The Printer

The air in your flat always smells faintly of solder and old paper, a scent you’ve come to associate with the peculiar comfort of being alone. It’s a Tuesday, which means your only real obligation is a two-hour lab for Advanced Microprocessor Design at noon, a class where you sit in the back corner, answer questions in your head, and are generally forgotten by everyone, including the professor, by the time the session ends. You’ve learned not to mind. Forgetability is a kind of superpower, you tell yourself. It means people don’t ask for your notes, don’t invite you to study groups, and don’t remember the time you tripped over a backpack in the lecture hall and sent a laptop skittering across the linoleum.

You are twenty-two. You are skinny in a way that makes most t-shirts hang off your collarbones like they’re disappointed in you. Your hands are clever, the kind that can coax life out of a dead circuit board with a soldering iron and a bit of patience, but when it comes to talking to women, those same hands become inexplicably damp and useless. You’ve tried. God knows you’ve tried. Freshman year, you’d attempted to sit with a group of lacrosse players, thinking proximity to their easy laughter might rub off on you. They’d been polite, in the way people are polite to a stray dog before they close the door. After three days, you stopped trying. It wasn’t that you were uncool, exactly. You were just… in-between. Not geeky enough for the gamer clique, not athletic enough for the gym bros, not artistic enough for the film kids. You dissolved into the background, a ghost in a hoodie.

Your flat, a compact one-bedroom on the third floor of a building that smells like garlic and other people’s laundry, is paid for by your parents. They’re good people, a little disappointed that you hadn’t blossomed into the social butterfly they’d hoped for, but generous. The rent arrives on the first of every month like clockwork, a direct deposit you never have to think about. Your own scholarship covers tuition, so your days are filled with lectures, labs, and the long, empty stretches in between where you tinker with electronics you buy from a junk shop three blocks over.

That junk shop, a place called “Curios & Copper,” is where your story takes its first strange turn. But not yet. First, you have to walk to campus.

The route takes you past a coffee shop where the university’s star athletes sometimes gather, all white teeth and compression shorts. You slow your pace as you approach, a tiny, shameful part of you hoping for a glimpse of Cathy. There she is. She’s perched on the edge of a wrought-iron chair, laughing at something Matt, the soccer team’s captain, just said. Her dark hair falls in a wave over one shoulder, and her face—God, her face—is the kind of symmetrical perfection you’d expect to see on a magazine cover, but always with a warmth in her eyes that makes your chest hurt. She’s wearing a fitted athletic top that shows the lean lines of her arms, and her denim shorts hug the curve of what you’ve spent more nights than you care to admit imagining: that big, perky ass, the kind that makes even walking look like an event. Her tits aren’t huge, maybe a perfect B-cup, but they sit high and round, and when she shifts in her chair, you catch the faint outline of her sports bra. You look away quickly, your face heating. You’re not a creep. You’re just… lonely.

Matt notices you and raises a hand in a casual wave. “Yo, Marty! Headed to lab?” His voice is friendly, easy, the voice of a man who has never once worried about being forgotten.

“Yeah, just the usual,” you manage, surprising yourself with how steady you sound.

Cathy turns and smiles at you, and for a second, the whole world narrows to the curve of her lips and the little dimple on her left cheek. “Don’t work too hard, Marty. You always look so serious.”

“I’ll try,” you say, and then you’re moving again, legs carrying you away before you can say something stupid. The smile stays with you for the rest of the walk, a small, warm thing you hold close to your chest like an ember.

The lab is as forgettable as ever. You sit in the back, fiddle with a badly soldered breadboard, and watch the minutes crawl by on the institutional clock above the whiteboard. A girl a few rows ahead, You don’t know her name, maybe a sophomore, is wearing a low-cut top, and when she leans forward to adjust a wire, you catch a glimpse of the soft swell of her cleavage. You look away, but not before your mind supplies an image: her on her knees, looking up at you with wide, wanting eyes. You shift in your seat, willing the half-hardness in your jeans to go away. It’s not just her. It’s May, the school’s unofficial queen bee, blonde and sharp-edged, who you saw earlier in the student union, tossing a copy of the campus paper onto a table and laughing with her court. May’s beauty is different from Cathy’s, sharper, more dangerous. She has a way of looking at people that makes you feel like you’re being filed away under “irrelevant.” And yet, you’ve imagined her too. You’ve imagined a lot of women. Too many women. It’s the one thing your brain can always do well, conjure them up in the dark of your room, their bodies replacing the blank ceiling.

