The concept was interesting, but a few things kept bothering me.
1) While I can grok judging people by what they can afford and I can even grok having an underclass of Have-Nots whom the technological Haves look down upon as subhuman, what I have a hard time grokking is the point of view - apparently shared by everyone in the world - that person + phone = real person, but that same person - phone = subhuman. Given that human beings still apparently reproduce the normal way and don't seem to have forgotten any other major cultural touchstones (there's still single mothers buying groceries, for Pete's sake!) then how has everyone forgotten what the brain is and how it works?
2) A planet, apparently still bustling in the future, with only one hundred "disabled" people living on the entire world? Man, no matter how they treat those hundred folks, sign me up for THAT cultural advance.
3) There's still concepts of sympathy and etc., as witness the caretaker's idea of legislation which will fund research to reattach phones to the poor deprived Disconnected. So why hasn't anyone noticed that the Disconnected are, um, caged, chained, rolling in their own filth, and fed gruel? We used to treat insane people that way, sure, nearly a hundred years ago. How is it that society has stayed so nice and orderly and reasonable except for this one enormous gaping flaw? We currently treat brain-dead individuals who literally can't breathe without outside assistance better than the phoneless wretches in this story, and those people were at least of "animal" intelligence.
4) So, um, at the end the pregnant lady goes off to... well, the only thing I can imagine happening is her rapid recapture and the abortion of her child. She has no resources, no allies, and no plans. If she doesn't die in childbirth, then how exactly is she going to manage to live? Sure, she's got half-invisibility in that people don't tend to look with their eyes anymore, but that only goes so far, especially when an infant starts squalling. I got the feeling I was supposed to feel a wash of happiness at the True and Natural Woman heading off into the sunset with that evergreen symbol of new hope, a pregnancy. However, because I wasn't able to quite get a handle on the mindset this "new society" represented, all I really saw was some poor deprived woman off to live a short and brutish life of starvation and fear.
Frankly, the phones just weren't scary on their own, not without the weird, out-of-place brutality with which the Disconnected were treated. I think having that sort of automatic empathy would generally be a positive thing, or at least morally neutral. The "evilness" of the networked society felt forced and somewhat tacked on. I would have much preferred a piece that simply explored what it was like to be a part of that network and then lose that connection than I did this story, which seemed intent on proving how eeeeevil the phones were without much actual evidence for it.
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I started to go on for like two or three pages about privacy and democracy and empathy and groupthink, but then I realized that no one else cares that much, so just leave it that I think there's an awful lot of thematic meat here that wasn't cooked up to my taste (and had a weird foreign spice on it that I had to mask with lots of ketchup.)
