Summary: Martin Phillip had a vision on Christmas Eve, 2002. By 2026, he'd changed the world, and seriously buggered up Christmas.
Martin Phillip chewed his nails habitually and stood in the middle of the supermarket aisle, staring at cans of protein drinks and teetering with one foot standing on the other like a nervous geekazoid waiting for his first date. He'd taken the same case of “Be Sure” nutrition drink from the shelf to his shopping cart and back again for the third time now, and squished some of his sushi in the process. After he'd finally made up his mind and dropped the case into his basket, the middle-aged Mr. Phillip was the last one out of the supermarket as it shut down for the night on a snowless Christmas eve in 2002. By the time he'd awaken the next morning he found himself in the company if five empty cans of protein drink, joining himself on the floor of his office at the Phillip Rapid Prototyping Machine Corporation.
Competition was rough in the Stereolithography business. Martin was up against the likes of American Rapid Prototyping and Applied Thermodynamics who always seemed to have the next best innovation, the lowest tolerances, the biggest customers, and there was Phillip-RPM shipping units to two-man machine shops and toymakers who'd do nothing more exciting on Phillip's equipment than fabricate moulds for old tractor parts or new doll bodies. But for most of Christmas night, slurping thick, oily cans of liquid diet, Martin hatched a plan to rule the world.
Stereolithography is simple in concept. You get yourself a tank of resin—a liquid that solidifies in the presence of a certain wavelength of light—and shine a laser of that wavelength on it to slowly carve a solid and three-dimensional shape, layer by layer. Then you lift the dripping, yellow, plastic object it out of the resin, let it dry, and there you are: from a tank of chemicals you give birth to an idea that, only minutes before, existed only in the memory of a computer.
Late Christmas afternoon Harvey Kawalski picked up the phone and got a job offer.
“I want to hire you!” said the voice on the other line, and Kawalski frowned with confusion.
“Who is this?”
“My name is Martin Phillip, I'm the president of Phillip RPM, I want to hire you as marketing director.”
Harvey smiled, “Why, that's very generous of you, Mr. Phillip, but I already have a job as a marketing director.”
“For Cabbott Laboratories, yes I know. In fact, that's why I want you, because you've already done what I need to do myself.”
“Really, now?” Harvey said with good nature, “and what, exactly, do you think that is?”
“Well pardon me for being so frank,” Martin said, “but you took the world's most boring maker of liquid diets for hospitals and nursing homes and turned its product into a lifestyle. Now I need you to do that for me.”
Harvey sighed, “listen, I don't know who gave you my number, but this isn't funny.”
“It's simple,” Martin pressed, and described his plan hurridley. Harvey sighed again and waited the man out.
“Well that's all very interesting, Mr. Phillip, but I'm quite happy with where I am. I think you should just go and find someone else. Now if you'll excuse me, I...”
“Wait!” Martin called, and then paused, as if working up the balls to say something he'd been practicing. “Do you want to go back to Cabbot and spend the rest of your life selling protein water, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
“Oh-fer-all-the... look, Mr. Phillip, I'll meet with you if that'll make you happy. I lunch at Gregorio's every Saturday. You found my phone number, now find Gregorio. Now I've got a Christmas party to be at, goodbye!” and he unceremoniously hung up the phone.
That Saturday, Harvey sat down to a lunch served on a stereolithographed plate, stereolithographed wine glass, and stereolithographed flatware, and talked business with a balding, nail-biting man who had a vision and a promise. And before the new year, Harvey was a full partner, and trying to figure out how to sell a tank of chemicals as a lifestyle.
Poor Martin stumbled through failure after failure before getting to market, and even that model was a failure.
By greasing many palms and campaigning very hard, Harvey helped Martin get the first home stereolithography machines stocked by a handful of nationwide retailers. The big, heavy, smelly machines promised the home and small business customer the power to “Print 3D!”. But there were problems. There were always problems.
