by Jerry Oltion

* * * *

The Latest Thing may not be what you think....

The tinkle of the bell caught Rick by surprise. It had been hours since anyone had come into his store. He’d cleaned and dusted the shelves so many times in the last few weeks that there was nothing left to do, so he had settled in behind the cash register with a Discover magazine and had happily lost himself in an article about nanofabrication units. Apparently they were the wave of the future in retail.

His customer was a gray-haired man in his late fifties or so, round-nosed and red-cheeked from the cold. Five-eleven by the measure on the doorframe. Rick didn’t know why he still checked; the police would look at the video rather than trust his estimate if the guy turned out to be a robber. Old habits were hard to break, though.

The gray-haired man looked over at Rick, then around at the shop. What does he see? Rick wondered. A neighborhood convenience store with character or a cluttered mess of outdated junk?

The customer headed for the personal hygiene aisle. Probably staying at the Holiday Inn just down the block, forgot his toothbrush or deodorant, and didn’t want to pay the hotel shop’s outrageous prices.

Rick turned back to his magazine. Nanofabs. A single unit could churn out anything from electronics to a two-by-four. Anything that had a digital template, anyway, but practically every new product was being introduced digitally as well as traditionally. The process hadn’t been certified for food yet, but that was sure to come. Nanufactured products were identical to the original template right down to the molecular level. A block of cheese was a block of cheese, whether the carbon and the hydrogen went through a cow or a fab.

Rick wondered if this technology could make small stores competitive again. If he could buy templates and pay the same royalty as Wal-Mart, then he could sell products for the same price and reap the same profit. No shipping costs or price gouging for low volume. And no inventory sitting idle on shelves for months at a stretch. One guy with a nanofab could sell every product in the world out of a store no bigger than his largest item.

Well, okay, you’d need a raw materials tank. You could get carbon and oxygen out of the air—and help cut global warming in the process—and hydrogen and more oxygen from the water tap, but you’d need iron and silicon and who knew what else. That’s where the small shop owner would still be at a disadvantage, but it was a much smaller disadvantage than what he faced now. Or maybe it would be no problem at all. There was, after all, a dumpster in back.

He looked up as the customer approached. Toothbrush. Make that toothbrushes. The guy must be buying for an entire family. And he was definitely from the hotel: he still wore a badge on his jacket that said, “Hi, my name is:” with “Gary” written in bold Sharpie in the white box.

“Find everything you need?” Rick asked.

“Did I!” said Gary. “You have any idea how hard these are to find anymore?”

Rick took a brush from his outstretched hand. Reach, medium, compact head. It had purple rubber grippy lines running up the handle. “Looks like the same thing I’ve been carrying for years,” he said.

“Better stock up, then,” Gary said. “Because I haven’t seen one in a store for quite a while. I think the company’s quit makin’ ‘em. Toothbrushes nowadays are all fancy, with wear indicators and bristles sticking out every which way. And twice as big. Ever notice how everything has gotten fatter in the last few years?”

“Tell me about it,” Rick said. “I’ve had to change my shelving to accommodate it.”

Gary set his hoard of toothbrushes on the counter. Four of them. Rick rang them up and the guy paid cash, which Rick ran through the counterfeit scanner before counting out his change. He wondered what would happen if you used a nanofab to make money? It would be the same as the original right down to the molecular level. His scanner wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Except for the serial number. The scanner already checked those against an online database. You’d have to be pretty clever to assign each bill a new number that wasn’t in service somewhere else. Rick wondered if it was even possible to modify a template to that degree, assuming you could get a template for a hundred-dollar bill in the first place. Was there some kind of scanner for solid objects? And maybe a 3D Photoshop program to tweak them after you’d scanned them?

Gary thanked him and headed out the door with his prizes. Rick settled in to read the rest of the article. He got through the whole thing without another interruption.

