"So, how are you liking life in a post-scarcity society?" Ruby asks, slumping down in a seat across from me in the mess hall. She's an older Kate than me by about two years, and a doctor, an oncologist in training preparing for a foreseen need of the older Kates needing one soon, but she finds excuses to get involved in my engineering work. I don't mind; engineering is way more interesting than biology, and I was only printed a couple of months ago and am still adjusting to the time skip, so it's nice to have someone to help.
"This is hardly a post-scarcity society," I remark, poking at my freeze dried dinner while I wait for it to rehydrate properly.
"We have a magic printer! Whatever we want, we can – "
"Whatever we already have to scan in," I point out. "We can make a lot of a very limited range of things." I scowl at my food. Although, to be fair, the past couple of decades' worth of Kates have made wondrous strides in the food variety department. With nothing to grow, there's little to be done to expand the repertoire, but one thing we Kates are great at doing is pushing boundaries. Mostly through food separation – chocolate peeled carefully off chocolate-coated nuts and put through the foldgate separately gives us chocolate and nuts. The little spice packs in instant noodles had their ingredients separated grain by grain into individual spices, to be replicated up and remixed in different ways for variety. Chemists devoted their free time to synthesising simple artificial flavourings and food scents; most of them are a little too complex to make in the facilities we have, but you can do a lot with a few synthesised salts and esters. One of the doctors drew some of her blood to make blood pudding, which is so much more soft and succulent than the dehydrated foods we have available and feels almost like eating real fresh meat.
Whenever a Kate dies, there's some talk of putting real fresh meat on the menu, but nobody's made that copy, at least to my knowledge. It feels like going a bit too far.
"You," Ruby tells me, "are a killjoy. I was so much more optimistic at your age."
"To think, you had the full potential within you to be like me, and you chose to be like you instead. How embarrassing for you."
"Can you imagine what Earth would do with this tech? Maybe they have it by now. I mean, we're not the only genius foldgate technician in existence, surely. And there's got to be an old foldgate with all the space and the shielding for old clunky foldfield tech in a museum somewhere, so maybe someone..."
"Earth would have no use for this," I point out. "It's a matter of energy efficiency. Using a foldgate normally doesn't take much energy, but what we're doing sure as fuck does. We're sitting on top of a giant nuclear power generator designed to support a colony of, eventually, ten or twenty thousand people, and we're already hitting limits at less than two hundred of us. Part of that is that it takes time to print goods for that many people, but mostly it's energy. There's nothing that Earth could produce with one of these that they couldn't make far, far more efficiently without it."
"Precious historical artefacts," Ruby points out. "Instead of sending fragile things between museums in foldgates, just make a copy while sending them. Print one for every museum. Worried about them degrading over time? Print a new one from the data later. Ultimate storage."
"Well, okay, it could have that one specific niche use, but in general the energy – "
"Printing people."
"People on Earth have no problem making people as it is. But man, can you imagine the social chaos? This thing would be outlawed everywhere immediately."
"The wealthy would make copies of themselves as a way to cheat death. That'd be like a service, I bet, a special kind of life insurance. $100,000 per year and we'll keep a copy of you in reserve to reprint when you die. Come make a new copy every six months."
