Loss of Sensation

Plot

Engineer Jim Ripple, who came from a family of workers, created universal robots meant to assist laborers. He believed that making goods extremely cheap through mass production would bring down capitalism. The workers disagreed with him, and his own family saw him as a traitor. A crucial part of his invention was a high-capacity capacitor that supplied power to the robots. The government took notice because the robots could also function as weapons, so Ripple received a secret factory and funding to produce them. The robots were not self-aware or intelligent; they were operated by radio or by sound, and Ripple used a saxophone for the latter. When he was drunk, he would even make the robots dance. On the day of a general workers’ strike, the management at a factory where Ripple’s brother worked replaced the human staff with robots. A delegation of workers went to check for strike breakers and discovered the robots doing the jobs. During a demonstration, Ripple tried to show off a robot’s abilities, but an accident killed one of the workers. This triggered a conflict between the workers and the factory management, backed by the military. The military deployed the robots against the workers, with an officer in a tank controlling them by radio. Ripple attempted to stop the robots by playing his saxophone, but he failed and was killed. Eventually, the workers took control of the robots using their own remote control device, which they had secretly built after taking measurements at the robot factory and studying Ripple’s damaged prototype robot, Micron, which he had left at his home.