The Machine Stops

The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster
First published in the Oxford and Cambridge Review in 1909

I
THE AIR-SHIP
Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a
bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a
soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh.
There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my
meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An
armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk--that is all the
furniture. 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. It is to
her that the little room belongs.
An electric bell rang.
The woman touched a switch and the music was silent.
"I suppose I must see who it is", she thought, and set her chair in
motion. The chair, like the music, was worked by machinery and it
rolled her to the other side of the room where the bell still rang
importunately.
"Who is it?" she called. Her voice was irritable, for she had been
interrupted often since the music began. She knew several thousand
people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced
enormously.
But when she listened into the receiver, her white face wrinkled into
smiles, and she said:

"Very well. Let us talk, I will isolate myself. I do not expect anything
important will happen for the next five minutes--for I can give you
fully five minutes, Kuno. Then I must deliver my lecture on 'Music
during the Australian Period'."
She touched the isolation knob, so that no one else could speak to her.
Then she touched the lighting apparatus, and the little room was
plunged into darkness.
"Be quick!" She called, her irritation returning. "Be quick, Kuno; here I
am in the dark wasting my time."
But it was fully fifteen seconds before the round plate that she held in
her hands began to glow. A faint blue light shot across it, darkening to
purple, and presently she could see the image of her son, who lived on
the other side of the earth, and he could see her.
"Kuno, how slow you are."
He smiled gravely.
"I really believe you enjoy dawdling."
"I have called you before, mother, but you were always busy or isolated.
I have something particular to say."
"What is it, dearest boy? Be quick. Why could you not send it by
pneumatic post?"
"Because I prefer saying such a thing. I want--"
"Well?"
"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."
"Oh, hush!" said his mother, vaguely shocked. "You mustn't say
anything against the Machine."
"Why not?"
"One mustn't."
"You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. "I believe
that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget
that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything.
I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear
something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That
is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to
face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind."
She replied that she could scarcely spare the time for a visit.
"The air-ship barely takes two days to fly between me and you."
"I dislike air-ships."
"Why?"
"I dislike seeing the horrible brown earth, and the sea, and the stars
when it is dark. I get no ideas in an air-ship."
"I do not get them anywhere else."
"What kind of ideas can the air give you?"
He paused for an instant.
"Do you not know four big stars that form an oblong, and three stars
close together in the middle of the oblong, and hanging from these stars,
three other stars?"

"No, I do not. I dislike the stars. But did they give you an idea? How
interesting; tell me."
"I had an idea that they were like a man."
"I do not understand."
"The four big stars are the man's shoulders and his knees.
The three stars in the middle are like the belts that men wore once, and
the three stars hanging are like a sword."
"A sword?;"
"Men carried swords about with them, to kill animals and other men."
"It does not strike me as a very good idea, but