Graphics Reference
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Printcrime
22
A futuristic excerpt from
Overclocked: Stories of the
Future Present
.
W
RITTEN
BY
C
ORY
D
OCTOROW
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 supple-
ments, metabolic boosters. The kind of
things that cost a fortune over the counter,
the kind of things 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 any-
thing 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 puri-
fier unit over the window. My tweetybird es-
caped 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. All the
while a spokesman told the world that my
Da's organized-crime bootlegging opera-
The coppers smashed my father's printer
when I was 8. 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.
