The Girl Who Was Plugged In

“The funky girl on the street, she just loves. Grooving on their beautiful lives, their misterioso problems. No one ever told her about mortals who love a god and end up as a tree or a sighing sound.”

The narrator here uses more unconventional diction to create both a distinctive voice and a sense of this voice speaking from a slightly different world. There are hints of 1970s slang, but combined with “misterioso problems,” we see a quasi-futuristic idiom. We also see another aspect of Tiptree’s style—short, punchy sentences and laconic expressions, pregnant with dark humor and wider significance.

The last line foreshadows P. Burke’s unfortunate fate, as her own life and the lives of the gods come together. The references are to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the stories of Daphne and Apollo, and Syrinx and Pan. In Ovid’s stories it is divinity and myth that enact transformation, and in Tiptree’s novel it’s the technologies of the future that make this possible. In both cases, the mortal encounter with a higher power proves deadly.

“They are absolutely unremarkable. Those faces were seen once at their nuptials and will show again in their obituaries and impress nobody either time. If you’re looking for the secret Big Blue Meanies of the world, forget it. I know. Zen, do I know! Flesh? Power? Glory? You’d horrify them. What they do like up there is to have things orderly, especially their communications.”

This passage is part of the narrator’s description of GTX and the figures who run it. They hold a vast amount of power in this future world. What’s striking then is that they go largely unnoticed and are unremarkable. People’s attention is focus on the gods GTX controls, not on the six figures making the big decision in the boardroom.

These figures are not villains or dictators pursuing flesh, power or glory in the conventional sense. In their own way, they’re merely functionaries, just another part of the system.

The line “I know. Zen, do I know” is curious. The special emphasis on personal knowledge here raises the possibility that the narrator may be close to or part of this world. One possible, but highly speculative reading is that the narrator is in fact Paul Isham—the Paul Isham who matured and became part of the boardroom after the tragic events of the narrative played out.

“Now let’s get one thing clear. P. Burke does not feel her brain is in the sauna room, she feels she’s in that sweet little body. When you wash your hands, do you feel the water is running on your brain? Of course not. You feel the water on your hand, although the ‘feeling’ is actually a potential-pattern flickering over the electrochemical jelly between your ears.”

In this digression, the narrator emphasizes that P. Burke’s experience as a remote is immersive and immediate. She’s right to do so, because for the story to work, a lot hinges on our understanding of this remote technology. But this also becomes a point of repeated tension and ambiguity in the novella, as P. Burke starts to realize and strain against the limitations of this immersive experience and reach for a fuller identification with Delphi.

“The name winks out of cycle, dances from pulses into modulations of modulations, whizzes through phasing, and shoots into a giga-band beam racing up to asynchronous satellite poised over Guatemala. From there the beam pours twenty thousand miles back to earth again, forming an all-pervasive field of structured energies supplying tuned demand-points all over the Can Am quadrant.”

This is one of the points where the narrator pauses to describe the technologies of the future and the pervasive role they play in society. It’s a description of the carrier field, and how Delphi is given a binary code (or name). There’s a sense of vast distances being overcome as the narrator describes the journey of this name from initiation up to a satellite station and back down into the carrier field. There’s also a sense of dynamism and energy, and a hint of something poetic in the description—the name winks and dances, as if having a life of its own. We see here too, the use of quasi-scientific terminology to bring to life the technology of the future—"giga-band beam” and “an all-pervasive field of structured energies.” It’s impressive that Tiptree anticipated aspects of how the internet would work in contemporary culture.

“Do you see why Delphi grins, stretching her delicious little numb body in the sun she faintly feels? Beams, saying, ‘Please, I’m ready now.’”

Another of the narrator’s rhetorical questions addressed to the reader. It comes at the point where P. Burke has realized that Delphi does not experience sexual sensation (or only very dimly). The passage presents another example of Tiptree’s concise but poetic prose. The image it captures is one of bodily openness, confidence and luxuriation. It also captures a sense of an imminent contradiction. The body feels the sun “only faintly.” The expression “delicious little numb body” captures a sense of objectification.

“Gods make it on novelty now. By Delphi’s time the hunt for new god-gear is turning the earth and seas inside-out and sending frantic fingers to the stars. And what gods have, mortals desire.”

Shortly after Delphi’s life as a god begins, the narrator pauses to explain about the role they play in advertising and the link between these gods and consumerism. After pointing out sarcastically how gods always depended on “things”—and alluding to the magical items and garments possessed by the gods of paganism, the narrator draws the contrast that today’s gods rely on not one divinely imbued item, but an endless stream of novelty products. It’s a comment, too, on the nature of capitalism and consumerism.

We sense that this isn’t a new process, “by Delphi’s time” implies that the endless cycle of consumption has been running for a long time. Great effort is placed in “turning the earth and seas inside-out” to find new resources, hinting how this process exploits and potentially exhausts nature.

“Really you can skip all this, when the loving little girl on the yellow-brick road meets a Man. A real human male burning with angry compassion and grandly concerned with human justice, who reaches for her with real male arms and—boom! She loves him back with all her heart.”

The development of P. Burke and Paul’s love affair is presented from this very broad point of view. The phrase ‘you can skip all this’ suggests the affair is almost fated. P. Burke’s childishness is emphasized, and the reference to the yellow brick road links P. Burke imaginatively to Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, another young woman pulled into a fantasy world where she has little control over events. The road must be followed, all the way to Oz, just as P. Burke has no choice but to follow the road that leads to Paul and love, and beyond that to her tragic end.

