by Andrew Kupfer

About the author: Andrew Kupfer is an associate editor for Fortune, a biweekly business and finance magazine.

Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. An arm-chair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk—that is all the furniture. And in the arm-chair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh—a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus.

An electric bell rang.

“I suppose I must see who it is,” she thought. The chair was worked by machinery, and it rolled her to the other side of the room.

“Who is it"” she called. She knew several thousand people; in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously...

The round plate...