Machines Like Me

None of this seemed so unreasonable to me, or all that interesting. I didn’t say so. I wanted to encourage Miranda in everything she did or thought. Love is generous. Besides, it suited me to think that whatever had once happened was no more than its evidence. In the new dispensation, the past weighed less. I was in the process of remaking myself and eager to forget my own recent history. My foolish choices were behind me. I saw a future with Miranda. I was approaching the shores of early middle age, and I was taking stock. I lived daily with the accumulated historical evidence my past had bequeathed, evidence I intended to obliterate: my loneliness, relative poverty, poor living quarters and diminished prospects. Where I stood in relation to the means of production and the rest was a blank to me. Nowhere, I preferred to think.

Was my purchase of Adam more proof of failure? I wasn’t sure. Waking in the small hours – next to Miranda, her place or mine – I summoned in the darkness a lever of the sort found by old railway tracks that would shunt Adam back to the store and return the money to my account. By daylight the matter was more diffuse or nuanced. I hadn’t told Miranda that Adam had spoken against her, and I hadn’t told Adam that Miranda was to have a hand in his personality – a punishment of sorts. I despised his warning about her, but his mind fascinated me – if a mind was what he had. His appearance was thuggishly handsome, he could put on his own socks and he was a technical miracle. He was expensive but this child of the Wiring Club could not let him go.

Working on the old computer in my bedroom, out of Adam’s sight, I typed in my own choices. I decided that answering every other question would be a sufficiently random kind of merging – our home-made genetic shuffling. Now I had a method and a partner, I relaxed into the process, which began to take on a vaguely erotic quality; we were making a child! Because Miranda was involved, I was protected from self-replication. The genetic metaphor was helpful. Scanning the lists of idiotic statements, I more or less chose approximations of myself. Whether Miranda did the same, or something different, we would end up with a third person, a new personality.

I wasn’t going to sell Adam, but the ‘malicious liar’ remark rankled. In studying the manual, I’d read about the kill switch. Somewhere on the nape of his neck, just below the hairline, was a mole. If I were to lay a finger on it for three seconds or so, then increase the pressure, he would be powered down. Nothing, no files, memories or skills, would be lost. That first afternoon with Adam I’d been reluctant to touch his neck or any part of him, and held back until late in the day after my successful dinner with Miranda. I’d spent the afternoon at my screen losing £111. I went into the kitchen where the dishes, pots and pans were piled in the sink. As a test of his competence I could have asked Adam to clear up, but I was in a strange, elevated state that day. Everything to do with Miranda glowed, even her nightmare that had woken me in the small hours. The plate I had put before her, the lucky fork that had been in and out of her mouth, the pale bowed shape where her lips had kissed her wine glass were mine alone to handle and cleanse. And so I began.

Behind me, Adam was in place at the table, gazing towards the window. I finished and was drying my hands on a tea towel as I went over to him. Despite my sunny mood, I could not forgive his disloyalty. I didn’t want to hear what else he had to say. There were boundaries of ordinary decency he needed to learn – hardly a challenge for his neural networks. His heuristic shortcomings had encouraged my decision. When I had learned more, when Miranda had done her share, he could come back into our lives.

I kept a friendly tone. ‘Adam, I’m switching you off for a while.’

His head turned towards me, paused, tilted, then tilted the other way. It was some designer’s notion of how consciousness might manifest itself in movement. It would come to irritate me.

He said, ‘With all respect, I think that’s a bad idea.’

‘It’s what I’ve decided.’

‘I’ve been enjoying my thoughts. I was thinking about religion and the afterlife.’

‘Not now.’

‘It occurred to me that those who believe in a life beyond this one will—’

‘That’s enough. Hold still.’ I reached over his shoulder. His breath was warm on my arm, which, I supposed, he could snap with ease. The manual quoted in bold Isaac Asimov’s tirelessly reiterated First Law of Robotics, ‘A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.’

I couldn’t find what I wanted by touch. I walked behind Adam and there, as described, right on the hairline was the mole. I put my finger on it.

‘Might we talk about this first?’

‘No.’ I pressed and with the faintest, whirring sigh he slumped. His eyes remained open. I fetched a blanket to cover him up.