The realness and masculinity of Paul is stressed as something P. Burke can’t resist. It contrasts with her own illusory nature as a Remote, and the insipid figures that populate her world of illusory gods.

“A bit delayed, isn’t it, her understanding that the bargain she made was forever? P. Burke should have noticed those stories about mortals who end up as grasshoppers.”

This is another rhetorical question from the narrator that helps to show us P. Burke’s state of mind as she shifts from innocent contentment with her new life to the anguish and conflict created by her love for Paul. The narrator emphasises the finality of her situation. Her life is simply that of a remote, there’s no opportunity to change, adapt or go back on the fundamentals of her situation.

The next line is another example of the narrator’s terse, sardonic humor. The reference is to the classical myths of unfortunate human encounters with gods that end in a life-destroying transformation. Burke has already undergone such a transformation to become Burke, but the deadly implications of this change are only just beginning to manifest themselves.

“—you can’t break in or out of it, you can’t get hold of it anywhere. I don’t think they even have a plan except to keep things going round and round […] One great big vortex of lies and garbage pouring round and round getting bigger and bigger and nothing can ever change. If people don’t wake up soon we’re through!"

Here, Paul is describing to Delphi the nature of the social order as he sees it. It’s a damning critique and one that’s quite close to aspects of the narrator’s own description of GTX earlier in the story. Paul describes the system as inescapable, invisible, empty, and all pervasive. Despite its formidable power, it’s not something that can be concretely gasped, seen, or challenged—"you can’t get hold of it anywhere.”

Paul goes on to touch on the question of purpose—just keeping things “going round and round.” It is however accretive, the “vortex of lies” keeps growing. It lives in so far as it keeps moving and expanding. And within it there is seemingly no possibility for real change and social transformation.

For all that, Paul finishes with a desperate and seemingly contradictory imperative: “If people don’t wake up soon we’re through!” On the one hand, the system is inescapable, and yet on the other, Paul still has hope in some conscious resistance, and the possibility of change perhaps resides in that alone. This is one of the reasons why he is so keen to awaken Delphi to what he sees as the reality of the system. His own analysis of the social order, though, seems to preclude the possibility of any meaningful escape.

“The simple solution is to lock the waldo-cabinet until Paul gets tired of waiting for Delphi to wake up. But the cost, the schedules! And there’s something odd here […] he eyes the corporate asset hulking on the bed and his hunch-sense prickles.”

In this scene, Mr. Cantle is trying to work out how to deal with the situation that Burke has fallen for Paul and is disobeying her instructions. Mr. Cantle is a man with some subtlety of understanding. As he’s thinking, the real nature of the problem hits him. It’s not directly about Paul and his actions, it’s about Burke’s state of mind—he starts to sense something unexpected, that she fully identifies with Delphi and has fallen in love with Paul. She’s a very lucrative corporate asset, one he doesn’t want to risk losing; but this corporate asset now has a significant problem that needs unriddling. The description of her at the end continues the trend of objectification—she’s not a person but a “corporate asset,” and she’s described in monstrous terms “hulking,” not lying on the bed.

“P. Burke is seeing Heaven on the far side of death, too. Heaven is spelled P-a-u-l, but the idea’s the same. I will die and be born again in Delphi. Garbage, electronically speaking. No way.”

P. Burke is desperate at this point to fuse with Delphi and feels trapped between her love of Paul and her obligation to GTX. The intensity of her feeling and her desire to escape into Delphi develops a quasi-religious character. She’s attempting a kind of self-transcendence into Delphi, and the narrator draws a direct comparison with Christian faith. For Burke, Heaven becomes Paul, and she’s pursuing a kind of redemption and rebirth through death. We hear again the abrupt, idiosyncratic style of the narrator, who shoots the idea down to earth: “Garbage, electronically speaking. No way.” Tiptree holds the possibility in the balance, as she hints at those little miraculous moments that shouldn’t technically be possible: Delphi crying real tears or talking in her sleep.

“Inside is a big mean-looking cabinet with its door panels ajar. And inside that cabinet is a poisoned carcass to whom something wonderful, unspeakable, is happening. Inside is P. Burke the real living woman who knows that HE is there, coming closer [.]”

This is the moment just before the novel’s final denouement, Burke’s real-life encounter with Paul. The capsule here is portrayed from the perspective of Paul, arriving in the suite. It’s something unfamiliar and ominous—reminiscent of a coffin or the contraption from which Frankenstein’s monster emerges. Tiptree deliberately plays up the horror-movie associations here. Behind that is the genuine human tragedy of Burke reaching out toward the man she loves and believes (or hopes) will accept her. Suspense is built here with the slight opening of the capsule. We have the contrast between the description of Burke, “a poisoned carcass” and the idea of a miraculous transformation “something wonderful, unspeakable, is happening.”

“It’s doubtful he recognizes his name or sees her life coming out of her eyes at him. And at the last it doesn’t go to him. The eyes find Delphi, fainting by the doorway, and die.”

After the fatal encounter where Burke’s dreams and life come crashing down, she’s left on the floor, repeating Paul’s name. The hoped-for union never came. Paul doesn’t understand who or what Burke is. There’s a strong sense of incomprehension and distance in this failed moment of intimacy. He doesn’t recognize his name on her lips, nor does he comprehend the way she is looking at him in her dying moments. Her death is described metaphorically as a journey toward him, which is just what it has been—"her life coming out of her eyes at him.” There’s then a subtle but significant change of direction. Her last look doesn’t go to him, but, more enigmatically, to the deeper source of her desire—to Delphi, the woman she almost was, and wanted to become.