshit. Watch this."
Next out of the printer was a notepad. It looked exactly like mine, even down to the hundreds of scratches I'd carelessly gouged into the plastic backing. But it was faster. A lot faster.
Manny was literally rubbing his hands. I almost expected him to cackle. "Now what, exactly, do you think a printer is save some chips and a lot of plastic? Nothing."
A section of black tubing was being extruded.
It took us almost a month to print out all the parts for a second printer, smuggle them past Manny's father and into my basement. By then I had litres of feedstock grown and ready. It took us another month of pouring through online HOWTOs and some rather messy and sometimes literal bug hunting to get it working. But we did it. What had cost Manny $2,000 (or nearly a years income), we'd replicated in a month. With what we'd learnt, and without having to worry about his dad catching us, we could do it again in a week.
But summer vacation was over, and we had to go back to school. I got 15 minutes of popularity when I let anyone print whatever clothes they wanted to surreptitiously scan at the mall. We offered to help build our classmates their own printers, but they thought it was too geeky. By October I was out of the feedstock I'd grown from grass clippings over the summer, and there was only so much kitchen scrap available to throw into the bioreactor.
The mainstream world started to take notice of the hacker underground building and sharing pirate printers and feedstock. SG hired several Mafiaa firms to sue and bully, including Manny's father's. Hundreds of Americans were arrested, and thousands more had their life savings extorted from them.
Manny and I did our social studies team project on the issue. We explained to our class how, as Canadians we were safe so long as no money changed hands. Our seminar covered the compromise bill C-31 passed by Prime Minister Charlie Angus (Canada's first Liberal Democrat PM) banned DRM circumvention and all unauthorized copying unless it was for strictly noncommercial purposes. We used a play on Angus' famous quote ("The state has no place in the bookshelves of the nation") as our subtitle, and I think that snagged us our 'A'.
Our teacher had been an old copyfighter, apparently. She and my father had even campaigned together for Angus in the election of '14. She called him up to reminisce and praise our paper. I don't think the old hippie had ever been prouder of me. I didn't get many 'A's.
Manny didn't come to school the next day, or the one after that. I eventually heard that his father had sent him to an American military school, and that throwing his son under the bus was good for his career - he was promoted and his family moved to the city.
In the spring I took three blocks of shop class. I had to register for something, but Manny had helped me get all the credits I needed for both junior and senior years in the first term. He said he had plans and wanted us to have as much free time as possible when we could get plentiful feedstock. I'd have had trouble even passing the core classes on my own, so I gladly played along.
I enjoyed the shop classes. They weren't too hard, and really only amounted to playing with toys all day. I printed a suborbital balloon and digital camera, and released it to take pictures of our town from the edge of space. I took apart and rebuilt a biodiesel lawnmower engine.
In the evenings I made a little money cutting grass, which let me build up lots of feedstock. I wasn't really using much of it, but I felt like I owed it to Manny somehow.
Summer rolled around, and I was bored out of my mind. I didn't really have any friends other than Manny, and there was absolutely nothing to do in the faceless patch of suburbia I lived in. Like most 16 year old boys, I wanted a car but had little money. I looked for a beater I could buy with the few hundred dollars I'd have above the cost of insurance, but I'd barely be able to buy an engine with that.
But I'd done well in shop. The lawnmower couldn't be that much less complicated than a car, could it? Nearly everything else in a modern car was plastic, and I could get more than enough goop to just print it. I had three months with nothing else to do, so why not try?
I dug around the forums we'd used when we assembled my printer, asking around for help printing a car frame. I figured I'd be laughed off, but it turned out lots of people were printing not only frames, but whole engines! Someone inside SG had posted the genome for a microbe that could build super strong, heat tolerant plastics to The Pirate Bay, and people were openly using it everywhere but America.
A Swedish grandmother walked me through printing the sequencer I'd need to kickstart the new bioreactor, and a college student from Kansas taught me how to upgrade my printer to use the new feedstock.
I'd never been more terrified than when I started disassembling my printer - I wasn't sure I'd be able to rebuild it without Manny, but I did ok.
By the end of June I was ready to start, but I took a week to print an air conditioner first. It was hot, especially when I ran the printer, and it placated my parents. It took me the rest of the summer to finish my car - a copy of a Tata design I found online.
