Ultraviolet

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  But it didn’t feel like winning. It felt like I’d just gotten a glimpse of how bad things were going to get, maybe not any time soon but one day, years in the future, when the whole system finally collapsed. When the workers were too exhausted and too poor, when everyone was too sick, when the city was truly crumbling all around us… this is what it would be like. Anger. Fear. Violence. Suffering.

  And death.

  But only for us. Everyone who could afford to leave would go, and that would be the end of everything.

  I sat down on a bench by the harbor and watched the water turn black as the sun vanished and the street lights came on behind me.

  “You’re her, aren’t you?” a voice said.

  I looked up and saw a middle-aged man in a dark uniform pointing a flashlight at me. A cop.

  “Yeah, I’m her.” I tensed a little, but I was too tired to be really scared, and the truth is that he didn’t scare me that much. Just a little.

  He nodded and glanced up and down the plaza. There was no one else around. He looked back at me and lowered his flashlight. “Are you okay?”

  I almost didn’t know how to answer him. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

  “Hell of a day.”

  “Yeah.”

  He took a few steps closer. “You’re sure you’re okay?”

  “Why?” I slid to the edge of the bench, ready to stand, ready to make a big black motorcycle appear to whisk me away.

  “Just…” He shrugged. “I have a daughter about your age. I can’t imagine her doing the things you’re doing. I’ve seen all the video. I read the reports. They keep telling us that you’re dangerous. Public enemy number one.”

  I flashed a tired smile. “Yeah, that’s me. Big bad numero uno.”

  “Well… you should get home. It’s late. They’ll be starting more drone patrols tonight, as soon as the patrol routes are all plotted and synced.”

  I nodded and stood up. “Okay. Thanks.” I paused, wondering how much I should be talking to him, trusting him. But I wanted to trust him, so I did. “Have you ever seen anything like today before?”

  “Not here, no. But it happens in the bigger cities from time to time. I guess we’re one of those cities now. Riots. Curfews. National guard.” He shook his head.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Martin.”

  “Hi, Martin. I’m Carmen.”

  He smiled. He looked as tired as I felt.

  I turned to go. “Listen, Martin. When you get a chance, you should download the specs for something called a recycler and print one out. Or two. Or ten. Tell your friends. Recyclers.”

  “Is it legal?”

  “Nope.” I started walking.

  “So what’s it do?” he called after me.

  “It sets you free,” I said. “It sets everyone free. Good night, Martin.”

  I walked a little farther, and then I got on my bike and rode away. I wished the night could have just ended there, magically fading to black so I could sleep and just get away, but that’s not how the world works. I had to ride all the way back to the Cygnus delivery center to grab the printer I had hidden in the alley, and I had to spend half an hour in that alley getting my suit to project a cargo-carrier on the back of the motorcycle, and then I had to spend nearly an hour more driving back to the house out in the county where Felix was waiting for me.

  He was standing in the driveway when I pulled up, and the second that the bike vanished he had his arms around me, and he held me, and I held him. I was so tired, and he held me up. He brought the printer and feedstock into the house, and he had some hot food waiting for me, and he rubbed my back, and he sang softly as I ate.

  He sang badly, but it was still nice.

  But the best part was that he didn’t ask any questions. He didn’t want all the details, he didn’t pester me for a replay of all the insanity I had seen that day. He just looked at me, and then took care of everything between the driveway and bed.

  I fell asleep in his arms, and a part of me wanted to never wake up.

  Chapter 15

  Reset

  The next day we took our time getting up and eating and getting dressed. Eventually Felix did ask what happened in the city, and I told him some of it. I told him about the crowds and the vans and the people in cuffs, and the fires and the fights and the broken windows.

  He just shook his head and rubbed his eyes. Then he looked over at the printer in the corner. “So. Time to change the world?”

  I checked my phone. No news about any more riots during the night. The world was still quiet and sane, for the moment. People were safe, or as safe as they could be. And the only real question was whether I wanted to go back again to play peacemaker in the warzone, and the truth was, I didn’t. I didn’t want to see that again. And even though I know I helped some people yesterday, fighting off men in suits with a giant sword didn’t seem like a good way to change things. And I wanted to really change things. So I said, “Yeah. Let’s go change the world.”

  We loaded up all of our food and supplies along with the stolen printer onto my cargo trailer behind my bike, and we were off. We headed northwest, navigating by old satellite maps of the empty counties. Well, they weren’t completely empty. We drove past the farms, mile after mile of tilled fields full of little green and yellow shoots and leaves, all tended by huge machines rolling slowly down the rows, spraying who-knows-what on the food.

  Eventually we found what we needed. It was a nice neighborhood. Big houses with big yards between them. But it wasn’t too far from the city, just a few miles straight out old Route 40. That was important. If anyone was ever going to get to us, they’d need it to be easy going on a bicycle, and this was about as easy as we could make it for them.

  We picked a house, some huge place with thirty rooms with high arched ceilings and bathrooms full of glass walls and rocky fountains and kitchens that stretched forever past cabinet after sink after cabinet. The solar panels on the roof were in decent shape so we cleaned them off and checked the wiring as best we could, and turned the place on.

