Short Fiction · Chapter
Part II: The Mending Apparatus explained
Vashti visits her son Kuno after a difficult journey, only to find him threatened with Homelessness for having discovered a way to exit the Machine without a permit.
What happens
Vashti visits her son Kuno after a difficult journey, only to find him threatened with Homelessness for having discovered a way to exit the Machine without a permit. Kuno recounts his harrowing experience of climbing out of the underground world, fighting a worm-like creature from the Mending Apparatus, and reaching the surface where he felt a profound connection to humanity and nature. He argues that the Machine has robbed humanity of space, touch, and true relations, and that only by reclaiming these can people live authentically. Vashti is horrified by his blasphemies and atavism, recognizing that he cannot survive in their world.
Themes in this chapter
Repression vs. Liberation
Kuno's escape from the Machine represents a struggle for liberation from technological repression, while Vashti embodies the internalized repression of the system.
Nature vs. Civilization
Kuno's experience on the surface contrasts the artificial, controlled world of the Machine with the raw, natural world he rediscovers.
Imagination vs. Rationality
Kuno's visionary account of the hills of Wessex and his spiritual connection to the past challenges the rational, mechanical worldview upheld by the Machine and Vashti.
Characters to notice
- Vashti
Visits Kuno reluctantly, is horrified by his revelations and atavistic tendencies, and feels shame and disgust at having borne such a son.
- Kuno
Threatened with Homelessness for finding his own way out of the Machine; recounts his journey to the surface and his philosophical awakening about humanity's lost connection to space, touch, and nature.
Key passages
“Cannot you see, cannot all your lecturers see, that it is we who are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine?”
Kuno argues that humanity is perishing while the Machine alone thrives.
Kuno's central critique of the Machine's dominance over human life.
“Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man's feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong.”
Kuno asserts that human physicality should be the standard for understanding the world.
Kuno's rediscovery of embodied experience as a counter to the Machine's abstraction.
“The Machine develops—but not on our lines. The Machine proceeds—but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.”
Kuno claims the Machine has its own trajectory, indifferent to human purposes.
A metaphor for humanity's subservience to technology.