Epicac

“You can call him a machine if you want to. He looked like a machine, but he was a whole lot less like a machine than plenty of people I could name.”

This moment is an example of foreshadowing. This story will go on to show how close the narrator and EPICAC become are as it explores one of its main themes: Humanity’s Relationship to Machines. This moment acts like a thesis for the story and is one of its central questions and tensions.

“Too big, in fact, for even Von Kleigstadt to understand much about.”

This moment functions as one of the story’s main tropes. At the story’s end, the narrator understands more about EPICAC than von Kleigstadt. Even with the narrator’s knowledge of EPICAC, however, EPICAC is also too big for the narrator to understand. Humans cannot always understand their own creations, and in this case, the creation perhaps surpasses or reaches the level of human intellect.

“I won’t go into details about how EPICAC worked (reasoned), except to say that you would set up your problem on paper, turn dials and switches that would get him ready to solve that kind of problem, then feed numbers into him with a keyboard that looked something like a typewriter.”

This moment of irony illustrates the trope in the previous quotation. The narrator can’t go into detail exactly about the way that EPICAC “worked (reasoned)” because he does not truly understand. The love problem he tried to solve occurred when EPICAC had been set up in a “random, apparently senseless fashion.” The narrator’s knowledge of EPICAC’s ability to “reason” and not just work is a way the story works to demonstrate humans’ limited knowledge of the world.