The machine didn’t transmit nuances of expression.

A friend and I were talking the other day through the machine. I could hear something like her, and I believe I received something of her tone. I was satisfied…

Beneath those corridors of shining tiles were rooms, tier below tier, reaching far into the earth, and in each room there sat a human being, eating, or sleeping, or producing ideas.

He woke up in the morning and rushed to check if any comments had been left on his blog. He excitedly checked his e-mail to see if there was anything that had arrived since it was last checked before he went to sleep a few hours ago. There were a few advertisements. Digitally enhanced pictures of people smiling, sterile beaches and fully air-conditioned rooms. He was satisfied.

The blog, which contained ideas and discussions about the “philosophical thoughts” that had struck him, had no new comments. It made him unhappy. It upset him that there was nothing there yet, and the satisfaction of a few seconds ago dissipated. He began to rummage around for better and more interesting ideas to post up in the evening. It had to be interesting, it had to be attractive. It had to, above all, inspire comment.

There was the button that produced literature.

All through the day, he scrutinised for things to think. He put them in his blog in the evening. He arranged them in Times New Roman script in a mechanical size of 12, evenly spaced and ready to be presented for the ignition of other’s mind engines. He hit the submit button and the characters were transmitted by electric pulses to the central Machine from where it could be accessed by other human beings and their minds and machines.

The clumsy system of public gatherings had long since been abandoned; neither Vashti not her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her arm-chair she spoke, while they, in their arm-chairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well.

On another side of the sphere rotating in melancholy silence in the vastness of space, uninspiringly, as she who stared at the white liquid crystal screens in her machine room thought, while the last buds of autumn gave way to white white white winter outside the unobserved window, sat the judge of his happiness. The ideas were proclaimed of mediocre quality. They was duly processed and considered. No comment was made. Another blog was switched to. Within the day, sixty-two blogs were read. Some were commented on, some were not.
“In certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.”

Similarly, he looked at the blog. The idea was of some interest but there simply wasn’t any time to comment. There were several other correspondences to be attended to. In a machine room another machine room somewhere between the neutrons and electrons of that atom that the blogger didn’t know, another blog was switched to.

“I want you to come and see me.”
Vashti watched his face in the blue plate.
”But I can see you!” she exclaimed. “What more do you want?”
”I want to see you not through the Machine.” said Kuno. “I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”

In the evening, he checked his blog again. There was no comment. “No matter,” he thought, hitting the refresh button over and over again, “it’s only a matter of time.” But deep down, where the plastic covering of his wiring met the copper conductor, where all was dark save for the humming, he was unhappy. He wanted his blog to be commented on. It was of no concern that he didn’t know the people who usually commented. It was no matter that he didn’t know their face, whether they were man or woman or child, or what they were reading or saying or tasting or ironing or walking or dressing or eating save for that which they chose to communicate in little electric pulses. It was of no concern that little shapes in regular patterns were all he knew of them who he ought to have concerned himself with only if they could be regarded as insignificant to his own life’s happiness. In the old days they would have been at atom’s worth of significance, a moth in an abandoned shed while the families played in the snow. Now they were sustenance.
The little bicycle stood outside the window, looking like a little grasshopper ready to eat a fresh green leaf. The man stayed at his machine.



The imponderable bloom, declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit.

“Read my blog,” said the friend as we ended our conversation.

“How we have advanced thanks to the Machine!”
“How we have advanced thanks to the Machine!” said Vashti.
“How we have advance thanks to the Machine!” echoed the passenger







Inspired by
E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops