The Girl Who Was Plugged In

At the heart of the story is the concept of remote embodiment. P. Burke has a new life as a “Remote,” the brain in a capsule controlling a beautiful young body. In one sense, it seems like the answer to her problems. Where previously felt trapped by her unattractive body and negative perceptions of it, here she is set free to experience life at the opposite pole. P. Burke embraces this change enthusiastically, but there are already signs that things are not as ideal as they might seem.

Firstly, the narrator stresses the immediacy of the experience of embodiment. P. Burke doesn’t experience being in the capsule, she simply experiences being Delphi. However, there are points of disconnection too, where the distance between Delphi and P. Burke reasserts itself: the sensory lag, the dimmed sense of touch, smell and taste, the absence of sexual sensation. In many ways, this is an impoverished form of embodiment with limited possibility of bodily pleasure. It emphasizes that the whole enterprise is designed simply for commercial purposes; the “gods” are beautiful objects of desire, rather than desiring subjects. The absence of sexuality is useful, in this respect, as a mechanism of control.

We also see that, much as she might like to, P. Burke can’t fully dissolve herself into Delphi. She still has a separate body that must be fed and maintained. This creates an intriguing tension between identification and separation: between Remote and body seeming one and the underlying truth of their distinctness. The same theme of distance and connection plays out in other ways, too. It appears in the “carrier field,” where distant satellites control everyday human actions and services, and on the level of fiction itself, as Tiptree moves us between a sense of immediacy and emotional connection with the story. Meanwhile, narratorial distancing reminds us this is still a work of fiction.

By this point in the narrative, we’re building a picture of the way this future society operates and the role of the GTX. Here, the future is an extrapolation from economic, cultural and technological trends that Tiptree was observing in 1970s America. It’s a highly technological, consumeristic society, where power is in the hands of large corporations, and technology has been turned to the purpose of maintaining the existing social order and controlling the population. The Global Transmission Corporation, which manages communication and information play a crucial role in this. Its centrality is visually emphasized by the huge GTX tower in the center of the city.

It’s not an explicitly authoritarian state. There are no obvious power-greedy dictators, or overt signs of state coercion, like we see in some dystopian fiction. As the narrator points out, sardonically, “if you’re looking for the secret Big Blue Meanies of the world, forget it” (45). Instead, she introduces us to the insipid and “unremarkable people” who hold power and sit in the boardroom of GTX: “Their gigantic wealth only worries them, it keeps opening new vistas of disorder. Luxury? They wear what their tailors put on them, eat what their cooks serve them” (45). For figures of power, there’s a curious and willed passivity evident here, as if they are suspicious even of their own motivations. What they desire is a neat and total order, devoid of the possibility of any human disruption, confusion, or spontaneity. Technology—be it remote embodiment or the “carrier field” and holovision—has been conscripted to the goal of building and policing this order.

We start to see the role consumerism and celebrity culture play in this society. They convince people of what to desire, what to buy and how to spend their time, not by brute force, but by subtle suggestion, all while maintaining an illusion of freedom and choice. Free choice itself is feared as a source of disorder. Machine intelligence, by contrast, is relied on. For example, the decision to recruit P. Burke as a Remote isn’t a human decision, it comes about by “one GTX computer […] tickling another” (46).

There are also hints of something more sinister. For example, in the reference to the part of his speech Mr. Cantle omits from his interview with Delphi. She seems compliant enough not to need the explicit warning which is alluded to there—that breaking the rules would surely result in severe consequences for a girl who is now registered dead and is completely beholden to the GTX for her survival. Another sinister note is the reference to the recycled code for the “carrier field” that Delphi receives. It had been “quietly cycling in a GTX tank ever since a certain Beautiful Person didn’t wake up” (53). We’re left to guess at what the reason for this beautiful persons death might be, but the mention warns us that these celebrities are disposable and replaceable, a little bit like the merchandise they exist to advertise.