“I want to see you not through the Machine,” said Kuno. The son, we learn, wants to see the mother face to face, and in the following exchange we begin to recognize the nature of the third main character in the story, The Machine: We discover that this person to person communication takes place with the help of a device which projects a holographic image of the other person.

The constant wall of sound and sight is the norm, and the woman must press the “isolation knob” in order to speak exclusively with one person. His call is taken as a great inconvenience because it requires the mother to silence the music, dim the lights, and disconnect from the flow of networked communication. The action begins when the woman is contacted by her son who lives on the other side of the globe. It is to her that the little room belongs. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh-a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk-that is all the furniture. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. Humanity had driven itself under ground and each person lived in a habitation like the one Forster describes at the start of his story, The Machine Stops: Forster envisioned a networked world in which every person lived physically isolated from, yet at the same time, mechanically connected to every other person. Teleconferencing, instant global communication, and televisions all make an appearance.

The machine stops and other stories