For a start, they were too big, too heavy, too expensive, too smelly, too noisy, and the objects that came out of its tank were too ugly. It was a smash hit with hobbyists, model airplane enthusiasts, and a couple of eccentric artists who swore it was revolutionary, but the general public treated it like an Edsel. As it turned out, there just wasn't many people with a crushing need to “Print 3D!”. Not the right kind of software, not the right kind of uses, just this noisy fishtank that needed refills of expensive gunk. Where the device was popular, Internet newsgroups sprang up to discuss them, and the first piece of advice always given to new users was: “lay down sheets of newspaper” in case the resin spilled. Which it always did.
Martin paced the floor of the boardroom, stopping only to chew his nails and stare off into the distance while balancing on one foot. “We've got the hobbyists, we've got the hobbyists” he muttered, “and we can always go back to the machine shops. They like us. We're cheaper. We've always got those guys...”
Harvey was, by contrast, poured into a leather chair with his legs crossed and spilling over the sides, his posture completely relaxed, his hand too calm to play with a pencil. He watched Martin tread a circular depression into the carpet and sipped his coffee. “We'll be dead in a year, Martin.”
“Nonononono! I can see this, I can make this work!” Martin was hanging in mid-step and biting his red lip, “we're okay so long as we've got the hobbyists. And the machine shops! They like us, too.”
“We're fucked, Martin. You need volume. You got this? Volume. You're buying the resin from another company, your only profits come from the machines. Look, what was the genius of Henry Ford?”
“The production line, I know that!”
“No, asswipe! The production line was around before the civil war. It was the volume! The volume! He's fucking famous because he knew he had to sell a car to everybody. Everybody means millions of people, millions of units is volume!”
“So how do I sell machines to everyone, smart ass?”
“You find out what the fuck they want!”
Martin Phillip chewed his nails habitually and stood in the middle of a hardware store's aisle, staring at a “home” stereolithography machine from Applied Thermodynamics. He balanced on one foot and then the other and reached for his cell phone, then put it back, then reached for it again, then put it back, and then finally stormed out of the store with his tailfeathers on fire.
That evening, Raymond Sperling picked up the phone and got a job offer.
“You were an engineer at Hewlett Packard for the inkjet printer, right?”
“Yeah... wait, who are you?”
“I want to hire you!”
It was another year gone by, and Phillip RPM was running on vapors. With the help of Sperling's direction, Print 3D! was now a much smaller, cheaper, compact machine that threw away Stereolithography and its tanks of resin for a mechanism that... well... sorta resembled an inkjet printer. It was a variation of Selective Laser Sintering. It spread a thin layer of powdered material over the work surface, and then a laser would sinter it into a solid mass. With some trade secret improvements, it worked faster than prior SLS machines, and you didn't need to lay down newspaper.
Alas, this didn't fare much better, but it was cheaper to make and that helped a lot. Martin was now making daily trips to every hardware and computer store in town, and he'd come back jumping and twitching whenever he saw anything that looked remotely like competition. He found the guys who figured out how to print working circuits with conductive ink, and begged them to come work for him. Two years of miserable sales later, the first ever Print 3D! Plus rolled off the lines. It could fabricate working electronic devices. And Martin and Harvey unleashed this inexpensive and versatile monster onto the world and received...
Nothing. The machines were great, but nobody really knew what to do with them. Some Radio Shack stores tried them out for making audio and video adaptors on-demand, but the cost of making them that way was too high, and Radio Shack soon lost interest.
Martin started drinking, Harvey held out for a few more months, and then announced his retirement. The spirit dwindled in the engineering team, and some started to leave for better offers being fished out by other companies (including Applied Thermodynamics). It was the night before Christmas in the year Two Thousand and Eight, and all through the factory nobody was stirring, except for a Phillip, crashed on the floor amidst empty beverage containers that once held an earlier form of liquid medication manufactured by the Stolichnaya corporation. He was jerked awake by the vibrations of his pager, which he had rolled onto while shifting in his sleep.
Martin stared at the display for several minutes with bloodshot eyes before his inebriated and sleepy brain could make sense of it. It was an automatically generated alert from his web server: it had crashed again. Martin growled—or rather moaned—at it and chucked it across the room before collapsing unconscious again. A few minutes later it woke him up again, as the pager had come to rest against a vodka bottle that was amplifying the vibrations. Phillip moaned into the carpet and pried himself off the floor, wiped his clammy hands on his shirt, and lurched next door where the web server sat in pain.
