Machines Like Me

We didn’t go back to bed. A silence forced its way between us. I could see that she was already withdrawing into her private world and I didn’t know what to say. Besides, she had a seminar at King’s, in the Strand. I decided to settle my feelings by avoiding Adam downstairs and going straight out for a stroll on the Common. There, I walked up and down for two hours. My inaccessible wrist itched as I thought about Miranda. I didn’t know how we had traversed so smoothly from coolness to joy, from suspicion to ecstasy, and from there to an impersonal conversation about arrangements. She excited me and I couldn’t understand her. Perhaps some intelligible part of her had been damaged. I was anxious to dismiss that. It must be that she knew more about love, the deeper processes of love, than I did. So she was a force, but not of nature, not even of nurture. More like a psychological arrangement, or a theorem, a hypothesis, a glorious accident, like light falling on water. Wasn’t that of nature, and wasn’t this old hat, men thinking of women as blind forces? Then, might she resemble a counter-intuitive Euclidean proof? I couldn’t think of one. But after half an hour of fast walking, I thought I’d found the mathematical expression for her: her psyche, her desires and motives were inexorable, like prime numbers, simply and unpredictably there. More old hat, dressed as logic. I was in knots.

Pacing the littered grass, I numbed myself with truisms. She is who she is. She’s herself and that’s the end of it! She approaches love with caution because she knows how explosive it can be. As for her beauty, at my age, in my state, I was bound to think of it as a moral quality, as its own justification, the badge of her essential goodness, whatever she might actually do. And look what she had done – from my waist, almost to my knees, I still felt the afterglow of the most intense sensual pleasure I had ever known, and everywhere, its emotional correlate glowed too.

I had done two turns when I stopped in one of the larger, emptier expanses of the Common. A good way off, on all sides, the traffic turned about me like planets. Usually it oppressed me to reflect that every car contained a nexus of worries, memories and hopes as vital and complicated as my own. Today, I welcomed and forgave everyone. We would all turn out well. We were all bound together in our own overlapping but distinct forms of comedy. Others might also have a lover living with a death threat. But no one else with an arm in a cast had a machine for a love rival.

I headed home, north along the High Street, past the burned-out premises of the Anglo-Argentinian Friendship Society, past the stinking black heaps of plastic sacks, trebled in height since I was last this way. A German company had launched their bipedal, dustmen-automata in Glasgow. Public contempt was aroused because each one wore the perpetual grin of a contented worker. If Adam could make an origami boat in seconds, it should not have been much of a stretch to have a drone chuck sacks into the mechanical maw of a garbage truck. But the filth and dust caused failure in the knee and elbow joints, according to the Financial Times, and the cheaper batteries couldn’t survive an eight-hour shift. Each device cost five years’ wages of a dustman. Unlike Adam, it had an exoskeleton and weighed 350 pounds. The automata were falling behind on the work and on Sauchiehall Street, the bags were piling up. In Hanover, a robot dustman had stepped backwards into the path of an autonomous electric bus. Teething troubles. But in our part of the country, humans were cheaper, and they remained on strike. General outrage had given way to apathy. Someone said on the radio that the stink was no more remarkable than in Calcutta or Dar es Salaam. We could all adapt.

Peter Gorringe. Once I had the name, it was easy to find the press reports as I waited with my throbbing wrist in Casualty. They dated back three years and, as I’d guessed, concerned a rape. As victim, Miranda’s name was withheld. In broad outline, the case resembled a thousand others: alcohol and a dispute over consent. She went one evening to Gorringe’s bedsit in the centre of town. They knew each other from school, which they had left only months before, but they were not close friends. That night, alone together, they drank a fair amount and around nine o’clock, after some kissing, which neither side denied, he forced himself on her, according to the prosecution. She tried to fight him off.