This story was very interesting to read. Along the passage, it became easy to understand each character and what their “function” was. In the first couple of paragraphs, it became recognizable that the “mother” ,or I think to be the motherboard, was in control of many different aspects of the machine and the other characters as maybe wires that serve a singular function. E.M. Foster makes this quite evident just by the way he describes the scenery of each part of the reading and how the surroundings are activated through the other. The machine has a set of actions that she must perform in a certain order and it seems like when other characters are trying to explore different “locations” or receive an unseen outcome, it makes the mother frustrated.
I think this story is read for a commuter programming class to show how people have become very reliant on technology, like the mother in the story. Over time, people begin to use technology and put it before everything, not remembering that it is man made. Towards the end of the story, everyone dies because Kuno suggests that the machine dies which cannot be fixed due to everyone's loss of self. If everyone had the same curiosity as Kuno and didn’t see the machine as a worshipping subject, then they wouldn’t be in a situation of death.