It had crashed because of a traffic overload. The traffic overload was the responsibility of Slashdot. Slashdot was sending visitors to his site because someone called Karl Hobert had designed a pocket MP3 player for Fabrication on the Print 3D! Plus and released it into the public domain (or, more precisely, he GNUed it).
Within months the Hobert MP3 player was joined by the Hobert AM/FM Radio, the Hobert Satellite radio, the Hobert calculator, and the Hobert Cell Phone, and people were writing software for designing the packaging to go around it. People designed their own gadgets, Fabricated them, painted them, wore them like jewelry, and made a new one for every mood, or every day of the week, or just every day. Soon there were Hobert parties, Hobert conventions, and Hobert cults, and Martin was attending as many as he could, grinning and chewing his nails and balancing on one foot and driving a new Porche. He bought one for Karl, too, but Karl didn't drive, so he bought him a house. Karl occupied one room and let his buddies crash semi-permanently in the others. Martin sent him care packages regularly and twittered nervously for news on every new gadget Karl reinvented for Martin's little box of fabrication.
The year was now Two Thousand and Ten and the retail chains were starting to get the message. The Print 3D! Plus required cartridges of raw materials that came in a powder form to be melted and hardened by the laser beam, and these had to be replaced periodically. Wal-Mart was already devoting a hundred square feet per store to these cartridges, and was considering the probability they'd have to add more. Martin's little machine was now capable of sintering harder metals into larger blocks, and that meant it was capable of producing objects with more durability. The first hammers and screwdrivers made with the Print 3D! were brittle and shattered easily, but Martin was hiring every chemical engineer he could lure out of college, and that, along with many other small little problems, began to disappear one by one.
It was 2014 when comfortable fabrics and better color control were perfected, and Wal-Mart was in a cold sweat. It was devoting a third of every store to the Print 3D! and its accessories, cartridges, books, videos, software and “recipes”. In the summer of 2014 no fewer than twelve different fashions came and went as teenagers would Fabricate one wardrobe-worth of clothes, and then rush out to buy fiber refills to Fabricate the next fashionable thing that came over the Internet. Wal-Mart saw its clothes revenue drop precipitously, held their breath for a month, then let it out slowly as cartridge sales rose to fill the gap, and then some. The executives held meetings and argued, came out of the meetings and told the press they were confident of long-term profitability. After all, Martin Phillip was simplifying their product line for them. What could be bad about that?
Martin Phillip, megabillionaire, chewed his nails habitually and stood in the middle of the shopping mall on Christmas Eve Two Thousand and Twenty, balancing on one foot and trying to think of a gift to get for his wife. The top two floors of the mall had been closed off for two years, now, and were being remodeled as a 31-screen movie theater. All around him were arts-n-crafts stores, jewelry stores, and a chocolatier who had expanded three stores left and right to become a chocolate supermarket. Gift giving had become impossible in the last six years, and most people just bought jewelry and chocolates these days, since the Print 3D! Advance—their fourth generation Fabricator—couldn't yet Fabricate real gemstones, and its foodstuff still tasted wrong. He'd already buried his wife in jewelry, and she weighed 230 lbs, and she said if she saw another Genuine Authentic Hand Made From Real Wood carving she'd file for divorce.
All the priests were thrilled, as the commercial angle of Christmas was slowly being eroded away. Every town now had a Wal Mart, which was also the supermarket, and small plaza nearby with some jewelry, chocolate, and arts-n-crafts stores. You went to Wal-Mart and bought your Fabricator and some cartridges, then you bought food and went home. If you needed blankets, you'd Fabricate them. If you needed clothes, you'd Fabricate them. If you needed a new refrigerator, you'd go back to Wal-Mart and rent the use of one of their giant Fabricators to Fabricate a refrigerator. If you wanted a car...
Martin drove home in his brand new (this week) Fabricated Jaguar S-type and bought a bouquet of roses from Floral Depot (second floor, Floral Arrangements For Her department, open 'til midnight) on the way. Edina was understanding and hugged him and kissed him and said it was the thought that counted, and then she had the maid put the roses in a Fabricated Ming vase, water them from a Fabricated watering can, and placed them in the center of the Fabricated dining room table. As they sat down for dinner, Martin's Fabricated in-ear Hobert cellphone went off.