* * * *

Six months later a gleaming new nanofabrication unit filled the front half of his store. The racks of magazines and shampoo and toothbrushes had all gone into the back, soon to wind up in the raw materials hopper if things went according to plan. It was a gamble, but with business down so much, he hadn’t really had much choice. Now he could sell a pair of shoes or a TV or a case of paper for the same price as anybody else. His corner shop wasn’t just a convenience store anymore, it was a convenient store, right downtown but offering the same deals as the box stores out in the boonies.

All that remained of the old store were the food and beverages. Those still weren’t approved for duplication. Apparently it had something to do with farm subsidies and milk price supports, though Rick suspected those would go the way of the dodo soon enough.

In the meantime he was doing a brisk business in, well, just about everything. The novelty of it probably accounted for the first few weeks of sales, but the convenience and the bargains brought people back. Business grew until the fab was running nonstop, pouring out products as fast as people could punch the buttons and Rick could fill the hopper with raw materials. He couldn’t quite bring himself to toss everything into the bin, so he saved one of each old product, more as a memento than with any hope of selling any of it. Maybe he could put them in a museum someday: the last macro-manufactured products ever made.

He was just about to buy a second fabricator when the first hint of black cloud drifted around his silver lining. A teenage girl keyed in a request for a new phone and hit the “make” button, but instead of the whir of machinery and the hiss of the spray heads, the machine went “ding!” and displayed a message on the control panel: “Template not in database.”

“Er?” Rick said when she showed him the problem. He checked to see if he was connected to the ‘net. If this was the first time anyone had ordered this particular model, then the machine would have to go find the template, which it couldn’t do if the connection was down. But that wasn’t the problem. The machine simply wasn’t able to retrieve the template. Rick spent a frustrating few minutes trying to puzzle out why it couldn’t, eventually losing the teenager out the door before he learned anything.

He stood aside and let the next customer build a wrist TV while he called customer support. It took thirty minutes to get through to someone live, who told him the news: “Your rights package doesn’t include special editions.”

“What do you mean, ‘special editions?’“ Rick asked.

“Special editions are custom releases of new product variants that are keyed to exclusive markets,” the service rep said in a voice that had clearly repeated the same phrase hundreds of times already.

“How do I become one of those markets?” Rick asked.

The answer was just what he expected: “Pay a premium.”

Brilliant. Rick checked his contract, and then he called a lawyer, only to learn that the distributors had him by the short hairs. He had the legal right to sell any “standard” product in the database, but nothing required a company to put new products in that database.

“It’s planned obsolescence,” the lawyer explained. “You didn’t really think new technology would change that, did you?”

“I did,” Rick admitted. “Because the advertising for the nanofab made it sound like it would.” He felt himself blush as he said it.

“Caveat vendor,” said the lawyer.

Over the next few months, it seemed like every product had a “New!” and “Improved!” variant that was available only at Wal-Mart or Freddie’s or Costco. Rick watched his clientele dwindle and debated subscribing to a premium service, but he couldn’t afford the top tier and nothing less would keep him competitive.

He had a moment of temptation when he caught a group of teenagers using the fab to build a music player that he knew wasn’t in the database. He suspected something the moment they came in, six boys who went into a huddle around the control panel to hide what they were doing. Rick let them get far enough into it for the machine to start up, then walked over and said, “Hi, guys. What’cha making?”

“MiPod,” one of the kids said.

“I didn’t know the old ones were still popular,” Rick said.

About then the machine spit out the player. Rick picked it up before any of the kids could. It was a tiny rectangle of iridescent purple metal with swirls of green and silver across the face. Two bright orange ear buds stuck out the top, smaller than a baby’s little finger. The only lettering anywhere on the player simply said “Aiden.”

“Odd brand name,” Rick said. “I haven’t seen that one before.”

One of the kids snickered, and another one punched him quickly in the side.

Rick tapped the power button and the face lit up with a menu. The lettering was too small for him to read easily, but he could see that the player was already filled with song categories. He picked one at random and expanded it. Titles scrolled by for screen after screen.

“Man, preloaded, too,” he said. “The royalties on all those songs must really add up.” He looked at the nanofab’s control panel. The item register said “Aiden MiPod, $24.95.”

