Hieroglyph (33 page)

STORY NOTES
—Cory Doctorow

Some of the early conversations around this story took place on the Project Hieroglyph website in the “Remote Stereolunagraphy” forum, and with Mark Ganter, co-director of the Open 3D Printing Lab at the University of Washington. Thank you to Jekan Thanga and Katie Levinson for technical feedback. Thank you to Bre Pettis for suggesting the idea in the first place! Thank you to Esther Dyson for getting me involved with
Hieroglyph
. Thank you to Liminal Labs, my Burning Man campmates.

FORUM DISCUSSION—REMOTE STEREOLUNAGRAPHY:
Materials and Engineering

Cory Doctorow, Neal Stephenson, and other Hieroglyph community members tackle some of the engineering and storytelling challenges of lunar 3D printing at hieroglyph.asu.edu/the-gadget.

TECHNICAL PAPER
—
Lunar Regolith Sorting

Read a technical paper from NASA's Microgravity University on sifting lunar regolith at hieroglyph.asu.edu/the-gadget.

TECHNICAL PAPER
—
First Demonstration on Direct Laser Fabrication of Lunar Regolith Parts

Check out a 2013 article from the peer-reviewed
Rapid Prototyping Journal
evaluating the feasibility of fabricating buildings, tools, and parts from lunar and Martian regolith at hieroglyph.asu.edu/the-gadget.

JOHNNY APPLEDRONE VS. THE FAA

Lee Konstantinou

HE DIED UNDER A
Wyoming summer sky, high and blue and marbled with clouds, his interns at his side, just like he would have wanted. Fire nibbled at his rehabbed Volkswagen Westfalia Camper and then swallowed it whole. Its propane gas tank farted, rhythmic, and a tree of black smoke grew with mean leisure into the afternoon. Cars and trucks self-drove down I-80, swerving to avoid the hard heat. Another day, another domestic drone strike. Charlotte took my hand.

“Is this really how it had to end?” I asked.

She said, “He always predicted it would.”

“It's my fault.”

“We're all partly to blame, Arun.”

The other interns looked at us, not wanting to believe Charlotte, but it was true. Still, I had played a special part. My gullibility gave the fucking FAA the opening that it needed. Most likely, anyway. We're still not sure what happened that day. He never told us his real name, never told us anything straight. Everyone called him Johnny Appledrone. The man was a fanatic, possibly crazy, but he finally won me over. He helped me see the world with new eyes.

An orange Fire Drone flew in low, its bladder swollen with chemical retardant.

JOHNNY APPLEDRONE WASN'T INNOCENT.
Like all good gurus, he roped you in when you were vulnerable. I wasn't at my best when I met him. I'd earned my worthless social media certification from WCC Facebook Extension and sat on my sad unemployed ass for six months after that. No one wanted to hire a twenty-four-year-old social media grad. I was the first in my family to get something more than a gen ed certification, so I was a little proud. I was reluctant to take work that I thought was beneath me. Jobber, my job-counseling app, kept telling me that we lived in a new economy.

“The newest economy ever!” is actually what he said, dealing poisonous megadoses of algorithmic cheer.

The app came so highly recommended that Maa bought me a year's subscription on her precarious credit line. Jobber was a cartoon beaver, someone's symbol of hard work. “You gotta brand yourself, Arun,” he advised me daily, “become a self-starting freelancer.” On his advice, I consulted for free a couple times, helping local bands with their social strategy, but creatives are jerks when filling out Reputation Reports. You spend three hours customizing a promotional font, and then they suddenly decide they dislike it or blame you for printing costs.

“It's a vicious cycle, Jobber.” I'd gotten into the habit of talking with him late at night, using him off label as a therapist. “If I keep working for free, everyone'll expect me to keep working for free. If I don't, I'll still get nothing.”

“I understand you're frustrated, Arun. I hear it in your voice. But in my heart I know you'll find a paying client. Would you like to hear positive testimonials from other social media consultants whose Jobber profiles resemble yours?”

“No, I'm fine.”

