Player Piano

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

“Makes you feel kind of creepy, don’t it, Doctor, watching them keys go up and down? You can almost see a ghost sitting there playing his heart out.”

Anita had successfully combined the weapons of sex, taste, and an aura of masculine competence.

“As you say, like rabbits. Incidentally, Paul, another interesting sidelight your father probably told you about is how people didn’t pay much attention to this, as you call it, Second Industrial Revolution for quite some time. Atomic energy was hogging the headlines, and everybody talked as though peacetime uses of atomic energy were going to remake the world. The Atomic Age, that was the big thing to look forward to. Remember, Baer? And meanwhile, the tubes increased like rabbits.” “And dope addiction, alcoholism, and suicide went up proportionately,” said Finnerty.

And Halyard suddenly realized that, just as religion and government had been split into disparate entities centuries before, now, thanks to the machines, politics and government lived side by side, but touched almost nowhere.