My parents were bemused. My shop teacher was ecstatic. He called the local blog, and they cajoled me into walking them through how I'd built it. I tried to explain that I'd just followed instructions I found online, but they didn't really get it. I was front page news.
Then the Mafiaa noticed.
A private security firm broke down our front door at 3 AM the next morning. They pulled my family and I from our beds and held us kneeling in the living room with our hands bound behind our backs with thick plastic straps. My sister was crying quietly - they'd killed her cat in front of her just because they could, and my father was crumpled on the floor with my mother trying to wake him. I later found out they'd broken his arm and concussed him with the butt of a rifle.
They kept us there until the real police arrived to arrest us. I watched them carelessly load my printer, bioreactor and all of our notepads into a black van, and then all of us into separate paddywagons.
At the station they left me in a grey, windowless room for what seemed like hours. Every time I moved to sit on the floor, an officer burst into the room and pulled me to my feet, and once, when I almost dozed off standing, a shrill buzzer rattled my skull.
Eventually a dour policeman escorted a morbidly obese bald man into the room, set up a table and one chair. Mr. Goldstone - Manny's father - sat in it and stared at me with naked malice.
"Boy, you're in real trouble. Praise the Lord I got my Manny away from you when I did. He's shaping up nicely, 'case you're wonderin'."
"I've done nothing wrong, you bastard."
Mr. Goldstein flashed his teeth in a predatory smile. "No? The way I see it, you took money to take away what you used to fill that stolen printer of yours. Which you stole from me and mine, by the way. That makes it a commercial act, and illegal even under Canadian law. My employers are mighty tired of people flouting American law just 'cause they live elsewhere. They've been looking for someone to make an example of. Someone like you."
"Try it. This is a free country. You can't pull that crap here."
"You think, do you? Maybe we wouldn't win out, in the long run. Maybe, maybe not. But justice ain't free, boy. We're gonna sue you, your sister, and both your parents separately, and we can have you all held under ACTA charges. Maybe even extradited to the US where you'll face real charges. Can your family pay lawyers while locked up? It should only take, oh five or ten years."
I grit my teeth and seethed.
"But it doesn't have to come to that, boy. I can be moved to let your family go, if you agree to a settlement. You agree to a $500,000 fine, and we'll call it done. We won't even make your parents pay it, so long as you agree to drop out of school and work it off in one of our call centres."
They'd been pulling this crap in the US for decades, but it had never happened in Canada. I wouldn't stand for it.
"I want to talk to a lawyer."
"You do that, boy. But the offer won't be on the table long."
The next day, they let my family meet with a lawyer my mother found in the jail directory. He told us bluntly that we were clearly on the right side of the law, but that we wouldn't have the funds to fight it. My mother was holding back tears and insisting we fight, but I stood up and said "No."
"I'll take their settlement offer."
I saw how this had played out in the US in previous decades. The people who fought eventually settled for even worse terms when they ran out of money to pay their lawyers, and they always did. The Mafiaa never ran out of lawyers.
I turned and walked out the room before anyone could object.
I worked in the Mafiaa call centre for two years. Nominally I was paying off my settlement to SG and Tata (or rather, their Mafiaa lawyers), but the amount owed never went down. They located the call centre somewhere in the middle of Flyoveria, United States, where they were the only ones offering housing and any other necessities. They only had to pay us minimum wage, and they priced our rent and the company store so that we always owed a little bit more at the end of the month. The US government didn't care that they were sharecropping - the Mafiaa always made generous "campaign contributions" to both parties.
Technically we could quit any time we wanted, but then our settlements would be struck. We were in America, and so we'd face American Criminal Interference With a Business Model charges, and our families would be pulled in under ACTA back home. We could be fired if we were less than enthusiastic, too.
We sold settlement insurance to hapless Americans. The idea was that you could never be entirely certain someone in your household hadn't started using BitTorrent, or that a neighbour hadn't cracked your wireless connection. For only $79.99 a month, you could have that liability covered.
Occasionally we had to call people the Mafiaa had targeted for a lawsuit. I never got used to that.
