THE MISSIONARIES

THE FATHER and THE SON favor each other in manner as well as appearance.

The older man is confident, set in his ways, and he maintains an unnerving degree of eye contact when speaking.

THE SON tends to gaze down at the floor with a furrowed brow when considering a question—he doesn't yet understand this new world, he readily admits, but nor did he understand the old one.

THE FATHER: We heard about it straight from the Elders. They put out a big proclamation, calling the faithful to the temples for "a demonstration of God's power." Very grabby. What day was that?

THE SON: I dunno. It wasn't the Sabbath.

THE FATHER: There were probably a hundred of us men there. The bishop didn't spend too much time explaining the thing. He just said, "This machine can create copies of anything." And then, you know, he did what you always do when you first show somebody a rep. Just start scanning and copying everything around you, until people get the picture. (Laughs.)

Then he showed us how you could use a rep to print out all the necessary parts for another rep. That shocked us. The bishop said that the directive from the Elders was to spread these things far and wide. To gentiles, as well as Mormons.

THE SON: I remember, somebody asked where these things came from. The bishop said a teenager in a beat-up truck had appeared at the Salt Lake Temple one night, and that the kid had dropped it off with a secretary who happened to be there.

The kid's explanation was that he wanted to spread the reps as fast as he could, and that nobody had more experience than Mormons when it came to knocking on doors unannounced and handing out stuff. (Laughs.)

He wanted to enlist us. And the elders had decided they were game.

It really clicked for us. The fact that reps originated in America… Well, let's just say it felt very right for the Mormon community.

We all thought something like this might happen one day.

What do you mean? Something like the reps?

THE SON: We didn't know exactly what it would be. But we have prophecies that we've believed in for a long time. Prophecies about America becoming The New Jerusalem. It might sound silly to you, but in many ways the reps really are turning America into a new Garden of Eden. We Mormons recognized that potential right away.

THE FATHER: Obviously we've always believed in giving food to folks in need. Mormon Missionaries do their fair share of proselytizing, but they're expected to do humanitarian work as well, as a matter of course.

So there was some debate amongst us about whether we'd use the opportunity to spread the good word, too. We thought it might be too heavy-handed to subject folks to a lecture about God's plan for their life, when really we should just be spreading reps as quickly as possible. People needed food. And we believe you should help a man meet his basic needs before demanding he spend his time pursuing the higher ones.

The compromise we agreed to was that we'd simply include an informational pamphlet about the church when handing out reps.

THE SON: The only problem then was figuring out how to effectively distribute the machines.

THE FATHER: A lot of us in the Salt Lake area have heavy duty trucks—my own is plenty big enough to tote around reps. So at first we were just printing out reps as quickly as we could at the main temple and loading it up into the backs of trucks. We realized pretty quickly that we'd be a lot more efficient if production was decentralized.

THE SON: Basically, we had to figure out produce reps while driving around in a truck.

First we needed a way to power a rep. We thought about running them off our truck battery, but realized it would've put a pretty bad strain on the truck. So we decided we needed a gas-powered generator that was big enough to run the rep, while also small enough to fit into a truck bed with an active rep.

Dad drove while I sat in the back. I'd alternate between printing out gas cans and rep parts. That way we could keep the whole setup running while dad drove us around. That approach worked just fine. Only problem was, I was making tons of empty gas cans. (Laughs.)

So whenever the truck was getting filled up with cans I'd just run them through the rep's scanner to get rid of them.

THE FATHER: Once we had mobile rep production up and running, the next problem we had to overcome was fear of the people we were out there trying to help. A lot of folks were more than happy to accept a free rep from two Mormon boys. But just as many were suspicious, especially some of the more intense protestants. They'd run us out of their yards, yelling about how reps are idolatrous, blasphemous, that sorta thing.

I understood where they were coming from. It doesn't seem right, having that much power. And all in a little machine that plugs into the wall like a microwave.

THE SON: I think it reminds some people of the story about Jesus feeding the multitudes. You know, turning just a couple fish and a few loaves of bread into enough food to feed thousands of people. That's what the reps do. They tap into the same power Jesus was tapping into. Anybody could see it.

THE FATHER: Power like that scares people. We think that's why the government started sending folks after us.

Tell me about that. What sort of pushback were you getting from the officials?

THE SON: They were doing everything they could think of to stop us. First, we noticed it online. We were trying to spread the good word about the reps on social media. Literally the moment after you'd post somethin' about the reps, it would just disappear. So fast it was almost hard to believe. And then not too long after that your account would get banned.

No explanation, nothing like that.

Within about 24 hours you'd get a visit from the feds.

It happened to my cousin. Two of my best friends. They got hauled off by the feds, and we didn't see them for a while after that.

THE FATHER: Pretty quickly we figured out that posting about reps online was a fool's errand. The posts got removed instantly, and the feds would know how to track you to your house, that way. So we went underground. Started mostly doing rep deliveries at night.

THE SON: I taught a bunch of the older guys in the church how to use encrypted messaging apps to stay in touch. That became the main way our leadership issued orders.

As more and more of us got arrested, it got a lot tougher to organize distribution runs. So we started going further from home, where we'd be less likely to get noticed.

One guy in a prop plane decided he was gonna fly to Mexico and try to get things started down there.

His plane went down just a few miles from the border.

THE FATHER: We're pretty certain that was no accident.

THE SON: Damn certain.

THE FATHER: Language, son.

THE SON: Sorry.

What makes you so certain?

THE FATHER: Oh, there's no reason to doubt it. At some point they realized that arresting us wasn't gonna scare us off this thing.

We were gonna spread the reps no matter what they did.

So they did the logical thing and started sending in people to kill us.

And not just us. But the people we'd given reps to, too.