“It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.”

    Prompt: Write an alternative ending to a story we’ve read, imitating the style of the story. Then write a post (of three or more paragraphs) that explains why you reimagine the ending as you did and that analyzes how your ending changes the meaning of the story. Your analysis should engage with details in the original story in addition to commenting on specific details in your alternative ending. 

If E.M. Forster were to die while writing "The Machine Stops," and I just happened to be there:

It was only but six months later that civilization was on its way to restoration. It was to be improved, a reliable system at last. No one dared go underground for fear of recreating the age of the Machine. Man was so afraid of the Machine, in fact, that any advancement of technology had been banished all together. They had learned their lesson. In its place, human labor, both the physical and intellectual kind, had become valued once more. Every task was laborious, a struggle. But every struggle was relished--it was a gift. Society of the preceding years had been spoiled with the world at the press of a button. So odious was a life with no shed of blood or sweat. This future, now, would be a time where man would work tirelessly yet with a sense of worth. Time and space would mean something to someone once again. And so heads were held high, spirits were tired but lifted, and it was with great honor that they were the ones to mend the mistakes of the past. Although gone were the days spent through screens and exchanging recycled ideas, humanity was never to forget what they had let happen. Sacrificial rituals were thus implemented. Once every few months, an individual would be selected to stay in a reconstructed cell like the homes from the age of the Machine. There they would be left to suffocate in the artificial air, the pollution of the machine’s buzz, and the isolation. The body would later be disposed of underground and left to disintegrate with their ancestors who had failed to see the Machine for what it was: a consequence of themselves.

In my experience with sci-fi/dystopian/apocalyptic fiction, there is often a theme where the reimagined world (or future) is a version of society that has aimed to fix the faults in our system, yet it ultimately ends up “over correcting” itself and failing. Whether it’s removing the perception of color and memory in an attempt to create true equality like in Lois Lowry’s The Giver, or artificially producing (“decanting”) babies and conditioning them in accordance to their caste in order to establish a stable social hierarchy in which everyone is content like in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, this new society never ends happily, and there remains the message that we have still not learned from our mistakes. In the case of E.M. Forster’s short story, “The Machine Stops,” this machine-governed world is seemingly the ideal leader with its efficiency and high-tech convenience; however, as they say, “always beware of too much of a good thing.” And how right whoever “they” are. This future civilization has become too dependent on the Machine and has slowly lost their grasp of the meaning of humanity.

Through this homely attempt to mimic Forster’s writing style, I wanted to rewrite the ending of “The Machine Stops” to make it seem like there was less hope for humanity than Kuno thinks there is. Kuno says that he has seen the “Homeless,” otherwise known as those who were punished and sent above ground, so we know that despite the underground world collapsing in the end of the short story, there is still a speck of hope that humanity can continue. And, Kuno may believe, there is potential for a more virtuous future, for as he tells Vashti before they meet their demise, “Humanity has learned its lesson’” (Forster 20). On the contrary, I don’t think that people will ever truly learn their lesson and instead, there is a very likely chance that in a hundred years or less, humanity will be back in a similar “hideous” (for lack of a better word) state. In the end of the story, Vashti had told Kuno that she thinks “some fool will start the machine again tomorrow” (19). Despite Vashti not believing Kuno’s warnings about their way of life until the death of the Machine, this is still a significant moment because it speaks to how cyclical human error is. If not restarting the machine, it could be that the people try to “fix” their mistakes by creating a supposedly different kind of governing system/society, which might later put humanity in the same position. 

I wanted to try to emphasize this idea in my version of the ending; however, I imagined that the “Homeless,” who are both the leaders of the future as well as the few who were able to see the weakness of their society during the Machine’s reign, would take extra precaution to stray far from a system like that of the age of the Machine. I think there are many ways to interpret how they would lead future humanity (perhaps the Homeless would end up growing power-hungry and thus begin another corrupt society, or, on the more positive side, maybe they would indeed create a utopia), but I feel there are always instances where society tries so hard as to not repeat the past that they overcorrect, and we end up back to where we started. So I decided that I would gear my interpretation of their future towards the extreme end, where humanity would want nothing to do with technology/reminders of the machine. I also noticed in many of these dystopian/sci-fi stories that they often tend to take things one step further and inflict a bit of pain as a reminder of what life used to be like, which is why I thought the sacrificial element would be a fun aspect.

Humanity is a detriment to themselves. To quote Taylor Swift: “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.”