Machines Like Me

‘I would have been on Einstein’s side. I don’t understand the doubt about it,’ he said. ‘Quantum mechanics makes predictions to such a fabulous degree of accuracy, it must be getting something right about nature. To creatures of our immense size, the material world looks blurred and feels hard. But now we know how strange and wonderful it is. So it shouldn’t surprise us that consciousness, your sort and mine, could arise from an arrangement of matter – it’s clearly odd to just the right degree. And we don’t have anything else to explain how matter can think and feel.’ Then he added, ‘Except for beams of love from the eyes of God. But then, beams can be investigated.’

Another morning, after he had told me how he had been thinking all night of Miranda, he said, ‘I’ve also been thinking about vision and death.’

‘Go on.’

‘We don’t see everywhere. We can’t see behind our heads. We can’t even see our chins. Let’s say our field of vision is almost 180 degrees, counting in peripheral awareness. The odd thing is, there’s no boundary, no edge. There isn’t vision and then blackness, like you get when you look through binoculars. There isn’t something, then nothing. What we have is the field of vision, and then beyond it, less than nothing.’

‘So?’

‘So this is what death is like. Less than nothing. Less than blackness. The edge of vision is a good representation of the edge of consciousness. Life then death. It’s a foretaste, Charlie, and it’s there all day.’

‘Nothing to be afraid of then,’ I said.

He raised both hands as if to grip and shake a trophy. ‘Exactly right! Less than nothing to be afraid of!’

Was he covering for an anxiety about death? His term was fixed for approximately twenty years. When I asked, he said, ‘That’s the difference between us, Charlie. My body parts will be improved or replaced. But my mind, my memories, experiences, identity and so on will be uploaded and retained. They’ll be of use.’

Poetry was another instance of his exuberance in love. He had written 2,000 haikus and had recited about a dozen, of the same quality, each one devoted to Miranda. I’d been interested at first in learning what Adam could create. But I soon lost interest in the form itself. Too cute, too devoted to not making much sense, too undemanding of their author as they played on empty mysteries of the sound-of-one-hand-clapping sort. 2,000! The figure made my point – an algorithm was churning them out. I said all this as we walked the backstreets of Stockwell – our daily exercise to extend Adam’s social skills. We’d been into shops, pubs and had even taken a trip on the Tube to Green Park and sat on the grass among the lunchtime crowds.

Perhaps I was too harsh. Haikus, I told him, could be stifling in their stillness. But I was also encouraging. Time to move on to another form. He had access to all the world’s literature. Why not attempt a poem with verses of four lines, rhyming or not? Or even a short story and eventually a novel?

Early that evening he gave me his response. ‘If you don’t mind, I’m ready to discuss your suggestions.’

I was not long out of the shower, freshly dressed and on my way upstairs, therefore a little impatient. On the table, waiting to come with me, was a bottle of Pomerol. There was a conversation I needed to have with Miranda. Gorringe was due to be released in seven weeks. We still hadn’t decided what to do. There was an assumption that Adam could act as her bodyguard and I was worried – I was legally responsible for anything he might do. She had been back to the local police station. The detective who had visited Gorringe in prison had moved on. The desk sergeant had taken a note and advised her to phone emergency in the event of trouble. She had suggested that it might be difficult, if she was being bludgeoned at the time. The sergeant did not take this to be facetious. He advised her to make the call before that eventuality.

‘When I see him coming up the garden path with an axe?’

‘Yes. And don’t open the door.’

She had seen a solicitor about going before a judge to get an exclusion order. Success was not certain and it wasn’t clear what it would achieve. She had asked her father not to divulge her address to anyone. But Maxfield had worries of his own and she thought he’d forget. We were left with the hope that the threat wasn’t serious and that Adam would be a deterrent. When I asked her how dangerous Gorringe really was, she said, ‘He’s a creep.’

‘A dangerous creep?’

‘A disgusting creep.’

I wasn’t in the right mood for another conversation with Adam about poetry.

‘My opinion,’ he said, ‘is that the haiku is the literary form of the future. I want to refine and extend the form. Everything I’ve done so far is a kind of limbering up. My juvenilia. When I’ve studied the masters and understood more, especially when I’ve grasped the power of the kireji, the cutting word that separates the two juxtaposed parts, my real work can begin.’