The Printer
Leslie had some metal in the back of his truck in the form of about a hundred feet of chain, and that would get them a lot of the way there in this plow project. To fill in the rest of the material requirements he also ended up donating the tailgate of his truck. Mr. Drake had a five gallon bucket full of change that he had been adding to cent by cent for a few decades, so they gathered that too. He said that the nickels in it would be useful against corrosion, which made a lot of sense. Cash, and change in particular were really a thing of the past at this point, so the only real reason to hold onto a couple buckets of coins was a misplaced sense of nostalgia for presidents that nobody remembered.
All of these materials were loaded by Leslie into a hopper on one end of the printer. Once the lid was closed on the contraption, microwave lasers took apart the change and the tailgate and the chain and broke them up into the elements that they were made of. This yielded a bunch of iron, a touch of nickel, some trace amounts of chromium, carbon, molybdenum and aluminum from somewhere. Mr. Drake thought that maybe some of the links in the chain that Leslie had scavenged may have been masquerading as iron to save a bit of money down at the chain factory. Luckily, Leslie had never used it for anything all that critical.
Having sorted out the material end of things, they moved on to the design phase. Mr. Drake offered to CAD one up for free, but this was the 2050s and almost everything was available on the web. Molecular scale printers had been available to the common consumer for about fifteen years and people had printed just about anything you could think of. Something like a plow was a solved issue.
On the web, you got what you paid for, for the most part. There were people who made a living designing things to be printed and selling the plans. Finally, you could download a car. The problem with this whole situation was anybody could design and sell a car, or an airplane, or a rocket ship, but not all of these people were engineers. A good portion of them were complete dipshits looking for a buck. Of course there was a rating system for all of these things, but like most things, Leslie was skeptical of ratings. Long gone were the days when four stars meant something. Those things were not beyond manipulation, especially when money was involved.
Leslie ended up picking a plow design from Deere industries, they had been making plows for a long time and they generally knew their ass from a hole in the ground. This cost him money, which he did have, but there was no such thing as free plows in his world view. A plow was a tangible good, a feat of human engineering, of course it would cost money.
This plow was printed in place. As in, Leslie pulled his truck into the garage and about a third of the way into the printer. His truck was scanned and they had to move a couple of mounting points in the plow design, but otherwise it was a pretty straight forward process.
This new plow made his old plow look like dogshit. Instead of a full hydraulic system prone to failure and needing maintenance, it had alloy electro-muscles. This was a specific molecular arrangement of iron, carbon, and molybdenum that expanded and contracted when different levels of current were applied to it. Leslie wasn’t all that clear on how it actually worked, but he more or less understood the idea behind it.
“Should take about two or three hours to print Les,” Mr. Drake said with his hands on his hips, examining the machine coming to life, “coffee or something?”
“That’d be nice, Mr. Drake,” Leslie answered, his truck was currently occupied and he would be stuck here on the property for the duration of the print.
“You gotta cool it with this Mr. Drake business,” Mr. Drake rolled his eyes as he shuffled out of his garage toward the house, “Mr. Drake was my mom’s name.”
Leslie chuckled and followed him inside. Mr. Drake’s first name was Finnigan, but Leslie would be dipped in shit before he called him that. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel comfortable enough around the old man to be on a first name basis, he just felt that names held a certain power over people and he preferred not to engage in that sort of dynamic. This was a common practice among people his age. A sort of resurgence of politeness that has been abandoned by the generations that preceded him. This came off as a cageyness to people that didn’t really understand the motivation behind it, but it gave Leslie a comfortable framework in which to engage the world and the social minefield of human interaction.
As they left the garage, they were treated to a taste of bitter arctic wind that left them both bent double and grabbing for their hats. Mr. Drake’s, some sort of fur lined baseball cap with ear flaps that could be tied below the chin was blown into the driveway, initiating a brief rescue mission headed up by Leslie. While Leslie chased down his hat, Mr. Drake’s shock of white hair and beard whipped around flag-like from his head.
In the years after losing his wife, Mr. Drake had gone a bit feral. This resulted in an unkempt aesthetic that rolled over from his choices in fashion into the general state of his property. He and the house he shuffled around weren’t dirty or neglected, but things like getting a haircut or chasing down errant tarps didn’t really hit the todo list. He was constantly distracted by his inherent need to putter, tinker, abide, and think. Considerations of personal grooming were way down the list, he truly didn’t give a shit. Leslie found this refreshing.
After a minute or two of chasing and kicking the hat around the driveway, Leslie and Mr. Drake headed into the house. This was sort of a converted barn with variously ill conceived additions. A specimen of a typical Vermont structure. When it was originally built in the 1980s, it had been a shack. It had been bought and sold around half a dozen times since then, and each owner seemed to have their own hundred year plan for the structure. Through the arcane horse trading of the modern real estate market, these plans had failed to disseminate through the chain of custody. This resulted in thousands of squandered man hours spent decrypting a palimpsest of interpretive carpentry and bellyaching about design considerations of long dead idiots.