“I believe in you, Arun. I see your tremendous potential. My advanced analytics tell me you're not the quitting type.”

I put Jobber into sleep mode, tears of frustration—and, okay, maybe gratitude—in my eyes. After two years learning frameworks and platforms that were already obsolete, I felt cooked. Living with my parents and sisters in Casper, I slept in every day, drank too much, and smoked up more frequently than was advisable with friends from my old gen ed playgroup, who were, like me, “structurally unemployed.” But then one day, I woke up. I felt a fire inside. It wasn't anything particular that lit me up. I just realized that Jobber was right. At bottom, I wasn't the quitting type. I'd take anything, I swore. No matter how low the work, or how little it paid. You have to start somewhere, right? That's what Jobber told me, anyway.

I WORKED EIGHT-HOUR NIGHT
shifts, six days a week, making sure BigMachine worked right. It was two hours from home, and it paid shit, but it was a job. The rambling complex was off I-80, a rest stop and Amazon-UPS droneport franchise. You could sometimes catch sight of mechanics in silhouette, quadcopters, tiny zeppelins, and fixed-wing aircraft taking off, landing nonstop. On my side of BigMachine, rigs came in, gassed up, loaded and unloaded cargoes. Truckers, ranging from chunky to obese, drank, ransacked vending machines, in search of diverting calories. Everything at BigMachine was automatic. Well, almost everything. Occasionally, a hose tangled up, an unusually big rat would die in the bathroom, a trucker would collapse drunk on a snooker table with a mighty thud, or a stray drone jammed up with bird poop would drop from the sky. I did what little the robots couldn't, a poorly paid ghost in the machine.

The bosses knew me only as a data plot on their management dashboards. Never met or spoke to me. My time was mostly open, as long as hoses behaved, spindly Lucite robot bartenders got orders right, temperamental vending machines belched out their goods to hungry shoppers, and drunken truckers didn't get too violent. Dimethyl ether fueled trucks; alcohol, people. My consulting career was a nonstarter, so I paid a big chunk of my new income, and burned through my extra time, retraining. Took classes in Microsoft Ampersand and then Iterated C, both at home and during work hours. When classes depressed me too much, I sometimes watched serials, but I never had much love for entertainment media.

Mostly, I was an eyewitness to the end of the age of the truckers. They told me that their days were numbered now that their rigs were mostly automatic. In the beginning, because robot trucks increased total trucking volume, truckers actually got
more
work. More trucks meant more legally mandated drivers, manning machines in case of trouble. But robotrucks became more reliable, and corporate lobbyists gathered in Washington. The law couldn't last. Truckers would eventually have to be sacrificed on the economy's automating altar.

I sympathized with them, though my sympathy wasn't entirely pure-hearted. If the truckers
liked
me—not just BigMachine, but
me
as an individual cog of that machine—my performance scores went up, my evals would reflect those scores, and I'd make a bit more money. So though I saw myself in them, those doomed truckers, though they found me genial enough to tell me their troubles, though they liked me enough to
like
me, I was, basically, whoring myself out for tips. And good at it.

I was surrounded by friendly folk all night, every night, but Big-Machine was a lonely place. I stopped talking to Jobber, ignored his increasingly urgent messages as my one-year subscription expired. It felt awful, like abandoning a real friend, like Jobber
missed
me, but I just couldn't face him. He reminded me of the person I once said I wanted to be.

EVERY HEAD IN THE
bar turned. The truckers were too confused to catcall. Kneeling in a corner, rescuing a reckless cleanbot, I forgot to breathe. When you spend the better part of six months hanging out with cranky middle-aged men, when you haven't talked to a woman your own age for the better part of a year, that's how you might react, too. Charlotte Wong came into BigMachine in full intern regalia: blue pleated pants, crisp white shirt, shoes with gold buckles, leather satchel under her arm. Her black bob shone fluorescently. I knew who she had to be. I-80 often gossiped about Johnny Appledrone.

