Birthmachine — Celestial Hyperventilation Mod

Speculative device for giving birth autonomously
Date
25 Mar 2014
Seen in

As time goes, few­er and few­er things in a human's life require the hands of anoth­er. We seem to con­flate progress with more auton­o­my, and our auton­o­my with a mix of automa­tion and tak­ing mat­ters into our own hands. The cal­lig­ra­ph­er got oust­ed by the print­ing press, the home sewing machine killed the seam­stress, and the por­traitist suc­cumbed to our self­ies. The final fron­tier might be any labor relat­ing to the med­ical field. And the answer to the moth­er of all labors (with an extreme­ly intend­ed pun) would be this fic­tion­al device seen in N002: the birth­ma­chine. A con­cept as total­ly inhu­man as it is absolute­ly lib­er­at­ing.

The ladies of the nor­mal future, and in fact any­body with a capac­i­ty for preg­nan­cy, often give birth on their own. Their most com­mon approach is to use a spe­cial tub tem­plate, equipped with a dex­ter­ous auto­mat­ed arm. Once fab­ri­cat­ed, the birth machine is a soli­tary mix of enter­tain­ment and para­met­ric pain. Some tem­plates come with games, some with a mini-bar offer­ing cer­e­mo­ni­al bev­er­ages, some gen­er­ate music, and some focus sole­ly on pain. This tem­plate was appar­ent­ly intend­ed to focus on breath­ing (as a form of enter­tain­ment, obviously).