After the lab, you walk home slowly, avoiding the busier streets. The sky is the color of an old bruise, and the air smells like rain. You stop at a corner bodega for a soda and a packet of instant noodles, more out of habit than hunger. At the entrance to your building, you run into Janice, your neighbor from 3B. She’s in her late twenties, a brunette with a face that’s always a little tired, a little kind. Today she’s juggling a canvas tote bag of groceries and a leather work bag, and her white blouse has pulled taut over her chest, revealing the generous curve of her breasts. You’ve seen her many times, but you’ve never managed to learn much beyond her name and the fact that she works in marketing.

“Hey, Marty,” she says, shifting her bags. “Help me with the door?”

You hold it open, and she brushes past you, close enough that you smell her perfume, something floral and clean. “Thanks. Long day?”

“Always,” you say.

“Same.” She smiles, a little weary, a little warm. “Don’t work too hard up there with your little gadgets.” She disappears into the stairwell, and you’re left standing in the foyer, thinking about the way her blouse had strained over her breasts, the way her smile had been just for you, even if only for a second.

Inside your flat, you lock the door behind you and let out a long breath. The place is a controlled mess: shelves of half-disassembled electronics, stacks of textbooks, a bed you haven’t made in three days. On your desk sits the printer.

It’s an old, clunky model, off-white and stained with age, the kind of thing you’d find in a 1990s government office. You’d found it a week ago in a dusty corner of Curios & Copper, buried under a pile of vintage clocks. The shop owner, a strange old woman with silver hair and eyes that looked through you like glass, had charged you ten bucks and told you, “It’s not for everyone. But you look like someone who needs it.”

You’d laughed it off. But you’d taken it home because it felt heavy in your hands, heavier than it should have, and because the circuitry inside, when you opened it up, was unlike anything you’d ever seen. No serial number, no manufacturer’s mark, just smooth, dark green boards with traces that glowed faintly gold in the light.

You spent the next week fixing it. It was broken in a hundred small ways: cracked solder joints, a stripped gear, a ribbon cable chewed by what might have been a mouse. But tonight, after hours of painstaking work, you’d finally gotten the power LED to flicker to life. Now, as you sit down at your desk, your phone buzzes in your pocket.

You pull it out. A new app has installed itself. It has no icon, just a plain black square with a single word in white serif type: Imprimatur. And beneath it, in smaller letters: “You have been chosen as the Printer’s sole operator.”

You stare. You’re sure you didn’t download this. Your thumb hovers over the screen, hesitating. But curiosity—that old, familiar engine—wins out. You tap it.

The app opens to a simple interface. A search bar. A photo library button. And a single sentence:

“Select an image. The Printer will create a perfect, wearable skinsuit of the person depicted, including their clothing at the time of capture. While wearing the suit, you will gain access to their memories, mannerisms, and physical form. The printer is bound to you and cannot be used by anyone else. It is invisible to all but you when in its dormant state.”

You read it again. Then a third time. Then you laugh, a short, disbelieving sound in the quiet apartment. A skinsuit. A magical printer that prints people. It’s absurd. It’s impossible. It’s the plot of a low-budget anime.

But your eyes drift to the photo library button. Your thumb hovers. Then, without fully deciding to, you tap it.

Your camera roll appears, thousands of images. Most of them are of circuit boards, stray cats, blurry shots of lecture slides. But some are of people. Screenshots from Instagram. Candid photos taken from across the quad, always when no one was looking, always when you were too much of a coward to say hello. Cathy. May. Janice, captured yesterday when she was unlocking her door, her profile soft in the evening light.

The app seems to sense your hesitation. A small text box appears at the bottom:

“Choose wisely. The suit will create an exact physical duplicate, down to the last cell. But the person whose image you choose will not be aware of the duplication, nor will they be harmed. The suit is a tool of liberation, not of theft. It allows you to walk in another’s skin, to understand them from within, but not to replace them, so be careful not to get caught.”

Liberation. You turn the word over in your mind. Your whole life, you’ve been on the outside, looking in. What would it be like to be Cathy, to feel the weight of her hair, the way her body moves when she runs? What would it be like to be May, to command a room without even trying? What would it be like to be Janice, to get a glimpse a life already underway, with bills and deadlines and the quiet confidence of adulthood?

Your hand trembles. The printer behind you emits a low, melodic hum, a sound it has never made before. The app shows a progress bar: “Awaiting first use. The suit will be printed in approximately three minutes.”

You look at your phone. Then back at the printer. Then back at the photos.

And you make a choice.

The app closes. The printer begins to whir. The sound is like paper feeding through rollers, but wetter, softer, less mechanical. A thin sheet of material starts to emerge from the output tray. It looks like skin. It looks like flesh. It looks like the color of someone’s hair, the exact shade of their eyes.

Your heart is slamming against your ribs.

The sheet grows longer, taking shape: arms, a torso, legs, a face. It flops onto the desk, warm and real and undeniably alive, yet hollow, waiting to be filled.

The app dings once, cheerfully. “Print complete. Your new skin awaits.”