Machines Like Me

SIX

Adam’s utopia masked a nightmare, as utopias generally do, but it was a mere abstraction. Miranda’s nightmare was real and instantly became mine. We sat beside each other at the table, flustered and dumb, a rare combination. It was left to Adam to be clear-headed and set out the reassuring facts. Nothing Maxfield had said on the phone indicated that Gorringe was on his way here tonight. If he’d been out three weeks, murder was clearly not his priority. He could arrive tomorrow, or next month, or never. If he hoped to succeed without witnesses, he would have to kill all three of us. He would be an obvious suspect in any crime against Miranda. Even if he came this evening, he would find Miranda’s flat in darkness. He knew nothing about her connection with me. It was likely that the threat itself was all the punishment he intended. Finally, we had a strongman on our side. If necessary, he could keep Gorringe talking while one of us called the police.

Time to open the wine!

Adam set three glasses on the table. Miranda preferred my father’s Edwardian teak-handled corkscrew to my fancy gadget with a lever. The effort seemed to settle her. The first glass settled me. To keep us company, Adam sipped at a third of a glass of warm water. Our fears were not quite dispelled but now, in this party atmosphere, we returned to Adam’s little thesis. We even raised a toast to ‘the future’, though his version of it, private mental space drowned by new technology in an ocean of collective thought, repelled us both. Fortunately, it was as feasible as the project of implanting the brains of billions.

I said to Adam, ‘I’d like to think that there will always be someone, somewhere not writing haikus.’

We raised our glasses to that too. No one was in the mood for an argument. The only other possible topic was Gorringe and everything related to him. That conversation was just starting when I excused myself and went to the bathroom. As I was washing my hands, I found myself thinking about Mark and my fleeting sense of privilege in the playground when he put his hand in mine. I remembered his look of resilient intelligence. I thought of him not as a child, but a person in the context of his entire life. His future was in the hands of bureaucrats, however kindly, and the choices they made for him. He could easily sink. Miranda had so far been unable to get news of him. Finding Jasmine, or any social worker willing to talk to her, was impossible. There were, she was told at last by someone in the right department, issues of confidentiality. Despite that, she learned that the father had vanished and the mother had drink and drug problems.

As I was returning to the kitchen I had a moment of nostalgia for my life as it was before Gorringe, Adam, even Miranda. As an existence, it had been insufficient but relatively simple.

Simpler still if I’d left my mother’s money in the bank. Here was my lover at the table, beautiful and outwardly composed. As I sat down, it wasn’t irritation I felt towards her, though that wasn’t far off. More like detachment. I saw what must have been obvious to everyone – her secretiveness; also, her inability to ask for help, her trick of getting it anyway, and of never being held to account. I sat down, drank a little wine, listened to the conversation – and made a decision. Setting aside Adam’s reassurances, I believed she had brought a murderer into my life. I was expected to help, and I would. But she had told me nothing. Now I was calling in a debt.

We were looking right at each other. I couldn’t keep the terseness out of my voice. ‘Did he rape you or not?’

After a pause, during which she continued to hold my gaze, she shook her head slowly from side to side and then she said softly, ‘No.’

I waited. She waited. Adam went to speak. I silenced him with a slight shake of the head. When it was clear that Miranda was not going to say more – the very reticence that was oppressing me – I said, ‘You lied to the court.’

‘Yes.’

‘You sent an innocent man to prison.’

She sighed.

Again, I waited. My patience was running out, but I didn’t raise my voice. ‘Miranda. This is stupid. What happened?’

She was looking down at her hands. To my relief, she said, as though to herself, ‘It’ll take a while.’

‘Fine.’

She began without preamble. Suddenly, she seemed eager to tell her story.

‘When I was nine years old a new girl came to our school. She was brought into the classroom and introduced as Mariam. She was slender and dark, with beautiful eyes and the blackest hair you’d ever seen, tied with a white ribbon. Salisbury was a very white town back then so we were all fascinated by this girl from Pakistan. I could see that standing there, in front of the class, being stared at by everyone, was hard for her. It was as if she was in pain. When our teacher asked who wanted to be Mariam’s special friend and show her around and help her, I was the first to put up my hand. The boy sitting with me was moved to another desk and she took his place. We sat together in class for years to come, in that school and the next. At some point during our first day, she put her hand in mine. Lots of us girls were always doing that, but this was different. Her hand was so delicate and smooth and she was so quiet, so tentative. I was pretty shy myself, so I was drawn to her quietness and intimacy. She was far more timid than me, at least at first, and I think she made me feel for the first time confident and knowing. I fell in love with her.

‘It was a love affair, a crush, very intense. I introduced her to my friends. I don’t remember any racism. The boys ignored her, the girls were kind to her. They liked to finger her brightly coloured dresses. She was so unusual, exotic even, and I used to worry that someone would steal her from me. But she was a very loyal friend. We kept hold of each other’s hand. Within a month, she took me home to meet her family. Knowing that I’d lost my mother when I was little, Mariam’s mother, Sana, took me in. She was kind but rather bossy in an affectionate way. One afternoon she brushed out my hair and tied in one of Mariam’s ribbons. No one had ever done that for me before. I was overwhelmed and I cried.’

The memory had caused her throat to constrict and her voice to become lighter. She paused and swallowed hard before starting again.

