THE CUSTODIAN

A small, spry man, he pats his belly and tells me of his recent weight loss. "Infinite food, and I'm eating less than ever," he laughs.

Though gray-haired, he appears younger than his 52 years—it's something in the eyes.

When told of the rumors surrounding him and his family, those eyes flash and he turns boastful.

Hell yeah, I stole one.

These people have no sense, man. You would think– I mean, these are people who are gonna be smart about security, right? They spent all this money on their bunker. Easily eleven, twelve different levels of security to get through before you get into the room where they kept the reps. Nobody got through unless they were vetted upside down and inside out.

Nobody except me—the fucking janitor. They took me for granted. Just didn't worry about me.

I worked alongside these people every day for five years. Coming in, taking out their used coffee cups. Never once did anyone say hello, or ask how I was doing. A few times, I'd say some shit like "good morning" to them. They wouldn't say anything back. Like they couldn't even see me.

To them, I was a non-person, not worth responding to, not worth looking at.

I'll tell you something else they never looked at—the paystub they were giving me. Twelve bucks an hour, man. To be a janitor at the most secure lab in the country.

And they really thought I wouldn't steal a rep, given the chance? Come on.

I'll tell you what it is. It's these libertarian math-and-science types, man. They're all about "market-based solutions" for everything, even shit they should've figured out on their own, if they spent two seconds thinking about it. It never occurred to them that if you're going to trust somebody with access to top-secret technology, you may want to pay him more than what "the janitorial market" might normally dictate.

I was making, like, $25,000 a year, pre-tax, in a suburb close to San Francisco. My wife was on a teacher's salary, too. That was better than my take-home, but not by much. Think I could afford my rent? Hell no. I couldn't even afford to feed my family, man. But hey, at least they gave me a fancy title: Custodial Affairs Lead. That made me feel much better.

So there I am, inside the lab, day-in-and-day-out, wiping the floors. Picking up, like, Starbucks cups and shit. Putting 'em in a bag and taking em out. Janitor stuff. And I'm walking right around these precious machines worth millions of dollars.

These guys, the scientists, they're like, "Holy shit Frank, this is gonna change everything!" And, "We're gonna end world hunger with this, Bob."

All while I'm right there next to them, cleaning up their shit. I'm skipping two out of three meals a day just so I can afford rent, and they're jerking each other off nonstop about how they're the planet's greatest heroes.

So when did you decide to take one?

It never really was a conscious decision.

I guess… I had thought about it. Dreamed about what it would be like. Not to take it, you know. But just to have one. Like, if Alphacorp got around to putting them on the market. Maybe one day I'd be able to afford it, and then I could print some nice steaks for me and the wife. Some wine. Maybe a decent cake for once, for my daughter's birthday. Or something healthier, I don't know.

What do you make for kids that's healthy, if you can make anything? Wouldn't you just always eat steak and cake? See, this is the kind of shit I'd think about while cleaning the lab.

But nah– I never did think seriously about stealing one. I'm no thief, you know? Wasn't raised that way. But... one night, the perfect opportunity arose.

It was St. Patrick's day, and there was an office party. Lotta drinking. These guys were partying like it was their last night on earth. Blackout drunk, some of them. Grown men, department heads. Smart men, you'd think. But half a dozen drinks in, they started getting less smart.

A couple of them decided to go down to the lab. Just drunk as hell. Started making cocktails on one of the damn things. Getting more drunk. And finally one of them throws up all over the lab floor. Just blows chunks. People are slipping and falling in it. The director's wife has vomit all over her dress. Absolute mess.

Up until that point I was just hanging around in the custodial lounge waiting for the party to end, but I got the call that they really needed somebody to clean the lab, STAT.

So I go down there with my mop and my bucket, and everybody is scrambling out of the place. They all get out, and I'm about to start cleaning when I realize that the machine is still sitting out. It's on a table in the middle of the room, and I'm alone with a rep.

Was it normal for them to be left out like that?

No way. They usually locked them up in this big fancy box. Multiple layers of locks and keypads and shit to get through before you get it out, because you don't want it getting contaminated.

So yeah, this thing was just, like, out there. No locks on it. No keypads to get through. None of that shit. And... I don't know what it was, man. I didn't think about it, really. I just emptied out my mop bucket, dried it out a little bit, and put the rep in the bucket. I had the mop on top, kind of hiding it, you know?

You were able to move it by yourself?

Barely. It was too heavy to carry far, but light enough for me to roll around in that bucket.

So I just got out of there. Walked right past the party guests, straight through security, out to my truck. Plopped it into the backseat and drove home.

What was your plan? I mean, obviously, they were going to notice at some point.

Yeah man, I wasn't really thinking about all that. I just wanted to go home and make dinner for my family.

Mind you, even though I worked around the lab all the time, I had never even seen a rep in action before. I didn't know what they were really capable of. I thought they were just for food. So I was like, hell yeah, gonna go cook me up some steaks with this bad boy. Wasn't thinking too far beyond that point.

I got home and wheeled it into the kitchen like it was no big deal. Just plopped it up on the kitchen counter. Yanked the microwave out of the wall and plugged in the rep instead.

