THE CMO

Her apartment is situated across the bay from the wreckage of San Francisco. She's tan, with a face sketched with laugh lines, but her laughter is filled with irony more than mirth.

"If we'd done things my way, it'd have gone a lot differently," she says.

I came into this thing with absolutely no idea of what Alphacorp was really working on. They just kept saying, "It's like 3D printing, but better." (Laughs.)

What an understatement.

But curiosity got the best of me, especially when I found out about the company's funding arrangement. I didn't believe them at first, so they showed me their records to prove it. About three billion in financing, cash money, from just one investor. Crazy!

I knew that whatever was going on here, it'd be big. And their offer package was generous, of course.

So, you had a product that could end world hunger. Why keep it secret?

Listen. When you're making a truly disruptive product, you can't just go around blabbing about it before it's ready to go to market. Any CMO worth her salt would tell you that. One has to think carefully about how to roll things out in a way that maximizes market share.

That means you don't risk leaks.

Or, you try not to, anyway. Secrecy was required, because nobody had ever made a product this disruptive. We disrupted capitalism itself.

And we would've done more, if we'd been able to execute on our original release strategy.

Which was?

It was the marketing equivalent of a blitzkrieg.

We'd start with the most wealthy elites, selling the reps at an immense profit margin. We were still debating on the final price point, but we would've likely settled somewhere north of $20 million per unit.

The idea was to recoup our investor, THE OLIGARCH, as quickly as possible before dramatically lowering the price and expanding to less wealthy markets.

Key to this was our plan to put software limitations on the reps so customers couldn't make obviously problematic things like guns, or counterfeit cash, or—god forbid—other replicator parts. The possibility of customers using replicators to create fully functioning duplicate machines was the most obvious risk to our entire business strategy, so we decided we'd simply prohibit customers from replicating any object made of metal.

There was a big debate internally about how to frame the metal restriction to customers. We could've been straightforward and presented it as an intentional software block... or we have gone a more strategic route, perhaps by framing the restrictions as a hardware limitation.

Of course, we knew that couldn't last forever. Eventually, some smartass would crack our protections. We had absolutely no illusions about that. We were simply betting we could sell enough units before it happened.

Our plan was to cover our upfront costs, repay our backer, and convert our winnings into impossible-to-replicate assets like land, houses, and boats.

Of course, as soon as the first person figured out how to break our system and replicate metals, the prices of traditional stores of value like physical currencies and precious metals were going straight to zero. Gold? Worthless. Same with the reps themselves. Anybody with access to at least two could produce an infinite number of new ones.

The only way for any of us to make money on reps would be in that brief window before someone else started pumping them out for free. It was the ultimate go-to-market plan in a literal sense, because after we launched, nobody would be able to go to market with any replicable commodity ever again. At least, not with anything smaller than a watermelon. If it could be replicated, it would be, quickly. Only utility value and sentimental value would remain.

But by that point, myself and the others at Alphacorp would be off to greener pastures.

I see you're making sort of a face at me. You can judge if you want, but our intentions were noble. We were ending world hunger. Destroying capitalism, consumerism, and creating a post-scarcity utopia, all with one product.

We knew the risks. Of course we did. And if we'd been able to stick to our plan—rolling the product out a little more slowly—we could've actually mitigated some of the worst damage that was done.

The world wasn't yet ready for everyone to have a rep, after all. At least not all at once.

If we could've made it happen more gradually, things would've gone much more smoothly.

Given the potential impact of the reps, did you ever consider looping in lawmakers or government officials in the process?

We thought about it, but there was a chance they'd want to shut us down. We weren't willing to risk that. The mandate from THE OLIGARCH was to roll the product out slowly and carefully—not to get it locked up in a regulatory purgatory.

None of it matters now.

When the other two reps were stolen, we knew our plan was shot.

When it was just one rep missing, that was no big deal. You'd need to be able to take apart and scan another rep piece by piece in order to start printing your own.

But with three reps out in the wild… well. We knew it wouldn't be just three for long.

Now that I think about it, it's incredible to me that no one was ever able to track down THE THIEVES. I mean, those guys infiltrated our headquarters, made it past security, and got out with the reps within minutes.

They must've been real professionals.

Right?