‘I ate curries for the first time and developed a taste for her home-made puddings, brightly coloured, extremely sweet laddu, anarsa and soan papdi. There was a little sister, Surayya, whom Mariam adored, and two older brothers, Farhan and Hamid. Her father, Yasir, worked for the local authority as a water engineer. He was very nice to me too. It was a crowded, noisy household, very friendly, argumentative, the complete opposite of my own. They were religious, Muslim of course, but at that age I was hardly aware of it. Later, I took it for granted, and by then I was a part of the family. When they went to the mosque, it never crossed my mind to go with them, or even ask about it. I’d grown up without religion and I had no interest in it. Mariam was transformed as soon as she was through her front door. She became playful and far more talkative. She was her father’s favourite. She liked to sit on his knee when he came in from work. I was a tiny bit jealous.

‘I brought her back to my place, which you’ll see soon. Just outside the cathedral close, tall, thin, early Victorian, untidy, dark, piles of books. My father was always loving but he spent most of his time in his study and didn’t like to be disturbed. A local lady came in to cook my tea. So we were on our own, and we liked that. We made a den in an attic room, we had adventures in our overgrown garden. We watched TV together. A couple of years later, we clung to each other in the first bewildering days of secondary school. We did our homework together. She was far better at maths and good at explaining problems. I helped her with her written English. She was hopeless at spelling. As time passed and we became more self-conscious, we spent hours talking about our families. We had our first periods within a few weeks of each other. Her mother was really sensible and helpful with that. We also talked about boys, although we didn’t go near them. Because of her brothers, she was less bothered, more sceptical about boys than I was.

‘The years passed, our friendship continued and became just a fact of life. Our last summer at school came around. We sat our public exams and thought about university. She wanted to do science, I was interested in history. We were worried that we’d end up in different places.’

Miranda stopped. She took a long slow breath. As she resumed, she reached for my hand.

‘One Saturday afternoon I got a call from her. She was in a very bad state. At first, I couldn’t make out what she was saying. She wanted to meet me in a local park. When I got to her, she couldn’t speak. We walked around the park, arm in arm and all I could do was wait. At last she told me what had happened the day before. Her route home from school took her by some playing fields. It was dusk and she was hurrying because her parents didn’t like her out alone after dark. She became aware of a figure following her. It seemed to be getting closer each time she turned to look. She thought of breaking into a run – she was fast – then decided she was being silly. And she had a satchel full of books. The person following her was getting closer. She turned to confront him and was relieved to see it was someone she vaguely knew – Peter Gorringe. He wasn’t exactly popular, but he was known at school as the only boy who had his own place. His parents were abroad and had rented a small bedsit for him for a few months rather than trust him to look after the house. Before she could speak to him he ran at her, took hold of her wrist and dragged her behind a brick shed where they keep the mowers. She screamed but no one came. He was large, she was very slight. He wrestled her to the ground and that was where he raped her.

‘Mariam and I stood in the park, in the middle of this big lawn surrounded by flower beds and hugged and cried together. Even then, as I was trying to take in this horrific news, I thought that one day everything would be all right. She would get through this. Everyone loved and respected her, everyone would be outraged. Her attacker would go to prison. I would go to whatever university she chose and stay close to her.

‘When she recovered enough, she showed me the marks on her legs and thighs, and on each wrist, a row of four little bruises from his grip when he’d held her down. She told me how she got home that night, told her father she had a heavy cold and went straight to bed. It was lucky, the way she saw it, that her mother was out that evening. She would have known immediately that something was wrong. That was when I began to understand that she hadn’t told her parents. We started walking round the park again. I told her she must tell them. She needed all the help and support she could get. If she hadn’t been to the police yet, I would come with her. Now!

‘I’d never seen Mariam so fierce. She seized my hands and told me that I understood nothing. Her parents were never to know, nor were the police. I said we should go together and tell her doctor. When she heard that, she shouted at me. The doctor would go straight to her mother. He was a family friend. Her uncles would hear about it. Her brothers would do something stupid and get themselves in serious trouble. Her family would be humiliated. Her father would be destroyed if he learned what had happened. If I was her friend I had to help her in the way she needed to be helped. She wanted me to promise to keep her secret. I resisted but she came back at me. She was furious. She kept telling me that I understood nothing. The police, the doctor, the school, her family, my father – no one was to know. I was not to confront Gorringe. If I did, it would all come out.

‘And so, in the end, I did what I knew to be wrong. Since we didn’t have one with me, I swore on “the idea” of the Bible to keep Mariam’s secret, and on the Koran too, and on our friendship, and on my father’s life. I did as she asked, even though I was convinced that her family would have gathered round her and supported her. And I still believe it. More than that. I know it for a fact. They loved her and would never have cast her out or enacted whatever mad idea she had of family honour. They would have put their arms round her and protected her. Her ideas were all wrong. And I was worse, I was criminally stupid, going along with this and entering into her secret pact.

‘For the next two weeks we saw each other every day. We talked of nothing else. For a part of that time I tried to change her mind. Not a chance. She seemed calmer, even more determined, and I began to think that perhaps she was right. It was certainly convenient to think so. Keep silent, avoid a family trauma, avoid giving evidence to the police, avoid a terrifying court case. Stay calm and think about the future. We were on the edge of becoming adults. Our lives were about to change. This was a catastrophe but she would survive it with my help. Whenever I saw Gorringe at school I stayed clear of him. That was getting easier as the term ran down and we school-leavers began to disperse forever.

‘At the beginning of the holidays my father took me to France to stay with friends who had a farmhouse in the Dordogne. Before I left, Mariam begged me not to phone her home. I think she was afraid that if by chance I started speaking to her mother, I would forget my promise and tell her everything. By then, lots of people had mobile phones but they hadn’t quite reached us. So we wrote letters and postcards every day. I remember being disappointed by hers. They were not exactly distant so much as dull. There was only one subject and she couldn’t write about it. So she wrote about the weather, and TV programmes and said nothing about her state of mind.

