yo!...1909...innit!
PALOOKAVILLE FINANCIAL stardate : capitulation day+53
THE RED WEED
..." This was the Book of the Credit Machine...In it were instructions against every possible contingency...
...If she was hot or cold or dyspeptic or at a loss for a word, she went to the book...
...and it told her which button to press... ...The Central Committee published it...
...In accordance with a growing habit, it was richly bound...
ALL PRAISE THE MACHINE
..."The Machine," they exclaimed, "feeds us and clothes us and houses us...
...through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being...
...The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition...
...the Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine."
LATER...
..."The Machine stops."...
..."What do you say?"
"The Machine is stopping, I know it, I know the signs."
...She burst into a peal of laughter. He heard her and was angry, and they spoke no more...
"Can you imagine anything more absurd?" she cried to a friend...
..."A man who was my son believes that the Machine is stopping...It would be impious if it was not mad."
"The Machine is stopping?" her friend replied. "What does that mean? The phrase conveys nothing to me."
"Nor to me."
"He does not refer, I suppose, to the trouble there has been lately with the music?"
"Oh no, of course not. Let us talk about music."
VOTE...MACHINE..!
"The Machine," they exclaimed, "feeds us and clothes us and houses us; through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being....
The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition...
...the Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine."
THE CREDIT MACHINE STOPS
"Have you complained to the authorities?"
"Yes, and they say it wants mending, and referred me to the Committee of the Mending Apparatus...."...No one confessed the Machine was out of hand...
...Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence...
...The better a man knew his own duties upon it, the less he understood the duties of his neighbour...
...and in all the world there was not one who understood the monster as a whole.
...Those master brains had perished...
...They had left full directions, it is true, and their successors had each of them mastered a portion of those directions.
But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself...
...It had exploited the riches of nature too far...
...Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean...
...the progress of the Machine.
THE CENTRAL SCRUTINIZER
...To attribute these two great developments to the Central Committee, is to take a very narrow view of civilization.
The Central Committee announced the developments, it is true, but they were no more the cause of them than were the kings of the imperialistic period the cause of war.
Rather did they yield to some invincible pressure, which came no one knew whither, and which, when gratified, was succeeded by some new pressure equally invincible...
...To such a state of affairs it is convenient to give the name of progress.
petey : it were me wot messed abaht wiyit but...a story is from E M Forster
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