We were openly encouraged to tell our stories to the people we called. There was no need to lie or exaggerate like any other salesperson. Pay up or suffer our fate. It was a strong and painfully personal argument.
I was lucky in that my parents were trying to raise the money needed to buy out my settlement. In ten, maybe fifteen years I could be free. Less if my parents managed to get a second mortgage, but that was pretty hard with potential charges looming over them. Most of my colleagues had few illusions of ever being released. Suicide rates were pretty high - that was not technically a settlement violation.
So when my outgoing calls were hacked that morning I was bitter and angry. It wasn't all that unusual. A lot of people thought we should fight the Mafiaa regardless of the cost to our families. Some probably just didn't care who got caught in the crossfire. I was surprised when my earpiece rang after just a few moments. It usually took them hours to reset the autodialers.
"Hello, George"
"Hello Sir, I'm calling to offer you a limited time opportunity to purchase comprehensive intellectual property..."
The sales script had left well worn tracks in my mind. I could probably recite it in my sleep, so it took me a beat to realize the customer had called me by name.
"Who is this?"
"You don't recognize my voice? You wound me. It's your old friend Manny. Sorry I left you hanging there buddy, but I was kinda stuck myself. It's all good now, though, you're talking to the valedictorian of Wedgewood Military Academy."
"That's great for you. I can't tell you how happy I am to hear that. Now piss off before you get me fired."
"Woah, hold on a sec. First, don't worry. I've disabled the supervisor interface for your line and replaced it with recordings from yesterday. They won't know we've talked. Still, best not leak any more intelligence than needs be. Just know that I'm getting you out of there buddy, clean and safe. Be ready. You'll know when."
He hung up, and the autodialer kicked back in. I tried to forget about Manny and all the trouble he'd caused me. A month later I'd almost I almost had. I'd just gotten off my regular 16 hour shift, and all I wanted was to sleep.
There was a corpse hanging from a noose over my bed.
My corpse.
"Come on then." Manny's voice came from a printed phone on my desk. "You'll be worse than fired if they find you with a body, so you might as well take a runner. It looks just like you - it'll even pass a DNA test - so you're free and clear. The dead own no debts."
"What? How..."
"Time and place Georgie boy, and it's time you were anyplace else. There's a geocache a few clicks north of your compound marked on the phone. Be there in an hour."
I nearly threw the phone at the wall. Manny had backed me into a corner the same way his father had. I could do what he said, or my family and I would be crushed underfoot.
I'd go north. What else could I do?
I waited half an hour in my room before leaving the residence building. Half an hour in that tiny room with my own corpse hanging lifelessly beside me. I had to; my coworkers were still moving through the halls of the building to their own tiny rooms, and I couldn't let them see me leaving.
I made my way out of the building quickly, and headed north. Once away from the compound the night closed in on me, overcast and moonless, but the ground was clear and level. I made my way by the cold glow of the phone's LED flash and followed the GPS beacon. I didn't see Manny's humvee until he rolled down the window, spilling out glow from LCD panels inside.
"Get in buddy, I don't like being so close to that compound of yours."
As I walked around to the passenger door, I ran my hand over the surface of the humvee. It was cool, but not cold to the touch and matte black across it's entire surface. It had no mirrors, and what I thought were tinted windows were just panels of the same material that made the rest of the frame.
I got in and sank into a warm, soft leather bucket seat. Manny handed me a steaming cup of coffee. Real coffee! I wrapped my hands around the mug and just held it under my nose, taking in the smell. We couldn't get real coffee at the company store. They'd only sell us caffeinated chicory root powder. It tasted almost, but not quite, entirely unlike coffee.
I closed my eyes and took my first sip just holding it against my palate, letting those wonderfully complex oils infuse my senses. I swallowed and exhaled slowly, disturbing the surface patina like a gulf coast tide pool.
Manny handed me a lid. "It might get a bit bumpy. There are no roads where we're headed."
I looked around the interior of the vehicle. I could see the countryside tinged green in all directions. I touched the panel and it rippled a tiny rainbow away from my fingertip - the entire upper surface of the interior was a seamless LCD panel.
"Manny... who paid for this?" I asked nervously. "What have you gotten me into now?"
Manny just laughed.
