Machines Like Me

Then nothing was solved, despite this high gloss of rationality. Miranda and I had different states of mind. What was new? But we were united against Adam in our differences. At least, this was my hope. He may have understood the relevant issue after all: he thought I was right about the Falklands and, given a degree of programmed intellectual honesty, the best he could offer Miranda, to whom he was also loyal, was an appearance of neutrality. But if that was sound, why not accept the mirror possibility, that he believed Miranda was right and I was the one in receipt of loyal support?

With a sudden scrape of a kitchen chair, Miranda stood. There was a faint flush about her face and throat and she wasn’t looking at me. We’d be sleeping in separate beds that night. I would have happily unsaid my entire argument to stay with her. But I was dumb.

She said to Adam, ‘You can stay up here to charge, if you like.’

Adam needed six hours a night connected to a thirteen-amp socket. He went into sleep mode and sat quietly ‘reading’ until after dawn. Usually he was in my kitchen downstairs, but recently Miranda had bought a second charging cable.

He murmured his thanks and slowly folded a kitchen towel in half with close attention, hunched over the task, and spread it across the draining board. As she moved towards her bedroom door she shot me a look, a regretful smile that didn’t part her lips, sent a conciliatory kiss across the space between us and whispered, ‘Just for tonight.’

So we were fine.

I said, ‘Of course I know you care about the dead.’

She nodded and left. Adam was sitting down, pulling his shirt clear of his belt to locate the tethering point below his waistline. I put a hand on his shoulder and thanked him for clearing up.

For me, it was far too early for bed and it was hot, like a summer evening in Marrakech. I went downstairs and looked in the fridge for something cool.

*

I remained in the kitchen, in an old leather armchair, with a balloon glass of Moldovan white. There was much pleasure in following a line of thought without opposition. I was hardly the first to think it, but one could see the history of human self-regard as a series of demotions tending to extinction. Once we sat enthroned at the centre of the universe, with sun and planets, the entire observable world, turning around us in an ageless dance of worship. Then, in defiance of the priests, heartless astronomy reduced us to an orbiting planet around the sun, just one among other rocks. But still, we stood apart, brilliantly unique, appointed by the creator to be lords of everything that lived. Then biology confirmed that we were at one with the rest, sharing common ancestry with bacteria, pansies, trout and sheep. In the early twentieth century came deeper exile into darkness when the immensity of the universe was revealed and even the sun became one among billions in our galaxy, among billions of galaxies. Finally, in consciousness, our last redoubt, we were probably correct to believe that we had more of it than any creature on earth. But the mind that had once rebelled against the gods was about to dethrone itself by way of its own fabulous reach. In the compressed version, we would devise a machine a little cleverer than ourselves, then set that machine to invent another that lay beyond our comprehension. What need then of us?

Such hot-air thoughts deserved a second, bigger balloon and I poured it. Head propped in my right palm, I approached that ill-lit precinct where self-pity becomes a mellow pleasure. I was a special case of the general banishment, though it wasn’t Adam I was thinking of. He wasn’t cleverer than me. Not yet. No, my exile was for one night only and it gave a twist of sweet, bearable agony to a hopeless love. My shirt unbuttoned to the waist, all windows open, the urban romance of getting thoughtfully drunk amid the heat and dust and muted din of north Clapham, in a world city. The imbalance of our affair was heroic. I imagined an onlooker’s approving gaze from a corner of the room. That well-formed figure slumped in his beaten-up chair. I rather loved myself. Someone had to. I rewarded myself with thoughts of her, mid-ecstasy, and considered the impersonal quality of her pleasures. I was only good enough for her, as many men might be. I refused the obvious, that her distance was the whip that drove my longing. But here was something strange. Three days before, she had asked a mysterious question. We were mid-embrace, in the conventional position. She drew my face towards hers. Her look was serious.

She whispered, ‘Tell me something. Are you real?’

I didn’t reply.

She turned her head away so that I saw her in profile as her eyes closed and she lost herself once more in a maze of private pleasure.