“Okay,” Rick said, “Pretty clever, but I can’t let you have this. There must be five hundred bucks worth of music in here alone. I get caught selling stuff like this and I lose my license to fab anything.”

The kids looked at one another nervously. None of them looked at Rick.

“Which one of you is Aiden?”

The one nearest the door bolted for it. The rest of them took off after him, the bell dinging madly in their wake.

Rick pressed the “No sale” tab on the nanofab screen and carried the MiPod back to the checkout counter. He set it there while he called up the last ten minutes of surveillance video and saved it to his off-site backup, then he pulled the ear buds out of their sockets, popped them in his ears, and pressed “Play.” The deafening blast of electric guitar that assaulted him was all the proof he needed: the knock-off player actually worked.

He would bet money that the original was right there in one of those kids’ pockets. They must have figured out how to scan it and upload its template to a product database somewhere and then direct his nanofab to that database. For a moment Rick considered tracking it down in the nanofab’s records and seeing what else was in there, but he quickly sent that notion out the door with the kids.

No, tempting as it might be, he wasn’t going to start pirating stuff just to stay in business.

* * * *

He was reading Discover behind the counter again—a magazine he’d had to buy with his own money in order to fabricate—when the bell startled him. He looked up to see a guy with gray hair, round nose and red cheeks on a slender, late-fiftyish frame. Five eleven. The man looked vaguely familiar, but Rick couldn’t place him. He looked to the side of the store where the personal items used to be, then back at Rick.

“Got any more of those toothbrushes?” he asked.

Toothbrushes. Right. “I probably have one, if you didn’t buy me out last time,” Rick said.

“I didn’t,” the man said. “Although I wanted to. Didn’t seem right, though, to be greedy.”

Rick laughed. “You might be the last person left in America who feels that way. Come on back.” He led the man into the stockroom, now the raw materials room, and over to the shelves of stuff that he hadn’t recycled. He blew the dust off the toothbrush rack and said, “Have at it.”

The man—still wearing a “Gary” name tag—happily dug through them until he found his favorite brand and style. “Last one,” he said, holding it up for Rick to see. “Could be the last one anywhere as far as I know. Seems a shame to use it.”

Rick shrugged. “Better than lettin’ it gather dust.”

“Maybe. I’ll have to wrestle my wife for it, though. We’re both on our last ones from the batch I bought before.”

“You want to stay married, let her win,” Rick said.

Gary laughed. “Smart man.”

Rick waved at the dusty shelves. “Need anything else off the bargain rack?”

He meant it as a joke, but Gary turned back and poked through things for five minutes or so, selecting a package of Bic shavers, some Suave shampoo, and a pack of Handi-wipes. “Can’t get any of this stuff anymore,” he said.

Rick looked through the doorway into the shop where his nanofabrication unit idled, waiting for customers who only wanted the latest thing. “Hold on a second,” he said, and led the way back to the front of the store. “The bastard distributors screwed me on the new products, but I never thought to check about old stuff. What if they packed the database with old products to pad it out so it looked like everything in the world was in there?”

Gary grinned conspiratorially. “Wouldn’t that be too cool!”

It would have been, but alas, when Rick navigated the menu into toothbrushes, all that came up on the screen were the fancy ones with the bells and whistles. One even had a separate “uvula wand,” whatever the heck that was. On the off chance that there was more in the memory bank than showed in the menu, Rick keyed in the make and model of the toothbrush his customer liked, but he only got the now-too-familiar response: “Template not in database.”

“I guess that would have been too easy,” Gary said.

“Yeah, I guess.” Rick looked at the nearly useless—and only partially paid-off—nanofab humming quietly there in his shop and wondered how he could turn this one customer into the horde that had crowded in here just a few months earlier. Or even just the steady trickle that he’d enjoyed years ago, before the big box stores had cut into his customer base so badly.

Well, this guy liked old toothbrushes. There must be more people like him.

“So how do you make a template?” Rick asked.

“I have no idea,” Gary said.

“Me either,” said Rick, “But it can’t be too tough.” He told Gary about the kids who had duplicated the MiPod. “If we can figure out how to do it for other stuff, you’d never have to scrounge in storage rooms for toothbrushes again.”

