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Night Call, Collect

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Night Call, Collect is a short story by Ray Bradbury from his collection I Sing the Body Electric! which can be accessed via the Internet Archive.

Summary

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Night Call, Collect tells a story of a man so alone that he creates an unusual way of keeping himself occupied. One that is designed to ward off loneliness, but that will come back to haunt his future self. Barton is a man completely shut off from the rest of humanity. He is the sole remaining human on the planet Mars. As a young man, Barton made a series of messages for his future self, delivered through pre-recorded phone calls. The older Barton has forgotten he did this, so the calls come as a surprise. As he relives his past through the calls, we learn that the younger Barton has played a trick on the older Barton. The trick is intended to be fatal, and it is successfully executed. Barton has laid this vicious trap for himself and dies alone on Mars. As the story ends, without a human left to call, the messages begin talking to one another.

Analysis

While this story was published over fifty years ago, we can still learn from it today. We need to see the warning that Bradbury has laid out for us. Technology can certainly enhance our lives. However, left unchecked, we have the power to build that which will lead to our destruction. This is a common theme in science fiction because it has happened again and again throughout the history of humanity. Sometimes it feels like as soon as we invent something designed to improve society, we set off a countdown clock ticking away the time until we use it to cause harm. Less than two decades ago, we viewed social media as a fantastic new way to connect with others and create a truly global community. Today we see it also has tremendous capability to degrade our society, pit us against one another, and cause us to lose our innate sense of empathy. It is not uncommon for people to get into vicious arguments with strangers online. When we are not speaking face to face with another person, it is easy to lose sight of the other’s humanity. Young Barton does not, and cannot, honestly know Old Barton. When Young Barton was first building his system of telephone messages, he could never have imagined what his older self would be like. In fact, he could not even be certain his older self would still be living on Mars receiving these messages. As none of us can predict our future or know the person who we will be in fifty years, Young Barton would not be able to know and have empathy for his future self. It’s a common phenomena of being a human that we look back on our younger selves, our previous hopes and dreams, and find it difficult to recognize the reflection looking back at us from the past. In the time that Old Barton is living, Young Barton no longer exists as a human person. He exists only in these recorded messages, an artificial intelligence incapable of human emotion. In their first exchange, the younger Barton warns, “Don’t expect my sympathy. You’re like a stranger off in another country. I can’t be sad.” (140) This lack of identification with his older self makes it all the easier for him to lay the trap which leads to his demise.

Bradbury gives us several indications throughout the story of how he feels about this technology created by the young Barton which ultimately leads to his future counterpart’s death. At the start of the first phone call, Bradbury writes, “The conversation was impossible, and should not be continued, yet he went on with it.”(139) This foreshadowing is our first warning of what’s to come. Though it seems impossible for these calls to be ignored. As time goes on they become ever more frequent. It’s then that the older Barton decides to take action against the machines he’s built. “I’ll find them, he thought, and destroy them all.” (144) However, this task is impossible for several reasons. First of all, there are far too many machines for Barton to find them all. And more importantly, as one recording from younger Barton reminds him, he needs the telephone lines to remain open if he is going to maintain hope of being rescued. It’s then that very hope that is turned against him by the younger Barton when he plays the prank which leads to Barton’s death. How is it that this technology that Barton himself created as a means to keep himself company, to comfort him in his solitude, could turn on him in the end? Again we can find an allegory here that relates to the current state of social media. What was once heralded as a magnificent tool to connect people all over the world, often has the tendency to make people feel more alone.

Bradbury is also making an inextricable link between technology and youth. The artificial intelligence was made by the younger Barton, but it also remains young itself. The AI is incapable of aging. The ideas it has been filled with are incapable of changing and growing. This inability to learn leads to an even further lack of empathy by the machine. This is in large part because its creator was a young person who was incapable of foresight and an understanding of how this would affect his future self. There has been research in recent years into the development in the adolescent brain, specifically in regards to the part of the brain that regulates decision making and reasoning. This research has shown that there is evidence that young people don’t have the same ability to anticipate outcomes of their actions that most adults possess. Therefore, technology created by young people would reasonably also lack this ability. Young Barton did not consider how his AI would behave in the future. He could not envision the capabilities of the machine he was creating. Combined with the AI’s inability to connect on a human level with Older Barton, this is how we arrive at the deadly outcome of Night Call, Collect.

Bradbury and Technology

Technology plays a major role in Ray Bradbury’s entire body of work. In fact, there are numerous times that he seems to have predicted certain types of technology including flat-screen TVs and electronic surveillance (citation or note or more content needed). It’s not uncommon for science fiction to be the inspiration for those who invent these kinds of technology.

Additional Reading

This Washington Post article Dreams of Ray Bradbury: Predictions that came true shows

a list of technology that Bradbury wrote about as science fiction which eventually became reality.

This JSTOR article Ray Bradbury on War, Recycling, and Artificial Intelligence analyzes the themes of technology and AI that Bradbury wrote about in several other stories.

Activity

Science Fiction Inspires the Future of Science | National Geographic

After watching the video above, write a short journal based on one of the following prompts:

What is something you’ve read about in a sci-fi novel that feels similar to the technology that exists today?

If you were to invent a futuristic piece of technology what would it be and how could it benefit society? What are the potential downsides?

Do you think the technology created in the last century is more helpful or harmful?

In what way have you seen technology bring people together or keep them apart?