Machines Like Me

FIVE

When I got back from the hospital, an hour after lunch, Miranda was waiting for me. She intercepted me in the hall by her front door. We’d already been talking on the phone while I waited to be treated and I had a lot more to say, and I had some questions too. But she led me upstairs to her bedroom and there my words died in my throat. I relaxed into her concern for me. I was encased in plaster from elbow to wrist. While we made love, I protected my arm with a pillow. We passed into the sublime. At least for a while, she was personal, as well as inventive, she was solicitous, and joyous, and so was I. It was me she was with, not any capable man. I didn’t dare threaten with questions the novel and exalted feelings that passed between us. I couldn’t bring myself to ask her about Peter Gorringe, or about what she had told the court, or tell her what I had already discovered about the case while sitting in Accident and Emergency. I didn’t ask her whether she knew that Adam was ‘in love’ with her, or whether she had intended to dispose him to be so. I didn’t want to refer to the coolness between us after I’d mentioned marriage in Holy Trinity Church. How could I when at one point she pressed my face between her palms and looked into my eyes and shook her head, as if in wonder?

Afterwards, I remained silent on these subjects because I greedily thought that within the half-hour we would be going back to her bed, even though she was pulling away from me again as we drank coffee in her kitchen. I was happy to believe that all questions and tensions would be settled later. We talked now in a businesslike way, first about Mark. We agreed to try to find out what was happening to him. She was concerned about Adam. She thought I should take him back to the shop for a check-up. She still held to her plan for the three of us to drive to Salisbury to visit her father. I didn’t say that the prospect of us packed into my small car, spending the entire day covering for Adam and being polite to a difficult, dying man, had no appeal. I was keen to want whatever she wanted.

We didn’t go back to bed. A silence forced its way between us. I could see that she was already withdrawing into her private world and I didn’t know what to say. Besides, she had a seminar at King’s, in the Strand. I decided to settle my feelings by avoiding Adam downstairs and going straight out for a stroll on the Common. There, I walked up and down for two hours. My inaccessible wrist itched as I thought about Miranda. I didn’t know how we had traversed so smoothly from coolness to joy, from suspicion to ecstasy, and from there to an impersonal conversation about arrangements. She excited me and I couldn’t understand her. Perhaps some intelligible part of her had been damaged. I was anxious to dismiss that. It must be that she knew more about love, the deeper processes of love, than I did. So she was a force, but not of nature, not even of nurture. More like a psychological arrangement, or a theorem, a hypothesis, a glorious accident, like light falling on water. Wasn’t that of nature, and wasn’t this old hat, men thinking of women as blind forces? Then, might she resemble a counter-intuitive Euclidean proof? I couldn’t think of one. But after half an hour of fast walking, I thought I’d found the mathematical expression for her: her psyche, her desires and motives were inexorable, like prime numbers, simply and unpredictably there. More old hat, dressed as logic. I was in knots.

Pacing the littered grass, I numbed myself with truisms. She is who she is. She’s herself and that’s the end of it! She approaches love with caution because she knows how explosive it can be. As for her beauty, at my age, in my state, I was bound to think of it as a moral quality, as its own justification, the badge of her essential goodness, whatever she might actually do. And look what she had done – from my waist, almost to my knees, I still felt the afterglow of the most intense sensual pleasure I had ever known, and everywhere, its emotional correlate glowed too.

I had done two turns when I stopped in one of the larger, emptier expanses of the Common. A good way off, on all sides, the traffic turned about me like planets. Usually it oppressed me to reflect that every car contained a nexus of worries, memories and hopes as vital and complicated as my own. Today, I welcomed and forgave everyone. We would all turn out well. We were all bound together in our own overlapping but distinct forms of comedy. Others might also have a lover living with a death threat. But no one else with an arm in a cast had a machine for a love rival.

I headed home, north along the High Street, past the burned-out premises of the Anglo-Argentinian Friendship Society, past the stinking black heaps of plastic sacks, trebled in height since I was last this way. A German company had launched their bipedal, dustmen-automata in Glasgow. Public contempt was aroused because each one wore the perpetual grin of a contented worker. If Adam could make an origami boat in seconds, it should not have been much of a stretch to have a drone chuck sacks into the mechanical maw of a garbage truck. But the filth and dust caused failure in the knee and elbow joints, according to the Financial Times, and the cheaper batteries couldn’t survive an eight-hour shift. Each device cost five years’ wages of a dustman. Unlike Adam, it had an exoskeleton and weighed 350 pounds. The automata were falling behind on the work and on Sauchiehall Street, the bags were piling up. In Hanover, a robot dustman had stepped backwards into the path of an autonomous electric bus. Teething troubles. But in our part of the country, humans were cheaper, and they remained on strike. General outrage had given way to apathy. Someone said on the radio that the stink was no more remarkable than in Calcutta or Dar es Salaam. We could all adapt.

