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Printcrime

This story appears in my collection Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, 2007

Nature Magazine

Mini-comic by Martin Cendreda, published by Secret Headquarters

Podcast (Escape Pod)

Animation by Josh Swinehart

French fan-translation (Rigas Arvanitis)

Spanish fan-translation (Ariel Maidana)

Italian fan-translation (Emanuele Vulcano)

Polish fan translation (Luke Kowalski)

Fan audio adaptation (Jason Mayoff, professional voice artist)

Greg Elmensdorp's 3D illustration for the story

Brazilian Portuguese fan-translation (Eduardo Mercer)

Filipino fan-translation by Paul Pajo

European Portuguese fan-translation, by Luis Filipe Silva

Hiligaynon fan-translation, by Lorna Belviz-Pajo

Korean fan-translation (Sejin Choi)

Romanian fan-translation, by Alex Brie

Japanese fan-translation, by Hikaru "Anna" Otsuka.

Chinese fan-translation by Renjie Yao

Hungarian fan-translation by Judit Hegedus

Polish fan-translation by Krzysztof Mroczko, in Creatio Fantastica XXVII

German fan-translation by Nemo Folkitz

Nature have generously granted me permission to reproduce this short-short story in full -- click below to see the whole thing.

Printcrime

Copy this story.

(originally published in Nature Magazine, January 2006)

Cory Doctorow

The coppers smashed my father's printer when I was eight. I remember the hot, cling-film-in-a-microwave smell of it, and Da's look of ferocious concentration as he filled it with fresh goop, and the warm, fresh-baked feel of the objects that came out of it.

The coppers came through the door with truncheons swinging, one of them reciting the terms of the warrant through a bullhorn. One of Da's customers had shopped him. The ipolice paid in high-grade pharmaceuticals -- performance enhancers, memory supplements, metabolic boosters. The kind of things that cost a fortune over the counter; the kind of things you could print at home, if you didn't mind the risk of having your kitchen filled with a sudden crush of big, beefy bodies, hard truncheons whistling through the air, smashing anyone and anything that got in the way.

They destroyed grandma's trunk, the one she'd brought from the old country. They smashed our little refrigerator and the purifier unit over the window. My tweetybird escaped death by hiding in a corner of his cage as a big, booted foot crushed most of it into a sad tangle of printer-wire.

Da. What they did to him. When he was done, he looked like he'd been brawling with an entire rugby side. They brought him out the door and let the newsies get a good look at him as they tossed him in the car. All the while a spokesman told the world that my Da's organized-crime bootlegging operation had been responsible for at least 20 million in contraband, and that my Da, the desperate villain, had resisted arrest.

I saw it all from my phone, in the remains of the sitting room, watching it on the screen and wondering how, just how anyone could look at our little flat and our terrible, manky estate and mistake it for the home of an organized crime kingpin. They took the printer away, of course, and displayed it like a trophy for the newsies. Its little shrine in the kitchenette seemed horribly empty. When I roused myself and picked up the flat and rescued my poor peeping tweetybird, I put a blender there. It was made out of printed parts, so it would only last a month before I'd need to print new bearings and other moving parts. Back then, I could take apart and reassemble anything that could be printed.

By the time I turned 18, they were ready to let Da out of prison. I'd visited him three times -- on my tenth birthday, on his fiftieth, and when Ma died. It had been two years since I'd last seen him and he was in bad shape. A prison fight had left him with a limp, and he looked over his shoulder so often it was like he had a tic. I was embarrassed when the minicab dropped us off in front of the estate, and tried to keep my distance from this ruined, limping skeleton as we went inside and up the stairs.

"Lanie," he said, as he sat me down. "You're a smart girl, I know that. You wouldn't know where your old Da could get a printer and some goop?"

I squeezed my hands into fists so tight my fingernails cut into my palms. I closed my eyes. "You've been in prison for ten years, Da. Ten. Years. You're going to risk another ten years to print out more blenders and pharma, more laptops and designer hats?"

