“Him? Seems harmless enough,” I said.
“If you saw what he was trying to make, you’d keep him out too,” she told me. “He got kicked out of a woodworking class for the same reason.”
“What was he making?”
She grimaced. “I’d rather not say.”
“Come on, what?”
“Not sure, really,” she said at length. “They were... sex toys, maybe. Anyway, they looked nasty.” She huffed her disapproval, and left the building.
I didn’t think too much of her assessment, honestly. If you hang around an engineering or math department long enough, you’ll see people with far worse social deficits than Conrad. I felt a bit sorry for him, so I let him stay late and use the printer.
“You’ll lock up, right?” I asked him. The Skulptomatic was working away, drawing a new shape in plastic on the heated stage, something that looked a little like a diseased kidney.
“Sure,” he said, eyes fixed on the equations on his laptop.
♦
Conrad hung around the hackspace a lot over the next few days. He was a math undergrad, not an engineer, but I let it slide. He ignored all the other gear and focused on the Skulptomatic exclusively, designing complex mathematical shapes and printing them. There were curved ones, angled ones, ones that seemed like three-dimensional optical illusions. Some of them I wouldn’t have thought it was possible to make with the printer. He knew how to adjust the design file to compensate for that individual printer’s quirks. Based on his work, we actually fine-tuned some of our own designs and got them to print better. For lack of a better word, he had a knack for it.
I dated this girl once who had severe dyslexia. When she was a kid, all her teachers tried to force her to write longhand or on a typewriter. She hated it, and got shunted off to remedial classes. Then somebody showed her an early word processor, and she grasped it immediately. She could just type in thoughts as they occured to her, non-linearly, and edit them into shape later. Now she’s writing stories and getting published in literary journals, even winning awards.
My point is, she just couldn’t adjust her thinking to write prose in a linear way on a typewriter or longhand. Her talent as a writer never would have been expressed without access to word processing software.
I think it was like that with Conrad – a combination of mental qualities that made him a savant with this particular medium without any formal training, like an outsider artist. He had shapes in his mind that he could express mathematically but not physically, not until he encountered the 3-D printer.
The better Conrad got with it, the more obsessed he became. He was always the first in when we opened the hackspace and the last out when we closed. Not big on people skills. If you asked him to let somebody else use the printer, he’d ignore you, or snap at you, or call you an idiot because you wanted to make a model of your Warcraft character instead of doing something important with it.
After I broke up another argument over the printer, I took him out into the hallway for a chat. I think he only went along with me because the printer was in the process of doing his job.
“Conrad, I understand that you’re really into the printer, but you’ve got to learn to share your toys, okay?”
“It’s not a toy,” he said, looking at me like I was an idiot.
“It’s not yours. It belongs to the hackspace and there are other people who have a right to use it. You’ll have to wait for your turn like everybody else.”
He glared at me, then went to collect his print job, another abstract, vaguely insectile shape. Then he unplugged his laptop and stepped outside. I tidied up a few things in the hackspace and locked up. I found Conrad sitting right there in the hallway, his laptop plugged into a wall socket, still doing math.
“Jesus, Conrad,” I said. “Can’t you give it a rest?”
He looked up at me, and instead of his usual arrogance, he just looked tired and sad. “No. It never stops.” He made a spiral motion next to his head. “The math. It’s always there, always changing, always demanding. When I close my eyes. Even when I sleep.”
I crouched down so I could talk with him. “Can’t you see a doctor or something?”
“I’ve tried, since I was five years old. Seventeen different diagnoses. Ritalin, fluoxetine, Quaaludes, Haldol, risperidone, marijuana, hashish, hypnosis, cognitive therapy, LSD, peyote, mescaline, psilocybin, biofeedback... Either it has no effect, or the side effects are unacceptable.”
Conrad reached into his messenger bag and pulled out one of his abstract printed forms, like a peapod with thorns. “The printer helps. If I make some of the numbers into shapes, and create three-dimensional objects of those shapes, something that can be touched, they become less intrusive. For a while.” He rolled it between his fingers, the spikes digging into his skin.
“Sorry.” It was all I could say. That and, “But you can’t stay here.”
“I know.” He closed his laptop and put it in his messenger bag. “I... don’t like being this way.” That’s when I realized he was in pain, not just from how he was obsessed, but from knowing how he treated other people.
As Conrad walked down the corridor, I felt sorry for him, whatever had him in its grip.
♦
The next morning, I dropped by the hackspace and found the door crowbarred open. I’ll give you one guess which single device was missing. I tried to track down Conrad, hoping that he’d return the Skulptomatic and the ABS filament if confronted. He hadn’t attended lectures for weeks though, and he’d abandoned his room in student housing the same night the hackspace was robbed. Nobody had seen him since.
A few days later, the things started to appear around campus. When I say “things”, that’s because I really don’t know what else to call them. All they had in common was that they had the drawn-out-of-string-and-hardened texture of the Skulptomatic. But even aside from the distinctive texture of the printer, those shapes were unmistakable.