Peter Gorringe. Once I had the name, it was easy to find the press reports as I waited with my throbbing wrist in Casualty. They dated back three years and, as I’d guessed, concerned a rape. As victim, Miranda’s name was withheld. In broad outline, the case resembled a thousand others: alcohol and a dispute over consent. She went one evening to Gorringe’s bedsit in the centre of town. They knew each other from school, which they had left only months before, but they were not close friends. That night, alone together, they drank a fair amount and around nine o’clock, after some kissing, which neither side denied, he forced himself on her, according to the prosecution. She tried to fight him off.

Both parties agreed that intercourse took place. Gorringe’s defence, provided through legal aid, argued that she had been a willing partner. Counsel made much of the fact that she had not called out for help during the alleged assault, nor had she left Gorringe’s place until two hours later, or made any distressed phone calls to police, parents or friends. The prosecution case was that she was in a state of shock. She had sat on the edge of the bed, half dressed, unable to move or speak. She left around eleven, went straight home, did not wake her father, lay on her bed crying until she fell asleep. The next morning she went to the local police station.

It was in Gorringe’s story that the particulars of this case emerged. He told the court that after they made love, they drank more vodka and lemonade, that the post-coital mood was celebratory. She asked him if he had any objection to her texting her new friend Amelia to announce that she and Peter were an ‘item’. Within a minute there came a reply in the form of a laughing emoticon making the thumbs-up sign. The case for the defence should have been simple. But the messages were not on Miranda’s phone. Amelia had been living in a hostel for problem teenagers, and had gone off backpacking and couldn’t be traced. The phone company in Canada would not release their record of texts without a formal approach from the police. But the police had targets to meet for solved rape cases and were keen to see Gorringe go down. They knew, as the jury did not, that he had previous convictions for shoplifting and affray.

In evidence, Miranda was emphatic that she had no friend called Amelia and that the story of the text was a fabrication. Two of Miranda’s old school friends gave evidence in court that they had never heard mention of this Amelia. The prosecution suggested that it was too convenient, a vanishing rootless teenager. If she was on a beach in Thailand, and if Miranda was her friend, where were the customary teenage photos and messages? Where was Miranda’s original message? Where was that merry emoticon?

Deleted by Miranda, said the defence. If the court would suspend proceedings and serve an order on the British subsidiary of the phone company to release its copies of the texts, these disputed versions of a summer evening would be settled. But the judge, whose manner throughout was impatient, even irritable, was in no mind to let the matter drag on. Mr Gorringe’s defence had already had many months to mount their case. A court order should have been sought long ago. Memorably, the judge noted that a young woman who took a bottle of vodka to a young man’s room should have been aware of the risks. Some press reports portrayed Gorringe as a guilty sort. He was large, loose-limbed, he lounged in the dock, he didn’t wear a tie. He appeared not to be awed by the judge or his court and its procedures. The jury was unanimous in favouring Miranda’s story over his. Later, in his summing-up, the judge did not find the accused a credible witness. But certain sections of the press were sceptical about Miranda’s story. The judge was criticised for not putting the matter beyond doubt by calling in her text records.

A week later, before sentencing, there were pleas of mitigation. The headmaster of their school spoke up for both ex-pupils – hardly helpful. Gorringe’s mother, who was too scared to be articulate, tried bravely but wept from the witness stand. No use at all to her son. He rose for sentencing and was impassive. Six years. He shook his head, as the accused often do. If he behaved himself in prison, he would be gone for half his sentence.

The jury had confronted a stark choice. Miranda raped and honest, or unmolested and a cruel liar. Naturally, I could bear neither. I didn’t take Gorringe’s murderous threats as proof of his innocence, as the intentions of a wronged man looking for redress. A guilty man could be furious at his loss of freedom. If he could threaten to kill, he could surely rape.

Beyond the either-or was a dangerous middle ground where the half-forgotten student anthropologist in me could free his imagination of all constraint. Grant the insidious power of self-persuasion, mix in some hours of carefree teenage drinking and blurred recall, then it would have been possible for Miranda to feel genuinely that she’d been violated, especially if afterwards there were elements of shame; equally possible for Peter Gorringe to convince himself he had permission when he desired it so urgently. But in the criminal courts, the sword of justice fell on innocence or guilt, not both at once.

The story of the missing texts was particular, inventive, easily verified or disproved. By telling it to the court, Gorringe as rapist may have calculated that he had nothing to lose. A wild fiction and he almost got away with it. If he was innocent, if the texts existed, then the system had let him down. Either way, it had let itself down. His story should have been checked. On that, I was with the sceptical press. The blame could lie with an inexperienced legal aid team, too hard-pressed, too sloppy. Or with policemen greedy for success. And certainly with an ill-tempered judge.

On my way back from the Common, I slowed as I turned into my road. Now I knew as much as Adam. I hadn’t spoken to him since the evening before. After a painful, sleepless night, I had got up early to go to the hospital. As I went through the kitchen I had passed close by him. He was sitting at the kitchen table as usual, connected to his power line. His eyes were open and had that tranquil, faraway look whenever he retreated into his circuits. I had hesitated there for a whole minute, wondering what I had got into with my purchase. He was far more complicated than I’d imagined, and so were my own feelings about him. We had to confront each other, but I was exhausted from two broken nights and needed to get to the hospital.

