Machines Like Me

The woman lifted her cane and pointed in the direction she intended to go. At the same time, she dragged at Eve’s arm.

I said, ‘Adam. For God’s sake. Go on!’

He wouldn’t move. With her gaze still locked on him, Eve allowed herself to be led away. They moved off through the crowd. Just before they disappeared from view, she turned for one last look. She was too far away for me to read her expression. She was no more than a small pale face bobbing in the press of bodies. Then she was gone. We could have followed them but Adam had already turned in the other direction and had gone to stand by the oak tree.

We set off for home in silence. I should have done more to encourage him to approach his twin. We stood side by side on the crowded Tube heading south. I was haunted, and I knew he was too, by Eve’s abject look. I decided not to press him to explain why he had turned away. He would tell me when he was ready. I should have spoken to her, I kept thinking, but he didn’t want it. The way he had stood with his back to her, gazing into the tree trunk as she vanished into the crowd! I’d been neglecting him. I’d been lost to a love affair. In the daily round, it no longer amazed me that I could pass the time of day with a manufactured human, or that it could wash the dishes and converse like anyone else. I sometimes wearied of his earnest pursuit of ideas and facts, of his hunger for propositions that lay beyond my reach. Technological marvels like Adam, like the first steam engine, become commonplace. Likewise, the biological marvels we grow up among and don’t fully understand, like the brain of any creature, or the humble stinging nettle, whose photosynthesis had only just been described on a quantum scale. There is nothing so amazing that we can’t get used to it. As Adam blossomed and made me rich, I had ceased to think about him.

That evening I described the Hyde Park moment to Miranda. She wasn’t as impressed as I was that we had seen an Eve. I described the sad moment, as I saw it, when he turned his back on her. And then, my guilt about him.

‘I don’t know what you’re being so dramatic about,’ she said. ‘Talk to him. Spend more time with him.’

In the mid-morning of the following day, when the rain had stopped at last, I went into my bedroom and persuaded Adam to desert the currency markets and come for a walk. He was just back from escorting Miranda to the Tube and reluctantly got to his feet. But how confident his stride was as he weaved through the shoppers on Clapham High Street. Of course, our excursion was costing hundreds of pounds in lost revenue. Since we were passing the newsagent, we called in on Simon Syed. While I browsed the magazine shelves, I listened as Adam and Simon discussed the politics of Kashmir, then the India–Pakistan nuclear arms race and finally, to end on a celebratory note, the poetry of Tagore, whom both could quote in the original at length. I thought Adam was showing off, but Simon was delighted. He praised Adam’s accent – better than his own these days, he said – and promised to invite us all to dinner.

A quarter of an hour later, we were walking on the Common. Until this point, we had small-talked. Now I asked him about the visit of Sally, the engineer. When she had asked him to imagine an object of hatred, what had he brought to mind?

‘Obviously, I thought about what happened to Mariam. But it’s hard when someone asks you to think about something. The mind goes its own way. As John Milton said, the mind is its own place. I tried to stay focussed on Gorringe, but then I started thinking about the ideas that lay behind his actions. How he believed he was allowed to do what he did, or had some kind of entitlement to it, how he could be immune to her cries and her fear and the consequences for her, and how he thought there was no other way for him to get what he wanted than by force.’

I told him that I’d been watching Sally’s screen, that there was nothing in the cascade of symbols that could ever have told me the difference between the feelings of love and hate.

We had come to watch the children at the pool with their boats. There were fewer than a dozen. Soon, it would be time to drain the water off for winter.

Adam said, ‘There it is, brain and mind. The old hard problem, no less difficult in machines than in humans.’

As we walked on, I asked him about his very first memories.

‘The feel of the kitchen chair I was sitting on. Then the edge of the table and the wall beyond it, and the vertical section of the architrave, where the paint is peeling. I’ve learned since that the manufacturers toyed with the idea of giving us a set of credible childhood memories to make us fit in with everybody else. I’m glad they changed their minds. I wouldn’t have liked to start out with a false story, an attractive delusion. At least I know what I am, and where and how I was constructed.’