E.M. Forster: Bit Rot

Fictional

Jason Weiser

Arts, History, Books

4.9 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 10 March 2022

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Humanity is isolated for their own safety in their homes, but they settle in to communicate through world-wide messaging and video calls, and face-to-face, person-to-person interaction becomes rarer and rarer, to the point that it's uncomfortable and awkward.

And no, the writer had no knowledge of the year 2020. E. M. Forster's prescient work of science fiction was first published in 1909.

After an ecological disaster, humanity is forced to flee underground, living alone in pods. But...it's not uncomfortable. In fact, it's the opposite. Humans have everything they could possibly need or want, thanks to the machine that oversees everything. But, when we give the power to watch over us to computers, who watches over the computers?

Check out our new mini-cast, Best of the Worst! https://www.nextpod.com/botw-subscribe

The original: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops/Chapter_I

**Disclaimer**

Warning: spoilers

A character struggles with loneliness and depression and tries numerous times to have the machine painlessly euthanize her, but it refuses.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Just a quick disclaimer, this time on the podcast, there's a character that deals with suicidal ideation.
0:04.6	It is not graphic or violent, but it's there.
0:07.1	If you'd like more information, I'd detail in the show notes, but there are some lights boilers.
0:11.1	Voshti knelt down. She ran her fingers across the polished way to the floor.
0:30.8	It always felt slightly warm. It had a hum. One that told you you'd never need to be alone.
0:39.2	Ever. She had children and a husband, but all of them had left her. Her children to rooms all around the world.
0:49.2	She had never been married and didn't know much more about her children's father than his donor number.
0:53.7	The hum. The machine. It was a promise. It would never leave her. It would always accept her.
1:02.4	No, her. It would always love her. She always marveled that you could never feel the seams in the floor of her room.
1:12.0	The room was a thousand rooms. The single place was her bedroom, her office, her dining room,
1:17.3	her auditorium. It molded to every purpose. She could wake up, teach a course, play a recital,
1:23.6	attend a thesis defense, have dinner, visit with her son on the other side of the world,
1:28.0	read a book and fall asleep all from the same chair, all in the slightly warm, humming embrace of the
1:34.9	machine. The machine that oversaw all of it. She stood and found the button. And the door hissed as
1:43.1	it unsealed. Fast, she's heart beat. She hadn't heard that sound in 11 months. The hallway was white
1:51.4	and polished like her room. The lights were always on. There was too much. She couldn't breathe.
1:59.6	She studied herself on the doorway. She stood in between two worlds. Her world, her pot,
2:06.7	her home that hadn't been unsealed in months. In the hall, the hall that led to the train,
2:13.2	that led to the airship, that led to Kuno. Her son, her son needed her. That's why she was doing this.
2:22.5	She looked down the long hallway. The doors were hidden, as hers were. But she knew they were there.
2:30.0	The people, all the people in the world, all nestled into holes like hers. Single room homes
2:36.3	underground. All cozy, all content. Part of the warmth of the machine was knowing that you were
	...

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