What I wanted now, returning from my walk, was to retreat to my bedroom for a dose of painkillers and a nap. But he was standing facing me as I came in. At the sight of my arm suspended in its sling, he gave a cry of astonishment or horror. He came towards me, arms spread.

‘Charlie! I am so sorry. So sorry. What a terrible thing I did. I honestly didn’t intend it. Will you please, please accept my most sincere apologies.’

It looked as though he was about to embrace me. With my free hand, I pushed past – I disliked the too-solid feel of him – and went to the sink. I turned on the tap and bent low to drink deeply. When I turned, he was standing close, no more than three or four feet away. The moment of apology had passed. I was determined to look relaxed – not so easy with my arm in a sling. I put my free hand on my hip and looked into his eyes, into the nursery blue with its little black seeds. I still wondered what it meant, that Adam could see, and who or what did the seeing. A torrent of zeros and ones flashed towards various processors that, in turn, directed a cascade of interpretation towards other centres. No mechanistic explanation could help. It couldn’t resolve the essential difference between us. I had little idea of what passed along my own optic nerve, or where it went next, or how these pulses became an encompassing self-evident visual reality, or who was doing my seeing for me. Only me. Whatever the process was, it had the trick of seeming beyond explanation, of creating and sustaining an illuminated part of the one thing in the world we knew for sure – our own experience. It was hard to believe that Adam possessed something like that. Easier to believe that he saw in the way a camera does, or the way a microphone is said to listen. There was no one there.

But as I looked into his eyes, I began to feel unhinged, uncertain. Despite the clean divide between the living and the inanimate, it remained the case that he and I were bound by the same physical laws. Perhaps biology gave me no special status at all, and it meant little to say that the figure standing before me wasn’t fully alive. In my fatigue, I felt unmoored, drifting into the oceanic blue and black, moving in two directions at once – towards the uncontrollable future we were making for ourselves where we might finally dissolve our biological identities; at the same time, into the ancient past of an infant universe, where the common inheritance, in diminishing order, was rocks, gases, compounds, elements, forces, energy fields – for both of us, the seeding ground of consciousness in whatever form it took.

I came out of this reverie with a start. I confronted an immediate and unpleasant situation and wasn’t inclined to accept Adam as a brother, or even a very distant cousin, however much stardust we shared. I had to stand up to him. I started talking. I told him how I came by a large sum of money after my mother’s death and the sale of her house. How I decided to invest it in a grand experiment, to buy an artificial human, an android, a replicate – I forget which term I used. In his presence, they all sounded like insults. I told him exactly how much I paid. Then I described for him the afternoon when Miranda and I carried him on a stretcher into the house, unpacked him, charged him up, when I tenderly gave him my clothes, and discussed the formation of his personality. As I went along, I wasn’t certain of my purpose, or why I was talking so fast.

It was only when I got there that I knew what I had to say. My point was this: I had bought him, he was mine, I had decided to share him with Miranda, and it would be our decision, and only ours, to decide when to deactivate him. If he resisted, and especially if he caused injury as he had the night before, then he would have to be returned to the manufacturer for readjustment. I finished by saying that this was Miranda’s view, as she expressed it earlier this afternoon, just before we made love. This last intimate detail, for the lowest of reasons, I needed him to know.

Throughout, he remained impassive, blinking at irregular intervals, holding my gaze. When I finished, nothing changed for half a minute and I began to think I had gone too fast, or spoken gibberish. Suddenly, he came to life (to life!), looked down at his feet, then turned and walked a few paces away. He turned again to look at me, drew breath to speak, changed his mind. A hand went up to stroke his chin. What a performance. Perfect. I was ready to give him my devoted attention.

His tone was of the sweetest, most reasonable kind. ‘We’re in love with the same woman. We can talk about it in a civilised manner, as you just have. Which convinces me that we’ve passed the point in our friendship when one of us has the power to suspend the consciousness of the other.’

I said nothing.

He continued. ‘You and Miranda are my oldest friends. I love you both. My duty to you is to be clear and frank. I mean it when I say how sorry I am I broke a bit of you last night. I promise it will never happen again. But the next time you reach for my kill switch, I’m more than happy to remove your arm entirely, at the ball and socket joint.’

He said this kindly, as though offering help with some difficult task.

I said, ‘That would be messy. And fatal.’

‘Oh no. There are ways of doing it cleanly and safely. A practice refined in medieval times. Galen was the first to describe it. Speed is of the essence.’

‘Well, don’t take my good arm.’

He had been speaking through a smile. Now he began to laugh. So here it was, his first attempt at a joke and I joined in. I was in a state of exhaustion and suddenly found it wildly hilarious.

As I passed him on my way to the bedroom he said, ‘Seriously. After last night I came to a decision. I’ve found a way to disable the kill switch. Easier for all of us.’

‘Good,’ I said, not quite taking this in. ‘Very sensible.’

I entered my room and closed the door behind me. I kicked off my shoes, and lay on the bed on my back, softly laughing to myself. Then, forgetting about the painkillers, I was asleep in less than two minutes.