"No one paid for it. It's printed, just like that Tata you put together, and just like the body hanging in your room. It took some doing to get the bone, muscle and gristle all in the right spots, but it's just meat. No significant difference from the soggy pork I'm sure they fed you back there."
"You can print people!?"
"Well, not singing, dancing, breathing people. At least not other than the slow, old fashioned way. But they've been growing hearts and kidneys for the insured for over a decade now. It's pretty well worn tech. Putting the whole thing together wasn't easy. I'd have sprung you a year ago if it were, and that body wouldn't pass an autopsy, but how many people killed themselves in even just your compound last year? They don't care enough to look closely. Maybe once enough people start doing it they'll notice, but cremation is cheap, so yours will be ashes by then."
"But this isn't a flimsy Tata like I printed, and I still had to buy some materials for even that."
"You didn't have to, you just didn't know how to get them otherwise. Fine, you can't get a lithium battery from switchgrass no matter how clever the bugs in your bioreactor are, but throw a long dead iPod in there and you can. If we were on the coast we could even use seawater if we wanted, but the iPod is easier. Never underestimate the contents of a municipal dump. Really, it comes down to this: rare stuff is rare, if it's hard to get we don't need much of it. Material cost is effectively zero now. You don't need to pay for atoms."
"So money doesn't matter anymore?"
"Of course it does. Money is just a stand in for things that matter. No one will every be able to print you a parking spot in downtown New York or a hand cooked meal, but what is that, really? Solient Green is people. The hand cooked meal is valuable because a person took the time to make it, and the spot in New York is different from the spot we just drove over because it's close to those 30 million people."
"Money is slavery, then." I said bitterly.
Manny laughed.
"It can be. I'm sure it's looked that way to you the last few years, but there's nothing inherent to capitalism that makes it so. I didn't break you out to fight a revolution, if that's what you're thinking. I paid attention at that military school; the most victorious general is the one who never fires a shot, and I play to win.
Look, this vehicle took us 500 person hours to build. Tesla would do something similar in maybe 20. It makes more sense for us to let Tesla build our cars, do something else ourselves, and split the difference. If we're both saintly altruistic angels, I give Tesla something worth 240 hours and they give me wheels. We both walk away 240 hours richer. But neither of us are, so they'll try to get all 480 hours from me, and I'll do the same. All else being equal, if Tesla asks too much more than 20 hours someone else will come along and offer cars for a little less, so long as people can't do it themselves in 20 hours or less.
But that's not what's happening. If I tried to trade with Tesla, or any other car company for something like this, they'd ask for the equivalent of about 4000 hours of your average person's time. Eight times what capitalism would set as the upper bound. They can escape the rules only by sending soldiers and lawyers at anyone, like you, who tries to do better than them."
"It doesn't sound to me like you're winning."
"Change isn't something you can accomplish with guns. No one marched into Moscow and forced Gorbachyov to hold elections, but Iraq reverted to an Islamic Republic shortly after the occupation ended. Local revolution doesn't work any better; Iran and the USA are both nominally democracies, but you can only run for office if an Ayatollah or National Committee gives you their blessing.
Change happens slowly, a new system whittling away at the old until, one day, it just isn't there anymore. Be a patient mammal, let the dinosaurs die on their own."
Over the next three months Manny helped me build my own humvee. He had dozens of bioreactors and printers hidden in the area of countryside we could cross in a night. We only visited them to drop off biomass or collect feedstock, and we had lots of hidden cameras on every approach, just in case they were being watched. They never were, we camouflaged them well.
When we'd finished the second vehicle we started taking turns delivering unrestricted printers around the country. We'd never meet the the people they were going to. Someone would post a request online, and we'd hide it somewhere near them and send a GPS location a day or two later. All we asked in return was that they do the same for at least two other people. Most people did far more.
It was dangerous for us to actually, physically, cross borders, so we didn't. There were thousands of nomads like us around the world. People who were just better off without a fixed address to storm or bank account to seize. So long as there was even one of us on the right side of a border, there was no need to cross. We were citizens of the internets. That's where all important work had gotten done for decades, anyway.