The first one I saw was sitting on the floor in the library stacks. It was the size of a golf ball, shaped like a model of a virus, and positioned right in the centre of an intersection. You might have mistaken it for some random piece of plastic from a junked machine, but I could tell by sight that it was the work of Conrad and the stolen printer. I kept it, puzzled by this one clue as to what had become of him.
The next few I found around campus were abstract shapes, of unknown purpose and insane geometry. Over time they started to look more representational, though it was hard to say what they represented. The closest comparison was to insects or deep-ocean marine life, or even the fossils of whole orders of extinct life that had thrived and died out millions of years before the dinosaurs, completely divorced from the vertebrate life we’re familiar with. One egg-sized piece was right in the centre of campus, a little statue that looked like the love child of a squid and a gargoyle, maybe.
The printed shapes became more varied over time. Some of them seemed to be actual tools, created for some purpose, though I can’t say what. Imagine trying to figure out what a corkscrew was for if you had never seen a wine bottle. Others looked incomplete, like they were components of something larger that had to be made in pieces because of the printer’s size limitations. Again, I couldn’t begin to guess how they fit together.
During this time, I read in a local news story that somebody had broken into the toy store in town. Didn’t touch the money, but took every Lego brick in the place. The bricks are made of ABS plastic, the same stuff that feeds the Skulptomatic. Various theories circulated around campus, claiming that this was some kind of fraternity scavenger hunt or publicity stunt for a movie, but nobody took credit for it. People wrote it off as a harmless prank. Until things got weird.
One freshman took a nap on the padded benches in the library and woke up with this bracelet locked around his wrist.
It was a twisting, Möbius-strip meets Ouroboros worm kind of thing, epoxied together. He had to cut it off with a hacksaw. Similar things happened to other people. The printed objects kept turning up too. I actually started patrolling the campus, looking for Conrad’s creations. I was hoping to catch sight of him, and persuade him to get some help. I assumed that he was holed up somewhere with his laptop and the printer and a supply of ABS plastic, printing out these things again and again. If you knew where to look, there were lots of places you could tap into power, and the wi-fi network covered the entire campus.
I called in a favor from a guy I know in campus IT, and asked him to look for network packets going to MathSciNet, math society sites and the like. Ones that originated outside of the usual places, like the student dorms or the math faculty building. Normally I’m opposed to surveillance, but I made an exception because Conrad might hurt somebody, or himself.
A day later, I got a report. Somebody was downloading math journal articles through a router near one of the old agricultural buildings. That suggested Conrad was hiding out somewhere in a city-block-sized area full of nooks and crannies.
It was later than I expected when I got out to the building, expecting a long search in the autumn evening. Instead, there he was, walking down the road towards me, wearing an oversized raincoat. I was so surprised, I didn’t rush over. Instead, I watched as he walked up to the bus stop between us, took something the size of a baseball out of his coat pocket, put it on the bus stop bench, turned around and hurried back the way he came.
I jogged after him, and spared a glance at the printed plastic thing he left on the bench. A ball of vulvas or something. Just as he ducked behind a hedge, I caught up with him. “Conrad, what the hell are you doing?”
He noticed I was there, shushed me and motioned for me to join him. Reluctantly, I crouched behind the bush, next to him.
Conrad looked even twitchier than usual. His glasses were cracked, and the smell said he hadn’t bathed in a while. The thighs of his khakis were covered in scrawled equations. He peered over the hedge. “Look, look!” I followed his gaze.
An older man, probably a professor, walked over to the bus stop bench and sat down, looking at his phone. He happened to glance down at the ball, and jumped up like he’d sat down next to a live sewer rat with rabies. After backing several steps away, he warily circled it, examining it. With a shudder, he turned away.
Conrad watched closely as the guy stepped away from the bench and pulled a loose stick from under a nearby tree. The man used the stick to knock the printed ball off the bench and under another hedge, out of sight, then threw the stick as far as he could away. After taking a moment to compose himself, he stood next to the bus stop pole, far from the bench.
“Interesting,” Conrad muttered to himself, ducking below the hedge. “The consciousness attempts to visualize the object in three dimensions, and that’s when the instinctive revulsion occurs. But is it universal?” He turned to me. “Do you know anybody illiterate?”
“No. Conrad, you need to give the printer back.” I didn’t give much thought to why the professor had reacted so strongly to the thing Conrad had made; I assumed the guy had a phobia or something that Conrad’s little art project had set off.
“But there’s so much more to do.”
I stood up. “You also need to stop freaking out people all over campus with your... whatever those things are. It’s not healthy.” Just then, the bus pulled up and the professor got on. When I looked back down, I just saw Conrad’s feet vanishing under a hedge. I looked around the area for a while, but I couldn’t find any trace of him. He definitely didn’t want to be found.