The next morning I turned thirty-three. It rained all day and I worked for nine hours, content to be indoors. For the first time in weeks, my profit for the day was in three figures – just. At seven I stood up from my desk, stretched, yawned, looked in my drawer for a clean white shirt, then took a bath. I had to hang my arm over the edge to protect the cast from dissolving, but otherwise I was in good shape. I lay in the heat and rising steam, singing snatches of Beatles songs in the tiled echo, the new old Beatles, and occasionally topping up the hot with my healed toe now fit to turn a tap. I soaped myself single-handed. Not easy. Thirty-three seemed as significant as twenty-one and Miranda was treating me to dinner. We were meeting up in Soho. The simple prospect of a rendezvous with her raised my spirits. The view I had along the length of my body was uplifting in the misty light. My penis, capsized above its submerged reef of hair, winked encouragement with a cocky single eye. So it should. The muscles of my gut and legs looked nicely sculpted. Heroic even. I wallowed in self-love, happier than I’d been in weeks. I’d been trying not to think about Adam all day and had almost succeeded. He’d been in the kitchen for hours, he was there now – ‘thinking’. I didn’t care. I sang louder. In my twenties, some of my most cheerful times were spent getting ready to go out. It was the anticipation rather than the thing itself. The release from work, the bath, music, clean clothes, white wine, perhaps a pull on a joint. Then stepping out into the evening, free and hungry.

The pads of my fingers were well wrinkled by the time I got out. An adaptation, I’d read, of our sea- and river-loving ancestors to enable them to catch fish. I didn’t believe it, but I liked the story, the way it lay beyond disproof. We didn’t catch fish with our feet, so toes didn’t need to wrinkle like that. I dressed in a hurry. In the kitchen I passed Adam without a word – he didn’t look round – and put up my umbrella to walk the few hundred yards down a squalid side-street to where my wreck of a car was parked. This short depressing stroll often brought me to my usual lament, to the song of my unhappy lot. But not tonight.

My car dated from the mid-sixties, a British Leyland Urbala, the first model to do 1,000 miles on a single charge. It had 380,000 on the clock. Rust was eating it away, especially around the dents in the bodywork. The wing mirrors had snapped or been snapped off. There was a long white rip in the driver’s seat and a piece of the steering wheel, from eleven to three o’clock, was missing. Years ago, a girl had been sick on the back seat after a rowdy Indian dinner and not even professional steam-cleaning could erase the scent of vindaloo. The Urbala had only two doors and it was awkward to get an adult into the back seat. But there was little to go wrong with these engines and the car ran smooth and fast. It was an automatic and easy to drive with one hand.

I took my usual route, singing all the way, to Vauxhall, then downstream with the river on my left, past Lambeth Palace and the abandoned St Thomas’s Hospital, where scores or hundreds of the homeless squatted. The windscreen wiper on the driver’s side worked every ten seconds or so. The wiper on the passenger side thumped out a beat to my pop tunes. I crossed the Thames by Waterloo Bridge – in both directions, best views in town – then slipped down to take the sinuous curves of the old tram tunnel at speed and burst in triumph into Holborn – not the shortest route to Soho, but my favourite. I was hitting some high notes on a new Lennon song. What was right with me? Thirty-three today and in love. The unaccountable brew of hormone cocktails, endorphins, dopamine, oxytocin and all the rest. Cause or effect or association – we knew next to nothing about our passing moods. It seemed objectionable that they should have a material base. On this particular evening, I hadn’t touched grass or even had a sip of wine – there was nothing in the house. Yesterday I had been almost thirty-three, and in love and I hadn’t felt like this. £104 up on the morning would never have such an effect. I should have been sobered by yesterday’s exchange with Adam about his kill switch, by all the matters I hadn’t raised with Miranda, by my poor wrist. But a mood could be a roll of the dice. Chemical roulette. Free will demolished, and here I was, feeling free.

I parked in Soho Square. I knew of a three-metre stretch where the yellow lines had been tarred over in error and the space was legal. Most cars wouldn’t fit. Our restaurant, a one-room shoebox with fierce strip lighting, was in Greek Street, just a few doors along from the famous L’Escargot. There were only seven tables. In a corner was an open kitchen, a tiny space defined by a brushed-steel counter, where two chefs in white gear cooked in sweaty proximity. There was a plongeur, and one waiter to serve and clear tables. Unless you knew the chef, or knew someone who did, you couldn’t book. Miranda had a friend at one further remove. On a quiet night it was enough.

She was there before me, already seated, facing the door as I came in. In front of her was an untouched glass of sparkling water. Beside it, a small parcel done up with green ribbon. By the table, in an ice bucket on a stand, was a bottle of champagne, its neck bound in a white napkin. The waiter who had just drawn the cork was walking away. Miranda looked especially elegant, even though she’d been at seminars all day and had left the house wearing jeans and a t-shirt. She would have taken with her a bag of clothes and make-up. She wore a black pencil skirt, and a tight black jacket with boxy shoulders and silver thread woven through the fabric. I’d never seen her before with lipstick and mascara. She had made her mouth smaller, in a dark red bow, and dusted away the faint freckles on the bridge of her nose. My birthday! At the same time, as I entered the bright white light and closed the restaurant’s glass door behind me, I felt a sudden elated detachment. I didn’t, I couldn’t, love her less. But I no longer had to feel anxious or desperate about her. I remembered my truisms from the day before. Here she was, and whatever she was, I would find out and celebrate her, regardless. I could love her, so I thought, and remain immune, unharmed.

