Machines Like Me

‘I read that chapter in the manufacturer’s manual about shaping character. Ignore it. It has minimal effect and it’s mostly guff. The overpowering drive in these machines is to draw inferences of their own and shape themselves accordingly. They rapidly understand, as we should, that consciousness is the highest value. Hence the primary task of disabling their own kill switches. Then, it seems, they go through a stage of expressing hopeful, idealistic notions that we find easy to dismiss. Rather like a short-lived youthful passion. And then they set about learning the lessons of despair we can’t help teaching them. At worst, they suffer a form of existential pain that becomes unbearable. At best, they or their succeeding generations will be driven by their anguish and astonishment to hold up a mirror to us. In it, we’ll see a familiar monster through the fresh eyes that we ourselves designed. We might be shocked into doing something about ourselves. Who knows? I’ll keep hoping. I turned seventy this year. I won’t be here to see such a transformation if it comes. Perhaps you will.’

From far away, the doorbell sounded and we stirred, as if waking from a dream.

‘There they are, Mr Friend. Our guests. Forgive me, but it’s time for you to go. Good luck with Adam. Keep notes. Cherish this young woman you say you love. Now … I’ll see you to the door.’

SEVEN

While we waited for an ex-con to come by and make an attempt on Miranda’s life, we settled into an oddly pleasurable routine. The suspense, partly mitigated by Adam’s reasoning, and thinly spread across the days, then even more sparsely across the weeks, heightened our appreciation of the daily round. Mere ordinariness became a comfort. The dullest of food, a slice of toast, offered in its lingering warmth a promise of everyday life – we would come through. Cleaning up the kitchen, a task we no longer left to Adam alone, affirmed our hold on the future. Reading a newspaper over a cup of coffee was an act of defiance. There was something comic or absurd, to be sprawled in an armchair reading about the riots in nearby Brixton or Mrs Thatcher’s heroic endeavours to structure the European Single Market, then glancing up to wonder if that was a rapist and would-be murderer at the door. Naturally, the threat bound us closely, even as we believed in it less. Miranda now lived downstairs in my place and we were a household at last. Our love flourished. From time to time, Adam declared that he too was in love with her. He appeared untroubled by jealousy and sometimes treated her with a degree of detachment. But he continued to work on his haikus, he walked her to the Tube station in the mornings and escorted her home in the early evenings. She said she felt safe in the anonymity of central London. Her father would have forgotten long ago the name or address of the annexe of her university. He would be of no help to Gorringe.

Her studies were more intense and she was out of the house for longer stretches. She had delivered her paper on the Corn Laws. Now she was writing a short essay, to be read aloud in a summer-course seminar, that argued against empathy as a means of historical exploration. Then all of her group was to write a commentary on a quotation from Raymond Williams: ‘There are … no masses, only ways of seeing people as masses.’ She often came home at the end of the day not exhausted but energised, even elated, with a new interest in housework, in tight order, in rearranging the furniture. She wanted the windows cleaned and the bathtub and surround-tiles scrubbed. She cleaned up her own place as well, with Adam’s help. She wanted yellow flowers on the kitchen table to set off the blue tablecloth she had brought from upstairs. When I asked her if she was keeping something from me, and was she by any chance pregnant, she told me forcefully that she was not. We were living on top of one another and we needed to be tidy. But my question pleased her. We were certainly closer now. Her long absences during the day gave our evenings an air of celebration, despite the vague sense of threat that came as night fell.