Her name is Vashti and she lives in the Machine, a subsurface residential complex that has evolved over time from the London Underground. But in Forster's ‘The Machine Stops’, the rail-network stretches from Somerset to Sumatra, and the tubes containing railways have been supplemented with speaking-tubes, food-tubes, medicine-tubes and music-tubes to form a colossal automated service-provider capable of supplying its users with every commodity they could ever desire, at the mere touch of a button: ‘There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. And there of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.’ The comprehensive nature of the Tube-network in the story reflects the huge expansion of the system taking place at the time that Forster was writing. London's was the first underground network in the world; the earliest line was opened in 1863, but for the first thirty years expansion was slow, and trains, for the most part, ran through open cuttings. The completion of the first ever deep-level Tube-railway in 1890 ushered in a new era. Soon an enormous subterranean transit network extended beneath the metropolis, and though it was never in fact to offer the full range of services listed in the fable, Forster was right to suggest that the London Underground represents the earliest phase in the development of that new category of space embodied in his story by the Machine.