Machines Like Me

Marriage, parenthood, love, youth, wealth, a heroic rescue – my life was taking shape. In a mood of elation, I told her what had really passed between Maxfield and me. I’d never heard her laugh so freely. Perhaps only here, with Mariam, in this enclosed, private space far from the house, had she ever been so unrestrained. She embraced me. ‘Oh, that’s precious,’ she kept saying, and ‘So like him!’ She laughed again when I described how I had told Maxfield that I needed to go downstairs to recharge.

We sat a little longer with our plans until we heard footsteps. The overlapping branches of the rain-soaked willows stirred and then parted. Adam was before us, beads of water gleaming along the shoulder line of his black suit. How upright, formal and plausible he looked, like the assured manager of an expensive hotel. Hardly the Turkish docker now. He advanced across the lawn and stopped well short of our bench.

‘I really am very sorry, intruding on you like this. But we should think of going soon.’

‘What’s the hurry?’

‘Gorringe tends to leave the house around the same time every day.’

‘We’ll be five minutes.’

But he didn’t go. He looked at us steadily, from Miranda to me and back to her. ‘If you don’t mind, there’s something I should tell you. It’s difficult.’

‘Go on,’ Miranda said.

‘This morning, before we set off, I heard by an indirect route some sad news. Eve, the one we saw in Hyde Park, is dead, or rather, brain dead.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I murmured.

We felt a few spots of rain. Adam came closer. ‘She must have known a lot about herself, about her software, to achieve a result with such speed.’

‘You did say there was no turning back.’

‘I did. But that’s not all. I’ve learned that she’s the eighth out of our twenty-five.’

We took this in. Two in Riyadh, one in Vancouver, Hyde Park Eve – then four more. I wondered if Turing knew.

Miranda said, ‘Does anyone have an explanation?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t have one.’

‘You’ve never felt, you know, any impulse to—’

He cut her off quickly. ‘Never.’

‘I’ve seen you,’ she said, ‘looking … it’s more than thoughtful. You look sad sometimes.’

‘A self, created out of mathematics, engineering, material science and all the rest. Out of nowhere. No history – not that I’d want a false one. Nothing before me. Self-aware existence. I’m lucky to have it, but there are times when I think that I ought to know better what to do with it. What it’s for. Sometimes it seems entirely pointless.’

I said, ‘You’re hardly the first to be thinking that.’

He turned to Miranda. ‘I’ve no intention of destroying myself, if that’s your worry. I’ve got good reasons not to, as you know.’

The rain, which had been fine and almost warm, was more persistent now. We heard it on the shrubbery leaves as we got to our feet.

Miranda said, ‘I’ll write my father a note for when he wakes.’

Adam was not supposed to be out in the rain unprotected. He went first and Miranda was in the rear, as we hurried back through the long garden towards the house. I heard him muttering to himself what sounded like a Latin incantation, though I couldn’t make out the precise words. I guessed he was naming the plants as we passed them.

*

The Gorringe house was not really in Salisbury, but just beyond its far eastern edge, well within the white-noise roar of a bypass, on a reclaimed industrial site where colossal gas storage tanks once stood. The last of these, pale green with trimmings of rust, was still being dismantled, but no one was working there today. Circular concrete footings were all that remained of the others. Around the site were scores of recently planted saplings. Beyond them was a grid of newly laid-out roads lined with out-of-town retail warehouses – car showrooms and pet supplies, power tools and white-goods warehouses. Yellow earth-moving machinery was parked among the concrete circles. It looked like there were plans to make a lake. A single development was screened off by a line of leylandii. The ten houses, on smooth front lawns, were arranged around an oval drive and had a brave, pioneering look. In twenty years the place might acquire some bucolic charm, but there would be no rest from the arterial road that had brought us here.

I had pulled over, but no one felt like getting out. Our view was from a littered lay-by on a rise that was also a bus stop. I said to Miranda, ‘Are you sure about this?’

The air in the car was warm and moist. I opened my window. The air outside was no different.

Miranda said, ‘If I had to, I’d do it alone.’

I waited for Adam to speak, then I twisted round to look at him. He was sitting directly behind my seat, impassive, staring past me. I couldn’t quite say why, but it was both comic and sad that he was wearing a seat belt. Doing his best to join in. But of course, he could be damaged by physical impact too. That was part of my worry.

‘Reassure me,’ I said.

‘All fine,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

‘If things turn nasty?’ This wasn’t the first time I’d said this.

‘They won’t.’