He grinned. "I'm not stupid, Lanie. I've learned my lesson. There's no hat or laptop that's worth going to jail for. I'm not going to print none of that rubbish, never again." He had a cup of tea, and he drank it now like it was whisky, a sip and then a long, satisfied exhalation. He closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair.

"Come here, Lanie, let me whisper in your ear. Let me tell you the thing that I decided while I spent ten years in lockup. Come here and listen to your stupid Da."

I felt a guilty pang about ticking him off. He was off his rocker, that much was clear. God knew what he went through in prison. "What, Da?" I said, leaning in close.

"Lanie, I'm going to print more printers. Lots more printers. One for everyone. That's worth going to jail for. That's worth anything."

Cory Doctorow has spent the past four years at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org), fighting at the United Nations and in tech-standards bodies to balance the rights of copyright and patent holders with the public interest. His novels can be had free online at www.craphound.com.

62 Responses to “Printcrime”

1. Paul "The Pageman" Pajo says:

   August 25, 2008 at 5:27 pm

   I asked my mother to do a translation in Hiligaynon:

   http://lornapajo.multiply.com/journal/item/37/
2. Mark Wise says:

   October 20, 2008 at 9:40 am

   Some folks have built 3d printers that can reproduce about 60% of their hardware. The rest is off-the-shelf parts.

   The project homepage is here: http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome
3. Joel Walsh says:

   March 26, 2009 at 10:39 pm

   Has anyone compared this with Nancy Kress's "Nano Comes to Clifford Falls?" Also a world with printers, only Nancy Kress is scared of them. She'd be one of the people banning printers. Such a good contrast between two very different philosophical and political minds.
4. Paul "The Pageman" Pajo says:

   April 1, 2009 at 3:37 am

   Here's a Japanese translation by my ITETHIC student Hikaru "Anna" Otsuka.
5. Cory Doctorow says:

   April 1, 2009 at 3:41 am

   Thanks, Paul!
6. Yao says:

   August 17, 2009 at 11:26 pm

   Very quaint.

   I went ahead and did a Chinese translation too:
   http://welkin25.blogspot.com/2009/08/printcrime.html

   Thanks for such a wonderful story! =)

   (Though I'm sad to say Jason Mayoff's audio link is now dead =\)
7. Martin says:

   October 15, 2009 at 12:16 am

   Loved this story - I am busy working on building a reprap for work, to train people in 3D manufacturing (google it), which is literally a printer...a 3D printer which replicates itself, and can make other things too. 100 years from now, and a lappie might even be possible from a home-made unit...who knows ?

   Goop - sounds a bit like acetal, but clearly its nano....this story isn't that far off in another way, as governments assume a more totalitarian stance as time goes on, and a revolt of this sort is surely in the offing...
8. Philipe Mongeau says:

   October 19, 2009 at 6:06 pm

   Just wanted to say that the link to the french translation is broken.
9. Jeremy Dunck says:

   December 8, 2009 at 8:56 am

   Just after "Japanese fan-translation", you have a single quote opening the link to http://craphound.com/?p=2357, but close with a double-quote; this nukes the rest of your links. Please fix this; it affects links on your stories index so that I had to view source to find links to Human Readable.

   http://craphound.com/?cat=2
10. Jason Mayoff says:

    January 22, 2010 at 9:33 pm

    Thanks to Yao for pointing out the link to my audio version is dead. I've uploaded a new version where I hope it will remain forever.

    Cory: Maybe you could update the link? Thanks.

    http://jasonmayoff.com/voice/2010/01/22/printcrime/
11. May Batun says:

    June 13, 2010 at 10:37 pm

    Exciting send. Gives thanks for share
12. Anonymous says:

    August 15, 2010 at 8:08 pm

    Re "Nano Comes to Clifford Falls", here's the first half of it: http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0607/nano.shtml .

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