“It's Donald at the lab, I think we've just made that breakthrough you were looking for.”
Martin excused himself from the table and dashed out of the door.
The cartridges were the biggest problem. For a start, you needed to have a separate compartment in each cartridge for each basic material, be it fibrous, soft metal, hard metal, soft plastic, hard plastic, semiconductor, insulator, glass, ceramic, or whatever. They were big and heavy and the more complex the thing you wanted to Fabricate, the more materials had to be stocked by the cartridge, so they got wider and wider to hold more compartments.
Competition was also starting to be a problem again. Applied Thermodynamics had always been monkeys on his back, but now they were filching good engineers from his team, keeping up with each innovation he managed to make, and even exceeding his own best models. The effect was a rapidly decreasing profit margin. What's worse, both of them were making refill cartridges that were interchangeable with his own, and beating his price on them.
Donald Topper, a bright star in the realm of particle physics, was showing Martin Phillip a window into a chamber in a laboratory. All Martin could see was a rod of carbon being attacked by what looked like a thin jet of plasma meeting it head-on. The carbon rod was being vaporized, and on the other side of the chamber, away from the point of vaporization, a glassy substance was condensing on the chamber wall.
“It's alchemy,” Donald whispered to an awed, fingernail nibbling and half-balanced Martin, “it's fucking alchemy!”
The new process put a tiny nuclear reactor in everybody's home. Rods of carbon went in one end, and out the other came any element you wanted. It was late November of 2026. It had taken Martin's team just under six years to make the reaction safe and to produce nearly all the elements in the Periodic Rainbow. These elements then had to be stitched together, atom by atom, compound by compound, molecule by molecule, into the tissues and structures that made up a Fabricated object. Martin was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and booze again, but as the products passed government tests and began shipping, Martin was in the most optimistic of moods.
The day after Thanksgiving he and his team held a press conference to announce the new machine.
“You say this new Alchemizer can take anything as its source of raw material?” Asked a reporter.
Donald, standing by Martin's side, nodded. “The conversion process is much cleaner and more efficient with carbon, though, so that's what we recommend. Although you could recycle Fabricated objects, you'll have to clean residue out of the Alchemy chamber more frequently.”
“Any source of carbon?” the TV reporter pressed.
Donald and Martin looked at each other and shrugged, “well, there is one type that works well and is particularly cheap and easy to obtain these days, especially since the conversion to Nuclear power in 2018,” and they told them what it was.
Everyone was dreading another impossible gift shopping season that year. Applied Thermodynamics had solved the heat-and-pressure problem involved with making jemstones, so the jewelers were rapidly going out of business, and Martin himself had sheparded the discovery of a new mathematical model of the human tongue that made Fabricated food taste good, so the chocolatiers were fast disappearing, too. Almost everybody employed in that day were either in the information and services business, or were designing new Recipes for Fabrication, or they were in the Authenticity industry, or they drew their paycheck from Wal Mart.
After the news conference, a bunch of people around the world got the same idea at once, told it to their friends, who had a giggle and told it to their friends. Soon it was spread all around the world, and everyone with a Fabricator—fifth generation or not—groaned and rolled their eyes at the idea, but admitted it was probably the only thing to do, given the circumstances.
And so in the year 2026, everybody got coal in their stockings for Christmas.
(These are discovered in real-time and sorted by newest first. See how to get listed.)
Have a response to something said on this page? Want others to see it after reading this article? This page can detect where a visitor is coming from and provide a permanent link back to it that all other visitors can see. Link to this article from the page where you've posted your response, and a reciprocal link to your page will be made automatically and for free.
More information is available for this service and even how to make individual paragraphs link back to you
All material published at this site, unless otherwise indicated, is Copyright © 2000 - 2004 Synesmedia, Inc. All rights reserved. No reproductions in any media are permitted without written and electronically signed permission from Synesmedia, Inc. Disenchanted occasionally features references to real people, companies and products for the purpose of satire.
Disenchanted is published by Synesmedia, Inc. Synesmedia also publishes Interchange Techniques