Machines Like Me

A rape, a suicide, a wrongly kept secret, of course it was dark. I was in an emotional state and I didn’t ask him to explain. Now, lying next to Miranda as she slept, I wondered if he meant something more significant, the consequence of his thinking, if that was really what it … depends on definitions … That was when I too fell asleep.

Perhaps half an hour passed. What woke me was a sound outside the room. My arm in its cast was wedged uncomfortably against my side. Miranda had rolled away from me, into a deeper sleep. I heard the sound again, the familiar creak of a floorboard. My sleep had been light and I felt no anxiety, but the abrupt click of the door handle turning woke Miranda into a state of confusion and fear. She sat upright, one hand gripping mine.

‘It’s him,’ she whispered.

I knew it couldn’t be. ‘It’s fine,’ I said. I freed myself from her and stood to knot a towel around my waist. As I went towards the door it opened. It was Adam, offering me the kitchen phone.

‘I didn’t want to disturb you,’ he said softly. ‘But I think it’s a call you’d want to take.’

I closed the door on him and came back towards the bed with the phone against my ear.

‘Mr Charles Friend?’ The voice was tentative.

‘Yes.’

‘I hope it’s not too late to call. This is Alan Turing. We saw you briefly in Greek Street. I wondered if we might meet up for a chat.’

*

Gorringe did not appear during the following two weeks. One early evening, I left Miranda in my flat, by her choice, with Adam in attendance, and set off to cross London to Turing’s house in Camden Square. I was flattered and awed by the summons. With a touch of youthful self-regard, I wondered if he’d read my short book on artificial intelligence in which I’d praised him. We were bound by our ownership of highly advanced machines. I liked to think I was an expert on the early days of computing. Possibly, he wanted to take issue with me on the way I had placed such emphasis on the role of Nikola Tesla. He had come to Britain in 1906 after the collapse of his radio-transmission project at Wardenclyffe, New York. He joined the National Physical Laboratory, something of a demotion and a blow to his vanity, and helped in the arms race against Germany. He developed not only radar and radio-guided torpedoes, but was the inspiration for the famous ‘foundational surge’ that produced electronic computers capable of making calculations for artillery fire in the coming war. In the twenties he had been instrumental in the development of the first transistors. Notes and sketches for a silicon chip were found among his papers after he died.

I had written in my book about the celebrated meeting between Tesla and Turing in 1941. The old Serb, immensely tall and thin, and inconveniently trembling, only eighteen months away from death, said in an after-dinner speech at the Dorchester that their conversation had ‘reached for the stars’. Turing’s only comment, made to a newspaper, was that they had exchanged nothing but small talk. At the time he was working in secret at Bletchley on a computer to crack German naval Enigma codes. He would have taken care to be circumspect.

The carriage was almost empty when I got on the Tube at Clapham North. Once we were north of the river, the train began to fill with people, mostly young, carrying placards and furled banners. Yet another unemployment march was coming to an end. At first they looked like a typical rock-and-roll crowd. The humid air carried a scent of cannabis, like a fond memory of a long day. But there was another constituency, a large minority, some of whom carried plastic Union Jacks on sticks – that foolish stock-market position of mine – or wore Union Jack t-shirts. These factions loathed each other but were making common cause. A fragile alliance had been formed, with dissenters on both sides resisting any affiliation at all. The right blamed unemployment on immigration from Europe and the Commonwealth. British workers’ wages were being undercut. Foreign arrivals, dark-skinned and white, were adding to the housing crisis, doctors’ waiting rooms and hospital wards were overcrowded and so were local schools, whose playgrounds were supposedly filling with eight-year-old girls in headscarves. Whole neighbourhoods had been transformed in a generation, and no one in faraway Whitehall had ever asked the locals.