Machines Like Me

That afternoon I should have been making and losing money at my computer. Instead, I watched from the great height of a helicopter as the leading ships of the Task Force rounded Portland Bill and filed by Chesil Beach. The very place names deserved a respectful salute. How brilliant. Onwards! I kept thinking. And then, Go back! Soon, the fleet came along the Jurassic coast, where herds of dinosaurs once grazed on giant ferns. Suddenly, we were down among the people of Lyme Regis gathering on the Cobb. Some had binoculars, many had the very flags I had in mind, plastic on a wooden stick. A news team might have handed them around. Vox pops. Gentle local voices of hard-working women, tight with emotion. Tough old coves who’d fought in Crete and Normandy, nodding to themselves, giving nothing away. Oh, how I wished I too believed. But I could! A long lens mounted somewhere on the Lizard showed the tiny receding blobs of ships heading bravely out onto the big swell of the open sea to the sound of husky Rod Stewart, while I tried not to be tearful.

What turmoil on a weekday afternoon. A new kind of being at my dining table, the woman I newly loved six feet above my head, and the country at old-fashioned war. But I was tolerably disciplined and had promised myself seven hours every day. I turned off the TV and went to my screen. Waiting for me was the email from Miranda that I’d hoped for.

I knew I would never get rich. The sums I moved around, safely spread across scores of opportunities, were small. Over the month I had done well out of solid-state batteries but had lost almost as much to rare earth element futures – a foolish leap into the known. But I was keeping myself out of a career, an office job. This was my least bad option in the pursuit of freedom. I worked on through the afternoon, resisting the temptation to look in on Adam, even though I guessed he would be fully charged by now. Next step was downloading his updates. Then, those problematic personal preferences.

Before lunch I’d sent Miranda an email inviting her to dinner that night. Now she’d accepted. She liked my cooking. During the meal I would make a proposal. I would fill in roughly half the choices for Adam’s personality, then give her the link and the password and let her choose the rest. I wouldn’t interfere, I wouldn’t even want to know what decisions she had made. She might be influenced by a version of herself: delightful. She might conjure the man of her dreams: instructive. Adam would come into our lives like a real person, with the layered intricacies of his personality revealed only through time, through events, through his dealings with whomever he met. In a sense he would be like our child. What we were separately would be merged in him. Miranda would be drawn into the adventure. We would be partners, and Adam would be our joint concern, our creation. We would be a family. There was nothing underhand in my plan. I was sure to see more of her. We’d have fun.

My schemes generally fell apart. This was different. I was clear-headed, incapable of deceiving myself. Adam was not my love-rival. However he fascinated her, she was also physically repelled by him. She had told me as much. It was ‘creepy’ she had told me the day before, that his body was warm. She said it was ‘a bit weird’ that he could make words with his tongue. But he had a word-store as large as Shakespeare’s. It was his mind that aroused her curiosity.

So the decision not to sell Adam was made. I was to share him with Miranda – just as I might have shared a house. He would contain us. Making progress, comparing notes, pooling disappointments. I regarded myself at thirty-two as an old hand at love. Earnest declarations would drive her away. Far better to make this journey together. Already she was my friend, she sometimes held my hand. I wasn’t starting from nowhere. Deeper feelings could steal up on her, as they had on me. If they didn’t, then at least I’d have the consolation of more time with her.

In my ancient fridge, whose rusty door handle had partly come away, was a corn-fed chicken, a quarter-pound of butter, two lemons and a bunch of fresh tarragon. In a bowl on the side were a few bulbs of garlic. In a cupboard, some earth-caked potatoes, already sprouting – but peeled, they would roast nicely. Lettuce, a dressing, a hearty bottle of Cahors. Simple. First, heat the oven. These ordinary matters filled my thoughts as I stood from my desk. An old friend of mine, a journalist, once said that paradise on earth was to work all day alone in anticipation of an evening in interesting company.