"Repent, Harlequin!" said the Ticktockman.
"Get stuffed!" the Harlequin replied, sneering.
"You’ve been late a total of sixty-three years, five months, three weeks, two days, twelve hours, forty-one minutes, fifty-nine seconds, point oh three six one one one microseconds. You’ve used up everything you can, and more. I’m going to turn you off."
"Scare someone else. I’d rather be dead than live in a dumb world with a bogeyman like you."
"It’s my job."
"You’re full of it. You’re a tyrant. You have no right to order people around and kill them if they show up late."
"You can’t adjust. You can’t fit in."
"Unstrap me, and I’ll fit my fist into your mouth."
"You’re a non-conformist."
"That didn’t used to be a felony."
"It is now. Live in the world around you."
"I hate it. It’s a terrible world."
"Not everyone thinks so. Most people enjoy order."
"I don’t, and most of the people I know don’t."
"That’s not true. How do you think we caught you?"
"I’m not interested."
"A girl named Pretty Alice told us who you were."
"That’s a lie."
"It’s true. You unnerve her. She wants to belong; she wants to conform, I’m going to turn you off."
"Then do it already, and stop arguing with me."
"I’m not going to turn you off."
"You’re an idiot!"
"Repent, Harlequin!" said the Ticktockman.
"Get stuffed."
So they sent him to Coventry. And in Coventry they worked him over. It was just like what they did to Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was a book none of them knew about, but the techniques are really quite ancient, and so they did it to Everett C. Marm; and one day quite a long time later, the Harlequin appeared on the communications web, appearing elfin and dimpled and bright-eyed, and not at all brainwashed, and he said he had been wrong, that it was a good, a very good thing indeed, to belong, and be right on time hip-ho and away we go, and everyone stared up at him on the public screens that covered an entire city block, and they said to themselves, well, you see, he was just a nut after all, and if that’s the way the system is run, then let’s do it that way, because it doesn’t pay to fight city hall, or in this case, the Ticktockman. So Everett C. Marm was destroyed, which was a loss, because of what Thoreau said earlier, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, and in every revolution, a few die who shouldn’t, but they have to, because that’s the way it happens, and if you make only a little change, then it seems to be worthwhile. Or, to make the point lucidly:
"Uh, excuse me, sir, I, uh, don’t know how to uh, tell you this, but you were three minutes late. The schedule is a, little, uh, bit off."
He grinned sheepishly.
"That’s ridiculous!" murmured the Ticktockman behind his mask.
"Check your watch." And then he went into his office, going mrmee, mrmee, mrmee, mrmee.
(1965)
THE MACHINE STOPS
E. M. Forster
On 30 March 1904, the Anglo-French aviator Henri Farman took an experimental powered aircraft into the air, made a perfect one-kilometre round trip, landed safely, and set the twenty-five year old Edward Morgan Forster to thinking about the end of humanity. Between the novels A Room with a View (1908) and Howards End (1910), which have more or less defined Edwardian England in the public imagination, Forster wrote "The Machine Stops", a dystopia more devastating than anything science fiction has since produced. While most of his peers were celebrating the coming of the machine age, and lapping up H. G. Wells’s enthusiasm for technological Utopia, Forster foresaw, particularly in the birth of air travel, a moment of moral crisis, in which the machines we made to help us would actually become what we started living through, relying upon – and even emulating. Forster the futurist was so on the money morally, he inevitably got a lot of the furnishings right. Writing a century ago, he foresaw the internet, social media, YouTube and all the tiny technologically enabled fracturings of our civic life. No one has conveyed human-as-robot as well as Forster, of whom Virginia Woolf once wrote, "He says the simple things that clever people don’t say."
1. 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."