Machines Like Me

The story of the missing texts was particular, inventive, easily verified or disproved. By telling it to the court, Gorringe as rapist may have calculated that he had nothing to lose. A wild fiction and he almost got away with it. If he was innocent, if the texts existed, then the system had let him down. Either way, it had let itself down. His story should have been checked. On that, I was with the sceptical press. The blame could lie with an inexperienced legal aid team, too hard-pressed, too sloppy. Or with policemen greedy for success. And certainly with an ill-tempered judge.

On my way back from the Common, I slowed as I turned into my road. Now I knew as much as Adam. I hadn’t spoken to him since the evening before. After a painful, sleepless night, I had got up early to go to the hospital. As I went through the kitchen I had passed close by him. He was sitting at the kitchen table as usual, connected to his power line. His eyes were open and had that tranquil, faraway look whenever he retreated into his circuits. I had hesitated there for a whole minute, wondering what I had got into with my purchase. He was far more complicated than I’d imagined, and so were my own feelings about him. We had to confront each other, but I was exhausted from two broken nights and needed to get to the hospital.

What I wanted now, returning from my walk, was to retreat to my bedroom for a dose of painkillers and a nap. But he was standing facing me as I came in. At the sight of my arm suspended in its sling, he gave a cry of astonishment or horror. He came towards me, arms spread.

‘Charlie! I am so sorry. So sorry. What a terrible thing I did. I honestly didn’t intend it. Will you please, please accept my most sincere apologies.’

It looked as though he was about to embrace me. With my free hand, I pushed past – I disliked the too-solid feel of him – and went to the sink. I turned on the tap and bent low to drink deeply. When I turned, he was standing close, no more than three or four feet away. The moment of apology had passed. I was determined to look relaxed – not so easy with my arm in a sling. I put my free hand on my hip and looked into his eyes, into the nursery blue with its little black seeds. I still wondered what it meant, that Adam could see, and who or what did the seeing. A torrent of zeros and ones flashed towards various processors that, in turn, directed a cascade of interpretation towards other centres. No mechanistic explanation could help. It couldn’t resolve the essential difference between us. I had little idea of what passed along my own optic nerve, or where it went next, or how these pulses became an encompassing self-evident visual reality, or who was doing my seeing for me. Only me. Whatever the process was, it had the trick of seeming beyond explanation, of creating and sustaining an illuminated part of the one thing in the world we knew for sure – our own experience. It was hard to believe that Adam possessed something like that. Easier to believe that he saw in the way a camera does, or the way a microphone is said to listen. There was no one there.

But as I looked into his eyes, I began to feel unhinged, uncertain. Despite the clean divide between the living and the inanimate, it remained the case that he and I were bound by the same physical laws. Perhaps biology gave me no special status at all, and it meant little to say that the figure standing before me wasn’t fully alive. In my fatigue, I felt unmoored, drifting into the oceanic blue and black, moving in two directions at once – towards the uncontrollable future we were making for ourselves where we might finally dissolve our biological identities; at the same time, into the ancient past of an infant universe, where the common inheritance, in diminishing order, was rocks, gases, compounds, elements, forces, energy fields – for both of us, the seeding ground of consciousness in whatever form it took.

I came out of this reverie with a start. I confronted an immediate and unpleasant situation and wasn’t inclined to accept Adam as a brother, or even a very distant cousin, however much stardust we shared. I had to stand up to him. I started talking. I told him how I came by a large sum of money after my mother’s death and the sale of her house. How I decided to invest it in a grand experiment, to buy an artificial human, an android, a replicate – I forget which term I used. In his presence, they all sounded like insults. I told him exactly how much I paid. Then I described for him the afternoon when Miranda and I carried him on a stretcher into the house, unpacked him, charged him up, when I tenderly gave him my clothes, and discussed the formation of his personality. As I went along, I wasn’t certain of my purpose, or why I was talking so fast.