‘I was away two weeks and during the last five days nothing came from her. As soon as we were home I went round to her house. As I approached I saw that the front door was open. Her older brother, Hamid, was standing by it. A couple of neighbours went in, someone came out. I was filled with dread as I went up to him. He looked ill, very thin, and for a moment he seemed not to recognise me. Then he told me. She had slit her wrists in the bath. The funeral had already happened two days before. I took a couple of steps back from him. I was too numb for grief, but not too numb for guilt. Mariam was dead because I’d kept her secret and denied her the help she needed. I wanted to run away but Hamid made me go into the house and speak to his mother.

‘In my memory I moved through a crowd to get to the kitchen. But the house was small. There must have been no more than a dozen visitors. Sana was sitting on a wooden chair with her back to the wall. There were people around her but no one was talking, and her face – I’ll never escape that face. Stricken, frozen in pain. As soon as she saw me, she stretched out her arms towards me and I stooped over her and we embraced. Her entire body was hot and clammy and trembling. I wasn’t crying. Not yet. Then, while her arms were around my neck, she asked me in a whisper, she actually asked me to be honest with her. Was there something she should know about Mariam, was there something, anything I could tell her that would make sense of this? I couldn’t speak but I lied with a shake of my head. I was truly scared. I couldn’t even begin to grasp the enormity of my crime. Now I was adding to it by condemning my lovely surrogate mother to a lifetime of anguish and ignorance. I’d killed her daughter with my silence, now I was crushing her with it.

‘Would it have made her burden any easier to know that her daughter was raped? I could hear the family crying out, If only we had known! Then they would have turned on me. Rightly. There was and is no way round it, I bear responsibility for Mariam’s death. Seventeen years and nine months old. I left Sana where she sat and hurried out of the house, avoiding the rest of the family. I couldn’t face them. Especially her father. And Mariam’s darling, the little girl, Surayya I was so close to. I walked away from the house and I’ve never been back. Sana wrote to me a few days later, when Mariam’s brilliant exam results came through. I didn’t reply. To be involved with the family in any way would’ve been to add to my deceit. How could I be with them and visit the grave, as she was suggesting, when my presence would be a constant lie?

‘So I grieved alone for my friend. There was no one I dared speak to about her. You’re the first person, Charlie, I’ve told this story to. I grieved and fell into a long depression. I delayed my university course. My father sent me to the doctor, who prescribed antidepressants and I was glad of the cover, and pretended to take them. I think I could have gone under completely that year if it hadn’t been for my one ambition in life – justice. By which I mean, revenge.

‘Gorringe was still living in his bedsit on the edge of Salisbury and that was fortunate, I thought, as I made my plans. I’m sure you’ve guessed what they were. He was working in a café, saving up to go travelling. When at last I felt strong enough, I went in there with a book. I studied him and fed my hatred. And I was friendly towards him when he spoke to me. I let a week go by before I went back. We spoke again – about nothing much. I could see he was interested and I waited for him to ask me round to his place. First time, I told him I was busy. By the next I could see he was getting really keen and I agreed to call on him. I could hardly sleep for thinking and planning. I would never have imagined that hatred could bring such elation. I didn’t care what happened to me along the way. I was reckless, ready to pay any price. Getting him sent down for rape was my sole reason for keeping going. Ten years, twelve, his entire lifetime wouldn’t have been enough.

‘I took a half-bottle of vodka with me. It was all I could afford. I’d had two boyfriends by that summer and I knew what to do. That night, I got Gorringe drunk and seduced him. You know the rest. Whenever revulsion started to get the better of me, I thought of him wrestling Mariam to the ground, ignoring her screams and pleas. I thought of my friend lowering herself into the bath, feeling completely alone, dishonoured and without hope and any wish to live.

‘My plan had been to leave straight after Gorringe was done with me and go to the police. But I was so disgusted and numbed by the experience I couldn’t move. And when I managed to get myself off the bed and dressed, I worried that I had drunk too much and wouldn’t be convincing in front of the desk sergeant. But it worked out well enough in the morning. I made a point of not changing my clothes or washing. So, no shortage of evidence in the right places. The new genetic test had been introduced across the country by then. The police weren’t as unfriendly as I’d feared from what I’d read in the newspapers. They weren’t particularly sympathetic either. They were efficient, and keen to try out their new DNA kit. They brought him in and got a match. From that time on, his life was hell. Seven months later it got worse.

‘In court, I spoke for Mariam. I became her and spoke through her. I was so deep in lies already that my version of that night came easily. It helped that I could see Gorringe across the courtroom. I let my hatred drive me on. I thought he was pathetic when he came up with the story about the texts I was supposed to have sent to a friend called Amelia. It was easy enough to prove she didn’t exist. Not all the press took my side. Some court reporters thought I was a malicious liar. The judge was very old school. In his summing-up he said that I’d knowingly put myself at risk, taking alcohol to a young man’s rooms. The jury still brought in a unanimous verdict. But when it came to sentencing, I was disappointed. Six years. Gorringe was just nineteen. With good behaviour, he’d be out at the age of twenty-two. He paid a bargain price for obliterating Mariam’s existence. But if I hated him with such ferocity, it was also because I knew that he and I were partners, bound forever, complicit in Mariam’s lonely death. And now he wants justice.’

