Machines Like Me

‘Give me a date and place and the man’s name. Quick!’

‘October the … Salisbury. But look—’

Then he began to giggle, a silly, hissing sound. It was embarrassing to witness, but I couldn’t look away. On his face was a complicated look – of confusion, of anxiety, or mirthless hilarity. The user’s handbook claimed that he had forty facial expressions. The Eves had fifty. As far as I knew, the average among people was fewer than twenty-five.

‘Get a grip, Adam. We agreed. We need to understand your mistake.’

It took him more than a minute to get himself under control. I drank the last of my tea and watched what I knew to be a complex process. I understood that personality was not like a shell, encasing and constraining his capacity for coherent thought; that his deviousness, if that was what motivated him, did not live downstream of reason. Nor did mine. His rational impulse to collaborate with me may have pulsed through his neural networks at half the speed of light, but it would not have been suddenly barred at the logic gate of a freshly devised persona. Instead, these two elements were entwined at their origins, like the snakes of Mercury’s caduceus. Adam saw the world and understood it through the prism of his personality; his personality was at the service of his objectifying reason and its constant updates. From the beginning of our conversation, it had been simultaneously in his interests to avoid a repetition of an error and to withhold information from me. When the two became incompatible, he became incapacitated and giggled like a child in church. Whatever we had chosen for him lay far upstream of the branching intricacy of his decision-making. In a different dispensation of character he might simply have fallen silent; in another, he might have been compelled to tell me everything. A case could be made for both.

I now knew a little more than nothing, enough to worry about, not enough to follow up, even if I’d had access to the closed sessions of the courts: Miranda as witness, victim or accused, sex with a young man, vodka, a courtroom, one October in Salisbury.

Adam had fallen silent. His expression, the special material of his face, indistinguishable from skin, relaxed into watchful neutrality. I could have gone upstairs and woken Miranda to confront her with the obvious questions and get everything clear between us. Or I could wait and reflect, holding back what I knew in order to grant myself the illusion of control. A case could be made for both.

But I didn’t hesitate. I went into my bedroom, undressed, leaving my clothes in a heap on my desk, and lay down naked under the summer duvet. It was already light. I would have liked to be soothed and hear, above the dawn chorus, the sound of the milkman going from door to door, clinking his bottles on the steps. But the last of the electric-powered milk floats had vanished from our streets. A shame. Still, I was tired and suddenly comfortable. There’s a special dispensation in the sensuousness of an unshared bed, at least for a while, until sleeping alone begins to assume its own quiet sadness.

THREE

In the waiting room of the local doctor’s practice, a dozen junk-shop dining-room chairs were arranged round the walls of what had once been a Victorian front parlour. In the centre was a low plywood table with spindly metal legs and a few magazines, greasy to the touch. I had picked one up and immediately put it back. In one corner, some colourful broken toys, a headless giraffe, a car with a missing wheel, gnawed plastic bricks, kindly donated. There were no infants in our group of nine. I was keen to avoid the gaze of the others, their small talk or ailment-swapping. I kept my breathing shallow in case the air around me swarmed with pathogens. I didn’t belong here. I wasn’t ill, my problem was not systemic but peripheral, a toenail. I was the youngest in the room, surely the fittest, a god among mortals, with an appointment not with the doctor but the nurse. I remained beyond mortality’s reach. Decay and death were for others. I expected my name to be called first. It turned out to be a long wait. I was second to last.

On the wall opposite me was a cork noticeboard with fliers promoting early detection of this or that, healthy living, dire warnings. I had time to read them all. A photograph showed an elderly man in cardigan and slippers standing by a window. Without raising a hand to his mouth, he was lustily sneezing in the direction of a laughing little girl. Backlighting illuminated tens of thousands of particles flying towards her – minute droplets of fluid teeming with germs shared by an old fool.