Machines Like Me

I had no ambition but to walk off my restless state. I increased my pace through the business end of the High Street. I passed the boarded-up office of the Anglo-Argentinian Friendship Society. A rubbish collectors’ walkout was in its second week. The bags piled round lamp posts were waist-high and the heat was generating a sweet stench. The public, or its press, agreed with the prime minister, that a strike at such a time was an act of heartless disloyalty. But the wage demands were as inevitable as the next rise in inflation. No one knew yet how to dissuade the snake from eating its tail. Very soon, perhaps by the end of the year, stoical robots of negligible intelligence would be picking up the rubbish. The men they displaced would be even poorer. Unemployment was at sixteen per cent.

By the curry house and along the greasy pavement outside the fast-food chains, the smell of rotting meat was a force that hit the chest. I held my breath until I was past the Tube station. I crossed the road and walked onto the Common. There were shouts and squeals rising from a crowd by the boating and paddling pool. Even some of the kids splashing about were wearing ribbons. It was a happy scene but I didn’t linger. In these new times a solitary man had to be wary of seeming to stare at children.

So I strolled over to Holy Trinity Church, a huge brick Age of Reason shed. There was no one inside. As I sat, hunched forward, elbows on knees, I could have been mistaken for a worshipper. It was too reasonable a place to evoke much awe, but its clean lines and sensible proportions were soothing. I was content to stay a while in the cool gloom and let my thoughts drift back to our very first night together when I’d been woken by a prolonged howl. I thought a dog was in the room and I was half out of bed before I came to and realised that Miranda was having a nightmare. It wasn’t easy to wake her. She was struggling, as if fighting with someone, and twice she mumbled, ‘Don’t go in. Please.’ Afterwards, I thought it would help her to describe the dream. She was lying on my arm, clinging to me tightly. When I asked her again, she shook her head, and soon she was asleep.

In the morning, over coffee, she shrugged my question away. Just a dream. That moment of evasion stood out because Adam was behind us, making a good job of cleaning the window, which I had told him, rather than asked him, to do. While we were talking, he had paused and turned, as if intrigued to hear an account of a nightmare. I wondered then if he himself was subject to dreams. He was on my conscience now. My command that morning had been snappish. I shouldn’t have treated him like a servant. Later that day I had powered him down. I had left him switched off too long. Holy Trinity Church was associated with William Wilberforce and the anti-slavery movement. He would have promoted the cause of the Adams and Eves, their right not to be bought and sold and destroyed, their dignity in self-determination. Perhaps they could take care of themselves. Soon, they’d be doing the dustmen’s jobs. Doctors and lawyers were next in line. Pattern recognition and faultless memory were even easier to compute than gathering up the city’s filth.

We could become slaves of time without purpose. Then what? A general renaissance, a liberation into love, friendship and philosophy, art and science, nature worship, sports and hobbies, invention and the pursuit of meaning? But genteel recreations wouldn’t be for everyone. Violent crime had its attractions too, so did bare-knuckle cage-fighting, VR pornography, gambling, drink and drugs, even boredom and depression. We wouldn’t be in control of our choices. I was proof of that.

I wandered out across the open spaces of the Common. Fifteen minutes later I reached the far side and decided to turn back. By now, Miranda should have made at least a third of her decisions. I was impatient to be with her before she set off for Salisbury. She would be back late that night. I was resting from the heat in the narrow shade of a silver birch. A few yards away was a fenced-in little swing park for children. A small boy – I guessed he was about four years old – dressed in baggy green shorts, plastic sandals and a stained white t-shirt, was bent over by a see-saw examining an object on the ground. He tried to dislodge it with his foot, then he crouched down and got his fingers to it.

I hadn’t noticed his mother sitting on a bench with her back to me. She called out sharply, ‘Get here!’

The boy looked up, seemed about to go towards her, then his attention returned to the interesting thing on the ground. Now he had moved, I saw it myself. It was a bottle top, glinting dully, perhaps embedded in the softened tarmac.

The woman’s back was broad, her hair black, curly, thinning towards the crown. In her right hand was a cigarette. Her elbow was cupped in her left hand. Despite the heat, she was wearing a coat. Below the collar was a long tear.