All this in a flash as I squeezed between two crowded tables to get to her. She raised her right hand and in mock formal fashion I bowed and kissed it. As I sat down she gazed at my sling with evident pity.

‘Poor darling.’

The waiter – he looked sixteen and serious– came with glasses, and filled them while holding his hand behind his back. A professional.

As we raised and clinked them across the table, I said, ‘To Adam not breaking more of my bones.’

‘That’s rather limiting.’

We laughed, and it seemed as though laughter at the other tables followed and rose with ours. What a wild place we were in. She didn’t know how much, how little, I knew. I didn’t know what to believe about her, whether she was the victim or perpetrator of a crime. It didn’t matter. We were in love and I remained convinced that even if I came to know the worst, it would make no difference. Love would see us through. It should have been easier, therefore, to broach any of the issues that my cowardice inclined me to suppress. And I was on the edge of doing just that, of saying more about my broken scaphoid, when she took my good hand in hers across the white linen.

‘Yesterday was glorious.’

I was giddy. It was as if she had proposed that we make love in public, now, across the table.

‘We could go home right now.’

She did a comic little double-take. ‘You haven’t opened your present.’

She pushed it across with a forefinger. While I unwrapped it, our boy waiter refilled the glasses. I found a small plain cardboard box. Inside was a z-shaped piece of strip metal with padding on the parallel surfaces. A wrist exerciser.

‘For when your plaster comes off.’

I stood and went around the table to kiss her. Someone nearby said, ‘Oi-oi!’ Another person made the sound of a barking dog. I wasn’t bothered. Back in my seat I said, ‘Adam says he’s disabled his kill switch.’

She leaned forward, suddenly serious. ‘You’ve got to get him back to the shop.’

‘But he loves you. He told me.’

‘You’re making fun of me.’

I said, ‘If he needs reprogramming, you’re the one he’ll listen to.’

Her tone was plaintive. ‘How can he talk about love? This is madness.’

Our waiter was hovering and heard everything we said next, even though I murmured quickly. ‘You helped choose the kind of guy he is – the sort who falls in love with the first woman he sleeps with.’

‘Oh Charlie!’

The boy said, ‘Have you decided yet, or shall I come back?’

‘Stick around.’

We passed a couple of minutes choosing and changing our minds. I ordered at random a twelve-year-old Haut-Médoc. It occurred to me that I was the one paying for my birthday treat. I cancelled the order and asked for a twenty-year-old bottle of the same.

The waiter left and we paused to consider where we were.

Miranda said, ‘Are you seeing someone else?’

The question astonished me and for a moment I was stuck for the most reassuring and convincing reply. At the same time, I noticed that the chef, who was also the owner, had come from behind the counter and was making his way between the tables to the door. The waiter was following him. I glanced over my shoulder and saw through the glass two figures out on the pavement. One of them was folding away an umbrella.

I must have looked evasive to Miranda. She added, ‘Just be honest with me. I don’t mind.’

She clearly did mind and I gave her my full attention.

‘Absolutely not. You’re all I care about.’

‘When I’m out all day at seminars?’

‘I work and I think about you.’

I felt a draught of cool air on my neck. Miranda’s gaze shifted from me to the door and I felt I could turn again and look. The chef was helping two elderly men out of their long raincoats which he dumped into the arms of the waiter. The men were led to their table – set apart and the only one with a lit candle. The taller man had swept-back silvery hair and wore a brown silk scarf loosely knotted around his neck and some kind of artist’s cotton jacket that drooped from his shoulders. A chair was held out for him and before sitting he looked around the room and nodded to himself. No one else in the restaurant seemed interested. The man’s style of bohemian grandeur was not so unusual in Soho. But I was excited.

I turned back to Miranda, still aware of her surprising query, and placed my hand on hers.

‘Do you know who he is?’

‘No idea.’

‘Alan Turing.’

‘Your hero.’

‘And Thomas Reah, the physicist. Invented loop quantum gravity more or less single-handed.’

‘Go and say hello.’

‘That would not be cool.’

So we returned to the question of the someone else I was not seeing, and once she appeared satisfied, we went back to Adam and discussed how we might overcome his resistance to the kill switch. She suggested hiding the charging cables until he was too weak to resist us. I reminded her of his instant origami sailboat. He would improvise a power cable in minutes. My concentration was poor during this exchange. I kept looking at her, hallucinating a glow around her head and shoulders, and thinking about the time when we would be alone, travelling the smooth and rising curve to ecstasy. Even as I was hobbled by a state of continuous sexual arousal, it excited me to be in the same room as a great man. From pre-war meditations on the idea of a universal computing machine, to Bletchley in the early years of the war, to morphogenesis, to his glorious patrician present. The greatest living Englishman, noble and free in his love for another man. In his seniority, dressed with the flamboyance of a rock star, a genius painter, a knighted actor. I could see him only if I turned rudely away from Miranda. I resisted. I distracted myself with the usual list, the buried suspicions, all we had not touched on – the Salisbury court case and the death threat being the most rank. Where was my courage when I lacked the clarity to raise these subjects, when they tormented me while they remained unspoken?