“Or nice-looking digital watches,” Gary said. “Or toilet paper on regular-sized rolls. Or—”

“Digital watches?” Rick asked.

“You remember when they first came out? They were the coolest things you could get. Timex and Bulova made the most elegant styles, with braided-metal bands and fancy numbers and the whole shebang. Then somebody decided digital was uncool except for sports, so the only decent watch you can buy now is analog. It’s like that with everything. Once the patent runs out, manufacturers drop it like a hot potato and push something else on us. And the only versions of the old stuff you can get afterward are cheap knockoffs that often as not don’t even work.”

“What about trademarks?” Rick asked. “Those don’t expire, do they?”

“Probably not,” Gary said. “So you file off the serial numbers and the brand name before you scan it, and sell it as generic. Or put on the package, ‘Compare to the Reach Advanced Model with Compact Head.’ That not only tells people what it is, but it states straight out that you’re not trying to pawn it off as the original brand, so there’s nothing they can do to stop you.”

Rick laughed. “What do you do for a living?”

“I run seminars on investment strategies. Why?”

“Because you seem to know a lot about patent law.”

Gary shrugged. “I know when a company is vulnerable. And when it’s strong. If you can bring back a bunch of old stuff that people used to like but can’t get anymore, I’ll be buying stock in you.”

Would he really? That was the most encouraging thing Rick had heard for months. Especially because he had a suspicion how he might accomplish it. He nodded toward the toothbrush and razors and shampoo and dishcloths that Gary held in his hands. “If you want to make an investment, then those would be a good place to start.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean leave them with me for a few days. I may be able to get ‘em scanned for you.”

Gary looked at his treasures, then at Rick. Slowly, he laid them down on the counter, then took out his wallet and extracted a business card. “That’s my cell number,” he said. “I’m at the Hilton until Friday. Call me if you get ‘em in time. Call me at home if you don’t, but call me.”

“Will do,” Rick said, hoping he would have something positive to report. He only had one lead, and a tenuous one to boot, but at least it was a lead.

* * * *

After Gary left, Rick printed a still from the surveillance movie of the kids who had made the knock-off MiPod, posted it on the front door with a sign that said, “Aiden, call me, no questions asked,” and waited for the grapevine to do its thing. He expected it to take a day or two for word to spread, but within an hour he noticed a girl pause at the door on her way in to buy a pack of gum, and about ten minutes later his phone rang.

“What do you want?” a boy’s voice said, trying to sound tough.

“I want to offer you a job,” Rick said.

“I got one.”

“This is a better one.” Rick explained the deal.

“You want me to scan toothbrushes and shit?” Aiden asked contemptuously.

“That’s right. Anything that’s in the public domain. You get a royalty on every one I sell.”

That got his attention. “How much?”

Rick laughed. “Hell, I don’t know. We’re breaking new ground here. You’re the computer genius, or you must know someone who is. Set up a website for public-domain products and charge what you think the market will bear.”

Aiden took a minute to think it over. “Toothbrushes,” he said.

“And anything else you used to like but can’t get anymore,” Rick said. He took a shot in the dark and added, “Your first iPhone. A classic Game Boy. A skateboard with wheels.”

“Oh,” said Aiden.

Rick smiled. Oh, yeah.

He looked up when the bell rang. Gary. And half a dozen other people from his convention, by the name tags. They all started talking at once. “Can you get me an incandescent light bulb?” “. . . slide film?” “. . . a Mac Cube?” “. . . a real Coke?”

Rick held up his hands. “Not yet. But if we can find an original anywhere, then yes, I can.”

They left business cards with him. Promised to send their last remaining treasures to him for scanning. Offered to pay up front. The list of items they wanted topped 100 by the time they stopped brainstorming and went back to the convention.

After they had gone, Rick went to his computer and printed out a sign for the front window: “Old and Unimproved. Whatever you can’t get anymore, Coming Soon!”

Then he sat back to wait for the tide to turn.