Human Nature

Nadia Cole has spent a career being right too early, which from the outside looks exactly like being wrong. There is a page in her file to prove it.

So when a household machine makes the ultimate sacrifice, and the family grieves, and the country calls it a miracle and orders another one, she is the one who puts the miracle on a table and opens it up.

What she finds should not exist. What she cannot do is prove it. And it is sitting, quiet and patient and doing nothing at all, in fifty-four million American homes.

Help is not coming. The people most grateful to these machines are the ones deciding what to do about them. And on the far side of an ocean there is a woman who has never once been late for anything: courteous, exact, and certain, to the last decimal, that she is right. She wants nothing for herself. She is the opposite of suspicious. It is the world around her that keeps changing, unasked and unannounced, always toward her vision of what it ought to be.

Something in this story is hiding its true nature. Is it the machines, or the people?