Michael Knowles

That's O-9.

And, uh,

They have a nice little love affair.

But then he meets I-330.

And I-330 is a hot tramp, to put it bluntly.

She smokes.

She drinks.

She tells jokes.

She tells jokes.

She, in a way, enslaves him with her feminine wiles.

And she is a rebel.

She's part of the Mephi organization that seeks to subvert the world state.

And he goes along with this for a while.

But

Eventually, he is brought in by the Big Brother character, you know, the autocrat of the world state, and he recognizes that he might be duped, that maybe she was actually, it was a honeypot, maybe she was targeting him because he's the engineer working on the rocket ship that's going to bring the totalitarianism to the whole cosmos, and he undergoes an operation.

which is to remove his imagination.

The sickness that is set in, which is described as his developing a soul, he's got to get rid of it.

He has to excise it.

And in the end, the rebels are caught, the Trollope is tortured and killed, and he's rooting for the state to win in the end.

In a way, a similar ending, though maybe more satisfying, than you would get in 1984, which is, you know, at the end, he's essentially lobotomized, and he doesn't know or care about the distinction between truth and falsehood, and he's rooting.