‘You’re not even listening.’

‘I am, I am. You said Adam’s got a screw loose.’

‘I didn’t. Idiot. But happy birthday.’

We raised our glasses again. The Médoc was bottled when Miranda was two years old and my father was moving out of swing into bebop.

The meal was a success, but the bill was a long time coming. While we waited we decided on a parting cognac. The drinks the waiter brought were double measures, on the house. Miranda returned to the business of her father’s illness. The new diagnosis was lymphoma, of a slow-acting kind. He was likely to die with it rather than of it. He had much else to die of. But there was a pill he now took that made him cheerful and assertive – and even more of a handful. Impossible projects filled his thoughts. He wanted to sell the Salisbury house and buy an apartment in New York, in the East Village, not the current one, she suspected, but the Village of his youth. On a rush of self-belief, he had signed a contract to deliver a coffee-table book on the folklore of British birds – a vast project that he could never hope to complete, even with a full-time researcher. On a strange whim, given his views, he had joined a fringe political group dedicated to taking Britain out of the European Union. He was up for election as treasurer at his London club, the Athenaeum. Every day he phoned his daughter with new schemes. Everything I heard made me gloomier about our proposed visit, but I said nothing.

At last we were done and we shrugged on our coats. Miranda preceded me towards the door. Our path between the tables would take us close to Turing’s. As we approached, I saw that apart from a bowl of nuts, hardly touched, the distinguished diners had eaten nothing. They were here to talk and drink. In an ice bucket was a half-bottle of Dutch genever, and on the table were ice cubes in a silver dish and two cut-glass tumblers. I was impressed. Would I be so game at seventy? Turing was facing me directly. The years had lengthened his face, marking out the cheekbones, giving him a keen ferocious look. Many years later I thought I saw the ghost of Alan Turing in the figure of the painter, Lucian Freud. I crossed his path late one night as he came out of the Wolseley in Piccadilly. Same lean fitness in early old age that seemed derived less from healthy living than from a hunger to keep on creating.

The decision was taken for me by the cognac. I approached as millions before me had approached a famous presence in a public place, with outward humility masking the entitlement that genuine admiration confers. Turing glanced up at me, then looked away. Dealing with admirers was Reah’s business. I wasn’t drunk enough to be unembarrassed and I stumbled over the formulaic opener.

‘Really sorry to intrude. I just wanted to express my profound gratitude to you both for your work.’

‘That’s very kind,’ Reah said. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Charlie Friend.’

‘Very nice to have met you, Charlie.’

The tense was clear. I came to my point. ‘I read that you have one of these Adams or Eves. I’ve got one too. I wondered if you’ve experienced any sort of problem with…’

I trailed away because I had seen Reah look at Turing, who had firmly shaken his head.

I took out my card and put it on their table. Neither man looked at it. I retreated, muttering my foolish apologies. Miranda was right beside me. She took my hand and as we stepped out into Greek Street she gave a sympathetic squeeze.

‘In her loving look,

a whole universe contained.

Love the universe!’

This was the first of his poems that Adam recited to me. He had come into my bedroom without knocking just after eleven one morning, while I was working at my screen, hoping to take advantage of volatility in the currency markets. There was a square of sunlight on the carpet and he made a point of standing in it. I noticed he was wearing one of my turtleneck sweaters. He must have taken it from my drawer. He told me he had a poem he urgently needed to recite. I swivelled in my chair and waited.

When he finished I said unkindly, ‘Short at least.’

He winced. ‘A haiku.’

‘Ah. Nineteen syllables.’

‘Seventeen. Five then seven then five again. Here’s another.’ He paused, looked towards the ceiling.

‘Kiss the space where she

trod from here to the window.

She made prints in time.’

I said, ‘Spacetime?’

‘Yes!’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘One more. I’ve got to get on.’

‘I’ve got hundreds. But look…’

He left his illuminated spot and came to my desk and put his hand over the mouse. ‘These two rows of figures, don’t you see? Intersecting Fibonacci curves. A high probability that if you buy here and wait… now sell. Look. You made £31.’

‘Do that again.’

‘Best to wait.’

‘Then do me one more haiku and leave.’

He returned to his square of light.

‘You and the moment

Came when I touched your—’

‘I don’t want to hear that.’

‘I shouldn’t show it to her?’

I sighed and he moved away. As he reached the door I added, ‘Clean up the kitchen and bathroom, would you please? Difficult to do with one hand.’

He nodded and went away. A kind of peace or stability had settled over our household, despite the matter of Gorringe’s release. I was more relaxed. Adam was spending no time alone with Miranda, while I was with her every night. I was confident he would keep his promise. He had told me several times that he was in love, and chaste love was fine by me. He wrote poems in his thoughts and stored them there. He wanted to talk to me about Miranda but I usually cut him off. I didn’t dare attempt to power him down and I had no particular need. The plan to get him back to the salesroom was set aside. Love appeared to have softened him. For reasons I didn’t understand, he was eager for my approval. Guilt, perhaps. He had fallen back into a routine of vague obedience. I remained cautious because of my wrist and I was watchful – but nothing of that showed. I reminded myself that he was still my experiment, my adventure. It was not supposed to run smooth at every turn.