My daughter, she's 17 at this point. She comes into the room and immediately starts messing with the rep. She's thumbing through the menus, trying out stuff. I start trying to explain what the machine is, and I'm giving her a lecture about the importance of keeping this thing quiet. But she was way ahead of me. She goes, "No shit, dad. You stole this. It's our secret."

In retrospect, I guess it was pretty obvious—there was really no other way to explain it.

So my daughter is scrolling through the menus. You could see the cocktails that the staff had been drinking. She selected one of those—a manhattan—and it printed out, complete with the glass. She starts laughing and sipping on it, and then she notices that there's a bunch of empty slots in the menu, along with a "scan" button. Suddenly she hops up, clears everything off the kitchen table. Grabs my wife's coffee mug, full of joe, right out of her hands. And sticks it right in the tray at the bottom of the device. Pushes it in, starts tweaking a bunch of settings on the rep's touchscreen. The machine lights up, buzzing, vibrating a little bit. And then—I shit you not, this is the sound it made—DING! Like it's a microwave.

She pulls out the tray, and the coffee is gone. Nothing there anymore.

My wife says, "Where'd it go?"

My daughter turns back to the machine and points at a little 3D image of our mug right there on the screen. She touches that, starts the rep back up, and thirty seconds later it dings again.

She reaches into the tray and pulls it out—the same mug of coffee that moments ago we thought had disappeared.

My daughter hands the mug back to my wife, then does some inputs on the machine and prints out yet another mug. Now there's two of them. Identical lipstick stains on the rim and everything.

We're all sitting there looking at it like, "Holy shit."

My wife picks it up, takes a sip out of the mug. Her eyes go wide, and she says, "It's hot."

We were just floored. I mean, up until that point, I knew the thing could cook up a bunch of food, but I didn't realize you could scan new shit straight into the system. I figured that somebody had to program stuff into it manually.

We sat there for a few minutes letting it really sink in.

Then my daughter gets up and goes to her bedroom. Comes back out with a pile of twenty dollar bills. Her secret savings stash.

Before any of us can say anything, she shoves the pile in the tray and scans it. Finds the pile in the menu, selects it. Just like that, a new, neat little pile of twenties pops out.

She takes the first pile out and hits the button again. More twenties.

At this point, I'm freaking out. My daughter is making it rain all over the kitchen with the new bills, my wife is yelling at her to chill, and I'm just sort of shell-shocked at the table with magical cloned coffee sitting in front of me.

My daughter gets this crazed look in her eye, and runs back over to the machine. Smashes the "print" button again. And just starts laughing when more money comes out. She's like, "It prints money!" Absolutely losing it.

That's when I jumped up and yanked the power cable out of the wall. I'm yelling, "Sit the fuck down!" Pushing my wife and daughter into chairs at the table.

They're looking at me totally bewildered. No idea what got into me. And I don't really know either. I just felt like I couldn't see straight. Everything's shifting around in front of me. My ears are ringing.

I tell 'em I just need everybody to calm down for a minute so we can think this thing through. And I can see my daughter's eyes going wide as she starts to figure out the same thing as me, which is we've gotta get the fuck out of here.

She's staring at me, and her jaw kinda falls open. But she's all action.

She gets this sort of hard look on her face and says, "Do they know where we live?"

My wife took a few seconds to catch up to her thought process, but then she figured it out and just sort of slumped at the table. Like, of course Alphacorp has our address. They're gonna figure out that the rep is missing—probably by that point, they already had. So I figured we've got at most an hour or two before cops would be swarming the house.

I tell the wife and kid, "Pack your bags," and we all jump up and start running around. Ten seconds into it, my daughter pokes her head out of her room and yells out, "Only bring one of everything!" It took my wife and I a second, but then we both cracked up.

Like, right, the rep makes backup underwear pointless. (Laughs.)

I think we all realized nothing would be the same from that point forward. And all we could do was laugh. But after a second, my wife went stone-faced all of the sudden, turned to me, and said five words that made me fall in love with her all over again. She said, "I woulda took it too." Then she went right back to packing.

So like twenty minutes later, we're at a gas station, fueling up for a trip– to where, we had no idea. I wasn't willing to risk running the rep off of the truck's battery, so we stocked up real good on food, paid using some of my daughter's repped bills, and just started driving.

That's when my phone started buzzing. It was my boss.

Who was your boss?

The facilities director. He managed all the on-campus contract employees like me. I thought about just ignoring the call, but for some reason I just couldn't stop myself from answering.

As soon as I picked up, he was like, "Where the fuck are you?"

I said, "Just went home early for the night. Started feeling sick after cleaning up all that puke."

He just starts yelling, cursing me out. "We know what you did, motherfucker—you better bring that fucking machine back here right this instant."

I was just like, "Okay, I'll bring it in right now." Like, yeah right.

He knew I was bullshitting. He started talking about how they'd already sent a private security team to my house to make sure I brought it back. I didn't know if that was true, but I figured I wasn't gonna risk finding out.

I just told him, "Good luck," and hung up on his ass. After that, I literally threw my phone out the window. Got my wife and daughter to do the same, just for safety.

I didn't know what kind of power these guys had, but I didn't want them tracking us.

So you were just headed east without any real plan?

Yep. I got a cousin—who's really more like a brother—that lives in the mountains outside of Boulder, Colorado. Somewhere along the way, I decided we'd try stopping at his place first.