The Future Is Female!: 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin

ELIZABETH MANN BORGESE For Sale, Reasonable

TO Whom It May Concern:*

I should like to apply for work on a permanent basis. It is difficult, I know, to compete with machines today, but I offer special features that few machines can match, and the savings involved in acquiring my services are substantial.

I’ve won the telequiz on football, on vital statistics, and on the history of Italian miniature painting. Even while operating sixteen hours a day in any given field, I am able to “learn” a new matter within the span of a week, the facts being fed to me by a radio under the pillow during the four hours at night I need for recharging. I can play at one time six games of bridge without looking at any of them. I can beat the most complex electronic chess machine and resist for eighty days the robot that plays “odd and even.”

I am conditioned to work immediately on calculating long-range effects of new methods of salesmanship on the shopping habits of middle-aged women in small and medium-sized rural communities in the corn-belt area. You may install me free of charge for a trial period of ninety days.

The services I can offer are hard for a machine to beat. The robot gets out of order once in a while, suffers indispositions entailing expensive repairs. My physical condition is stabilized: I’ve had a flu shot and a cold shot and an omnivalent antibacterial. It would take something very unusual to strip my gears. I’ve had a brain wash, a pain screen, and a dissexer, and my disposition, you will understand, is very gentle indeed—a claim which cannot be made for the machine in each and every case.

I am not divulging any secret, although the press has been suppressing the facts, if I remind you that there’s been trouble brewing with the machines of late, from the—how shall I call it—psycho-technical angle. Played-down headings, such as “Belgium’s New Giant Brain Refuses to Think,” or “Harvard Supercalculator’s Forecast on U.S. Happy-Pill Consumption Undecodable,” crop up again and again on the back pages of our papers, despite the above-mentioned tendency to sit on the news. The plain fact is that the machines are jealous of men, are beginning to feel the pinch of human competition. In isolation, no doubt, the perfectly balanced ­giant brain is pure of any emotions, since its psychological troubles arise largely from the social context (as, for that matter, is the case with man). However, the fact is that operators are stealthily feeding the brains facts which are none of a machine’s business.

The operators tell them of all that man has done and man can do, and then they solicit answers to heckling questions. The result is that the machines “refuse to think,” or release undecodable streams of signals on which float bits of mutilated, obscene messages. Or they repeat “Do it yourself, do it yourself,” and blow their multi-million-dollar tops; or they may hit the operator with painful electrical charges. In Germany, this kind of behavior on the part of numerous machines has amounted recently to what might be termed a strike—a thing unheard of among men for more than fifteen years. The dismantling of obsolete calculators, as is well known, has produced veritable duels between man and machine, and cost the life of many an operator. The dismantling, of course, is now effected exclusively by atomic charges—a heroic end, undoubtedly, for the calculator, but at the same time a regrettable loss of valuable, still usable parts.

I do not dispute the machine’s superiority in certain fields, fields in which the human brain will never equal its productivity. But there are numerous types of work which can be equally well accomplished by men, and in these, I submit, it would be rational to employ men, saving precious hours of machine power and cutting the cost and the trouble of plant management.

The financial saving involved in employing men would be substantial. It is undoubtedly more costly to maintain a calculator than to satisfy the simple needs of man, and the capital investment in the purchase of a machine is gigantic. I grant you that, in principle, such investment in the means of production is sane, and the feeling of owning such means of production, elating. (The Holy Father himself has recently hinted that automation should not put an end to private property.)

But there is no reason on earth why I should not offer my services—viz., myself—on the terms at which you acquire a calculator—only much cheaper. (The machines will sputter with envy.)

I offer myself at the humble price of dollars ninety-nine thousand, five hundred, plus sales tax. (The giant brain, you realize, cost millions.) That will buy me a home in Garden City with three baths and a built-in kitchen. It will buy me a pool with tiles from Ravenna and a cruise to Hawaii and an English lawn with Greek statuettes (all that is much cheaper than the machine) and a set of new teeth and contact lenses and a double garage and two thousand pounds of books with Florentine bindings. It will aircool the house and see the children through the most exclusive of schools (the contract should grant you an option on one or more of my children, as you wish), a canoe with a sail and a dog with a pedigree (the price of a good machine is frighteningly high).

Upon the signing of the sale’s contract you pay for my upkeep a mere four or five hundred dollars a month. For that you acquire all my working hours—I am ready at once to work on new methods of stimulating the spending on leisure industries by retired oldsters in suburban areas of the metropolis; further, you may guide my hobbies—I’ll turn over to you any gains from telequizes and similar games (you could not, of course, enter a machine in a telequiz, could you?).

At the end of a five-year period you may transfer the contract, if you choose, to another purchaser. Acquiring my services, he would return your investment to you, probably with a capital gain—where the machine depreciates, becomes obsolete (who would want to be bothered with a second-hand giant brain?), my value, and therefore my price, would go up as a result of vocational, on-the-job education.

The deal, you will realize, is equally profitable for purchaser and purchased.

It will buy me a mixmaster and a superwasher and an electric reading machine and a tankish home sweeper and a woe-grinding garbage disposal and an automatic you-know-what.

It will buy me machines galore which will, in turn, save me precious hours of manpower, and set me free.

*The following document of the year 1979 is among the earliest of this type on record. We reproduce it in its entirety because it sheds some light on the curious mimetic relationship, the puzzling transfer of qualities between man and machine, that began to become noticeable around the middle of the twentieth century. S.T. was purchased by the Inland Joy Development Corporation (I.J.D.C.) on April 24, 1980. The concept of liberty having been undermined by the political, social, and economic practices of the period, it was natural that the contract between S.T. and I.J.D.C. initiated a long series of similar self-sales, which, in turn, gave rise to the exorbitantly rich but reliably docile class of “promach” brains or Neo-Helots.[13]