When I called his parents, they were totally unconcerned. They told me that ever since he was a kid he’d been wandering off by himself and coming back days or even weeks later, unharmed. I got the distinct impression they barely knew their own son.
About a week after I’d seen Conrad, campus security visited the hackspace. They had found the remains of a pregnant alley cat near the football field. They asked us because the cat’s womb had been cut open, vivisection apparently, and held open with a kind of clamp. They showed us a picture of the device, shaped like a giant head louse or tick, and it was undeniably printed by a Skulptomatic. The cat’s fetuses had been removed and placed in individual bowls, also printed.
That’s when I got really worried. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, had avoided capture for so long in part because he included hand-crafted wooden components in his bombs. Who knew what Conrad might do if he got his hands on some fertilizer, diesel fuel and a few electronic components?
A few days after that, there was a fire in the attic of one of the old agricultural buildings. After the firefighters put it out, campus security investigated and found the burnt remains of a squat: a sleeping bag, a lot of empty soup cans and a metal bucket on a camp stove, with a residue of melted ABS inside.
Most likely Conrad had been melting down the ABS for the printer and got it too hot, igniting the fumes. There was no sign of the man himself.
After a while, I gave up looking for him and tried to catch up on my master’s thesis. Thankfully, the university’s insurance covered the theft of the printer, and the hackspace used that money and some member contributions to buy a new Skulptomatic 650, which could fabricate objects up to twenty centimeters on a side. Life went back to normal, and I completely stopped thinking about Conrad.
♦
One night, I dropped by the hackspace to futz around with the new printer, and found that the door had been pried open again. Prepared for the worst, I stepped inside. The new printer was working away, creating a shape on the stage. Next to that was a man in a dirty raincoat, facing away, bent over a laptop. He was completely absorbed.
“Conrad,” I said, though I wasn’t positive it was him. “You okay?” Whoever this was, he reeked, way beyond ordinary unwashed human.
He turned around to face me. I took a step back when I saw what covered his face – a mask, made of printed plastic. Most masks are distortions of a recognizable human face: symmetrical, horizontal mouth, bilateral eyes. This wasn’t anything like that, more like what you’d see on the underside of a mollusk.
Trying to keep control of the situation, I said, “Conrad, I’m worried about you, and I really think you need to get help.” That’s when I noticed that his laptop was covered with printed parts epoxied over the keyboard keys, with shapes and symbols I didn’t recognize.
He moved to one side, and for the first time I could see that there was this... thing on the table. The color and texture were clearly printed plastic from the Skulptomatic. It was much larger than anything he had made before, obviously fabricated in pieces and assembled. Just looking at it made me feel queasy and like I was on the verge of a migraine, the way lights flashing at certain frequencies can trigger headaches in most people. I rubbed my eyes and tried to look only at Conrad.
He raised his hands, which had printed, clawed brass knuckles fitted over his fingers. I wasn’t sure ABS was strong enough to be used as a weapon, but I didn’t want to test it. Fortunately, he just took off the mask. It had clamped onto printed plastic rings and rods in his temples, earlobes, septum and lips. The holes in his skin were red and infected, and wept pus. I could only guess that he’d pierced himself, and inserted the printed objects directly into his own body. After all that, I barely noticed the burn marks on one side of his face.
Whatever Conrad had been doing for the past few weeks, it hadn’t been good for him. His face was pale and sweaty, like he was running a high fever, and his skinny neck and wrists poked out of his baggy shirt. Hard spiky shapes on his chest poked against the cloth. “It’s almost finished,” he said. His eyes were bloodshot, and surrounded by dark bags.
“What is?” I tried to humor him.
“Couldn’t get it to render properly with the smal
ler printer,” he said, almost casually. “The new device is performing splendidly.”
“How about you pause the printer and we can talk for a minute.” I stepped towards the printer.
“Let it finish!” he screamed at me.
Terrified of what he might do, I stepped back and left him alone, hoping that when the printer stopped, he would calm down and I could persuade him to get help. He rambled on for a while, something about how “the many-angled ones” had shown him “the shape” that would be “a blade” to “perform a Caesarian on the world.” Then he started cursing me, saying I had made him use metaphors.
The printer stopped moving, and the laptop beeped. From where he had positioned the laptop’s screen, I couldn’t see what it had made.
“It has to cool,” he said.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
He looked apologetic for a moment. “They promised me it would stop hurting.” He reached into the printer and gently, reverently took out what it had made.
When I saw the object Conrad held, I made a noise of reflexive fear and disgust. I could visualize where the object would fit into the thing on the table, and having that shape in my head made me...
Ever hear of Stendhal Syndrome? Supposedly, some people see works of great art and go into trance states, their minds overwhelmed by the beauty. Now, imagine the opposite of that, your mind overwhelmed with a sight of something that it just can’t handle, that it didn’t evolve to handle. Imagine the sensation of vomiting while having a cluster headache and an epileptic seizure, all at once.
Cthulhu Lives!: An Eldritch Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft Page 20