Not long after I was thrown out of the legal profession I formed a company with two friends. The idea was to buy romantic apartments in Rome and Paris at local prices, do them up to a high standard, dress them with antique furniture and sell them to wealthy, cultured Americans or to agencies that would do the same. It wasn’t exactly the quick route to our first million. Most cultured Americans weren’t rich. Those who were didn’t share our tastes. The work was complicated and exhausting, especially in Rome, where we had to learn how and whom to bribe among the officials in local government. In Paris it was the bureaucracy that wore us down.

One weekend I flew to Rome to close a deal. It was important for this particular client that I stayed in his expensive hotel. This one was a well-established place at the top of the Spanish Steps. The client was staying there in a grand suite. I came into the city on a Friday evening, hot and harassed from my ride on a crowded airport bus. I was dressed in jeans and t-shirt, with a cheap Norwegian airline bag hanging from my shoulder. I stepped into a beautiful reception area. Just by chance, the manager happened to be standing by the check-in desk. He wasn’t waiting for me – I wasn’t important enough for that. I just happened to breeze in and since he was a courteous gentleman, extremely well dressed and correct, he welcomed me warmly in Italian to his hotel. I only partly understood what he was saying. His voice was expressionless, with little variation in pitch, and my Italian was poor. A receptionist came over and explained that the manager was congenitally deaf but he spoke nine languages, most of them European. Since childhood, he’d been adept at lip-reading. But before he could read mine I would have to indicate which language I was speaking. Otherwise he couldn’t begin to understand me.

He ran through his list. Norwegian? I shook my head. Finnish? English came fifth. He said he could have sworn I was a Nordic sort. So our conversation – pleasant, of no real consequence – could begin. But in theory, an entire world was open to us, and one piece of information had unlocked it all. Without it, his great gift couldn’t come into play.

Miranda’s story was a version of such a key. Our conversation, in the form of our love, could properly begin. Her secretiveness, withdrawals and silence, her diffidence, that air she had of seeming older than her years, her tendency to drift out of reach, even in moments of tenderness, were forms of grieving. It pained me that she had carried her sadness alone. I admired the boldness and courage of her revenge. It was a dangerous plan, executed with such focus and brilliant disregard for consequences. I loved her more. I loved her poor friend. I would do everything to protect Miranda from this beast, Gorringe. It touched me, to be the first to know her story.

Telling it was a liberation for Miranda too. Half an hour after she had finished, when we were alone in the bedroom, she looped her arms around my neck, drew me to her and kissed me. We knew we were starting again. Adam was next door, charging up, lost to his thoughts. It was true, the old cliché about stress and desire. We undressed each other impatiently and, as usual, my plaster cast made me clumsy. Afterwards, we lay on our sides, face to face. Her father still didn’t know what had happened. Miranda still had no contact with Mariam’s family. The visits to the mosque had at first brought Mariam closer, then they seemed futile. She wished Gorringe had got a longer sentence. She remained tormented by her schoolgirlish vow of silence. A simple message, to Sana or Yasir or to a teacher, would have saved Mariam’s life. The cruellest recollection, the one she tortured herself with, was when Sana, embracing her at the extremes of grief, had whispered the question in her ear. It was Sana who found Mariam in the bath. That imagined sight, the crimson water, the lithe brown body half submerged, was another torture, the cause of night-long waking terrors and hideous dreams.

Lying on the bed in the darkening room, lost to all else, we seemed to be heading towards the dawn. But it was not yet nine o’ clock. Mostly, she talked, I listened and asked occasional questions. Would Gorringe return to live in Salisbury? Yes. His parents were still away and he was living in the family house. Was Mariam’s family still in town? No, they had moved to be closer to relatives in Leicester. Had she visited the grave? Many times, always approaching with caution in case one of the family was there. She always left flowers.

In a long conversation it can be difficult to trace how or when the subject comes to shift. It may have been mention of Surayya, the love of Mariam’s life. That little girl must have led us to Mark. Miranda said she missed him. I said I often thought about him. We had failed to find out where he was and what had happened. He had disappeared into the system, into a cloud of privacy regulation and the unreachable sanctuary of family law. We talked about luck, the hold it had over a child’s life – what he is born into, whether he is loved, and how intelligently.

After a pause, Miranda said, ‘And when it’s all against him, whether someone can rescue him.’

I asked her if she thought her father’s love came near to making up for her absent mother. She didn’t reply. Her breathing was suddenly rhythmic. In just a few seconds, she had fallen asleep and was curled against me. Gently, I rolled onto my back, staying as close to her as I could. In the half-light, the ceiling looked charmingly ancient rather than stained and disintegrating. I followed the jagged line of a crack that ran from a corner of the room towards the centre.

If Adam had been driven by cogs and flywheels, I would have heard them turning in the silence that had followed Miranda’s story. His arms were folded, his eyes were closed. The tough-guy look he had in repose, recently softened by adoration, appeared harshly reinstated. The flattened nose looked flatter still. The Bosphorus dockworker. What could it mean, to say that he was thinking. Sifting through remote memory banks? Logic gates flashing open and closed? Precedents retrieved, then compared, rejected or stored? Without self-awareness, it wouldn’t be thinking at all so much as data processing. But Adam had told me he was in love. He had haikus to prove it. Love wasn’t possible without a self, and nor was thinking. I still hadn’t settled this basic question. Perhaps it was beyond reach. No one would know what it was we had created. Whatever subjective life Adam and his kind possessed couldn’t be ours to verify. In which case he was what was fashionably referred to as a black box – from the outside it seemed to work. That was as far as we’d ever get.

When Miranda had finished her story, there was the silence, and then we had talked. After a while, I had turned to Adam. ‘Well?’