  It wasn’t full power without the grid, of course, but it was good enough for us. We had lights, a stove, and a fridge, which made us royalty considering the circumstances. I was shocked to find that the faucets and toilets still worked, and Felix said they would probably keep working for weeks if there was enough water still in the old water towers to give us pressure, and only the two of us using any of that water up.

  We cleaned up a few rooms, made sure no curious raccoons or bears could get inside, and then we went to work. We fired up the stolen printer, gave it the specs for the recycler, and waited.

  “Nervous?” he asked.

  “A little.”

  “What if it doesn’t work?”

  “Then nothing changes,” I said. “The better question is, what if it does work?”

  He grinned. “Then everything changes.”

  The finished recycler slid out of the printer about five hours later, looking almost identical to the printer itself, just a little smaller.

  “Well, here goes nothing.” I put a handful of sticks inside the machine, closed the door, and hit Recycle.

  It wasn’t as whisper-quiet as the printer, but the noise wasn’t awful either. It buzzed and whined for about five minutes and then clicked off. I opened the door. The inside bay was empty. Felix pointed to the tray at the back. On a printer, the tray was where you put the feedstock in, loading the cylinders into the round slots. On the recycler, the tray had been empty, but now there was a small brown cylinder in the left slot.

  I touched it. “Wood pulp. It works!”

  We spent the rest of the day putting all sorts of things into the recycler, anything we could find lying around the old house. Plastic toys, mildewed clothes, broken legs and arms of chairs. Wood, metal, plastic, rubber, cotton, wool. They all worked. Bit by bit, we cleaned out the entire house and yard and the three nearby houses, turning every random thing we could pull free into
a tidy little cylinder, which we stacked up against the wall.

  By supper time, we had a lot of stacks.

  “Now what?” He grinned at me.

  “Now?” I grinned back. “Now we start building.”

  The next three days were amazing. Crazy. Busy. Quiet. Simple.

  We would wake up whenever we wanted to, and then wander outside and work on whatever we wanted to. First we replaced the solar panels on the roof, upgraded to the latest designs by a pair of twin sisters in Portugal. Then we replaced all the windows, and the door knobs, and the switches, and the plumbing fixtures. It was so easy. Just tear out the old and screw in the new. Any time we got stuck, we just had to pull out a phone and search for a tutorial, and ten minutes later we were doing it ourselves like pros.

  But we didn’t just make things decent, we made them wonderful. The door knobs were shaped like angel wings, and half the windows were stained glass with images from our favorite movies, and the old bathtub got replaced by a luxury hot tub with a dozen massage features.

  We painted the walls with a digital polymer made by a father-son team in Thailand that basically turned every flat surface into a screen, so we could change the colors ten times a day with just a word, or add famous paintings in high definition in the bathroom, or just watch a show on the ceiling.

  Then Felix printed out the parts for a greenhouse and while he was out building it in the back yard, I was in the bedroom assembling a set of furniture based on designs from the court of King Louis XIV. And after that I put together a dining room set from the old Lord of the Rings movies.

  The carpets on the floors were all custom tapestries of whatever we wanted. Dragons in the living room, the periodic table in the guest room, spaceships in the back hall.

  Of course, there were limits. We didn’t have the right feedstock to make just anything. We didn’t have any precious metals or modern plastics. But we made do. Especially with wood. There was plenty of wood.

  So we filled up every room with beautiful things, and to be honest, the end result was pretty ridiculous. Nothing went together. Everything clashed. But everything was the best of everything, and it hadn’t cost a cent.

  For three days we worked together, just for ourselves. No offices, no factories, no bosses, no paperwork, no schedules, no meetings, no nonsense. Just making things and building our home. Our very strange, very eclectic model home.

  But there was one problem. A very large problem, one we didn’t talk about out loud because neither of us had any idea how to solve it.

  Food.

  The greenhouse would grow some food, eventually. But we needed food now, every day. It was the one area where the printer failed us. It couldn’t turn simple feedstock like wood pulp into complex organic objects like tomatoes and steaks. So after a long day of replacing appliances and assembling furniture, we would put a movie on the ceiling and scour the Internet (the real Internet, thanks to Dean’s magic hacking app) on our phones for any information at all about printing food.

  And wouldn’t you know we found it. It took a little time, but we got it. Apparently the government didn’t want people searching for “3D printed food”, because most of the search results were just conspiracy theories and white noise. But then we got onto a bunch of Nigerian sites and there it was, plain as day.

  Organic printing.

  It was a thing. It was real, out there in the world, the big horrible world where we were told that everyone was poor and starving. Out there they had organic printers making food out of dirt, and grass, and water.

  And they’d had it for the last four years.

  I double-checked the date.

  Four years.

  “Does it make you want to scream, too?” I whispered.

  “Yeah, a little bit,” he whispered back.

  We spent a couple hours trying to read everything we could find about organic printing, how it worked, what we needed to do it. Unfortunately, a lot of the materials we found were in Chinese, Russian, and French. Felix glanced at me once when the Chinese web sites came up, but he didn’t ask if I could read it so I didn’t have to admit that I couldn’t. My dad did try to teach it to me once, but I did better learning Spanish from my mom, and besides, no one else in the neighborhood spoke Cantonese, so I didn’t try very hard and after a while, neither did he.

