Gadgets

      I’ve been a Service Engineer, working on 3D printers since I finished my apprenticeship in 2015. I was a little green at first and had to suffer the usual Newbie tricks like swapping a UV resin for the base starch mix so producing rock hard objects rather than the programmed choc chip muffins. I got over all this nonsense and saw myself as a true professional who could sort out most problems from my home, using the print anywhere ® software my Company had developed, in a very short time.

      Part of my job was selling and installing upgrades – I enjoyed this part, mainly because I got sales commission but also I enjoy supplying customers with what they want. Most of our income comes from the materials we supply which is why the printers themselves are so cheap. It is the same system that was used in the 20^th century when companies would almost give the 2D printers away to get the sales of the ink cartridges. We don’t supply ink of course but a range of material flasks that allow the printers to produce anything from the choc chip muffins I talked about earlier, through engineering parts for cars and home appliances, prosthetic body parts to bespoke doseage pills of any drug you can imagine. You buy a prescription over the internet then feed the code into the printer and out pops the pills.

      Some clever guys started modifying the software so they could turn out the other type of drugs but we easily stopped that by inserting a couple of lines of code in the Bios that added a sneeze inducing chemical to the mix so anyone with a sneezing fit was automatically arrested. The cold and flu viruses had, of course, been wiped out in 2017 so there was no danger of an innocent cold sufferer getting imprisioned.

      I went to the annual sales conference in 2018, at the Bristol Centre. We were shown the new temporal chip® that had been developed exclusively for our range of printers by our in-house tech guys. It was a very clever idea and did exactly what they said it would. I know this because I saw several demos. Our Company now had a Unique Selling Point – the world’s first true 4D printer.

      ‘So what?’ I hear you ask, ‘Any 3d printer can produce any item you want so what’s the use of  the extra vector in space-time?’

      A good question that has an interesting answer.

      Everything wears out eventually, right? So therefore you design each item with a dimension along this fourth vector – in other words each item you produce on your printer will have a built in life. This is ideal for food of course as you can set the shelf life so the product diappears just before the goes off and becomes unfit to eat. ( This system struggled with some French cheeses… )  This facility can also be used for many engineering materials. You can make car ignition keys that disappear a week after the MOT is due so that a car cannot miss it’s due date. The chip is remotely programmed from DVLC at Swansea so that there is no cheating. Aircraft throttle levers have a similar system so that the engines cannot be run up to full power if they are due for an overhaul. There are inumerable possibilities like that so our printers were starting to make the world a safer place using our Limited-Life technology®.

      Every silver lining has a cloud however and they certainly started turning up. If all these items disappeared as soon as they reached the end of their design life, where did they go? Unfortunately that is a null question because the answer is that they disappeared into their future. But what about the other part of the vector I hear you ask, what about the dimension in the future direction? That, of course depends on the original setting in the source programme. Some careless programmers had set this dimension to a very small value so, for example, after a car key had disappeared as planned, it was likely to turn up again at some random time in the near future. As for the place, that would be where it disappeared from so keys started appearing in mid air in all sorts of inconvenient places and even more inconvenient times. I think you can probably imagine some of those and the chaos it caused…

      Then there was another breakthrough by George Dirac who was working in the temporal development lab. He is a maths wizard who was playing with imaginary numbers one day – you know the ones –‘operator j for example which is the square root of minus one and has the effect of rotating vectors through 180^o around the y axis.           Anyway, he was trying out different equations for the patented algorhythms we use when he had a eureka moment. He changed the polarity of the fourth vector by incorporating j in the algorhhythm equation. This had the effect of keeping the vector dimension the same but reversing it’s effect. Rather than objects being produced on the printer and then lasting for a finite time in the future, they now travelled to the past. Young George had invented a time machine!

      He quickly got some techs to build a suitable printer. He placed a choc chip muffin on it and pressed the ‘start’ button. We all watched in amazement as the muffin slowly dematerialised and the materials flasks started filling up.

      Everyone crowded round George, shook his hand and congratulated him but I had a thought, ‘what about the application of this technology? I could see it being the end of our Company. I was right – it goes something like this.

      A customer buys one of our new 4D reverse temporal® printers, which we sell at a loss to get the future sales of the base materials. The customer goes home and makes all sort of things that he thinks he needs. He runs out of materials, but instead of ordering some more, he puts some of his new gizmos that he has found that he doesn’t really need on the printer and operates it in reverse mode. His material flasks fill up and he can now make some new gizmos, that he thinks he needs more than the old ones.

      This was great for our green credentials as all items produced on our printers could be recycled indefinitely. The problem was that the sales of our base materials rapidly dropped to near zero.

      We reduced the orders to our suppliers in line with our sales and they reduced the orders to the mining companies and farmers in line with their sales to us. The mines shut down, the farmers went bankrupt, the transport companies folded, the taxes dries up so hospitals and schools had to be closed, the economy went into deep recession and unemployment soared.

      What happened to our Company I hear you ask?

We couldn’t sell any base materials now so we tried putting the price of the printers up and selling those at a profit instead. Didn’t work – I am sure you know why?

      Our customers were scouring the old landfill sites, collecting any old junk, as long as it had been made on one of our printers, taking it home and reverse printing to get the materials but then…

      George Dirac had set himself up as a freelance software engineer ( hacker ). He had reverse engineered the source code to make our printers and was selling this to anyone so our ex customers could now print their own printers.

And what did I do?

      I took delivery of a top of the range printer, in lieu of my redundancy settlement and set up as a shoe repairer. People would come into my shop with a scruffy pair of shoes and the original software. I’d take the shoes, put them them through the printer to recover the materials, modify the software to change the design to the latest fashion and then reprint them. Bingo! A pair of brand new shoes in the latest style. I also trimmed down the materials used by about 10% so after recycling ten pairs of shoes, I had enough to make a new pair which cost me nothing, also in the latest style.

      Well, everyone has to make a living and Tempus Fugit…