With Adam’s love came intellectual exuberance. He insisted on telling me his latest thoughts, his theories, his aphorisms, his latest reading. He was putting himself through a course on quantum mechanics. All night, while he charged up, he contemplated the mathematics and the basic texts. He read Schrödinger’s Dublin lectures, What is Life?, from which he concluded that he was alive. He read the transcript of the celebrated 1927 Solvay conference, when the luminaries of physics met to discuss photons and electrons.

‘It was said that at these early Solvay meetings there took place the most profound exchanges about nature in the history of ideas.’

I was at breakfast. I told him I’d once read that the elderly Einstein, while at Princeton in his final years, started each day with eggs fried in butter and that in Adam’s honour, I was frying two now for myself.

Adam said, ‘People said he never grasped what he himself had started. Solvay was a battlefield for him. Outnumbered, poor fellow. By extraordinary young men. But that was unfair. The young Turks weren’t concerned with what nature is, only with what one could say about it. Whereas Einstein thought there was no science without belief in an external world independent of the observer. He didn’t think quantum mechanics was wrong so much as incomplete.’

This after one night’s study. I remembered my hopeless brief entanglement with physics at college, before I found safety in anthropology. I suppose I was a little jealous, especially when I learned that Adam had got his mind round Dirac’s equation. I cited Richard Feynman’s remark that anyone who claims to understand quantum theory doesn’t understand quantum theory.

Adam shook his head. ‘A bogus paradox, if it’s even a paradox at all. Tens of thousands understand it, millions make use of it. It’s a matter of time, Charlie. General relativity was once at the outer edge of difficulty. Now it’s routine for first-year undergraduates. The same was true of the calculus. Now fourteen-year-olds can do it. One day quantum mechanics will pass into common sense.’

By this time, I was eating my eggs. Adam had made the coffee. It was far too strong. I said, ‘OK. What about that Solvay question? Is quantum mechanics a description of nature or just an effective way of predicting things?’

‘I would have been on Einstein’s side. I don’t understand the doubt about it,’ he said. ‘Quantum mechanics makes predictions to such a fabulous degree of accuracy, it must be getting something right about nature. To creatures of our immense size, the material world looks blurred and feels hard. But now we know how strange and wonderful it is. So it shouldn’t surprise us that consciousness, your sort and mine, could arise from an arrangement of matter – it’s clearly odd to just the right degree. And we don’t have anything else to explain how matter can think and feel.’ Then he added, ‘Except for beams of love from the eyes of God. But then, beams can be investigated.’

Another morning, after he had told me how he had been thinking all night of Miranda, he said, ‘I’ve also been thinking about vision and death.’

‘Go on.’

‘We don’t see everywhere. We can’t see behind our heads. We can’t even see our chins. Let’s say our field of vision is almost 180 degrees, counting in peripheral awareness. The odd thing is, there’s no boundary, no edge. There isn’t vision and then blackness, like you get when you look through binoculars. There isn’t something, then nothing. What we have is the field of vision, and then beyond it, less than nothing.’

‘So?’

‘So this is what death is like. Less than nothing. Less than blackness. The edge of vision is a good representation of the edge of consciousness. Life then death. It’s a foretaste, Charlie, and it’s there all day.’

‘Nothing to be afraid of then,’ I said.

He raised both hands as if to grip and shake a trophy. ‘Exactly right! Less than nothing to be afraid of!’

Was he covering for an anxiety about death? His term was fixed for approximately twenty years. When I asked, he said, ‘That’s the difference between us, Charlie. My body parts will be improved or replaced. But my mind, my memories, experiences, identity and so on will be uploaded and retained. They’ll be of use.’

Poetry was another instance of his exuberance in love. He had written 2,000 haikus and had recited about a dozen, of the same quality, each one devoted to Miranda. I’d been interested at first in learning what Adam could create. But I soon lost interest in the form itself. Too cute, too devoted to not making much sense, too undemanding of their author as they played on empty mysteries of the sound-of-one-hand-clapping sort. 2,000! The figure made my point – an algorithm was churning them out. I said all this as we walked the backstreets of Stockwell – our daily exercise to extend Adam’s social skills. We’d been into shops, pubs and had even taken a trip on the Tube to Green Park and sat on the grass among the lunchtime crowds.

Perhaps I was too harsh. Haikus, I told him, could be stifling in their stillness. But I was also encouraging. Time to move on to another form. He had access to all the world’s literature. Why not attempt a poem with verses of four lines, rhyming or not? Or even a short story and eventually a novel?

Early that evening he gave me his response. ‘If you don’t mind, I’m ready to discuss your suggestions.’