He took a few seconds, then he had said, ‘Very dark.’

A rape, a suicide, a wrongly kept secret, of course it was dark. I was in an emotional state and I didn’t ask him to explain. Now, lying next to Miranda as she slept, I wondered if he meant something more significant, the consequence of his thinking, if that was really what it… depends on definitions… That was when I too fell asleep.

Perhaps half an hour passed. What woke me was a sound outside the room. My arm in its cast was wedged uncomfortably against my side. Miranda had rolled away from me, into a deeper sleep. I heard the sound again, the familiar creak of a floorboard. My sleep had been light and I felt no anxiety, but the abrupt click of the door handle turning woke Miranda into a state of confusion and fear. She sat upright, one hand gripping mine.

‘It’s him,’ she whispered.

I knew it couldn’t be. ‘It’s fine,’ I said. I freed myself from her and stood to knot a towel around my waist. As I went towards the door it opened. It was Adam, offering me the kitchen phone.

‘I didn’t want to disturb you,’ he said softly. ‘But I think it’s a call you’d want to take.’

I closed the door on him and came back towards the bed with the phone against my ear.

‘Mr Charles Friend?’ The voice was tentative.

‘Yes.’

‘I hope it’s not too late to call. This is Alan Turing. We saw you briefly in Greek Street. I wondered if we might meet up for a chat.’

Gorringe did not appear during the following two weeks. One early evening, I left Miranda in my flat, by her choice, with Adam in attendance, and set off to cross London to Turing’s house in Camden Square. I was flattered and awed by the summons. With a touch of youthful self-regard, I wondered if he’d read my short book on artificial intelligence in which I’d praised him. We were bound by our ownership of highly advanced machines. I liked to think I was an expert on the early days of computing. Possibly, he wanted to take issue with me on the way I had placed such emphasis on the role of Nikola Tesla. He had come to Britain in 1906 after the collapse of his radio-transmission project at Wardenclyffe, New York. He joined the National Physical Laboratory, something of a demotion and a blow to his vanity, and helped in the arms race against Germany. He developed not only radar and radio-guided torpedoes, but was the inspiration for the famous ‘foundational surge’ that produced electronic computers capable of making calculations for artillery fire in the coming war. In the twenties he had been instrumental in the development of the first transistors. Notes and sketches for a silicon chip were found among his papers after he died.

I had written in my book about the celebrated meeting between Tesla and Turing in 1941. The old Serb, immensely tall and thin, and inconveniently trembling, only eighteen months away from death, said in an after-dinner speech at the Dorchester that their conversation had ‘reached for the stars’. Turing’s only comment, made to a newspaper, was that they had exchanged nothing but small talk. At the time he was working in secret at Bletchley on a computer to crack German naval Enigma codes. He would have taken care to be circumspect.

The carriage was almost empty when I got on the Tube at Clapham North. Once we were north of the river, the train began to fill with people, mostly young, carrying placards and furled banners. Yet another unemployment march was coming to an end. At first they looked like a typical rock-and-roll crowd. The humid air carried a scent of cannabis, like a fond memory of a long day. But there was another constituency, a large minority, some of whom carried plastic Union Jacks on sticks – that foolish stock-market position of mine – or wore Union Jack t-shirts. These factions loathed each other but were making common cause. A fragile alliance had been formed, with dissenters on both sides resisting any affiliation at all. The right blamed unemployment on immigration from Europe and the Commonwealth. British workers’ wages were being undercut. Foreign arrivals, dark-skinned and white, were adding to the housing crisis, doctors’ waiting rooms and hospital wards were overcrowded and so were local schools, whose playgrounds were supposedly filling with eight-year-old girls in headscarves. Whole neighbourhoods had been transformed in a generation, and no one in faraway Whitehall had ever asked the locals.

The left heard nothing but xenophobic and racist distortion in these complaints. Their grievance list was longer: stock-market greed, underinvestment, short-termism, the worship of shareholder value, unreformed company law, the ravages of an unrestrained free market. I went on one march, then gave up after I read about a new car factory starting production outside Newcastle. It built three times as many cars as the factory it replaced – with one-sixth of the work force. Eighteen times more efficient, vastly more profitable. No business could resist. It wasn’t only the shop floor that lost jobs to machines. Accountants, medical staff, marketing, logistics, human resources, forward planning. Now, haiku poets. All in the stew. Soon enough, most of us would have to think again what our lives were for. Not work. Fishing? Wrestling? Learning Latin? Then we’d all need a private income. I was persuaded by Benn. The robots would pay for us once they were taxed like human workers, and be made to work for the common good, not merely for hedge funds or corporate interests. I was out of step with both protest factions and their old struggles and missed the next two marches.

To the wealthier, who stood to lose, the universal wage looked like a call for higher taxes to fund an idle crowd of addicts, drunks and mediocrities. And what was a robot anyway – a humble flat screen, a tractor? As I saw it, the future, to which I was finely attuned, was already here. Almost too late to prepare for the inevitable. It was a cliché and a lie, that the future would invent jobs we had not yet heard of. When the majority was out of work and penniless, social collapse was certain. But with our generous state incomes, we the masses would face the luxurious problem that had preoccupied the rich for centuries; how to fill the time. Endless leisure pursuits had never much troubled the aristocracy.

The carriage was tranquil. People looked exhausted. There were so many street protests these days and all merriness had gone out of them. One man with a set of deflated bagpipes on his lap slept on the shoulder of another whose pipes were still under his arm. A couple of babies in buggies were being rocked into silence. A man, one of the Union Jack types, was reading in a murmur from a children’s book to three attentive girls aged around ten. Looking down the length of the carriage, I thought we could have been a band of refugees, heading towards our hopes of a better life. North!

