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In A Future Human Society
In A Future Human Society
In A Future Human Society
their needs and wants are provided by “the Machine.” One day, a woman, Vashti,
receives a call from her son Kuno asking her to visit him in person. She doesn’t see
the point of visiting him, since they can communicate just as easily through the
Machine. Kuno wants to visit the earth’s surface (which is now apparently incapable
of supporting life), a desire that Vashti, who is perfectly content living underground
with the aid of the Machine, doesn’t understand. Kuno criticizes Vashti for
worshipping the Machine as if it were a divine being. Later, Kuno tells Vashti that he
will not talk to her anymore until she comes to visit him. She reluctantly decides to
travel on an air-ship to the other side of the world where her son lives.
Onboard the air-ship, Vashti is distressed by the need to talk to and touch other
people, and she is entirely uninterested in the natural scenery below. When she arrives
in her son’s room, angry at him for making her undergo such a worthless trip, he tells
her that he has been threatened with “Homelessness”—a form of execution in which
the victim is placed on the earth’s surface without protective equipment, killing them.
Kuno tells Vashti the story of how he escaped to the earth’s surface through a
ventilation shaft and stayed there for a short time, fascinated by the natural world
around him, before being drawn back underground by the Machine’s Mending
Apparatus. Feeling that her son’s deviations are unforgivable, Vashti leaves and rarely
talks to him again.
One day, the ultimate disaster strikes, and the Machine stops entirely. All lines of
communication are cut, and the air and light start to dissipate, condemning all the
people living underground to certain death. As Vashti watches the crowds of people
dying around her, she reunites with Kuno. He says there is no hope for them, but there
are still humans living above-ground—“the Homeless”—who will carry on after this
calamity, now that humanity has learned its lesson about the Machine. Vashti realizes
that her son has been right all along about the Machine’s destructive impact on
humanity. Vashti and Kuno embrace as an air-ship crashes into the city, destroying it
and killing them.
Vashti loses all contact with her son, until she receives a
message from him one day. He has been transferred to the
southern hemisphere, to a room close to her own, as a result
of his transgressions. He utters to her the cryptic words ‘the
Machine stops’, arguing that the Machine – on which everyone
is now wholly dependent – is slowing down and grinding to a
halt.