Once into the house propper, they settled at the kitchen table for small talk over coffee while they waited for the printer to work its miracle. Out in the garage, it had been chilly. When they spoke to each other about the plow and the printing operation, they looked to have been exchanging little clouds with their breath. Each cloud, a little thought bubble encoded with an idea or a quip about what a ridiculous process they had been undertaking.
Inside, it was warm and pleasant. Mr. Drake had a woodstove damped to an almost imperceptible level of combustion. Despite this fact, the stove was dumping out heat like a coal furnace and Leslie had to shed various layers of wool and technical outerwear to be anywhere near reasonably comfortable. His daily attire consisted of a kind of coverall, under which were layers of insulation dictated by weather conditions. He ended up clad in a set of long underwear and a red and black chequed wool vest. Under most circumstances this would be deemed an inappropriate state of dress, but this was not out of the ordinary for Vermont in the winter. Years of living in his truck and the yurt that he currently inhabited had given him a predilection toward colder living spaces, and he looked at long underwear as basically house clothes.
Once the coffee was made, and decanted into mugs that had been warmed on the hearth, they began the small talk portion of the social contract that they were both obligated to follow through a blood oath that neither of them remembered taking.
“So, about this ghost ship,” Mr. Drake seemed to be letting Leslie in on a conversation he had been having with himself.
He had been referring to something that had happened yesterday out in the Republic of California. From what Leslie understood, a container ship had run aground near Santa Cruz resulting in some sort of media blackout. Media blackouts weren’t all that uncommon, there was a war on and information was one of the many fronts where battles were being waged. This ship seemed to be a mystery of a different order though, nobody could get near the thing. It could be observed from afar, but anything that made it within about a thousand feet of the thing simply just went dark.
In typical fashion the Web was a buzz with speculation and conspiracy, so ferreting out the signal of accuracy from the noise of reactionary speculation driven by monetized engagement was a bit of a challenge. This had put the information about the ghost ship in a category that Leslie referred to internally as “fucked if I know.” This was an informational bucket into which he dismissed noise about comets being alien spaceships and alternate theories as to who built ancient mega structures. In other words, bullshit.
Leslie was a big fan of consensus. He tended to think that experts were generally right about the things in which they held expertise. He had seen this first hand a number of times dealing with doctors and plumbers and other people who had access to arcane knowledge. People who trained most of their adult lives in a subject generally knew what they were talking about.
The advent of the post truth society he found himself in had given rise to a class of people who claimed to have expertise in a subject without doing any of the work required. What gave them this confidence was unknown to him, but he had a sneaking suspicion that it was some combination of narcissism, a broken educational system, and an unhealthy reliance on AI to do their intellectual heavy lifting.
Artificial intelligence was something that he shunned for the most part. It was one of those things that stuck him as a little too good to be true, and in practice it was. A lot of people loved having a personal assistant that agreed with pretty much everything that they said. A bespoke yes man to subtly coax you in directions that the people that owned them would find financially advantageous.
Leslie enjoyed libraries. They were a repository of the consensus of human knowledge. The process of acquiring, publishing, organizing, and maintaining this body of knowledge was something that hinged on one fact. All of this stuff requires work. For example, let’s say that you, an expert in Fonts, want to write a book about that subject. Letters and Lettering by Frank Chouteau Brown published 1902 by Bates and Guild company is a decent example of this, and can be checked out at the Bethel public library.
Chouteau, certainly dealing with quite a different publishing landscape that what is offered today, had to hold a level of expertise in the knowledge of fonts, lettering, typesetting, history, and undoubtedly any number of other subjects to such a high degree that he convinced the lovely people at Bates and Guild to fire up their presses and shell out untold hundreds of dollars (at the time) to pay copy editors, designers, typesetters, printers, binders, paper makers, and the janitorial staff to get off their asses and get to work. This book had to make it past the unyielding gaze of the typesetters in particular, who undoubtedly gave it an extremely careful look twice over. Not only out of a professional jealousy, but if the word got out in the typesetting community that they had they had blown it, they would never live it down. These were checks and balances.
This act, this human consensus in action acted as a de facto fact checking algorithm for Leslie. The informational landscape that he had to trudge through every day was full of dead ends and false turns, and he saw places like the library as his polestar. Actual physical information, something tangible that you can hold in your hand that is verifiably made by a human trying their level best to convey data to the best of their knowledge.
When Letters and Lettering was published in the early twentieth century, getting an idea out there in the world was a tedious process that took years. Now, in the 2050s a piece of work like that could be birthed with little to no human oversight. From conception to having an ISBN, the process would take maybe a couple of milliseconds. An AI prompted to be a bespoke publishing house could fire off a couple billion books a day, pick the best million of them, and get them to market for roughly the energy it took to boil a gallon of water for ten minutes or so. This was not a hypothetical situation, this happened twenty four hours a day. Book publishing was merely a small example of the tectonic amount of specious information that assaulted the planet, crushing unprotected minds beneath a lahar of scalding hot bullshit.
“I reckon I don’t really know what to think of it, Mr. Drake,” Leslie answered after an almost unreasonable pause.
“Something doesn’t sit right about this whole thing,” Mr. Drake mused, as he took a sip of his coffee “it’s got me a little spooked.”