Overclocked

Overclocked
Cory Doctorow

--
Printcrime
When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth
Anda's Game
I, Robot
I, Row-Boat
After the Siege
--
Forematter:
This story is part of Cory Doctorow's 2007 short story collection
"Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present," published by Thunder's
Mouth, a division of Avalon Books. It is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, about
which you'll find more at the end of this file.
This story and the other stories in the volume are available at:
http://craphound.com/overclocked
You can buy Overclocked at finer bookstores everywhere, including
Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560259817/downandouti
nt-20
In the words of Woody Guthrie:
"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085,
for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our
permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a
dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it,
that's all we wanted to do."
Overclocked is dedicated to Pat York, who made my stories better.
--
Introduction to Printcrime:
Printcrime came out of a discussion I had with a friend who'd been to
hear a spokesman for the British recording industry talk about the
future of "intellectual property." The record exec opined the recording
industry's great and hysterical spasm would form the template for a
never-ending series of spasms as 3D printers, fabricators and rapid
prototypers laid waste to every industry that relied on trademarks or
patents.
My friend thought that, as kinky as this was, it did show a fair amount
of foresight, coming as it did from the notoriously technosqueamish
record industry.
I was less impressed.
It's almost certainly true that control over the production of
trademarked and patented objects will diminish over the coming years
of object-on-demand printing, but to focus on 3D printers' impact on
*trademarks* is a stupendously weird idea.
It's as if the railroad were looming on the horizon, and the most
visionary thing the futurists of the day can think of to say about it is

that these iron horses will have a disastrous effect on the hardworking
manufacturers of oat-bags for horses. It's true, as far as it goes, but it's
so tunnel-visioned as to be practically blind.
When Nature magazine asked me if I'd write a short-short story for
their back-page, I told them I'd do it, then went home, sat down on the
bed and banged this one out. They bought it the next morning, and we
were in business.
--
Printcrime
(Originally published in Nature Magazine, January 2006)
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 thing that cost a fortune over the
counter; the kind of thing 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,
while a spokesman told the world that my Da's organized-crime
bootlegging operation had been responsible for at least twenty 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 peeping poor 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