Johnny was a
dronepunk
. His custom Volkswagen Camper drove up and down the interstate. Its ruined chassis had been replaced with fabbed hard plas. It had a custom sensor and control pack, which did an okay job at driving the vehicle, though sometimes the system rebooted unexpectedly, and the Camper veered off the road. Johnny was too busy to drive it himself. Was always tinkering in his mobile workshop, tweaking custom code for CAD freeware, making local-brew fabricator feedstock, building and refining drone prototypes, adding to forums, thousands of words a night, they said, spinning drone philosophy with the world community of dronepunks. If you were lucky, you'd see one of his small batches, freshly fabbed, rising from his open moon roof. They looked like hummingbirds, like butterflies, like largish cockroaches, sometimes like flying Wiffle balls, but they were basically airborne router/servers, designed to form mesh networks with like-minded devices.

© 2013, Haylee Bolinger / ASU

He was an engineer and an artist, already a legend, to some a hero, to the FAA a menace to the national airspace, which had in the last year become the site of a low-grade war between the agency and those who refused to obey its mandates. No warrant had yet been issued for his arrest. He'd lawyered up pretty good, the ACLU at his back. But the consensus was he couldn't walk free for long. Johnny was a hippie loser, the truckers said, but
whoo-whee!
those girls of his? Johnny's lovely interns? They dressed all Wall Street, were routed to him through the ACLU's pipeline, were committed to
this that or the other thing,
but still, wow. Man had some kind of thing for left-wing yuppie ladies.

“The vending machine,” Charlotte said, nervous, which made me nervous.

“What seems to be, you know, the trouble?”

“It . . . It's better if I show you.”

I said, “My name's Arun, by the way.”

“What?”

“My name . . .”

“Charlotte,” she said. “It's a mess. The machine, I mean. It told me you could help.”

I FRIENDED HER, DEAR
no-nonsense Charlotte. She was a New York City charter-school girl who, by way of Yale and then an ACLU paralegal job, had found Johnny, deferring admission to Columbia Law's certification program to support his mission. Through her, I met the others. All told similar stories: bubbly Beatrice (Wesleyan), Sandy of the Perpetual Smirk (Vassar), gentle Zara (Brown), and then, when Zara lost her faith, icy Petra (Oberlin). Whenever Johnny's entourage came through BigMachine, usually just the Camper and a support vehicle or two, Charlotte made a point to stop in, say hi, fab skim lattes for the crew. Johnny himself never left the purple Camper. I saw his browned hands once, carpal tunnel braced, reaching out from the side of the van to take his latte and a bag of Extra Calorie Yum-E Pretzel Chips. His dreaded beard was momentarily visible, as if floating free of his face, and in that moment I imagined him as the love child of a sadhu monk and a survivalist Santa Claus.

Charlotte mostly (well, okay,
only
) talked about Johnny's mission. I'd heard about the Drone Commons from the truckers, but she taught me how it worked. Ordinary computers, ordinary networks—that is, the mediasphere—they're filtered end to end. You run illegal encryption software, say, or watch a movie without paying, and your phone knows, and the network you're on knows, and the platform you're using knows, and the servers those platforms are running on know, and soon enough the U.S. Department of Intellectual Property Protection, the National Security Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation know. So you just don't do it, run the software or steal the movie, I mean, however tempting. The system isn't 100 percent foolproof, but it works well enough as a deterrent to illegal activity. The feds can always shut down the physical network if there's real trouble, like they did during that anti-Marriott strike two years ago in Chicago, whose organizers were using illegal encryption to organize the picket line.

On the Drone Commons, by contrast, nothing's filtered. No one owns it exactly, or you could say everyone owns it. It's just out there. Anyone can add devices to it as long as they follow the
Staskowski burst transfer protocol
. You need a special device to use it, since hacking a locked phone is a Class E felony. But it isn't hard to find open devices, Charlotte said, showing me hers (it looked like an ordinary phone), as long as it's made from a legal fabricator. And though it was technically illegal for someone to sell open fabricators, there were hobbyist loopholes, which the dronepunk community exploited.