Machine Made
"Machine Made" is a science fiction short story by Scottish writer J. T. McIntosh, originally published in the Summer 1951 issue of New Worlds magazine. One of its author's earliest genre works, it was also his first to appear in a British publication. It was anthologized at least five times, including volumes edited by Groff Conklin and by John Carnell, and was translated into French for the 1974 volume Histoires de machines. Plot A young woman with a stunted intellect, being the victim of brain damage from birth, is hired on to perform basic menial labor (such as janitorial services) in a facility dedicated to the operation and programming of a mainframe computer. In her free time, she is curious whether the machine can add and subtract some basic numbers when she types them in. She has checked the results when she goes home, and sometimes spends days adding and subtracting the numbers to see if the results are correct. When she is at work, she has a long day walking alone through the thousands of square feet of the facility, checking on metal casings and consoles in this facility, and dusting them as needed. She knows that typing things