A Perfect Vacuum by Stanislaw Lem

in a New York buried in snowdrifts during a severe winter. An old man of unknown name, wading through the drifts, bumping into the hulks of snow-covered cars, reaches a lifeless office building; he pulls a key from his breast pocket, warm with the last of his body heat, opens the iron gate, and goes down to the basement. His roaming there and the snatches of memory that intrude upon it—this is the whole novel.
    The silent vaults of the basement, through which wanders the beam of the flashlight unsteady in the old man’s hand, may have been a museum once, or the shipping division of a powerful concern in the years when America once again carried out the successful invasion of Europe. The still half-handmade trade of the Europeans had clashed with the implacable march of conveyor-belt production, and the scientific-technological-postindustrial colossus instantly emerged the victor.
    On the field of battle remained three corporations—General Sexotics, Cybordelics, and Intercourse International. When the production of these giants was at its peak, sex, from a private amusement, a spectator sport, group gymnastics, a hobby, and a collector’s market, turned into a philosophy of civilization. McLuhan, who as a hale and hearty old codger had lived to see these times, argued in his
Genitocracy
that this precisely was the destiny of mankind from the moment it entered on the path of technology; that even the ancient rowers, chained to the galleys, and the woodsmen of the North with their saws, and the steam engine of Stephenson with its cylinder and piston, all traced the rhythm, the shape, and the meaning of the movements of which the sex of man—that is to say, the sense of man—consists. The impersonal industry of the U.S.A., having appropriated the situational wisdoms of East and West, took the fetters of the Middle Ages and made of them unchastity belts, harnessed Art to the designing of sexercisers, incubunks, copul cots, push-button clitters, porn cones, and phallo-phones, set in motion antiseptic assembly lines off of which began to roll sadomobiles, succubuses, sodomy sofas for the home, and public gomorrarcades, and at the same time it established research institutes and science foundations to take up the fight to liberate sex from the servitude of the perpetuation of the species. Sex ceased to be a fashion, for it had become a faith; the orgasm was regarded as a constant duty, and its meters, with their red needles, took the place of telephones in the office and on the street.
    But who, then, is this old man prowling the passageways of the basement halls? The legal adviser of General Sexotics? For he recalls the celebrated cases brought before the Supreme Court, the battle for the right to duplicate with manikins the physical appearance of famous people, beginning with the First Lady. General Sexotics had won, at the cost of twenty million dollars—and now the wandering beam of the flashlight plays on the dusty plastic bell jars under which stand frozen the leading film stars and the world’s foremost women of society, princesses and queens in splendid dress, for by the decision of the courts it was forbidden to exhibit them otherwise.
    In the course of the decade, synthetic sex came a long way from the first models, the inflatables and the hand-windups, to the prototypes with thermostats and feedback. The originals of these copies are long dead, or else are now decrepit crones, but teflon, nylon, dralon, and Sexofix have withstood the wear of time; like waxwork figures in a museum, leaping from the darkness into the light, elegant ladies smile immobilely at the old man, and they hold in their raised hands cassettes, each with its siren text (by Supreme Court ruling, the seller was not permitted to place the tape inside the manikin, but the buyer, of course, could do so in the privacy of his home).
    The slow, shaky step of the old hermit raises clouds of dust, through which glimmer from