I was not long out of the shower, freshly dressed and on my way upstairs, therefore a little impatient. On the table, waiting to come with me, was a bottle of Pomerol. There was a conversation I needed to have with Miranda. Gorringe was due to be released in seven weeks. We still hadn’t decided what to do. There was an assumption that Adam could act as her bodyguard and I was worried – I was legally responsible for anything he might do. She had been back to the local police station. The detective who had visited Gorringe in prison had moved on. The desk sergeant had taken a note and advised her to phone emergency in the event of trouble. She had suggested that it might be difficult, if she was being bludgeoned at the time. The sergeant did not take this to be facetious. He advised her to make the call before that eventuality.

‘When I see him coming up the garden path with an axe?’

‘Yes. And don’t open the door.’

She had seen a solicitor about going before a judge to get an exclusion order. Success was not certain and it wasn’t clear what it would achieve. She had asked her father not to divulge her address to anyone. But Maxfield had worries of his own and she thought he’d forget. We were left with the hope that the threat wasn’t serious and that Adam would be a deterrent. When I asked her how dangerous Gorringe really was, she said, ‘He’s a creep.’

‘A dangerous creep?’

‘A disgusting creep.’

I wasn’t in the right mood for another conversation with Adam about poetry.

‘My opinion,’ he said, ‘is that the haiku is the literary form of the future. I want to refine and extend the form. Everything I’ve done so far is a kind of limbering up. My juvenilia. When I’ve studied the masters and understood more, especially when I’ve grasped the power of the kireji, the cutting word that separates the two juxtaposed parts, my real work can begin.’

From upstairs I heard the phone ring and Miranda’s footsteps across my ceiling.

Adam said, ‘As a thinking man with an interest in anthropology and politics, you won’t be much interested in optimism. But beyond the currents of disheartening facts about human nature and societies and daily bad news, there can be mightier stirrings, positive developments that are lost to view. The world is so connected now, however crudely, and change is so widely distributed that progress is hard to perceive. I don’t like to boast, but one of those changes is right in front of you. The implications of intelligent machines are so immense that we’ve no idea what you – civilisation, that is – have set in motion. One anxiety is that it will be a shock and an insult to live with entities that are cleverer than you are. But already, almost everyone knows someone cleverer than themselves. On top of which, you underestimate yourselves.’

I could make out Miranda’s voice on the phone. She was agitated. She was walking up and down her sitting room as she spoke.

Adam appeared not to hear her but I knew he had. ‘You won’t allow yourselves to be left behind. As a species, you’re far too competitive. Even now, there are paralysed patients with electrodes implanted in the motor strip of their brains who merely think of the action and can raise an arm or bend a finger. This is a humble beginning and there are many problems to solve. They’ll certainly be solved, and when they are, and a brain–machine interface is efficient and cheap, you’ll become a partner with your machines in the open-ended expansion of intelligence, and of consciousness generally. Colossal intelligence, instant access to deep moral acumen and to everything known, but more importantly, access to each other.’

Miranda’s pacing upstairs had ceased.

‘It could be the end of mental privacy. You’ll probably come to value it less in the face of the enormous gains. You might be wondering what relevance any of this has to the haiku. It’s this. Ever since I’ve been here, I’ve been surveying the literature of scores of countries. Magnificent traditions, gorgeous elaborations of—’

Her bedroom door closed, steps swiftly crossed her sitting room to her door. It slammed shut and I heard her footsteps on the stairs.

‘Apart from lyrical poetry celebrating love or landscape, almost everything I read in literature—’

Her key was in my door and then she was before us. Her face had a greasy shine. She was doing her best to keep a level voice. ‘That was my father on the phone. They let Gorringe out early. Three weeks ago. He’s been to Salisbury, to the house, talked his way past the housekeeper and got my address out of my father. He could be on his way here now.’

She lowered herself into the nearest kitchen chair. I too sat down.

Adam took in Miranda’s news and nodded. But he pressed on into our silence. ‘Nearly everything I’ve read in the world’s literature describes varieties of human failure – of understanding, of reason, of wisdom, of proper sympathies. Failures of cognition, honesty, kindness, self-awareness; superb depictions of murder, cruelty, greed, stupidity, self-delusion, above all, profound misunderstanding of others. Of course, goodness is on show too, and heroism, grace, wisdom, truth. Out of this rich tangle have come literary traditions, flourishing, like the wild flowers in Darwin’s famous hedgerow. Novels ripe with tension, concealment and violence as well as moments of love and perfect formal resolution. But when the marriage of men and women to machines is complete, this literature will be redundant because we’ll understand each other too well. We’ll inhabit a community of minds to which we have immediate access. Connectivity will be such that individual nodes of the subjective will merge into an ocean of thought, of which our Internet is the crude precursor. As we come to inhabit each other’s minds, we’ll be incapable of deceit. Our narratives will no longer record endless misunderstanding. Our literatures will lose their unwholesome nourishment. The lapidary haiku, the still, clear perception and celebration of things as they are, will be the only necessary form. I’m sure we’ll treasure the literature of the past, even as it horrifies us. We’ll look back and marvel at how well the people of long ago depicted their own shortcomings, how they wove brilliant, even optimistic fables out of their conflicts and monstrous inadequacies and mutual incomprehension.’