Machines Like Me

In the days that followed this powering-down, two questions preoccupied me: would Miranda fall in love with me? And would French-made Exocet missiles scupper the British fleet when it came within range of Argentinian fighter jets? When I was falling asleep, or in the mornings while I lingered a few seconds in the foggy no-man’s-land between dreaming and waking, the questions merged, the air-to-ship missiles became arrows of love.

What was disarming and curious about Miranda was the ease that settled round her choices, the way she abandoned herself to the flow of events. That evening she came to supper, and after a pleasant two hours eating and drinking, we made love, having closed the bedroom door on Adam. Then we talked into the night. Just as easily, she could have kissed me on the cheek after the chicken with tarragon and retreated upstairs to her own bed and read a history book before falling asleep. What for me was momentous, the immediate, astonishing fulfilment of my hopes, was for her enjoyable and entirely unsurprising, a pleasant extra course after the coffee. Like chocolates. Or a good grappa. Neither my nakedness nor my tenderness had the effect on her that hers, in all their glorious sweetness, had on me. And I was in decent shape – good muscle tone, full head of dark brown hair – and generous, resourceful, some had been kind enough to say. I played a decent hand in pillow talk. She hardly seemed to notice how well we got along, how one topic, one harmless running joke, one mood-tone succeeded another. My self-esteem allowed that this was how it must have been with everyone she had known. I suspected that our first night together barely entered her thoughts the following day.

I could hardly complain when the second night followed the pattern of the first, except that she cooked for me and we slept in her bed, and on the third, in mine – and so on. For all our carefree physical intimacy, I never spoke about my feelings in case I prompted her to admit she had none of her own. I preferred to wait, to let things build, let her feel free until she realised that she wasn’t, that she was in love with me and it was too late to turn back.

There was vanity in this expectation. After a week or so there was anxiety. I’d been glad to switch Adam off. Now, I wondered about reactivating him to ask about his warning, his reasons, his sources. But I couldn’t let a machine have such a hold over me, which was what would happen if I granted it the role of confidant, counsellor, oracle, in my most private affairs. I had my pride and I believed that Miranda was incapable of a malicious lie.

And yet. I despised myself for doing it, but ten days into the affair I began my own investigations. Apart from the much-discussed notion of ‘machine-intuition’, Adam’s only possible source was the Internet. I trawled through the social media sites. There were no accounts under her name. She lived in the reflections of her friends. So there she was, at parties or on holidays, carrying a friend’s daughter on her shoulders at a zoo, gum-booted on a farm, linking arms or dancing or romping in the pool with a succession of bare-chested boyfriends, with boisterous crowds of teenage girlfriends, with drunken undergraduates. All who knew her liked her. No one on any accessible site had a sinister story. Now and then the chatter endorsed parts of the past she was recounting in our midnight conversations. Elsewhere, her name came up in connection with the one academic paper she had published – ‘Pannage in Swyncombe: the role of the half-wild pig in the household economies of a medieval Chilterns village’. When I read it, I loved her more.