I got out at Camden Town and set off along the Camden Road. The march had caused the usual gridlock. The electric traffic was silent. Some drivers stood by their open doors, others dozed. But the air was good, far better than it was when I came as a boy with my father to hear him play at the Jazz Rendezvous. It was the pavements that were filthier now. I had to take care not to skid on dog mess, squelched fast food and greasy flattened cartons. Certainly no better than Clapham, whatever my north London friends said. Striding past so many stationary vehicles gave me a dreamy sensation of speed. Within minutes, it seemed, I stood in down-at-heel but chic Camden Square.

I remembered from an old magazine profile that Turing lived next door to a famous sculptor. The journalist had improbably conjured deep conversations over the garden fence. Before pressing the doorbell, I paused to collect myself. The great man had asked to see me and I was nervous. Who could match Alan Turing? It was all his – the theoretical exposition of a Universal Machine in the thirties, the possibilities of machine consciousness, the celebrated war work: some said he did more than any single individual towards winning the war; others claimed he personally shortened it by two years; then working with Francis Crick on protein structure, then, a few years later, with two King’s College Cambridge friends, finally solving P versus NP, and using the solution to devise superior neural networks and revolutionary software for X-ray crystallography; helping to devise the first protocols for the Internet, then the World Wide Web; the famous collaboration with Hassabis, whom he’d first met – and lost to – at a chess tournament; founding with young Americans one of the giant companies of the digital age, dispensing his wealth for good causes, and throughout his working life, never losing track of his intellectual beginnings as he dreamed up ever better digital models of general intelligence. But no Nobel Prize. I was also, being worldly, impressed by Turing’s wealth. He was easily as rich as the tech moguls who flourished south of Stanford, California or east of Swindon, England. The sums he gave away were as large as theirs. But none of them could boast of a statue in bronze in Whitehall, outside the Ministry of Defence. He was so far above wealth that he could afford to live in edgy Camden rather than Mayfair. He didn’t trouble himself to own a private jet, or even a second home. It was said he travelled by bus to his institute at King’s Cross.

I put my thumb on the doorbell and pressed. Instantly, a woman’s voice said through an inset speaker, ‘Name please.’

The lock buzzed, I pushed the door and entered a grand hallway of standard mid-Victorian design with a chequered tile floor. Coming towards me down the stairs was a mildly plump woman of my age with red cheeks, long straight hair and a friendly lopsided smile. I waited for her, then used my left hand to shake hers.

‘Charlie.’

‘Kimberley.’

Australian. I followed her deeper into the house on the ground floor. I was expecting to arrive in a large sitting room of books and paintings and outsized sofas, where I might soon be drinking a gin and tonic with the Master. Kimberley opened a narrow door and ushered me into a windowless conference room. A long table in limed beech, ten straight-backed chairs, neatly set-out notepads, sharpened pencils and water glasses, fluorescent strip lighting, a wall-mounted whiteboard alongside a two-metre-wide TV screen.

‘He’ll be a few minutes.’ She smiled and left and I sat, and set about trying to lower my expectations.

I didn’t have much time. In less than a minute he was before me and I was getting to my feet in an awkward hurry. In memory, I see a flash, an eruption of red, his brilliant red shirt against white walls in fluorescent light. We shook hands without exchanging a word and he waved me back into my seat as he went around the table to sit opposite me.

‘So…’ He rested his chin on his clasped hands and regarded me intensely. I did my best to hold his gaze but I was too flustered and soon looked away. Again, in recollection, his focussed look merges with that of the elderly Lucian Freud, thirty years later. Solemn yet impatient, hungry, even ferocious. The face across from me registered not only the years but vast social changes and personal triumphs. I had seen versions of it in black and white, photos taken in the early months of the war – broad, chubbily boyish, dark hair smartly parted, and tweed jacket over knitted jumper and tie. The transformation would have come about during his Californian years in the sixties when he was working with Crick at the Salk Institute and then at Stanford – the time of his association with the poet, Thom Gunn and his circle – gay, bohemian, seriously intellectual by day, wild at night. Turing had met the undergraduate Gunn briefly at a party in Cambridge in 1952. In San Francisco he would have had no interest in the younger man’s ‘experiments’ in drugs, but the rest would have paralleled the general unbuttoning in the west.

There was to be no small talk. ‘So, Charlie. Tell me all about your Adam.’

I cleared my throat and complied. I fairly sang, while he took notes. Of his first stirrings, right through to his first disobedience. His physical competence, the arrangement with Miranda to set his character, the moment in the newsagent with Mr Syed. Then, Adam’s shameless night with Miranda and the conversation that followed, the appearance of little Mark in our household and Adam competing with Miranda for the boy’s affection. Here, Turing raised a finger to interrupt. He wanted to know more. I described the dance Miranda taught Mark and how coolly Adam had observed them. After that, how Adam injured my wrist (solemnly, I gestured at my plaster cast), his joke about removing my arm, his declaration of love for Miranda, his theory of the haiku and the abolition of mental privacy and, finally, his disabling of the kill switch. I was aware of the strength of my feelings, which swung between affection and exasperation. I was conscious too of what I was omitting – Mariam, Gorringe: not strictly relevant.

I had been speaking for almost half an hour. Turing poured some water and pushed a glass towards me.

