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"I'm a farm boy. It's very interesting; you can detect self-starting characteristics in this society and they are strongest among people who have had some kind of rural upbringing and a very impressionable stage."
- Frank Herbert
 |
| Government Machine | ||
| The automata that constitute the entire government, all in one building. |
| "That square massive building just below us is the one we were in? And you say that is the center, the
brain, the key of the whole World Government?" "That is the Government," Quentin replied. "Just as your brain is you. These other countless acres of buildings are merely its arms and lingers and eyes and ears. Without this building they could not function, and the world would be chaos." Jack stared down fascinatedly. "And yet," he breathed in amazement, "I ran through miles of corridors, passed hundreds of rooms full of apparatus and instruments, and not a soul did I see,*' Quentin nodded in confirmation. "For an hour I ran, and by the end of it I was caring less about being caught than about finding some people about in these buildings. Is there no one?" "No one," Quentin replied. "And yet you say it's the Government!" The boy seemed dumfounded. "After all my explaining," Quentin said, "haven't you realized that the Government is merely a huge machine, made of metal and rubber and glass and run by electricity and light and heat?" "But—but how can machinery govern the world?" "Better than human beings can. Even your business men in Democratia use machines to help them run their businesses; their offices are full of automatic machines for managing a business, time-clocks, adding-machines, bookkeeping machines, cash-registers, dictaphones—no end of them. The Government Machine is not essentially different. Merely a little more automatic and a little more complex." "And are all the people willing to be governed by a machine?" It was all amazingly strange to Jack. "They cannot conceive of anything else," Quentin explained. "For three hundred years they have grown up in it. They are intensely loyal to it, because it not merely governs them as you understand the wrord govern ; it takes care of them as a mother takes care of children." "They seem to be happy," Jack observed. Quentin nodded down toward the beautiful countryside over which they were flying at a swift rate. The green fields were intersected by broad roads and huge power lines, and the blue bulk of a city loomed on the horizon. "The world is more prosperous than it has ever been before," he replied. "Life is thoroughly comfortable, absolutely safe and certain. But you would call it monotonous. Everybody does everything by rule and schedule, all alike, the world over. Standardize. You wouldn't like it." "I couldn't stand it!" Jack exclaimed. |
| Technovelgy from Mechanocracy,
by Miles J. Breuer. Published by Amazing Stories in 1932 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the games Machine from AE van Vogt's World of Null-A. Compare to other computers large enough to run whole planets or societies: see the City Fathers from James Blish's Cities in Flight, Watchdog from Jack Haldeman's story of the same name, and Deep Thought from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the Vulcan 3 from Vulcan's Hammer (1960) by Philip K. Dick.
See also the way computers design computers in Isaac Asimov's 1958 short story The Feeling of Power.
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'...Anything was possible in my imaginary environment.'
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'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair...'
'We had discovered that metal was relatively impervious to the telepathic effect.'
'Detailed plans for the construction of the Gundstetter-Halone warp drive were flowing.'
'Do not waste your priceless company on the unappreciative folds of a sleep pod...'
'...so we've promised him a generous pension from the royalties.'
'Hocus-pocus religions and archaic weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at your side.'
