Machines Like Me

‘Two well-run places for rough sleepers. Very appreciative. Next, a state-run children’s home – they accept contributions for trips and treats and so on. Then I walked north and made a donation to a rape crisis centre. I gave most of the rest to a paediatric hospital. Last, I got talking to a very old lady outside a police station and I ended up going with her to see her landlord. I covered her rent arrears and a year in advance. She was about to be evicted and I thought—’

Suddenly, Miranda said through a downward sigh, ‘Oh Adam. This is virtue gone nuts.’

‘Every need I addressed was greater than yours.’

I said, ‘We were going to buy a house. The money was ours.’

‘That’s debatable. Or irrelevant. Your initial investment is on your desk.’

It was an outrage, with many components – theft, folly, arrogance, betrayal, the ruin of our dreams. We couldn’t speak. We couldn’t even look at him. Where to start?

A full half-minute passed and then I cleared my throat and said feebly, ‘You must go and get it back. All of it.’

He shrugged.

Of course, it wasn’t possible. He sat complacently before us, in resting mode, palms down on the table while he waited for one of us to speak again. I felt my anger gathering, finding its focus. I hated that careless little shrug. Completely fake, and how easily we were taken in by it, a minor sub-routine tripped by a limited range of specified inputs, devised by some clever, desperate-to-please postdoc in a lab somewhere on the outskirts of Chengdu. I despised this non-existent technician, and I despised even more the agglomeration of routines and learning algorithms that could burrow into my life, like a tropical river worm, and make choices on my behalf. Yes, the money Adam had stolen was the money he had made. That made me angrier still. So too did the fact that I was responsible for bringing this ambulant laptop into our lives. To hate it was to hate myself. Worst of all was the pressure to keep my fury under control, for the only solution was already clear. He would have to make the money all over again. We would need to persuade him. There it was, ‘hate it’, ‘persuade him’, even ‘Adam’, our language exposed our weakness, our cognitive readiness to welcome a machine across the boundary between ‘it’ and ‘him’.

To be in such a confusion of concealed bad feeling made it impossible to remain sitting down. I stood, with a loud scrape of the chair and walked about. At the table, Miranda made a steeple of her hands that concealed her mouth and nose. I couldn’t read her expression and I assumed that was the point. Unlike me, she was likely doing some useful thinking. The disorder of the kitchen agitated me further – I was truly in a bad state. On the counter was a dirty cup I’d brought through from my study. It had been hidden a few weeks behind the computer screen and contained a green-grey disc of floating mould. I thought of taking it to the sink and rinsing it out. But when you’ve lost a fortune, you don’t clean up the kitchen. Directly below the wooden surface on which the cup stood was a drawer left untidily open a few inches. Left open by me. It was the tool drawer. I stood close to it in order to lean in and shut it when I saw the grubby oak handle of my father’s heavy-duty claw hammer lying diagonally across the rest of the jumbled contents. It was a dark impulse, one I didn’t want, that made me leave the drawer as it was and come away.

I sat down again. I had unfamiliar symptoms. My skin from waist to neck was tight, dry, hot. My feet inside their trainers were also hot, but moist, and they itched. I had far too much wild energy for a delicate conversation. A thuggish game of football might have suited me, or a swim in a heavy sea. So might shouting, or screaming. My breathing was out of kilter, for the air seemed thin, poorly oxygenated, second-hand. I’d given the bass guitarist a non-returnable £6,500 on the house. It was plain that to lose a lot of money was to acquire an illness for which the only cure would be to have the money back. Miranda collapsed her steeple and folded her arms. She gave me a quick warning look. If you can’t look sensible, stay quiet.

So she began. Her tone was sweet, as though he was the one in need of help. It was useful to think so. ‘Adam, you’ve told me many times that you love me. You read me beautiful poems.’

‘They were clumsy attempts.’

‘They were very moving. When I asked you what being in love meant, you said that essentially, beyond desire, it was a warm and tender concern for another’s welfare. Or what was the word you used?’

‘Your well-being.’ He produced from the chair beside him the brown envelope and put it on the table between us. ‘Here’s Peter Gorringe’s confession and my narrative, which includes all the relevant legal background and case history.’