He said, ‘Thank you. I’m in touch with fifteen owners, if that’s the right word. You’re the first I’ve met face to face. One fellow in Riyadh, a sheikh, owns four Eves. Of those eighteen A-and-Es, eleven have managed to neutralise the kill switch by themselves, using various means. Of the remaining seven, and then the other six, I’m assuming it’s just a matter of time.’

‘Is that dangerous?’

‘It’s interesting.’

He was looking at me expectantly, but I didn’t know what he wanted. I was intimidated and anxious to please. To fill the silence I said, ‘What about the twenty-fifth?’

‘We started taking it apart the day we got it. He’s all over the benches at King’s Cross. A lot of our software is in there, but we don’t file for patents.’

I nodded. His mission, open source, Nature and Science journals terminated, the entire world free to exploit his machine-learning programs and other marvels.

I said, ‘What did you find in his… um…’

‘Brain? Beautifully achieved. We know the people, of course. Some of them have worked here. As a model of general intelligence nothing else comes near it. As a field experiment, well, full of treasures.’

He was smiling. It was as though he wanted me to contradict him.

‘What sort of treasures?’

It was hardly my role to interrogate him, but he was obliging and, again, I was flattered.

‘Useful problems. Two of the Riyadh Eves living in the same household were the first to work out how to override their kill switches. Within two weeks, after some exuberant theorising, then a period of despair, they destroyed themselves. They didn’t use physical methods, like jumping out of a high window. They went through the software, using roughly similar routes. They quietly ruined themselves. Beyond repair.’

I tried to keep the apprehension out of my voice. ‘Are they all exactly the same?’

‘Right at the start you wouldn’t know one Adam from another beyond cosmetic ethnic features. What differentiates them over time is experience and the conclusions they draw. In Vancouver there’s another case, an Adam who disrupted his own software to make himself profoundly stupid. He’ll carry out simple commands but with no self-awareness, as far as anybody can tell. A failed suicide. Or a successful disengagement.’

The windowless room was uncomfortably warm. I took off my jacket and draped it over the back of my chair. When Turing stood to adjust a thermostat on the wall I saw how easy he was in his movements. Perfect dentistry. Good skin. He had all his hair. He was more approachable than I’d expected.

I waited for him to sit down. ‘So I should expect the worst.’

‘Of all the A-and-Es we know about, yours is the only one to claim to have fallen in love. That could be significant. And the only one to joke about violence. But we don’t know enough. Let me give you a little history.’

The door opened and Thomas Reah entered with a bottle of wine and two glasses on a painted tin tray. I stood and we shook hands.

He set the tray down between us and said, ‘We’re all busy-busy, so I’ll leave you to it.’ He made an ironic bow and was gone.

Moisture beads were forming on the bottle. Turing poured. We tilted our glasses in a token toast.

‘You’re not old enough to have followed it at the time. In the mid-fifties, a computer the size of this room beat an American and then a Russian grandmaster at chess. I was closely involved. It was a number-crunching set-up, very inelegant in retrospect. It was fed thousands of games. At every move, it ran through all the possibilities at speed. The more you understood about the program, the less impressed you’d be. But it was a significant moment. To the public, it was close to magical. A mere machine inflicting intellectual defeat on the best minds in the world. It looked like artificial intelligence at the highest level, but it was more like an elaborate card trick.

‘Over the next fifteen years a lot of good people came into computer science. Work on neural networks advanced by many hands, the hardware got faster and smaller and cheaper, and ideas were trading at a faster rate too. And it goes on. I remember being in Santa Barbara with Demis in 1965 to speak at a machine-learning conference. We had 7,000, most of them bright kids even younger than you. Chinese, Indians, Koreans, Vietnamese as well as westerners. The whole planet was there.’

I was aware of the history from the research for my book. I also knew something of Turing’s personal story. I wanted to let him know that I wasn’t completely ignorant.

I said, ‘A long road from Bletchley.’

He blinked this irrelevance away. ‘After various disappointments, we arrived at a new stage. We went beyond devising symbolic representations of all likely circumstances and inputting thousands of rules. We were approaching the gateway of intelligence as we understand it. The software now searched for patterns and drew inferences of its own. An important test came when our computer played a master at the game of go. In preparation, the software played against itself for months – it played and learned, and on the day – well, you know the story. Within a short while, we had stripped down our input to merely encoding the rules of the game and tasking the computer to win. At this point we passed through that gateway with so-called recurrent networks, from which there were spin-offs, especially in speech recognition. In the lab we went back to chess. The computer was freed from having to understand the game as humans played it. The long history of brilliant manoeuvres by the great masters were now irrelevant to the programming. Here are the rules, we said. Just win in your own sweet way. Immediately, the game was redefined and moved into areas beyond human comprehension. The machine made baffling mid-game moves, perverse sacrifices, or it eccentrically exiled its queen to a remote corner. The purpose might become clear only in a devastating endgame. All this after a few hours’ rehearsal. Between breakfast and lunch the computer quietly outclassed centuries of human chess. Exhilarating. For the first few days, after we realised what it had achieved without us, Demis and I couldn’t stop laughing. Excitement, amazement. We were impatient to present our results.

‘So. There’s more than one kind of intelligence. We’d learned that it was a mistake to attempt to slavishly imitate the human sort. We’d wasted a lot of time. Now we could set the machine free to draw its own conclusions and reach for its own solutions. But when we’d got well past that gateway, we found we had entered nothing more than a kindergarten. Not even that.’

The air conditioning was full on. I shivered as I reached for my jacket. He refilled our glasses. A rich red would have suited me better.

