The Very Pulse of the Machine

"The Very Pulse of the Machine" is a science fiction short story by American writer Michael Swanwick, published in 1998.

It was also nominated for the 1999 Locus Award for Best Short Story and Asimov's Science Fiction magazine's Reader Poll.

[1] In 2022, the story was adapted into an episode of the Netflix anthology series Love, Death & Robots.

Along the way she hears a voice in her radio claiming to be Io, which is actually a machine, using Burton's body to communicate.

Burton is a poetry enthusiast, and Io (or Kivelsen's hallucinations) quotes several poets, including Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Edmund Hamilton Sears.