Epicac by Kurt Vonnegut.

Hell, it's about time someone told you about my friend Epicac.

After all, he cost the taxpayers $77,434,927.57.

and 54 cents.

They have a right to know about him, picking up a check like that.

Epicak got a big send-off in the papers when Dr. Ormond von Kleigstadt designed him for the government people.

Since then, there hasn't been a peep about him,

not a peep. It isn't any military secret about what happened to Epicac, although the brass has

been acting as though it were. The story is embarrassing, that's all. After all that money,

Epicac didn't turn out the way he was supposed to.

And that's another thing. I want to vindicate Epicac. Maybe he didn't do what the brass wanted him to do,

but that doesn't mean he wasn't noble and great and brilliant. He was all of those things,

the best friend I ever had. God rest his soul. You can call him a machine if you want to. He looked like a machine, but he was a whole lot less

like a machine than plenty of people I could name. That's why he fizzled as far as the brass was concerned. Epiak covered

about an acre on the fourth floor of the physics building at Wyandotte College. Ignoring his

spiritual side for a minute, he was seven tons of electric tubes, wires and switches, housed in a bank

of steel cabinets and plugged into a hundred and ten-volt AC line, housed in a bank of steel cabinets and plugged into a 110-volt AC line,

just like a toaster or a vacuum cleaner.

Von Klyckstatt and Nebraska wanted him to be a supercomputing machine that, who, could plot the course of a rocket from anywhere on earth to the second button from the bottom

of Joe Stalin's overcoat if necessary.

Or, with his control set right, he could figure out supply problems for an amphibious landing

of a marine division, right down to the last cigar and hand grenade.

...