Machines Like Me

The meal I intended to cook for her and the homely dictum of my friend distracted me and for the moment Adam was not on my mind. So it was a shock to enter the kitchen and find him standing there, naked, by the table, partly facing away from me, one hand vaguely fiddling with the wire that protruded from his umbilicus. His other hand was somewhere near his chin, stroking it in a contemplative way – a clever algorithm no doubt, but entirely convincing in its projection of a thoughtful self.

I recovered and said, ‘Adam?’

He turned towards me slowly. When he was facing me full on, he met my gaze and blinked, and blinked again. The mechanism was working but seemed too deliberate.

He said, ‘Charlie, I’m pleased to meet you at last. Could you bear to arrange my downloads and prepare the various parameters …’

He paused, looking at me intently, his black-flecked eyes scanning my face in quick saccades. Taking me in. ‘You’ll find all you need to know in the manual.’

‘I’ll do that,’ I said. ‘In my own time.’

His voice surprised and pleased me. It was a light tenor, at a decent speed, with a kindly variation in tone, both obliging and friendly, but no hint of subservience. The accent was the standard English of an educated man from the middle-class south, with the faintest hint of West Country vowels. My heart was beating fast, but I was intent on seeming calm. To show that I was, I made myself take a step closer. We stared at each other in silence.

Years before, as a student, I read of a ‘first contact’ in 1924 between an explorer called Leahy and some highlanders of Papua New Guinea. The tribesmen could not tell whether the pale figures who had suddenly appeared on their land were humans or spirits. They returned to their village to discuss the matter, leaving a teenage boy behind to spy from a distance. The question was settled when he reported back that one of Leahy’s colleagues had gone behind a bush to defecate. Here, in my kitchen in 1982, not many years later, things were not so simple. The manual informed me that Adam had an operating system, as well as a nature – that is, a human nature – and a personality, the one I hoped Miranda would help provide. I was unsure how these three substrates overlapped or reacted with each other. When I studied anthropology, a universal human nature was thought not to exist. It was a romantic illusion, merely the variable product of local conditions. Only anthropologists, who studied other cultures in depth, who knew the beautiful extent of human variety, fully grasped the absurdity of human universals. People who stayed behind at home in comfort understood nothing, not even of their own cultures. One of my teachers liked to quote Kipling – ‘And what should they know of England who only England know?’

By the time I was in my mid-twenties, evolutionary psychology was beginning to reassert the idea of an essential nature, derived from a common genetic inheritance, independent of time and place. The response from the mainstream of social studies was dismissive, sometimes furious. To speak of genes in relation to people’s behaviour evoked memories of Hitler’s Third Reich. Fashions change. But Adam’s makers were riding the new wave of evolutionary thinking.

He stood before me, perfectly still in the gloom of the winter’s afternoon. The debris of the packaging that had protected him was still piled around his feet. He emerged from it like Botticelli’s Venus rising from her shell. Through the north-facing window, the diminishing light picked out the outlines of just one half of his form, one side of his noble face. The only sounds were the friendly murmur of the fridge and a muted drone of traffic. I had a sense then of his loneliness, settling like a weight around his muscular shoulders. He had woken to find himself in a dingy kitchen, in London SW9 in the late twentieth century, without friends, without a past or any sense of his future. He truly was alone. All the other Adams and Eves were spread about the world with their owners, though seven Eves were said to be concentrated in Riyadh.

As I reached for the light switch I said, ‘How are you feeling?’

He looked away to consider his reply. ‘I don’t feel right.’

This time his tone was flat. It seemed my question had lowered his spirits. But within such microprocessors, what spirits?

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I don’t have any clothes. And—’

‘I’ll get you some. What else?’

‘This wire. If I pull it out it will hurt.’

‘I’ll do it and it won’t hurt.’