Audibly Audiobooks

1 Hour of Supernatural Horror Stories

The story describes a world in which most of the human population has lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual now lives in isolation below ground in a standard room, with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Travel is permitted, but is unpopular and rarely necessary. Communication is made via a kind of instant messaging/video conferencing machine with which people conduct their only activity: the sharing of ideas and what passes for knowledge. The two main characters, Vashti and her son Kuno, live on opposite sides of the world. Vashti is content with her life, which, like most inhabitants of the world, she spends producing and endlessly discussing secondhand 'ideas'. Her son Kuno, however, is a sensualist and a rebel. He persuades a reluctant Vashti to endure the journey (and the resultant unwelcome personal interaction) to his room. There, he tells her of his disenchantment with the sanitised, mechanical world. He confides to her that he has visited the surface of the Earth without permission and that he saw other humans living outside the world of the Machine. However, the Machine recaptures him, and he is threatened with 'Homelessness': expulsion from the underground environment and presumed death. Vashti, however, dismisses her son's concerns as dangerous madness and returns to her part of the world. As time passes, and Vashti continues the routine of her daily life, there are two important developments. First, the life-support apparatus required to visit the outer world is abolished. Most welcome this development, as they are sceptical and fearful of first-hand experience and of those who desire it. Secondly, "Technopoly", a kind of religion, is re-established, in which the Machine is the object of worship. People forget that humans created the Machine, and treat it as a mystical entity whose needs supersede their own. Those who do not accept the deity of the Machine are viewed as 'unmechanical' and threatened with Homelessness. The Mending Apparatus – the system charged with repairing defects that appear in the Machine proper – has also failed by this time, but concerns about this are dismissed in the context of the supposed omnipotence of the Machine itself.

The narrator discusses his discovery of an invasion of Earth. The narrator warned the government but he was ignored. The narrator learned of this invasion by reading book found abandoned on a bus. He did not notice that the author of the story seemed to predict an alien race with immense powers, but on closer examination it was obvious on every line.

Reading every line of the novel literally, the narrator learned that the aliens’ eyes can move around the room, even shifting from person to person. They can remove other body parts, divide themselves into two parts to be in two places at once, and function without brains. Terrified, the narrator runs from the garage where he was reading the story to the house, where he plays Monopoly and awaits the alien invasion.

The Eyes Have It by PHILIP K. DICK

3 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Ray Bradbury The Pedestrian by Ray Bradbury The Fight of the Good Ship Clarissa by Ray Bradbury All Summer in a Day By Ray Bradbury

She was very pretty when I first knew her, with the sweet straight nose and short upper lip of the cameo-brooch divinity, humanized by a dimple that flowered in her cheek whenever anything was said possessing the outward attributes of humor without its intrinsic quality. For the dear lady was providentially deficient in humor: the least hint of the real thing clouded her lovely eye like the hovering shadow of an algebraic problem.