The Illustrated Man

“The Veldt” opens with a worried conversation between George and Lydia Hadley over their children’s virtual reality nursery. They had bought their fully automated Happy-life Home which “clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and play and sang and was good to them” (7). The nursery generates 3D reproductions from their children’s imaginations but now only shows an African veldt. George and Lydia watch lions feeding far away as vultures circle above them. Suddenly the lions charge and the Hadleys escape, reminding themselves it is only a simulation. 

The Hadleys muse over how addicted their children are to the nursery and how the Home performing their duties for them has stripped them of their utility as parents. As they watch, something collides with the door from inside the nursery.

At dinner, George frets over how obsessively the children seem to be thinking about death. He cannot remember the transition from storybook scenes to the veldt; “being busy, he had paid it no attention” (13). He tries to change the simulation himself but cannot. He and Lydia wonder if it is stuck because the children think about killing so repetitively or because Peter, unusually smart for his age, has somehow reprogrammed it.