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# Beware of Things!
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/beregites-veshchei/
- Published: 2023-05-23T11:58:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:36:32.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Books, Observations, Science

Beware of things! They enslave us very quickly and very firmly!

So Ebenezer Sidney, the hero of Alexander Grin's novella "The Grey Motor-Car", warns his interlocutor as he reflects on the degree to which mechanical objects, or creatures, may be endowed with life. I recalled the story while reading discussions of the phenomenon of artificial intelligence, in which some fear that the soulless machine will soon displace man everywhere. Well, a text of 1921 rather got ahead of these anxieties.

"Inanimate matter," said Kishley. "Iron and steel are dead."  
I made no objection to this. It seemed to me that a motor-car had cried out beyond the window. Indeed, the cry was repeated, nearer, and then directly beneath the window.  
"Do you hear?" I said. "There is its voice, a howl that distantly recalls some coarse, embittered words. So it has a voice, movement, sight, perhaps memory. It has a home. In the Rue Bock-Methane it is worth visiting the wholesale motor-car showrooms and looking at them in their domestic surroundings. They stand gleaming, oiled, on the cement floor of a vast hall. On the walls hang their portraits: photographs of models and of winners in competitions. It has its music: certain new compositions which so diligently reproduce the dissonance of street din or of chance sounds arising from any movement. It has, finally, a gramophone, a cinema, doctors, panegyrists, poets, the very ones of whom you spoke half an hour ago, people with a highly developed sense of the mechanism. It has mistresses too, those ladies who bestow the smile of their wax faces from the windows of fashionable shops. And this is not life? A fairly full existence, I should say. Besides, it goes in for sport and murder, and takes part in war."  
"It turns out, then," said Nikolai, "that... However, I shall put it more briefly: a certain motor-car, covered in mud and wounds, returned from the theatre of military operations. Having shaved at the barber's, it went home, where it put the record of the march 'For Glory and Triumph' on the gramophone and ordered the cinematograph to be started with the film 'The Motor Races between Liss and Zurbagan'. In its delight, a tyre burst."

The main character, the eccentric Sidney, seriously ponders the earthly being of machines, and even seriously supposes that some of them may not differ from people in the least.

By his conjecture, the girl he loves is a wax mechanical doll so artfully made that she has managed to escape from a shop and to act like a real girl, even to conduct love affairs. He observes her skin, the colour of yellow chalk, which at times pales and turns the colour of a waxwork; her empty, pleasant smile; he notes that her daily routine is governed by nothing but the machine, and that she is a soulless slave of things; but above all he observes her unreal feelings: incapable of love, she, though seemingly endowed with a soul, is drawn to him solely by a craving for his wealth. By all signs, an indifferent creature with an unmoved voice and the strange name Corrida El Baso, of unknown nationality and unknown origin, can be nothing but a mannequin, one that Sidney really did once see in another city. This, together with the sinister appearance in his life of the grey motor-car, does not merely rob the hero of peace but very soon of his reason. Corrida is not a living girl but an animated doll. And therefore she must be killed. And Sidney tells her at the edge of the precipice: "I have grasped the secret of your mechanism. It has come to resemble the outward appearance of human life by the force of all the mechanisms that clatter around us. But to become a woman, understand this, to become a truly living being, you can only after your destruction."