  Eventually we figured we had learned as much as we were going to about the new printer tech and how it used a cold laser array to basically turn organic material into a slurry, and then it used a centrifuge to separate the slime into different densities, which were then baked and frozen and sorted as cubes of protein, sugar, and plant fiber. The diagrams were pretty confusing and the pictures weren’t pretty, but the walkthroughs were straightforward enough. So we downloaded the specs and printed one out.

  The first one must have been corrupted because the machine came out all crooked and didn’t work, so we had to recycle it and start over with another spec from another site, but the second one turned out fine. In fact, it looked a lot like Dean’s recycler. Felix and I exchanged a few uneasy looks as we loaded the hopper with grass, leaves, bark, pine cones, walnuts, and dirt, and let it run.

  A few minutes later, we had food. At least, the machine said it was food. It came in the shape of a sandwich, or maybe a wrap. There was something hot and brown in between two layers of green. Felix shrugged and took the first bite.

  I watched him chew. He chewed very thoughtfully, and then swallowed.

  “Well?”

  He cleared his throat. “It’s not delicious, but it is food. A little salt and pepper would go a long way, and so would some ketchup, hot sauce, spicy mustard, and some cooked onions. But it is food. It’s… sort of like a veggie burger in a seaweed wrap. Sort of.”

  So I tried it, and he was exactly right. The printed food was not delicious, but it wasn’t bad either. It was chewy and warm, and oddly filling. Bland, but okay. So we finished our first printed lunch and spent the rest of the day learning more about this new miracle in our house.

  The good news was that everything had worked just fine. The weird meat sandwich was a very common meal all over the world, and people from China to Chile all described the sandwich exactly the same as Felix had. And apparently it was fairly healthy. Not awash with a variety of vitamins and minerals, but it had protein and fiber and a handful of nutrients.

  For the next few hours, we pulled down lists of common wild plants and household objects that could be turned into food, and then spent a little while in the woods beyond the back yard searching for the raw materials for our printed pantry.

  That evening, after dining on a pair of burritos made slightly tasty by the addition of several fistfuls of flowers, we sat on the back porch and watched the stars come out.

  “So… how are things?” Felix asked. “How are you doing?”

  “Good. It’s so quiet. I can really think. You know?”

  “Yeah. No people.”

  “It’s not just that there are no people. It’s that there’s no stuff. No work, no boss, no bills, no worries. Just work enough to make a decent home, and then… stop.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s going to be weird when we’ve got other people here.”

  “Oh, right.”

  I looked at him and caught the disappointed frown as he turned away. “Hey, you okay?”

  “Yeah, no, I’m fine.”

  “What was that face? You don’t want to tell people about this place?”

  “Not really, no. I mean, yes, I want to give them the machines and all, but I don’t want to give up this place.” He nodded back at the house, at the living room and dining room full of artfully carven tables and chairs, chandeliers, carpets, and digital artwork spread across the walls. “I’ve never done anything like this before. Or had a home like this before. I guess I don’t want to give it up, or share it.”

  “With me?”

  He smiled. “No, with other people. I like the quiet here.”

  “W
ell, we’re not going to invite a thousand people into this house, you know. We’re just going to set them up in the other houses. Start over. Start clean.”

  “Yeah. It’ll be good.” He put his hand on mine and squeezed my fingers gently.

  I smiled. “Should we start spreading the news?”

  “Yeah, why not?”

  I got out my phone and started tapping out the message that I would post anywhere and everywhere, from the Ultraviolet site to the 3D printer forums. I told everyone what we had done, what we had discovered. Dean’s recycler, the Nigerian food printer. Everything. I described the house we had set up, and the life we were creating, a life of building things for ourselves, feeding ourselves, all the conveniences of the modern world without any of the madness.

  We weren’t just standing on the shoulders of giants. We had leapt right off their heads into some wild new world with rules that barely made sense, if they existed at all. We didn’t know how it would turn out, but everyone was invited to come and help us try.

  “I’ll try to keep the directions simple, but we may want to put some signs out on the road,” I muttered.

  “Okay. I’ll do that tomorrow.”

  “And I’m telling people to bring their own printers and feedstock, to get started.”

  “Good idea. Actually, they should probably bring everything they can carry, shouldn’t they? Otherwise, we’re going to have to spend a lot of time wandering through these neighborhoods, house by house, pulling out materials to recycle.”

  “Well, we’ll have to do that anyway, sooner or later.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  I hit Send. The message went out, suddenly and silently, to millions of people all over the city, and all over the country I suppose. And the rest of the world too, if they bothered to look.

  I laughed.

  “What?” He smiled at me.

  “I was just thinking about all the people all over the world who are going to see my message, telling people to come live in a town with 3D recyclers and printed food, and they’re all going to think we’re crazy for just now figuring it out, for just now catching up.” It was a humbling thought, but still a happy one, to be joining the rest of the human race in the new world. The better world.