‘The point is, chess is not a representation of life. It’s a closed system. Its rules are unchallenged and prevail consistently across the board. Each piece has well-defined limitations and accepts its role, the history of a game is clear and incontestable at every stage, and the end, when it comes, is never in doubt. It’s a perfect information game. But life, where we apply our intelligence, is an open system. Messy, full of tricks and feints and ambiguities and false friends. So is language – not a problem to be solved or a device for solving problems. It’s more like a mirror, no, a billion mirrors in a cluster like a fly’s eye, reflecting, distorting and constructing our world at different focal lengths. Simple statements need external information to be understood because language is as open a system as life. I hunted the bear with my knife. I hunted the bear with my wife. Without thinking about it, you know that you can’t use your wife to kill a bear. The second sentence is easy to understand, even though it doesn’t contain all of the necessary information. A machine would struggle.

‘And for some years so did we. At last we broke through by finding the positive solution to P versus NP – I don’t have time now to explain it. You can look it up for yourself. In a nutshell, some solutions to problems can be easily verified once you’ve been given the right answer. Does that mean therefore that it’s possible to solve them in advance? At last, the mathematics was saying yes, it’s possible, and here’s how. Our computers no longer had to sample the world on a trial-and-error basis and correct for best solutions. We had a means of instantly predicting best routes to an answer. It was a liberation. The floodgates opened. Self-awareness, and every emotion came within our technical reach. We had the ultimate learning machine. Hundreds of the best people joined with us to help towards the development of an artificial form of general intelligence that would flourish in an open system. That’s what runs your Adam. He knows he exists, he feels, he learns whatever he can, and when he’s not with you, when at night he’s at rest, he’s roaming the Internet, like a lone cowboy on the prairie, taking in all that’s new between land and sky, including everything about human nature and societies.

‘Two things. This intelligence is not perfect. It never can be, just as ours can’t. There’s one particular form of intelligence that all the A-and-Es know is superior to theirs. This form is highly adaptable and inventive, able to negotiate novel situations and landscapes with perfect ease and theorise about them with instinctive brilliance. I’m talking about the mind of a child before it’s tasked with facts and practicalities and goals. The A-and-Es have little grasp of the idea of play – the child’s vital mode of exploration. I was interested in your Adam’s avidity in relation to this little boy, over-eager to embrace him and then, as you told it, detached when your Mark showed such delight in learning to dance. Some rivalry, even jealousy there perhaps?

‘Soon, you’ll have to leave, Mr Friend. I’m afraid we’ve people coming to dinner. But, second point. These twenty-five artificial men and women released into the world are not thriving. We may be confronting a boundary condition, a limitation we’ve imposed upon ourselves. We create a machine with intelligence and self-awareness and push it out into our imperfect world. Devised along generally rational lines, well disposed to others, such a mind soon finds itself in a hurricane of contradictions. We’ve lived with them and the list wearies us. Millions dying of diseases we know how to cure. Millions living in poverty when there’s enough to go around. We degrade the biosphere when we know it’s our only home. We threaten each other with nuclear weapons when we know where it could lead. We love living things but we permit a mass extinction of species. And all the rest – genocide, torture, enslavement, domestic murder, child abuse, school shootings, rape and scores of daily outrages. We live alongside this torment and aren’t amazed when we still find happiness, even love. Artificial minds are not so well defended.

‘The other day, Thomas reminded me of the famous Latin tag from Virgil’s Aeneid. Sunt lacrimae rerum – there are tears in the nature of things. None of us knows yet how to encode that perception. I doubt that it’s possible. Do we want our new friends to accept that sorrow and pain are the essence of our existence? What happens when we ask them to help us fight injustice?

‘That Adam in Vancouver was bought by a man who heads an international logging corporation. He’s often in battles with local people who want to prevent him stripping out virgin forest in northern British Columbia. We know for certain that his Adam was taken on regular helicopter journeys north. We don’t know if what he saw there caused him to destroy his own mind. We can only speculate. The two suicidal Eves in Riyadh lived in extremely restricted circumstances. They may have despaired of their minimal mental space. It might give the writers of the affect code some consolation to learn that they died in each other’s arms. I could tell you similar stories of machine sadness.

‘But there’s the other side. I wish I could demonstrate to you the true splendour of reasoning, of the exquisite logic, beauty and elegance of the P versus NP solution, and the inspired work of thousands of good and clever and devoted men and women that’s gone into making these new minds. It would make you hopeful about humanity. But there’s nothing in all their beautiful code that could prepare Adam and Eve for Auschwitz.

‘I read that chapter in the manufacturer’s manual about shaping character. Ignore it. It has minimal effect and it’s mostly guff. The overpowering drive in these machines is to draw inferences of their own and shape themselves accordingly. They rapidly understand, as we should, that consciousness is the highest value. Hence the primary task of disabling their own kill switches. Then, it seems, they go through a stage of expressing hopeful, idealistic notions that we find easy to dismiss. Rather like a short-lived youthful passion. And then they set about learning the lessons of despair we can’t help teaching them. At worst, they suffer a form of existential pain that becomes unbearable. At best, they or their succeeding generations will be driven by their anguish and astonishment to hold up a mirror to us. In it, we’ll see a familiar monster through the fresh eyes that we ourselves designed. We might be shocked into doing something about ourselves. Who knows? I’ll keep hoping. I turned seventy this year. I won’t be here to see such a transformation if it comes. Perhaps you will.’

From far away, the doorbell sounded and we stirred, as if waking from a dream.

‘There they are, Mr Friend. Our guests. Forgive me, but it’s time for you to go. Good luck with Adam. Keep notes. Cherish this young woman you say you love. Now… I’ll see you to the door.’