The Girl Who Was Plugged In

The narrative starts moving towards a tragic conclusion. We have a chain of misguided actions and unintended consequences that inexorably draw things back to the capsule, P. Burke, and her demise. The spark for this is the “sharp faced man’s” decision to use force to bring Delphi back into line and Paul’s reaction. Seeing her writhing in agony, he realizes that GTX is controlling her. The tragic misunderstanding is that he doesn’t grasp the true nature of Delphi’s identity and thinks instead she has pleasure and pain implants that could be easily removed. His wording in the moment suggests to Burke that he’s grasped the full truth: “You’re a doll! You’re one of those. PP implants. They control you” (70). For Burke, this is nothing less than a miracle—that he could love her enough to accept her for what she is. Indeed, the narrator allows us to believe this to be the case for a moment, before making things clear: “How can she guess that he’s got it a little bit wrong?” (70).

The culmination of the tragic action hinges on this misunderstanding. It’s what drives Paul to take Delphi to Carbondale in a doomed quest for freedom. Burke’s caught up in the action and desperate to be closer to Paul. The GTX team’s attempt to deter them by inflicting more pain only furthers the sense of crisis and makes it impossible for either Delphi or Paul to clarify their mistaken beliefs as they fly toward Carbondale. Even if Burke starts to glimpse the real problem when Paul triumphantly shows her the scrambler he thinks will help her, she’s powerless to escape the situation. She’s already shown herself willing to die for love in the desperate hope that she can die and be reborn as Delphi.

Paul and P. Burke’s misunderstanding also has the effect of heightening the pathos (intense pity and sadness) in the moment of their actual meeting. There aren’t many times where P. Burke decisively acts, she’s more often a passive figure pulled between greater forces. Here, with Paul so close, she steps out of the capsule to meet him. This expression of love is conveyed in all its tragic intensity, but also described in the now familiar style of the narrator, as something almost out of a horror movie, with shades of Frankenstein: “The doors tear open and a monster rises up” (76).

The longed-for moment of real contact and intimacy never comes. Instead, Paul is immediately repulsed and doesn’t recognize or understand who she is at all. His only touch is to push her away and accidentally kill her in the process: “It’s doubtful he recognizes his name or sees her life coming out of her eyes at him” (76). Even in her death, Paul still doesn’t grasp what’s happening; in this moment of closeness, they’ve never been further apart. Tiptree balances the complexity and pathos of Burke’s death—captured in her last enigmatic glance towards Delphi—with a sense of the grotesque. Her body is a “poisoned corpse […] nervous system hanging out” (76). Yet that last glance past Paul toward Delphi is truly poignant.

The pathos continues in Delphi’s death, as she slips away and what’s happening finally dawns on Paul. Throughout the novella, there have been momentary hints at the possibility of Delphi’s independent life—the miracle that Burke really could become Delphi. And those miraculous hints are there too in Delphi’s death, but only to be pulled away. Severed from Burke, Delphi staggers toward Paul, and can manage a few words before death takes hold.

Her last words are delicately poised: “I’m Delphi” could be a first flicker of life and identity, or it could be just the involuntary spasm of Burke’s last thought. Her very last words, a warning, “Paul…don’t sleep” (77) again suggests the pathos of an identify struggling to set itself free, for it was in sleep that Delphi’s consciousness was lost to Burke’s. But these fragile echoes of life are lost to a visceral bodily breakdown—the swelling of the pupils, the inarticulate noises that come from Delphi before her death. Again, pathos and the grotesque are in balance, and this pathos is also furthered by Paul’s agonized realization of what’s happened and his own role in killing the person he loved. For both Paul and P. Burke, their respective quests for something true and authentic: for love, or freedom, for a human connection not possible in the world prescribed by GTX, has led them here to this fatal confrontation with reality.

There’s a tremendous sense of lost opportunity, and in the last scene, this comes back to P. Burke, who has throughout been the overlooked, buried figure in her own narrative. In the final scene, we see Joe rush to her body to try and save her, but the line captures the futility of the effort: “it’s like saving an orchestra abandoned in mid-air” (78). There is something both sad and redeeming in the final realization that she was loved, even if she never knew it: “he alone had truly loved P. Burke […] she was the greatest cyber system he has ever known” (78). His love too is a reaching through Burke to something else, but it’s grounded in the knowledge of who she is.

It brings home that, far from being the rotten husk she’s described as, P. Burke was exceptional: able to captivate audiences and do things thought impossible for a Remote. She was too good and felt life too intensely for the role she was given, and so, in her own way, subverted the prescriptive social order GTX sought to entrench and preserve.

When the narrator casually intervenes with one of her trade-mark questions: “The end, really. You’re curious?” (78), we’re moved to a wider temporal view that suggests the fate of key characters. Paul grows in maturity through events, but it’s left open as to how successful his attempts to bore the system from within are. We do know the prevailing social order continues relatively undisrupted.

We learn that Delphi is reborn with another less capable Remote: “next year she’s back on the yacht getting sympathy for her tragic breakdown” (78). The absence of disruption is telling. For all that’s happened behind the scenes, in the eyes of the public, Delphi simply continues—her temporary absence and return is processed as another harmless celebrity story.

Delphi continues, the illusions continue, the system continues, but for the reader, the emphasis is still on the unique and strangely disruptive quality of P. Burke: “you don’t get two P. Burkes in a row —for which GTX is duly grateful.” (78). Again, Tragedy provides a useful frame of critical reference.

The tragic hero’s death is usually absorbed into the continuing social order, but in their death and the intensity of their life, we catch a glimpse of something more meaningful. This is what the narrator first directed our attention to when she insisted “look […] I’d love to show you something” (43)—and here the narrative comes full circle. That something was a challenge, a question, something more real than the zombies’ narrow concern with accumulating wealth and status.

The narrative also comes full circle in another way. The last character we’re told about is the ambitious and unscrupulous sharp faced lad, who inadvertently becomes the test subject for a time travel experiment. He “wakes up lying on a newspaper headlined NIXON UNVEILS PHASE TWO” (78). This reference locates the point in time and place as America, 1971—when President Richard Nixon introduced phase two of his tax regulations. We’ve moved from the imagined near future to a concrete political reality close to the author’s present. We’re told, in typically laconic, but suggestive, terms that the sharp faced lad is a fast learner. He’ll take full advantage of his knowledge of the future to adapt to and shape our world to his advantage—perhaps to create the very world the narrator has described.

The narrator finishes by talking of growth. We’ve seen Paul grow in maturity and wisdom, we’ve seen Delphi and Burke’s aborted growth, and finally, sardonically, the narrator returns us to the kind of growth which she mentioned right at the start: capital appreciation. Burke’s story is just a ripple in that great expanding commercial order, where there will always be wealth to be accrued, investments to make, new markets to grow, and new products to sell. The last line, addressed to her audience of zombies, is one of ironic reassurance: “[Y]ou can stop sweating. There’s a great future there” (78). The prevailing order sweeps on, people like the ‘sharp faced lad’ (and even Paul) adapt, grow and perpetuate it, the zombie audience go back to contemplating their stocks and shares. What actually lingers with us is P. Burke and that sense of something more real and profound that her life touched upon before it was washed away.