Within a few years, anyone who wanted a printer had one. Most people kept going to their jobs, mowing their lawns and participating in the dinosaur economy where they could be seen. Behind closed doors they cheated on it. Grocery stores were the first casualty, as people began to print their staples. Restaurants flourished as people had more to spend on them, and that became the Netflix euphemism to yesteryears subscription cable. Most people were really just pirating their food.
Governments started requiring proof of material purchase for building permits, which just caused people to stop applying for them. The unforeseen secondary effect was the near collapse in the market for professional construction contractors - since their permits could be more closely monitored - and a renaissance of do-it-yourselfism.
It took a while for the vehicles we nomads drove to penetrate the mainstream. They didn't look anything the cars sold for road travel, and took some doing to assemble. We designed them to cross open country, and to hide. We never took them into cities and avoided even small towns. Still, bit by bit hobbyists adapted our designs. They made them look more like brand name cars, and got better at faking registration and transfer documents. While someone who got caught with a pirate car when they were one in a thousand would blame a phantom used car dealer and go out and buy a legitimate one, once every tenth car was a knock off they'd just shrug and print another. Then everyone did.
In the space of about six months, the auto industry just... popped. The Mafiaa lashed out viciously, but those it targeted just drove out to the abandoned corn fields and joined the nomads. We had plenty of experience by then, and could equip them quickly, and put them to work doing the same.
Martial law was declared in countries around the world, and troops were sent into the shantytowns of newly converted nomads to confiscate illegal printers. About half the time the soldiers threw down their weapons and joined us, when it happened west of the rust belt.
Even when printers were captured, we quickly replaced them. After the first few raids, people started launching spy balloons to warn of approaching soldiers, letting the shantytowns scatter ahead of them.
The balloons were simple things meant to stay up a few days and then be replaced. They had no means to be recalled, and many people started making them radar transparent. That made it harder for the shantytowns to be seen, but they became a hazard to navigation. An American Airlines 797 crashed over Idaho, and pushed them into receivership. The rest were grounded, and most quietly folded.
It didn't much matter to us. The FCC wouldn't have let us fly even if we did print airplanes.
In an act of desperation, the US government shut down ICANN and severed most internet backbones within their borders. We recovered quickly, installing wireless transceivers on our balloons and creating a giant meshnet in the sky. It was quirkly, slow and unstable, but whenever it got bad enough to bother someone sufficiently, they fixed it themselves. Ironically, the shutdown was really only effective against commercial interests.
Denmark took the first step away from the brink. In Copenhagen, instead of fleeing out of the city they went inward, to the hippie commune of Christiania before spilling back and occupying the rest of the city. The Danish parliament capitulated, and withdrew from ACTA. Sweden, Norway and Finland followed.
In North America, we were divided regionally but transnationally. The east was furious as manufacturing industries crumbled, and banking followed it. The prairies were unsympathetic - they felt nothing had been done for them when people stopped buying food. The west was blamed for instigating the crisis, and really, they had. We're not entirely sure, but it had always seemed that at least half the nomad population was Californian.
British Columbia and Washington jointly seceded and began talks to form a Cascadian Union. Oregon followed a week later. The US military retreated east of the Rockies to hold the rest of the Union together. Prime Minister Benedict Mulroney called for calm, then shot himself in the face that very night.
Today Cascadia and the Norden Union are the world's only islands of stability. Africa and the Middle East are in open, but thankfully small scale war, outside of the radioactive remains of Israel. The rest of the west is in chaos. The Chinese aren't talking and there have been no sustained communication links with the rest of Asia. Ships sent to Australia do not return or make radio contact.
California is still debating joining Cascadia, and it seems likely at least everything from San Francisco north will.
As for me, I've picked a nice quiet spot on the beach on a tiny island in Haida Gwaii, an archipelago in northern Cascadia. My years as a nomad have made me skittish around people, so I hope you'll understand if I don't say which one. My sister is thinking of joining me. My dad had a heart attack shortly after I "died", and my mom was killed by an Albertan peacekeeper during The Troubles.
Manny is running for a seat in the first Cascadian parliament, and he's got a fair chance of being elected Prime Minister, depending on how the seat allocation falls. I'd appreciate it if you voted for him. He's on the Liberal Democrat ticket.
This story is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license.